Hokkaido Highway Blues

the least bit of prompting (I’m something of a philanthropist that way). Then I met a professor from Cambridge who nodded thoughtfully at my inductive reasoning and, with a single pin prick, punctured it like an overinflated beachball.
    “The opposable thumb is not a symbol of movement,“ he said. “It’s a symbol of stability. A symbol of invention. Without such a thumb, we couldn’t have constructed complex tools or learned to sow the ground or plow the fields or build cities. The thumb is a symbol of the settler, the farmer, the townsman. It is the toe, the big toe, that makes our upright walking capable. It is this toe that makes long journeys on foot possible. We rise up above the grasslands, because of our big toe. It is that which made humans capable of such remarkable feats of migration. We walked everywhere, to the far corners of the earth. It is the big toe that is the symbol of the traveler. Not the thumb.”
    “It’s the thumb versus the toe?” I asked.
    “Exactly. The settler versus the traveler. The farmer versus the nomad. Our two primal urges: the nesting instinct versus the migratory. The man who stays at home and the man who doesn’t.”
    My chest slowly deflated. The thumb is a powerful, Romanesque symbol, strong, assertive, proud—but the toe , the big toe? This was hardly the romantic image I was looking for. “Excuse me, sir. May I toe a ride with you.” It just doesn’t scan.
     

13
     
    THE PORT CITY of Rumoi: a gang of Russian sailors blusters by, speaking in backwards R’s and lower-case capitals. They are wearing genuine Russian sweaters and appropriately brooding expressions. They look like extras in a Soviet montage.
    “Chernobyl!” I said in greeting as they passed. “Kasparov Chernobyl.” But these Russians were clearly uneducated Russians, for they failed to understand me even when I was speaking their own language and they went scowling past without reply.
    What can you say when you meet a Russian? “Here’s to the end of the Cold War, shame about your country”? “Steal any good bicycles lately?”
    “So what ever happened to that dialectical materialism anyway?”
    I caught a ride to Rumoi with a barber-supply salesman named Sato Isoichi. Sato was a warmhearted man, stout and solid, with a bristled haircut and a square jaw. He reminded me of a high-school gym teacher, a nice high-school gym teacher. I dubbed him Coach. We got along well, but his route took him from small barbershop to barbershop along the way and the cumulative effect was so sad my heart started to ache. I’m not sure why, but something about getting glimpses into the lives of so many people living in obscurity, cutting hair behind faded façades where the barber poles were sun-bleached to the point of being pastel renditions rather than eye-catching totems—it was all too much. One woman in her mid-years, her hair and clothes carefully attended to, came out and waved to me in the car. Sato had been inside and had told her about me. Behind, in her tiny shop, I could see a single mirror and an empty chair. She bought one small bottle of hair tonic.
    Sato was a popular man, and clearly his visit was the highlight of the week for many of his customers. Self-effacing, friendly, always making time to chat, he worked his way slowly up the back of Hokkaido and then down again once a week. He was in his fifties and had two daughters, both in their twenties, both now living in Sapporo.
    I have to be careful; I don’t want to paint a Willy Loman portrait where none existed. Sato lived a seminomadic life, true, but he was closer to Tora-san, the wandering hero of Japanese popular cinema, than of Arthur Miller’s salesman. When I compared Sato to Tora-san he laughed. “But Tora-san has no children, no home. My life is not as sad as Tora’s. You”—he said with a smile —“you are more like Tora-san.”
    “But I have a family, I have a home,” I said a little too sharply.
    “Of course you do.” His voice was now conciliatory, which only made me feel worse.
    Sato picked me up in Hamamasu, which was little more than a name on a map. Above Hamamasu the highway hugged the coast, at times it was the coast, as we went up and around a great bulge of land where seabirds nested on the cliffs.
    Hamamasu North appeared (there had barely been a Hamamasu), which was a pocket of blue rooftops huddled in a small cove along the beach. Sato took me down a twisty dirt road for a better view of the sea,