Hokkaido Highway Blues

far more suspicious of other Westerners than the Japanese ever are. For all his exuberance and surprisingly good English, Hot Sushi was still Japanese—which is to say, trusting, innocent, and a little naive.
    Michelle was from Delaware, which is apparently a city or a state or something somewhere in the United States, but I wasn’t exactly sure. (Later, I learned that most Americans can’t find Delaware on a map either, which made me feel better.)
    Hot Sushi and the gang were ski instructors from the mainland, which explained their healthy tans and almost sexual vigor. Next to them, I looked like—well, like not a ski instructor. As we drove out of Ogi, Hot Sushi chatted enthusiastically about skiing, a sport that has always seemed slightly Sisyphian to me. Go up a hill. Ski down. Go back up again. So why not just stay at the bottom in the first place? No matter, I had once skied in the interior of British Columbia, which gave me much-needed credentials.
    “Skiing is a rush,” said Hot Sushi and on this they agreed.
    The hedonism of ski instructors seems universal. I have no doubt that this foursome would get along just fine with any other ski instructors from any other country. Hot Sushi went one better: during the winter he was a ski instructor; in the summer he flew to the island of Guam, the American protectorate in Polynesia, and taught Japanese tourists how to scuba dive. That was how he met Michelle. They both worked in Guam at the Pacific Island Club, a high-end resort with its own “swim-through” aquarium.
    “Ever been to Guam?” asked Hot Sushi. “You’d like it. Lots of sun, lots of surf.”
    “It’s like Hawaii,“ said Michelle, “but without the culture.“ Michelle had studied at a university in Hawaii and had come to Guam not long after. “Guam is a gaijin zoo,” she said. “Japanese tourists go to Guam so that they can feel they went to a foreign country, but everything is geared so they don’t have to speak to foreigners and don’t have to eat anything but Japanese food. Even the karaoke is in Japanese. They go to Guam to look at the gaijins.”
    Hot Sushi sighed, but had to agree. “It’s true,” he said. Japanese want to see gaijins in their natural habitant. But they don’t want to have to actually deal with them directly.
    “You could get a job easily in Guam,” Michelle said to me. “You speak Japanese. You’re like a tame gaijin.”
    It stung, but her observation was true. Many foreigners had made entire careers out of being a tame gaijin. Japanese television was littered with them.
    Hot Sushi and the gang were touring Sado Island to celebrate the end of the ski season.
    “Sado Island is dying,” said Hot Sushi. “It’s beautiful. But it’s dying. The young people are leaving. No one is staying. It’s an island of old people.”
    Just then, as luck would have it, we passed a young boy running beside the road, which Michelle quickly—and maliciously—pointed out. “There’s a young person right there. Look.”
    But Hot Sushi was not fazed in the least. “Sure,” he said. “But he’s running to catch the last ferry off the island. It just proves my point.”
    The road twisted along the coast, through clustered villages where the sea and wind had leeched color from the wooden buildings, leaving them washed-out and gray
    “This car has no radio,“ said Hot Sushi. “But that’s okay, because I will sing for you.” Michelle rolled her eyes, but Hot Sushi was undeterred. “Do you know—where you ‘re going to—do you like the things that life has shown you —”
    This woke up Say Ya. In spite of being a robust young man, he looked an awful lot like a grumpy child. “He’s singing,” he muttered. “He’s always singing.“
    And so it was, we cruised through the rolling hills and slow curves of Sado accompanied by an off-key but spirited rendition of “Mahogany.”
    Where are you going to—do you know?
     

2
     
    ONE OF SADO’S most illustrious exiles was a man named Zeami who lived from 1363 to 1443. Zeami was the Shakespeare of Japan. As an actor and a playwright, he codified the art of Noh theater, fusing traditional dance with the sublime austerity of Zen philosophy. Central to his aesthetic was yūgen, “that which lies below the surface, that which is hidden but always present,” a concept that is as difficult as it is vague. Yūgen, the world beyond words, lies in the resonance and beauty of pure experience. It was a theory of art