by Alan Booth
At twenty past ten I set off down the toll road, past a bus whose driver smiled at me and told me he'd take me down for nothing, past five elderly women on their hands and knees scrubbing the curbs with pumice stones, and past the small sign that told me I was leaving this corner of Miyazaki and entering Kagoshima, the last prefecture of my journey.
All day the sky mounted a frantic pantomime in which patches of blue and thunderclouds chased each other about at the speed of a Chaplin film. Occasionally, through the trees that lined the road, I could glimpse the sea far below—the first I had seen of it since Moji. The road dipped toward the rash of hot springs that speckles the southwest slope of Kirishima—first a small abandoned ryokan, its windows smashed, its old tiled roof caved in, then the enormous nine-story Hayashida Spa Hotel, flanked by a bus terminal, a bowling alley, and a vast department store which I trudged round, partly to make sure it wasn't a hallucination (not many department stores are plonked down halfway up an active volcano) and partly in search of somewhere to have lunch. It was an eerie experience. I was the only customer in the store, and between the lingerie and the escalator I was bowed to by nine uniformed shopgirls who stood like automatons behind their counters in a hall that was silent as the grave. At the foot of the escalator an officious little manager in a blazer came bustling up saying "Basu! Basu!" and pointing toward the terminal.
"I don't want a bus," I snapped, "I want my lunch." And he gaped at me so thunderstruck that three of the shopgirls forgot they were automatons and tittered into the backs of their hands.
The department store—as I should have known the moment I clapped eyes on it—contained nothing I wanted to eat. There was a sort of palm court restaurant, completely empty, with a stage at one end equipped with half a dozen conga drums; and I quickly left and found a little shack further down the road where I ate a plate of fried rice and ran briskly through my life history for the benefit of a toothpick-chewing customer who, though he wanted all manner of personal in-formation about me, addressed every one of his questions to the cook. It was like having to use a simultaneous interpreter, an experience made particularly bizarre by the fact that we were all speaking the same language. The only remark the customer made directly to me was when I had finished eating and was halfway out of the door: only Japan, he told me, has four seasons.
That afternoon I tramped through more Kirishima hot springs as the road wound down toward the coast. All of them boasted eight- or nine-story hotels and red-brick steak houses, and one of them had a Herusu Sentaa (Health Center). A high school girl who had been sitting on a grass bank came bouncing across the road to have an English chat.
"My school stands on a hill," she told me.
"What hill?" I asked.
"It has no name," she said mysteriously. Then she confided that she wanted to be a simultaneous interpreter (there must be a call for them in shacks that sell fried rice) and she handed me a packet of bubble gum and told me she was glad to have met me. Two high school boys who saw this happen yelled obscenities at her from the safety of their bicycle saddles, and I walked on past a snack bar called Al Capone and left the last of the plush hot springs behind me just as it began to rain.
Lower down, the resorts were less plastic and more inviting. Some had little corrugated-iron shelters that served as changing rooms by the side of the road, and I passed a group of elderly women sitting about five yards from National Highway 223 with their naked breasts and bellies hanging out over their petticoats, waving at me with vigor. Overhead, invisible above the rainclouds, jetliners growled toward Kagoshima airport, and after snaking for thirty minutes through a wet gray gorge, the highway dumped me at the entrance to the Shiohitashi Hot Spring ryokan, which was so crumbling and shabby that I hadn't the heart to pass it by. I spent the evening there, the only guest, with a painfully hot sulfur bath all to myself; and for conversation, a tired-looking woman with dyed red hair, an azalea-leaf kimono, and a fag hanging out of the corner of her mouth, who lent me her Givenchy soap.
At three o'clock on the afternoon of the 124th day of my walk I reached Kagoshima Bay and turned south to follow the coast along the last of all the roads to Sata. Immediately ahead-loomed the magnificent gray-brown cone of Mount Sakurajima, topped by its own little beret of cloud. The road was flat, and all the way the smell of the ocean—of fishing nets drying, of petrol on the water, of open drains, of rubbish tipped onto the beaches, of castor oil and rotting fish heads—floated up to remind me that Japan where the Pacific meets the East China Sea is the same Japan that is lapped by the Sea of Okhotsk.
Twenty piglets lay one on top of another in a sty, flapping their pink ears and trying to sleep. In the house next-door an elderly woman in kimono lay on the floor in front of a huge color television, snoring through the late afternoon news. A girl at a shop I stopped in spent five minutes admiring the hair on my forearms, and a man with a red nose told me that he'd saved two million yen as a wedding present for his son. Evening drew on: fishing boats purred past the winking red lamps of tiny harbors. Across the bay the amber lights of the city of Kagoshima flickered on behind the dark lava slopes of the volcano, and as on the very first road of my journey—that hot June road—so here on the last, an old man said to me "Gokurosan (thank you for taking the trouble)."
Next morning I picked my way lazily round the foot of Sakurajima, which until 1914 had been an island in the bay, but which spewed out enough lava and ashes that year to form the neck that now joins it to the mainland. The Kyushu sea is much more placid than the earth. The great chunks and mounds that rise around the volcano look as if they have been flung there by some giant playing at mudpies, and over everything I passed—the palms, the cactus plants, the fruit trees by the roadside—lay a thick coat of moon-gray dust.
I stopped for lunch in a little restaurant that was completely deserted. The woman who ran it saw me from the window of her house across the road and came bustling over to tell me that her daughter had just given birth to her grandson, and so she hadn't much time to mess about but would fry me some noodles. I sat there alone eating the noodles and drinking beer that I fetched myself from the restaurant's refrigerator. When I had finished the woman was nowhere to be found, so I left a thousand-yen note under one of the empty beer bottles and slept for half an hour on a white, silent beach.
For kilometers that afternoon I walked not along the road, but along the top of the crumbling sea wall that offers a whisker of protection to the shacks and houses of this bare coast. An old woman gave me a piece of salted fish, and an angler scrambled up from his stool on the beach to shake my hand. Though the sky was clear for most of the time, sheet lightning kept flashing along the Pacific horizon, and by five o'clock thunderclouds had swarmed across the bay with gaps among them that the rays of the sinking sun shot through in a perfect imitation of the old Japanese flag.
The sea had grown restless too, and as darkness fell the waves rose, and the rain came all at once in a torrent. There was nowhere to shelter and I raced on to the little village of Hamada, where the woman at the minshuku brought me warm towels and tea and slippers in the pauses for breath that she managed to snatch between serving pork cutlets in her restaurant and packets of soap powder in her grocer's shop. I was left to myself and made friends with the cat. But at dinner, when the woman had closed the grocer's and turned the lights off in the restaurant, we sat together in her living room, and she told me that Hamada was a nothing, a nowhere, a place where weekend fishermen dropped off rubbish as their cars sped through it on their way back from the cape.
"How far is the cape?" I asked.
"Fifteen ri," she told me. "An hour by taxi. A day and a half if you're mad enough to walk."
Her husband came home at ten-thirty, having driven the secondhand car he'd just bought from North Kyushu City. It had taken me eighteen days to walk that distance, and he had driven it in a little over twelve hours. They spoke in whispers for a while and I gathered he'd had some sort of run-in with the police. But they soo
n perked up and showed me a picture postcard that they had once received from distant Cape Soya and had kept for the amusement of their guests.
"That's the northernmost point of Hokkaido," they told me. "You'd be astonished how like Cape Sata it is."
November third—a national holiday—a day that, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization's official guide, is "set aside to foster the love of peace and freedom as well as the advancement of culture." South of the village of Sata the road curved and climbed into the hills. Occasionally, the blue sea appeared below with tiny white fishing boats bobbing on it, and across the bay on the Satsuma peninsula, Mount Kaimon brooded like a pyramid.
I stopped in at a grocer's shop that appeared to be managed by two small children: all the faces on the posters and placards had beards and gaps in the teeth drawn on them, and the youngest child clutched a small red cushion which screeched with laughter whenever it was pressed, and which reacted to my presence in the shop with as much hilarity as a cushion could. It was at this shop that I first met the re-porter from the Minami Nihon Shimbun—The South Japan News—who was driving past and recognized me from the description given him by my wife. She was waiting for him—and for me—at the cape, where the reporter planned an interview; but he seized this opportunity to snap a photo of me with the perfect cone of Mount Kaimon in the background and another with an old grandmother who owned a wooden frame for humping vegetables and things about on her back and who was made to explain to me, for the sake of the picture, what it was.
"Your rucksack is much nicer," she told me. "I wish I had a ruck-sack like that. They're better than these old... what d'you... what d'you call 'em...?"
"Shoiko," I suggested, which is what they are called in the north of Honshu.
"Could be," she said, giving me a funny southern look.
The reporter drove on ahead, but kept lying in wait for me at unlikely spots that he thought would make backgrounds for picturesque photographs, which was a nuisance because I was dying for a piss and never knew where he was going to pop up next.
The last stretch was a toll road lined with palm trees. To right and left the sea rolled in to break heavily on the rocks below, and the road itself rose and fell sharply as it wound toward the end of land. The next day, sitting on a bus for the first time in four months, I would travel back along this bumpy road and be as sick as a dog.
I tramped past a picnic area ringed by small round straw-thatched huts that resembled a travel agent's vision of Tahiti, then paid a hundred yen to walk through the tunnel that led to the lighthouse at Cape Sata. Hawaiian guitars serenaded me out of loudspeakers, uni-formed schoolgirls tut-tutted about the state of my jeans, and the admission ticket to the tunnel informed me that I had arrived at latitude 31° N—the latitude of Alexandria, Shanghai, and the Punjab.
Waiting for me at the top of the winding steps that led up to the lighthouse were the reporter and Yukie, my wife. The reporter took a picture of me standing in front of the signpost that marks the southern extremity of mainland Japan, then bought me one last beer in the empty restaurant and asked me these questions:
"How long has it taken?"
"A hundred and twenty-eight days."
"How far have you walked?"
"It's difficult to be exact. The maps weren't always reliable and the roads in the mountains often doubled back on themselves. If I include the 'rest' days I spent wandering round large cities (because even then I walked), the nearest figure I can come up with is 3,300 kilometers, but that is probably too low."
"Did you never take a bus or a train?"
"No."
"Didn't drivers stop to offer you lifts?"
"Often, especially when the weather was bad, but I always resisted the offers."
"How do you feel?"
"Nine kilograms and three toenails lighter."
"What was the hardest part of the journey?"
"Parts of Hokkaido, when my body was still adjusting, and the mountains of central Hyogo and Yamaguchi, where some of the roads that are marked on the map as highways are actually dirt tracks that seem to run in circles."
"Did you have any trouble with the food?"
"Of course not."
"Or with local dialects?"
"Not much."
"Did you ever feel like giving up?"
"Once, early on, when I thought I might not be up to it, and once in Hiroshima when I began to wonder what the point was."
"Can you say now what the point was?"
"No."
"Did you enjoy it?"
"Yes. I would do it again if I had the time and energy and money." "Why did you decide to do it in the first place?"
"Because I'd lived in Japan for a quarter of my life and still didn't know whether I was wasting my time. I hoped that by taking four months off to do nothing but scrutinize the country I might come to grips with the business of living here, and get a clearer picture, for better or worse."
"Have you managed to do that?"
"No."
"Do you like the Japanese?"
"Which Japanese?"
"The Japanese."
"Which Japanese?"
"Do you feel at home in Japan?"
"No, I think it would be a peculiarly thick-skinned foreigner who was able to do that."
"Do you think you've learned much during the last four months?" "Yes, I think I've learned a bit about Japan and a lot about myself" The reporter closed his notebook and we shook hands and said good-bye, and I sat at the restaurant table with Yukie, scribbling postcards to friends in Tokyo, and feeling that I had answered those questions as well as I was able...
... but I couldn't help remembering a conversation I'd had in Hokkaido in July, a fortnight into my journey. I was sitting outside a little grocer's shop in the sun, talking to an old man. The old man had asked me where I lived, and I told him I lived in Tokyo.
"Tokyo is not Japan," he said. "You can't understand Japan by living in Tokyo."
"No," I agreed. "That's why I'm taking this time off to have a good look at the rest of it."
"You can't understand Japan just by looking at it," the old man said.
"No, not just by looking at it," I said. "Not by looking at it as a tourist might out of the window of a bus, but by walking through the whole length of it."
"You can't understand Japan just by walking through it," the old man said.
"Not just by walking through it," I argued, "but by talking to all the different people I meet."
"You can't understand Japan just by talking to people," the old man said.
"How do you suggest I try to understand Japan, then?" I asked him..
He seemed surprised by the question, and a little hurt, and a little angry.
"You can't understand Japan," he said.
Prize-winning author Alan Booth travelled the length of Japan to record, with wry humour and discerning affection, the colourful scenes and characters along the route to Sata.
The small back roads from Soya in the north to Cape Sata in the far south cross three islands and 2,000 miles of rural Japan. Alan Booth walked all the way, meeting an assortment of local people, from fishermen and soldiers to bar hostesses and professional wrestlers. Treated as a foreigner, a gaijin, despite his fluent Japanese, Booth describes the diverse, elusive culture of the people he met. This gently ironic narrative is a wonderfully funny and unforgettable attempt to uncover the true nature of modern Japan.
'The consummate travel writer... he is a master of the absurd... one of the best foreign observers of Japan today... his book is unsurpassed' - Far Eastern Economic Review
'One of the finest to be published on Japan in some time, this book deserves the widest readership' - Japan Times
'Alan Booth has given us a memorable, oddly beautiful book' - Asian Wall Street Journal
'Perceptive, funny and revealing... a marvellous glimpse of a side of Japan that rarely peeks through the country's public image' - Washington Post Book World
Cover illustrated by Cathy Felstead
A PENGUIN BOOK
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