Hokkaido Highway Blues

like the Grinch in the Seuss book. His teeth were yellowed piano keys and his breath reeked of stale cigarettes and old fish. Every time we passed a female, whether she was sixteen or sixty-one, he would nudge me in the ribs and ask me if I wanted to have cheap, meaningless sex with her. Of course I wanted to have cheap, meaningless sex, but he made it sound so dirty.
    Hookers, young girls, strippers, women, sex: the man had a wide repartee of topics. And as he detailed his imaginary exploits, and molested passersby from afar, I thought to myself, Wow, guys really talk like this. I thought they only did in comedy skits and feminist films.
    The day was hot and the traffic was terrible. We crawled away from Himeji, slower than continental drift, and along the way we passed a Japanese gas stand with its well-groomed fleet of attendants who ran out like cheerleaders every time a car pulled in. One girl waved cars back into traffic and bowed to departing customers.
    Sukebe grinned at me. “What d’you think of her, eh? eh?“
    She had a nice bum. “She has a nice bum.”
    “Haw! You pervert!” He was almost squealing in delight. “You like our women, eh? Like to screw, eh?”
    He then pointed to my crotch and said, “You must have a big dick. I bet you do, all you gaijins are big. Big!“ He made a fist and held out his forearm.
    This was not the first time I had been leered at like this. In Japan, white males have all the nasty sexual innuendoes surrounding them that blacks do among whites. At first, I took it as some kind of lewd compliment, but it isn’t. What it says is this: You are animalistic, a caricature, abnormal. When I was teaching high school, one of the gym teachers was absolutely obsessed with my dick. At parties he would make juvenile jokes and ridiculous gestures. I tried to diffuse him first through bravado. When he held up his hands, like a fisherman exaggerating the size of his catch, I would say, “No, no, that isn’t true, I am much bigger than that.“ But this only egged him on, until finally I decided to hit back, below the belt so to speak. The next time he started carping on and on about how well endowed white men were purported to be, I said, “That isn’t really true. It’s not that our penises are big, it’s just that Japanese penises are so small.“ His smile withered. The joking ended. He never hung out with me much after that, which suited me just fine.
    My present traveling companion, meanwhile, was all but slavering. He was, I realized, less a man than he was a slug, a sack of phlegm that had somehow assumed human form. At one point he came dangerously close to actually grabbing my crotch. I smiled grimly and considered bouncing his forehead off the dashboard. That such an invertebrate had learned to operate a motorized vehicle was rather amazing.
    Finally, I thought, to hell with it. No ride is worth this. “Big?“ I said. “Big?” My little friend’s eyes gleamed. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It isn’t that we foreigners are big , it’s just that—”
    And once again I saw a smile wither and a once jocular rapport chill. He stared ahead, snarling at traffic and then, abruptly, stopped the car and let me out. It had been a very short ride.
    “Thanks for the lift!” I said in an overly singsong manner.
    He muttered some reply, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,” and drove off. I was quite proud of myself.
    Although it was the type of encounter that makes you want to wash your hands afterward, this short hop had put me far enough away from the downtown core to allow me to breathe a bit freer. The city had thinned out by this point, and the traffic was no longer bumper to bumper. The Human Slug had barely disappeared when the next driver pulled over. It was a large freight truck. Large by Japanese standards, you understand. Which is to say, it was quite small. You don’t see the fourteen-wheel, rocket-fueled, amphetamine-powered cannonball rigs we have back in North America.
    The driver, a young man in his mid-twenties, gave me a hand to shake even as he pulled his truck back into the flow of traffic. “Going to Osaka?” he asked—ominously.
     

4
     
    JAPAN IS A long twisted rope. To cross over, to traverse the spine of the country, is to go against the grain. No roads go straight across. To get from one sea to the other, from the placid Inland Sea to the cold and stormy Sea of Japan, I had to zig and zag from one route to another.
    The truck driver I