Hokkaido Highway Blues

I mumbled something about there being a distinct lack of Presbyterians in Japan.
    Mr. Endō had been a radio operator on a cargo ship and had seen the world: Australia, New Zealand, the east coast of North America, the islands and ports of Southeast Asia. He had retired just that year—not for reasons of age but for some unspecified illness—and now he was here in Japan’s far north, seeking solace in the words of a distant carpenter from Galilee. The world is a strange place indeed, and the ebb and flow of religions that move around the globe like ocean currents is stranger still. Religions rise and fall, fade and overlap, from Buddhist prophets to Christian sailors, all in pursuit of—of what? Insight? Deliverance? Discipline? Flowers?
    “I saw many things,” said Hiroshi. “In the Philippines I saw a man singing to the sea. In Australia, I saw kangaroos in cages.” His voice was furtive, as though the vehicle were bugged, as though his life were under surveillance. “I sailed to many ports, but I wasted my youth and I married very old.” (At thirty-one, it turned out; hardly a senior citizen but a bit late for Japan.) “My daughter is a teenager now, and she looks like her mother, but everyone says she has my eyes.”
    “Is your wife a Christian?” I asked.
    There was a slow, liquid pause. He said, quietly, almost to himself, “I go to church alone.” And then, changing tack. “How about you?”
    “I don’t go to church. Alone.”
    Hiroshi dropped me off on the eastern outskirts of Sakata. I was on an overpass, above a vast marshland and a flaccid, muddy river. A white heron skimmed across the surface, but any sound was lost to the traffic that rolled by with monotonous regularity. Here too, the view was dominated by the pressing mass of Dewa Sanzan, the holy mountains of Japan. Clearly visible, even from here, were sacred ski runs running down the sacred mountainsides. They looked like frozen rivers.
    Cities create their own gravity wells. Hitching in is easy; you just relax and allow yourself to be pulled in. Hitching out , however, can be a nightmare. I wanted to skim the edge of Sakata, Sputnik-like, using the city’s gravity to throw me farther along, all the way to Akita.
    It was tough. I couldn’t ask—or expect—traffic to stop for me on the middle of an elevated bypass, but I thrust out my thumb anyway and hoped for the best.
    And that’s when I was captured by leprechauns.
     

10
     
    THEY WERE LITTLE leprechaun people in a little leprechaun car and they spoke a leprechaun dialect I couldn’t understand. There were three of them, none over five-foot-four and all of them dressed in tidy, freshly pressed clothes. They were the Takahashis. There was Mr. Takahashi, friendly, hunched-shouldered, cigarette-smoldering, with an expressive face that had been battered by life but not defeated. Beside him was Mrs. Takahashi, his wife, an attractive lady very prim, who sat with her hands folded carefully on her lap. In the back seat was Mr. Takahashi’s elderly mother, a tiny, thin lady.
    Mr. Takahashi was full of grins and handshakes and nervous, bobbing bows. His wife was less enthusiastic. She sat as rigid as an overstrung harpsichord, and her smile never wavered. Clearly, she had not been in favor of stopping. I had seen their little car drive by three times before it finally pulled over, a common enough event in Japan, where hitchhiking is not a custom and where the driver and passengers often have hurried, frantic discussions when they see someone with their thumb out.
    “It was Mother,” said Mr. Takahashi sheepishly. “She said it’s common courtesy. She said we had to stop, so we did.”
    Mr. Takahashi was an industrial mechanic with a large steel refinery. He worked swing shifts and today, being his day off, he had decided to take his mother and wife out for a drive.
    The mother was delighted to have company, even though my bear-size body and awkward backpack—the pack alone was larger than she was— crowded her up against her side of the car. She shared with me plums from a plastic bag and when I was done, she held my hand in hers and patted it gently, like you might pat a sleeping baby. This was a woman who was not afraid of bears. We had a wonderfully elaborate conversation, she and I, hindered only by the fact that neither of us understood a word the other was saying. She spoke with a murky Tohoku dialect, bluesy and rich and filled with late nights and long winters.