Hokkaido Highway Blues

tipped the cup right back, flower and all, and swallowed it in one gulp. The circle applauded and laughed. I smiled proudly and was about to speak when I felt something clinging to the back of my throat like a wad of wet tissue—and I began to choke. I hacked and coughed and retched until my face became red. I hacked for so long, the others stopped laughing and became concerned. A man began pounding me on my back as I tried to get at the blossom with my fingers but that only made it worse. I began to gag until finally, like a hairball I spat it out. My eyes were watering, and when I looked at the faces around me I saw varying degrees of worry and disgust. “It—it tried to kill me,” I gasped.
    I was drunk on flowers. I was choking on cherry blossoms. That night, looking for someone to ground me, I called Terumi from a pay phone at the edge of the castle grounds. Back in Kyushu, the sakura had scattered weeks before and the rainy season was now dribbling to an end. The first waves of summer were beginning. I was several seasons out of step. “You missed spring in Minamata,” said Terumi. “The trees behind your apartment were beautiful.”
    As we spoke, the sakura were swirling around the phone booth in a flurry of pink and white. I had spent more than a month surrounded by them, more than is possible, more than is natural. And it struck me then, with a deep sense of unease, that what I was doing was fundamentally wrong. The sakura are meant to be transitory, ephemeral. To try to cling to them was like trying to cling to youth. Following the Cherry Blossom Front was a denial of time, of seasons, of mortality even. It was like spraying lacquer on a lily. Like embalming a mirage. Like trying to stop time.
    Back at the inn, the bathwater was tepid and yellow, and the mirror gave my skin a tallow-waxy look. For some reason, I couldn’t stop sighing. I climbed the stairs to where my futon waited. The shutters had been left open and the wind was searching my room. Outside, the moon was lost in a sea of clouds. I turned out the lights and was a long time falling to sleep.
     

17
     
    MORNING SEEPED BACK in on a musty, wet scent. The blankets were cold and clammy.
    I had planned on leaving Hirosaki right after breakfast, but the sky cast doubts, dispersions, and eventually rain on my travel plans. I sat in the front room of the inn with the doors opened to the street as the rain fell. Umbrellas moved past. The streets filled up with water. Vehicles crept by as slow as funeral processions. There was only me, the maid who passed through now and then, and the perpetual yawn of a television screen, the volume muted and the movements flickering frantically across the screen like the antics of a small child who knows it is losing our attention. It was one of those long, gray mornings that seem to last forever.
    Even the rain was listless, falling down in sheets, letting gravity do all the work. No gusts or swirls, just a dreary constant downfall. The tea cooled, lukewarm and bitter, and the air had that dank smell of dentures and wet newspaper. The television continued to flicker, the rain to fall.
    The sky didn’t clear until late in the afternoon, and when it did, I decided to make my break. I had already paid for another night at the inn, but after pleading poverty and ignorance, I was allowed to leave with a begrudging refund, and I hurried to pack and clear out.
    Hirosaki after the rain was even more bedraggled and tattered than before. I had spent the morning studying my rail maps and had discovered a rural train station just west of a major highway A highway that would take me all the way to Aomori City. From there, I would catch the ferry to Hokkaido.
    The train rattled its way slowly east and then north, across the flatlands and through the farming village of Onoe, where I disembarked.
    Everything would have been fine if I had just stayed on the main road. In the distance, at the far edge of the rice fields, I could see a tiny parade of vehicles running alongside the mountains. All I had to do was make my way across the plains, toward the mountains to this mystery road, and then hitch along it until I came to the highway. Simple.
    I could have cut directly across the fields, but I decided instead to follow a small side road. I didn’t walk across the fields because the rain had turned them into mud. But more important, in Japan there is a strong taboo about walking through someone else’s land. When I was