Hokkaido Highway Blues

wife dabbed at imaginary tears as well and then surprised everyone—herself included—by inviting me to their home whenever I came through. “We want to see you again.” Yes, yes, Grandmother nodded, “and please, whatever you do, take care not to...” and off she went into the depths of regional dialect to places I could not follow, leaving me with the vague feeling I had just missed a very important warning.
    In the end, they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t simply abandon me to my fate, and, instead, Mr. Takahashi began scouring the parking lot and accosting strangers. As always when this happened, I felt very uncomfortable and vicariously embarrassed. “Excuse me, you wouldn’t be going north would you, towards Akita City? It’s just that, well, we have this American who is in some trouble, you see, and well—”
    Two birdlike ladies, twittering away at the proposition, came within a giggle of offering me a ride but at the last minute declined. A husband said yes only to be vetoed by his wife, who gave us all a disapproving, sour look. Eventually a young man in a khaki-brown company uniform shrugged and said, “Sure, I can take him into Akita City.”
    “You can?”
    “Sure.”
    “Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Takahashi, as he clutched the man’s arm. “Thank you so much.”
    “No problem,” said the young fellow, who was clearly warming to his role of savior. “Do not worry. I will take care of everything.”
    The Takahashis waved us into the distance; even when they were specks fading into the vanishing point, I could still make out Grandmother bowing and Mr. Takahashi’s high waving arm, like a man signaling a ship on the horizon.
     

11
     
    DAISUKE WAS A computer programmer and yes, some stereotypes transcend national boundaries. He wore thick glasses, he had lots of pens, and he had an inordinate interest in video games. He worked for a steel processing plant that belonged to the same company that Mr. Takahashi worked for, though his office was based in Akita and Mr. Takahashi’s was in Sakata. Or at least I think that is how it worked. The tangled web that Japanese corporations weave, and the interconnecting alliances and extended families they create, are something I have never been able to sort out. As near as I can tell, everyone in Japan is employed by everyone else.
    Daisuke had a vested interest in giving me a ride. “I want you to explain something to me.” He popped a cassette by Madonna into his car deck, and the Material Girl’s coos filled the air. “What is she saying?“ Daisuke had reams of tapes, filled with hundreds of English pop songs that he enjoyed but had never been able to understand. He was dying to find out what he had been listening to all these years.
    The problem, of course, is how do you translate something like “Hanky-panky, all I need’s a good spanky.”
    “She, ah, wishes for someone to strike her repeatedly on the buttocks,” I said, and he frowned deeply, as though considering a philosophical concept.
    And how about “Slap me with your love stick!’’ or “C’mon and ride my pony.” Pop lyrics never sound stupider than when you try to explain them to someone in another language. Most of them boil down to this: Let’s have cheap, frantic sex right here on the dance floor.
    We went through song after song until my frontal lobes started to ache from the exertion. Could the Spice Girls have more banal lyrics than they do? And how about Bryan Adams? Could this guy string together more clichés than he does? After being subjected to two hours of Mr. Adams’s music— which is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, I should point out— after two hours of this, my patience was paper thin. Every song Bryan Adams has ever written contains the word gonna or wanna somewhere in the lyrics. The ultimate Bryan Adams song would be titled: “I’m gonna wanna gonna go.”
    It was a very long drive to Akita. The low point came when Daisuke, apparently hoping to find something with a little more depth to it, dug up a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel and asked me to translate “Scarborough Fair” into Japanese.
    “I see,” he said. “So it’s a shopping list.”
    “Basically, yes.”
    After that, Daisuke lost interest in translating pop songs. Instead, he wanted to talk about computer programming, a subject I knew nothing about. He then tried Formula I grand prix racing, which was even worse. I didn’t even know enough about this to