Hokkaido Highway Blues

come upon the town’s public bath. Inside, the sudden drop in temperature had turned the air cumulus. I soaped myself down with lather as thick as shaving-cream, rinsed, and then lowered my body into the water. The shapes of people emerged and dissolved from the mist, and my vision blurred as I tried to look at—through—into—the fog. It was like trying to focus on flux itself. Nearby was a font for drinking the sulfuric water, and I took a token, medicinal sip. It had the taste of blood and rust.
    That the bath is a return to the womb, I do not doubt: a chance to float again in the oceanic state as layers of dirt and fatigue and worry wash away. You emerge, flush and well-scrubbed, with skin so clean it hurts, and your head reels and you almost fall and float away. I sat in the water as long as I could and when I rose, steam rolled from my body, and the smell of sulfur clung to me like a lover’s scent.
    That night, I lay awake looking at the ceiling, thinking about people and places. I remembered friends I hadn’t thought of in years. I tried to make sense of my trip, my past. But it was all jumbled together like a box of slides that has fallen over and then been thrown back together, out of order. The images flashed upon the screen without rhyme or reason. Landscapes. Faces. Sunsets. Airplane wings. Tourist snapshots mixed in with still-life portraits of flowers.
    I came to Japan looking for some kind of realignment. A new start. A game plan. But somehow, along the way, I had become a collector of trivia, a gatherer of memories. Postcards addressed to a future self who would—somehow—make sense of it all.
    Deferring judgment to a later date resolves nothing, and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knickknacks and odd ends. Here a face. There a sunset.
     

17
     
    I WOKE TO a cold gray sky. The hot-spring town was deathly still as I walked through it, and a few paltry snowflakes drifted down. What I didn’t know— what I couldn’t know—was that this was the advance guard of a cold front that would eventually lash out against Hokkaido and shipwreck me on an island, far from the mainland.
    I caught a ride with a schoolteacher into the town of Toyotomi itself. Toyotomi had the impermanent feel of a movie set. It was the type of place where stores sell goods from the 1950s, and fashion is something you get from a mail-order catalog. It was Rumoi without the despair. Or the harbor.
    Outside a small shop, a solemn-eyed six-year-old shared small confidences with me: favorite teachers, best friends, meanest bullies, that kind of thing. “Is it far?” he asked. “Where you come from, is it far?”
    “No, it’s not far at all.”
    And he walked me to the end of the street and saw me off. “Be careful,” he said. “Be careful and good-bye.” And that was how I left Toyotomi, walking out of town on a slow slope uphill to the gradually fading farewells of a six-year-old. “Good-bye, Gaijin-san. Good-bye.“
    As I set out for Cape Sōya, I felt no sense of foreboding, no premonitions— only that odd mix of disappointment and triumph that accompanies the coming end of any journey. In light of what happened next, foreboding might well have been more appropriate.
     
    * * *
     
    Tomio Honda stopped for me just north of Toyotomi. He had a rough-cut, sun-creased, Jake-the-Farmhand look about him. He was a friendly man.
    “Welcome to Hokkaido!” he said when he opened the door.
    He was on his way to a country club to play a round of golf. Nothing unusual there. He took a shortcut, along the backroads, through sheep pastures and herds of cows. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.
    “And what do you do?” I asked.
    He tried to explain, but I didn’t recognize the word. “I’m a teacher myself,” I said.
    Tomio grinned at this and suddenly switched to English. “Cows!“ he said, pointing to one as we passed.
    “Cows,” I agreed.
    He pointed to several more. “Cows!”
    “Yes,” I said. “That is correct. Cows.”
    “Sex!”
    “Beg your pardon?”
    “Cows,” he said. “Cows. Sex. Cow sex!” He was now pointing vigorously at a herd and grinning.
    The admittedly small section of my brain devoted to rational thought had seized up like a rusty gear. I was utterly, positively, irretrievably baffled.
    “Cow sex?” I said.
    “Yes, yes. Me. I do cow sex.” His grin was now taking on a slightly demonic hint. I slowly reached for the door handle. We were