Hokkaido Highway Blues

world a pale cast, as though I had fallen into a black-and-white photograph tinted blue. There were monkey cries across the water. I lay on the sand, looking up at the stars, and I could feel the earth turning beneath me. If you listened carefully, you could hear the groan and creak of pulley and rope, turning the earth and all the life that clings to it. In a single, vertigo heartbeat, it felt like I might slip off entirely and free-fall into nothingness.
     
    * * *
     
    I knew a girl once. Her name was Marion. She came to Japan from Scotland and we traveled through Korea and across the Japanese islands. We hiked along volcanic ridges. We island-hopped across Okinawa. We spent nights like this on empty beaches. We drank a lot of beer. Made a lot of love. And then she left and made her way back to Scotland. She left and I stayed, and that is pretty much where the story ends.
    Sometimes I hate Japan. I hate it for not being an easier place to leave. And sometimes I fear that I have fallen off the earth. Maybe, when people fall off the earth, Japan is where they land.
    It was not that I was lovesick or heartbroken. It was just that, on nights like this, under a full sky of stars, listening to the ah and unn of waves along an empty beach, on nights like this the mind turns naturally to a Scottish girl with brown hair and a warm smile. At night, when I dream, she is always laughing and turning into the sunlight. And I wake, feeling like a kite returning to earth because the wind it was riding has passed.
    A moon, half-empty, had possession of the sky. Distant stars and islands near at hand. I lay there almost till dawn, on a Japanese shore, turning the image of Marion over and over in my mind, like you might with a stone in your hand. The edges blur and the features rub away, until all you are left with are scattered recollections and a vague sense of loss. Not feelings, but the memory of feelings. Longing. Nostalgia. Regrets so sharp they make your chest hurt.
     

11
     
    I WOKE TO the sound of waves and a sky of soft sakura pink. The morning wind had the smell of freshly washed sheets. In the forest, the birds were having their morning meeting and apparently things had degenerated into insults and name-calling. I sat up, stretched, and tried to flick the sand from my scalp. There was grit in my mouth, between my toes, and stuccoed to my skin. I rubbed my teeth with my fingers: morning breath. After crawling out and shaking my sleeping bag a couple of times, I jumped around trying to rub the sand from my body, but all I achieved in doing this was a kind of accidental aerobics. At least it woke me up.
    The waves had receded during the night, and ebb tide had left a wide slope of wet, soft sand. I walked down to the water’s edge, peed into the sea. Mused about life.
    The forest bird committee abruptly ended discussion, their Bali music jangle stopping as suddenly as if a volume switch was turned off. The seabirds took over, flying in low, turning wide arcs above the water. In the distance, a pistonlike chugging could be heard, growing nearer, louder—and then, in a flurry of seagulls, the fishing boats from yesterday reappeared, jostling into position along the pier. The young men turned off the engines and resumed the same postures as before. Strength in reserve. A boredom so intense it bordered on worldly disdain.
    “Morning!” I said as I walked down the pier. This elicited a grunt here and a nod there, the most minimal forms of acknowledgment possible.
    I wanted directions back to the highway but they were more interested in boat rides. How much to go across? It was half of what they demanded from the Professor. Maybe it was because they knew me now. Maybe it was because they recognized the Professor’s Tokyo accent. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t interested in visiting the island again.
    A tour bus pulled in, crunching gravel under tires. The door slid open and a dozen or so men climbed out. They were members of an agricultural co-op—“potato boys” the fishermen said under their breath—and they were on an outing. A tour guide, with white gloves and a flag, marched them across the ten feet that separated the road from the pier, her flag held high should any of them lose their way. I watched the interaction of the agricultural co-op and the boatmen with interest. Farmers and fishermen, they have so little in common. The Harvest versus the Hunt, the sea versus the seed.
    Japan is both fisherman and farmer.