As a final challenge, the last restaurant of the trip sits on a mountainside outside Kyoto, requiring Less to rent a car. This goes more smoothly than Less imagined; his international driving permit, which looks to him like a flimsy phony, is taken very seriously and photocopied numerous times, as if to be handed out as keepsakes. He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert and enters to find the steering wheel missing—then is shown to the driver’s side, all the time merrily thinking: Oh, I guess they drive on the other side over here! Somehow he never thought of it; should they give out international driving permits to people who never think of it? But he has done his time in India; it is all a matter of Looking-Glass driving. Like laying type for a letterpress; you just reverse your mind.
The instructions for getting to the restaurant are as mysterious as a love note or an exchange of spies—Meet at the Moon Crossing Bridge—but his faith is fast; he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto, toward the hill country. Less is grateful the signs are clear because the GPS, after giving crisp, stern directions to the highway, becomes drunk on its own power outside the city limits, then gives out completely and places Arthur Less in the Sea of Japan. Also unnerving is a mysterious windshield box, which reveals its purpose when the Toaster approaches a tollbooth: it produces a high-pitched reproving female shriek not unlike his grandmother’s when she came upon a piece of broken china. He dutifully pays the toll man, thinking he has done what the machine wants, and passes into a green countryside where a river has magically appeared. But the pastoral scene does not last long—at the next tollbooth, the lady shrieks again. Surely she is berating him for not possessing an electronic pass. But could she also have discovered his other crimes and inadequacies? How he made up ceremonies for a fifth-grade report on the religions of Iceland? How he shoplifted acne cream in high school? How he cheated on Robert so terribly? How he is a “bad gay”? And a bad writer? How he let Freddy Pelu walk out of his life? Shriek, shriek, shriek; it is almost Greek in its fury. A harpy sent down to punish Less at last.
“Take the next exit.” The GPS, that rum-drunk snoozing captain, has awakened and is back in command. Mist is rising as steam rises from damp clothing set beside a fire; here, it is from the pine-dark, folded wool of the mountains. A leaden river is coiling along a bank of reeds. The Toaster passes a sake factory, or so he assumes, because here is a cheerful white barrel sitting as advertisement on the road. Some farm or other has a sign out, in English: SUSTAINABLE HARVEST. Less rolls down the window, and there is the salt-green smell of grass and rain and dirt. He rounds a corner and sees white tourist buses parked all in a row along the river, their great side mirrors like the horns of caterpillars; before them, in a military line, stand elderly people in clear raincoats, taking photographs. Scattered below the steaming mountains are perhaps fifteen thatched-roof houses furred with moss. Across from them: a bridge over the river, a wood-stone trestlework, and Less steers the car to cross it, passing tourists huddled against the rain. He imagines a boat is meant to take him upriver to the restaurant, and as he reaches the other bank and parks the Toaster (from the dashboard comes the harpy’s shrill reminder), he sees a few people waiting on the dock, and among them—he recognizes her through her clear umbrella—is his mother.
Arthur, hello, honey. I just thought I’d take a little trip, he can just imagine her saying. Have you been eating enough?
His mother lifts the umbrella, and, free of its distorting membrane, she is a Japanese woman wearing his mother’s hair scarf. Orange with a pattern of white scallop shells. How did it get all the way here from her grave? Or no, not her grave; from the Salvation Army in suburban Delaware where he and his sister donated everything. It was all done in such a rush. The cancer moved very slowly at first, then very quickly, as things always do in nightmares, and then he was in a black suit talking to his aunt. From where he stood, he could see the scarf still hanging on its wooden knob. He was eating a quesadilla; as an areligious WASP, he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing. He had somehow renounced that inheritance. So it was Freddy who took over, Freddy who had already mourned his own parents, Freddy who ordered up a Mexican feast that was all prepared when Less stumbled in from the church service, drunk on platitudes and pure horror. Freddy had even hired someone to take his raincoat. And Freddy himself, in the very jacket Less bought for him in Paris, stood directly behind Less the whole time, silently, one hand resting on his left shoulder blade as if propping up a cardboard sign against the wind. One person after another came up and said his mother was at peace. His mother’s friends: each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show. She is in a better place. So glad she went so peacefully. And when the last had gone by, he could feel Freddy’s breath on his ear as he whispered: “The way your mother died was awful.” The boy he met years before would never have known to say that. Less turned to look at Freddy and saw, in the close-cut hair on his temples, the first shimmer of silver.
Less had so specifically wanted to save that orange scarf. But it was a whirlwind of duties. Somehow it got bundled into the donation pile and vanished from his life forever.
But not forever. Life has saved it after all.
Less steps out of his car and is greeted by a young man in black, who holds an enormous black umbrella over our hero; Less’s new gray suit is dotted with rain. His mother’s scarf vanishes into a shop. He turns to the open water, where already the low dark boat of Charon is coming to carry him off.
The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor; some of the walls seem bent with humidity, and paper hangings have taken on the crinkle Less associates with books he has left in the rain. Intact are the old tile roof, wide roof beams, carved rosettes, and sliding paper walls of the old inn this used to be. A tall stately woman meets him at the entrance, bowing and greeting him by name. On their tour of the old inn, they pass a window onto an enormous walled garden.
“The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar.” The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation.
“And now,” Less says, “it’s unpoplar.”
She blinks for a polite moment, then leads him into another wing, and he follows the sway of her green and gold kimono. At the portal, she slips off her clogs, and he unlaces and removes his shoes. There is sand in them: Saharan or Keralan? The woman gestures to a sniffling teenage girl in a blue kimono, who leads him down another corridor. This one is filled with hanging calligraphy and has the Alice in Wonderland effect of beginning with an enormous wooden frame and ending in a door so small that as the woman slides it sideways into a pocket in the wall, she is forced to get onto her knees to enter. It is clear that Less is meant to do the same. He supposes he is meant to experience humility; by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost. There, in the room, a small table, a paper wall, and one glass window so ancient that the garden behind it undulates dreamily as Less crosses the room. The room is wallpapered in large faint gold and silver snowflakes; he is told the design is from the Edo period, when microscopes made their way to Japan. Before that, no one had seen a snowflake. He takes a seat on a cushion beside a golden folding screen. The young woman exits through the little door. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die.