Hokkaido Highway Blues

remarkable concentration. A smaller, parallel row of temples runs beside it and both converge on Chōshō-ji, the granddaddy of them all.
    I spent the night in a capsule hotel near the station, and I walked down Zenrin the next morning in the early dawn, when everything was lit in water-colors. Priests swept their gates, food stalls opened up, preparing for an onslaught of sightseers, and a monk went by on a bicycle, trilling his bell. I entered Chōshō-ji Temple through its brooding wooden gate and passed the temple bell. The gate was built in 1629, the bell cast in 1306. And I thought: this gate has been standing since the days of Shakespeare, this bell has been tolling out the woes of man since centuries before Columbus.
    I entered the cool dark of what was once the temple kitchen. The floor was pockmarked with the memory of spiked sandals worn by samurai soldiers and I stopped to run my fingers across it. The lady taking admission smiled at me. “Samurai,” she said.
    The room was stained with the smoke of countless meals and the steam of countless fires. A pot was simmering and the aroma of green tea, as heavy as incense, hung in the air. I had arrived in time for the city’s Spring Festival, the only time when the mummy prince of Chōshō-ji was put on display.
    “He was dug up in a schoolyard,” said the small round woman who sat beside it—him?— it . “The prince was very young,” she said. “They suspect he was poisoned. Imported peaches, you see. Very tragic. But the prince’s love of sweets may have helped maintain his body You know, a bit like pickling him from the inside out.”
    The body was displayed behind glass with some of the items found in his coffin: a memorial tablet, sackcloths, a headband. After one hundred forty years the young prince looked remarkably spry. Freeze-dried, but spry. His skin was smooth and taunt, polished like beechnut, as frail as papyrus.
    I stood gaping awhile at the eternally young mummy prince before wandering deeper into the temple, past the Buddhist Statuary Hall and down a “nightingale corridor” where the floor planks were tightly set to squeak as anyone approached, an early and poetic form of burglar alarm. I tried walking down it in my best ninja-soft steps—I even hummed the theme song from Kung Fu for inspiration—but to no avail; the singing floorboards gave me away every time.
    Outside, behind the temple, lies a surprising optical illusion. The entire avenue of Zenrin appears to be on a low, flat stretch, but when you peer out you discover that it is actually built on a strategic bluff overlooking the Hirosaki Plains. The land on which Chōshō-ji was built was, in fact, the first choice for Hirosaki Castle, but the influence of the Zen monks was strong at that time and they managed to outmanoeuver even the local warlord. In response, the lord of Hirosaki insisted that all the outlying Zen monasteries be relocated to this road so that he could keep his eye on them. This, unfortunately, only consolidated the priests’ strength. I liked Hirosaki; I liked the fact that in all of the many machinations and schemes and ploys and endless intrigues, the Zen monks always came out on top. Even now, they are the wealthiest temples in the area. (And really, it is a contradiction in terms, is it not?)
    I spent the next night in a temple. It was on the city’s other Temple Row, Shin-Teramachi, a short walk from Hirosaki’s much photographed and often admired pagoda. The temple was named Henshō-ji, and the view from my window was of Buddhist headstones fading into cityscape.
    That view seemed to sum up everything: graveyards melting into city. In Hirosaki, past and present merge. Hirosaki is a mummy prince. A city where the merchants are poor and the Zen priests are rich. A city of graves, where even its prized pagoda was built to comfort the souls of men killed in battle. I stood, looking out across this city of ghosts until dusk crept in and supper was called.
     

15
     
    I SPENT MY next night at the Hirosaki Youth Hostel, a weary, past-its-prime building wedged into a backstreet. My budget couldn’t withstand another night at the temple, and so, with a suitable amount of dread hanging over me, I was forced to move to a hostel. It was filled with college students, and a sign in English said Well Come! but there were no English speakers present. A pair of sullen-looking East Indian men were huddled in a corner speaking in dark whispers. They didn’t