When I was reading 'His Motorcycle, Her Island'

If I were asked to name just one travel destination that has left an impression on me, I would answer the Gono Line area without hesitation.

I first visited there when I was 17. That was 45 years ago.

Nowadays, the Gono Line is a tourist route where the 'Resort Shirakami' runs, but back then it was just a normal local line where a locomotive pulled old passenger cars and baggage cars. I spent half a day swaying on that train, just blankly gazing at the Sea of Japan in winter.

The train ran slowly along the deserted coastline, occasionally stopping at small stations. Nothing special happened. Even so, that day left something in my heart.

Five years later, at the age of 22, I visited the same place again, this time on a Kawasaki motorcycle.

It was summer this time. A short summer vacation.

In an era where you can't do such things anymore, I was traveling around the Tohoku region while camping at unmanned stations.

That day, too, I had taken a quick ride on the Chokai Skyline from early morning. The television at Ugo-Honjo Station, where I stopped on the way, was full of reports about a plane crash on Mount Osutaka.

I passed through Akita as it was, and by the time I was riding on the national highway along the Gono Line, evening was approaching.

Handwritten signs had been appearing on the side of the road for a while.

'Casual Inn'

It seemed I could stay there. I was getting tired of camping out, so I wanted to lie down on a futon.

The 'Casual Inn' was a drive-in along the coast. Although it had a drive-in sign, it was actually a diner that looked like a private house. As far as I could see, there were no other houses besides this shop.

For now, I put down my luggage and went out to the beach.

The Gono Line running close to the national highway and the Sea of Japan were no different from five years ago.

I sat on the rocks and just stared blankly for a while at the Sea of Japan, dyed red by the setting sun.

There were no guest rooms at that inn. It was just a house with a fisherman father and his wife who was tending the shop, and when I went inside, the father was having a drink in the living room. I gave a small nod, and he nodded back. We watched TV together. There was no conversation.

The wife told me that a couple from Tokyo had come by motorcycle the day before. Perhaps she was trying to be considerate of me, as I was quiet; I felt sorry.

I remember the simmered local fish for dinner was delicious. After having that dinner in the living room, I slept in the room just one glass door away. In a way, it was like being put up for the night in a fisherman's house.

I am still unsociable even now, but back then I was an even more surly young man. A young man who appears silently in an unfamiliar land and begs for a night's lodging might have been scary from their perspective.

It is unthinkable in today's dangerous world.

Having been sleeping outdoors for days, I fell into a sleep as deep as sinking into a swamp the moment I got into bed. It seems the fisherman father went out to fish in the middle of the night, but I don't remember the sound of it at all.

When I woke up in the morning, the wife was talking on the phone with a neighbor at the storefront.

I couldn't understand a word of what she was saying.

Perhaps it was the Tsugaru dialect. Even though it was Japanese, I couldn't grasp a single meaning. Only the words that flowed there remain in the back of my ears even now. I was just a traveler who had wandered into the life of that land for only one night.

I can no longer remember the name of the inn or even where it was. That inn, too, is probably gone by now.

However, the piercing blue of the sky and the blue of the Sea of Japan when I departed that morning remain clearly in my heart even now.

The reason the area along the Gono Line continues to be the starting point of my travels is not just because of the scenery of the Sea of Japan. It is because there were people who accepted an immature and quiet young man.

Travel becomes a memory more through people than through scenery.

The summer of 40 years ago. That season is approaching once again this year.