Hokkaido Highway Blues

mine.
    “You,” he said, “are a foreigner.”
    “And you,” I replied, “are drunk.”
    But even as I walked away, I knew full well that in the morning, he would be sober, and I felt deeply depressed.
    Farther down, I came across something you rarely see in Japan: a fistfight. Well, it was more of a lapel fight, really. Two very drunk salarymen were grappling with each other’s jacket collars, while a third man, even drunker than they, was trying to get between them as he repeated, unconvincingly, “Stop it, stop it.”
    There is a sad lack of profanity in the Japanese language. Just about the only bad thing you can call someone is “fool.” So around and around these two went, yanking at each other’s lapels, shouting abuse at each other as best they could.
    “Fool! Fool!”
    “I am not a fool. You are a fool!”
    “Fool!”
    I sidled up beside one of the spectators and asked, “Do they know each other?”
    “Sure. Same company. Different departments.”
    “Really? So what’s the problem?”
    “They are having a disagreement about next year’s sales plan.”
    And for once I was able to say, with no small amount of pride, “Well, you would never see two people getting violent over something like that back where I come from.”
    Ogawa of the Lone Accordions was still at his post, and he gave me a grin and a wave when I came back in. (We were now old friends.) I went to the Roman bath, a luxurious affair with pseudo-European décor: fake marble, fake gold leaf, fake frescoes and very real scalding water. After simmering myself for awhile, I changed into the hotel pajamas and went down the rows of capsules until I found my number. I wasn’t really tired and I would have liked to lounge awhile in the common room, but it was filled with the hacking coughs of chain-smoking reprobates, so I declined. Instead, I purchased some clean underwear from a vending machine—just for the novelty of purchasing underwear from a vending machine—and climbed up into my space pod. It was a tight fit, what with the television set hanging down in my face, but I eventually worked my way in. Capsules are not for the claustrophobic.
    Fascinated with the futuristic control panel, I pushed various cryptically marked buttons, I turned the radio WAY UP and then way down, I fiddled with the air conditioner and its sinus-numbing face-blast, and I set the alarm for exactly 06:48. I then clicked on the television set and I was suddenly staring at a huge pair of hooters. Mr. Ogawa, apparently, had decided to treat me to some adult entertainment. This would have been fine, except that I hate watching smutty movies. Everyone in them is always having so much more fun than I am. Hell, in most movies, the actors have more fun in the first ten minutes than I have had in my entire life. (I’ve suspected that the reason so many tight-lipped types get worked up over pornography is primarily sour grapes. “If I’m not going to get invited to a menage à cinq , no one is!”)
    Even worse, the movie Ogawa had chosen for me was an American flick, which meant everyone was completely naked within five minutes and there were at least four people in the frame throughout. This might have been exciting were it not for the fact that in Japan the naughty bits are video scrambled, so what I was staring at was in essence one big writhing abstract rendering. A Cubist orgy in my little capsule. From what I could gather, it was a religious experience of sorts. (“Oh, my God!”
    “Oh, my God!”) I tried squinting, which did focus the images, but also gave me a severe headache and some very bizarre dreams.
     

3
     
    THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I tried to outwalk the urban clutter of Himeji City, but after hiking for over an hour, I was still beside a traffic-choked, exhaust-bathed, stop-and-go traffic disaster. I stood there with my arm held out, fighting to keep a smile on my weary, dusty, sticky face, and wishing desperately someone would pick me up. Someone did.
    He was a repulsive little man, and I will change his name to—ah, flick it, he’ll never read this. His name was Sukebe Hashimoto. He was a carpenter and—he claimed—a world traveler who had sailed the Seven Seas and visited every brothel and flesh house from Bangkok to Amsterdam. “Women like it as much as men,” he said within minutes of our having met. “You just have to remind them who’s the boss.”
    When he grinned his mouth curled up past his ears and his brow furrowed