banquets.”
“The food is not bad at all there,” said the younger attendant.
“The other is where traveling businessmen or young folk or, well, where regular people stay. The looks of it might put you off, but it’s not unsanitary or anything. The bath is something else.”
“Though the walls are thin,” said the younger.
Whereupon the two them launched into debate over the thinness of the walls.
“We’ll go for the expensive one,” I said. No reason to economize. There was the envelope, still stuffed with money.
The younger attendant tore a sheet off a memo pad and drew a precise map of the way to the inn.
“Thank you,” I said. “I guess you don’t get as many people coming through here as you did ten years ago.”
“No, that’s for sure,” said the elder. “Now there’s only one lumber mill and no other industry to speak of. The bottom’s fallen out of agriculture. The population’s gone way down too.”
“Hell, there aren’t enough students to form proper classes at the school anymore,” added the younger.
“What’s the population?”
“They say it’s around seven thousand, but really it’s got to be less than that. More like five thousand, I’d guess,” the younger said.
“Take this spur line, boy, before they shut us down, which may be any day. Come what may, we’re the third deepest in the red of any line in the country,” the elder said with finality.
I was surprised to hear that there were train lines more run-down than this one. We thanked them and left.
The inn was down the slope and to the right of the street of shops, three hundred yards along the river. An old inn, nice enough, with a glimmer of the charm it must have had in the heyday of the town. Facing the river, it had a well-cared-for garden. In one corner of the garden, a shepherd puppy buried its nose in a food dish, eating an early evening meal.
“Mountaineering is it?” asked the maid who showed us to our room.
“Mountaineering it is,” I answered simply.
There were only two rooms upstairs. Each a spacious layout, and if you stepped out into the corridor, you had a view of the same cafe-au-lait river we’d seen from the train.
My girlfriend wanted to take a bath, so I went to check out the Town Hall. Town Hall was located on a desolate street two blocks west of the street of shops, yet the building was far newer and in much better shape than I’d expected.
I walked up to the Livestock Section in Town Hall, introduced myself with a magazine namecard from two years before when I’d posed as a freelance writer, and broke into a spiel about needing to ask a few questions about sheep raising, if they didn’t mind. It was pretty farfetched that a women’s weekly magazine would have need for a piece on sheep, but the livestock officer bought the line immediately and conducted me into his office.
“At present, we have two-hundred-some sheep in the township, all Suffolks. That is to say, meat sheep. The meat is parceled out to nearby inns and restaurants, and enjoys considerable favor.”
I pulled out my notebook and jotted down appropriate notes. No doubt this poor man would be buying the women’s magazine for the next several issues. Which, admittedly, made me feel embarrassed.
“A cooking article, I assume?” he stopped to ask once he’d detailed the current state of sheep raising.
“Well, of course that’s part of it,” I said. “But more than that, we’re looking to paint a total picture of sheep.”
“A total picture?”
“You know, their character, habits, that sort of thing.”
“Oh,” said my informant.
I closed my notebook and drank the tea that had been served. “We’d heard there was an old sheep ranch up in the hills somewhere.”
“Yes, there is. It was appropriated by the U.S. Army after the war and is no longer in use. For about ten years after the Americans returned it, a rich man from somewhere used the place for a villa, but it’s so far out of the way that he finally stopped going up there. The house is as good as abandoned now. Which is why the ranch is on loan to the town. We ought to buy it and turn the place into a tourist ranch, but I’m afraid the finances of this township aren’t up to it. First, we’d have to improve the road …”
“On loan?”
“In the summer, our municipal sheep farm takes about fifty head up into the mountains. There isn’t enough grass in the municipal pasture and it’s quite fine pastureland up there, as pastures go. When the weather starts turning bad around the latter half of September, the sheep are brought back down.”
“Would you happen to know when it is that the sheep are up there?”
“It varies from year to year, but generally speaking it’s from the beginning of May to the latter half of September.”
“And how many men take the sheep up there?”
“One man. The same man’s been doing it these ten years.”
“Would it be possible to meet this man?”
The official placed a call to the municipal sheep farm.
“If you go there now, you can meet him,” he said. “Shall we drive there?”
I declined politely at first, but I soon learned that I couldn’t otherwise get to the sheep farm. There were no taxis or car rentals in town, and on foot it would have taken an hour and a half.
The livestock officer drove a small sedan. He passed our inn and headed west, taking a long concrete bridge to cross over a cold marshy area, then climbing up a mountain slope. Tires spun over the gravel.
“Coming from Tokyo, you probably think this is a ghost town.”
I said something noncommittal.
“The truth is we are dying. We’ll hold on as long as we have the railway, but if that goes we’ll be dead for sure. It’s a curious thing, a town dying. A person dying I can understand. But a whole town dying …”
“What will happen if the town dies?”
“What
I offered him a cigarette and gave him a light with the sheep-engraved Dupont lighter.
“There’s plenty of good jobs in Sapporo. I’ve got an uncle who runs a printing company there, and he needs more hands. Work comes from the school system, so business is steady. Really, moving there would be the best thing. At least it’d beat monitoring shipments of sheep and cattle way out here.”
“Probably,” I said.
“But when it comes to actually packing up and leaving, I can’t bring myself to do it. Can you see what I mean? If the town’s really going to die, then the urge to stay on and see the town to its end wins out.”
“Were you born here in this town?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, but did not go on. A melancholy-hued sun had already sunk a third of the way behind the hills.
Two poles stood at the entrance to the sheep farm and between them hung a sign: JUNITAKI-CHO MUNICIPAL SHEEP FARM. The road passed under the sign and led up a slope, disappearing into the dense autumn foliage.
“Beyond the woods there’s the sheep house and behind that the caretaker’s quarters. What shall we do about you getting back to town?”
“It’s downhill. I can manage on foot. Thanks for everything.”
The car pulled out of view, and I walked between the poles and up the slope. The last rays of the sun added an orange tinge to the already golden maple leaves. The trees were tall, patches of sunlight filtering down through the boughs and shimmering on the gravel road.
Emerging from the woods, I came upon a narrow building on the face of the hill, and with it the smell of livestock. The sheep house was roofed in red corrugated iron, pierced in three places by ventilation stacks.
