Hokkaido Highway Blues

strewn around the back and I sat sweltering in heat, praying he was buying me something cold to drink. He wasn’t.
    “Where are you going?” he asked, breathlessly, as he jumped back in. “Hang on!” He changed lanes and then, having seen the error in his ways, immediately changed back again. We careened through the streets, dodging pedestrians and passing on single lanes—and single lanes are very narrow in Japan.
    “D’you fish?” he asked. “Fishing. Ever done it?”
    He came within a heartbeat of sideswiping a bent-backed old lady, but she proved remarkably spry and managed to get away. The traffic increased, the lanes narrowed even more. He leaned forward in anticipation, taking every opportunity to pass and cursing the very notion of traffic lights. He looked a lot like Zatōichi, the Blind Swordsman, a popular television character. Drove like him, too.
    We went around a corner on what felt like two wheels and then, having seen someone he knew in the truck ahead, he leaned on his horn and came roaring to a stop. He leapt out and, as I watched from my seat, had a very animated discussion with the driver of the truck in front of us, with much laughter and many sweeping hand gestures. Where I was, I didn’t know. I sat there, patient as a stone Buddha, for almost twenty minutes as a dusty, neurotic fly buzzed against the windshield. After half an hour of this, I quietly gathered my pack and slipped out. He never noticed me leave, and as I walked through the streets of Komatsu it dawned on me that I was once again lost. A tiny vegetable-shop lady came out from behind her modest display of produce to point me in the right direction, back toward the main highway—where I had been an hour earlier. I was hiking out, head down and cursing, when a vehicle came screeching to halt beside me. “There you are!” It was Zatōichi, the Blind Swordsman. “Why did you leave?” he said, somewhat huffily. “Get in, you are going the wrong way.”
    Once again we plunged into Komatsu City, but this time, we didn’t stop. We went up, then down, then right, then left, then this-away, then that-a-away and then who-the-hell-knows where. It was like he was trying to shake someone who was tailing him. Perhaps he was in the middle of a bank robbery. Whatever the reason, we eventually ended up heading north, without much in the way of conversation. He pushed his floppy hat back on his head and hunched even farther forward, as though willing the vehicle on. He squinted into the distance and then —“Over there!” he cried.
    He slowed down and coasted toward it: an expressway on-ramp. Damn. I was trying to avoid expressways. Expressways are fast and precise, and they cut straight through the countryside. Too fast, too easy. If I was going to take expressways the entire way, I might as well have taken the Bullet Train. “I was hoping to stay on the highway,” I said, as he stopped. The ride ended on the same rushed incomprehension it had started on. I got out. The Blind Swordsman roared off in a cloud of blue exhaust, and I was alone beside a wide but empty road.
    In front of me lay one of those crisp cloverleaf intersections that look terribly efficient on a map, or from the air, but are mind-boggling when approached on ground level. I tried to figure out which lane went where, but it was hopeless; the intersection swirled up in arcs of concrete like an Escher drawing, like a Moebius strip, like, well, like an expressway interchange. With a noble sigh, I began the long walk up one of the ramps.
    I usually avoided expressways, but at this point I had spent the better part of the day covering less than twenty kilometers and I just wanted to put some ground between me and Komatsu. In the expressway above me, hidden from view, was the constant buzz and zip of traffic, clipping along at a hundred kilometers an hour—a far cry from the usual slow go of Japan’s sideroads. I was taking the easy way, true, but having survived an encounter with Zatōichi, I felt I deserved a break.
    Halfway up the expressway ramp, a sports car came whipping around the corner and right the fuck at me! I flattened myself against the guardrail and the car flew past, with the driver and me exchanging looks of mutual panic. I fled back down the ramp, with my heart pounding away in rehearsal for the sort of clutch-and-grasp attack that I suspect will eventually do me in. My knees were still wobbly when I emerged back on the street below.
    The sports