Cycling the Noto Peninsula

In May 1987, two German friends, Albrecht and Sylvia, and I went cycling up the west coast of the Noto Peninsula (能登半島). From my journal:

 May 6, 1987

Our route: From near Togi [富来], where we left the car to go up the coast to Monzen [門前]. The rain & cold wind Sunday was misery. Sylvia was far behind. I stopped at a police box outside Monzen. That proved the best possible move under the circumstances: late on a rainy, cold Golden Week afternoon, with reservations to stay nowhere. Disaster loomed. I resolved not to leave that police box until we had a place to stay. The little guy in there was put out, but we must surely have broken the monotony of his sitting there, staring at an unchanging log book. The room was hot from the glowing kerosene heater. There was no room at anyone’s inn.

 The ”Golden Week” holiday period is not a good time to go cycle touring in Japan. It is a string of holidays which in 1987 consisted of the Shōwa Emperor’s (Hirohito) birthday, Constitution Day (celebrating the enactment of the 1947 Japanese constitution), and Children’s Day. (The names of the holidays have changed in the intervening years, but Golden Week remains firmly implanted in the calendar.)  During Golden Week, most Japanese take time off to go somewhere, and we found the coast road choked with cars. Worst of all, there were virtual caravans of gigantic tour buses lumbering noisily, gaseously, and perilously close to us as we cycled along the narrow road.

Since my first youth hostel tour in 1973, I have always yearned to travel by bicycle. Self-supported and independent, of course, panniers on the rear rack, everything needed for several days and nights of escape. I drove us in my car out of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture near the Sea of Japan. Sylvia had arrived in Osaka from Berlin the night before. She was a music friend of Albrecht’s from Berlin where he lived before coming to Japan.

The police officer in Monzen was much put out, but he came through and found us a place to stay, an inn called Miyakoya (宮古屋).

It is an old place, but the woman was kind, and the food delicious.

As they say: すき腹にまずいものなし (sukibara ni mazui mono nashi: “nothing tastes bad on an empty stomach”).

In the morning, we saw Sōji-ji (總持寺) Temple, for which Monzen is famous….Monks were chanting the sutras inside the memorial hall at the back of the temple complex. Beautiful sound, mysterious, Stravinsky-esque with the beat of the drums, the clear tones of the bells. Joss sticks & old people remembering the dead & and the cramped pains in their feet from kneeling in the seiza position.

The next day, we pushed ahead over the mountains to the coast road toward Wajima (輪島),a much larger town. (In 2006, Monzen was absorbed by Wajima and no longer exists as an independent municipality. On January 1, 2024, the area was devastated by a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in which nearly 500 people lost their lives.)

Albrecht was a tall, thin man (around 192 cm), and he was struggling with my wife’s too-small bicycle, the seat hiked up as far as it would go. Sylvia was riding Albrect’s own bike, which was well past its prime, but at least fit her reasonably well.

At Akasaki (赤崎) we turned onto the coast road (“cliffs, pounding waves”) toward Wajima. It was hard going, and we had to push our bikes up some of the hills. Arriving in Wajima feeling spent, I went into the tourist information center and managed to find a minshuku (民宿, a kind of bed-and-breakfast), a lovely old place that had a connection to Wajima’s famous lacquerware industry. We had two rooms separated by sliding paper doors. Sylvia slept on one side and Albrecht and I on the other. We very nearly got Sylvia to go into the communal bath with us, but at the last moment, the elderly woman who ran the place steered her over to a private bath. I was 28 and Albrecht a little north of 30, and that’s the way we were.

The next day, we took in some of the sights of Wajima at the tip of the Noto Peninsula. We went to the morning market (asa-ichi; 朝市) and I bought souvenirs. We left the town early and headed inland back toward Togi, where the car was parked.

We decided to avoid the coastal road: we’d already come up that way, and we did not want to ride again with the dreaded tour buses. The map indicated a “Route 51,” but we could not be sure that we were actually on that particular road: no road signs. I stopped my bike beside a rice field where farmers were laboring. I went down into the field and asked: “Is this road Route 51?”  (この道は51号線ですか。) No one seemed to know. Finally, one of them said, in a country accent I could barely understand, “I dunno. Anyways, it’s the road that goes to Monzen!” At that, the farmer went back to hoeing his field. That was all I needed; that’s where we needed to go. My visit had to have been the first time a gigantic gaijin (foreigner – me) had descended into his field to ask directions. Maybe I was an extraterrestrial, but the farmer seemed to think nothing of it. Maybe it didn’t happen at all.

Albrecht was an excellent traveling companion. Tall, lanky, with a bushy moustache and long hair, there was something about him that reminded me of Big Bird. He was funny, forever punning and riffing on the English language and what little he’d picked up of Japanese. It seemed that he’d learned a lot of his English from pop songs, the Beach Boys being a favorite:

“How are you doing, Albrecht?”

“Good! ‘Good…good…good…good vibrations’!”

That sort of thing. The humor masked a shy awkwardness. He was very much not in his element in Japan, but Japan gave him employment that would probably have eluded him in Germany. He said there was not much demand for Ph.D.’s who specialized in German Romantic literature (his dissertation was on the novelist Jean Paul, 1763-1825). Even a first-class scholar who had done his doctorate at Berlin’s famed Free University cold not find work. Albrecht landed a well-paid job teaching German at Kanazawa University, the national university in Ishikawa Prefecture. We crossed paths in Fukui, where he came to teach once a week to teach at Fukui University, where I taught English. I admired Albrecht because he made me laugh, and he was cosmopolitan and well-read, a real European. He was also deeply musical, a skilled amateur classical pianist.

…a long climb up past terraced fields & isolated farmhouses, people stooping to plug the green rice seedlings into the waterlogged muck of the fields. Salt-of-the-earth of Japan, looking up toward the whirling click of my freewheel, just in time to see an inhabitant of another world blow by.

Down another long downhill stretch, to a quiet temple. Rather plain & unadorned. We stopped, A & I, and he went to slide open the big wooden doors. Inside, an upright piano, newish & in good playing condition. Inside that temple, with the massive exposed rough-hewn logs supporting the roof, Albrecht began to play from the 2nd book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Beautiful, mysterious. No one came, except Sylvia after a few minutes. Then a bit of a Chopin impromptu.

“Beautiful, mysterious.” That’s what I wrote 37 years ago. That’s the curious thing about keeping a journal for so long: The event happens, it’s written down, the ink dries in a moment, and the book is closed. Often that’s where the record of the moment stays, largely unremembered. But sometimes there are moments that persist in memory, sometimes with pain, sometimes with delight. This moment at a small roadside temple in the backcountry of the Noto Peninsula has stayed with me and, if anything, has intensified over the years. I don’t remember which piece Albrecht played from the Well-Tempered Clavier. My journal reminds me that he also played some Chopin as well.

I can still see Albrecht, his long torso on the piano bench, the scent of pine trees and hint of incense in the air, and I can recall the feeling of pure joy as the music of Bach floated out from the temple. I believe I thought “This must be a first. This temple, this road, this forest has never heard this music before.” And there was no one else present to hear it, just me and, for a few moments, Sylvia.

We returned to the car and I drove Albrecht and Sylvia back to Kanazawa. I never saw Sylvia again. For years after I returned home to the U.S. in 1989, I maintained a letter-writing friendship with Albrecht. He left Kanazawa and took an adjunct faculty teaching job at Kyoto University and ultimately became a professor of German at Ōtani University in Kyoto, a school associated with Pure Land Buddhism. Albrecht married a Japanese woman with whom he had beautiful boy-and-girl twins. He and his family lived in a lovely house in a northwest suburb of Kyoto. He commuted by scooter to the university.

I saw him last when I took my ten year-old daughter to Japan in 2005. Albrecht and I had a parting of the ways at that time: He was suffering from tinnitus and had lost much of his hearing. The deafness had robbed him of music and, in doing so, robbed him of some his greatest joy. His opinions, some of which I found surprisingly reactionary and retrograde, had hardened. Bitter, opinionated, and partly deaf, Albrecht had become hard to talk to and we stopped communicating after that visit.

But I’ll always have the moment at that temple in Noto, the sound of Bach floating in the fragrant still air of the Japanese countryside in spring.

Danke, lieber Albrecht.