Hokkaido Highway Blues

back up to announce—after he had swerved back onto his side of the road—that he had indeed found his business cards. They were still in their original shrink-wrap plastic, and I don’t know why, but that detail struck me as being very sad. He broke the plastic and handed me one. It said: Norio Ito, Maker of Konnyaku. “Go ahead,” he urged. “Take several. You can give them to your friends.”
    Norio explained carefully and at great lengths how to prepare konnyaku, and I pretended to listen (like I will ever want to know how to make jellied boogers). At one point, he even reached around and pulled out a foil-wrapped, rubbery brick of konnyaku and handed it to me. “A present,” he said.
    “Ah, thanks.” And I thought to myself, How do I tell him that in the washroom stall of the Rock Balloon in Kumamoto City, a bar I used to frequent, there is the scrawled graffiti: What is konnyaku? Where does it come from and what does it want? And how do I tell him that it was I who wrote it?
    “Is it true,” I asked, “that konnyaku contains animal ash to add color?”
    He giggled at the notion. “No, no,” he said. “Not animal ash. Animal gelatin. The ash we use is from wood. Mixed with potato flour.”
    “Wood ash?”
    “Yes,” he said. “For color. Modern companies have tried experimenting with artificial dyes, but the real konnyaku needs ash. It is a long, difficult process. And as you know, the art of handmade konnyaku is dying out.”
    “What a shame,” said I.
    “It makes it difficult to raise a family in this business.”
    “You aren’t married?” I asked.
    “Oh, no.” The very notion of women made him blush. “Some day, but not yet. Still single.”
    He was a nice kid. He giggled a lot, in a head-bobbing way. He had probably spent a lot of his time in school getting stuffed into lockers, but he was a good kid. I felt a sort of big-brother affinity toward him.
    The rain came down. Norio and I talked our way through several cloudbursts, the wipers sloshing back and forth. It was as though we were being pursued by bad weather. Behind us, a cloudbank came down in a slow wave, dissolving the landscape into ether.
    The road we were on took us past an island shrine in a small lake, the torii gate made from rough-hewn logs. Farmhouses tumbled up the mountainsides in reverse gravity. The trees were bare, the barns the gray of old bone marrow. Dilapidated buildings, half-finished and long forgotten, gave the towns we passed the archaeological feel of a construction site abandoned long ago. The only bright colors came from the wind-sock carp that were hoisted in front of homes in recognition of Children’s Day, flying upstream against the wind in a personification of that peculiarly Japanese value called gaman, or “perseverance.”
    Ōdate City was Norio’s home. He was supposed to drop me off there, but instead he offered to take me just out of town, and this, in turn, became an epic drive across the high mountains into Aomori prefecture.
    We managed to outrun the storm. The weather broke and the rain gave up its pursuit. Outside of Ōdate there were a few marshes, some cabins, and then a thick stand of forest.
    “Virgin,” he said.
    “Well, that’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “I’m sure someday you will meet the right girl and—oh, you mean the trees.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Virgin forests. Never been cut. This is very rare in Japan.”
    A thick blanket of snow welcomed us as we crossed the prefectural boundary into Aomori. The snow spread, white and pure into the hills, and a clutch of homes loitered by the roadside, bright blue against the white, the tin roofs having melted themselves free. It was a mythic scene: vapor was rising up from the highway and rooftops, as though the landscape itself were expelling ghosts.
    At my urging, Norio pulled over so that I could walk out into the white. Other than a few faint falls like the one that greeted me when I arrived on Sado Island, I had not seen snow—real snow, deep snow, snow that doesn’t disappear as soon as it lands—for more than five years. Coming as I do from the original Snow Country, this was a traumatic loss. I missed snow deeply and with heartfelt sincerity. So, naturally, the first thing I did was zing Norio in the head with a packed snowball.
    “C’mon,” he said. “Quit it.”
    I got him again, pow! and he tried to retaliate, chasing me, flailing wildly with handfuls of snow and failing miserably. I ran