Hokkaido Highway Blues

seem to be looking for company so I let them be.
    The old lady who signed me in was no bigger than a hand puppet, and just as cute. She even took me outside to see her ducks, which were living a pampered life in a small pond beside the hostel. “They are very happy,” she said, though how one could tell, what with a duck’s limited store of facial expressions, was hard to say. They certainly looked content, waddling about, plopping into the water, quacking away. They were only for show apparently, or perhaps for eggs, because when I suggested we broil up a duck or two she gave me a look of dismay and disbelief.
    A group of hostelers were organizing a trip downtown to hear the tsugaru shamisen, a type of Japanese banjo that is famous in this area. “It’s wonderful,” said one young lady after I invited myself into their conversation. “The music is very fast. Very exciting.”
    Her name was Midori. She smiled at me. A nice smile. A warm smile. A smile you could roast marshmallows on. Suddenly, I became very interested in the tsugaru shamisen. Midori talked on about it enthusiastically, with breathy gestures and wondrous big eyes. I can’t remember much about what she said, but I do remember those eyes.
    I chatted with Midori long enough to weasel an invite to the Live House Pub, a place that specializes in the local robust cuisine and its equally robust music. One of Midori’s friends called a taxi and we wedged ourselves in. The driver was nice enough about it, but apparently we were being shadowed by spies, because he turned half a dozen corners, threading his way into the maze until, satisfied that we were no longer being followed, he roared down the main boulevard of Hirosaki, which was now as thick as thieves with nighttime traffic. With each turn and lurch, my leg had—accidentally at first and surreptitiously as the ride progressed— pressed up against Midori’s thigh. When she didn’t shift her weight, I took it as a good sign and began casually, yet in a highly erotic manner, moving my leg slightly against hers. She turned and smiled at me, and she didn’t move her leg away, but when we got to the Live House she sat as far away from me as possible.
    I nursed a beer and picked at my meal as a family of musicians tuned up their banjos on stage. I was soon befriended by a professor of music history who was visiting Hirosaki from Tokyo. He was a nice enough man, but his eyes were not at all wondrous.
    My self-pity ended with a splash when the music began —began is not quite the right word. It pounced on us. It detonated. One moment there were murmurs and the smell of soy sauce and beer. The next moment there was only music.
    The western half of Aomori prefecture is the home of the proud Tsugaru culture, with its own distinct dialect and music, and Hirosaki is at the heart of it. “You should hear tsugaru shamisen,’’ said the temple priest of Henshō-ji. “That is the rhythm of Hirosaki.”
    And now, here I was, buffeted by it. It was wilder than the drums of Sado, more joyous, more raucous, more insane. An entire family of musicians, from grandfather down to daughter-in-law, whipped up tunes like they were making meringue. It was amazing—that’s the only word for it—how they managed to coax such complicated riffs and lively melodies out of a simple, three-stringed instrument. It lasted for hours, then came crashing to a halt. The room hummed with silence for a moment and then burst into wild, boisterous applause.
    “Thank you,” mumbled the family patriarch as he mopped his brow with a hankie. “We have CDs and cassettes for sale at the cash register.” He then introduced his son, the current tsugaru shamisen champion of Japan, who played a mournful, interlaid rhythm spiced with apples and mountain air.
    “The sound of Hirosaki,” said the music professor as he raised his glass to the stage. “The sound of Hirosaki.”
     
    * * *
     
    My stay at the youth hostel ended when I found a private room at a small inn for less than I was paying at the hostel. It was my fourth place in almost as many days, and it represented a descent through Dantean degrees of travelers’ purgatory: first a temple, then a hostel, and then this—a minshuku of mildew and lost dreams. It was the type of place where failed writers come to nurse grievances and rage at the world, where men with sinister eyes blow smoke rings across open bottles of gin. If young Ernest Hemingway or Malcolm Lowry had ever