Hokkaido Highway Blues

generally involves a lot of drunken laughter.) Ditto if you see carefully paired men’s and women’s shoes. The moans of short-lived ecstasy are less obtrusive than the drunken shouts of salarymen, but they are also more disturbing to listen to—especially if you happen to be traveling alone. The walls in Japanese inns are notoriously thin. You can hear people snoring in the other room. And if you press your ear to the baseboard and listen carefully, you can’t help but overhear couples making love. The worst entranceway sight, one that strikes terror into my heart whene’er I see it, are rows of children’s running shoes. This signifies a school outing and you might as well forget about getting any sleep, what with the shouts and screams and flirting squeals and the play-fights and the constant treks to the bathroom. And that’s just the teachers; the students are even worse.
    The inn at Sukumo Port bad a row of rubber boots in the entrance, a mixed blessing. These were’ fishermen’s boots, and it meant that everyone would be sound asleep, but it also meant that they would be getting up at four in the morning when the only creatures dumb enough to be awake would be fish and other fishermen.
    I called out, “Excuse me!” but there was no response.
    It was an old, weathered inn, the kind that you can never imagine as ever having been new. A calendar in the lobby was dated from four years back and the floorboards had the only polish in sight, a shiny path down the middle, buffed by generations of feet walking to and from the rooms. The faint smell of mildew and mothballs permeated the place.
    I called out again, louder this time, and I heard someone stir from a back room. An old woman shuffled out in slippers three times too big. She showed me to my room, explaining the bath times and toilet procedures and where the futons were stored, all in an accent as thick as stewed seaweed.
    When I responded in Japanese she laughed with delight and clapped her hands once, lightly in surprise. “You speak Japanese!” she said. “How clever of you, how very clever.” (I speak Japanese the way a bear dances. It’s not that the bear dances well that impresses people, it’s the fact that the bear dances at all.)
    Congratulating me again, she backed out of the room and left, still smiling. I looked around. It was a room that would have done Sparta proud: a pot of tepid tea, a wastebasket in case I was suddenly overcome with the urge to throw something away, and an alcove with a very tacky scroll of a tiger. There were cigarette burns on the tatami mats and water stains on the ceiling. Still, I liked the place. It had “character,” as defined by the number of cockroach traps within sight. I changed into the cotton bathrobe, overstarched as always. (What is it with Japanese inns? Do they really think we like walking around as if we were suited up in cardboard?) I went downstairs to the bath and, finding the water still piping hot, I undressed, soaped and rinsed, and climbed in. Ahhhhh. If there is a Heaven and if I am going there, I expect it will be a hot Japanese bath with a bamboo cover and wisps of steam rising from the surface.
    The Japanese find our habit of washing ourselves in the bathtub to be a bit disgusting, and they have a point. We do tend to wallow in our own dirty water. In Japan, you scrub yourself down first, rinse yourself off and wallow instead in other people’s residue. Not filth, of course, because you are expected to wash completely before you get in. Except that not everyone is as thorough about washing as they should be, and if you examine the water in any Japanese bath you will always find a hair or two floating on the surface and small flakes of soap or skin suspended in the water. There is a sense of communal baptism to it.
    I am sharing water with strangers, I said to myself and this seemed to be a very revealing metaphor of some sort, but I was too tired to work it out.
     
    * * *
     
    The next morning, I walked, besieged by yawns, down the street to Sukumo’s Tropicana Café. The most glorious thing about it was its name. Remember the general rule, which I just now made up: the grander the name, the blander the dame. If you see a place called the Flamingo Club Caribana Coconut Inn you can expect K-rations, pineapple juice, and a ukulele solo. I ordered the Sunrise Festival Excitement Breakfast: fruit salad and a fried egg. Chewing thoughtfully, I scanned the room.
    The only thing