Hokkaido Highway Blues

the bomb was ready.”
    “There is no excuse for what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no excuse!” His voice had a sudden snap to it and a cold fury cut through the alcoholic haze. He looked at me with a rage that was directed outward at every angle, to all points of the compass. One shouldn’t talk about the war in Japan. This is one of the first rules of conversation. Every family has a litany of sorrows and a closet filled with skeletons. As often as not, Southeast Asian skeletons.
    I knew that, and yet I continued anyway. Mr. Saito and I argued well into the night, arguing for the sake of arguing, like a pair of Talmudic scholars debating some fine, esoteric, and utterly irrelevant point. And nothing we said that night changed history in the least.
     

7
     
    I WOKE TO the familiar sound of bongo drums being played across my cranium. Death by Hangover once again loomed large as the probable outcome of my irresolute lifestyle. My journey was coming to an end, but I wasn’t so much cruising to a finale as I was limping toward the finish line. I figured: Cape Soya and then three weeks in a hospital getting a blood transfusion.
    It had been decided the night before that Mr. Saito, against my better judgment and constant urging, would drive me out to the Hakodate ferry port for the arrival of the Aomori ferry. “Most of the passengers will be driving all the way to Sapporo,” he reasoned. “If you hitchhike right in front of the off-ramp, you will surely get a ride.”
    “But what if I don’t get a ride? I’ll be stranded way out of town.”
    “That’s true. What you need is a sign,” he said as he cut up a cardboard box. “This will do nicely.” He reached for a felt-tip marker.
    “But I’ve made it this far without a sign. Signs can actually hurt your chances in Japan. People think they should stop only if they are going to the exact destination you are holding up. One time, a Japanese friend of mine—”
    “Now then,” he said, with the air of a man who knows his way around the world. “You must, how do you say it, reassure the drivers. So, let’s first write your name, so they know who you are—” and in wide, thick Japanese letters he wrote HELLO EVERYBODY! I AM WILLY FROM AMERICA.
    “Now then,” he sat back to consider this. He had been drinking, so the letters looked a little crooked and poorly spaced, something like a schoolchild would write. When I commented on this, he was unfazed. “It will help you, see? Because they will think you wrote it yourself. Very cute.”
    He thought a moment and said, “Now we must reassure them that you can speak Japanese a little.” So he wrote I CAN SPEAK JAPANESE A LITTLE. ‘And we must let them know where you are going.” So he added, PLEASE TAKE ME TO SAPPORO.
    He frowned at this, and then added, I AM AN ENGLISH TEACHER. And then, I CAME ALL THE WAY FROM KYUSHU. A pause. REALLY, I DID.
    He ended with thank you very much, I AM SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, and then held it up for me to admire.
    By this point the cardboard was completely filled with characters, which got progressively smaller and more cramped as they neared the bottom of the page, much like the listings posted before a sumo tournament. In tiny English letters he scrawled across the bottom, let’s be international friends!
     
    HELLO EVERYBODY!
    I AM WILLY FROM AMERICA.
    I CAN SPEAK JAPANESE A LITTLE.
    PLEASE TAKE ME TO SAPPORO.
    I AM AN ENGLISH TEACHER.
    I CAME ALL THE WAY FROM KYUSHU.
    REALLY, I DID.
    THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
    I AM SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
    let’s be international friends!
     
    This wasn’t a sign, this was a short story. It looked bad enough when I was tipsy, but the next morning, when I found it tucked in with my bags, it looked even more illegible and more bizarre. I discarded it as soon as Mr. Saito was out of sight.
    He was right about the ferry traffic. They were all heading north toward Sapporo. But not with me. I watched with that sinking, yet oddly familiar sense of dismay that overcomes travelers with bright schemes, as car after car filed off like cattle down a chute, thumping across the ramp, across the terminal parking lot, and then out to the highway. No one stopped or even seemed to notice me. Perhaps I should have held up Mr. Saito’s sign after all. Perhaps I should have juggled and danced. Perhaps I should have set my hair on fire and sung “Ave Maria.“ But I doubt any of that would have helped. I was stranded in an industrial park, miles from the