A thick blanket of snow welcomed us as we crossed the prefectural boundary into Aomori. The snow spread, white and pure, into the hills, and a clutch of homes loitered by the roadside, bright blue against the white, the tin roofs having melted themselves free. It was a mythic scene: vapour was rising from the highway and rooftops, as though the landscape itself were expelling ghosts.
At my urging, Norio pulled over so that I could walk out into the white. Other than a few faint falls like the one that had greeted me when I arrived on Sado Island, I had not seen snow—real snow, deep snow, snow that doesn’t disappear as soon as it lands—for more than five years. Coming as I do from the original Snow Country, this was a traumatic loss. I missed snow deeply and with heartfelt sincerity. So, naturally, the first thing I did was zing Norio in the head with a packed snowball.
“C’mon,” he said. “Quit it.”
I got him again, pow! and he tried to retaliate, chasing me, flailing wildly with handfuls of snow and failing miserably. I ran into deeper banks, pelting Norio with snowballs and then laughing loudly, when suddenly the sun broke through and the world stopped. It was magnificent. Everything went quiet and sparkling. The mountain air was as crisp and clean as a celery stalk snapped in two. I breathed in deeply, filling my chest. It was like a homecoming and then—wham! Norio stung me in the ear with a slush ball. At almost the same moment, the snow gave way beneath me and I sank up to my waist. I could feel running water around my feet, icy cold. “Help!”
Norio came scrambling up to rescue me, which was a big mistake because, of course, my cries of help were but a ploy and I pulled him into the snow and then rolled him down the hill. He came up sputtering, and as I leaned over to help him, I got a full wet face of snow. I pulled away.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“Oh, but it is,” said Norio, and he shovelled some more into my face and down my neck. Which pretty much ended our ice capades for the day. I stomped back to the car with a cloud over my head and Norio trailing behind me, giggling and skipping about and flinging more snow on my head.
Grumbling about unsportsmanlike behaviour, I climbed back into the car and sulked. We began our descent into Aomori’s valleys. The snow that Norio had plastered me with soon turned into cold water, soaking my shirt, trickling down my back, and chilling my wet, squishy running shoes. “I won!” he said.
“It was a tie.”
“Clearly, we are using a different scoring system,” he said. “By my calculations, I had victory.”
“It was a tie,” I said, crossing my arms and looking straight ahead. There’s never a school locker around when you need one.
14
IF AKITA is rice country, Aomori prefecture is apple country—and boy, they don’t let you forget it. Apples are embedded in fence patterns, painted on signs, alluded to at every turn. When we crossed into Aomori prefecture, everything changed as if by clockwork from rice fields to apples. Orchards, endless orchards, filled the hills and valleys with rows of gnarled, bad-tempered apple trees. It’s a theory of forest personalities I developed during my many idle moments: cherry trees are wistful, plum trees are wise, cedars are mysterious, and apple trees are bad-tempered.
We came down into the wide Hirosaki Plains, slaloming from switchback to switchback, and dropping so suddenly our ears popped. In the distance, Mount Iwaki rose like a slow volcanic eruption. Traffic began to pick up as we rejoined the main highway, and a robot flagman waved us through a construction site. As we approached Hirosaki City, more and more coloured rooftops appeared, like squares in a quilt.
Hirosaki—dusty, historic, ramshackle Hirosaki—is a sort of backwoods, discount Kyoto. A northern outpost of traditional Japan, Hirosaki is a castle town, a Zen stronghold, a warehouse of artifacts. Imagine a city laid out in narrow alleys and carefully arranged blocks. Take that city and give it a couple of good shakes. Knock everything out of whack and add a layer of dust and a bucketful of history—and you have Hirosaki.
Hirosaki is the singularly most Japanese city I know. Not the finest or the prettiest or the oldest, but definitely the most Japanese. It is a city of neighbourhoods and alleyways. Its grandest sights are meant to be walked through, to be ducked under, sought out. Japan is Hirosaki, with its contradictions and narrow alleys, the self-referential streets, the sudden dead ends, and the constant backtracking.
Everything about Hirosaki is slightly askew, and yet—like so many Japanese towns—it has its own internal logic. The variously converging and diverging lines of perspective, the carefully thought-out lack of city planning, the labyrinthine angles: Hirosaki is not a beautiful city, but it is endlessly captivating, in the true sense of the word—captive. Once Norio dropped me off, I was soon lost in Hirosaki’s architectural bedlam. The city, it is said, was purposefully designed to be confusing in order to thwart would-be invaders. I believe it. Several times I expected to come across a haggard band of samurai invaders, stumbling blindly about, searching for the castle.
I was looking for Zenrin Avenue, and it took me all day to find it. Zenrin is a long, unusually wide street flanked on either side by wealthy Zen temples (a contradiction in terms, no?). There are thirty-three Zen temples along this one street, a remarkable concentration. A smaller, parallel row of temples runs beside it, and both converge on Chōshō-ji, the granddaddy of them all.
I spent the night in a capsule hotel near the station, and I walked down Zenrin the next morning in the early dawn, when everything was lit in watercolours. Priests swept their gates, food stalls opened up, preparing for an onslaught of sightseers, and a monk went by on a bicycle, trilling his bell. I entered Chōshō-ji Temple through its brooding wooden gate and passed the temple bell. The gate was built in 1629, the bell cast in 1306. And I thought: this gate has been standing since the days of Shakespeare, this bell has been tolling out the woes of man centuries before Columbus.
I entered the cool dark of what was once the temple kitchen. The floor was pockmarked with the memory of spiked sandals worn by samurai soldiers, and I stopped to run my fingers across it. The lady taking admission smiled at me. “Samurai,” she said.
The room was stained with the smoke of countless meals and the steam of countless fires. A pot was simmering and the aroma of green tea, as heavy as incense, hung in the air. I had arrived in time for the city’s Spring Festival, the only time when the mummy prince of Chōshō-ji was put on display.
“He was dug up in a schoolyard,” said the small, round woman who sat beside it—him?—it. “The prince was very young,” she said. “They suspect he was poisoned. Imported peaches, you see. Very tragic. But the prince’s love of sweets may have helped maintain his body. You know, a bit like pickling him from the inside out.”
The body was displayed behind glass with some of the items found in his coffin: a memorial tablet, sackcloths, a headband. After one hundred and forty years the young prince looked remarkably spry. Freeze-dried, but spry. His skin was smooth and taut, polished like beechnut, as frail as papyrus.
I stood gaping awhile at the eternally young mummy prince before wandering deeper into the temple, past the Buddhist Statuary Hall and down a “nightingale corridor” where the floor planks were tightly set to squeak as anyone approached, an early and poetic form of burglar alarm. I tried walking down it in my best ninja-soft steps—I even hummed the theme song from Kung Fu for inspiration—but to no avail; the singing floorboards gave me away every time.
Outside, behind the temple, lies a surprising optical illusion. The entire avenue of Zenrin appears to be on a low, flat stretch, but when you peer out you discover that it is actually built on a strategic bluff overlooking the Hirosaki Plains. The land on which Chōshō-ji was built was, in fact, the first choice for Hirosaki Castle, but the influence of the Zen monks was strong at that time and they managed to outmanoeuvre even the local warlord. In response, the lord of Hirosaki insisted that all the outlying Zen monasteries be relocated to this road so that he could keep his eye on them. This, unfortunately, only co
nsolidated the priests’ strength. I liked Hirosaki; I liked the fact that in all of the many machinations and schemes and ploys and endless intrigues, the Zen monks always came out on top. Even now, they are the wealthiest temples in the area. (And really, it is a contradiction in terms, is it not?)
I spent the next night in a temple. It was on the city’s other Temple Row, Shin-Teramachi, a short walk from Hirosaki’s much-photographed and often-admired pagoda. The temple was named Henshō-ji, and the view from my window was of Buddhist headstones fading into cityscape.
That view seemed to sum up everything: graveyards melting into city. In Hirosaki, past and present merge. Hirosaki is a mummy prince. A city where the merchants are poor and the Zen priests are rich. A city of graves, where even its prized pagoda was built to comfort the souls of men killed in battle.
I stood, looking out across this city of ghosts, until dusk crept in and supper was called.
15
I SPENT my next night at the Hirosaki Youth Hostel, a weary, past-its-prime building wedged into a back street. My budget couldn’t withstand another night at the temple, and so, with a suitable amount of dread hanging over me, I was forced to move to a hostel. It was filled with college students, and a sign in English said Well Come! but there were no English speakers present. A pair of sullen-looking East Indian men were huddled in a corner speaking in dark whispers. They didn’t seem to be looking for company so I let them be.
The old lady who managed the hostel took me outside to see her ducks, which were living a pampered life in a small pond beside the building. “They are very happy,” she said, though how one could tell, what with a duck’s limited store of facial expressions, was hard to say. They certainly looked content, waddling about, plopping into the water, quacking away. They were only for show apparently, or perhaps for eggs, because when I suggested we broil up a duck or two she gave me a look of dismay and disbelief.
A group of hostelers were organizing a trip downtown to hear the tsugaru shamisen, a type of Japanese banjo that is famous in this area. “It’s wonderful,” said one young lady after I invited myself into their conversation. “The music is very fast. Very exciting.”
Her name was Midori. She smiled at me. A nice smile. A warm smile. A smile you could roast marshmallows on. Suddenly, I became very interested in the tsugaru shamisen. Midori talked on about it enthusiastically, with breathy gestures and wondrous big eyes. I can’t remember much about what she said, but I do remember those eyes.
I chatted with Midori long enough to weasel an invite to the Live House Pub, a place that specializes in the local robust cuisine and its equally robust music. One of Midori’s friends called a taxi and we wedged ourselves in. The driver was nice enough about it, but apparently we were being shadowed by spies, because he turned half a dozen corners, threading his way into the maze until, satisfied that we were no longer being followed, he roared down the main boulevard of Hirosaki, which was now as thick as thieves with nighttime traffic. With each turn and lurch, my leg had—accidentally at first and surreptitiously as the ride progressed—pressed up against Midori’s thigh. When she didn’t shift her weight, I took it as a good sign and began casually, yet in a highly erotic manner, moving my leg slightly against hers. She turned and smiled at me, and she didn’t move her leg away, but when we got to the Live House she sat as far away from me as possible.
I nursed a beer and picked at my meal as a family of musicians tuned up their banjos onstage. I was soon befriended by a professor of music history who was visiting Hirosaki from Tokyo. He was a nice enough man, but his eyes were not at all wondrous.
My self-pity ended with a splash when the music began—began is not quite the right word. It pounced on us. It detonated. One moment there were murmurs and the smell of soy sauce and beer. The next moment there was only music.
The western half of Aomori prefecture is the home of the proud Tsugaru culture, with its own distinct dialect and music, and Hirosaki is at the heart of it. “You should hear tsugaru shamisen,” said the temple priest of Henshō-ji. “That is the rhythm of Hirosaki.”
And now here I was, buffeted by it. It was wilder than the drums of Sado, more joyous, more raucous, more insane. An entire family of musicians, from grandfather down to daughter-in-law, whipped up tunes like they were making meringue. It was amazing—that’s the only word for it—how they managed to coax such complicated riffs and lively melodies out of a simple three-stringed instrument. It lasted for hours, then came crashing to a halt. The room hummed with silence for a moment and then burst into wild, boisterous applause.
“Thank you,” mumbled the family patriarch as he mopped his brow with a hankie. “We have CDs and cassettes for sale at the cash register.” He then introduced his son, the current tsugaru shamisen champion of Japan, who played a mournful, interlaid rhythm spiced with apples and mountain air.
“The sound of Hirosaki,” said the music professor as he raised his glass to the stage. “The sound of Hirosaki.”
My stay at the youth hostel ended when I found a private room at a small inn for less than I was paying at the hostel. It was my third place in almost as many days, and it represented a descent through Dantean degrees of travellers’ purgatory: first a temple, then a hostel, and then this—a minshuku of mildew and lost dreams. It was the type of place where failed writers come to nurse grievances and rage at the world, where men with sinister eyes blow smoke rings across open bottles of gin. If young Ernest Hemingway or Malcolm Lowry had ever come to Japan, this is where they would have stayed.
A woman showed me to my room, where a lumpy futon awaited my arrival. The sheets, I suppose, had once been white. The wallpaper too. Perhaps. But everything had soured, faded, and turned to this: the yellow of cigarette-stained fingers, the yellow of that one little mutant toenail that grows as hard as a claw. The walls themselves sagged, as much from ennui as from age, and I dropped my bag on the floor in defeat.
The lady smiled at me. “The best room in the house,” she said.
16
HIROSAKI HAS the only extant castle in northern Japan and the only one with its original walls still intact. It is also, and here I quote the official tourist brochure, “One of the Three Best Cherry Blossom Viewing Spots in Japan.” Unlike most castle towns, in Hirosaki the castle does not dominate the skyline but exists, almost shyly, in a forest park, tucked out of sight. The original castle, built in 1611, had towered above the plains, but it was (surprise, surprise) struck by lightning, and a much smaller, scaled-down version was erected in its stead. The present castle dates from 1810. It doesn’t exactly soar so much as it huddles, three stories high and perched on the corner of the castle wall, teetering above the moat and looking more like a watchtower than a main keep.
Spring had arrived in Hirosaki in full force. There are more than five thousand cherry trees on the grounds of Hirosaki Castle, an embarrassment of riches that seems almost baroque when at full bloom. I didn’t so much enter the grounds as I swam in, through the sakura, which hung in garlands. In the park, the street lamps glowed within fountains of flowers, and crowds swirled by, hurrying to parties.
A few blossoms had already begun to scatter, falling like faint snow into the castle moat, blowing across the footbridge and stone paths. They had barely arrived and already they were leaving. Sakura, scientists insist, are scentless. Or at least very nearly scentless. A single flower has a pale perfume that is so slight it cannot be detected by the average human sense. But a thousand blossoms, bursting with colour and tumbling on the wind, do have a scent, faint perhaps, but unmistakable.
Sakura also have a sound all their own—the late night revelries of hanami parties. More than two million people visit Hirosaki Castle during the city’s Cherry Blossom Festival, and tonight it seemed as though every one of them were on hand. The castle grounds were alive with motion. Noisy. Celebratory. A circle of office workers waved me in with much fanfare, and when I told them I had been travelling with the Cherry Blossom Front, a voice y
elled out, “It’s an omen! A good omen!” They asked me to present a toast to the sakura, and a ceramic cup quickly appeared and was ferried across to me. Warm saké was sloshed into it and the voices rose in laughter and mock solemnity. “A toast, a toast to the flowers! To your journey!”
My entire trip seemed to pivot on this moment.
“Tell us about your journey!” they cried. What could I say? That it seemed like a good idea at the time? That the flowers were sadder the more time I spent with them? That I had met dozens of strangers, made dozens of friends, and was still hopelessly alone? That I didn’t really know what I was doing, or whether there was any point to it? There was so much to say, and yet there was nothing much to say. I raised my cup. They strained forward to hear what I would offer. “To the cherry blossoms,” I said. “May we never understand them.”
This was taken as a fine bit of insight and the crowd burst into rowdy applause. “Kampai!” they shouted, and just then a wind stirred the branches, softly scattering blossoms across the crowds. More applause, and I was just about to put the cup to my lips when I noticed that a single flower had dropped into my saké. It floated there a moment, and I was about to fish it out when the man next to me raised a hand and the crowd quieted down. “It is a sign,” he said. “A lucky sign. Surely that is from the gods.” There was good-natured laughter at this, but no one dared out-and-out deny it either. After all, what if it was from the gods, what then? “Drink it!” said a voice somewhere in the circle. “Yes,” said another. “You must. Drink it, drink the flower.”
I looked down and considered this small act of communion I was being asked to perform. Then, with a flourish, I tipped the cup right back, flower and all, and swallowed it in one gulp. The circle applauded and laughed. I smiled proudly and was about to speak when I felt something clinging to the back of my throat like a small wad of wet tissue—and I began to choke. I hacked and coughed and retched until my face became red. I hacked for so long, the others stopped laughing and became concerned. A man began pounding me on my back as I tried to get at the blossom with my fingers, but that only made it worse. I began to gag until finally, like a hairball, I spat it out. My eyes were watering, and when I looked at the faces around me I saw varying degrees of worry and disgust. “It—it tried to kill me,” I gasped.