The Audacity of the Essay

Riding my bicycle one afternoon down a major thoroughfare in the city of Akashi, Japan, I watched an old woman on an adult-sized tricycle veer off the shoulder of the road and head into oncoming traffic. She'd been pedaling down the street toward me, and I remember the double shock of her abrupt turn and her apparent disregard for the automobiles running up and down the four-lane highway. Without so much as glancing at the passing cars, she crossed one, then two, and almost three lanes of traffic before being struck by a gray sedan whose driver had seen her coming just in time. Skidding to a halt, the woman behind the wheel managed to slow down enough that her bumper just tapped the side of the tricycle, which teetered up on two wheels, and then slowly tipped over onto the asphalt.

The old woman spilled onto the ground, moaning in pain, and the driver jumped out of her car. "I didn't see her," she said. "She didn't use the crosswalk. I tried to stop." A teenage bystander called an ambulance, and I got off my own bicycle to see if I could help. Along with the distraught driver, I knelt beside the old woman, and we did our best to comfort her until the ambulance came.

What was remarkable about this moment? And why mention it here in the introduction to a literary magazine? It wasn't the accident per se that has stuck with me all these years, but the audacity of her crossing.

Japan is famous for crosswalks. Automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic gives the typical downtown street in Tokyo, Osaka, or Hiroshima the feel of a wide, deep, fast river—fluid, relentless, and uncrossable, but for the giant white stripes that zig and zag across the urban roadways at each intersection. The most celebrated crosswalk, "Shibuya Scramble," is in Tokyo, and sees as many as twenty-five hundred pedestrian crossings at every signal change. But all major cities in Japan have their own supersized crossings, and in a country where conformity and cooperation are deeply ingrained cultural values, the crosswalk rules are often treated with startling deference. Walking in Japan, I've found myself standing with other pedestrians at the mouth of some narrow, deserted alley barely wide enough for a single car, waiting for the signal to change, nobody willing to break ranks and take the few illicit steps to freedom on the other side of the road.

But even in the absence of an official crosswalk, Japanese culture for a long time provided a workaround—or, rather a workacross. It's an old (and technically outdated) custom that for much of the twentieth century was as common as the "look both ways before you cross the road" advice I grew up with. In essence, anyone who wanted to cross a street in Japan could simply stand on the curb, raise one hand high in the air, and expect traffic to temporarily pause. Such jaywalking has been illegal since 1978, and I wouldn't try it today in Tokyo, but I'm told it is still fairly common in the countryside, and some children still learn it in elementary school. I put the method to use myself a few times when I lived in a more rural part of Japan, and I still marvel at this cultural attention to intersection, at the caution and respect for places where paths cross, where for the briefest moment, the assertion of an individual draws the consideration of the masses.

You might see where I'm going with this, metaphorically. Essayists have long extolled the virtues of the pedestrian, and the pedestrian: the idler out for a stroll, the quotidian observer on an evening walk, the "I" asserting itself in the world. One of the most famous works of classical nonfiction to come out of Japan was written while walking a "Narrow Road to the Interior." Montaigne called his essays "a rugged road," with a pace "rambling and uncertain." William Hazlitt wrote "give me the clear blue sky over my head...