Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  It was like Zorba all over again. “Look at his biceps,” they cried, squeezing my arms like fresh bread. “The gaijin is strong. How much do you weigh? What is your blood type?”

  I set out to find Akita bijin and I end up boxed in between drunk salarymen. Could the evening have gone more awry than it had? By now I was sloshing my consonants so badly, all I could produce was a silly “I hafta go” type of noise which everyone ignored.

  They had, by this point, decided that I was their new best friend. (The Vice Supervisorial Whatsit was convinced that I worked for the company as well, which didn’t help. Mind you, he did promise me a raise next year, which I found very encouraging.) There were more drinks, more songs, more backslaps, and endless, pointless handshakes. I tried to leave several times, but every time I did, I was dragged down, liquored up, and mauled some more. They drank beer from mugs the size of rain barrels, they smoked fistfuls of cigarettes, they pried open my jaws and poured gallons of whiskey down my gullet. When we left, I staggered out as though fresh from a pummelling, ears ringing, head spinning, eyes raw red from tobacco fumes.

  “Well,” I gasped once we got outside. “Good night—”

  But they were just warming up. They grabbed my arms and marched me down the street like a prisoner caught trying to escape. “Help me,” I said weakly to people I passed. “In the name of God, help me.”

  My tormentors led me through a series of bars, each smaller and seedier than the last, until we found ourselves scrunched together in a piss-soaked packing crate wedged into a closet that was stuffed into a breadbox. The karaoke machine, naturally, had a microphone and an amplifier. Even worse, because they were all in a very patriotic Japanese-salaryman sort of mood, the bars they chose had traditional tatami-mat floors and low tables, which aren’t a problem if you have space to sprawl, but with half the Akita male population crowded in around me, I was forced into contortionist positions, my elbows in and my legs folded up in a pretzel-shaped figure eight, much like a Yogic flyer. And oh, how I wished I could have levitated out of there. By now they were ordering Japanese gin, Akita saké, Hokkaido beer, and Suntory whiskey straight up, mixing them in my belly like Taoist alchemists seeking the elixir of life and—probably—almost certainly—death.

  At some point a heated discussion broke out about my quest. “You understand the true heart of Japan,” said one man, the same man who told me earlier that, as a foreigner, I could never understand the true heart of Japan. They raised their glasses. A younger member said loudly, “This—this is the true heart of Japan! Drinking. Singing. Friends.” Which provoked an immediate response. “That is not so. We must take him to a temple, to see the plum blossoms by night!”

  Soon we were back outside on some nameless side street. They were determined to show me the Real Japan. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree just what that was. One man insisted that a topless cabaret was the real Japan, another man was equally adamant that I visit a public bath, and another wanted to drink saké under the stars and compose haiku. The group dissolved into factions, and I slipped away during the confusion.

  I reeled down the streets of Akita, ricocheting from one side to another, narrowly missing a plunge into one of the metre-deep gutters that plague drunkards across Japan, and finally, after exhaustive staggering, I found myself right in the centre of who-the-fuck-knows-where. The Hotel Hawaii might as well have been in Hawaii for all the navigational skills I then possessed. I wandered blindly through the city, seeking some kind of salvation.

  I saw it before me in liquid purple and pastel pink, a neon oasis in a night of assassins. The name read Hotel Elegance, or Hotel With, or something along those lines. Either way, I was glad to see it. It was a Love Hotel.

  Love Hotels are a bargain. For couples travelling together, they are the same cost as a business hotel but with far more space and entertainment. No reservations are necessary, though Love Hotels do often turn away single travellers (masturbation apparently being the only sexual act that is unacceptable to the proprietors). Lost and luckless, I decided to stumble in and try my luck.

  Love Hotels are designed for people who feel that Las Vegas is too restrained. The rooms are spacious and luxurious, and shamelessly kitsch. They can be rented by the hour or by the night. When I was travelling through Japan with Marion, I became something of a connoisseur of Love Hotels. In Okinawa, we stayed in one where the entire building was shaped like a battleship (there was a large American base nearby) and the bed was a shuttlecraft. Above it, in blinking command-phrase capital letters, was the message: ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! In Kagoshima, we stayed in the Mickey and Minnie Room, filled with cartoons of the famous rodent couple—which was not exactly conducive to sustained physical passion, if you know what I mean. In Beppu, we stayed in a round room with a seashell bed and silhouettes of starfish and mermaids pinned on the walls, meant to evoke an adventure on the bottom of the sea, but which induced a chest-tightening, suffocating feeling. I woke up several times and felt like I was drowning. This too was not conducive to sustained physical passion.

  Still, for all their endless variation of rooms, the hotels themselves come in only three basic styles, which I have dubbed: the Park ’n’ Ride, the Peekaboo, and the James Bond Secret Hideout.

  The Park ’n’ Ride–style Love Hotels are usually out on the highway or on the outskirts of town. Each room has its own entrance and its own parking stall. Couples drive in, park their cars below, and walk up the stairs to their rooms—all without having to face another person, anonymity being the prime attraction at Love Hotels. Once a couple has settled in, the phone rings, they state whether they are spending the night or just “resting.” Payment is made through a slotted door, like you might in a Chicago speakeasy, again without any face-to-face contact.

  The Peekaboo-style Love Hotels are almost like real hotels. Some even have lobbies, though no one ever seems to hang out in them. The distinguishing feature of the Peekaboo is the front desk, which is shielded with a pane of frosted glass—only the clerk’s hands are visible—so that the monetary transactions are again done anonymously. These are the ones that most often turn away foreigners, simply because it is harder to slip in unnoticed.

  The Secret Hideout style is the most common and the most fun. Everything is automated. When you walk in, an electronic voice greets you and guides you to a display panel of illuminated photographs. These are the pictures and prices of the different rooms available, from the Leather Bondage Den to the Little Bo Peep Sheep Room. Rooms that are not occupied are lit up. You pick your temporary suite of passion, press the button below it, and then go to your love nest. It will be easy to spot: a light above the door will be flashing.

  The Park ’n’ Ride hotels are the easiest ones for foreigners to slip into unnoticed, but the Secret Hideouts are the most entertaining. The hotel I approached was of the Secret Hideout style. I staggered in, punched the cheapest room I could find on the display panel, and made my way to the elevator. The room was a crushed-velvet, purple-wallpaper affair with a round bed—which can be maddening when you’re drunk—and polyester sheets that were meant to suggest silk. A single condom was laid out on the pillow, like a mint. I looked up. Sure enough, a mirrored ceiling. Just what I need to see while I sleep: me, suspended above the bed like a Macy’s Parade balloon.

  The phone rang, and I mumbled “overnight” when she asked me what my plans were. In this hotel you didn’t pay by secret door but by pneumatic tube. A whoosh of air and a plastic canister came sliding down. I stumbled over and took the canister out, put in my money, pressed a green button, and—whoooosh!—off it went. A few moments later, it came back down the tube with some change and a souvenir key chain.

  I sprawled out across the bed, my head still spinning in a fog of alcohol. When I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with a scruffy, ashen-faced man in a crumpled shirt and a sweaty face. Damn these mirrored ceilings. I rolled over like a walrus looking for a place to die, and found, beside the bed, a notebook and a
pen. These notebooks are the most bizarre aspect of staying in a Love Hotel. Each page has a cartoon Kama Sutra of sexual positions and space for messages. Couples circle the sex positions they tried and leave notes to the people who follow. I flipped through this one and noted that the most recent entry was made that very day. The rooms are spotlessly clean and antiseptic, but figuratively speaking—the sheets were still warm. These room journal notebooks are meant to be titillating, and they are, I suppose, but I find the entire ritual a bit odd. Erotic notes to strangers. Clinical, cartoon descriptions of what you have just done to each other. I don’t get it. Whenever I’m in a Love Hotel, I usually write something in the room journal in Japanese-English, just to shake things up, something along the lines of Many times enjoy American-style happy sex play! Tonight, still reeling and feeling queasy, I wrote nothing.

  A catalogue of sexual aids and vibrating love toys, available from the front desk, was discreetly tucked in behind the headboard. The catalogue was titled, in elegantly written English, Playing Goods for Lovetime. But even this could not hold my interest. I crawled over to the bed’s side panel and tried to turn off the lights, but managed instead to flood the room with romantic music and a swirling disco-ball effect that didn’t do my vertigo any good whatsoever.

  I slumped back, feeling very morose. No, there wasn’t an Akita bijin beside me drinking champagne and laughing at my ready wit. No, there was no one here to enjoy my American-style happy sex play. I was in a Love Hotel. Alone. Surely my lowest point ever.

  Then, just as I drifted into something approximating sleep, I realized that all my clothes and belongings were still in a room at the Hotel Hawaii, which was costing me money. Big money. Over twenty thousand yen. Having set out to save money, I was now spending over two hundred and fifty dollars for accommodation: one room for me and one for my baggage.

  Personally, I blame the pizza toast.

  13

  OH LORDY.

  I woke up with a hellish hangover and a headache of apocalyptic proportions. With a painful gait, I limped out of the Love Hotel, into the pallid streets of an Akita morning. Japanese cities by day—and especially the nightlife zones—are a lot like waking up beside someone you picked up at a bar: a bit hard to escape, or even face, in the harsh glare of morning. So it was with Akita. It proved a difficult city to leave. I walked for over an hour, past stale façades and concrete buildings, along blue-fume highways.

  Akita by night had been exciting. By day, it had all the vitality of a sucked lemon. My teeth were furry, and my mouth felt as though I had fallen asleep in a dentist’s chair with the suction tube on at maximum.

  I vowed solemnly never to drink again. Or at least, not to excess. Or at least, not to the point of falling-down drunk. It was the Law of Diminishing Returns kicking in, the notion that if one ice cream is delicious, eating a hundred ice creams will be a hundred times more so. I had once enjoyed the flurry of festivities but, after riding a wave of drunken parties for over a month, the novelty was fast wearing thin. It had become almost an ordeal. I knew something was wrong that morning in the Love Hotel when I woke up and heard a strange, strangled noise. It was the sound of my liver whimpering. I would need to enter detox after this. My blood was so thin, my heart was pumping pure alcohol. No more, I decided. No more. Well, maybe once more, when I got to Hokkaido, but that was it.

  Over breakfast (a cup of coffee and five aspirin), I watched a news report that announced, with barely restrained jubilance, that the Cherry Blossom Front had finally begun creeping up the coast. The announcer was calling for its arrival in Akita any day, but I was already exhausted with the city and was longing for the open road.

  North of Akita City lay Hachirōgata-chōseiike, an odd doughnut-shaped lake. I was fascinated by this. On a map it looked like a giant moat surrounding a vast island. Up close, I discovered, it was simply a man-made lagoon that encircled flat, reclaimed farmland. I was sorely unimpressed.

  I followed the eastern edge of this moat-like lagoon, through several drab little towns. Showa, Iitagawa, Hachirōgata, Kotōka: there was little to distinguish one from the rest save their names.

  I caught a series of short rides from one town to the next. A CocaCola delivery man picked me up on the outskirts of Noshiro City and dropped me off ten minutes later, still on the outskirts of Noshiro City. He wanted to know how the rides were in Akita. “Good, eh?” he said, answering his own question. “Akita people are famous for their hospitality.”

  “Well,” I said, “a lot of people slowed down to look—or even to laugh—but they didn’t stop.”

  “They are shy,” he explained.

  The Coca-Cola man had dropped me off on the Noshiro Perimeter Highway in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. I went in and nursed a cup of coffee for as long as I could, before going out and facing the road again. The toilet in the KFC had an electric seat warmer, and that is all I remember of Noshiro City.

  Outside, great warheads were boiling over in the sky. My luck held, however, and I caught a ride just before the rains began—big fat raindrops that broke like bullets across the windshield.

  “At least it’s not snow,” said the driver, a smiling, awkward young man named Norio Ito. (No relation to the other Itos I had met along the way; Japan has a decidedly limited pool of family names.)

  Norio’s car was in utter disarray. There were boxes stacked in the back and flour on everything. There was flour on his chin, powdered in his hair, dusted on the dash. Norio, it turned out, made konnyaku, a word that strikes terror into the hearts of most long-term residents in Japan. Konnyaku—translated, appropriately enough, as “devil’s tongue”—is a gelatin-like substance cooked in slabs, cut into chunks, and then hidden in broth and soup as a practical joke, in amid the tofu and boiled eggs. Biting into a chunk of konnyaku is about as appealing and as appetizing as trying to chew on an especially large eraser. It looks like congealed mucus—with flecks of stuff suspended in it, no less—but without the nutritional value or flavor you would expect from mucus.

  Though only in his twenties (he looked like he had barely hit his teens), Norio was now in charge of his family business. “My family has always made konnyaku,” he said, though I’m not sure if it was a source of pride or penance. Then, suddenly, “Wait! I have a card. I do. They’re here somewhere.” And he began searching through his glove compartment and among his various flour-dusted boxes and even under the seats, an action that involved putting his head below the dash for extended periods of time while holding the steering wheel on autopilot with his left hand. We were slowly drifting across the centre lane when he popped up to announce—after he had swerved back onto his side of the road—that he had indeed found his business cards. They were still in their original shrink-wrap plastic, and I don’t know why, but that detail struck me as being very sad. He broke the plastic and handed me one. It said: Norio Ito, Maker of Konnyaku. “Go ahead,” he urged. “Take several. You can give them to your friends.”

  Norio explained carefully and at great length how to prepare konnyaku, and I pretended to listen (like I will ever want to know how to make jellied mucus). At one point, he even reached around and pulled out a foil-wrapped, rubbery brick of konnyaku and handed it to me. “A present,” he said.

  “Ah, thanks.” And I thought to myself, How do I tell him that in the washroom stall of the Rock Balloon in Kumamoto City, a bar I used to frequent, there is the scrawled graffiti: What is konnyaku? Where does it come from and what does it want?

  “Is it true,” I asked, “that konnyaku contains animal ash to add colour?”

  He giggled at the notion. “No, no,” he said. “Not animal ash. Animal gelatin. The ash we use is from wood. Mixed with potato flour.”

  “Wood ash?”

  “Yes,” he said. “For colour. Modern companies have tried experimenting with artificial dyes, but the real konnyaku needs ash. It is a long, difficult process. And as you know, the art of handmade konnyaku is dying out.”

  “What
a shame,” said I.

  “It makes it difficult to raise a family in this business.”

  “You aren’t married?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” The very notion of women made him blush. “Someday, but not yet. Still single.”

  He was a nice kid. He giggled a lot, in a head-bobbing way. He had probably spent a lot of his time in school getting stuffed into lockers, but he was a good kid. I felt a sort of big-brother affinity toward him.

  The rain came down. Norio and I talked our way through several cloudbursts, the wipers sloshing back and forth. It was as though we were being pursued by bad weather. Behind us, a cloudbank came down in a slow wave, dissolving the landscape into ether.

  The road we were on took us past an island shrine in a small lake, the torii gate made from rough-hewn logs. Farmhouses tumbled up the mountainsides in reverse gravity. The trees were bare, the barns the grey of old bone marrow. Dilapidated buildings, half finished and long forgotten, gave the towns we passed the archaeological feel of a construction site abandoned long ago. The only bright colours came from the wind-sock carp that were hoisted in front of homes in recognition of Children’s Day, flying upstream against the wind in a personification of that peculiarly Japanese value called gaman, or “perseverance.”

  ōdate City was Norio’s home. He was supposed to drop me off there, but instead he offered to take me just out of town, and this, in turn, became an epic drive across the high mountains into Aomori prefecture.

  We managed to outrun the storm. The weather broke and the rain gave up its pursuit. Outside of ōdate there were a few marshes, some cabins, and then a thick stand of forest.

  “Virgin,” he said.

  “Well, that’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “I’m sure someday you will meet the right girl and—oh, you mean the trees.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Virgin forests. Never been cut. This is very rare in Japan.”