Hokkaido Highway Blues

when you take a tour. Free tour. Free beer. Which is to say, I decided in the interest of cultural appreciation to visit the site.
    I didn’t understand a damn thing. There were no English explanations and I tagged along with a handful of visiting Tokyoites who had the annoying habit of saying, “Is that so?“ every time the guide opened her mouth: “Good afternoon, my name is Ariko.”
    “Is that so?”
    I didn’t know, or want to know, the Japanese words for yeast, barley, malt, or fermentation. All I wanted was the free samples, and sure enough, once we had toured the historic, red-brick building, we were seated in a hall and given a selection of beer to taste. “Excellent!” said I. “Enlightening!”
    So good was the beer—and Japan makes some of the best lagers—I decided to take another tour. And another, by which time it was becoming very familiar. Same swollen copper vats, same long hallways, same tour guide, same nods, same “sō desu kas?“ And more beer. It was wonderful. So wonderful, I decided to go through a fourth time. But there was no one else in line, and when the guide saw me staggering up, she gave me a wry half smile and said, “You again?”
    “Is very interesting,” I replied, trying not to wobble too much.
    She cast a scolding look at me, the type women reserve for men who think they are being awfully clever but aren’t. She was dressed in a trim red blazer and a stewardess-type hat, but she wasn’t giggly or girlie at all. Her smile was ruthlessly intelligent. “Do you really want to take the tour again?” she said. “Is that really why you keep coming back?”
    “Well,” I said, “we could skip the tour.”
    She looked down at her wristwatch. “Let’s just walk through it,” she said. “We can talk.”
    I ended up spending most of the afternoon with her. She thought I kept going through the tour because I had a crush on her, and I was careful not to inform her otherwise. “I get off in twenty minutes,” she said. “Meet me at the main gate.”
    Now, I would like to say Ariko and I drove through Sapporo in a sports car with the wild wind in our hair, spilling champagne and laughing with carefree abandon, before retiring to my hotel room (which had somehow sprouted both a view and a canopy bed) to make mad passionate love for hours. But we didn’t. What we did do was go for coffee. And we talked late into the night, sharing small confidences and comparing the separate tangents of our lives. She had been to Australia, had seen every Audrey Hepburn movie ever made—twice—and she enjoyed being a tour guide. She didn’t love it, but it was all right. “You do get tired of beer after awhile,” she said, a statement beyond my frame of reference, akin to getting tired of air.
    Ariko had a single dimple, which only appeared when she frowned or when she sat back to consider something. She was, of course, beautiful. But one gets so used to seeing beautiful women in Japan that it hardly seems notable after awhile. A female friend of mine made a similar observation about California, of all places, where she got so used to seeing tanned, trim, tousle-haired men that after awhile they hardly registered. Ariko looked me over and said she liked my eyes, about the only good feature I have. “Blue,” she said, “like ice.”
    I always find it odd when other people find me exotic. It is a strange world indeed. I went back to my room in a very cheerful mood, singing my new theme song, ‘A Hitchhiker on the Road to Love” (Bobby Crutolla, circa 1959).
    My burgeoning idyll with Ariko seemed destined to turn into something more—until reality in all its pustule-pocked, wart-infested, joy-destroying majesty came bursting back on the scene. Ariko and I promised to meet again the next day (she invited me to her apartment to hear recordings of Ainu music, and needless to say I suddenly became very interested in Ainu music), but my time was running out as quickly as sand through a glass. Back in the real world, the non travel world, I was caught up in this odd arrangement whereby I agreed to spend all day doing things that were unbearably dull and monotonous for which I was compensated financially, much in the manner of a sea lion being rewarded with a halibut. Perhaps you’ve heard of this concept; it’s called a “job.” I have never really grasped the logic behind the system, but I did know enough that losing one’s “job” could have dire consequences in the food