Hitching Rides with Buddha

US: Knopf Canada, 1998. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Originally published as Hokkaido Highway Blues, with limited distribution i n Canada, Will Ferguson's classic book about Japan, for all fans of the bes tselling Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw. With the same fervour they have for outlandish game shows and tiny gadgets, the Japanese go nuts each spring when the cherry blossoms sweep from islan d to island towards the country's northerly tip. Will Ferguson was celebrat ing the event in the standard fashion. And after way too much sake he annou nced he would be the first person in recorded history to follow the blossom 's progress end to end. To make it a challenge worth doing, he'd hitchhike all the way: relying on the kindness of some very weird and wonderful stran gers. Mixing his penchant for biting observation with wicked humour, Ferguson sta rts at the southernmost tip of Cape Sata and heads north for distant Hokkai do. Whether he is doing the forbidden and not knowing it, or holding "conve rsations by non sequitur," it is a journey full of misadventures and revela tions. The resulting travelogue is one of the funniest and most illuminatin g books ever written about Japan. "To make matters worse, I decided to hitchhike. Striking a heroic stance, I declared my intention to my Japanese friends to become the first person ev er to hitchhike the length of Japan, end-to-end, cape-to-cape, sea-to-sea. This did not impress them as much as I had hoped. "Why would you want to do that?" they asked, genuinely puzzled. "There is n o reason to hitchhike. That's why we built the Bullet Train." Others worried about my safety. "But," I would argue, "Japan is a very safe country, is it not?" "Oh, ye.