Hokkaido Highway Blues

about the fish!”
    He dropped me outside the city limits on drab, colorless plains beside the banks of the Agano, a river so thick and silty brown, you could have floated coins on it.
    On hearing a lone buzz building up behind me, I turned to see a car approaching, drifting erratically across the center line. I held out my thumb and the car slowed down to inspect me. Inside were two scruffy-looking young men. They laughed at me and returned my thumbs-up gesture as they passed. I spun around, livid, and I was about to give them a farewell, up-yours, arm salute, when I saw the car skid to a stop and then lurch into reverse. It came swinging wildly back toward me, and I had to leap into the ditch to avoid it.
    “Fuck you!” said the passenger, leaning over the driver and shouting down at me. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.“
    I said nothing. What could I say? I stood there looking at their grinning faces until finally, in Japanese, the driver said. “So, where are you going?”
    “North.”
    “So are we!” he shouted, giddy over such a strange congruence of events. Here I was, walking on the same side of the street as them and we were both going in the same direction. Amazing.
    “Get in!” they shouted. “Welcome, welcome. Fuck!”
    They were harmless. A pair of disheveled construction workers, baggy-eyed and baggy-trousered, who had been out on a bender and were only now going home. Their eyes were bleary and red from their self-inflicted sleep-deprivation, and their breath reeked of late nights and seedy bars. “We haven’t been to bed yet,” the driver announced proudly. “Here! Have a beer.” The sun was barely up.
    The driver, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, was named Shintaro Kobayashi, though his friends called him Koba-chan. He had a thin smudge of hair on his upper lip that, in the right light, might have been mistaken for a mustache, and fine, almost petite, features. His cohort and passenger was Hisao Hasegawa. Hisao—the one who kept saying “fuck you“— was in his mid-twenties and definitely the drunker of the two. He had heavier features and thick, waved hair. Hisao was Koba-chan’s foreman, and he was wearing those split-toed rubber boots, still common in Japan, which give the workers such a medieval air.
    Koba-chan drove without a seatbelt, with his leg up on the seat and a can of beer in one hand and the steering wheel in the other.
    They had spent their night bar-hopping and had ended up at an inn where beautiful young girls (or old battle-ax matrons—who could tell when you were having so much fun?) had plied them with drinks and sexual innuendoes. What began as a rowdy work-crew celebration had eventually whittled down to just the two of them. “Japanese hostess,” said Hisao in sudden English. “Number one the world, sexy good! Oh, yeah!“
    The boys had made a night of it, but though there may have been some good-natured groping (often as not, it was the hostesses who groped the customers), there had been no assignations. I could tell this because they were both so rumpled and smelly. In Japan, brothels are known as “soap-lands,” and the specialty is a complete lathering up, followed by a naked body wash. If a husband comes home smelling fresh and clean and well washed, his wife will launch into an attack. But if he comes home reeking of cheap perfume and cigarettes, she will relax, secure in the knowledge that any fun he had was innocent. I knew a Japanese man who was addicted to soaplands in Fukuoka and before running home he would splash whiskey over his face and furiously puff on cigarettes and then blow smoke over his clothes.
    At some point during the night, Hisao had fallen into a leaden sleep and Koba-chan had been unable to rouse him. With the dawn, the hostess had relieved them of the burdensome weight of all that yen bulking up their wallets and had then unceremoniously dumped them on the front step—literally rolling Hisao out the door. Koba-chan, it was decided, was the less intoxicated, so he was now driving Hisao home to his waiting girlfriend. It was actually Hisao’s car we were traveling in. For all their slovenly attire and unwashed charm, the car was spotless and tidy.
    We soon came into their hometown of Toyosaka. “Bye-bye America!” said Hisao in way of farewell. They stopped at a convenience store and loaded me up with snacks and drinks. I was just about to depart when, with a gallant flourish, Hisao decided that they would take