by Alan Booth
After an hour I had pricked up satisfactorily, so I left the girl with her tinted hair singing "Scarborough Fair" to a collection of empty stools, and turned south onto the remote road which ran dead flat through marshy land that looked as though it had been reclaimed from the sea. The hills rose ahead in grades of mistiness, and the wind blew the chaff smoke from October fires into my eyes and mouth and hair.
But even on a remote road like this there were large electric shops and shops selling armchairs: testaments to the growing American-style dependence on motor cars, which is alarming when you consider the narrowness of most of the roads and the conviction of so many Japanese people that their country is impossibly tiny. For kilometer after kilometer I would see no drive-ins and then find a string of four or five together, as though, like primitive settlers, they had formed armed camps for protection. They were no different from the drive-ins I had seen in Hokkaido, three thousand kilometers further north, nor were the little towns different from those of Tohoku, nor the factories and their smoke less gray than those of Naoetsu. The people spoke with different accents, but the same proportion were gracious and kind and the same proportion treated me like a freak, explaining, if they got the chance, that Japan had had so little contact with foreigners (in modern times for only five generations) and that it was their native inquisitiveness, and not rudeness, that had got the better of them. Walk the length of Japan: what for? To hear a nation with a two-thousand-year history complain of growing pains?
The road bent east eventually to follow the meanders of the deep green Kuma River, dammed at intervals along its length into quiet, shady lagoons. Here, in the still bright afternoon, fishermen drowsed in motionless boats, and on the tiny dirt road I walked along, children cycled silently home. Across the river a military convoy growled to-ward Hitoyoshi along a highway regularly flooded by the summer rains that are this lovely valley's curse. And in the hills beyond the-highway, hidden by the mist that clung to the high passes, lay the lonely, impoverished village of Itsuki, soon to be flooded forever by the opening of another dam. It was from this village, in times not long past, that the daughters of the poorest families were sent as nursemaids into the neighboring towns before they themselves had outgrown their playthings, and sang in remorse the lullaby that I had hummed to myself eighty nights before in the sulfur springs of Hachimantai on the eve of the festival of O-Bon:
And if I die dig my grave by the road.
Let each passer-by sprinkle flowers.
What flowers shall they be?
The wild camellias, watered by
the rain from heaven.
At the little hot spring resort of Yoshio, a kilometer or so down a quiet tributary of the river, the woman in the single concrete ryokan showed me to a room that was entirely bare of ornament—no calendar, no plastic flowers—and in which the paper screens were half in tatters and the strong stink of sulfur—the same as from the Hachimantai volcanoes―clung to the tatami and the cupboards and the walls. Now was their busiest time, the woman told me, as she brought me a river fish pregnant to bursting. But in my three trips down to the yellow-stained bathroom I met only one other ryokan guest, an elderly man from the room next to mine who peppered the night with a rumbling snore while I lay awake flexing my toes and grimacing—growing pains of my own.
A thick white mist came down in the night, and I got up shortly after dawn and hobbled to the window where I stood staring out at a valley that had vanished. I went down to the bathroom but a woman was using the hot spring tub to do her pillow cases and sheets, so I had to wait until after breakfast before human ablutions could begin again. By ten o'clock the mist had risen and the hills sparkled like polished mosaics in the autumn sunshine. All five women of the ryokan came to the entrance hall to bow to me as I left, and they all waved and called out "Sayonara" as I crossed the little concrete bridge and turned east again toward the river and the road.
The river had begun to flow more swiftly now as it swept round the long jagged curve from Hitoyoshi, and half-submerged boulders and river-wide faults created a churning stretch of shallows down which old wooden boats plied. Each was poled by a boatman at the stern and steered through the swirls by another in the bow, and they were full of white-shirted salarymen on company outings with jackets and ties and towels knotted round their heads to remind them that they were in the country. Just as the boatloads of city tourists had clapped and sung on the Mogami River seventy-six days earlier in the choppy cool of the northern summer, so here in the warm autumn these salarymen clapped and sang, and the loudspeakers in their boats carried the songs of the guides and the grunts of the boatmen across the river to the highway where they were drowned by pneumatic drills.
Some of the salarymen had paper hats on their heads instead of towels and some had covered their legs with green blankets because the Kuma rapids are eighteen kilometers long and the knees of salarymen on such outings are easily intimidated. Along the highway, on the opposite bank, trucks hauled the old boats and the older boatmen two at a time back to Hitoyoshi where they were dumped in the river to start their long journey over again—reminding me of the prodigals in Dante who are condemned eternally to push heavy weights in a half circle and then reverse course and push them back again the way they had come.
I sat and watched boat after boat pass, and then ate a workman's lunch in a little restaurant overlooking the river where some of the guides had come to rest. They were women with frizzy red hair and red gaiters and dark blue checkered yukatas, who leaned out of the restaurant windows and made elaborate arrangements in sign language with the red-faced salarymen in the boats below—arrangements which suggested that shooting the Kuma rapids was but a prelude to a salary-man's country adventures.
As the afternoon wore on, the hills fell away and the road and river wound together into the Hitoyoshi basin. I sat for a while in a tiny, totally empty railway station—no staff, no ticket barriers, no sign of a train; only a little notice to remind travelers that this was "Everybody's Station"—and then crossed the river onto the highway from where I glimpsed, towering beyond the little city, the mountains of Miyazaki. Hitoyoshi was flat and quiet with fewer industrial scars than most cities its size, and perhaps this was because a large hot spring resort occupied the area nearest the station. But the ryokans all looked too expensive, so I searched the back streets and found a smaller place where a nervous woman with metal teeth did all my laundry for me while her two pet monkeys thumped their cage, and one reached out—as an old man had eighty-nine days earlier on a road near Osorezan— to peel a flake of sunburned skin from my nose.
In the evening I went to a place that did skewers of grilled chicken. I chose it because the outside walls were plastered with posters advertising draft beer. The red lanterns hanging over the doorway all had "Draft Beer" printed on them and the inside walls, too, were covered with pictures of Teutonic women in dirndl smocks serving mugs of draft beer.
I ordered a draft beer.
"We haven't got any," said the owner.
After that our conversation took a desultory turn. The owner's wife made two attempts: "Do you drink a lot?" she asked me, and "Are you with a large group?" A young man with long sideburns in a fawn-colored drape jacket came in and slouched up the stairs without a word. Then he slouched down again, went behind the counter, and broke a plate. The owner and his wife stood looking at the floor, and the young man left as wordlessly as he had come.
In the morning the Kuma mist had invaded the city, and though it had vanished by the time I left the ryokan, the sky was dark with clouds and for the first time in two weeks it looked like rain. On the way out of Hitoyoshi I passed an elegant old lady with white hair and a shopping basket walking slowly along the main street and bending down every five yards with considerable effort to pick up trampled cigarette packets. Out of the city the road grew steep, laboring up between drab brown harvested fields toward the prefectural boundary with Miyazaki. The rolling slopes of the plateau soon replaced the som
ber fields. I passed a roadside stall, decorated with Union Jacks, that had once sold pears but was shuttered now and dead as the landscape. In the gutter lay a dried-up tortoise—somebody's pet—and I was startled to find my shirt speckled with the corpses of half a hundred baby flies.
Just after one o'clock I came to the Hitoyoshi Loop Bridge, a towering red metal structure that soared into the air in a huge double helix as it lifted Highway 221 on an ingenious short cut toward a two-kilo-meter-long tunnel that burrowed through the top of a mountain. The bridge had only been open six months but the old highway below was already overgrown and completely unused. Incredibly, the builders had provided a set of steps for pedestrians which joined the two loops of road almost vertically and reduced my hike by a couple of kilo-meters. The wind in the exposed valley was strong, the clouds lower as I climbed toward them, and the metal girders of the bridge whistled softly with only me for miles to hear them. My last view of Kumamoto was an aerial one of crimson maples hiding the lowest approaches to the bridge, and then I plunged into the tunnel and emerged nineteen minutes later in Miyazaki Prefecture on a high terrace overlooking the Ebino valley.
Across the valley, silver mist formed a shimmering chain that joined the hills to the clouds, and barely visible—like ghosts—beyond, rose the three tallest cones of Kirishima. Below lay the flat little town of Kakuto, a silent railway snaking in and out of it and the town hall the only building over two stories. I trudged down the silent slope of the valley wall, and when I reached the streets of the little town I found them as deserted as the pass had been.
The room at the ryokan was completely bare, and I had to ask for a cushion and a small collapsible table to write my notes at. The last guest had signed the register on September tenth, and in the seven weeks since then the family had gone painstakingly and critically about the business of assimilating into the household the young woman from Hitoyoshi who, that spring, had married their eldest son.
I saw how the assimilation was progressing when I joined the family in their living room for dinner. The young wife was ordered about like a servant girl―first by her husband, then by an uncle from Tokyo who happened to be staying the night, and last and most ferociously by her mother-in-law, who sat magisterially on a sofa in the corridor, framed like an icon between the paper screens which stood open so that she could scrutinize every move made during the meal.
"Bring the gaijin his pickles at once!"
"Open another beer!"
"Isn't the bean soup ready yet?"
The young wife rushed about smiling uncertainly, making no complaints whatever to her adopted family members who had not shifted off their cushions for at least three-quarters of an hour.
After dinner an old grandmother was summoned from a neighboring house to entertain me. I had mentioned that I was fond of shamisen music and someone had remembered that the grandmother owned a shamisen. So we sat and watched her lower herself carefully onto a cushion in the center of the room, unwrap her instrument with meticulous care from its embroidered cover, select a plectrum, tune each of the three twisted-silk strings with her ear pressed hard against the neck; and then look round contentedly at her awestruck audience and confess that she had never learned, to play.
"But it's a shamisen all right," she said to me. "Here, would you like to touch it?"
To make up for the disappointment, the uncle from Tokyo sang a pop song very badly, and then turned the television on with the volume up so that no one would get a chance to improve on his performance. The grandmother, meanwhile, told me that she was stone-deaf and kept repeating this information at intervals for the rest of the evening.
"I'm deaf as a post," she kept saying; and then she would turn and growl at the young wife to make some more tea or fetch us some more crackers.
At about eight o'clock the young wife disappeared for fifteen minutes and came back looking sheepish and pregnant in a brand new blue-and-white track suit.
"Do you mind if I go to volleyball club?" she asked.
"Oh, it's volleyball, is it?" said the mother-in-law archly. "And I suppose we must all sit here dying of thirst until you get back! We've got a guest tonight, remember!"
"I won't go, then," the young wife said, grinning.
"Oh, you go, you go," said the mother-in-law. "The dishes will wait until after volleyball. And stand up properly so the guest can see what you look like in your outfit!"
The young wife, blushing and grinning, stood and posed in her track suit in front of the paper screens, while her mother-in-law pointed out what was wrong with her body, her husband smirked, and the grandmother reminded us that she was deaf as a post.
The young wife told me later that she had known no one in the town when she arrived and had joined the volleyball club so she'd have a chance to make some friends. She joined it in May but had only man-aged to get away three evenings during the five months since then, so the volleyball club had scolded her for not being serious and she was lucky they let her practice at all. There was no way they would have her on the team, she said; and she sighed and smiled: "That's country life."
"Country life," said the mother-in-law when the young wife had gone to volleyball, "means that you've no need to get up early in the morning. You take it nice and easy as long as you're here. We don't rush about like they do in the city. Have a late breakfast. Have a lie in."
"He's my son," said the deaf grandmother. "He can stay as long as he likes," and she handed me a persimmon that had taken her twenty minutes to cut and peel.
I was upstairs in my futon when the young wife got back from volleyball, and the rest of the family were in theirs. I lay awake for some time listening to the clatter from the kitchen, and then from the living room as she laid out the dishes for breakfast. She was not up late, not past midnight. The pace is easy in the country.
The young wife had given me a map of the roads to the Ebino plateau —a web of red biro lines on a page torn out of a pocket notebook— and I spent the first hour of the next day trying to make sense of it. I gave up near the Ebino Fish Center, a little shed in the middle of no-where, where an old man was carefully stacking logs for the winter. He drew me another map with a flint on the ground, and we crouched over it and discussed the state of the trails like a couple of Indian scouts. On these lowest slopes of Mount Kirishima the only buildings were pigpens and coops full of clucking scraggy chickens. The smell of the land was an English smell, and the sounds were the sounds of my child-hood Sundays.
"You see, it's only Japan that has four seasons," the mother-in-law had explained over breakfast, and as I emerged at midday on the road I had been looking for since I left her ryokan, the season burst on me with a display that took my breath away. Finest were the deep crimson maple trees, but as I climbed higher up the northern slope of the volcano, the golds and yellows and scarlets thickened till I imagined my-self shrunk to the size of an ant that had wandered into a kiddies' kaleidoscope. Round a bend, as though the whole of Kirishima had turned into a fairy tale, stood two harnessed horses that might have been waiting there a hundred autumns ago to haul their logs down to the valley farms. The road was silent but for the rustle of the leaves. Three cars passed me in the space of an hour, and in the one or two that stood parked by the roadside, honeymoon couples stared sleepily out at the century-old horses and at the fiery trees and me.
By midafternoon the leafy canopy had thinned and I saw, beyond the highest maples, the stark gray-green cones of Mount Kirishima belching streams of white vapor into a slowly clouding sky. Soon the road lurched downwards, and I heard the familiar sound of a woman's voice chirruping at tourists through a loudspeaker. The cloying smell of sulfur rid the air of all trace of pigs and English loam, and I emerged from the kaleidoscope onto the Ebino plateau, four thousand feet above the sea, and saw the sun go down behind the jagged cones of the volcano that towered over a landscape devoid of fairy tale and light, a landscape as seething and lunar as Osorezan's.
It was cold, too, on the hei
ghts of the mountain, and the eight bus-loads of schoolchildren who had just begun to wind their way up for a last look at the crater, accompanied by megaphone-wielding guides, half skipped and half shivered as they shouted out above the mega-phones, "Hey, this is a pen!" and "How do you doooo?"
I had two beers in the Bijitaa Sentaa (Visitors Center) and then booked myself into the almost empty government lodging house, which I could tell had been built for honeymoon couples because the souvenir postcards were heart-shaped. There was one honeymoon couple there that evening, and they sat at a safe distance from each other across the table and ate their dinner in total silence. Breakfast was a bit livelier: a small busload of businessmen had arrived and by a quarter to eight in the morning they had emptied seventeen bottles of beer between them.
When I left the government lodging house it was spitting with rain, and so I didn't spend very long touring the plateau's attractions. All the ponds and paths were neatly signposted, clouds of stinking vapor were billowing about, and hordes of teenagers in freshly laundered mountaineering gear were scrambling in and out of buses and paying so much more attention to me than they were to the ponds and craters that if I had stayed there much longer I expect I would have been sign-posted too.
