Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  “My husband is from South Africa. My children are only half Japanese.”

  She is nodding as she says this, angry now, angry for saying something stupid, she has never considered her children half anything, but she cannot take it back, and really it was a gift to Fumikaze because he would not ask until she mentioned it first and now she has, and so of course he wants to know more, he wants to know about Alec and Alec’s work because these are questions that must be asked between old friends, but Kanae places her chopsticks down on the table and reaches for her purse, and she looks outside at the cloud of starlings which has swelled to an ocean of black dots, there must be three hundred, four hundred birds, their slender bodies darting and twisting, heady with the tumult and race of their flight.

  The words come quickly and she says them, “I’m a widow.” She puts this lie between them on the table, breaking the glass wall, and now we know she will leave this restaurant soon, and she will not return to Alec just yet, she will drive back up the mountain to Kurokawa yet again, back to the volcanic waters, to their heat and their sulfur stench, their prickle and scald, and she will pay for a room for the night.

  * * *

  And now for me, yes, it’s time, so watch me, too, on this same day, rinsing a tea cup at the sink of this old house, my old house, washing the porcelain beneath the old faucet when I hear the shriek outside and so I drop my cup into the sink and a slender crescent of a chip splits off of the gold-painted lip. I am moving fast to the sliding glass door, scrabbling with the locks and racing out into the yard, taking my cloth bag from the bench by the landing and racing past the shed, out into the back field, looking at the row of thin moss-flecked sugi trunks that hems the yard, looking above the crowns of these trees but there is nothing in the sky, nor anything further out above the trees along the ridge of the gorge, until I hear the shriek again, and oh, the poor thing, will I get there in time?

  I take the path through the sugi and across the back road, over to the trail from the small onsen at the bottom of the gorge, and parts of this path are steep, slippery in the damp weather, but my old feet know these trails, my hands know where to reach out for tree roots and stones, steady I climb, steady I keep the river to my left, I am faster than one would expect at my age, but then no one really remembers how old I am anymore. There it goes again, keeeeeee—closer now, the bird is losing its voice—how long has it been calling? Why didn’t I hear it until now? At the top of the ridge the trees are thick but I know just where to go, because now I hear the hawk with my whole body, the cries are softer now, a stream of harsh chirps that cut through the low hum of the wind rushing through the tree tops, and I walk with my head tilted up, searching the low branches, sunlight from above because this morning’s clouds have cleared off, vanished into the lakes that dot these volcanic mountains and my body turns in a slow circle as I move forward, hands stretched out to touch the tree trunks, keeping my balance by gripping the soft red bark with my fingertips. There! A tall thin pine with peeling bark at the edge of the tree cluster, and on the second to lowest branch the hawk is hunching, one wing flapping at an unnatural angle, its yellow eye watching me, wary, but its cries continue. Help me. Help me. Help me.

  I am quick and silent, kicking off my shoes and throwing my studded leather belt around the trunk of the tree, and now I am scrambling up the tree like the most agile of our mountain saru—I have been able to do this since I was a child, and the cruelest, roughest children on the playground, jealous perhaps, found the taunts that still echo in my ears, dirty monkey, ragged squirrel. I was only thankful they settled on this skill of mine as the reason for their teasing, and knew not much about my family, I am grateful to have suffered so little.

  So watch me as I hitch myself up a few more notches, now eye level with the wounded hawk, and I slip a leg over to straddle the branch where he sits, he begins to hop away from me but I am too quick and before he knows what has happened, I have thrown my sack cloth over his head and scooped him up; I wrap him tight, ignoring the high shrrreeee of pain as I touch his broken wing, I am sorry, I am sorry, it cannot be helped because the only healing that is painless does not heal.

  Bound now, he cannot hurt himself and so I tuck him under one arm, I whisper to him in my secret language while I slide back down the tree, down to the bottom, my bare feet now flat on the ground, soles sticky with pitch and pierced with pine needles and scraped, and I put the bound bird to my chest, let him feel my heartbeat, in his darkness he hears it, a beat, then another: beat, beat, beat. He begins to quiet.

  “Eh, Kitauchi-san?!”

  Turning my head a familiar fear rises and I scan the base of the tree trunks, searching for the flick of a red tail, those amber eyes, but it is only Old Hoshi from the onsen, grinning his idiot smile and congratulating me on the hunt, a carton of shōchū in his hand and a dirty hat on his head, but before I can even answer him, can tell him I am not hunting, he has already forgotten about me and is weaving his way back toward the trails, my trails, and back toward his room and his family and his bottomless cup of spirits; holding the bird softly against me, I slip back into my shoes and follow Old Hoshi to where the trail forks and as he stumbles off down the right branch, toward the old shrine and the onsen, back to his daughter who will scold him and hustle him into his room to sleep off the drink, the bird is jerking beneath my fingers, trying to flap its wings inside its cloth prison, and I am racing along the left branch of the trail, back toward my cages and medicines and wing splints.

  Careful, careful now, I say, heading into the shed and hearing the other birds greet me, and the other animals tense in expectation because wild animals in cages are never quiet, never calm, and this newest patient rustles at the sound and the smell of the other creatures. But quickly, quickly I unravel him only to just as quickly set the wing and bind him again and place him into a recovery cage; I have worked for many years to be as fast as I am, the faster I work, the less the animal suffers and he is watching me, blinking those savage yellow eyes, ducking his head and nipping at the gauze, investigating the texture of this material with his beak.

  He sneezes against the non-forest smell of his bindings and the shed while I watch him, finding his name, yes, a name is very important, it will be the beginning of his story and so I ask my other patients if we should choose this raptor’s name together; only the badger answers with a little yip and so I go to her but when I approach she is backing into a corner, teeth bared, neck-hair bristled because she is still angry with me for not being able to save her cub, and I am angry with me too. But this anger, this red madness between us, will not heal her properly and so we must settle and forgive.

  Across the room three hares stare out at me through the mesh of their hutch and I know they will have to go soon, they are ready and every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, every story’s end contains the beginnings of another, and we all know it is time for the hares to begin a new story. I go to the cupboard, this tall cupboard with its six rows of small, box drawers and its large cabinet shelves, built by my grandfather and it is falling apart because Grandfather preferred the ink pot to the hammer, yes, his poetry is never falling apart but this woodwork must be reglued and renailed once a year, a task my grandmother hated, asking me each time why we didn’t get our neighbor Endo to help us move it out of the house and into the woodpile.

  “Let’s burn it, why waste that good wood.”

  But already then I was old enough to tell her what to do, and she could only shake her head and walk away, insulting me as she moved into the next room; I have found no sweetness in this role reversal and so even now that she is gone, and has been gone for so long, she is still able to hold me here, in this house, because by the end we had become too much of the other for me to feel I had any power. It is only in my tasks in this shed, using the medicines left to me by Grandfather and the healing he taught me, and the words, yes he gave me words, and so I push everything the hawk will need through the bars of the cage and he has alread
y started to walk around, he will heal quickly, the raptors always do.

  Grandfather almost never took raptors, he said they would heal on their own, he said they knew how to sit perfectly still for weeks at a time, if this was what was needed, and eventually the wing would reknit itself together; I have always doubted this, or maybe I just like being able to hold the power of a raptor between my fingers for those seconds when it is so weak it must submit. I want to sit with this hawk until I have found his name, but I cannot today because it is time for lessons and the women will be arriving soon—not all of them, today we are missing one, and so I will leave one tea bowl in the cupboard, leave one cake in the box, because Kanae has no time for lessons anymore, her story has no need of my tea ceremony, and I can only hope that my words will still help her and so I check all the cages, touch the animals that will let me and return to the house to clean up my broken tea cup because it will not do for any of the women to think that I have become careless.

  * * *

  It is evening now in our little town and the winds have settled, for now, for a few hours, while they regroup and gather off shore and over the ocean, preparing for their fury, but for now we are quiet, we can watch the sky and only wonder how it all will come about, and so now Alec is at his home, he has finished his afternoon classes at his little English juku, he has walked through town—past the butcher, past the new supermarket, past the garden shop, and past me where I was standing and waiting at the corner for the light to change; he even waved me a quiet hello.

  There in his driveway . . . nothing, Kanae’s car has not yet returned, there is nothing but the blurry dark round of the oil stain her car has produced over the last year, and in the kitchen he will find her note, her usual Thursday morning scribble with a promise, yes, a promise, to meet him at his appointment. See him crumple that note now, but he stuffs the little paper ball into his pocket all the same, and now he is at the fridge, now he is pouring a glass of wine because at the hospital they have said nothing about what he may eat and what he must avoid, and because this wine tastes like home and he is fearful that with this everywhere he will soon be nowhere and so he tries to root himself in any way he can.

  And this house in our small town is his deepest rooting, despite the years he first lived in another country, despite the memories of his parents and older siblings, all of them gone now except a brother still alive and living in Australia, and there are Christmas cards exchanged and the occasional phone call, but Alec’s life has passed here in Komachi, his real life began in fact with the exchange of several sentences at a roadside restaurant, a quick conversation with Kanae and the months that followed of curiosity and love and sex and quick decisions and meeting her parents, of taking her gently away from them and becoming the first version of who he is today.

  That man settled into himself with the repetition of a single word, a place name—Kirishima, Kirishima, Kirishima—at night he said this word to himself, the perfectly balanced syllables rising like peak sabove a dense mist, because nothing else in Japan had attracted him as much as the image conjured from the delicate characters that made up this word, an island of fog, and inside it, waiting for him, his Kanae.

  Now, a lifetime later, he has finished his glass of wine and is pacing the exterior hallway of his house, making a complete circuit of the rooms and continuing for another and then another, and then even another. The Chester house is old, one of the oldest in our town and it has a trademark exterior hallway that once, long ago, allowed servants access to any room without actually ever having to cross from one room to another and when Alec bought the house he called it a balcony and the real estate agent giggled, but now Alec’s footfalls on the polished wood are making the house tremble; he is more angry than worried. Alec stops to brush the leaves of a young gingko tree in its pot by a side door, noting that the plant needs repotting, but for now he only wipes his palm across the broad flat leaves and blows dust into the air which falls like dry rain around his toes, and then he is turning the west corner (for the third time), he is stopping and staring out the windows, watch him now as the muscles in his neck tense with this contemplation of defeat. So soon! And there is steam rising from the vents that dot the far ridge beyond the house, and the steam is uncurling above the greenery and disappearing as it cools.

  Now the floor trembles without his taking angry steps; this is how the mountain releases its own tension, little earthquakes, shudders of rock against earth against rock, mild displacements—all reminders of the steam and heat beneath the rocks, beneath our feet.

  Alec walks down the stairs and into his garden, he doesn’t bother to put on his shoes and when his bare feet hit the paving stones leading into the yard, he feels the little pebbles, the miniature mountains that cut into his feet; this is still his body and it still has feeling—for this he is relieved and his relief comes with little parcels of memory, moments lived in this house, and in this garden.

  First a day right here where we are standing, back when he was still filling this garden with plants from his native South Africa, still hoping to grow the grasses and flowers he’d asked his sister to send him, and there, still in his range of inner vision stands Kanae, pregnant with their second child and three-year-old Megumi in a matching homemade sundress and tangled up in her mother’s brown legs. In his memory there is sunshine, there is a slowing down of time.

  “Those flowers will not grow here,” Kanae had said, frowning.

  “Sure they will. It’s warm enough.”

  “You are forgetting the winter.”

  “I’ll protect them.”

  “I’m just warning you, it might not be the same. You might be disappointed.”

  “I’m happy to try.”

  And then a quick kiss, the slide of his lips across her cheek and her gentle resistance, because still then, after several years, he could still surprise her with his affection, the spontaneity of it, the lack of concern for anyone who could see, they were outside after all.

  But then Megumi was yelling, calling to them from the edge of the garden where she had found a frog hidden in a cluster of grass. Ashi ga ippon shika nai kono kaeru! This frog only has one leg! Oh, she screamed and cried, angry or sad they could not tell, but Kanae was already racing to soothe her tears and Alec found the frog and captured it between his fingers. Standing now in his garden, his body silently riddled with this everywhere, he can still feel the frantic-one-legged kick of the little creature as it tried to escape his grasp.

  Or the time he took his five-year-old son to the jugglers’ circus in Miyazaki, just he and Ken’ichi, a man’s day out and they ate fried mochi and hot senbei and Ken’ichi clapped and cried whena little girl balanced on top of ten steel cylinders without slipping or falling down, but then after the show, Ken grabbed Alec’s hand and said, “Do not sell Naomi to the circus. Megumi would be okay, but Naomi would never be able to do it.” And how he had laughed that night with Kanae, and she laughed as well, until she said to him, just as serious, “But you know he’s right. Our Naomi would never be able to do it.”

  Poor Alec is now jumping up off his bench, jumping up into the purplish light and the heat and fragrance of the flowers, but not in fright or horror at this memory; he is jumping up with hope, at the sound of a foot on their gravel driveway, at the possibility of Kanae’s face and the apology he is craving. But it is only Mr. Nishi, their nearest neighbor, and Alec would like to step off into the bushes and hide because he has no energy for this difficult man today.

  “Good evening, Chester-san.”

  And starting from this sentence, Mr. Nishi becomes a human fountain of mundane remarks and run-on words about the weather, about the flowers blooming in Alec’s garden, about the density of insects in the air this evening, about another neighbor’s new car . . . and Alec knows—we all know—that if Isamu Nishi is not interrupted quickly and politely, he can fill the air with his own breath for up to an hour.

  “Nishi-san,” says Alec, “thank you for the hon
or of your visit.”

  “Ah, yes, well, you see . . . hmmm, well, this morning, I . . . Uh . . . Surely it was my fault, really…”

  And now it is Alec’s turn to smile because he knows that Mr. Nishi means the opposite of this statement, the man is quiet and thoughtful, but he is angry about something and there will be much hemming and hawing now, and Alec must be patient, must keep his temper, must not feel doubly angry now at Kanae’s absence because she is usually the one to deal with Mr. Nishi’s requests—his complaints over a tree that has tipped a branch too far over the fence, over a toy or a candy wrapper dropped behind in his yard, over a mix-up with the mail or some other service worker.

  Finally, in desperation, Alec must try a new strategy and so he says, “Tell me, Nishi-san, what are you saying? My Japanese is so poor, I need you to be direct.”

  Mr. Nishi straightens in relief—what a surprise!—and says without a single preamble, “Mrs. Chester hit my car this morning. At the stoplight. She let her car roll back into mine. She scraped the bumper. And she didn’t even get out to make sure I was okay.”

  First, silence—our Alec is a little slow to respond—but then his first impulse is to laugh because it is so clear that Mr. Nishi is really only upset that Kanae did not ask after his health, did not get out and spend an hour discussing the accident and how lucky they were that no one really got hurt, how exciting it would have been to call the police and spend some extra minutes looking at the car for scratches!