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The night before, my brother, who is a teacher at the school,
took me straight off the plane from London, to what he referred
to ominously as a naked festival. It involved drinking lots of saki,
wearing nothing but a mawashi loincloth like a sumo wrestler,
standing out in the freezing night with around two hundred
similarly dressed men, and trying to grab hold of a long piece of
cloth. As we all fought to get hold of the cloth, priests threw cold
water over us. The scrum of two hundred men kicked, pulled and
barged around in the dark for hours before someone finally,
mercifully, emerged triumphantly with the cloth and disappeared
up some steps to a shrine.
The next morning there is a picture of the melee in one of
Japan’s national newspapers, featuring my pale backside right
there in the middle. I can tell it is mine because in my dazed,
drunken state I asked someone to write ‘Flash’ across my back. I
was thinking I was Flash Gordon, for some reason. A man on
another planet wrestling his way through a scrum of men. We’ve
had barely four hours’ sleep before my brother is up again.
‘I’m running an ekiden,’ he says. ‘You want to run?’ I have no
idea what an ekiden is, but running is the last thing on my mind
that morning. I was once a keen runner, but years of working in
the office of a London publishing company have left me all soft
and pudgy. My running days are long behind me.
‘No,’ I say, scratching the back of my neck.
Instead he positions me by the school wall, gives me a
raincoat to protect me from the drizzle, and goes off to join his
team. An ekiden, it turns out, is a long-distance relay race.