Hokkaido Highway Blues

Japanese prepositions. I hated them with a passion, and I did indeed use them at random, much like a slot machine, hoping they would occasionally come up correct. This had also been my approach to the feminine and masculine in French, just picking either le or la at random and crossing my fingers.
    “Well, I would like to study Japanese more,” I lied. “Someday, I’d like to become fluent.”
    “Fluent?” he raised an eyebrow. “No, no. Not fluent. Big mistake. We Japanese don’t trust foreigners who speak our language perfectly. It makes us nervous. You should improve your Japanese, but never, never become fluent.”
    I promised him I wouldn’t. “But only if you insist,” I said.
    I was shown to my room. It was dormitory-style with four bunk beds and crisp sheets freshly turned down. The only other occupant that night was a large, sad-eyed beanbag of a man. He was in Hakodate for some unspecified reason and was clearly not happy with being placed in the same room as a foreigner. He put on a brave face, he even smiled at me in a sorrowful, fatalistic way, but when he battened down for the night I noticed he carefully drew his bags in around him and hid his wallet under his pillow. Not to be outdone, I did the same thing with my bags—just to let him know that I was perfectly aware of what was going on. (This is how wars start.)
    Travel fatigue hit me in a wave of yawns and sighs, and I fell into sleep like a body down a well. It was a deep, rich, chocolate sort of slumber and it lasted all of—oh, ten minutes, before I was jolted awake by the sound of an asthmatic seagull being throttled to death by a mad bagpiper. It was my roommate. He was snoring. Loudly. So loudly, the walls were being sucked inward with each inhalation and bulging outward with each exhalation. In between, he made this high-pitched gawking sound that set my nerves on edge. I wrapped a pillow around my head, and I was considering my options—murder, madness, insomnia—when the man stopped breathing. Entirely. I had heard of sleep apnea, but this was alarming. It lasted for long agonizing minutes and now, damn it all to hell, I couldn’t sleep because of the silence. (It’s hard to drift off when you may be sharing a room with a corpse.) A few minutes later he started breathing again with a startled gasp, and I relaxed ever so slightly. With a mumbled moan, he rolled over and began releasing farts into the blankets like depth charges.
    I had horrible symbolic dreams, and I woke before sunrise. I got dressed—quietly at first and then, remembering the ordeal my roommate had put me through, loudly and with much crashing about and whistling— and walked out, into the city.
     

3
     
    EARLY MORNING IN Hakodate. Even the very air was drowsy. I walked down among some brick warehouses as the dawn slowly filled with sounds and smells; traffic, trolley bells, car exhaust. I ended up in the city’s morning market, a large, low-ceilinged building stuffed with stalls and wet smells. You could buy anything you wanted at the Hakodate market, as long as it had gills or was made of polyester.
    A woman in a rubber apron, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and—for all I know—rubber underwear, was hosing down a sheaf of freshly caught fish. There was that smell—that smell of fish. It fills your mouth and nearly suffocates you. It’s like breathing cod liver oil. “Tasty, we!” exclaimed an old lady behind me, scanning the fish with a greedy eye.
    Right next to the fish stall was a stand selling sweets. Is that bad market research or what? Kind of like putting a perfume factory downwind from a sewage treatment plant. I had a cup of green tea at the sweets shop, but it tasted like fish.
    The further I ventured into the market, the thicker became the crowds and the narrower the lanes between stalls. Women examined floppy octopi with the critical gaze of connoisseurs. I saw every sort of slimy sea creature imaginable slopped up on tables and carefully appraised. Voices rattled in echoes under the corrugated tin roof, voices haggled, endlessly haggled, and bodies pushed past me on every turn. For the most part, Japanese markets are sorely disappointing. They are too restrained, too orderly, too reserved. But here, in the clutter and clutch of Hakodate, was a market worthy of the name. It was almost Korean in its exuberance and bad manners. I wandered through the smell-sodden air like a sensory voyeur, taking in the sights, sounds, and malodorous