Hokkaido Highway Blues

and I in Guam.” He showed me the picture of them in their Sunday best, smiling in front of a coral reef, an American flag in the distance. He had his official Japanese retired man’s cotton hat on. He and his wife stood side by side like a pair of Buckingham guards who didn’t know they weren’t supposed to smile. The Japanese use the world as a backdrop for photographs of themselves; the important thing is not the place, but the fact that you were there. Whether this is shallow or just more honest is hard to say.
    “Australia,” said Mr. Nakamura. “Look, a koala in a zoo. Looks like Yoshihiro.” I looked at the photo and then over to Yoshi. He was right. And Ayané looked just like a little baby koala, clinging sleepily to her mother.
    “I do not look like a koala,” said Yoshi. He appealed to me as a disinterested judge. “Tell him. I don’t like look like a koala.”
    “Sorry,“ I said. “Your dad’s right, you look like a koala. But in a nice way.”
    “Ha,” said his father, “I told you. My son is a koala.”
    Mr. and Mrs. Nakamura’s next trip was to be a tour of Europe. Mrs. Nakamura was nervous, but her husband would hear none of it.
    “My wife said she didn’t want to go to Australia either. Too dangerous. Everyone hates Japanese, she worried. But we went.” He chuckled. ‘And now she wants to go back.”
    “Really?” I said to her, switching over to Japanese.
    “Oh yes,” she said. ‘Australians were so fun and lively. Japanese are too shy, I like lively people.”
    “Like Pop,” said Yoshi.
    “Yes, your father is very cheerful,” she said, using that ineffable, untranslatable, multipurpose term— genki. It is one of my favorite words in any language. It means healthy, energetic, optimistic, high-spirited, filled with life. When Japanese greet each other, it is not “How are you?” met with a hedged, “Not bad.” In Japan the question is ‘Are you genki?” and the answer is “Genki yo!” And when you part, “Stay genki!”
    All languages have their blind spots. The Japanese can distinguish between this hotel and that hotel, but they cannot suggest a hotel or the hotel. English speakers can’t describe savoir faire without slipping into French, and the French can’t say hot dog without sounding silly: chien chaud.
    Certain words just fit. The Americanism OK, with its many varied uses and easy-tripping rhythm, has been adopted by all but the most remote tribes in the world. Go to a bazaar in Istanbul or a village in Tierra del Fuego and you will hear native residents using okay among themselves, making it the most common word in human history.
    The Japanese, meanwhile, can’t distinguish between shame and embarrassment; in Japan, to be embarrassed is to be ashamed, the two are inseparable, which may or may not signify something about the Japanese value system as a whole. Yet at the same time, the Japanese have a pair of words, wabi and sabi, which together signify the beauty of the ephemeral and the fleeting; the aesthetic of decay, asymmetrical detail and natural color, and an appreciation of the incomplete, the impermanent, the imperfect. It takes a mini-essay in English to sum up what can be said in four syllables in Japanese.
    “My father,” said Yoshi, with the affection of a son who has given up ever trying to reform his father, “is too genki.”
    “Australia was genki,” said Mrs. Nakamura. “I liked it. Very big. Very wide. And lots of koalas.”
    “Enough with the koalas already,” said Yoshi.
    Saké had appeared and we were exchanging drinks. “Your parents are world travelers,” I said to Yoshi.
    “It is their time to travel. My mother worked as a nursing instructor at the Woman’s University in Kumamoto; my father is retired from his work at City Hall. It’s their chance.”
    “We must see many countries, to see their ideas, to learn,” said Mr. Nak. “Me and my terrible wife.”
    “Together?” I asked.
    Mr. Nak was genuinely surprised by my question. “Of course, together,” he said. He would be lost without her, to be apart was as inconceivable as to be alone. She touched his hand gently, as you might a sleeping child’s.
    Chiemi and Ayané had gone to bed and Yoshi’s eyes were at half-mast, but Mr. Nakamura was wide awake and so was I. We started in on a second round of saké. We sang a couple of songs, with Mrs. Nakamura giving a haunting rendition of a traditional ballad and with me replying with “Blue Suede Shoes.”