Free Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan by Will Ferguson Page B

in my element. But it also increases my discomfort when I return to Japan—as I always do—and find that once again I am this clumsy, unwieldy figure, shirt untucked, shopping bags in disarray, hair uncombed, groping for a handkerchief that I do not have.
    The lady who invited me into her home was so small it felt as though I were conversing with a hand puppet. We sat at the hearth and she stirred the ash in the fire pit. A cast-iron teakettle was suspendedby a large hook—and even this was heavy with dust. She tilted hot water into a ceramic teapot, and we waited for the tea to steep. This is the most beautiful sentence in Japan. The tea steeps . A smell of topsoil and perfume rises up. It tastes the way that rice fields smell. And the final swallow, where the powder collects in the bottom, is also the most bitter.
    In the adjoining sun parlour, she showed me further forests of bonsai. “The bonsai outside are in process. These are complete. His grandfather’s.” A pine tree clung to boulder, its trunk twisted, its branches curved by an imaginary wind.
    “Oi!” It was the husband returning. He saw my boots in the entrance, but he wasn’t prepared for a foreign face in his house. He recovered his decorum remarkably well.
    “American, eh? What brings you to Nango?” He was wearing a spotlessly clean white undershirt and a pair of polyester jogging pants—there must be more polyester jogging pants per capita in Japan than anywhere else in the world. I liked him because he was unapologetically bald. His hair was combed straight back, defiantly; no comb-over camouflage here. A retired rice farmer, he was also an artist.
    I admired his bonsai. He thanked me. I persisted. He thanked me again. There was one tree, a young one, still unshaped, that I particularly liked. I went on and on. His smile tightened. It really is a beautiful bonsai, I said, and then, before I knew it, I had gone too far.
    “Please,” said his wife. “Please take it. It is our present.”
    “No! Really, I just like it, that’s all.”
    She persisted. “It is our present to you. Please.”
    Her husband was smiling as though someone were slowly tightening a vise on his nuts. His wife continued in her efforts to give me the tree, and he kept trying to throw her some of those ah unn nonverbal understandings, but she was oblivious. “I’m sure you would want him to have it, wouldn’t you, dear? Such a nice young foreigner, travelling so far. It will make a nice memory of Nango. I can wrap it for you. It’s very light. No, I’m sure my husband doesn’t mind.”
    Fortunately, I managed to outlast her, and the man did not have to hand over one of his beloved bonsai. I always forget that in Japan complimenting something highly is good manners, but complimenting too long is gauche. True, no one is going to hand over his family sword or giant-screen Sony just because you keep prattling on about how much you like them, but he will be annoyed at the hints you are dropping, and as a hitchhiker, when you lose the goodwill of the people, you lose everything.
    The husband in turn tried to give me one of his wife’s flower-arranging vases. It was her turn to smile tightly, but I managed to decline his gift. The wife then offered me a ride out of Nango with her husband, and he graciously offered to have his wife make a box lunch for me. I half expected her to up the ante by offering me one of her husband’s gold teeth, but it didn’t come to that. They were a good couple, not exactly ah and unn , but close enough.

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    “ GOODBYE , G AIJIN-SAN ,” said the lady of the house, bowing from the driveway as her husband and I drove away. “Goodbye and thank you.”
    There was a time I would have rankled over someone calling me gaijin-san . The word gaijin means “outsider,” and is derived from the term gai-koku-jin , “outside-country-person.” When the suffix -san is added to gaijin , it means Mr. Outsider. This was how the lady in Nango referred to