Hokkaido Highway Blues

you sure you are really from Toyama?’ ”
    “Maybe he married a fox?” (Foxes often assume the guise of women to ensnare men.)
    “Yes!” she said. “Maybe I am a fox. You should have been more careful, to ride with a fox, it can be dangerous, but of course, I’m not a fox. We are only joking. Really, I am a—here, it is somewhere—no, that’s not it— here! My business card. Do you see, there is some English on it. Very sophisticated, don’t you think?”
    Kikumi worked for a life insurance company in Kurobe, and she had been returning from a recent meeting when she saw me.
    Kikumi called from her car phone and arranged to meet some of her friends at a hotel restaurant. She dropped me off at the entrance. “You get a seat, I’ll find a parking spot.” As she drove away, I realized I had left my backpack, my camera, most of my money, and all of my underwear with this flyaway woman. I had often marveled at how Japanese drivers would leave me sitting in their car with the keys in the ignition and the motor running, but here I was doing much the same thing.
    The dining room was sunny and surrounded with greenery. The menu included seafood-spaghetti, a dish that is inexplicably popular in Japan, but which always reminds me of a collision, as though one waiter, carrying a plate of octopus and oysters, ran headlong into another waiter carrying pasta. The coffee bar was one of those elaborate chemistry sets where coffee is weighed out like gold dust and then boiled in beakers and poured carefully out, cup by cup. Through painstaking preparation like this, the Japanese have managed to justify charging six hundred yen (five bucks!) for a single cup of what is, basically, overpercolated sludge.
    I choked back the java and basked in my celebrity. Three ladies, in varying ages from early thirties to late forties, were held rapt by my presence. We had a freewheeling discussion that ranged from whether perms suited Japanese women, to whether beards suited Western men, to whether Kikumi’s recent decision to take up downhill skiing was well-advised. The consensus on these issues was: no, yes, no. It turned out that Kikumi’s friend Mami did not speak English, but she had been to Australia and that qualified her to act as translator. One of the ladies would ask Mami a question about me, Mami would ask me how to say it in English. I would tell her, she’d repeat it in English to her friends and I would answer in Japanese. Everyone was happy.
    When I told them I was heading for Sado (the distant island of the round-washtub boats) Kikumi told me the same folk story that Mr. Nakamura had told me, about lost love. But in her version the woman was escaping Sado, to visit a lover on the mainland. It was a slight shift in emphasis, but the difference was revealing. In one version, the woman was trying to visit her exiled lover—a sad tale of sacrifice and womanly fidelity. In the other version, she was simply restless and wanted to get off her island. When I asked them about this discrepancy, one of Kikumi’s friends said, “It doesn’t matter. In both cases, she drowned halfway across.”
    I wasn’t allowed to pay for lunch. Kikumi waved it onto her tab with an empresslike gesture, only to have the waiter give her a strained smile. The manager soon appeared and he and Kikumi had a long heated exchange about some other past unpaid bills, after which it was settled that (a) Kikumi was right, and (b) the manager was very rude. As we left, Kikumi gave me a sour look and whispered, “Toyama men—obsessed with money. It’s terrible.”
    Kurobe City, it turned out, is the zipper capital of the world. It is the home of YKK, which stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha. The YKK Corporation has made its name and its fortune with the humble zipper. Except of course, they aren’t called zippers; that was a brand named introduced by B. F. Goodrich in the 1920s. The name zipper later became generic, but in the city of Kurobe, or at least within hearing range of YKK, zippers are still officially referred to, not as zippers but rather as “slide fasteners.” It seemed like such a strange industry to build a city around, zippers. I tried to imagine similar cities—the Shoelace Metropolis, the Button and Tie-Clip Capital of the World, String City—but I couldn’t do it.
    We swung by Kikumi’s office on the outskirts of town and as she pulled into the parking lot, she suddenly—frantically—said “Quick! Get