The Roads To Sata by Alan Booth

Author:Alan Booth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Buddha and the Floating Bridge of Heaven

On the curb of the main road out of Kanazawa a dozen or so mourners fresh from a funeral stood fidgeting in loose black suits around a hearse. The hearse was a long maroon-brown limousine on which a marvelous folly of black and gold lacquer had been constructed to resemble a portable shrine. The driver bowed solemnly to the mourners, who plucked bits of invisible fluff off their suits and then sprinkled pinches of salt over themselves before lapsing into a large two-story restaurant for lunch. They looked like an outing of tired crows, sitting at the long wooden table of the restaurant eating their pork cutlets in complete silence while the color television set in the comer blared an advertisement for a "new sexy" brassiere called Top Feel.

I had had enough of main roads and cities. The Cafe Terrace Love Love (the menu included Love Love Pudding) brought that home to me with a wallop, so straight after lunch I turned sharp across the rail-way tracks onto the old coast road that the Hokuriku Expressway had left puddingless and empty. It was a scorching hot day. The cement piles of the expressway shut the sea off like the bars of a prison, but between them I could glimpse it close and blue. The narrow streets of the one or two little villages I passed through on this flat coastal strip were silent and packed with solid black shadows, but the heat bounced wickedly off the open tar road. In the sky real crows flapped, rasping to each other, surveying the stubble in the fields that had been cut, while gray wisps of smoke trailed up from the pale fires burning autumn husks.

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