Hokkaido Highway Blues

obviously pleased with herself. Her brothers were dying to know what she had said. “Tell us, tell us!” they demanded, but she held her head high and proud and didn’t say a word.
     

5
     
    THE MIGITAS LIVED on the outskirts of Kanoya City, in a two-story apartment block that faced an open field. Mr. Migita’s wife welcomed me without batting an eye and, like a conjurer, she produced a full-course meal out of thin air. We nudged our way in around their low dining-room table and the food never stopped coming: raw fish with sinus-clearing horseradish, fried vegetables, noodles, more fish, salad, seaweed, soup, mini-sausages. It became a challenge to see if they could ever fill me up. Mr. Migita kept topping my glass with beer and encouraging my gluttony until finally, bloated to the brink of bursting, I conceded defeat. Mrs. Migita cleared the table of the wreckage and debris, and her husband and I settled back, sucking on toothpicks like a pair of feudal lords. This may sound sexist and insensitive and politically incorrect—and it is—but I had long since learned that had I offered to wash the dishes, or worse, had I insisted, I would only have humiliated Mrs. Migita. And anyway, I’m a lazy git and I was weighed down with forty pounds of excess food at the time.
    The kids were doing their homework in front of the television. Which is to say, they were not doing their homework, they were watching television. It was clear that my presence had caused a lapse of household rules, and whenever their father absentmindedly looked over at them, they began to scribble away with feigned studiousness. A sci-fi animation show was moving stiffly across the screen. Everyone in it had huge blue eyes and ridiculous yellow hair and all the fluidity of a comic book being flipped through— slowly. Man, I hate Japanese animation. Give me some good live-action drama any day: Ultraman or Godzilla or Mothra. Oh no! A giant moth! Those were the classics. But you tell that to kids today and they just don’t listen.
    Mr. Migita eventually did notice what his kids were up to, and they had that immortal parent-child conversation, one so innate I believe it is imbedded right in the DNA. It goes something like this: Hey you kids, turn off the Ty it’s bedtime. Just a few minutes more, please, Dad, please. No, you have school tomorrow. But the good part is coming, please, Dad, please. No! I said no, and when I say no I mean no, so the answer is no.
    As usual, the children won. The animated characters blew up the planet and everyone was very happy, and the three kids filed off to bed. Mr. Migita and I, meanwhile, were on our sixth bottle of Yebisu Beer. He cleared a space on the table and began spreading out maps like a general planning a campaign.
    “You can do it,” he said. “But we must chart your way with great care.”
    We sat up late into the night, he and I, tracing highways with red pens, and with me making copious notes.
    Eventually we came up with a complex course that zigzagged brilliantly across Japan and that made complete sense to us at the time. But the next day and miles away, when I unrolled Mr. Migita’s maps, the routes we had marked and the cryptic asides I had jotted down with such conviction were now completely incomprehensible: “Good here, but not overland—highway changes to new one, must check to always see—Do not (and here I had underlined the word not forcibly several times) cross highway—wait at other places—West instead?—Check as I go.”
    It was two in the morning by the time Mr. Migita and I finished our cunning plan. We congratulated ourselves heartily and opened another bottle of Yebisu. By this point, he and I were blood brothers and we vowed eternal loyalty and friendship. He rolled up the maps with that careful deliberation people get when they have consumed too much alcohol, and we shook hands. Again. We did that a lot, often in lieu of coherent conversation.
    Mr. Migita straightened himself up and said, with sudden determination, “You are my friend. You do not need to hitchhike. I will give you the money for a train ticket.”
    I was taken aback. “I’m not hitchhiking because I can’t afford a train ticket.” Had he offered me food and shelter, because he thought I was broke? He was equally puzzled. If I wasn’t short of funds, why was I hitchhiking? Why did I want to go all the way to Hokkaido in the company of strangers?
    I assured him that the reason was not financial.