Hokkaido Highway Blues

the pier. The wind was cool and wet and filled with the thick smells of the sea and the night.
    Tonoshō Town, where the ferry docked, was made of silhouettes. The few people I saw on the streets were hurrying home like Albanians trying to make a curfew.
    I knew I wanted to get to Uchinomi, on the other side of the mountain where a youth hostel was located, but night was falling fast. As I stood there mulling over my options, a bus pulled up across the street. I ran over and asked the driver how I would get to Uchinomi. “That’s where I’m going,” he said. “I’m leaving in two minutes.”
    When a Japanese bus driver says he is leaving in two minutes, he means he is leaving in two minutes. Not two and a half. Not one minute, fifty seconds; he means two minutes. Exactly. And yet, you never see bus drivers or train conductors getting in a frenzy as they maintain their precise schedules. The atmosphere is always calm and collected—and yet somehow exact. It is a talent I envy.
    The youth hostel was spacious and well lit—and as crisp and clean as a hotel. But it was still a hostel, with all that that implies: petty rules, communal quarters, despotic regulations. I believe that one of the signs of maturity is a dislike of youth hostels. When I was nineteen, I loved the rapport and collective energy. At twenty-five, I was starting to find it all very annoying. And now that I’d entered my thirties, it was all I could do not to go around arbitrarily slapping people in the head.
    My roommates at the Shōdo hostel were no more enamored with me than I was with them. They had piled their bags on the one remaining bunk bed—mine—and had to quickly reorganize when I came in. They were motorcycle enthusiasts and they had the evil aura of early risers about them. Young people in Japan, even in youth hostels, are generally considerate—no one will be smoking hashish in your room or blasting your bones with boom-box noise—but they are notorious for getting up way too early, even while on holiday. Especially while on holiday.
    Uncomfortable in the room, I hung around the hostel lobby instead. I was feeling alone and unconnected, and I longed to hear a familiar voice. So I decided to call Terumi.
    Her full name is Terumi Matsumoto. I had met her back in Minamata through a mutual friend, a fellow overpaid-expatriate named Kirsten Olson. Kirsten staged a dinner party with the explicit purpose of setting up Terumi with a Japanese teacher who lived next door. But the young bachelor went home early and Terumi ended up with me instead, which is to say, she came home with a booby prize of sorts. Terumi and I had only been together for a few months.
    I stood for a long while looking at the phone, my hand still on the receiver. I tried to think of someone else I could call, but there wasn’t anyone. I went outside and looked at the night sky.
    The moon was phosphorous white, as stark as a searchlight, and a pale sweep of cirrus cloud arced above the island in a single brushstroke, like the kanji character for “one.” Uchinomi Bay curved in an arc toward the clustered lights of downtown. It was the most beautiful night of my trip— perhaps of my entire life—and like most great moments of beauty it was singularly unspectacular. Ships lay tethered on the water, feigning sleep amid the lap and roll of waves. The moon was so bright, and the sea so clear, that the sand beneath the water was lit up. It glowed. I have never seen an effect like that before and I have never seen it since. A moon so bright the seafloor glowed. Another of many incomplete haiku.
    I went back inside, calmed, and no longer needing someone to call. My bedroom was filled with moonlight and the sound of strangers sleeping.
     

17
     
    THE MOTORCYCLE ENTHUSIASTS left at six in the morning, in a muffled flurry of rustles and stage whispers. Why is it that hushed voices are so much more annoying than regular speech? It’s like someone in a movie theater trying to be inconspicuous by unwrapping a candy bar slowly. The bikers crept out, closing the door behind them on squeeeeeeeeaaky hinges and I faded back into slumber—only to be awoken two minutes later when they came creeping back in with hushed steps and furtive voices to pick up forgotten gear. A few minutes and they tiptoed back in for something else. At which point, I leapt from my bed and attacked them. Okay, not quite. What I actually did was lie there like a coiled spring, gnashing my teeth and