Hokkaido Highway Blues

rarely stop for other Japanese. You see—”
    Hisao tut-tutted my objections. They were having a great time annoying traffic. Their antics become sillier and sillier, but still no one stopped. Eventually the novelty wore off, and Hisao said with disgust, “I apologize. Japanese people are very bad.”
    Koba-chan agreed. “This is awful. They should help a foreigner like you who is visiting our area.”
    “Well,” I said. “We tried. You can go now. Don’t worry about me, I’m sure I’ll—”
    “But no one is stopping,“ said Hisao, almost plaintively. “What will you do?” He glanced at his watch, thoughts of Akiko flashing panic across his face.
    “Why don’t I give you my number,” said Koba-chan. ‘And later this evening, if you still haven’t gotten a ride, call me and I’ll come fetch you.”
    “Yes!” said Hisao. This was clearly a face-saving device, as well as a chance to plan a second night’s revelry. “Call us and we’ll take you drinking!”
    Koba-chan wrote out his number and Hisao gave me a spine-rattling thump on the back. “We’ll drink!” he said. “We’ll see girls! I am Japanese man! Fuck you!”
    I grasped Hisao’s hand warmly in my own. “Fuck you, too,” I said. It was a touching moment.
    Within five minutes of their having left, I caught a ride.
     

9
     
    THE CITY OF Tsuruoka had once been a castle town, but now it was a factory colony of TDR, a company that made—well, who knows what. I never did figure it out, and after the third attempt at discovering what exactly TDR produced, I gave up. Maybe shoelaces, maybe buttons, or maybe it was heat-seeking laser-guided missiles. Whatever it was, it paled next to the heavy presence of Dewa Sanzan, the Holy Mountains of the North.
    I didn’t go into Tsuruoka but hitchhiked around it on a wide-flying bypass that swept me across the Akagawa River and into Sakata, a sister city to Tsuruoka. Both were a similar size and layout, mirror reflections of one another.
    I rode with a soft-faced, thick-lipped man named Hiroshi Endō, who introduced himself in English as a Christian seaman. I can’t say I was immediately pleased on hearing Hiroshi’s confession of faith. Self-professed Christians make me uneasy. They are always way too friendly and way too smiley. They are using you, of course, to propagate their faith. They don’t really want to be your friends, they want to be your converter. I have always found that talking with Christian propagators is a lot like talking to used-car salesmen. They may be chummy and sugar-sweet, but all they are seeing when they look at you is another sale. (In Kumamoto City I once witnessed a wonderful encounter between two intense young Americans, one a Mormon and the other a Hare Krishna. They were locked in a polite but obviously strained theological debate when I passed by. And when I returned, three hours later, they were still at it, head-to-head. They were now yelling at each other about peace and love. “Oh yeah?! But what about ultimate reality, man?”
    “Don’t tell me about ultimate reality, I know ultimate reality!” It was hilarious. It reminded me of two sand crabs locked in mortal combat, pincers Shut, foam frothing up from their jaws. For all I know they are still there, spittle flying and eyes wild, in the name of God. Either that or they both succeeded and the Mormon went home a Hare Krishna and the Hare Krishna went home a Mormon. The main thing is this: they didn’t bother me. If proselytizers would all just pick on each other instead of the rest of us, this would be a happier world.)
    I felt none of the conversion fervor with Hiroshi. He was shy and soft-spoken, and his face was without angles or edges, as though his features had been slightly overinflated. He had a way of leaning in toward me and speaking out of the side of his mouth which made me feel as though we were doing something wrong. “There are two churches in Tsuruoka,” he whispered. “Two.”
    I wasn’t sure if he was complaining or boasting, so I made a sort of noncommittal “is that so?” noise, rather than congratulate him or commiserate. For all I knew, two churches were a triumph.
    “Which church do you belong to?” he asked.
    When faced with probing questions such as this (“So how much would you be willing to spend on a car today, Mr. Ferguson?”) I usually respond with something flippant like, the Church of Cheap Beer and Wild Women, but he was so shy, so painfully sincere, that