Hokkaido Highway Blues

of the Universe. I try not to snort too loudly at the awkward misfires of my fellow worshippers. A voice beside me says, “He’s cheating.”
    I looked around to see who was doing the cheating. They were referring to me.
    “I beg your pardon,” I said, scanning the crowd with a kind of How Dare You! look on my face, but no one would meet my eye. I continued tossing the pebbles. I was going for the world record slam-dunk pebble toss.
    “What a cheater.”
    I spun around to face my detractors. Nothing. No one said a word. Finally, out of pity I suppose, an elderly couple stepped out toward me. She was wearing a trim blue elderly-aunt-type skirt, her hair suspiciously black. The gentleman she was with had heavy-framed glasses, a string necktie, and a balding head with strategically combed strands of camouflage.
    The man smiled at me. He had his camera out and for a minute I thought he was going to ask if he could take my picture. This happens occasionally. Japanese tourists like to take snapshots of exotic white people in Japan, along with the usual pictures of flora and fauna. High-school yearbooks inevitably have photos of the school trip to Nara and Kyoto, with students posing first beside temple deer and then beside foreign tourists. In both cases, whether they are feeding the deer or feeding the foreigners, the students have the same nervous smiles. Personally, I hate posing for strangers’ photographs and I usually try to work a surreptitious middle-finger somewhere into the pose. But no, the man didn’t want my photo. He wanted to correct my error.
    “You are not doing it properly,” he said. “Men must use their left hand when they throw the pebbles. Women may use either, but it is better if they use their left hand also.”
    So I switched hands. I missed every shot. The crowd around me began chuckling and saying things like, “Jōzu desu ne,“ and other such derisive comments, so I decided to stop.
    The gentleman who had corrected me carefully folded his handkerchief over and dabbed his forehead a few times. The Japanese don’t seem to have any sweat glands. I know that sounds like a gross generalization, but it’s true. I was sweating like the proverbial pig, beads dripping from my eyebrows, my shirt plastered to my back like a really bad job of wallpapering, and yet this elderly man needed only a few token dabs to mop his brow. As usual, I had forgotten to bring a handkerchief. He offered me one of his spares and I wiped my face and neck and forearms, stopping just short of my armpits. We both agreed that it was very hot out. His wife nodded deeply at my astute observations regarding current weather conditions (hot), and I knew that I had been adopted. I wrung out the handkerchief and then reached out to shake their hands. They seemed to hesitate.
    “I am Professor Takasugi of Tokyo University,” he said and then paused. When I didn’t react, he repeated his introduction. “Tokyo University,” he said, and I realized that I was meant to be impressed by this, so I said, ‘Ah, yes, Tōdai, a great university.”
    He smiled modestly, “Thank you. My wife, Saori. She is also my assistant. We are in Kyushu for research. We are studying the social life of wild plates.”
    “Wild plates?”
    “Not plates, monkeys.“
    “Ah, yes,” I said. “That would make more sense.”
    The words for plate (sara) and monkey (saru) sound similar in Japanese, and for some reason I can never keep them straight. Another combination that gives me trouble is “human” (ningen) and “carrot” (ninjin) which once caused a lot of puzzled looks during a speech I gave in Tokyo on the merits of internationalization, when I passionately declared that “I am a carrot. You are a carrot. We are all carrots. As long as we always remember our common carrotness, we will be fine.”
    On another occasion I scared a little girl by telling her that my favorite nighttime snack was raw humans and dip.
    Once Professor Takasugi and I got the wild plate thing sorted out, he explained that he and his wife were planning to travel south, toward Cape Toi, to visit a remote wild monkey island. They invited me along, and even though I was originally headed north, I accepted their invitation. After all, how often is it that you get to see plates in their natural habitat?
     

8
     
    THE PROFESSOR’S CAR was cluttered with academic detritus. We had to move several boxes filled with loose papers to make a space for me in the back. All