The Japanese Book Club and the Chatty Cab Drivers

Here it is October already and I haven't yet written about my trip to Nagano Prefecture with the Japanese Book Club ladies in late August.  It's taken me over a month to get a good geographical and historical fix on where I spent three of the most memorable days of my life.

You probably know Nagano as the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics.  The long-term benefit to Nagano of hosting those games was the building of a bullet train line to shuttle athletes and spectators to and from Tokyo.

We took one of those trains from Tokyo's Shinjuku station to Chino where we loaded up on perishable items like milk, eggs, and bacon at a shop across from the train station before hopping in a taxi for a twenty-minute mostly uphill ride to Suzuki's "rustic mountain cabin" -- her words, not mine -- in Tateshina Village. Our driver prattled non-stop for the entire twenty minutes. Later Suzuki told me she had never been treated to such an indepth monologue on local history and hot spots in all her years of riding in a cab from the station to her cabin. Ishikawa said the driver might have been a bit nervous and giddy about transporting a foreigner. I was a bit giddy myself.

Suzuki's parents built this vacation getaway in the 1960s and she has continued to pay the taxes since they passed away.  There are hundreds of cottages scattered across the hillside but all are on lots of at least a half acre and are hardly visible to each other.  Homeowners are not permitted to build fences or to remove any trees surrounding their cottages.

They take that tree covenant seriously. There's one hosting a hairy sort of pale green moss partially blocking the steps that provide the only access to Suzuki's cottage. Inspecting that moss, I decided it might offer an adequate cushion should I smack into the tree while fleeing from a fire in the middle of the night. But Suzuki's daughters will probably have to remove the tree when their turn to pay the taxes arrives.

The mossy tree mentioned above

Tateshina Village offers a quiet, cool respite from the summer heat and the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and its suburbs. People come here to commune with nature, to soak their weary bones in natural hot springs (there are hundreds from which to choose), and to feast their eyes on fabulous views of the Yatsugatake Mountains, a volcanic range situated on the border between Nagano  Prefecture and Yamanashi Prefecture.  There are more than twenty peaks in the Yatsugatake Mountains, ranging in height from 2300 to 2900 meters.  (By way of comparison, the tallest mountain in Japan, Mount Fuji, is 3776 meters high.)
 

This road was pretty scary after the sun went down

We spent the first afternoon hiking the dirt roads and paths that honeycomb Tateshina Village. Suzuki has been coming here every spring, summer, and fall for fifty years yet never ventures out the cottage door without her large laminated map. If I had paused to reflect on the possible ramifications of getting lost in the wilderness with two women a dozen years my senior, I would have insisted on holding that map. My bad.

There are neither street lights in Tateshina Village nor road signs. The only signs are short cedar posts stamped with the number of each lot although one of Suzuki's neighbors has affixed a sign atop his post dubbing his domain "Walden". This tickled me, of course, and even more so late that evening when I happened to glance through his window and see his profile bent over a book.

To be perfectly frank, at the time I spotted him I didn't care that he was reading. After spending fifteen minutes wandering around an inky dark highlands forest with two seventy-something women who would not let me hold one of the two feeble flashlights, that man could have been washing dishes or sitting on the toilet and my heart would have rejoiced at the sight of another human being. Our afternoon hike had eventually led us to a charming French restaurant where we celebrated our June, July, and August birthdays with a marvelous meal prepared by an owner-chef who spent his youth collecting John Lennon memorabilia and his middle age attending cooking classes in Paris. The restaurant is only a ten-minute walk from Suzuki's cottage but she left the map at the restaurant and we took the first wrong turn we could possibly take. Eventually she admitted her error -- one thing I love about Suzuki is she hates to be wrong as much as I do -- and we managed to find our way back to the restaurant where the waiter informed us the owner had found our map and set off in his car to return it to us. We didn't pass each other on the road thanks to that wrong turn so we loitered in front of the restaurant until he came back and then we set off for the cottage again.

Even with the map, we managed to take a wrong turn but Suzuki was quicker to admit her error the second time around and the cottage emerged on our right blessedly soon after Ishikawa-san's voice alerted the noctural forest creatures to our presence. "This reminds me of one of those American teenage movies where they all start disappearing one by one." It's funnier now than it was at the time.

The Yatsugatake Mountains

On the second day, after a nourishing breakfast of salad, bread, and corn on the cob, we hiked half a mile to the nearest bus stop where we caught a ride to a rice field in the middle of nowhere. Our destination was a rustic open-air hot springs favored by the locals. The hot springs are about two miles from where the bus dropped us and I was so hot and sweaty by the time we got there I almost forgot to be embarrassed about disrobing in front of people to whom I'm not married.

If embarrassment wasn't such a powerful emotion, the big toe on my right foot would have been the only part of my anatomy to experience the rustic open-air hot springs favored by the locals. Conversations about onsen experiences with my American friends tend to focus on nudity (for people who favor bare midriffs and plunging necklines, we are a strangely modest nation). No one ever mentioned that the water in those hot springs is almost unbearably hot. Maybe they thought the name was self-explanatory but we're talking beyond tepid, beyond lukewarm. We're venturing into the region of boiling point here.

WARNING: That sign means "hot springs" not "coffee shop"

My flesh was a glowing pink when I emerged from the hot spring and my bones felt like a Slinky.  I was sorely tempted to extract a beer from the vending machine conveniently located between the entrances to the separate men's and women's facilities but Suzuki-san had a different agenda. She called a cab and we were whisked to Hotel Heidi for cake and coffee by our second chatty cab driver who took us on a scenic route past a golf course and former iron mine.  Hotel Heidi (click here for photo) was the villa of an imperial family member before the war.  The cake was excellent and the waitresses were adorable in their Alpine costumes.

After strolling the hotel grounds and poking our heads into a little Swiss chalet where guests can have their pictures taken in Tyrolean garb, we headed downhill to man-made Lake Tateshina.

Suzuki-san and Ishikawa-san kindly pointed out our location on the tourist map near the lake. The Tateshina Village cottage is located off the road that's extending due north over Ishikawa's head.  A third chatty cab driver responded to Suzuki's call and took us back to the cottage where we polished off the corn and talked about books late into the night.  

The idyllic Lake Tateshina

On the third morning we aired our futons on the deck rail while closing up the cottage. Ishikawa cleaned the kitchen and bathroom while I vacuumed and Suzuki packed all the dirty linens in a box to be shipped back to her house in Kamakura. There's a washing machine in the cottage but Suzuki wanted to spend our last day sightseeing rather than doing laundry.

There's also a twin bed in one of the cottage bedrooms. They offered it to me upon arrival but I opted to sleep with them in the tatami room on double futons. This was both a great experience and something of a science experiment. I had heard that Japanese body temperatures are lower than ours and now I know for certain that at least two Japanese ladies can snuggle under down comforters for eight hours straight while at least one American woman tosses aside the comforter after a mere three hours.

Futons airing on the deck rail

Suzuki-san arranged for a cab driver to whisk us to a museum and shrine in nearby Suwa before our train was scheduled to depart Chino. This driver was remarkably less chatty than his predecessors, perhaps because he knew in advance he'd have three hours in which to regale us with insights and remarks. First he took us to some dumpsters where we placed three pre-sorted bags of trash in the appropriate receptacles and then he stopped at a building where Suzuki arranged to ship the box of linens while he showed me a wide variety of vegetables and fruits at an outside market beside the building.

The Suwa Taisho (Grand Shrine) was a real show-stopper but, alas, my camera battery petered out about fifteen meters into the first courtyard. The architecture of the museum we visited was more interesting than its contents which tended towards scrolls and mounted heads of boars and deer.  The person who designed that museum is also responsible for a number of whimsical structures like the tree house shown above that dot the landscape of the hills overlooking Suwa.  I'll have to ask Suzuki to remind me of his name.  She bought a book about his work in the gift shop next to the train station just before we called it an adventure and headed for home.

Guess what?  (Insert squeal of delight here.)  Suzuki and Ishikawa want to hold another book club slumber party in Tateshina before I leave Japan!  We're going back in May.  Between now and then I'll be searching every nook and cranny of my brain to come up with the best possible reading assignment to cap off my tenure as their book guide.  Your suggestions are most welcome.