Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking in Japan by Will Ferguson

The lamely named Hokkaido Highway Blues contains the ramblings of a large Canadian who hitchhiked the whole length of Japan (not just Hokkaido, boneheads) following the Cherry Blossom Front.

Time-in-Japan snobs beware. This fellow had only been here two years when he decided to squeeze out his Japan book. Sound the alarms. And he couldn't speak or read much Japanese. Cynical cynics will wonder how, then, did he have all the conversations he describes. "Was he making them up, the lying whopper?" they'll inquire.

And let's face it. Resting knowingly and yet so at ease in the long-established tradition of the Japanese "pilgrimage travelogue" (blurb radar bleeping indignantly, like a sheep with every right to be indignant), following in the hallowed footsteps of the Japanese poet-wanderer Basho and British master travel writer Alan Booth (bleeping like a metal detector that's just struck cucumber in Spinal Tap), just isn't enough to make people shell out for your book.

People are much smarter and duller than that.

You can almost hear their whispers: Only two years. No Japanese. And from Canada.

It's an ask.

(Alright, this particular snob thought the same. He only read it because someone said the writer was better than Alan Booth.)

But but but. HHB is a good book. It's well-written. It's funny (blurbs would say irreverent). It's only annoying at times (economically viable blurbs probably wouldn't say that). And it's not afraid to take the piss unmercifully in a land that often needs it. Yes, all the usual sorry expat cliches are trotted out like gaijin teachers at a sportsday. But it also has--wait for it--moments of authentic insight (blurb alert raised to evacuate--the sheep leave town).

I'd no choice, your honour. "Authentic insight" was the right phrase. Exactly the right phrase. It's insight because all-seeing me hadn't thought of it. And it's authentic because it doesn't smell the place out like a stable of reeking horseshit. Like some of the nonsense you hear from the "Japanese are very polite" brigade. The two-year stage can be a rosy-tinted time in a man's expatriatism.

But not for this fellow. "Ferguson reached an early understanding of the enforced freedoms and limitations of the narrow role of the foreigner in Japanese society," an academic might pontificate.

He did. And then wrote a pretty funny book.

Japanese ability or not, some see early. Add hitchhiking, humour, self-deprecation, the occasional cracking of sarcasm's whip, and the innate ability of the storyteller, and you've got yourself a decent, enjoyable book.

Just couldn't help feeling it's been done before, and better. But what does that matter?

Posted by Setsunai at October 12, 2005 4:52 PM