Hokkaido Highway Blues

four forty-eight, and you really should get past that intersection before you start hitching rides.”
    Osaki came and went, we passed the intersection, but still Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “We are almost at the coast now. I’ll drop you off there.”
    It was five minutes to nine. “Won’t you be late?”
    “I’ll call. Don’t worry.”
    The highway crossed a river and there before us was the blue of Shibushi Bay. Palm trees filed by like telephone poles.
    Nine o’clock passed. Mr. Migita said, “I’ll take you to the next town. The rail line begins there. That way, if it rains, you can catch a train.”
    The sky was a clear, cloudless blue. “I don’t think it’s going to rain,” I said. “I’ll take you anyway.”
    Houses began appearing at quicker and quicker intervals, the rice fields became smaller, a cluster of buildings and then we were through the town and back in open countryside. The train tracks followed the highway, crossing under and over it. A huddle of hotels appeared and beside them, oddly, a Ferris wheel.
    Mr. Migita pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll just be a moment.”
    Across the parking lot, the empty Ferris wheel was turning against a backdrop of sea and sky, carried by its own momentum. The trick with any Ferris wheel is to get the motion started and then maintain the spin. Momentum is the only force capable of defeating both inertia and gravity. Satellites in space do not orbit the planet. They are falling, continually falling, carried past the arc of the earth by the angle of their descent. And what is walking itself if not simply maintaining a fall? It takes a great effort to set an object in motion, yet once you do, the motion becomes easier and easier to maintain. You strain to push a car but, once it’s moving, it becomes almost effortless: You keep it going with its own momentum. Travel is a matter of maintaining momentum. Resisting gravity. Free-falling past the horizon; falling, never landing.
    Mr. Migita returned. “I told them I would be late.”
    “You already are.”
    “I told them I’d be more late.”
    We left the Ferris wheel receding behind us. The waves rolled in and broke along the bay. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “Just a little farther,” he said, and then again, more to himself, “Just a little farther.”
    For a moment, I thought he was running away from home, but I was wrong. It wasn’t about escape, it was a matter of momentum. He was caught in it, the centrifugal force of the traveler, the force that moves satellites, nomads, and Ferris wheels.
     
    * * *
     
    The southeastern coast of Kyushu is part of Oni-no-Sentaku, the “Devil’s Washboard”, a natural ridge-rock formation that runs in striated claw marks along the coast. It gives the entire region a just-finished feel, like pottery freshly thrown. Or wood unpolished, still showing the mark of the adze. The rain-forest green of Kyushu spills over the coast and then, suddenly, the scoured stone of the Devil’s Washboard begins, as though the gods themselves had run out of sod.
    It was low tide as we drove north, alongside the Washboard, to the Grand Shrine of Udo Jingu. Udo Jingu is built inside a cave overlooking the sea. To get to it, you have to leave the main highway and take a short side road in. Mr. Migita stopped the car at the entrance of the shrine grounds. A large torii gate divided the secular world from the sacred, and Mr. Migita—the momentum finally broken—said, almost apologetically, “I have to get back. Home. Family. You know.”
    We shook hands, and I promised to send him a postcard from the top of Japan. “When you get to Hokkaido, look for horses. They have horses in Hokkaido.”
    We stood in the shrill white light of a parking lot at noon. He didn’t want to leave. Neither did he want to continue. Once interrupted, motion is hard to renew. We said good-bye and he drove away.
     

7
     
    SHINTO, THE WAY of the Gods, is Japan’s homegrown religion. Buddhism came much later (via Korea), and in some ways remains an imported faith. Buddhism has a founder, a doctrine, and an historical basis: Shinto has none of these. Shinto’s origins are lost in the mists of prehistory. As a faith, it grew from the natural awe, the fear and trembling, that humans have for the world around them: the fertility of womb and earth, the natural forces and the mysteries of life.
    In Japan, the world is filled with primordial spirits known as kami. The kami are everywhere. The unseen