Hokkaido Highway Blues

the while his wife was nodding with that painfully polite smile that many uninitiated Westerners mistake as being a sign of friendship. It is actually a sign of extreme unease.
    Her husband slipped into his professor posture. “The social life of monkeys is very revealing,” he said, with the air of a man who has spent his life studying something to the point where he has lost all perspective on its importance. (University does that to you.) “Japanese monkeys,” he assured me, “are a unique breed.”
    He eased his car out of the parking lot. Did I know that Japanese monkeys were the most northerly in the world? No? Did I ever see monkeys in the wild before? No? Well, this would be a very interesting trip for a foreigner such as myself.
    I tried to get the Professor to perform a monkey call for me, but he wouldn’t take the bait. “I study the social life of monkeys, not communication,“ he said, so I did my own call and asked him if I was close. His wife giggled behind her hand.
    The Professor was clearly an expert in his field. His wife showed me a book he had written and nodded in deep agreement whenever I complimented him, shutting her eyes as she did so. She wasn’t so much a wife as a fan. Unfortunately, I just can’t take any bald man seriously when he oils his hair and combs it over, in long mutant strands, across his head. I was in the backseat as well, which didn’t help, because I had this hardboiled-egg view of things. Instead of paying attention to the social life of Japanese monkeys, I was more fascinated with the Comb-Over Strategy itself. Do these people really think anyone is fooled? Don’t they have mirrors? Or is it mirrors that are the problem? Straight ahead in your bathroom mirror must be the only way that combed-over hair looks even remotely natural. And even then, how often do you see people with hair growing horizontally across their forehead? The Japanese, who have a certain flair for comic description, refer to the comb-over look as bar-code head , in reference to the bar-code prices in supermarkets. Sitting in the backseat with this uncomplimentary view of a Tokyo University (pause) Professor, I was longing to pass a light wand over his head and see what kind of price would come up.
    “And so, you can see how important the social life of the monkey is,” he said in conclusion.
    “Absolutely,” I said.
     
    * * *
     
    South of Udo Jingu, the sea was the clouded silver of a shrine mirror. The highway unrolled low along the water, slipping and sliding and falling off the shore entirely at times in a series of bridges and causeways. The mountains crowded in, almost pushing the villages into the sea. Regimented forests, planted generations ago in straight lines for easier cutting, marched up the mountainsides in perfect formation. In Japan, even the trees behave themselves.
    The Professor talked to me through the rearview mirror. I talked to the back of his head.
    “Japanese monkeys are more advanced than other monkeys,” said the Professor. “Foreign monkeys are individualist. They don’t get along. But Japanese monkeys have very complicated social something-or-other and blah blah blah blah blah, therefore Japan is unique.” (I’m paraphrasing.)
    The Professor was a closet nationalist. The academic world of Japan teems with them. I have had experts tell me—straight-faced and sober—that the Japanese use a different side of the brain from other people (which is why the shrill cry of the cicada is a thing of beauty to the Japanese, while Westerners find the insect annoying); that their tongues are shorter (which is why they have trouble pronouncing English words); that their intestines are longer (which is why they have trouble disgesting beef, especially foreign beef) and so on. In Professor Takasugi’s case, it was monkeys he was interested in but the subtext was clear.
    “Japanese monkeys have social patterns that are very different from foreign monkeys’. They prefer stability. Just like the Japanese. “In the Oita Monkey Park,” said the Professor, “a new leader has taken over. His name is Dragon and he has the respect of six hundred monkeys even though he has only one front paw. He lost the other in a train accident.”
    “A train accident?”
    “That’s right. I studied Dragon, and I believe that the experience of losing his paw taught him compassion for the other monkeys. Together with his fighting spirit, he could become leader even though he is