About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez

south of Sapporo, has been occupied by the Japanese for four hundred years. It was not until after the Meiji restoration in 1868, and with American help, that the Japanese settled the rest of Hokkaido, virtually destroying Ainu culture in the process. This extirpation of a native culture, for some attempt at conveying a sense of Hokkaido’s atmosphere, prompts a comparison with the nineteenth-century American frontier. The presence of great bears in the mountains, unruly public celebrations in some of Hokkaido’s small logging and fishing towns, and the freshly settled appearance of much of the countryside enhance the image.)
    Mr. Nishibe parks the car and we begin walking through the streets of Akan-kohan. He asks for directions frequently and is finally able to locate the small curio shop he is looking for. The local carver who works there is out. We eat lunch and return an hour later. A man named Kazuo Sunazawa, burly and accommodating, has returned. What is arranged in the ensuing conversation I cannot guess. All Naoki says, rather cryptically, is “
Ainu eskashi
” (Ainu elder).
    The three of us follow Mr. Sunazawa’s car north out of town. Lush, nearly junglelike growth around Lake Akan gives way to evergreen forests as we climb the flank of Mount Oakan. In little more than an hour and a half we arrive at a small town at the edge of Lake Kussharo, where we are ushered into a small,unpretentious home. The only person present is an elderly man sitting on the floor in the central room, smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. He wears white socks (the Japanese
tabi
with soles and sewn so as to separate the big toe from the others), black cotton pants, and a gray sweater with a black-and-white diamond pattern on the chest. His house coat is also black, with scrolled yellow threadwork designs, suggesting the ornate floral patterns done in beadwork that distinguish North American Indian clothing from around the Great Lakes. He has a long, narrow beard, bushy eyebrows that flare winglike above his eyes, and thin, gray hair. His eyes are blue. A cataract is prominent in the left one.
    For once I am without any sort of present, but Naoki, seemingly always prepared, offers our host a box of delicacies and graciously indicates that it is from both of us.
    Zenjiro Hikawa is seventy-six, an Ainu, the eldest of eight children. A long conversation follows, to which I mostly listen. Occasionally I am able to introduce a simple question, through Naoki, about Ainu home life or about the bear ceremony, the central religious celebration among the Ainu, or about the actual hunting of that animal. With hand gestures and pencil drawings I am able to participate somewhat more in the conversation, which is managed by Mr. Sunazawa, the only one present fluent in both Ainu and Japanese. It is Mr. Sunazawa who begins to make the first drawings in a notebook that moves around the wood-plank floor among us, part of his effort, it seems to me, to draw out a reluctant Mr. Hikawa. Some of the drawings show the placement of poisoned arrows used in bear hunts (the poison is derived from a species of
Aconitum
, a plant related to wolfsbane and monkshood). Other drawings depict the traditional arrangement of guests around an Ainu hearth and the patterns of facial and hand tattoos among Ainu women.
    As the afternoon progresses, Mr. Hikawa takes up again the work we have interrupted, the carving of dry willow sticks about ten inches long and a half inch in diameter. The rhythm of his stroke gradually terminates our conversation. With the draw ofhis knife he creates thick bundles of thin shavings which remain attached to the stick at different points. He either gathers them in bunches like tresses and cinches them with one of the shavings or leaves them flared, a rampant array. He stops once or twice during his work to explain the two figures he’s carving, one a hearth god, the other a house god. Beyond the supple movements of his long fingers,