Hokkaido Highway Blues

Will Ferguson

Quite simply, this is a great book. Great title, great subject matter, great writing. The sort of book that makes you glad that the lines you're addicted to are lines on a page.

Will Ferguson, Canadian ex-pat in Japan, decided to do something that no-one had ever done before, ever: to hitchhike the entire length of the island nation; to encounter the Japanese as a participant and not as a spectator. No mean undertaking, for, as everyone who picked him up kept reminding him, "People don't stop for hitchhikers in Japan".

But he makes it, encountering all manner of people and places along the way: gangsters, sales reps, truckers, rice paddies, surf beaches, drainage ditches and, everywhere he goes, hospitality and generosity beyond belief.

So, just another travel book? I hear you ask. Nope. This is a cut - a big cut - above the run-of-the-mill road book. Oh, you'll learn a lot about Japan, of course: its history, its culture, its - even today - seemingly impenetrable mores; Ferguson's skill is to present it in the most digestible fashion imaginable. Like Bryson, O'Rourke and Barry, he is humorous, often hilarious, and never boring, but his prose has a poignancy of touch that is all its own, as, for example, when he pauses to spare a thought for the young men (boys, actually) who manned the kamikaze planes, or when he visits the home of the old soldier. Anyone who isn't moved by those passages must have the heart of a statue.

But his journey also throws up several hilarious vignettes: the driver who keeps shouting "Cow sex! Cow sex!"; how he unwittingly got a lift from the cops who had arrested him; the drunken construction workers, and the time his own grandmother stopped for a hippie hitchhiker back in Canada. (My own favourite is the night he gatecrashes a salarymen's office party. That evening of dissipation will dwell in my memory forever.)

Hey, I'm starting to turn anecdotal! I'll soon be quoting chunks of the book to you (as I did to anyone who would listen when I was reading it). You've caught my drift. Sharing the road with Will was a gas, and I was sorry when our journey came to an end. His book's a cracker. Rush out and get your copy now.