Clinton Crockett Peters
Hiking Tokyo
The city began for me in a bedroom community, a town stuffed with gyoza peddlers, pachinko parlors, and rice lager vending machines. My then-girlfriend, now-wife Yumiko, shook herself ready for work at the shipping company where she coordinated the ballet of container ships across the Indian Ocean. After I left to cross the entire length of metropolitan Tokyo, a three-day hike, she squeezed into a subway car.
I followed a gray, vegetationless canal, where homeless camps, pelicans nests, and fathers and sons line the banks for fishing. Pleasure boats once clogged the water and housed opium dens. Now they host mahjong gambling parties and swan boats. I crossed a bridge, and a train jangled overhead. I stared up through whizzing windows at sardined bodies, bags and hands and noses pulped against glass. I imagined I saw Yumiko, her face greeting me, eyes caffeinated as she maneuvered to one of Japan's automotive companies. I texted, "Have a bueno día!" Apart from speaking English and French, Yumiko was digesting Spanish. I had a backpack with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, two half-liter water bottles that I would refill a lot on a summer stroll across a megacity, but no cellular charger—a cumbersome misfire.
The weight of the smog sat on my shoulders, and the city woke. Shopkeepers hosed off welcome mats. Lights tinkled. Homes gave way to towers, out of which hung fanning laundry and floating gardens. The smell of cooked rice edged the air, and last night's beer cans lined the street. A trickle and then a flood of humans poured out of the towers, whose heights were lost in haze. Women and men dressed in inky suits lined up for breakfast, cigarettes, and palm-sized cans of warm coffee. The flood swung its bags, swiftly churning downstream to the lakes of train stations. I felt carried by the flow, draining into our world’s largest city.
***
I don't remember when I had the idea to walk across a metropolis, from end to smoggy end. Writer Barry Lopez once said that cities are "the best we can do,” meaning that the life force of humanity bundled together, served by trains and living quarters stacked like crates, the vibrancy of the human rainforest is the most reasonable way to evolve eight billion of us.
Metropolises are thought to be antinature, urbanities the antimountaineer. But I have always fawned at cities, maybe because I grew up in tabletop-flat West Texas. The running joke in Lubbock is that if your dog runs away, you can stand on your roof and watch him run for two days. Skyscrapers affect my vision the way mountains do, breaking off the sky, sparking a thrill down my legs, an encounter with the sublime.
Outdoorsy folk, I know because I used to be a backpacking guide, detest metropolises and their sewage and density and rebar, but when I look at digital billboards and noodle shops and elevated rails, I sense another kind of wonder in human geology. The deep-time sight of what will be left of us when we're gone: skeletons of corporate havens, twisted train tracks, Styrofoam coolers. This is what will remain of us in the rock table. Our cities will be our fossils.
I assumed years ago that I would one day hike across New York City, that mythic creation, the "most over-imagined of places," according to writer Eula Biss, that beatific paragon of America. But it made little sense to jet to Brooklyn when I lived in Japan and the world's largest metropolis was a three-hour train ride away.
Tokyo is twice the size of New York City. It is home to thirty-eight million, which is more than 197 countries can claim. It houses the largest bank and the tallest freestanding tower. It sports the world's busiest train station and the busiest pedestrian crosswalk. It shelters the oldest unbroken imperial line. Tokyo is ten thousand years old, and it sits atop the intersection of three tectonic plates—probably the most explosive place humans have dumped this large a slice of our population.
I had the chance to walk across these veins of earth in the summer of 2009. I stumbled something like eighty miles. I developed the largest blister I have ever seen. I did it in the summer glare because I had time off from teaching. I blacked out for hours.
I wanted to know what it felt like to walk through a metropolis. Hikers, in Japan or America, travel to mountains and canyons to escape, but cities are where so many of us actually live. Where we conduct our lives and where we die. A hike is like a good prayer because it lets one reflect on the trappings of flesh not in the afterlife but in the here-now. And what if instead of escaping I dove deeper into the row of unpleasantries, of car honks and suffocating concrete heat? One in four people living in Japan dwells in Tokyo. This is where a lot of what people think of as "Japan" lives, if I cared to see it.
Two hours later that morning, I crossed a thoroughfare into metro Tokyo. Soon, I stepped inside Ginza, the "Money Place,” the neighborhood that housed a slur of fashionable boutiques where broad-shouldered men with microphones clipped to their collars eyed teenagers as they passed and would open the door if someone approached—or not, if it was someone like me. I had planned a route that took me to the highlights and to the ordinary, the five-star and the unspoken. I was lucky that I had seen most of guidebook Japan, so I wanted something abnormal. I had read up on the history of the land I was tramping through and wanted to see the locations etched thickly through time.
***
In medieval Japan, the brutal shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, erected his fortress next door to Ginza and connected two neighborhoods with what is still known as "Japan's Bridge.” Thence sprang the city's horror show. Adulterers and priests who'd fucked their last were nailed to the bridge. Murderers were lowered into holes, heads exposed, rusty saw blades scattered around. Bodies were flayed, felons shackled to railings, left to dangle. Most people shied away.
Then the shogun fell, the emperor returned, and Ginza was attired in glitter. World War II firebombs blackened Ginza. As much as 50 percent of Tokyo—one hundred thousand occupants—vanished. The emperor broadcast capitulation from a basement library while the Imperial Palace evanesced above.
As the 1980s economy bubbled, Japan recovered. One could buy Ginza sushi wrapped in gold leaf. Businessmen could squat upon toilets lined with mink. Salarymen strolled Ginza with briefcases filled with cash, looking to spend it all in one night. And why not, when history was bound to crash down around you.
Ginza is more modest now. On holidays and weekends, its streets are blocked off to traffic. Metal chairs and tables with umbrellas sprout from asphalt as shoppers picnic, guarded by smiling, elderly police. I have never felt at home on the burnished side of cites, the exploitative, somehow glamorized minority of platinum. The austere sheen leaves me nauseous; I wonder if this is justified. I'm used to unshowered grime, the laces of boots. Money and those accustomed to it speak an unfamiliar language.
But Yumiko worked in Ginza and so lent it an endearing atmosphere. We met up at Ginza intersections for dates amid ocean tides of people that ebbed and washed up on curbs. I’m now nostalgic for the glare of animated billboards and the white gloves worn by Ginza taxi drivers. During my hike, I craned up and detected a glass-coated building with a rotating restaurant on the roof. Beneath this, Yumiko tolled away crunching mileage, sending vessels into troubled waters. I glared at the building as if it could manifest her. I ached at the base of this ordinary construction, with bone-white plastic windows and eatery that spun like a globe.
What did Yumiko think of my urban stroll? She would rather I stayed home and had a glass of rosé waiting for her. Sometimes I did that. Sometimes I hiked, my mind tabulating my proper level of guilt. These days, ten years on, I stay at home more. I also write and cook, and I think Yumiko and I are happier. But I doubt I would have understood contentment this way when I was punishing my feet across a city for what I thought I wanted. For me, with a distance of three thousand miles and a decade, Tokyo is standing and staring up at Yumiko's work building and waiting.
***
The story of how Tokyo became a city should inspire Hollywood to finish siphoning off the dregs of American history.
In 1456, an uneducated ruffian who schooled himself on Chinese, Ōta Dōkan, also known as the "Warrior Poet," was the first to build a castle in a fishing hamlet called Edo—known today as Tokyo. The location, the Warrior Poet realized, would put a vast distance between himself and mainland Asian invaders. Edo also sat within what is still the largest fertile plain in Japan, flat as a chessboard, perfect for rice. Rivers converged into a bay for shipping fish.
Ōta built up fortifications for thirty years. In the meantime, he sheltered monks and aristocrats during a civil war. Some say that because of this the Warrior Poet was assassinated in 1486, and Edo was forgotten for a century.
In 1590, the hamlet was snug within the swamp of an inlet bay where people wore wraparound robes and straw sandals and fished with bamboo poles. Cranes speared invertebrates. Rice paddies fanned into the distance. Snow-capped Fuji hovered above the sea (now obscured by smog). Elsewhere in Japan, around the outskirts of Kyoto, you might see defeated warriors being roasted alive. Samurai serial killer Oda Nobunaga, one of the country’s unifiers, enjoyed burning his disarmed enemies. Up to twenty thousand were torched in his lifetime. Nobunaga also slaughtered priests because he didn't trust them. On at least one occasion, he burned an entire monastic complex.
With warfare, Nobunaga came close to unifying all of Japan. The lawless days of samurai were at an end, and the arts were manufacturing entertainment for calmer times. A monster with a dandy's taste, Nobunaga became a Noh actor, a dance art that builds on subtle and meditative movements. Watching the four-hour plays was like witnessing wind pour through trees. Oda and his son were dancing when his enemies killed his guards, barricaded the door, and incinerated the temple. Fittingly, Nobunaga was scorched out of existence.
When the future sire of three hundred years of shoguns, Tokugawa Ieyasu, shipped off to Edo, it was a punishment. His lord knew Tokugawa was ambitious, grievously smart, and sent him far away from the capital, Kyoto. But this was a mistake. Tokugawa saw in Edo what the Warrior Poet had: a giant fertile plain, rice paddies for miles, a natural moat and harbor, plenty of distance from enemies, but enough people for armies. Before he could stage a coup, his lord’s campaigns in Korea ended in disaster, twice sending Japanese forces swimming.
Undoubtedly, Japan’s most famous samurai battle is Sekigahara. Tokugawa led Edo against lords from the other side of Japan. Near Biwa, the country’s largest lake, horses and guns and carts became clogged with mud from rain, so the battle became something primal. Katanas and knives lopped off limbs, which cannonballed while innards slithered. Eyes gouged, hair pulled out. The rain and blood and mud churned into a steaming stew.
Tokugawa's greatest weapon was ink. For months, he promised land to turncoats. Several battalions switched sides. As the bodies piled, the tide turned, and opposition leaders committed seppuku. Tokugawa declared himself shogun, Edo the new capital.
***
As I edged under the fancy marquees of Ginza and the displays of Rolexes and fifteen-dollar chocolates, a sea of rushing hair, purse straps, plastic mugs, and tailcoats churned by. A fluidity that continued as I crossed a bridge and entered Imperial Park. Here I waded along with a few baby strollers, shoppers, and dog walkers. It was Thursday, but that hadn't stopped the dozens of tourist groups with their megaphones and signs from wandering across Imperial Lawn. Most took the gravel path that led up to a wide, sloped walkway that is chained off. Above that path, a bridge crosses a moat to the Imperial Palace. Sometimes, emperor and empress approach and wave to crowds that number in the thousands.
I was dancing around a giant group of Chinese tourists when my eyes fell on a foreigner, a white man. He was sporting tattoo sleeves and a backpack, and was all alone. We glanced at each other. He was looking at me just as I was at him for a sharp second. We walked on, and I was unable to shake the surprise I felt of recognizing myself—this mirror imaging, my face floating on another. I awakened, with clarity, to the absurdity of my skin. Witnessing a white man in an Asian country opened up a part of myself, the knowledge of how my race has made my existence possible: colonialism, imperialism. My walk had an added texture of self-awareness.
***
The next few hours blitzed by, leaving me steamy. I angled around the gray cobblestone and gothic Diet building (Japan's Congress, in session). I stumbled along the green Yamanote train line that ensnares most of Tokyo, and I found the world's busiest intersection.
At Shibuya, five fingers of pedestrian armies met the palm of Shibuya Station's exits. A thousand people crisscross every five minutes. I arrived at the scramble as lights changed, and the crowd surged toward the gyre. The sensation was whirlpool, the bright flash of phone screens, shoulder strap rhinestones, orange sunglasses. The animal young people with squeals and jingles. The sun glistening off hundreds of earrings and watches and bifocals. The pizza smell of humanity. The hive of life and nonlife breaking midstream into a chaos that sorted itself out when traffic lights turned green and the cars hummed across.
Within this mass, feeling brushes, hearing the chuckles and the voices was, to me, to take in the pulse of a thriving collective hivemind. Here we were, I thought, strolling, enjoying, or not, our day, headed toward destinations, goals, dreams, nightmares. We experienced the summer sun and beat of two thousand shoes, intent on whatever it was we desired, each trajectory colliding with a thousand others, a galaxy of thoughts. The collective sound of our steps like the crunch of an earth mover, the turmoil of raging human energy. Why people stay.
Across the street spread a taiko drumming group. No microphones, just basal power of cowskin stretched across cedar logs. An audience encircled them, many post-adolescents with their dogs. But I was swept by, caught in a current. I tramped on, the drums dying behind me as the crowd flocked to pachinko parlors, Shibuya’s “love hotels” (rooms rented by the hour), and concert halls.
Something crushed my foot. A man in a suit and glasses slammed into my back, toppling me. As I recovered, a few sharp elbows poked my ribs. I reached the curb and saw three people gawking. The microviolences of city life, why people leave.
***
I entered the city of Mitaka and tramped over a track leading to a thronging train station. Japan is a railroad geek's wet dream. Of the fifty busiest train stations in the world, Japan has forty-five. By far, Tokyo runs the most extensive city rail network in history, with forty million passengers per day (fourteen billion a year). And Japan's trains are clean and Mussolinian in their timeliness.
A train ride sounded medicinal when I realized my error in wearing old socks that were coming apart and sandpapering my heels. When I checked my foot at a bench, I was impressed by one blister the size of a half dollar.
Physically spent, I looked for a room. A tactical error: there were no hotels in this bedroom town. I pit-stopped at a convenience store and questioned the two elderly aproned and hair-netted madams behind the counter as I purchased a packet of squid jerky.
"Here? No, no hotels here," one said. She eyed me. "Why don't you try about a kilometer up the road?"
A kilometer later, I popped into another 7-11, also staffed by two old women in hairnets. They claimed I needed to walk a kilometer back, and I'd find a lively neighborhood.
"But I just left a konbini there, and they said to walk this way."
"I have no idea what they must have been thinking."
"Maybe they were just scared," I said, winking and smiling, but the women eyed each other.
I caught myself in a store mirror: I was a six-foot-four white guy with long hair and a scraggly goatee who may have been perfuming the convenience store with a collection of summer hike aromas. One of the women mentioned the police, which I first took as threatening. Then I remembered that Japan's police are streetwise guides.
At the police box, a square-headed, bulky cop wearing what I assumed was a bulletproof vest rose from his chair. When I queried about a hotel, he said, "What, you want a love hotel or something?" What nerve he must have thought I had to ask a cop where to have sex!
"No," I laughed. "I just want to sleep."
"What are you doing here?" He examined me, old shoes to long hair. It could have been my imagination, but I believed he was calculating how to throw me. I explained my quest.
"Why would you do that? It's hot," he said.
Amazing how seven words could deflate me! I relayed something at least a quarter true: "I'm trying to write about Japan. So this is research." I shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes to let him know this could be just as bad an idea as he probably thought.
He flipped open a binder of papers with scale maps of town. He fingered a red dot.
"Here's where we are. There's a manga café about a block away. It's the only place to stay within five kilometers."
If you're unfamiliar, manga cafés sprawl with mazes of foam-padded cubicles that you can rent by the hour, peruse manga and anime, and have discreet sex. Plus unlimited soda and coffee. Manga cafés are far cheaper than hotels. But during the night, a bit of dust fell into my eye. I looked up, saw cracks around a giant air conditioner unit bolted to the ceiling above my head. I woke up three times to minor earthquakes. One time a woman screamed. It occurs to me I could have trained to a hotel and then ridden back to where I stopped walking and slept much better. But I was into purity then, demarcating boundaries, making things harder out of some code. But no one knew except Yumiko. The only person I was cheating was me.
***
I left the café at 6 a.m. and followed many of Mitaka's citizens piling off to work. That Friday was firecracker hot, so I choose sidewalks along rivers and canals, savoring the tree shade and water.
During one heat-befogged moment, the lonely road I traveled exploded into vibrancy. I rounded a corner and Presto! the city's vitality spread before me, a neighborhood of creative juices. Shops and bicycles, walkers and shoppers, streets blocked to traffic. A pack of giddy kids frolicking with ice cream cones, one of them fisting strings that trailed a hive of balloons.
There was music in the air, floating out of coffee shops, J-pop and the ubiquitous jazz that finds succor in Tokyo's bars. I hadn't noticed how I'd missed music, or how unnatural it seemed not having it. I suppose for a lot of my generation surrounding ourselves with our chosen sounds is as biological as breathing. I didn't usually think twice about playing music, but I didn't have music in Tokyo because I never took it hiking.
What would I have missed, closing myself off from the stray audio experience of the urban world? So far, having tuned in that day, I was audience to the rush of tires as they jettisoned street grime, the roll of leaves in a limp wind, the omnipresent hum of wires, a screeching of civilized birds, and the soft padding of my poor shoes.
One thing I've moved away from since I was a backpacking guide is the idea of natural spaces as a counterbalance to humanity’s so-called sinfulness. It seems like an Edenic worship of celebrated forests while demonizing cities and the people within them. It deplores humans who do not follow a nature-lover’s path, when sometimes that isn’t a choice. Exploring wilderness is, in fact, a supreme privilege.
However, my negotiated space within the world isn't anyone else's. Once, backpacking in southcentral Colorado with a Walkman, something felt off. The silence of the mountains was deafening and invasive in a way that penetrated earphones. The hum of a city contrarily creates a gap in my hearing, an unsteadiness that is mollified by music. Music completes how I interact with the urban world in a way that, as much as anyone can tell, was the way I evolved.
***
Descending a hill, I espied a Key Coffee sign in the window of a store on a gray street, and I walked in, hoping to get a late-morning caffeine lunch. The door almost leaped off its rusted hinges when I opened it. Inside, darkened floorboards creaked, and newspaper-splattered tables slouched about. Faded enka calendars circled the walls, and an ancient glass bottle Coke machine stood in one corner. I looked to the right and saw garlic and bowls lining the counter, and I realized this was a noodle-monger.
There was a hum from a window air conditioner, and I sat before it, realizing too late that the Arctic air stormed the room, carrying my unwashed bodily tropics. Customers who had been staring since I walked in now jerked their heads as if punched. I moved against the wall.
The ramen obasan shuffled over. "Do you have iced coffee?" I asked.
“Sure.” She obliged, walking behind the counter. Then she emitted a high-pitched wail that startled the room. "No, wait! I'm such a stupid old grandma. We don't have coffee," she said, and began hitting her skull with a flour-strewn palm, the motion repeated, her head spasming back, a sight made more disturbing because it carried the tinge of familiarity. "We ran out," she said. "Only Coca-Cola. I can't believe I forgot we don't have coffee. Would you like a Coca-Cola?"
How was I going to say no?
“And what'll you'll have to eat, sonny?" she then asked.
"Miso ramen?" I said, cringing, fearing masochism.
"Sure, we have that." She tramped behind the counter and waited, staring at the old man, perhaps the co-owner, who perched on a stool. She put both her hands on her hips and smacked him on the shoulder with her palm. Violence seemed a common form of dialogue.
"Why don't you make the ramen for the customer," she said. "You're just sitting here, not doing anything. I have all this cleaning to do . . ." The rest I didn't understand, but it was a scolding. The old man rose, shook himself. His eyes sagged and his lips were parched. He wore a blue chest apron that revealed a golf shirt. He rubbed his eyes and grabbed a wok, but before cooking, he wrinkled his nose at something behind the counter and investigated. Retrieving a gallon jug of pickled eggs, he held it at eye level, sniffed, recoiled, and then poured the batch in a trash can.
The miso ramen was delicious.
Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom, and the obasan showed me to a staircase crowded with empty liquor bottles from bottom step to top. As I climbed, I realized that the lady and her husband lived there; clothes were flung about. There were shampoo bottles scattered on the floor and a clump of hair in the sink. Much like my bathroom.
***
After eating ramen, my life vanished until, sweaty, I walked off the hot streets and into the chain gyoza store. I sat at the bleach-white counter, refilled my water bottles, and ordered dumplings from the sour-looking young cook. After that, I followed a prominent road, cars revving alongside me. I zenned into a mowing-the-lawn trance. I ambled side streets to get away from cars, but the roads, as they tend to do, wound themselves into spaghetti and dead-ended, necessitating grumbling, backtracking. I was sticky as I slogged along the road, wishing again for new socks.
For an hour or two, as the sun arched, the neighborhood softened. I entered something of a tourist hovel, shops and eateries pushed against the road. I realized I could smell the Tama River. I was following it to its source. This urban sewageway, which empties into Tokyo Bay. Here, it was a modest, muddy sweep of rivulet that rested between two cut-grass banks, sandwiched by fenced yards. Upstream, it was dammed, hydropowering.
After the war, the Tama succored many of the homeless, repatriated troops disbanded in Tokyo—the wounded, maimed, glossy-eyed young men begging, starving, staring at faraway clouds near the Tama’s shores. During occupation, American GIs dumped prophylactics into waterways. Retainers at the Imperial Palace wielded a wire net to fish the condoms out once a week. The homeless vets met floating rubbers, occupational boogie-woogie from loudspeakers, and drunk American servicemen with arms around local prostitutes. But it wasn't just the vets encamped on the Tama who were depressed after the war. Writer Osamu Dazai grew up in north Japan and moved to Tokyo where he developed, after the war, the explicit intent to drink himself insane and drown in the Tama. He was a self-styled irreverent "decadent writer," a member of the barfly intelligentsia. In the economically thin but publishing postwar boom, decadent writers swarmed Tokyo's back alleys, coughed back a mixture of sweetener and airplane engine lubricant, and pontificated.
War, as Osamu Dazai saw it, had been a railroad through hell and darkness. He thought degeneracy might shatter the power structure engine. Dazai's novels epitomize a lost nation, hovering outside history, watching the firebombing of its cities, much like the protagonist of his novel The Setting Sun watches the proverbial self-immolation of her war-torn brother.
In The Setting Sun, Dazai writes, with typical bitterness-laced beauty, "I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again." Likewise, Dazai would have to attempt suicide four times before he perfected it, once botching a joint suicide attempt with a girlfriend. Finally, in 1948, soaked with whiskey, Dazai tied a sash around himself and a courtesan, and the couple heaved themselves into the Tama. They were discovered three days later, finally dead as planned.
One of his contemporaries, Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata, who also committed suicide, wrote at the time, "I have the strong, unavoidable feeling that my life is already at an end. For me, there is only the solitary return to the mountains and rivers of the past.”
***
Tramping along, I noticed a bait-and-tackle store. I'd entered the town of Fussa, which I later learned houses a US military airbase, along with its detritus: fast food, clothing box stores, love hotels. The bait-and-tackle sported hand-carved tables. A thin young man in a blue Tokyo Giants shirt and cap, my age, manned the counter. He glanced up and fled his counter to talk with me. He said his day had been slow, and he hadn't had a chance to practice his English. He sat with me and brought me a Coke, and I was happy to have the respite and equally euphoric that the sun had slipped over the building across the street.
The man’s English was intelligible, and we spoke in a kaleidoscope of our languages. A year or so ago, he said, he'd held a job at a dairy plant, squirting udders. "I was working eight to five, but it's never really that," he said. "You can't leave at five because you'd never be promoted. So I'd stay until six, seven, eight. Sometimes nine. And then go drinking with the boss and get home at two in the morning. I couldn't stay there. You know, it does something to your…” At this, he gestured to his stomach. “Soul?" he said. So he’d opened up a small store.
His story was familiar. Yumiko's favorite places were tiny coffee dispensaries owned by middle-aged men who had escaped big companies, abandoning job security. They, like this tackle store owner named Hiro, had chosen a quieter, self-made struggle.
"My shop's not doing that well," Hiro said. "But since I was a boy, I've loved fishing. Tying flies is something I'm good at. My grandpa took me fishing, then my dad. My dad died, but he didn't have a business to leave me. He'd tried owning a store selling sweets, but it didn't work out, and he ended up working for the same milk factory."
I asked him where to fish around Tokyo. I'd just taken the sport up with a coworker. He got up and retrieved some Polaroids. Each was underexposed and dark, but there were identifiable grains of fish under flash. One bass was the length of an arm. "I caught this at five in the morning," he said. "The fish don't see you."
We were sitting on a table that was a polished cross-section of a cherry tree. The rings of the cherry ran like waves beneath our arms and caught the light at golden angles. Above us hung pictures of marlin and taxidermied trout. "Cool, isn't it?" he asked of his setup, was proud of his catches. He asked what I did, and for once, I just said I was an English teacher, didn't mention my writing, nor my Tokyo walk.
"How are Japanese students?" he asked. He pulled out a cigarette and began smoking.
"They're fun," I said, thinking I was in a good mood or I might say something else.
He laughed. "I wasn't a very good child, so I wouldn't want to be a teacher. My bad behavior would come back to me."
"I wasn't a good kid, either, and I can't say I'm a very good teacher."
He laughed. "It's hard to teach. People think Japanese kids are so well-behaved, but it's not like that."
“My kids are all right," I said.
"I hope mine are." He reached back to a table and retrieved another Polaroid, this one revealing two sons, one who looked like he was about to enter elementary school.
Perhaps he sensed what I was wondering. "It was hard when I quit the dairy," he said. "I didn't know if I could be a father. I still don't. Sometimes I wonder if I'll have to close up shop." He exhaled smoke, pregnant with meaning. "It's hard to have everything you want, dream kids, dream wife, dream job." He said "dream" in the accented Japanese way that drags the word out into "du-reem-a-mu" and made it weightier.
"Sometimes I wonder how long I can hold it together. I can't give up my family, but I can't return to that work. It'll kill me, or I'll kill myself."
It occurred to me that behind his shop ran the portentous Tama, that what lay in front of Hiro was the real present and not the idealism of innocence. If he could survive, I thought.
And here's the moment I regret. The man was just settling into a conversation with another cigarette. And we were getting into serious terra incognita, and I felt like it was time for me to reveal myself in turn, my terrors. The day was cooling, comfortable. But I'd planned on tramping a few hours more. I wonder now if the man's maturity and accountability and good nature made me a little skeptical of myself—my struggles of love and finance made thinner in comparison to his acrobatic acts.
Anyway, I announced I had to go. The man was disappointed and showed it. I do not remember what he said when we parted, and I didn't write it down either, but I remember a childlike feeling as I left him, which is how I often felt while teaching, the forgotten past rushing to meet me, the sense of greeting a person whose knowledge or experience of the world cracks open something new inside, a raw kind of learning.
***
Less than thirty minutes up the road, my legs cramped—tentacles of pain crawled up my thighs. I had to find a place to stay. The bleached-white sidewalk morphed into cobblestones as I limped into a shopping district. Storefronts with glistening windows and dwarfing signs gifted me shade and the knowledge that this must be a thriving neighborhood. A liver-spotted old man on a one-speed bicycle cranked by, and when I said "Sumimasen" and asked for a hotel, he swung around, and I realized it was another cop.
He growled, "A love hotel?"
"No, no, no. I'm looking for a regular hotel."
"Well." He peddled on at a pace I could keep up with. When he came to a side street, he pointed up it and blurted complicated directions. He turned around, and I gave him a little bow and thanks. He pedaled on, and I turned to cross the street.
There was a screech of tires.
I didn't even notice the Toyota until the driver leaned out the window and yelled. I stared at the car and croaked an apology. The car wheeled around me, still glued to the street. I crossed to the side, pulse leaping in my throat, wondering what if this would be my last day walking across a jungle of cars. A man fallen prey to the beasts of the city ecosystem, who didn’t have his guard up. Participants on my backpacking trips always fretted bears, but cars were the animals you had to watch out for.
***
I entered the bursting downtown of Fussa, a town of ten thousand strong, with a train station and a half dozen pachinko parlors with their popping lights and tinted windows so you didn't know who was inside—family, friends, bosses, students. The hotel was murder to find, and I was not looking hard. As it happened, I walked past it, too north, then walked south, a block west, circling sharklike.
The lobby of the Fussa Business Hotel was Raymond Chandler-dark, the carpet off-purple or bloodstained, the paint peeling, adorned with geriatric furniture. It occurs to me now that I may have stumbled into a nondescript love hotel after all, no different from scores of others, with space for the one thing that drives so much human imagination.
I rang the bell, and a bellboy stood up, all sixteen years of him, laced in khaki, with brass buttons and a hat that he adjusted so it sat upright on a mess of moppy curls. He tucked his shirt in. "Yes?" he said, more a statement of confusion than a question.
"Do you have room?” I asked.
He laughed. "Sure."
"Can I get one?"
He stared at me. He started shifting his eyes sideways as if looking for help. I tried rotating through my Japanese language Rolodex: "I want to stay here." I pointed at the floor.
He looked down at the lobby carpet and laughed. "Uh . . ." he said.
My patience departed. "I want to sleep here!"
He jumped. "Oh," he said. He had me sign the register and pay. After I left him, I never saw another person in the hotel, nor heard another human sound. I was too tired to wonder if the "hotel" was a yakuza front or a coitus repository or some derelict property that anyone else would know better than to patronize. Walking to my room, the floorboards creaking, I paused on the dim landing of the second floor. My door was at the top of the stairs. In the room were two twin beds with dusty sheets and a window unit. I stripped naked and stood in front of the air conditioner, then cold showered.
I missed Yumiko and called her, our talk short to save battery without a charger. I knew she worried about the urban game trails. I caught the depression in her voice, the truth leaking out that she'd had another mind-crushing day, a kilogram of flesh lost. The call confirmed the worry I sometimes have that while tramping or doing anything my time could be better spent elsewhere.
***
By morning my leg muscles loosened, blisters receded. I tossed the hotel key on the unmanned desk and left, starting off at a little after seven. I walked to Ōme City, and my life in Japan came full circle. Here was the place where I’d shopped, an hour’s drive from my town, where Yumiko and I had eaten yakitori and fought in a little brick-lined neighborhood behind the train station.
We were increasingly, and quickly, I thought, talking about marriage. She was planning; I was stalling. I had crept along Tokyo as a way of escape. Fleeing from important decisions until panic was an old tactic. I loved Yumiko, but (and this I wasn't able to articulate then), she wasn't who I had imagined falling for. Years before, I daydreamed of a grad student in environmental studies, one who mountain-biked and didn't shave her legs.
Yumiko and I have been conjoined twelve years; our personalities feed each other—her centering me, and I freeing her dark moods. What I was doing while hiking Tokyo was conjuring a relationship. With Yumiko, I envision how we appear from the outside, but I’m more present within. In Japan, I held that image I’d dreamed and wouldn't erase until well after I was married, carrying outmoded ideas far past their expiration, not unlike many men of my generation.
***
The last day of walking Tokyo was a green and blissful blur. Ōme marked the transition from urban to rural, to spaces few outsiders could imagine Tokyo contains: wild trees draping streets, ancient volcanism belching steamy waterways, rabbits scattering everywhere. Japanese macaques scrambled over boulders, that performed cliff-hanging acrobatics, stared me down, and with elongated arms scooped up their children like footballs. Monkey legends are Japan’s version of trickster coyote tales. Primatologist Frans de Waal believes the presence of monkeys in Japan’s forests gives Japanese a better mirror to recognize themselves. He writes in The Ape and The Sushi Master, “Seeing primates makes it hard for us to deny that we are part of nature.”
This was the Tokyo I'd been waiting for on my walk, and it almost felt like a return. The green hills of Ōme were indistinguishable from Kosuge, where I lived and taught, just as the downtown Tokyo sprawl never separates from the metropolis. Ecosystems, urban or forest, are not demarcated. When walking these mountains, I hallucinated that I had just burst from Shibuya and fallen into the world of rolling water and primates, the human jungle inextricable from the more-than-human. It was cyclical, like it had all happened before.
The serpentine Tama gnawed through town, and I followed a cement sidewalk that trailed the Tama, where families vacationed, splashing, frying noodles, and kayaking. Dozens of restaurants abutted the banks, and I stopped into a few, checked out menus. I reclined on patios and decks shaded by cedars, listened to children and hawks squeal. I had hiked something just like this one day near Seattle and another time near San Francisco. Later, I would hike Mount Huashan in China and teleport to this time.
At one bend, I heard the shouts and clangs of a carnival. I swiveled around and found a crowd circling twelve men bedecked in the dark blue diaper-like wraps of sumo wrestlers, sweating, hollering, smiling, bouncing a portable shrine on logs. It was the yearly matsuri, a practice reaching back to time- and nature-worshipping Shintoism—nature which is cyclical with the seasons. The men jogged up the road and made a quick turn and trotted back, dancing—the shrine, housing a mountain god, balanced on their shoulders. Someone poured beer onto the twelve men’s heads. They tilted up their chins to drink. They turned back around; next year they would do the same.
At a restaurant with bone-white napkins, I sat for a steak and coffee. I scribbled in a notebook. I lost concentration, realizing the music was a Carpenters song, the one with fake words stitched throughout its chorus—La-la-la, Wo-o-wo-o, La-la-la, Wo-o-wo-o—ad nauseam.
I became combative, as I do when I'm in a mood and someone makes ugly noises. The snob inside unchained. The song was on repeat. The kind owner with an oval face and hair in a bun was rounding the tables. She had been eyeing me for the hour I was there. Finally, she came over and practiced her English. "How are you?”
I replied, "I'm fine, but is this really the same song over and over?”
She seemed joyous. "It's the Carpenters!" she sang, clutching her heart.
"They're great," I lied, and then added, "but the same song?
Her shoulders sank. "I thought all Americans liked the Carpenters."
"But who can listen to the same song over and over?"
She didn't answer and strolled away. She walked across the room, checking on customers. As new faces came in, sat down, the humans were different but the host followed her route, the same gyre around the room, the same greetings. The Carpenters song played hour after hour, perhaps year after year. I can travel back now and still hear the same Wo-o-wo-o.
***
My last memory sparkles with the dimming sun's magic hour. I separated from the main road and was tracking a cracked and weeded side thoroughfare that led into the town of Okutama, which held the closest train station to where I lived. If I wanted to, I could wind around the mountains on a track that sideswiped a lake, one that is mirror-flat, powers Tokyo with an electric dam, and puts up a startling reflection of the mossy-toothed Chichibu Mountains.
But my experiment, the urban jaunt, was concluded. I now fathomed, in a visceral way I hadn’t understood before, why so many citizens flocked to Tokyo’s outskirts, having retraced their very weekend escape from thrumming Shibuya to waterfalls on foot. And yet (there's always a yet), I could not forget how humanity reverberated energy and drenched Tokyo with history—the homeland of the Warrior Poet, the bloody Bridge of Japan, the rotating restaurant beneath which my future wife tolled away.
Maybe that is the essential thing that brings me to the places I come to live in and grow attached to, the tangled assortment of emotions projected onto the walls of mastodon skyscrapers, river bungalows, or the vastness of peaks. Maybe awe that I seek was for a permanence that wouldn't exist because one day I wouldn't, my love vanishing like the wink of a star. The same was true for mountains as well as my body. Mountains have risen and fallen like waves with tectonic dances and erosion. Humanity, maybe, will last longer. Or not.
I was grasping at this when I noticed a derelict shack, stripped by time, charcoal-gray, shaded by cedars. Marijuana smoke poured from the walls' prodigious cracks. The cloud was uncanny, like a thick mass of hovering flies. I halted in disbelief. Cannabis is akin to child pornography in Japan—unpardonable. But it was a familiar smell from adolescence, and its presence in the Tama-cut valley transported me eight years back to afternoons spent doping in window-cracked cars and soaking myself in Febreze after. That moment now seems a kind of warp, the smoke a wormhole between one existence and another. The point I was caught up in was halfway from controlled substance escapism to working as an English professor, which I do now. Spying on the figment who breathed those fumes at the end of his city-crossing quest, I did not get high, though in a way I did.
***
I fed the ticket machine at the train station some coins and plopped into a seat just as the doors shut. Finality drained me, something like the last bite of a meal. What I wanted was to savor, and I had no plans of talking with anyone. But then a bald white Australian walked in, shoving ahead his two Asian children, each about ten years old. He was tall with rugby shoulders and laser eyes that scanned the car. He spotted me and tugged his progeny over. They'd been soaking at the river, he said, and they’d been ceremoniously noisy. The man carried a bag of climbing gear, including ropes and some high-dollar tools I knew to be of use only for bare rock scaling.
He asked and without thinking, I told him about my walk across the urban forest. His lips grimaced and his eyes kindled with fire. Perhaps, if I hadn’t just hiked Tokyo, he would have found something else to feel insecure and competitive about. As it was, his eyebrows ascended, and his lips set into a war scowl. I think he didn't want to believe me and prodded with practical questions about bathrooms (I often used chain stores) and my feet (which were faring better now).
"Well, I've done a few rough things in my life," he said to me, "lots of backcountry, but never walked across Tokyo. No, never thought of doing that." He said "that" as if he wanted to spit it out. As we talked, he asked me about my salary as a teacher. I told him, and his satisfied grin almost broke his chin. "That's not bad, not bad," he said, "especially for just starting off. Not if you have a couple of kids; you'll have to make a little more."
The conversation spun unpleasantly. It came out that he fancied himself an outdoorsman, a climber in Australia. He kept eyeing his open duffel of ropes and cams and stoppers, which looked brand new. A guy who prided himself on outdoor accomplishments saddled with family, he seemed unsuited to children. While he was talking with me, his children climbed atop his Clydesdale shoulders and clambered onto the luggage rack, knocking around newspapers. I had never seen this before in Japan. The majority of train-riding children glued themselves to game screens or books and stayed quiet. I was fascinated, watching them revise train into jungle gym. While the Aussie and I barbed, one of his son's shoes slid off and glided across a man's face, taking his glasses with it. The other passengers scooted away down the car, exchanging glances. The Aussie made half-hearted attempts to corral his sons, never sternly. He picked them up at one point, but they just giggled and climbed away. He scolded in English, but the boys whispered in Japanese, a language, I gathered, their father didn't share.
At the time, what frightened me most was that I would turn out like him. A man in over his head with two children who probably took away his adventures and held the power of language over him. Meanwhile, he hacked whatever job he could hold down.
He was begging me with his gray eyes to ask him what he'd accomplished, the dream lists crossed off. I can't remember if I did or not. I might have, and whatever he told me wasn't as egotistical as I'd expected. He restrained himself, maybe; whatever wires I had tripped hadn't been part of my endeavor. As the ride wore on (two and a half hours to central Tokyo), it turned out that when calmed, he wasn't unreasonable.
"All right, you monsters, enough of that," he said to his children, roughhousing with them for a moment. But the kids went on summiting luggage. There was something about the way the man watched his boys that made me think he enjoyed seeing them climbing with abandon.
During the last hour of the ride, the man dozed; I read a book I’d brought along. One of his sons descended into the lap of a surprised woman who hadn't been paying attention. He came to a couple of times to scold his kids, who never returned him an English syllable. We got off together, and in a move that seemed familiar, the man scooped up both kids in one cobblestone arm while slinging the heavy duffle onto his shoulder. The kids were smiling, swinging in the tree of their father. I was impressed by how strong he was, yet caring in a soft way. He wasn't angry; their two-hour mobile gymnastics club seemed hardly worth his commenting on. He seemed to regard his children as natural beings that would climb or take root, his life something of a leaf caught in a breeze, not unlike mine.
As I watched his back receding, four legs poking through the curvature of a plump bicep, I thought that when I left Japan, I would pursue a job not as an outdoor leader, not as a mountain guide, but as a teacher, something I could do for the rest of my life. I didn't think I could live a carefree, troubled life like his, wishing for the glory of adventure. Watching the big man carry his children like firewood seemed to me to be a kind of small death, but one that was not so much tragic as instructive. I spent the last hour of the train ride thinking about where the earth would open up next.
Clinton Crockett Peters is an assistant professor of creative writing at Berry College. He is the author of two essay collections, Pandora’s Garden (2018) and Mountain Madness (2021). His work appears in Best American Essays 2020, Orion, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded literary prizes from the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Columbia Journal. In previous lives, he was an outdoor wilderness guide, an English teacher in Kosuge Village, Japan, and a radio DJ.