Hokkaido Highway Blues

down!”
    “Pardon?”
    “Get down, before someone sees you.” Her voice dropped. “I’m supposed to be working.“
    So I hunched over, twisting in my seat, as she parked and then said, “I’ll be right back. Don’t move!“
    I sat there, all scrunched up, for a long time. Finally, when my back could no longer take it, I slowly straightened up and peered out the window. In the second story of the office, I could see Kikumi talking with several coworkers. She was pointing to her car. When they saw me sticking my head up, they waved. I waved back. Then they began gesturing for me to get down. I saw a grumpy-looking man in a white shirt and tie appear and I quickly bobbed back down. I still wasn’t exactly sure why I was hiding. Finally, a back-aching eternity later, Kikumi opened the door and said, “Hi!”
    “Hi. Can I get up now?”
    “No, no, not until we get out of sight. I told them I was feeling ill and that something came up at home, so I got the rest of the day off.” She turned and beamed at me. “I’m going to take you to the Sado ferry terminal, what do you think of that?”
    But first we had to drop by her house to fill her husband in on the day’s events, and to ensure a proper alibi in case anyone called. Her husband was a solid but soft-spoken man. He looked on with a bemused, yet somehow satisfied smile as Kikumi bustled about gathering up items for our trip. He appeared to be almost pleased with what was happening, as though he were saying to himself, “Isn’t that just like her to show up with a foreigner in tow and a wild scheme to get out of work. After all these years, she is still full of surprises.“
    Kikumi and her husband didn’t catch a quick good-bye kiss on the fly as she charged out of the house—in Japan, even with someone as ebullient as Kikumi, that would be unheard of—but she did squeeze his arm, gently, briefly, as she was about to leave. It was one of the most touching gestures I had seen in a long time. Off we went in a roar of confusion.
    “You want to take the ferry to Sado, right?“ She tried to unfold the map with one hand and steer with the other. With her window half down, the paper was flapping up and plastering itself onto her. Rather than roll her window up, she simply flung the map into the back and said, “Don’t worry. I know the way, we’ll take the expressway.”
    “But that’s so expensive.” I insisted that she let me pay the tolls, which are unbelievably high in Japan.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “You can pay the tolls on the way back.”
    I smiled. ‘And how do you propose I do that?”
    She laughed. “You’re right. I never thought of that—anyway, it’s all right. I’ll pay the tolls because you got lunch, so—”
    “But you —”
    “Ah, ah, ah!“ She waved my protests away with another imperial wave.
    We joined the Hokuriku Expressway outside the town of Asahi. The expressway followed the sea, hugging the steep coastline and winding its way along the rocky shores of Oyashirazu. In ancient times, this coast had been an impassable barrier, and even, now the expressway slipped off the shore entirely at a few points and ran above the water on elevated pylons— and we would be suspended for an instant over open sea. When the seaside toehold could not be maintained, the road plunged headfirst into the very mountains themselves.
    There were twenty-six tunnels between Kurobe and the harbor town of Joetsu. The tunnels ranged in length from quick passes to gun-barrel funnels more than four-and-a-half kilometers long. The longest tunnels had huge jet fans pulling in air to prevent motorists from asphyxiating on carbon monoxide. In and out of subterranean darkness we drove, under flickering lights, then back into the afternoon sun.
    We came in to Joetsu beneath frost-ridden mountains. The air had chilled. It reminded me of that haunting opening line of Kawabata’s novel, Yukiguni: “The train came out of the long tunnel and into snow country.” I had passed over, into the Far North, into Snow Country. Here, on the northwestern side of the Japan Alps, cold wet air rises suddenly, creating some of the highest snowfalls on earth. Much of Japan is hot, humid, and semitropical. But in the north, towns disappear beneath layers of snow two stories high. Villagers burrow pathways from house to house and the secondary roads stay closed. The population is sparse and the winters are suffocating. Even here, with the arrival of spring,