The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  I sat in the hottest of the bathtubs chatting to a young man from Niigata who was anxious to explain to me the effect of pH on boiling points, but I told him that we didn't have that sort of thing in Britain and so was able to change the subject.

  "Did you hear about the old man who died this morning? Apparently it happens from time to time. They were going to have a Bon dance, and now they've had to cancel it."

  "Why?" asked the young man from Niigata, surprised.

  "Because of the old man dying."

  "And what do they suppose Bon dances are for? The whole point of O-Bon is to please the dead. They should have gone ahead and held the dance. It is no easy thing to die in a strange place. I would have danced. We should all have danced. The old man would have wanted it cheerful."

  But the hot spring seemed especially silent that night. No one stayed up to pass the time. One by one, the elderly left the baths and went back to their lodgings, gathering up their pallets and locking the doors quietly behind them. By nine I was quite alone in the bathhouse, and from the windows I could hear no voices at all—only the cicadas in the mountain pines.

  I locked the door of my own room before sleeping. It was a quiet death and no one danced.

  I don't know what magic properties the Tamagawa water possessed, but the next day—the fortieth—I walked faster and further than on any day since the start of my journey. I had begun to think of my legs as having gears, and I would pore over my maps each morning and calculate the gears I needed to use during the day. The road from the Hachimantai plateau to Lake Tazawa was almost all downhill, so I was in top gear within twenty minutes of leaving Tamagawa. I followed a stream down through thick woods, wiping away my sweat on a towel that reeked of sulfur, as it would for weeks to come. The water that trickled out of the rocks was cold enough to make my head ache if I drank it, and when the land leveled out and the stream widened into a still pool of brilliant turquoise, I stopped to rest on the road above a dam and sat looking out over the pale green rice towards the dark hills that surround Mount Taihei. In all my journey I found little to compare with the hills and valleys of Akita, and for all the heartaches of the northern winter I envied the people who looked out on them each day.

  Occasionally a car would stop to offer me a lift and I would have to put up a lengthy defense for not accepting. The couple who stopped for me just after the dam were particularly insistent.

  "Get in!"

  "No, as a matter of fact I've walked all the way from..."

  "We saw you at Osorezan."

  "Yes..."

  "You accepted a lift at Osorezan."

  "I didn't."

  "You did. We gave you a lift then. Why won't you accept one now?"

  "I haven't been inside a car for six weeks."

  "You've forgotten. Get in!"

  "You must be mistaken..."

  "Ooo... he's a liar!"

  The woman wound up the window and the man at the wheel accelerated away, leaving two pebbly ruts in the loose-surfaced road and the familiar dense white fog of dust.

  Down in the valley the houses of the first village I came to had professional wrestling posters tacked to their plywood walls: Mil Mascaras in black-and-silver tights would destroy Giant Baba in the Samaa Akushon Shiiriizu (Summer Action Series). There were posters, too, for a Lake Tazawa festival that said, in English, "Let's Do Your Trip," and on the veranda of the little grocer's shop an elderly woman made me a tiny pot of green tea, pouring the water from a red thermos flask that had "Lequel voulez-vous du café ou du thé" printed on it in fancy white letters.

  When, at dusk, I tramped down a narrow farm path and settled myself into the minshuku at the end of it, I realized with a shock that I had walked thirty-nine kilometers in top gear that day and hardly noticed it. I logged the fact with a complacent flourish in my diary, drank one too many jugs of postprandial sake, and went to bed tingling like an athlete. The next morning I woke up with stomach cramps and diarrhea.

  It was ten o'clock before I dared leave the haven of the minshuku, and by then my torments had been crowned with rain. Spots of it fell on the short road down to the lake and pocked the gray beach where small groups of holidaymakers sat squinting at the sky from under faded orange parasols. The lake itself was the color of a battleship. Four couples rowed aimlessly about on its surface, this way and that, determined to enjoy themselves. A speedboat howled past, cutting as close to the rowers as it possibly could and sweeping off in a tight, bumpy circle as its wake just failed to capsize them. I sat down in a small wooden pavilion, next to a trashcan full of dead fireworks, and thought seriously about stretching out and going to sleep. A squall of rain came in across the lake, carried by a wind that turned a sharp 180 degrees, uprooting a parasol and tugging it out into the water. Two holidaymakers retrieved it with a lot of flapping, and the rest snatched up their belongings and began to move quickly up the slope towards the car park. The squall had spun the trashcan over, and the charred fireworks lay scattered across the pavilion floor. I stood up gingerly so as not to jolt my bowels, held my breath while I hoisted my rucksack, and began a sullen trudge round the lake's northern shore.

  Lake Tazawa, an almost perfect circle with a circumference of twenty kilometers, is the deepest lake in Japan—425 meters at its center. You do not begin to suspect its depth until you leave the beach and walk round towards the Gozanoishi Shrine, where the sand gives way to a sheer wall of boulders that descends almost vertically into the water. Apart from its depth, the circular lake—on this unseasonal August day~had nothing special to recommend it. The hills that surround it are less spectacular than those at Lake Towada and the souvenirs at the shabby restaurants were well below standard for a prefecture boastful of its handicrafts: the commonest items were plastic pinball games and replicas of yet another mystical lakeside maiden—clothed this time, but in a clinging garment that left nothing to the imagination. In the shrine a set of tinny loudspeakers endlessly broadcast a tape loop of "Etenra-ku"—the only piece of shrine music most Japanese can recognize—and a gaggle of sightseers rinsed their hands in ritual water before lining up for a commemorative photograph.

  A dirt track led me away from Lake Tazawa, up into a short, high stretch of woodland, then down into a thin valley full of precast concrete blocks. The rain came on again, bringing out the snakes for an afternoon shower. One—a yard long—I almost trod on. It curled out of my way in two elegant sweeps of its mud-colored body and then stopped just short of the long grass and turned to stare at me, totally unafraid. A cemetery of rusted car chassis marked the approach to a village and the railway track that runs south to Omagari. By the time I came out onto a surfaced road, the rain had gathered such spiteful force that, having eased my other complaints in the lavatory of a restaurant, I found the prospect of going out into it again too depressing to face. I flopped down at one of the restaurant tables and sat scowling out at the grizzling sky and slowly sipping my way through a chilly beer that I would gladly have swapped for a mouthfill of beef stew.

  "Where are you going, then?"

  "South."

  "Where to?"

  "Saimyoji, I think. Is there a minshuku there?"

  "No."

  "A ryokan?"

  "No."

  "Shit."

  "Pardon?"

  "Sorry, I was thinking in English, Are you sure there's nowhere to stay in Saimyoji?"

  "Quite sure. I'm the village policeman."

  I looked up. He was a stocky man in his late thirties, wearing a pair of sodden faded trousers, Wellington boots, and a brown fisherman's anorak. He nodded.

  "Of course, I'm not in uniform. I only wear uniform for special occasions. But it's true all right. Have another beer."

  He ordered another bottle of beer and left the oil stove he had been hovering over to come and sit at the table.

  "Why do you want to go to Saimyoji?"

  "To get out of the rain," I said.

  "You're out of the rain here."

 
"I mean for the night."

  It was still only a little after two in the afternoon, but he must have caught a note in my voice that conveyed a certain weariness with cross-examination.

  "Of course," he said, after a thoughtful silence, "there's a ryokan here in Matsuba."

  "I saw nothing on the road except this restaurant," I frowned.

  "No," he agreed solemnly, "you wouldn't have. This is the new road, sort of a bypass. The old road runs to the east, through the village"

  There was no other road—not even a track—on the map.

  "It's not on the map," he agreed, equally solemnly, "but it's there all right. Want to give it a try?"

  I said I did. In less than a minute he had phoned the ryokan, booked me a room, ordered two more beers, and gone out on a call leaving three full bottles and a large plate of beans.

  "That's the policeman," gasped an old man who had been listening intently from a seat in the corner. "He's got a patrol car in his garage. He's got a fourth dan in judo, a second dan in kendo, a first dan in karate, and a first dan in sumo wrestling. He drinks whiskey—some-times a bottle a day, sometimes half a bottle—and he hunts bears with a rifle on Sundays and holidays. His wife's pregnant. Do you mind if I ask you a question?"

  The old man shuffled over, sat down wheezing, leaned across the table, and said, "Do you believe in Nessie?"

  A recent Japanese news bulletin had announced the capture of the Loch Ness monster by a Japanese fishing boat just off New Zealand. Since then, questions about the monster (in Japanese, Neshii) had acquired a tone of anxious concern. I said I wasn't sure but was prepared to be convinced. The old man shut one eye in a curious squint and said in a whisper, "I believe in the Tsuchi-no-ko Hebi (literally, 'ChiId-of-the-Earth Snake')."

  "The what?"

  "The Tsuchi-no-ko Hebi." He opened his squinting eye and examined my face to see if I was smirking. I definitely wasn't doing that.

  "I've seen it," he said, nodding and glancing over his shoulder. "I've seen it on Mount Taihei. That's where it lives. I saw it when I was up there for mushrooms. It's shaped a bit like a kokeshi, except you can't tell where the head ends and where the body starts." (A kokeshi is a wooden folk doll usually made from two pieces of wood, one a cylinder for the body, the other a globe for the head.) "It doesn't move fast, but I still couldn't catch it. I wish I had. There's a 400,000-yen reward for it. It's about the size of a beer bottle," he ended ruminatively.

  I poured him a beer.

  "Sounds like you missed a good opportunity."

  "Ah," he said, "it bit an old woman from Yatsu. Her hand went green."

  Later on, at the ryokan, the policeman confirmed the 400,000-yen reward, though he doubted the old man had actually seen the creature. Only two women, he said, had reported seeing it, and they had both come shrieking away in fright.

  Outside the window, in the still falling rain, an old woman in a conical straw hat and straw cape was carefully weeding her vegetable patch. In the ryokan room, the policeman sat with me, drinking beer, till dusk came down. The rain was still pounding as I lolled in the. bathtub, letting the hot water knead my stomach and feeling the aimless depression of the morning seeping out of me and drifting off with the steam. There are few complaints, whether of body or soul, that a Japanese bath will not help ease. It is simply a question of separating the functional from the hedonistic. You do not take a Japanese bath in order to wash. You wash before you get into the bath, thus freeing yourself from the obligation of doing anything in the tub itself but wallowing, reviving, gossiping with your neighbors, drowsing, humming, listening to the evening rain.

  Thus it was that, stomach cramps gone, diarrhea a fading nightmare, I emerged from the bathroom fully prepared for the evening revels of the Matsuba Phoenix Baseball Team who had just won the village tournament and had taken over the upstairs floor of the ryokan for what already sounded like Akita's answer to Balshazzar's Feast. Top of the bill on the circus program, I sang for them, played the taiko for them, attempted to explain the rules of cricket to them (an explanation doomed from the start by their unshakable conviction that cricket, croquet, and polo were the same game), drank a lot of their sake and most of their draft beer, and ended up being put to bed by two ryokan maids who told me that I had a good voice but rather loud, and that I should try to avoid the downstairs guests in the morning. It wasn't so much that they had complained; more that they had been "a bit surprised."

  In the night I made the beginner's lavatory mistake. Whatever the style of Japanese lavatory—whether Western or the traditional hole in the floor—you never go into it wearing the same pair of slippers that you wear along the corridors. Another pair of slippers—often help-fully marked "lavatory —is laid out for you there, and you change into them as you enter. The beginner's lavatory mistake is this: stumbling half-pissed into a hole-in-the-floor-type lavatory at night, he kicks one of the lavatory slippers down the hole. This, I suppose, happens fairly regularly, but for a veteran of seven years to commit this blunder was an immediately sobering embarrassment. In fact, it was so embarrassing to be left hopping about in a single lavatory slipper that I kicked that down the hole to follow the first. My plan was to disclaim all knowledge of the slippers so that the maid would be accused of having forgotten to lay them out. This, I congratulated myself was a cast-iron defense, but in the searing light of morning it struck me that I might well be resorting unawares to an instantly recognizable "beginner's lavatory feeble ploy," so I avoided not only the downstairs guests but the entire domestic staff as well.

  In the late afternoon of my forty-second day I went to see the old samurai houses in the town of Kakunodate. They line the sides of one long, unspoiled street between the station and the river. Standing back in the shade of their own gardens, some are still lived in, some deserted and empty, their gnarled raindoors stashed away, the odd leaf blown through open screens onto the faded tatami. The rooms are bare, devoid of furniture. The rough, worn wood of the beams and posts is dark and grained, and the creamy white plaster of the walls is cracked and, in several places, has crumbled away to reveal the daub-and-lath construction still very common in Japanese houses. The paper screens are yellow with charcoal smoke, the ends of the rooftiles black and hollow. The whole is silent, and the sound of a sparrow is enough to startle you as you stand there moping.

  The classical Japanese house attains its somber beauty by decaying in stages until it offers both the congenial textures of age and the sense of natural order that attends the first hint of ruin. Tatami are the color of green tea when new. Only gradually do they acquire the mellow gold-straw color that warms and softens rooms such as these. In time, the gold fades to the color of old hay, and the rich, smooth patina of wear grows lusterless. The glow dims out of the brown-and-white spaces, and the rooms die as these have.

  In the silent gardens of the old houses in Kakunodate the tops of the stone lanterns are lumpy and green, the stone wells drip with dark water drops that congeal in the summer heat. The moss is black-green and thick as a poultice. Not a single flower blooms, though the cherry trees are in full leaf, and beyond the mounds of twig and rock stands a small, empty veranda from which to view their blossoms. All of the colors are the colors of decay―decay, not the full-blown colors of maturity. Their tranquility stems from the brush of death on them.

  Across the road, in an open workshop, two young craftsmen sat hammering cherry bark, one making suzuribako―flat square boxes for writing instruments—and the other decorating geta. Behind them in a small dripping lumberyard a pile of logs lay under jets of water dousing them to separate the ripe bark from the wood, and as the young craftsmen worked they sang "Blowin' in the Wind."

  On the road the next morning I passed a Buddhist nun in a filthy white robe striding towards Kakunodate station carrying a round, flat, fan-shaped object called an uchiwa-daiko—a stained, single-skinned drum. She was beating it for alms as she strode along, and no one was paying her the least attention. To the southwest
the white, snow-riddled peak of Mount Chokai teased its way up through a fine mountain mist. Chokai is known as Dewa Fuji—Dewa being the old name for Akita and Yamagata—just as Yotei is known as Ezo Fuji, Bandai is known as Aizu Fuji, Iwaki is known as Tsugaru Fuji, and so on through at least a dozen "Fujis" that in some way, if only in the imagination, call to mind the famous prototype. Each of these lesser, provincial mountains is beautiful because it imitates Fuji. That, it has been decided, is the epitome of natural splendor, so that is what the rest shall aspire to. I sat and drank a bottle of beer in a drive-in and watched the largest, most beautiful moth I had ever seen—deep purple and orange, and huge as a bat—curl up and die on the windowsill.

  At the Omagari Batting Center a machine lobbed pitches to a solitary batter who whammed them into a frayed green net, and in the avenue to the south of the station a few soiled Tanabata lanterns bobbed on strings, and grit blew into the doorways of the Sony shops and the shops selling cherry-wood boxes.

  Early on the forty-fourth morning I seized the first opportunity to get off the dusty highway onto a flat country road that rambled through farms and slate-tiled villages, and on which, from midmorning till late afternoon, I saw not a single motor vehicle. Houses older than those in Kakunodate stood, lived-in and contained behind high tile-topped walls. Dark iron fire towers teetered over the village streets, and beyond the villages lay the fifty-kilometer sea of rippling green rice that filled the wide Yokote valley.