Hokkaido Highway Blues

into deeper banks, pelting Norio with snowballs and then laughing loudly, when the sun broke through and the world stopped. It was magnificent. Everything went quiet and sparkling. The mountain air was as crisp and clean as a celery stalk snapped in two. I breathed in deeply, filling my chest. It was like a homecoming and then— wham! Norio stung me in the ear with a slush ball. At almost the same moment, the snow gave way beneath me and I sank up to my waist. I could feel running water around my feet, icy cold. “Help!”
    Norio came scrambling up to rescue me, which was a big mistake because, of course, my cries of help were but a ploy and I pulled him into the snow and then rolled him down the hill. He came up sputtering and, as I leaned over to help him up, I got a full wet face of snow. I pulled away.
    “That’s not funny,” I said.
    “Oh, but it is,” said Norio, and he shoveled some more into my face and down my neck. Which pretty much ended our ice capades for the day. I stomped back to the car with a cloud over my head and Norio trailing behind me, giggling and skipping about and flinging more snow on my head.
    Grumbling about unsportsmanlike behavior, I climbed back into the car and sulked. We began our descent into Aomori’s valleys. The snow that Norio had plastered me with soon turned into cold water, soaking my shirt, trickling down my back, and chilling my wet, squishy running shoes. “I won!” he said.
    “It was a tie.”
    “Clearly, we are using a different scoring system,“ he said. “By my calculations, I had victory.”
    “It was a tie,” I said, crossing my arms and looking straight ahead. There’s never a school locker around when you need one.
     

14
     
    IF AKITA IS rice country, Aomori prefecture is apple country—and boy, they don’t let you forget it. Apples are imbedded in fence patterns, painted on signs, alluded to at every turn. When we crossed into Aomori prefecture, everything changed as if by clockwork from rice fields to apples. Orchards, endless orchards, filled the hills and valleys with rows of gnarled, bad-tem-pered apple trees. It’s a theory of forest personalities I developed during my many idle moments: cherry trees are wistful, plum trees are wise, cedars are mysterious, and apple trees are bad-tempered.
    We came down into the wide Hirosaki Plains, slaloming from switchback to switchback, and dropping so suddenly our ears popped. In the distance, Mount Iwaki rose like a slow volcanic eruption. Traffic began to pick up as we rejoined the main highway, and a robot flagman waved us through a construction site. As we approached Hirosaki City, more and more colored rooftops appeared, like squares in a quilt.
    Hirosaki—dusty, historic, ramshackle Hirosaki—is a sort of backwoods, discount Kyoto. A northern outpost of traditional Japan, Hirosaki is a castle town, a Zen stronghold, a warehouse of artifacts. Imagine a city laid out in narrow alleys and carefully arranged blocks. Take that city and give it a couple of good shakes. Knock everything out of whack and add a layer of dirt and a bucketful of history—and you have Hirosaki.
    Hirosaki is the singularly most Japanese city I know. Not the finest or the prettiest or the oldest, but definitely the most Japanese. It is a city of neighborhoods and alleyways. Its grandest sights are meant to be walked through, to be ducked under, sought out. Japan is Hirosaki, with its contradictions and narrow alleys, the self-referential streets, the sudden dead ends, and the constant backtracking.
    Everything about Hirosaki is slightly askew, and yet—like so many Japanese towns—it has its own internal logic. The variously converging and diverging lines of perspective, the carefully thought-out lack of city planning, the labyrinthine angles: Hirosaki is not a beautiful city, but it is endlessly captivating, in the true sense of the word— captive. Once Norio dropped me off, I was soon lost in Hirosaki’s architectural bedlam. The city, it is said, was purposefully designed to be confusing in order to thwart would-be invaders. I believe it. Several times I expected to come across a haggard band of samurai invaders, stumbling blindly about, searching for the castle.
    I was looking for Zenrin Avenue, and it took me all day to find it. Zenrin is a long, unusually wide street flanked on either side by wealthy Zen temples (a contradiction in terms, no?). There are thirty-three Zen temples along this one street, a