Even though the idea of learning to drive had been mine, I felt extremely nervous. Nagoyan proved to be a good instructor.
“All right. You put your right foot on the foot brake and use your left hand to lower the hand brake. Fine. Now with your left foot on the clutch, shift to first gear. Yes, you’ve got it. Look back over your right shoulder. Uh-huh. Now move your right foot to the gas pedal and slowly push down, as you also gradually let up on the clutch. Yes. The clutch is on the left. Okay. A bit more pressure on the gas pedal. Get ready to put your foot on the clutch again. Oh, you don’t need to brake. Push the clutch all the way down and shift to second gear. Now turn the steering wheel slightly to the right. Good…”
There in the deserted rest area parking lot, I practiced starting the engine, shifting gears, and turning left and right, before moving out onto the road. Nagoyan was long-suffering: no matter how often I let the engine die or turned too sharply, he never chewed me out. He merely gave me immediate pointers.
“When you’re going around a curve, keep your eye on where you come out of it. That way your hands will automatically turn the steering wheel in the right direction.”
“The first time you hit the brakes is to send a signal to the car behind you; the second time is to see that they’re working; the third time is to stop.”
“It’s hard to get the hang of it at first, but you need to make constant use of the side-view and rear-view mirrors. Not staring into them, but rather keeping your eyes moving about.”
It was a narrow country road, so whenever Nagoyan told me that a car was approaching from the rear, I would flip the turn signal and pull over to the left to let it pass. I initially drove at barely thirty kilometers per hour but was gradually able to get up to forty.
“The idea of having you drive was to let me get some rest. But you’re keeping me rather busy!” Nagoyan said with a laugh. “Let’s take a break.”
He had me pull into a convenience store parking lot. I stalled the car twice before finally managing to back up and park outside the entrance.
Seeing me shuffling about inside, Nagoyan said he would take a nap in the car. I hastily bought underwear for a hefty seven hundred yen, went to the restroom, and changed into it. The pair I had been wearing was still warm in my hand from my body heat. Hesitating for a moment, I finally pushed them into the sanitary napkin disposal bin.
We drove by a vineyard. Without thinking, I braked. The car behind us honked. Nagoyan and I exchanged glances and the next moment had gotten out of the car and slipped our way in. We broke off clumps of grapes one after another, popped the watery globules into our mouths, and savored the sweetness of stolen fruit. And now it was impossible for us to stop ourselves. Next came a field of tomatoes and then a field of cucumbers. The vines were surprisingly tough, and tearing at them with our hands was no easy task.
“If we had barbeque equipment, we could have quite a feast with eggplant or corn,” said Nagoyan, munching on a cucumber, quite oblivious to the right or wrong of it all.
We crossed a minor mountain pass and went loping along until the road began to wind through the Yabakei Gorge. Here I had been as a child on a family outing. As I saw through the windshield the sluggishly hovering dragonflies, I remembered chasing and catching them in the riverbed.
“I’ve been meanin’ t’ ask ye why ye don’t speak your native dialect.”
“Don’t you know ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’? I don’t want my world to be limited by Nagoya.”
“Whit is that supposed t’ mean?”
“It’s been common sense ever since Wittgenstein.”
“An’ who’d that be?”
“He’s said to be the last philosopher. He came up with the idea that philosophy is the same as the language game. It would behoove you to know that sort of thing.”
Whenever Nagoyan embarked on an irksome topic, the wings of his nose would quiver with pleasure. Even when I didn’t understand very well what he was talking about, it was so much fun to watch him that even when were in the hospital, I’d pose all sorts of questions.
“‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ That’s a famous saying of his.”
Again I didn’t understand, so I deliberately made an irrelevant remark.
“How d’ye say soiginta in Nagoya dialect?”
Soiginta is what you say to someone who is leaving, but it’s actually Saga dialect, so I don’t happen to use it myself.
“I don’t know what it means. I never use any kind of local speech.”
“Well, now if that don’t take the cake!”
“I don’t talk like that. I really don’t.”
As he spouted his pointless argument, I imagined a huge column of mosquitoes swirling inside his head. If magnified, they would number in the millions, buzzing about and all having the same twangy sound of Nagoyan’s relatives and fellow locals. Such an idea wouldn’t have occurred to that Wittgen-whatever-his-name-was. As I envisaged Nagoyan waving his hands about as he weepingly fought off the mosquito host, I found myself suppressing a laugh. Nagoyan gave me a puzzled look.
“It’s nothin’. It’s jus’ that I would’a thought it a good thing to be able t’ speak the local talk.”
“You should learn to talk properly.”
“I can, but I don’t.”
“Why? That’s crazy!”
“It’s the blood o’ Kyushu that runs in me veins. I’m proud of it, ’n of me language too.”
“Nowadays all that talk about ‘blood’ is so old!”
“But what of yer lyin’ that ye were born in Tokyo?”
“I didn’t lie. Because it is true that I went from Tokyo to Fukuoka.”
“Why’d ye want t’ cover up where ye were born? Now, that’s crazy!”
“You can only say that because you weren’t born in Nagoya. If you had been, you’d understand.”
Nagoyan would speak in a high-pitched voice whenever the subject of Nagoya came up. It was odd, because people normally spoke softly on matters they wished to conceal.
“Understand what?”
“My complexes. Nagoyans are like a walled city, the way Japan was when it cut itself off from the rest of the world. And the clingy sound of the dialect is simply unbearable. Yes, my parents speak it, but from the time I was small, I was determined not to. I wanted to leave home as quickly as I could. Besides, Tokyoites look down their noses at Nagoyans.”
I don’t know what Tokyoites do, but it seemed to me that Nagoyan would feel picked on no matter where he went. Because the slightest bit of teasing was all it took to produce on his face the sort of “feel-good pain” you get from a good massage. It made you want to go on goading him. Though he would never admit it, he was a classic case of masochism.
“But, you know,” he exclaimed with a sense of relief, “if we were in a Porsche now, we’d stick out like a sore thumb.”
“We’d be caught fer sure, awright. Jus’ as well we’re in this scrapheap!”
“I like it here, this ravine. I like streams better than the ocean anyway.”
“Oh? But it’s hardly anythin’ out o’ th’ ordinary.”
It occurred to me that scenery the likes of Yabakei Ravine can be seen all over Kyushu. I had nothing against it, of course, but if it is true that the poet-philosopher Rai San’yo was so overwhelmed at the sight that he broke his brush in two and threw in the towel, so to speak, all I can say is that he wasn’t all that well informed.
As we drove, we passed a tourist advertisement bearing the likeness of the statesman Yukichi Fukuzawa and informing us that the Memorial Hall erected to him lay straight ahead.
“Why here?” exclaimed Nagoyan.
“Ye mean the bloke on the ten thousand yen ticket? He came from Nakatsu.”
“You should at least be able to refer to it as the ten thousand yen banknote.”
“Ten thousand yen ticket” was what Tsuyoshi called it, and at some point I’d picked up the expression.
“You know, I went to Keio University for four years and never knew that our founder was from Kyushu.”
“He’s th’ one who said ‘heaven bestows only a single blessing,’ right?”
“No, no. He said, ‘Heaven does not make one man higher – or lower – than another.”
“So everyone at Keio’s quite fond of ’im?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘fond’. He’s thought of as a great man… Since we’ve come this far anyway, let’s have a look.”
Nagoyan talked about a book by Fukuzawa, written for the education of children, in which the beloved old folk tale of Momotaro is criticized as a tale of aggressive warfare waged against “ogres” who, though innocent of any wrongdoing, suffer the invasion of their island and the theft of their treasure. I was willing to go along with that, but I still didn’t know whether Fukuzawa was a great man.
The area through which the road to Nakatsu passed was well developed, but we seemed to see nothing but funeral halls and shops selling household altars, one after another. I wondered how with so few people living here, there could be so many people dying.
“Creepy!” exclaimed Nagoyan.
Yukichi Fukuzawa’s childhood home was a dilapidated, straw-thatched house. I was bored by the Memorial Hall, but Nagoyan seemed more than satisfied, as he excitedly pointed to the aerial photographs, “Look! There’s the Mita campus, and here’s the Hiyoshi campus! Ah, those were the days!”
“Yukichi,” we read, “bade farewell to Nakatsu in buoyant spirits.” It occurred to me that Nagoyan might well have left Nagoya in much the same frame of mind.
Next to the Memorial Hall was a modest café. We stood outside, looking at the lunch menu.
“Wonder what the Yukichi lunch is?”
“Deep-fried, soy-flavored chicken, it says.”
“How can they call such cheap fare the ‘Yukichi lunch’?”
He seemed genuinely indignant. I burst out laughing.
“Deep-fried sounds awright to me. I’d wager it’s quite tasty.”
“No… In Oita, there’ll be more variety. Bungo beef steak or branded horse mackerel… If one is going to put Yukichi’s name to food…”
“S’pose it’d haf to be a dinner costin’ a full Fukuzawa ticket, wouldn’t it now?”
Nagoyan turned on his heel and huffily returned to the car.
In the end, we stopped again at the highway rest area, where in the restaurant there I made quite a show of ordering and eating a set meal of deep-fried, soy-flavored chicken. It seemed to be the culinary pride of Nakatsu, after all.
The evening cicadas were whining. I felt as though my ribs were being squeezed. There was no place to which we might return. We would be stopping here for the night, with nothing to do but sleep in the car.
I had imagined a still and quiet night, but suddenly from the area loudspeakers blared the melody of Back Home.
“Hey! Lay off!” Nagoyan shouted.
“What time is it?”
“Nine.”
“Time fer sleep, isn’t it?”
“Huh? We’re not in the hospital!”
I had always thought it ridiculous that it was lights out at nine, saying that I liked to stay up late, but here we were keeping to that same absurd schedule ourselves.
“Ah, that startled me!”
We took our medicine and smoked a Salem Light.
The barbiturates didn’t work. I was usually an easy sleeper, despite being afflicted with early morning awakening, so now that I was wide awake, my foremost thoughts were of our weird, abnormal behavior – and of the wrong we had done. Had we been right to run away? Would we be caught? Waves of sleep were rolling back and forth with the lithe motion of a broom, catching only Nagoyan in their embrace, taking him away and leaving me behind as debris. Would I be taken back to the hospital, put away in a private room, with Tetropin piled mountain high, and left to congeal? Terrified by such thoughts, I would fretfully wake, sometimes going to the women’s room or walking around the rest area. Just when I thought I’d fallen asleep at last, the din of Back Home came on again. It was six o’clock. Nagoyan appeared to have already awoken some time before.