Hokkaido Highway Blues

right across freshly raked gravel. My arrival caught the attention of the temple priest.
    “Hullo,” I said breathlessly.
    The priest smiled and, without a word of explanation, waved me over. He took me by the arm and pulled me up a slippery earthen hillock beside the main building. Puzzled, I followed, pulling myself up on a grappling chain. I asked him where we were going. He didn’t reply, just urged me onward.
    At the top of the hillock was a mobilelike sculpture made of hanging sheets of slate. The priest was now almost entirely lost in the darkness, his black robes dissolved into the falling night, his face disembodied and faint. Picking up a small hammer, he tapped the sculpture once, lightly. A single metallic note sounded. The note lingered, like that of a tuning fork. He struck another hanging slate; another note, lower than the first. Then another softer, and then, in overlaying veils of sound, he struck several more and stepped back to listen to them disappear, one by one, in slowly fading layers.
    The priest handed me a wooden stick and together we managed to produce a shimmering version of “Jingle Bells,” after which he clasped my hand and called on the name of Kōbō Daishi to protect and bless me.
    This was a splendid chance to scam a ride and I succeeded brilliantly. We wrestled my one-gear rent-a-bike into the back of the priest’s truck, and he transported me back down the mountain.
    The road descended suddenly from dark forest into narrow streets. Instead of dropping me off at the hostel, the priest waved his hand in dismissal and took me instead to another temple. Every time I took a stab at conversation, he stopped me with a raised hand and a small embarrassed laugh and said, “ No English. Sorry. “
    “ But—but I’m speaking Japanese, really I am.”
    “ English. No.” It was demoralizing.
    We entered the lower temple through a two-story wooden gate, and a young priest came out to greet us. He had a Jiminy Cricket face and a shaved head. The older priest nodded toward him and said with deep satisfaction, ‘America.”
    Shuhō Jishi, the young priest at Seiken-ji Temple, spoke English fluently. He spent six years as a Shingon missionary in San Francisco and had adapted well to life in America but, when his father died, he was forced to return to Shōdo Island and take over the family temple. “I’m the oldest son,” he said simply. Priesthood is not a calling in Japan; it is a hereditary post. Training and proper knowledge are absolutely necessary, but a deep spirituality is not mandatory. As in so many things in Japan, it is proper behavior that is the essence of worship: how to follow the rituals, how to recite key sutras, how to avoid making errors of protocol. Buddhist priests are not celibate and Shuhō was no exception. He was married with three small children, and after his time in America he was still adjusting to the elevated but somber position of temple priest. Seiken-ji Temple was over three hundred years old, and its treasury contained sutras, lacquerware, and Buddhist statuary that were more ancient still. It was a heavy responsibility.
    Shuhō invited me to stay at his home. His young son was in elementary school and the kid took an immediate liking to me, in the same way that some kids like big friendly Saint Bernard dogs. I was obviously not very bright. After all, here I was, all grown up and I could barely speak Japanese. But I was, he decided, harmless.
    He was a gangly kid, all arms and legs and ears, and endearing in his very gawkiness. While Shuhō’s wife prepared a vegetarian supper, I sat with their son on the floor and played noisy absurdist games with his collection of Transformer Robots.
    You’ve got to love the way children make robots and toy soldiers fight. Shuhō’s son would pick one up, like someone holding a mallet, and deliver a series of complete body slams to the victim. Wham! Wham! Wham! Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t this hurt the person delivering the blow as much as one receiving it? I tried to explain this to him, but he just looked at me like I was stupid and continued the bout. Wham! Kids can be so illogical.
    The Transformer Commando, having body slammed the evil villain into unconsciousness, folded himself into a rocket ship and flew away. Another Transformer turned into a submarine, another into a rocket-launching tank. These toys, now standard fare, were invented in Japan and they strike me as being very