Hokkaido Highway Blues

asked.
    We mulled this over for quite awhile and finally came up with “well-mannered in a rude way.” It was great fun. I love labels. Especially paradoxical ones.
    The sun was setting when he dropped me off. He was turning back toward Rumoi and I was continuing north. He gave me his number and told me to call him if I got stranded. It was only after he drove away that I realized I was nowhere near a town, let alone a pay phone.
    I was alone on an empty highway in a cold land. Night fell like an executioner’s hood. The moon, half chewed, lit up the landscape just enough to create ominous shadows and shapes. I swallowed hard and told myself to be a man. Or, failing that, a very brave child. The wind was picking up. It carried all kinds of creaks and groans and various assorted sound effects sent down from the gods above for the sole purpose of tormenting me. I tried whistling, but then I thought, what if ghosts are attracted by whistles. You never know, so I compromised by whistling, but in a very low voice.
    I’m not sure why I was scared. I had camped out on beaches and in temples and in forests, but this was somehow different. This was a highway, and there is something innately unsettling about an empty highway at night.
    I kept whistling, and when a pair of car headlights finally approached, sweeping the road ahead like search beams, I took no chances. I stepped out and waved him down. He was a plant manager named—and here it gets really creepy and symbolic—Sakuraba, or Mr. Cherry Blossom Garden.
    “I’ve been chasing cherry blossoms since April,” I said, a little too cheerfully. ‘At last! I’ve found you.”
    This did not make him feel comfortable.
    “It’s a joke,” I said.
    “I see.”
    Mr. Sakuraba worked at a fish-processing plant in Sarafutsu, a small village on the north east shore of Hokkaido, an area even more remote than that which I was traveling through. “Iceberg alley,” I said, and he nodded. His village was the gateway to the Okhotsk Sea, the Japanese equivalent of the Northwest Passage. Mr. Sakuraba was on his way home from a late-night delivery and his route would take me right through the hot-spring town of Toyotomi, my last stop before reaching Cape Sōya.
    “We have Russians working at our plant in Sarafutsu,” he said. “Twenty Russian women and one Russian man.” (Bicycle thieves and salmon gutters; things were looking up.)
    “It’s been a long day,” he said. “But I have to get home tonight. Tomorrow morning, I promised to put up carp banners for Children’s Festival. I have two sons,” he said, and in the glow of the dashboard lights I saw his expression soften.
    At Teshio, the highway turned inland.
     

16
     
    THE HOT SPRINGS of Toyotomi are the northernmost in Japan. A six-kilometer detour east of the main town, the hot-spring area itself is little more than a clutch of inns and red lanterns huddled around a central public bath. At night the streets were awash in wisps of steam and revelers walking through on unsteady wooden clogs. Guests were wrapped in cotton yukata robes and laughing in whispers. Every inn had its own thermal baths and its own distinct style of yukata. You could identify which hotel you belonged to by the pattern you were wearing.
    I finally found a room in a dark-wood-and-white-plaster inn, a building with narrow winding corridors and angles that didn’t quite add up. In my room, I unfolded my maps and drew a thick line up the distance of Japan using a red marker, following the route I had taken.
    Tomorrow I would be at Cape Sōya. Then it was a train ride back to Sapporo, an afternoon of cherry blossoms (there were now rumors of flowers to the south) and then it was back to Minamata. This seemed to call for a celebration of some sorts, so I went for a walk.
    It was a cold, clear night and the stars were suspended like ice crystals in dark wine. I found the Big Dipper, turned upside down in the sky, and Venus, the North Star.
    Maybe life isn’t one big pachinko game; endless variations in a set pattern where the house always wins. Maybe there is no pattern. Maybe there is no pattern except those we project onto our lives, like constellations on a field of stars. Ah, yes Vega the Hunter. That’s Orion. That’s the Traveler. I remembered stargazing as a child and having the constellations pointed out. They made no sense then, and no sense now.
    Toyotomi Onsen is not a large place. Walk long enough and sooner or later you will