Hokkaido Highway Blues

fake a conversation; he might as well have been asking me about quantum physics or English grammar. Daisuke, alas, was a true-blue fan of racing and, like most fans, he was capable of talking for extended periods of time about his topic without having to come up for air.
    Having flunked out on race cars and computers, our conversation lapsed into silence. Daisuke began looking more and more forlornly at every video arcade we passed. “Do you play video games,” he asked.
    “Not really—but if you want to stop, please go ahead.”
    “No, no,” he said, smiling bravely in spite of the fact that he had picked up such a dud. ‘Ah, Street Fighter Two,” he would say wistfully as yet another arcade floated by.
    Gone were the palm trees of Kyushu and in their stead came the stunted, wind-warped pine forests of the north country. We passed stands of the trees, bent like beggars toward the road, and behind them a curtain of indigo blue: early evening on an open sea. As we approached the city, I realized that I had heard the word akita before. There were the Akita dogs that the prefecture was famous for, but there was something else as well: Akita bijin. Akita beauties.
    I had entered the area of Japan where the women were said to be the most beautiful. “Is it true?” I asked, a little too excitedly.
    “Of course.”
    This was the single best high-point apex apogee climax of my entire trip. It was like discovering the Elephant’s Graveyard or the Lost City of Troy. And why are the girls so pretty in Akita? “It is related to climate,” explained Daisuke with all the passion of a computer programmer. “Heavy snowfalls, long winters, not much sun. Makes the skin pale.”
    “And?”
    “They have round faces.”
    “Round faces?”
    “Very round,” he said, proudly. ‘And pale.”
    My heart sank. Big, pale, round moon faces. Not exactly what I had in mind.
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “Their voices are squeaky as well. High-pitched. You know, sexy.”
    The Japanese image of beauty differs from that of the West, as does its image of handsome. Japanese women, for the most part, prefer clean-cut, short-haired missionary types. Tom Cruise is a sex symbol in Japan not because he is dangerous, but because he is so inoffensive. He has the bland good looks that Japanese women like so much. I tried to explain this to Daisuke, that I actually preferred high cheekbones, full lips, a deep tan, and a low sultry voice in women, but he looked at me like I was more than a bit nutty.
    This ended any attempt at guy talk. I went back to translating lyrics. Not long after this, a black-painted, right-wing van zoomed by, red sun flags fluttering as it passed us, its speakers blazing out angry rhetoric. “Exalt the Emperor! Out With the Foreign Devils!” As always, the van was manned—and I use the term man only in the loosest sense of the word—by young, pimplyfaced Timothy McVeigh types. Only difference was, instead of being racially pure Aryans, they were racially pure Asians. What they thought of round-faced beauty versus high cheekbones, I wasn’t sure, and Daisuke wasn’t too keen to stop them and ask.
     

12
     
    WHEN I GOT to Akita, I checked into the Hotel Hawaii, a rambling, threadbare place east of the main station. I chose it from a list solely on its name; I liked the symmetry involved, echoing the Capsule Hawaii that I had stayed at in Himeji. After I dropped off my bags and bade farewell to Daisuke, I set off in search of food and pleasure.
    Akita City is a northern port and it has a reputation for being a bit dodgy, but nothing I saw confirmed this. The refineries and shipping lanes are on the coast, far from downtown, and the city I wandered through had a certain rough frontier charm to it. There were even a few Western-style shopping plazas—still a rarity in Japan’s smaller cities—and enough tall buildings to give it the appearance of prosperity, if not the fact. The time of day helped as well; the sun was low and golden, making the concrete blush. Bevys of girls hurried past, like leaves on an autumn wind. Akita bijin, every one.
    It was into this warm sunset of a city that I wandered. My stomach was beginning to growl and I went into the first restaurant I came across, a small coffee shop where the cheapest thing on the menu was pizza toast.
    Pizza toast, I should explain, is a Japanese specialty. Neither pizza nor toast, it is—in defiance of all known laws of gestalt—decidedly less than the sum