Hokkaido Highway Blues

least something that resembled something that might have been mistaken for English.
     
    Q: How much this is being two for each?
    A: That have good tension for you. It gives four.
     
    Q: Four? I am asking two for each.
    A: Yes, yes. Many good for you.
     
    I stood nearby eavesdropping on their increasingly surreal dialogue and tried to decide who was the worse speaker of English, the Russian sailor or the Japanese clerk. It was hard to say. Kind of like comparing infinity with infinity plus one.
    Hakodate’s prime cherry-blossom-viewing spot was at the city’s starshaped fortress, where four thousand cherry trees were now coming into bloom. More than one person heartily encouraged my attendance in much the same way that people root for their home team. “Hakodate cherry blossoms rule! Go Hakodate!”
    Even better, for the first time since I set out, for the first time ever, I was not assumed to be a Mormon or an American. Here in Hakodate, everyone mistook me for Russian. I thought this was splendid and to help it along I began speaking Japanese with a Russian accent. This was more difficult than you’d think. Shop owners would narrow their eyes and ask me questions that were tinged with suspicions waiting to be confirmed.
    “Are you a sailor?” they’d ask.
    “I am being from Vladivostok,” I would say in what I hoped was a suitably Slavic manner.
    “Here on business?”
    “Nyet, nyet. I am, how you say—” and here my voice would drop “—shopping.”
    “Shopping?”
    “For bicycles.”
    It was all very entertaining, and I like to think I helped escalate international tensions ever so slightly, for which I am suitably proud.
    I expanded the scope of my travels, venturing out to the international graveyards on the edge of town. There were several cemeteries to choose from: a well-kept Chinese graveyard; an overgrown Russian one; and a kind of miscellaneous, assorted-dead-foreigners one. It must be very sad to be a Belgian sailor or an Irish missionary and end your days here, dumped in the ground and categorized as “other.” Normally, a visit to three graveyards in one afternoon would have left me pondering life, death, and my own (theoretical) mortality. But I was in too good a mood to let even a bunch of dead foreigners spoil it, and I bicycled back into town humming happy songs to myself.
    The route I followed that day rambled across the map like an alley cat with Alzheimer’s. I passed the Greek Church several times, and at one point I came upon an imposing sign on a restored brick building that read:
     
    life design shop
    BLUE HOUSE
    live together with my sensitivity.
    we have abundant original for your enjoy
    life coordination.
    we, life design shop blue house,
    give aid to your self principle life style.
     
    As near as I could figure, BLUE HOUSE was either a fashion-consulting agency or a New Age cult of some sort. Either way, I decided that my lifestyle was self-principled enough, thank you very much, and I didn’t need to live together with anyone’s sensitivity. Still, it was heartwarming to think of the Japanese and the Russians working together on that sign, translating from one language to the other and then back again before finally coming up with this ode to miscommunication. I pedaled away, uplifted by the thought of it.
     
    * * *
     
    Having crisscrossed Hakodate all morning, I was now ravenously hungry. I saw several places advertising themselves as “Biking Restaurants,” which I took as an odd sort of speciality: cuisine geared toward cyclists. It wasn’t until I peered into half a dozen of these places that I finally figured it out. Biking was actually the Japanese pronunciation of viking. Vikings ate at rowdy, communal tables laden with food. Hence, if you can follow the logic, “biking” is any large buffet-style meal. (Is it any wonder that no one understands what the hell the Japanese are talking about?) I found one Biking Restaurant that called itself the King of Kings, and—ignoring the theological implications—I went inside and gorged myself on an all-you-can-eat meat bar. That’s right: all-you-can-eat meat. And they let me in. It was not a pretty sight. The manager and waitresses cowered in the corner, the other customers fled, and the cook came out and began frantically shoveling slabs of meat directly into my mouth. Every now and then I would lean back to drain a flagon of ale and roar, “More meat! Hahahahaha! More meat!” They had obviously never