Fog Island Mountains Read online

  What a deep fatigue steals over our Alec now, the flat line of his shoulders becomes a curve, the shape of his face sinks in, and he becomes an old man, watch him now, watch the furrows form and the light slink away from his eyes.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble, Nishi-san,” is all he can say.

  But what he really wants to do is weep at the smallness of this man’s life, his tiny miserable life with its complaints and neat gray slippers. And here it comes, Alec’s first comparison—he is quick to tuck it away but the thought has slipped up unbidden, the horrible question of whether anyone would miss this tiring and ordinary man if Dr. Ishikawa were to give him Alec’s everywhere.

  But they are already wishing each other good evening and walking in separate directions and the sky is dark now, the insects are beginning to flit about the lamp near the side door to Alec’s home, the gnats and the mosquitoes, those striped and furry beasts that will bite him, they always bite him, but he doesn’t care, he sits down on the front stoop anyway, because he has always loved this spot, loved watching this driveway and waiting for a visitor, for one ofhis children to come home from school or for a visit, for Kanae to drive up in high spirits after a lunch with her friends, but he is also sitting now because the shreds of pain have crept up in between his ribs again, his breathing is difficult, his body leaking a cold sweat.

  Sweet relief in the ring of his cell phone, in his fumbling fingers to answer the call.

  “Naemai?” he is whispering, this invented name, his only endearment for her, another hybrid of his life before and his life now: Kanae, my ai. Kanae, my love.

  Silence . . . then crackles and static, and he waits, he cannot hang up, hearing her in the empty twitch of electricity and space.

  When the silence is again too much, Alec stands and steps backward into the house, into his house with its porch and roof and windows, such a solid structure, and he thinks of the kanji for window—with its three seemingly unconnected root pictographs: space, I, heart—and he sees it for the first time, like a student again, this I like a person wedged between an open space and a heart, like a man standing still, his heart wedged and painful, looking out onto the open sky.

  * * *

  Summer evenings on southern Kyūshū retain their light for an eternity, clutch it bundled high above the island with bands of color and breezes from the not-so-far sea, and the sun hangs over the ridge of the mountains, like a wild eye bearing down on the little town of Komachi and the rest of the towns and villages of our Fog Island Mountains. Beneath this sun, Kanae has now said good-bye to her old friend Fumikaze and is driving back up the little mountain road for the third time today—this is when she sees the gathering of the cloud ocean, something she hasn’t seen for years, although it is what makes our region famous throughout Japan.

  She is slowing the car down; what else can she do on this first evening of her flight? She is only interested in slowing time and so she pulls over to a scenic lookout and stands with her hands against the low rock wall, watching the mist gather first over the treetops, slowly, collecting its white weight in billowing folds, and she is staring at this thick whiteness and her hand is reaching out into the void as if she might be able to touch the millions of droplets that are creating the vapor of this foggy ocean.

  If we are quiet, if we are careful, we, too, can watch this ocean amass. Shhh, we are just behind her, we are writing her and we are aware that in a few minutes these clouds will look so solid, so thick, that Kanae might think she could actually walk off the ledge and walk across them, because of course she knows the story of the young girl from Matsuzaki who did this. It is a story my grandfather wrote in one of his longest poems, and his version or older ones are still told at festivals and in children’s books. Kanae read it to her children and it always made Megumi clap and dance and it is this she is thinking about, she is seeing her own daughter jump across the white mist, like the young girl from so long ago who was sent out by a jealous older sister into a dark and dangerous forest to gather mushrooms, and who was chased by a wild boar and almost fell off the cliff to the rushing river and rocks below, but no, the cloud sea held her aloft and she walked to safety across the void to the other mountain ridge.

  Of course no one knows what happened to her on the other side. Not even my grandfather.

  But now Kanae is back inside the car, driving slowly through the now dense fog, the higher she climbs the more fog settles across the road, and the blazing eye of the sun is virtually lost to her now down amid the cloud sea, and she must turn on her fog lights because everything is muted now, white and wispy, and she drives past a deer grazing along the side of the road; it only runs away at the last second when it finally hears her approach.

  She is turning on her windshield wipers to erase the gathered condensation across the glass, and in the flick of her wrist is the first gesture of her anger, but she is already tamping it down, closing her eyes and pressing on the gas pedal. There is a curve ahead but she knows this road by heart, and so she takes a deep breath and her eyes are still closed; she pictures the curve and turns the steering wheel to match her memory and now she is pressing even harder on the accelerator, still steering by instinct and there is a rush of sound in her ears—is it her? Is she yelling?

  But the car lurches over something and her eyes fly open. There is no use checking the rear view mirror, she is going too fast and the fog is too thick and so she is telling herself it was probably a fallen branch, or perhaps a mountain toad, but it doesn’t matter, she is refusing to be moved at the possible death of a small animal because she is exactly where she thought she would be, she has negotiated the curve in her blindness.

  At the onsen the staff members are surprised to see her return yet again and they are silent as she pays for their smallest room, a Western style closet without even a window, and she can smell the grease and the fish from the kitchens even if the bathroom is immaculately clean. She removes her shoes and lies down on the single bed, but then she is standing and getting undressed, shivering in the slight chill of this early evening, and she wraps herself in the cotton robe provided by the hotel and slips out toward the baths, shuffling along in slippers that are much too large for her slender feet.

  There in the sound of her shuffle shuffle shuffle along the carpet comes a memory of her mother, and Kanae is remembering how, toward the end of her mother’s life, she had to help her along this very hallway, help her to these very baths, and how her mother could not keep the slippers on her feet and kept flinging them forward with each step, only to have to scramble toward them and slip her feet again into the soft brown plastic; each time she flicked a slipper, she would lower her head in shame, shuffle gracelessly forward and struggle to place a shaking foot where it belonged.

  Kanae, with her but unwilling to really help her, would watch her mother’s shame and grow irritated, she would step ahead and hold the door to the baths in a gentle reproach of her mother’s slow progress, because Kanae knew that everyone had trouble with these oversized and unsuitable onsen slippers, everyone in every onsen across Japan, so why couldn’t her mother laugh about it? Why couldn’t she shrug her shoulders and say, “It can’t be helped!”

  But now Kanae is pulling open that onsen door for herself and feels only the lingering glance of her fragile mother from the empty hallway, and the changing room is empty and she knows the baths might be empty too, and so she almost turns back around because she does not trust herself to be alone tonight in the baths, with all that heated water, all that possibility of oblivion; the sound of someone moving about in the pools is reassuring and Kanae undresses carefully and heads through the sliding glass door.

  At the threshold she sees the old woman standing beneath the bamboo pipe waterfall at the far end of the large bath, and she thinks of her mother and her mother’s death and then Alec is with her again, and the anger flares, there it is in the swift judging glance she gives to this woman’s sagging breasts and fat belly, there it is again in the vio
lent grip she uses to carry her stool and bucket over to the showers, and there it is in the icy water she sprays against her shoulders and down along her neck. She lets the water run until her teeth are chattering, until her skin is blue, and then she walks over to the bath and steps in as quickly as she can, wanting the shock of the heat against her frozen skin, wanting the pain of it to rise up against her rage.

  TROPICAL DEPRESSION

  It is morning now and he is back again, and waiting still, but this time the hospital has prepared Alec a special room and still he is surprised, even after so many years, he knows he should be upstairs, in the same wing with the other Komachi men; instead someone has cleaned out one of the older, larger rooms on the first floor, rolled in a bed and put up new curtains. Alec is looking at these curtains, at their strange brightness, and he is thinking that one of the nurses has brought them in from her home, he is thinking it might be Nurse Uchida, because she is one of his students and she has always liked him, but he is also wondering why he should be treated any differently than anyone else and he wants to be angry about this, he wants to feel a sense of outrage, indignation. But nothing comes, he has accepted (and it’s good that he has) that foreigners in small-town Japan remain foreign, even after several decades.

  A nurse is coming in now and she asks if he’s comfortable and he says yes and they exchange a number of quiet sentences that have no meaning, little barren phrases that could make Alec angry—it’s always lurking, the line of a temper—if he had the energy, but instead he is looking at the small room and the extra chair and square table, these items a courtesy for visitors. For Kanae. For Kanae who did not come home in the night, who was an empty space in their bed for the six hours of troubled sleep Alec allotted himself until the smell of their sheets, of her, of his own pillow, was too much, and so he got up and paced the house until it was time to pack his small bag for the hospital and walk across town.

  Alec is now arranging the sheet and thin blanket over his legs as though their slight weight might put a lid on his surge of despair, and he thinks only that the hospital is too cold, and that this is something he can fix so he slides gently out of bed—already he is taking too much care with his body, moving like an invalid—and he opens the window to let in some of the heat and the damp.

  “You’ll cost us a fortune,” says Dr. Ishikawa, who has put on his most cheerful face. “The air conditioner in the next room will start working overtime.”

  “The Japanese have never understood a happy medium.”

  “We like a challenge.”

  “You want everything perfect, but you go too far. You torture trees, Shingo. You want to control nature.”

  Ishikawa is shaking his head, smiling, smiling and sad because he is very attached to this man, this friend from another country, but today he must be a doctor and not a friend because they have a series of tests and they have already scheduled Alec’s surgery for the afternoon; an exploratory surgery, with the possibility of growth removal if possible and he is explaining all this to Alec when Nurse Uchida enters the room, a nod for the doctor, a deeper bow for Alec, and she leaves and comes back immediately pushing a wheelchair.

  “This is ridiculous,” Alec is sputtering. “No, no, I’m fine, I can walk.”

  “It is customary.”

  “I’m really fine. I’ll feel better on my feet.”

  “Please. I am more stubborn than you, Alec. Please.”

  A thought strikes—in all the years that Alec has lived in Komachi, and for all his family’s mishaps: Ken’s broken arm, Naomi’s pneumonia, and Kanae’s three pregnancies, he himself has never been a patient at the hospital, never overnight, never like this, never a serious accident or illness, and so it occurs to him that he has led an exceptionally healthy life, and it also occurs to him that someone has been keeping track and now it is his turn to pay up.

  “How self-centered of you,” Kanae would say. “This is Western thinking.”

  And she would be right, and so Alec closes a fist over the arm of the wheelchair and leans back into the sticky plastic, letting it all go, for now, and oh, how I wish she were wrong, Alec, I really do, for then I could write a villain into your poem and we, all of us together, would be able to chase him away.

  The conversation is growing intense now between these three as Dr. Ishikawa and the nurse lead Alec through scans and X-rays, through an examination of his entire body—slender fingers palpating and touching and measuring and feeling. For the first time in years there is a question of vocabulary, he’s never had to learn the Japanese words for these tricky medical terms and so they bring out a dictionary and everyone makes a big show of how educational this is, as if understanding the term for metastatic lesion—tenisō, such a soft-sounding killer—means nothing more to any of them than passing an upcoming test.

  Finally, finally, it is late morning and he rests, or at least he is pretending, because he is also dialing Kanae’s cell phone once again, and there is no answer and he wonders, hopes really, that she has spoken to their children.

  Which brings him to a deep breath and the idea that he must do this himself, he must do this because the line of speech must remain drawn through his family, regardless of Kanae, they must not forget their children—haven’t they already done this too much?—and already his fingers are dialing, already he is listening to the phone ring through and then it comes, the gentle tenor of Ken’ichi, the youngest, his only son.

  “Father, I was just about to call you, is it serious?”

  Relief that Kanae has not left their children, too, and relief at the sound of his son’s voice because Ken’ichi will understand exactly what it all means, he will not have to say more than necessary with Ken’ichi; already Ken is concerned that Alec should be moved to a larger hospital in Fukuoka or Kagoshima, somewhere they might have newer, and by this he means, better, radiotherapy treatments.

  “They know what to do here. I’m in good hands.”

  “What is happening first?”

  “I’m having surgery this afternoon. An investigation. Then we’ll know more.”

  “I’m coming. Can Mother get me at the station?”

  Alec manages calm, manages to be firm, despite the rising panic, and he is insisting that no one rush, that there is nothing to be so frightened about, and that they’ll know what to do after today’s results, and he is also thinking that maybe this evening Kanae will come back and he will not be forced to lie to his children about not knowing where to find their mother.

  Ken is not the kind of son to bully and push, he will accept Alec’s decision in the same way he accepts all of the decisions made without his consent; for this Kanae has always called him our Japanese son, the one who truly understands the words tradition and duty, but Alec does not agree, has never agreed, because Ken reminds him of his own maternal grandfather, a farmer from Rhodesia who loved nothing more than to watch the sun rise up over the veld from his front porch, a man with an immense collection of spider lilies, wisteria, and dombeya, a man quiet with his responsibilities and careful never to cause upset.

  “I must return for my tests. I’ll be in touch later today.”

  Ken’s silence is a cold one, a space of time stretched out with a frustration that Ken will not openly reveal to his father, but Alec is cutting it short, already hanging up and aware, with a tight breath, aware that now is when he will pay the price for loving Kanae more than he loved his children—he never meant to do this because no one plans on that sort of thing.

  More knocking on the door, the slender figure of Nurse Uchida with her long hair and wide eyes, and she is moving about the bed, rustling these stiff white sheets and snapping his pillow, smoothing the blanket at the foot of his bed, and she keeps moving until she is far enough away from him to face him directly and then she stands, strict and still.

  “It is none of my business.” She is rearranging the towels and bathrobe hanging from a hook on the bed post. “It is none of my business, but Sensei should be honest
with Mrs. Chester.”

  The laughter is up out of his throat before he can stop it and he lets it roll across the length of his legs stretched out on this bed, lets it shake his torso until he must suck in his breath at the pain of the movement, because now he understands why the staff members have been giving him guarded glances and half-started sentences—it is all so horrifically funny. For the first time in his life in Japan, he is being credited with truly Japanese behavior.

  “I haven’t lied to Mrs. Chester.”

  “She should be here with you.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t agree more.”

  And there it is, the flash of panic in her eyes, the fear that she will somehow disappoint him, he has seen it many times before during their English lessons—she is not comfortable with sarcasm, is much too afraid to misunderstand.

  “Uchida-san, I’ve been trying to get a hold of her. She knows, I believe, exactly what is going on.”

  The pity in her eyes vanishes almost instantly, but Alec has seen it, has felt it and it has made him ugly, made him shrink into himself, away from her, and he just wishes she would go now, would leave him be, because he’s always enjoyed her company during their lessons, enjoyed her curiosity about his life before he came to Japan and his life as a foreigner in their midst, but he can no longer look at her and she is backing up, backing away, making her excuses and finding comfort in the polite phrases and formulas of good-bye and take care.

  * * *

  This morning the onsen is nearly busy—five old women, ancient creatures with wrinkled bellies and gray hair who are meandering back and forth from the outside bath to the sauna to the inside bath to the showers and around and around, their naked bodies circulating in the steam and the heat, they walk together, they call to one another, they laugh at each other’s jokes; except for polite greetings, they leave Kanae alone but she cannot leave them, cannot keep her eyes from watching them, she is studying their movements from beneath the veil of water at the shower, from beneath the small towel she piles upon her head while she sits in the inside bath, from her stance at the bamboo waterfall she watches them and instead of relaxing in this hot water and this steam, she grows more and more rigid, her arms tighten, her shoulders tense, her jaw becomes a set line across her cheek.