About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez Read Free Book Online

Mr. Nishibe bargains with fishermen at a small dock for fresh salmon, scallops, and snails. (I’d asked Naoki to keep an eye out for an intact scallop shell on our beach walk, a gift for someone back home. Mr. Nishibe, though he speaks no English, quickly caught the drift of that conversation—it precipitated his parley with the fishermen for fresh scallops.)
    With the shellfish and salmon secure in the trunk of the Honda, the three of us head down the coast to the Nishibe farm where Naoki grew up, a few miles outside the town of Koshimizu.As we drive I can only stare in enchantment. I am reminded of the sparsely settled, agrarian countrysides of western North America, the coast plains of Washington State and lush green riverine valleys in the Coast Ranges.
    I ask Naoki if many tourists ever come to this part of Hokkaido. My Japanese is rudimentary, his English halting. Very few
gaijin
, he says, very few foreigners, but a fair number of Japanese, especially in the spring, when wildflowers are in brilliant profusion; also in the summer, when warm weather makes a boat ride on one of the area’s pristine mountain lakes or a walk in the evergreen forests very pleasant.
    “Many honeymooners,” says Naoki after a long pause, looking up from his Japanese-English dictionary with a smile.
    When the road draws close to the beach I ask if we might stop again. I am astounded—
the Sea of Okhotsk
, I keep saying to myself. Siberia fronts these same waters. This ponderous storm surf, I reflect, will soon lie frozen on the sand in buckled plates of sea ice. Snow will fly, and the bears of Hokkaido will go into hibernation. It seemed as obdurate a coast as I imagined that of the Atacama Desert in Chile to be. Down the beach from where I stand, fifteen or twenty gray herons, birds that would come to my shoulder, strut all angular in the churning surf. What do they seek there?
    The Nishibe house, set amid fields inland from the sea, is foursquare and plain. I offer Naoki’s mother two small presents from home when I enter, a jar of my wife’s pear marmalade, a jar of my neighbor’s fireweed honey. I was made to understand before I departed for Japan that to be a guest in someone’s home here would give me a completely new understanding of what welcome and cordiality meant. I was intent on reciprocity in these matters, however, and out of habit carry many small presents to convey my sense of pleasure at being brought in out of the indifferent world.
    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 honeyimmediately 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