Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  But he hasn’t planned very well, has he? Because how is he going to get these cartons back to his little room at the onsen, how will he carry them up the road without a crate or a bag, and this kind of problem is exactly what will get him to break his promise this afternoon, because he’s starting to get a little cold out here in the wind and the rain, he’s starting to feel pretty sorry for himself, what with his good ideas now gone bad, and so Hoshi is pacing a little, up and down the steps of the cellar, taking a sip then taking a gulp from one of the cartons, walking over to the road to look at the distance from this former outbuilding with its forgotten about cellar to the onsen, then another drink, sitting down for a moment and letting the shōchū warm him up, walking back over to the road, and then he sees a car flash past and then another one, and so he’s grinning again, he can’t be beat so quickly, he just needs a bag or a box and surely . . .

  Yes, surely someone will stop for him, and once he’s got his cartons—six of them, what a treasure—of this delicious Aka Kirishima into a rough canvas bag found on another shelf in the shelter, he’s back out onto the road, now he’s just an old man stuck in the rain, waving his arm at the passing cars and hoping someone will give him a lift back up to his house and of course one of the cars stops for him, pulling right up against the edge of the road and Old Hoshi is happy to slide right in and put his cartons at his feet, only what a surprise it is to see the driver isn’t Japanese, and Hoshi almost turns to get out again, but the driver is bowing and greeting him with perfect politeness and he even knows his name and so Hoshi takes another look and something about this foreign man looks familiar, so he must be okay, and Hoshi relaxes again into his seat.

  “It’s unlucky to get caught out in this weather, Hoshihara-san, can I take you back up home or are you going to town?”

  “Thank you for your trouble, I’m just going home. Just up the road. It isn’t far.”

  “Yes, I know. Are you all right? You’ve gotten very wet.”

  But Old Hoshi is giggling, he’s warm from the belly on out, he’s got his shōchū safe and he’ll probably even be able to get it past his pesky daughter and her constant scolding because she’s too worried about the basement flooding and about one of the old trees falling onto the roof and the wind breaking one of the upstairs windows of the bathhouse, and so he tells his driver that it’s a perfect day, no one needs to worry about the weather and when he peeks at the white man, he starts to feel a little funny because this gray-haired Westerner isn’t smiling very much.

  “Say, don’t look so down, sir, it’s just a little rain, isn’t it? We’re a tough little island, we’ve weathered worse.”

  And the man is nodding at him, not smiling, but nodding, and Hoshi is feeling brave from all the fire in his belly, feeling happy now that he’s out of the muck and the rain, and so he’s getting chatty, and he asks his driver what he’s got to be so unhappy about, and the driver looks at him and just shakes his head, smiling a little now.

  “It’s nothing for you to worry about Hoshihara, here we are, and there’s your daughter coming to meet us, so I’m going to let you out just here, you don’t mind walking the last bit.”

  “What’s the rush, Gaijin-san, can’t you take an old man to the door.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t. Thank you for understanding.”

  And Old Hoshi is scrabbling out of his seat, clutching his bag and grumbling a bit because this hasn’t worked out how he expected, now he’s got his daughter coming who will ask too many questions and this foreigner is bowing to him, that grim smile only a stretch of the lips, and Hoshi can’t stop himself now, the heat in his belly has turned to irritation and he’s grabbing a hold of the white man’s arm and he’s telling him to watch his ways, he’s saying, I’ve got an eye on you, and he’s saying, I’m careful about foreigners, okay, never can be too careful, and a little bit of spit is flicking out when he speaks, but the foreigner just shakes his arm away and is nodding politely and the car is driving away, the man hunched at the wheel, and Hoshi is waving now, feeling a little bad for his quick temper, it’s only his daughter’s face looks so angry and the rain has gotten his face all wet and here she is taking his arm and looking into his bag and she’s pulling it away from him, and he’s fighting her, he won’t let it go, not today, not with this storm, not when he’ll need it to block out the noise.

  * * *

  They do not find Alec in Komachi, not in a river, not at the bottom of a gorge, not at home, and despite her certainty that he has not left her in this manner, Kanae goes along with the searching and the questions, she stays with the police officers and even though the weather is becoming very difficult, they are able to check the most likely places and still there is no sign of him, until suddenly, in the early evening, when she calls his cell phone, it seems that someone picks up.

  “Alec? Is that you?” What rowdy crackle greets her question, or is that a breath? “Do you hear me?” She is speaking Japanese and English, trying all of their words, nothing seems to break through the static until the phone goes dead and the cheerful voice of a recorded message informs her that the phone has lost service, that they are very sorry for the inconvenience.

  That evening the local news carries the story of the missing English teacher and Kanae watches the brief broadcast with her three children beside her at their home, each child touching her in some way, whether a foot or a hand or a shoulder, and then, when the broadcast is finished and the television personalities have returned to discussing the weather, Megumi, who cannot abide inactivity for too long, clicks off the television and stands up, announces that maybe he saw it.

  “You mean if he were somewhere with a TV,” says Naomi from her end of the sofa, and everyone’s eyes turn to her, because all day she has been the most afraid of agreeing with Kanae’s conviction that Alec is unharmed, instead she has avoided the discussion, left the room or turned away from the conversation, she has been crippled by sudden bouts of crying, and even mild-mannered Ken’ichi has grown angry with his sister, reminded her that she must be stronger than this.

  Ken’ichi is the first to leave, ducking gently from the house with a word about wanting to get back to Etsuko and promising to return first thing in the morning, and then Megumi begins to gather her things, and Kanae follows Megumi right up to her car door, their faces sweating in the heat of the night, rain dropping on their heads, and they are staring at one another and Megumi says she heard the nurses speaking, she heard them whisper that Kanae hadn’t been at the hospital until today, and she is asking her mother what did they mean.

  She is such a wiry woman, Kanae is thinking, this girl-turned-mother, her body an arrow of movement and precision, and although her mouth is different now, a strict line across the small oval of her face, her eyes haven’t yet gone hard, and in them she can see there is another Megumi layered beneath this older woman and if she could just pull one up from beneath the other, if she could just flip her daughter inside-out, they would all remember that young Megumi loved to laugh.

  “Okāsan, why fight now? You never disagree about anything.”

  All that sky above her head, even with the thrashing trees and the moving clouds, she can see the moon, and her heart is beating too quickly with her sudden anger, this redness growing within. How can she explain when she cannot understand it herself. How she considers his life with her a promise, and that he is about to break it.

  Her always-angry daughter is pulling her close now, like she were the child, and they stand together next to Megumi’s car while the dark night swallows up the sound of Kanae’s hard breathing, and Kanae waits as long as Megumi will let her, holding tight to the rigid grip of her daughter’s thin arms, wanting Megumi’s sharpness for her own now, knowing that she will need it, and there is a moment when she thinks she can hear Megumi crying, but the sound is so alien, so unbelievable, that she knows it must be a tree limb leaning into another or a bird swooping under the cover of a bush, and then they are straightening up, leaning
away from each other, separate now, and Megumi’s tiny face is solemn. Resigned.

  Back inside and it is nearly midnight, but Kanae will not be sleeping this evening, not in her bed, not with the smell of Alec all around her, instead she is pacing the house, checking on Naomi who has taken something to help her sleep, checking the windows and listening to the creaking of the wood in the wind, and trying to see out into the darkness but the clouds have come down too low, there is no moon, there is only the black night and the drip of water racing down the glass.

  When the house telephone rings she picks it up, fully angry again, knowing that it must be a policeman or the hospital, knowing that what they will tell her cannot possibly be true and how dare they disturb her so late in the evening, but it is only a quiet voice she hardly recognizes, it is only Fumikaze.

  “I saw the news. About your husband.”

  She is holding a hand up, ready to block his approach.

  “Did they . . . I mean, have you . . . do they know where he is?”

  Kanae is opening her mouth, hoping that the action alone will get her voice to work, but it doesn’t right away, and she stands there, mouth frozen, throat dry, until the silence grows too long and he is the one to speak again, he is telling her that he’ll help, if he can, but she cannot allow this, and so she finds a single sentence to give him the apology he deserves.

  “I wish I had never seen you again.” Such a hard sentence for our Fumikaze to say, and even with these words, Kanae can tell he isn’t really angry.

  Her shame grows, she remembers from their childhood his willingness to surrender, if another child teased him, she was first to pinch an arm or push a body, she was his defender, and he was her quiet, shy friend.

  “They should not have burdened you with his diagnosis. That must have been quite a shock.”

  “No, no one told me.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I knew when my husband knew.”

  My husband, she repeats, she says this word a few times, how strange that it should feel so alien on her tongue, shujin. The master of the house, and how funny that all she would have to do is lengthen the vowel, shūjin, shūjin, and the word becomes something else entirely, prisoner or public. How quickly something intimate and secret becomes its opposite.

  “What I did was unforgivable—” But he cuts her off and tells her that he hopes she will find her husband soon, that he is sorry for her trouble, and she can only cover the mouthpiece of the phone and refuse him the sob that rises in her throat, and they are hanging up like strangers.

  * * *

  This morning the day and the night are still fighting, the lines have been blurred by the rain and the clouds, and it looks like the light will be half-dying all day until this storm pushes its way to us and passes on, and for some time yet it will feel like night will go on forever, it will feel like the sun is never coming back to us, it will feel like our little island has been abandoned, thrown to the side of the ocean like an unwanted thing, a sacrifice to chaos and weather; this is when we must finish our preparations and so I am getting out the rolls of masking tape and climbing upon a step ladder to crisscross the windows all over the house, I am filling pots and pans and jars and thermoses with water, I am pulling the old camping toilet up from the basement and filling its reservoir for the day or so that the plumbing may be disturbed from an overflow of water to the sewers, and I am nailing blankets to the windows at the top of the house because these windows almost always break if the typhoon is big enough, and they have said it will be plenty big. And when all of this is done, I move to the kitchen to make onigiri from my leftover rice—I don’t need much, I am just an old woman.

  But the animals will need more from me and the shed must be made safer, it is a rickety structure and last year one of the walls shifted, so on with my coat and my gloves and I am out in the wind now and looking at this slapdash structure, at the angle of the wall against the tinny roof, and I am pacing around it and checking for loose boards and pushing against it with my hands, as if my hands would have the strength of the storm, and I must laugh at myself just a little, I am getting carried away, and then I remember there are some thin old ropes in Grandfather’s cupboard and I can braid them and throw them over the shed roof and use them to anchor the sides of the building, like making this shed into a boat, an ark for these animals, and it only takes me an hour but when it is done I am pleased with my work, and if my grandfather were here he would give me that smile and that nod and I would know that he approved.

  Now I must rest, just a little, and the wind is only becoming interesting, only yet a slight force, a nuisance, not yet dangerous, and so I sit in the garden for a moment, just outside my shed on an old stump, and the trees are turning a darker green and I ignore the whispers and echoes of this street and of Komachi, and I hear only the sounds of the evening and the hum of the insects as they are startled from their daytime hiding places, and now that smell of rain has deepened and already the wind is pulling gently at the house, pushing at any loose wooden shingles and reminding me about the badger, who should really stay with me for another day or two, but she will not manage the storm in her cage, she must be underground or she will turn on herself, biting and hurting, and all of my work would be for nothing; so the storm has decided for me, it is time to give her up to her life.

  The shed erupts with nervous scrambling when I enter through the doorway; the hares excited and hopping around, rubbing up against the sides of their cages, and the hawk is sliding along his perch, trying to unfurl his wings and closing them tight against his bandage, and the lizard is moving carefully over his rocks and even the butterflies—yes, they can be healed—are flitting about, because with the open door comes the scent of the forest again and they have not forgotten it is their home.

  I am stopping now before the badger’s cage and she is watching me and I am watching her, and this is the first time she has been quiet enough to see me and when the understanding passes between us, she lies down on her belly and holds her head at attention and waits for me to unlock the cage door, and when it is open and I have stepped aside, she rises to her feet and stares at me once more.

  “Go,” I tell her. “Go on into the forest.”

  She is past me in a flash, slipping out the open door and off into the field, racing with her nearly healed legs and her head up to sniff the many scents of the open air and the forest and the running water just a few more bounds away, and her freedom is an exquisite thing to encounter, a healing done properly, even if that limp will endanger her for the rest of her days, she will be slower than necessary and she may not make it across a road as quickly as she will need to, because we humans are sloppy in our driving, careless with our speeds and the power and weight of our machines, and I am moving further into the field now, following her, hoping for a last glimpse of her stripe as it slips into the grass, hoping she might stop where the forest begins and let me admire her one last time, but I’m scanning the tree trunks and she is already gone, already following the scent of the wild persimmons, already thinking of a den, and I can only close my eyes and let her go, I can only wish her well for as many seasons as she has left in these woods.

  * * *

  What Kanae doesn’t know is that Fumikaze was standing outside the love hotel and searching for his car when two prostitutes were coming out, ready to go home, and what tired women they were, all that heavy make-up washed away, faces too plain for their latex skirts and high-heeled boots, but they offered him a ride to find his car and he accepted, sitting stiffly in the back seat, eyes on the road and making small talk about the rain and the wind and the women were yawning and he was thinking they had frightened each other, he and Kanae, he was thinking they had done something very rash and of course she had run away, who could blame her, it isn’t every day you reconnect with someone and find such passion.

  So very quickly he was back inside his car, and instead of driving north along the coast, instead of finding a sensible h
otel to weather out the storm, he has driven into the mountains, toward Komachi, and rented himself a room, not at one of the great, gleaming onsen hotels for whom he works, but at a worn down ryokan on the backside of one of our more modest mountain peaks, and because there were only two inns still open because of the impending storm, he chose the older, the less distinguished of the two. Our gentle Fumikaze told himself he wanted to look at property in Komachi, told himself it might be cheaper than Miyazaki, told himself he might like retiring in the place where he grew up, a kind of full-circle movement, and he told himself it had nothing to do with her.

  And then, from his room at the inn, he saw the news report about the missing English teacher, and of course Kanae was in the photo they flashed across the screen, such a handsome couple, and he learned more in that short news broadcast than he had at their two dinners and one night together, such a successful family—an academic son, an artistic daughter, another daughter in business, and there it was, the words plain as he could read, The Language Lab, one of Komachi’s most community-oriented companies, even if the police were sounding pessimistic, and he cannot stop the thought that maybe Kanae did not lie to him exactly, maybe she was already a widow but didn’t really know it.

  It is morning now and Fumikaze is sitting over a late breakfast he has asked to be able to eat in the garden of the ryokan because it is one of the best he has ever seen, and there is just enough shelter from the rain under one long slanting eave that juts out from the side of the house, and so he is raising his chopsticks again and again, resting his eyes on the perfectly smooth paving stones and the small pond frothy with rain and the darting movements of several fat koi.

  Across the garden the old owner has got her hands busy with twine and burlap sacks, tying up the plants and fastening the garden chairs, he nods to her and she raises a small curved hand in return, but what really struck him about the newscast was how quick it all was, how only the slimmest details of these lives were given, everyone a name and a profession, but what did all that have to do with losing a husband, losing a father, it was all so neat and prompt and clean, and then the newscaster was back at the typhoon and computer mock-ups of swirling clouds and bright colors and there it was at the edge of the screen, the line of Kyūshū and the water rising over the sea wall along the Pacific coast.