Hokkaido Highway Blues

and shelter departments. I had already used up my paid holidays at this point, and most of my sick days, and I had even canceled two weeks of company classes. When I called my supervisor from Sapporo, hoping to extend my furlough just a few more days—in the interests of a brewing romance, so to speak—the reception was chilled to say the least. I practically got frostbite of the ear from the receiver. “One week,” I was told. “One week and if you are not back at your desk we will have to”—and here is where it got scary—“reconsider our options.” When a Japanese company says they are going to reconsider their options, the only thing you can do is fall to your knees and beg for mercy and forgiveness.
    One week. That’s all I had. One week to get up to Cape Sōya and then back to Sapporo in time to catch a flight back to Kyushu but not before— please God please—I had a chance to consummate my relationship with Ariko. With any luck, by the time I got back to Sapporo, the cherry blossoms would be in bloom. (My mind was already feverishly churning up images of Ariko and me entwined on a bed of sakura.)
    In my cell-like hotel, where all the rooms looked inward, I laid out several maps across the bed and counted off the mileage. My heart sank in a cesspool of despair. It couldn’t be done. Even someone as cartographically challenged as I could see that. I’d be lucky to make Cape Sōya at all. In fact, I had to leave Sapporo right now’. Swallowing the pain, I called Ariko and canceled our date (talk about frostbite of the ear). The irony was worthy of an Alanis Morissette riff: It’s like a chance for a fling, when you’re already late. Isn‘t it ironic. Just when everything was going my way, I had to leave, proving once again that God can be a real bastard when he wants to be.
    I left Sapporo in an understandably foul mood, taking a subway to the end of the line at Azabu Station, and then walking out to Highway 231. It was already late in the day, and I wanted to clear the city and reach open country by nightfall.
    Ariko didn’t stay angry. She even tried to keep in touch, and for a while I received postcards and letters in carefully printed English, with the a’s written like those on a typewriter, with the curly bit on top. Ariko’s English was pieced together like the words in a ransom note, the phrases and expressions pasted up in long interminable strings that only occasionally made sense. “Please, many times thinking this season? Take care the hot weather.”
    I dabbled in fantasies: flying back to Sapporo, showing up at her door in a black cape and a Zorro mask, with a bottle of wine and two tickets to ANYWHERE clutched in my hand. But Ariko didn’t need rescuing. That may have been part of the problem. She was a funny, confident, levelheaded person. She liked her life and she wasn’t looking for an escape hatch. I was looking for: Someone to rescue. Someone to sweep up and carry away. Someone to save.
    I never answered Ariko’s letters.
     

11
     
    THE ISHIKARI RIVER reaches the sea in a lackluster fashion. Slow and silted, it threads its way aimlessly through sand dunes before fanning out into a lonely, windswept delta. A red-and-white-striped lighthouse peered above the dunes and grassy hills. The waves rolled in. And low across the horizon, the sun was setting fire to the sky.
    “I like it here,” said Mr. Tawaraya. “It calms your mind.”
    Mr. Tawaraya, a quiet, elderly man, had rescued me from the highway and taken me here—to the Ishikari delta. It was his favourite spot.
    Forget Zen, I thought. Forget the mindless repetitive rituals, the monasteries, the nonsense koans; all one needs is a windy cape, solitude, and a mind that needs calming.
    So taken was I with this spot that I decided to spend the night under the protective windbreak of a grassy dune. When I pulled my pack from the back of his truck, Mr. Tawaraya became adamant. No, this wouldn’t do, camping out on a beach miles from the nearest town. We wrangled over this for awhile and I relented only when he began citing imaginary weather forecasts. “The rains are coming,“ he said in his best Old Testament voice. “Heavy rains.” He hinted darkly at flash floods, heavy winds, ants, snakes, and—
    “Snakes? Did you say snakes?”
    We drove up the coast, looking for an inn. Mr. Tawaraya took a detour through the sand-swept streets of Ishikari Town, but the place was deserted, as though the entire