Hokkaido Highway Blues

tastes that hung in the air.
    The building itself could not contain the sheer mass of the market, and shops spilled out on all sides the way that cotton will burst from an overstuffed pillow. I found a tiny café in a nook by the back alley and I decided to stop for exacting gastronomical reasons; namely, the woman behind the counter was beautiful. Stunningly beautiful.
    The power of beauty to stop you dead in your tracks never ceases to amaze me. Here we were, perfect strangers, she and I, and yet my entire universe was suddenly focused on this woman. Her eyes were distant (sadly distant, I decided) and she looked as though she were perpetually on the verge of sighing. Her hair was a loose tumble of curls, an ode to a perm that didn’t take, and her skin was as unblemished and smooth as warm honey. I saw myself leaping across the counter, sweeping her up in my arms, and then, reaching out for a vine placed there solely for this purpose, sailing off into the distance with her in my arms. The female urge to mother men is something that is often commented upon. The male urge to rescue women, equally as unrealistic, is one less noted. Yet here I was, no longer a lower-rung, corporate-kept English teacher in a grubby coffee shop, but Errol Flynn about to take flight. It was, it was—
    “What do you want?” She was looking at me the way most people look upon drek.
    “What is the least expensive thing you have?” I asked and immediately regretted it. True, I was on a budget, but she didn’t have to know that. “Or the most expensive,” I said, desperately trying to salvage my dignity. “Either is fine.”
    I ordered pizza toast. “Nice shop you have here,” I said as she went about her work. There was no response. Leaning in, I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Nice shop you have’—”
    “I heard you the first time. Here,” she slapped down a slice of not-pizza-and-not-quite-toast. “Enjoy your meal.” (I’m assuming she was being ironic.)
    This woman had what writers call “a cold beauty,” meaning she was beautiful but didn’t respond when I tried to flirt with her.
    “Well,” I said as I got up to leave. ‘Äs an eccentric millionaire and close friend of Tom Cruise, I suppose I should be going.”
    But that isn’t really what I said. I just mumbled some banality and left. She hadn’t smiled once and had completely crushed my heart. For the rest of the afternoon, I kept burping up pizza fumes. It tasted a lot like fish.
     

4
     
    THE HEART OF Hakodate is the historic, time-battered Motomachi District, which curves around the base of Mount Hakodate. Mr. Saito, the innkeeper, insisted I borrow his wife’s bicycle to go sightseeing, and it was a good thing too. The Old Town is spread out over a far enough distance to make walking tiresome.
    “Just make sure you lock the bike whenever you park it. The Russians are in port today.”
    “The Russians?”
    “They steal bicycles. They take them back to Russia and sell them. Sometimes they even steal the tires off of cars. We have to be very careful whenever they’re in town.”
    Jeez. From thermonuclear superpower to bicycle thieves; no wonder the Russian hardliners are so pissed off. I assured Mr. Saito that I would indeed watch out for nefarious bands of spanner-wielding Russkies, and I set off.
    What a wonderful place. Cobblestone streets. A beautiful Greek Orthodox Church, rising up in onion domes and spires. Winding alleyways. Faded glory. Knocked-about, meandering—Hakodate wore its past like an old sweater. Even better, I now had a choice of three gears: slow, very slow, and really very slow. This was a vast improvement over the previous rent-a-bikes I had used.
    I bicycled down to a crumbling old wharf where the smell of the sea permeated the very wood and where houses were falling into ruin, the windows cracked, the walls patched up. It was as though the Japanese had moved into an Eastern European city en masse. As though Belgrade had been foreclosed by the bank and sold to Japanese investors. I wobbled up and down the side streets. Parked the bike and wandered into alleyways. Got lost. Got unlost. Got lost again. It was like playing hide-and-seek with yourself.
    A Russian man was having a futile conversation with a Japanese store clerk over some sort of purchase. Russian is not an international language, nor is Japanese—neither is spoken much beyond their borders—and this forced the two men to meet on neutral ground: English. Or at