Hokkaido Highway Blues

They are graphic, certainly, and unappealing, perhaps, but they are not offensive. The women in them take a very active part, their kimonos fanning out as they climb astride noblemen and sumo wrestlers with the utmost decorum and at unthinkable angles. It is only later—after Japan’s contact with the West, coincidentally—that the depiction of women in Japanese erotica becomes more and more passive, until, finally, they have been transformed into the submissive offerings presented in Japan’s adult comics and magazines.
    “And here on the left we have the Seven Stages of Seduction as portrayed by the French artist Pierre la Prevèrse—” Another tour group was coming up and it was time for me to escape.
    It was an exhausting experience. I never would have thought it possible, but I had reached my point of prurient satiety. Spend an afternoon in Uwajima’s sex museum and the last thing you want to think about is sex. It’s like gorging yourself on chocolate: you feel queasy for hours afterward and can’t face sweets for a week. It is more of an antisex museum, so mind-gnawingly incessant that it dims desires and mutes interest from sheer sensory overload. Force high-school students to make a field trip to this place once a week and you would end the problem of teenage pregnancy.
    I staggered out, shell-shocked and limp—literally—and ate lunch in a small café near the shrine, where I shoveled rice into my mouth like a dazed automaton. “So,” said the proprietor with a knowing yet sympathetic smile, “you’ve come from the sex museum.”
     

4
     
    THERE IS MORE to Uwajima than sex. The city is also home to one of Japan’s few authentic medieval castles. I checked into a quaint (read: decrepit) hotel not far from the station, and I asked the owner—a man permanently attached to a television screen—where I could find the best place to view Uwajima Castle. Without looking up from the television, which was playing a particularly engrossing commercial for foot powder, the owner waved his hand in the general direction of Tokyo and mumbled something about a mountain. “There’s a giant statue of Kannon at the top, you can’t miss it.”
    Kannon is the multiple-formed Goddess/God of Mercy and is easy to spot. When I stepped outside I saw Her/Him high above the town like Christ over Rio de Janeiro. The only thing that stood between me and the Kannon of Uwajima was a small cluster of houses.
    Trust me to lose a mountain.
    I strode purposefully toward the Goddess of Mercy only to exit from the maze of narrow streets, minutes later and facing the opposite direction. Again I plunged in, and again I ended up chasing a mirage. First I would find Kannon on my left, the next time on my right. Cursing loudly and glaring about me at this conspiracy of city planning, I did what any intrepid traveler would do: I gave up.
    Only then, as though a fog had lifted, did I notice the neighborhood I had been trying to escape. It was one of those timeless villages-within-a-town-within-a-city that Japan contains like gift boxes within gift boxes. I abandoned any hope of obtaining Mercy. Instead, I walked deeper and deeper into the side streets and avenues. I turned randomly at every corner and I never found myself at the same place twice. The scent of spring and woodsmoke folded itself around me.
    I followed an alley so narrow I could run my hands along the houses on either side of me. I looked in on people’s lives. A man in an undershirt shakes his head at a newspaper. A student stops to sigh amid a stack of textbooks. Two old men sit motionless before a game of go, one plotting his next move, the other waiting; it is impossible to tell which man is doing what.
    Vignettes: a woman raking the driveway gravel, a man tending a garden of bonsai, futons hung out to catch the sun from upstairs windows like seasick passengers slumped over the edge of an ocean liner. Clothes drying on bamboo poles, the pants legs strung up as if in mid-karate kick.
    The alley ended at an arthritic cherry tree that was sweeping its blossoms into an old canal. The petals floated atop the water, soggy pink islands that broke over rocks and were washed away. School kids rattled by on bicycles, pursued by a squat little dog who followed, wheezing and sad. I crossed the canal on what would have been a footpath in North America, but in Japan was part of a working residential street. Halfway across, a car squeezed past with only inches to spare. You