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nightfall.”
    “It’s twenty past five in the morning.”
    “I know.”
    I want to be on the henro path and over the next mountain before the Morikawas, after rejoicing, remember us, and want to thank us, praise us, give us things. Ask us questions. Bikes are ready, packs prepared in half an hour. With the light coming up all around us, pouring into the valley, flooding over us, we climb up through the bamboo and cane groves toward the henro way, me leading, Mas close up on my rear wheel.
    From the high farming country we dip down again onto the densely populated coastal plains. Many temples here, much traffic inbound for Tokushima. No place for the uninterrupted cultivation of memory. The way demands total concentration. Tokushima City, the prefectural capital, is noisy, dirty, nasty; straining to the point of collapse under the weight of migrants from the failed offshore colonies and the social chaos of the Tokyo Bay conurbation. Tokushima is—always has been—a barrier gate city. In historical times, the borders between provinces were tightly policed, and barriers established to check on the authorization and travel permits of traders and visitors. Henro were barely tolerated, suspected of being spies, assassins, Imperial agents, or other undesirables. Alongside the political barriers existed a second kind of barrier gate: temple barriers, places of spiritual examination and testing, where the pilgrim who was able to worship freely and purely might continue, but if misfortune was encountered, or ill omen, he must return and begin his pilgrimage again.
    The political barriers may have fallen, but the spiritual gates still stand. The henro path takes us away from Tokushima City’s thronged main thoroughfares, through back streets and industrial districts where the now-permanent recession that has struck down Japan is everywhere visible, the closed-up shops, the shut-down small factories. Mass-produced accommodation pods stacked ten, twenty high pen us in, direct us into a labyrinth of lanes and alleys. Emergency housing; the estate of the new dispossessed. Mas is visibly uneasy; even I can sense the angry desperation, one freakish alien among two hundred million; more, I am of that people that challenged and defeated their empire and condemned them to the estate of refugees in their own country. Children in This Year’s Model sportsgear watch with a disturbingly adult intensity from the scramble nets and bamboo ladders that access the higher levels; men squat at intersections around boomboxes, play handball against graffiti-stained walls, hang about, hang out, wait; women are the salarypersons here, casual part-time workers in labor-intensive service industries. Only the biopowered robots have jobs for life with the compassionate the caring the Company. Smells of shit, charcoal, street food, engine oil, hot dust, and the undefinably familiar sweet scent of home-brew E-Base. Sounds of twenty satellite channels playing at once; in every stall, every bar, every shop, every home, robot-manufactured flatscreen Sonys play all day, play all night. Life during prime-time. Disemboweled vehicles. Shot-down streetlights. Abandoned shopping trolleys. Graffiti aspiring to be Art, and Noticed. Dogs—fighting dogs.
    For some people it is the hairs on the back of the neck. For others, the pricking of the thumbs. For me, it has always been a tingle at the base of my spine; that unmistakable prescience of trouble. Eight of them, in light camouflage armor set to Chapter heraldics, enfolded by the elaborate streamlines of techno-gothic Yamahas. Akiras: middle-class kids seduced away from teleburbia’s low-key pleasures by fifteen channels of samurai- anime cut with the Guitarz’n’Blood ethos of Trash Metal, fleeing from a mythologized Imperial past, questing for an unattainable future. The big Yams circle us; engines growl, gobbling hydrocarbons. On the pillion seats, girls with fluttering standards fixed to the backs of their