Hokkaido Highway Blues

well we didn’t stop for him. He’s a lunatic.”
    I loved my grandmother, I truly did. But we accrued some heavy karma that day, karma that may take several lifetimes to escape and which—even now, as a hitchhiker myself—I am slowly working off.
     
    * * *
     
    Mr. Tawaraya eventually did find me a room. We ended up driving to the next community, a small seaside village named Atsuta which looked even more deserted than Ishikari—if such a thing is possible—but which did have an inn. It was one of those small-town everything shops; a bed-and-breakfast minshuku, a restaurant, a liquor store, a barber shop.
    “No, no, he’s not on a fishing trip. No, he is isn’t a birdwatcher. He isn’t with anyone. He’s alone.”
    Mr. Tawaraya was negotiating on my behalf. After long pauses, much teeth-sucking, several rounds of bows, and a flutter of insincere smiles, it was finally decided that the owners of the establishment would agree to take my money.
    My business card helped. “Nexus?” they said. “Very good corporation. Very good.” I threw in Donner’s business card as well, citing him as my personal reference. (And the cool thing is Donner, being an American, would have gone along with it. “Sure I know him, upstanding citizen. What was his name again?”)
    The owner and his wife treated me with a certain guarded respect, much like people treat a tame puma. I sat alone in the dining room, turning the inn’s matchbox over in my hand. Sure enough, there was a different ad on each of three sides: one for the B&B, one for the café, and one for the hair salon. All run by one family. They were the Rockefellers of Atsuta.
    Word must have leaked out about my arrival, because during supper a cyclone of children came scrambling in shouting, “Is it true? Is it!” only to stop dead in their tracks with a cartoonlike skid on the cement floor. It was a gang-gape.
    “Hello,” I said, and they scattered like birds. Feeling weary, I turned to the owner. “Surely I’m not the first foreigner to stay in this inn?“
    “Well, we did have one other. An Englishman. He stayed here one night. Spoke Japanese fluently. He was walking, all the way from Cape Sōya.”
    I choked back my squid. “When was that?”
    “Oh, fifteen, sixteen years ago. Maybe more.”
    “An Englishman,” I said. “Walking?”
    “That’s right.”
    On this lonely coast, miles from the nearest large town, it could have only been one person: Alan Booth. Alan walked the length of Japan and wrote a now classic travel narrative about his trip entitled The Roads to Sata. I had always wanted to meet Alan, just to thank him for being a writer, but he died of cancer in 1993. He was forty-seven.
    And here I was, in the very same inn. Perhaps dining at the same table. Talking to same people he had talked to.
    “The Englishman,” said the owner, “did you know him?”
    “No. I mean, yes. I knew o/’him. His work. He was a writer.”
    “Was he?” The owner smiled. Teeth of gold. “Isn’t that something.”
    His wife had been listening and she now butted in. “He wasn’t a writer, he was a student,” she said. ‘A college student. From America. And he wasn’t walking, he was riding a bicycle.”
    “But—”
    “An Englishman,” insisted the owner, and they eventually had to call on his uncle to resolve the dispute.
    “He was Australian ,” said the uncle. ‘And he wasn’t riding a bicycle, he was driving a motorcycle. Clear across Japan he was.”
    As quickly as my excitement had mounted, it now dissipated. Had Alan Booth stayed here? I knew for a fact that he followed this coast, but had he spent the night in this inn? Or was it someone else? It was all very confusing. That’s the problem with memory, it turns into myth so easily.
     

12
     
    SOME PENSÉES CONCERNING the human thumb:
    It always seemed significant to me that the sole tool of the hitchhiker is his or her thumb, that one single digit which made civilization and human society possible. When we hold out our opposable thumb, we are displaying that which distinguishes us from all other mammals. A thumb asks and expects random acts of kindness by the very virtue of being human. When we hail a taxi we use our index finger— I , the pointer, the finger of business and money. But the thumb is a free ride, bold, held erect, an affirmation. “Thumbs up!”
    This was a wonderful theory, finely spun, and I enjoyed dishing it out to whomever would listen—and often without