About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (6 page)

Mrs. Nishibe—a glance at the hand-polished surfaces of her kitchen tools and I can hope her judgment will be informed, not merely polite—samples both marmalade and honey
immediately and pronounces each exquisite. And nothing will do now but that she must prepare a few presents for me to take home, just as soon as she prepares tea and a light meal for all of us. Her guileless courtesy is disarming. A well-mannered people, I conclude, watching Mrs. Nishibe later ironing
furoshiki
, the traditional wrapping cloths used with presents.

That evening Mr. Nishibe takes his son and me and a friend of his to a Japanese resort inn, a
ryokan
, where guests can soak in the steaming mineral waters of a hot spring. Before we do, the four of us enter a shoji-screened private dining room, for the evening meal. We sit cross-legged on tatami mats, Naoki and I side by side with our dictionaries between us and facing his father and his father’s friend, Minoru Taketazu, across small black lacquered tables. The meticulously prepared food placed before me is so carefully arranged—the half dozen dishes on the first of four trays, and the food itself, arranged on each dish according to line, color, and texture—that I am hesitant to disrupt the symmetry. I enjoy traditional Japanese food, but am hard-pressed here to distinguish among many varieties of raw fish and sea vegetables. I am also apprehensive that I might embarrass my host with failures of etiquette, but Mr. Nishibe only nods reassuringly at my adventurous appetite, and even compliments me on my use of the chopsticks. Speaking through Naoki and shaking his head in disappointment, Mr. Nishibe adds that the youth of Japan are sadly deficient in these skills. Too many forks, he says.

Mr. Taketazu, sitting directly across from me, full of gesture, loquacious and affable, seems oddly familiar. It’s something in the drift of our conversation, which is turning on the habits of wild animals. He speaks very little English but, again with Naoki’s help, we manage to exchange a startling amount of information. He is about the same age as Mr. Nishibe, and the two of them exchange the beaming looks of proud parents when, at several points during dinner, using my dictionary, I try to state my affection for the landscape of Hokkaido.

I knew before I came, I tell them, that it is possible to witness the elaborate courtship displays of the Japanese crane here and
to see other large birds unknown to most North Americans—Blakiston’s fish owl and Steller’s sea eagle. The Kurile seals, I continue, the brown bears, red foxes racing over the frozen sea—such animals, encountered in the undisturbed wilds of Shiretoko and Akan National Parks, could pull a disaffected visitor up out of himself very quickly. Was it really true that few foreigners ever came? The three men looked at one another. Mr. Nishibe made a summary comment to Naoki.

“No Holiday Inn,” said Naoki.

After supper Mr. Taketazu asks me to sign a book of mine, a translation, and offers me a book of his in English,
Fox Family: Four Seasons of Animal Life
. I try to compose words appropriate to the moment, words that in the future may recall the memory of the meal, our enthusiastic conversation, and the generosity of our host.

Something hangs unresolved in my mind about this modest Mr. Taketazu. When he hands me the fox book, I decide his name must be familiar from a scientific paper I might have once read in translation.

We return to our separate rooms, change into light cotton kimonos, the summer
yukata
, and meet again outside the men’s
ofuro
(communal hot tub). Naoki explains the etiquette—a small towel held over the genitals, a thorough scrubbing and shampoo at one of the washing stations along the wall before entering a large tiled tub sunk in the floor. The chasteness, cleanliness, and orderliness of this ritual (my clothing rests folded in its own small wicker basket, perfectly aligned with dozens of other identical baskets on a white shelf in an adjoining room) are in keeping with principles of behavior long observed throughout Japan.

The steaming, sulphurous water is intensely calming. It encourages gentle and desultory conversation, not serious talk. Nevertheless, Naoki successfully communicates something quite abstract, that, traditionally, these circumstances did away with the façades from behind which people might be inclined to speak falsely. No one, he says, tells lies here.

A wall at the end of the room separates our
ofuro
from the women’s, but it does not reach the vaulted ceiling of the building. From behind it come bursts of evocative, high-pitched laughter.

We retire an hour later. Before stretching out on my sleeping mat, or futon, an inviting envelope of ironed white sheets and cotton quilts, I glance through Mr. Taketazu’s book. Staring at the many stunning photographs of foxes, I finally recall the connection. Several years before this Mr. Taketazu had made a film about the red fox, or Ezo fox, of Hokkaido. It virtually changed the attitudes of Japanese people toward this animal. I’d seen an edited version of the film in the States and been very impressed by the compassionate way Mr. Taketazu had suggested making provisions for wild animals within a settled but still rural land.

Tomorrow, I thought, I will have to pay my respects to Mr. Taketazu. I quickly make some notes about the day’s events and get into bed. I am exhausted by the effort to understand and to be understood, and I know no moment so blissful at the end of such a daylong effort than repose between fresh sheets, one’s skin bare and still puckered and tingling from a hot, soaking bath.

I
N THE MORNING
the four of us drive up to Mount Iō, a barren, jagged volcano on the periphery of a taiga plain. The wail of the ground vents, that violent escape of steaming air, and the pall of sulphurous fumes end our conversation along the footpath and send each of us off into private thought. The surface of the ground near the larger vents is coated bright yellow with sulphur deposits. Apart from these brilliant fumaroles, the volcano has a stern, prehistoric visage. It’s a dark shoulder set against the melancholy taiga and denser forests to the west. The Hokkaido bear, the same species as the North American brown bear, lives out there in good numbers, but it is rarely seen by the automobile traveler. If you want that encounter you must hike up into the mountains. Standing on the volcano’s steaming flanks, staring up into the moss-hung limbs of the pines and
spruces, I could easily imagine bears watching the handful of visitors strolling here. Perhaps the bears have their own version of the
ofuro
rituals, and are waiting for nightfall, when all of us will have moved on.

Our next stop—the two-lane roads we are traveling all look as if they’d just been paved, and Mr. Nishibe contends that these sleek, new roads simply encourage visitors to Hokkaido to drive too fast, that they actually cause more accidents than the old roads—is at a caldera (the basinlike depression left after the collapse or detonation of a volcano), which Mr. Taketazu tells me holds the clearest water in the world and is called Lake Mashu. He also adds that we are most fortunate: the lake is almost always blanketed with fog, but today it glitters under a cloudless sky. The reflection of sunlight on the water is too dazzling for us to see anything beyond its surface from our vantage point on the rim. Mr. Taketazu assures me, however, that from the right angle it’s possible to see the bottom contour at about 130 feet.

I’ve been trying all day to put my finger on an essential difference between Hokkaido and similar landscapes in western Oregon and maritime Washington. From the rim of this caldera I sense part of the answer. It’s more domestic here. In the distance are family farms, herds of Holstein dairy cattle, and rows of windbreak poplars. The maples and beeches in the woods are beginning to turn. In all this the landscape more resembles the Berkshires or the Adirondacks: the individual setting of each farm, the pursuit of small-scale agriculture hard by the haunts of wild bears, and autumn spreading like fire across the forest.

Mr. Taketazu must leave—he’s a veterinarian and has to attend to some animals at a nearby farm. But we’ll all meet later for dinner. Naoki, Mr. Nishibe, and I continue the trip over a high pass, driving beneath the shelter of extended snowsheds along a sinuous road that clings to the mountainside to my left and affords a view to the right of great stretches of evergreen forest and steep-pitched mountains standing alone, a scene reminiscent of views in the American Cascade Range. We descend after
little more than an hour to Akan-kohan, a tourist town at the edge of Lake Akan. The shop windows are filled with Japanese kitsch. A variety of watercraft stand ready to take visitors out on the lake.

But Mr. Nishibe has other ideas.

I should know by now that a thought offered only in passing might as well be a formal request as far as my host is concerned. I’d mentioned earlier that I was not eager to seek out remnants of the aboriginal culture of Hokkaido, that of the Ainu. I find their modern predicament painful to consider and believed witnessing the roadside scenes here—a few Ainu dressed in traditional costumes performing faux rituals for tourists—would be depressing. (The southwestern peninsula of Hokkaido, south of Sapporo, has been occupied by the Japanese for four hundred years. It was not until after the Meiji restoration in 1868, and with American help, that the Japanese settled the rest of Hokkaido, virtually destroying Ainu culture in the process. This extirpation of a native culture, for some attempt at conveying a sense of Hokkaido’s atmosphere, prompts a comparison with the nineteenth-century American frontier. The presence of great bears in the mountains, unruly public celebrations in some of Hokkaido’s small logging and fishing towns, and the freshly settled appearance of much of the countryside enhance the image.)

Mr. Nishibe parks the car and we begin walking through the streets of Akan-kohan. He asks for directions frequently and is finally able to locate the small curio shop he is looking for. The local carver who works there is out. We eat lunch and return an hour later. A man named Kazuo Sunazawa, burly and accommodating, has returned. What is arranged in the ensuing conversation I cannot guess. All Naoki says, rather cryptically, is “
Ainu eskashi
” (Ainu elder).

The three of us follow Mr. Sunazawa’s car north out of town. Lush, nearly junglelike growth around Lake Akan gives way to evergreen forests as we climb the flank of Mount Oakan. In little more than an hour and a half we arrive at a small town at the edge of Lake Kussharo, where we are ushered into a small,
unpretentious home. The only person present is an elderly man sitting on the floor in the central room, smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. He wears white socks (the Japanese
tabi
with soles and sewn so as to separate the big toe from the others), black cotton pants, and a gray sweater with a black-and-white diamond pattern on the chest. His house coat is also black, with scrolled yellow threadwork designs, suggesting the ornate floral patterns done in beadwork that distinguish North American Indian clothing from around the Great Lakes. He has a long, narrow beard, bushy eyebrows that flare winglike above his eyes, and thin, gray hair. His eyes are blue. A cataract is prominent in the left one.

For once I am without any sort of present, but Naoki, seemingly always prepared, offers our host a box of delicacies and graciously indicates that it is from both of us.

Zenjiro Hikawa is seventy-six, an Ainu, the eldest of eight children. A long conversation follows, to which I mostly listen. Occasionally I am able to introduce a simple question, through Naoki, about Ainu home life or about the bear ceremony, the central religious celebration among the Ainu, or about the actual hunting of that animal. With hand gestures and pencil drawings I am able to participate somewhat more in the conversation, which is managed by Mr. Sunazawa, the only one present fluent in both Ainu and Japanese. It is Mr. Sunazawa who begins to make the first drawings in a notebook that moves around the wood-plank floor among us, part of his effort, it seems to me, to draw out a reluctant Mr. Hikawa. Some of the drawings show the placement of poisoned arrows used in bear hunts (the poison is derived from a species of
Aconitum
, a plant related to wolfsbane and monkshood). Other drawings depict the traditional arrangement of guests around an Ainu hearth and the patterns of facial and hand tattoos among Ainu women.

As the afternoon progresses, Mr. Hikawa takes up again the work we have interrupted, the carving of dry willow sticks about ten inches long and a half inch in diameter. The rhythm of his stroke gradually terminates our conversation. With the draw of
his knife he creates thick bundles of thin shavings which remain attached to the stick at different points. He either gathers them in bunches like tresses and cinches them with one of the shavings or leaves them flared, a rampant array. He stops once or twice during his work to explain the two figures he’s carving, one a hearth god, the other a house god. Beyond the supple movements of his long fingers, at his feet, is a birdcage in which two redpolls perch, watching him. They haven’t made a sound.

Later, Mr. Hikawa brings out an aboriginal longbow, a present from someone who purchased it from Indians in the interior of Brazil. I am able, solely because of the coincidence of some of my own reading at the time, to say a few words about two of those tribes, the Kréen-Akaróre and the Yanomami; and to describe the great cedar logs carved into totem poles which still stand on British Columbia beaches before the abandoned villages of Tlingit and Kwakiutl people. But, to my obvious distress, true conversation is not possible. I must be satisfied with what I can see in the room, and with a few words and drawings. I feel I have offered nothing of substance to the conversation. As we are departing, Mr. Hikawa, with a hand at my shoulder, gently turns me around. He meets my eyes, smiling, and hands me the two figures he has carved.

On the road back to Naoki’s farm I watch dusk descend over the countryside. A nearly full moon rises yellow-orange in a deep blue sky. Stout-legged horses graze in fields along the road and herds of Holstein cattle drift toward the milking barns before sharp-voiced dogs. Over long distances I am relieved of the urgent sense of time. So much of northeastern Hokkaido seems to stand quiet at the edge of human endeavor. Nowhere here is the scale of human enterprise large. It meshes easily with the land.