OUT OF EDEN WALK

I landed by ship in Fukuoka. It was bright and muggy, and we began walking north. My plan was to cross the country afoot, on shanks’s pony, on “bus number 11,” by hoofing it. A photographer named Soichiro Koriyama joined me.

Outside the city limits were giant steel eggs filled with liquefied natural gas, and not another rational soul was about. No surprise here. The heat was cataclysmic. We bought water from vending machines. These machines were everywhere. We walked to them as to oases. They sold cold coffee and hot chocolate as well as water, and the heated drinks established their pre-apocalypse vintage. It was the hottest year in the history of Japan, or at least since data began to be collected in 1898.

“Sure, we’ve tried switching to tropical fruits,” said a man named Tsunehiro Takami who was farming near the Ayaragi River. “Bananas. Pineapples. But the soil isn’t right. So we’re trying different kinds of rice.”

Takami was 81 and looked 20 years younger. He had the round, cheerful face and bullet head of a drinking monk. He’d wrestled with cancer and won. But the heat! What could be said about this unspeakable heat? It sapped the will to farm, which was the will to live.

“It’s not just temperature,” he said, squinting from under a bamboo hat on a combustible afternoon spiking at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit). “Even this sun is too bright for rice.” Yields were down in the hot new world, he said. He waved a calloused hand at the paddies broiling around us. In that quick gesture lay all the finality of his last summer on the land. It was over for him, he said. The work was hard enough. Now that the weather itself was cancerous, it was time for someone else to grow rice inside a furnace. He was keen for a permanent holiday.

Climate crisis stories are a hard sell. We’re not a prudent species.

It’s folly to blame modernity.

Ten thousand years ago, we herded much of the large, ancestral, charismatic megafauna roaming the Americas through our intestines, just as today we knowingly deploy our mechanical comforts and remodel the planet into a violent sauna. I once watched an Indigenous inhabitant in New Guinea chop down a yard-thick teak to get at the few kilos of meat—an alarmed tree kangaroo—stranded in the canopy. It’s all a matter of grotesque scale, of course. Nonetheless, if the early Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers I’m following on my long ramble across the world had access to internal combustion or the A-bomb, there’s no doubt they would have used them. Still, we must at least try.

When you walk continents, the body becomes a thermometer. There’s damned little abstraction about any of this. Climate change registers through your pores.

The steppes of Kazakhstan were flooding erratically when I splashed through, and in the Himalaya, vast glaciers were melting about me like ice cubes in a microwave. Nothing quite prepared my organism, however, for the brutal heatwaves in South Korea and Japan. We’re talking about the weather’s impact on the stomach’s nerve endings. About food.

Rice feeds billions of souls in Asia. These harvests appear to be faltering from year-on-year sweltering temperatures. The grain quality of Japan’s most popular rice variety, Koshihikari, was severely degraded over the past two summers. Hot nights shorten vegetative growth, stunting yields. (Japan’s rice crop could drop by 20 percent this century.) Agronomists are fighting back with DNA tinkering to splice more heat tolerance into rice. Yet such molecular defenses take many years to introduce. And they don’t address increasing droughts, floods, and high winds.

There remains too the fate of the specialized humans that rice itself, Oryza sativa, has co-cultivated over 13,000 years: farmers. The family farms that Soichiro and I reeled past, panting in the sun, seemed often like vivariums in a museum. And not just because the youngest farmer we interviewed was born in the middle of the past century. (The greying of Japan is most pronounced in the countryside.) Many paddies appeared long abandoned.

“If my son wants to continue, I will, but if not, I won’t,” said Masami Hirata, 70, who dripped sweat watching a toylike combine gather in his rice. He shrugged. “I don’t think he will.” Past summers, he said, were 10 degrees cooler when he was a boy.

We walked on through the last of the harvest.

We took refuge in small, windowless, air conditioned, closet-like rooms tucked into the backs of cybercafes. This was because there were no lodges, hotels, guesthouses, youth hostels, resorts, Airbnb flats, trailer parks, or teepees for rent in our particular stretch of rural Japan, southwest Honshu. Why? Who knows? You could walk for almost 50 kilometers—as we would soon discover—without finding so much as a lean-to for hire. Cybercafes were our emergency shelters, places where Japanese went to play video games or read manga comic books in peace. They did this inside curtained booths. Customers with more money carried out their diversions in the tiny rooms, which were just large enough to lie down in, to be more alone. Unemployed men took showers in cybercafes. Nobody was too fond of looking each other in the eyes.

“Let’s go find some more farmers,” Soichiro said at one of these dim encampments.

Stepping out into the surrounding rice fields from the cybercafe, I experienced one of those strange moments in life when you can actually float outside of yourself and look down on your activities, like a bird or a ghost, from somewhere high above. Nothing seemed real. Out in the big golden rhomboids of the paddy fields, the rice drooped in the blowtorch heat. Dragonflies sparkled like glitter in the sun above the canals, while back inside the cool and darkened cybercafe, a soft ice cream machine hummed, giving and giving and giving for free. We eventually found a farmer and asked him what he was going to do next year. “I have no idea,” he replied.