Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

The lone place in Tokyo where my cowboy drag was appreciated wasn’t the Ichi-ban, where both staff and clientele exhibited persistent indifference, but, rather, a little okonomiyaki joint a couple of blocks away, where I usually lunched.

Okonomiyaki is a dish with an identity crisis: it doesn’t seem to know if it’s an omelet or a pizza. It’s round and flat like a pizza, but has the eggy consistency of an omelet, albeit an omelet topped with chicken, shrimp, or octopus (diner’s choice) and slathered with a tangy dark brown preparation (“bulldog” in translation) composed of soy sauce, spices, and apple butter. The place in my Otsuka neighborhood served nothing but okonomiyaki, which it cooked directly in front of each individual diner on a long narrow grill that ran the length of the counter.

The two countermen had hair almost as long as my own — a rarity in Japan in 1970 — and in me seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, grinning like short-order Buddhas when I presented them with color postcards depicting cowboys on horseback and Indian chiefs in full headdress. I signed the cards “Buffalo Silver,” the name I decided to travel under in Japan, and when I’d enter the establishment after a morning of visiting Zen temples and Shinto shrines, they’d shout out in unison, “Buffaro Sirver!” The rest of our discourse, once I selected my choice of topping, consisted entirely of loud and abrupt exchanges of band names. Apropos of nothing beyond camaraderie, I’d suddenly exclaim, “Grateful Dead!” and one of them would yell back, “Rorring Stones!” I’d shout “Beach Boys!” and they’d respond, “Beaters!” As a traveler in a strange land, I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a more satisfying conversation.

On what haiku master Basho called “the road to the far north,” we sorely tested the Japanese tolerance for exuberant public display: “Buffalo Silver” in his dopey cowpoke outfit, six-foot-five Darrell Bob signing inn registers as “Victor Mature Jr.” (after an actor he believed — incorrectly — he resembled more closely than he did Johnny Weissmuller); and diminutive Yoko, who presented herself in English to her disapproving northern countrymen as “Miss Chocolate Cake,” a tribute to the thing she most admired about Western civilization.

On trains, encouraged by quantities of beer, we were as unrestrained in our deportment (having led Yoko egregiously astray) as the Japanese passengers were closed and reserved, believing all the while, as we sang Hank Williams tunes, drummed on Asahi cans with chopsticks, and occasionally exercised in the aisles, that we were setting an example of how less tiresome life can be when people relax their grip on their egos and indulge the innate human capacity for playfulness; though in actual fact we were probably just assuaging any lingering guilt the Japanese might have harbored about Pearl Harbor.

(Hmmm? Remembering Pearl Harbor, I must concede that under certain conditions the Japanese have, indeed, demonstrated an affection for surprise.)

Kushiro proved to be a drab, dog-bitten port city, reeking of urine and fish, and enveloped in a gray air of unspecified danger. It was as different from Tokyo as Marseille is from Paris; it could have been Palermo to Kyoto’s Florence. The fact that its lone movie theater had external speakers and that the sound track blaring for two grimy blocks along the waterfront was that of Rebel Without a Cause (it was as if Natalie Wood, my boyhood goddess, my first herald of oceanic love, was once again addressing my heart, lighting my way in this shadowy town) contributed to a municipal ambience that was less cosmopolitan than it was just plain queer.

Thus it seemed only fitting when, the next morning, as we boarded the bus that would take us to the crane sanctuary, five or six kilometers out of town, the bus station sound system was broadcasting an American march, the one with the alternative lyrics that begin “Be kind to your fine-feathered friends…” Nor was the park itself any less of a bicultural oddity, for one entered it on foot through a gate in the largest Coca-Cola billboard I have ever seen. On an arch above the billboard were words in Japanese and English. The English read: SACRED CRANES/AKAN NATURALEY PARK. Naturaley.

There wasn’t an abundance of cranes in residence, that autumn being sufficiently mild to delay a wholesale migration from Siberia, but we did get a good close look at the early arrivals. Near the plastic chain-link fence that separated the miles of boggy crane habitat from human visitors, park rangers had strewn ears of corn, and the cranes showed no hesitation about approaching us gawkers to peck at their breakfast: like the whooper, the tancho zuru is not a meek bird. Its defiant nature, its refusal to compromise its way of life to adjust to human “progress,” may be one reason Asians regard the crane as sacred, a veneration American oil drillers and the Army Corps of Engineers fail to share.

While we weren’t treated to the cranes’ magnificent mating dance, a performance unequaled in all of nature (including John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever ), the seventeen birds near the fence were no more sedate than we Yanks had been on the train; hopping about on pogo-stick legs, spreading their wings (a span of a good seven feet), pointing their beaks at the sky, and bellowing, often in duet, a call that resembled an amplified extract of Tokyo traffic. After a voyeuristic couple of hours, I figured I’d absorbed enough direct craneness to complement my library research, so we returned to Kushiro where, as our lumbering, squid-eyed innkeeper (he reminded Darrell Bob and me of Lenny from Of Mice and Men ) served us a lunch of spiky-crab legs, red caviar, and seaweed, the disembodied voice of Natalie Wood once again came floating over the broken-tiled rooftops and dirty cement, making even the ubiquitous deposits of soot-speckled gull guano seem holy and right. Kushiro mon amour .

We parted company at the airport in Sapporo, a larger, brighter city to the southwest, so that Victor Mature Jr. could become Darrell Bob Houston again and attend to his assignment and his family back in Tokyo. We hugged good-bye, an embrace that caused men in the vicinity to turn away in ill-concealed discomfort. Miss Chocolate Cake bowed to me and said, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” Darrell Bob had taught her the phrase, and having no idea what it meant, she said it softly, sweetly, as though it were the most sentimental of endearments.

Alone now, I took a train down the dragon tail of Hokkaido (as spiky as a Kushiro crab leg), from where, on foot, I boarded a ferry to cross the strait that separates Japan’s northern and central islands. It was dusk and as the big vessel steamed out of Hakodate harbor, the sun was setting in one quadrant, a full moon was rising in another. On all sides of us, the open water was dotted with tiny wooden boats, each outfitted with luminous paper lanterns whose light was useful for attracting squid. It was as though the gods had plunked me down in the middle of a Hokusai wood-block print from the early nineteenth century. A solitary figure on the uppermost deck was playing a flute, ethereally, wistfully, as if coaxing the stars out of hiding, and, heart drumming an earthy accompaniment, my deep attraction to Japanese culture was rekindled.

In disdain for grimy Kushiro and the Coca-Cola commercialism of its “naturaley” crane park, I’d lost sight of wabi-sabi, the aesthetic of finding beauty in the imperfect and unexpected; the secret, private joy of being ever attuned to the Zen of things. These days, when people refer to Japan’s World War II atrocities, to its work-until-you-drop corporate climate, to its incongruent penchant for littering and polluting, and its reprehensible slaughtering of dolphins and whales, I remind myself of that most Zen of counterbalances: a big front has a big back.