The Way Of The Runner - eBook

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.