Hokkaido Highway Blues

again, like an echo returning from across a bay, the town of Malacatos high in the Andes of Ecuador. The sound of guitars in the town square in the falling dusk. Myself at nineteen, a spectator speaking in broken Spanish. “Hey, Gringo!“ Gringo. Gaijin. Outsider. And suddenly it seemed as though I had spent half my life as an outsider in someone else’s land.
    “What else?” he asked.
    “Nothing. Just that: roosters, the smell of sugarcane.”
    “Malacatos,” said Hitoshi. “It seems far away”
    “No. It isn’t far. It isn’t far at all.“
    Wee fields spread before us, as flat as a table at eye level. ‘And you,” I said. “Who are you? What places are part of who you are?” My syntax was tangled, but Japanese is a language of metaphors and it makes certain allowances. He understood what I meant.
    “I trekked the Himalayas,” he said. “I spent a month there, in Katmandu, in the mountains. But that is not who I am. Later, I went to India. Calcutta. Have you ever been to Calcutta? No? So many people, such energy. Beggars. The Untouchables.”
    “Like Japanese burakumin?”
    He held up a cautionary finger. “Other places,” he said, reminding me of the pact we had made. “Spain,” he said. “I went to Spain. It was what we say in Japan, an ‘Art Tour’. Spain and Portugal, to see Picasso, El Greco, in the original. But it isn’t the art I remember best. It is the people.”
    He looked into the middle distance.
    “I remember Nazarre,” he said. “In Portugal. The women waiting at the cape for their fishermen husbands to come home. They came together every evening, when the sun is low. Like gold. They were so beautiful, these women by the sea. They are there now, maybe at this moment. Waiting. Waiting for someone. Not me.” He laughed. “Too bad.”
    We rounded a long slow corner and the landscape shifted to the left. The far mountains were white with age.
    “You know,” he said. “If I had the courage, I would never have come back. I would be in Nazarre now, painting. Maybe fishing.” And then he asked me, “Have you ever seen the dance called flamenco?”
    “Just in the movies.”
    “Spain and Portugal, very different. Portugal is strong. The heart is strong. But Spain? For me Spain is like the flamenco. Women, dancing. The body is moving fast, strong, angry even. But if you look at their eyes, they are sad. The action is not the real Spain, the dance is not the real Spain. It is the eyes. That is Spain.”
    “And India?”
    “I was alone in India,“ he said, as though that answered some unasked question. “I was alone, solo travel. It was before Nepal. I was sweating, my shirt is like a bath. They said to me, India has three seasons: hot, hotter, hottest.” He smiled.
    “Is that all you remember of India, that it was hot?”
    “No,” he said, and there was a long pause. “India. Calcutta. So many poor people, hands like this, out for money please. ‘Rupee please, you give rupee please.’ One day I was in the feeling to joke. And this little girl, she is a beggar, maybe Untouchable. She asked me many times, rupee please, rupee please. I saw her every day, in front of my hotel. So I wanted to make a joke, you understand? Just a joke. So I said to her, ‘Why I give you money? I am poor too. Why’—” and his voice cracked. He was staring hard at the road ahead. “—I said, ‘Why I give you money? You should give me money, I am poor,’ I said to her.”
    He filled his chest and let it out slowly, a long, extended sigh. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.
    “So what happened?” I asked. “What did she do?”
    “She gave me some money.”
     
    * * *
     
    Much is made of Japan’s insularity. Too much. Commentators tend to treat the country as though it were disconnected from the rest of the world. But no nation looks as longingly or with such mixed emotions to the outside world as does Japan. Japan was never a crossroads of civilizations, it was always on the periphery, and the elements of other cultures, particularly Western cultures, have been imported painstakingly and at great cost. Today, as the world tilts toward the Pacific, Japan finds itself in the one position she has never prepared herself for: a crossroads of kingdoms, the meeting point of great cultural and economic currents. Worlds have collided and Japan is suddenly a pivotal point. It has been a trauma as much as a triumph.
    The Japanese can never forget the world that exists out there ,