by H. K. Bush
“Precisely. Can you direct me—Edna?”
Speaking her name seemed to accomplish some otherworldly magic, and her pursed lips widened into a full smile. Without a word, she unfurled her arm and gestured me through one of those low swinging doors, then toward a stairwell that led down into the bowels of the building. My platonic relationship with Edna was now officially terminated.
Downstairs, I sought out the correct attendant and was ushered into the solemn presence of a viewing room. The walls were lined with dozens of large and small boxes, and upon my provision of certain information and another presentation of the key, I was left alone with a fairly large container, approximately three feet by two feet, and about twenty inches deep. I sat there for what seemed just the right amount of time before flipping open the cover of the box to reveal its furtive contents, silently acknowledging Jack for whatever goods I might determine to be inside.
On top was a large, faded manila envelope. Nothing was written on it, and I placed it aside. Several old volumes came next. I took them out, one by one, and slowly inspected them. Indian Summer was on top, followed by A Hazard of New Fortunes and A Traveler to Altruria. These were all first editions of some of the greatest novels written by William Dean Howells, the centerpiece of my own academic eccentricities for some thirty years or more. They weren’t so valuable at auction, but they were all neglected novels that had been highly underrated, in my view. Books you might find stashed unknowingly in a crate at an estate sale, marked by their unwitting owner at an absurdly low price. Jack had placed these books here especially, to be retrieved by someone with a very particular interest in Howells— someone, such as myself. I smiled at his thoughtfulness.
I was so intrigued by these volumes that I did not initially notice the treasures beneath them: Pound’s signed copy of Moby-Dick, numerous other old tomes, but most importantly, another, rather large container of some kind placed at the bottom of the box. This item was wrapped in that same white and red striped holiday paper in which the small box holding the key had originally appeared. It was underneath everything else, on the very bottom of the box, a sort of foundation, and I lifted it out.
The faded wrapping paper fell away easily. It was Hemingway’s valise—or at least, Professor Goto’s facsimile. My first thought was that it was too small to hold much, but I was wrong. It contained multitudes. Opening it slowly, I found numerous file folders, all stuffed with old pages. One with “Pound” scribbled on top, another marked simply “Nook Farm,” along with a few more of Jack’s favorite volumes. Nestled at the very bottom of the valise, one more item was encased inside another plastic, padded envelope. The box within the box within the box, like an old Chinese puzzle.
I carefully opened the envelope and pulled out a volume with a leathery, faded green cover and gold embossed lettering. With a quickening pulse, I realized I held in my hands a genuine first edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s 1855 masterpiece which the poet had prepared, printed, and then held with his own hands. It was the mother lode of rare literary relics, a collection of words as impressive and as influential as any ever penned by an American.
I set Walt Whitman aside, gently, and began pulling out the contents of the manila envelope. It included a large, bulging, blue money pouch, marked Chase Bank, the kind of pouch stores and vendors use for toting around large amounts of cash for deposits. I discovered as well a map and some hand-scribbled directions on several sheets of legal pad paper, including a couple of the pages written in what appeared to be Japanese. There were photographs and business cards, Japanese on one side and English on the reverse. And another envelope, this one with “Marty” on it. It was sealed, and I quickly opened it and removed the letter. By now I was no longer surprised to find that it contained yet one more letter from the dead. This one neatly typed on old Gonzaga letterhead.
July 4, 2010
Dear Marty,
If you are reading this, I am evidently deceased. That’s a euphemism I have always liked: deceased. I have ceased to exist—at least in this dimension. I have passed away—that’s a good one too, so gentle, like a train rolling out of the station and away, into the countryside, gaining speed very slowly, almost imperceptibly.
Funny how that sounds now, rattling off my keyboard. Having been given my decree of death just a few months back, thanks be to prostate cancer, I needed to put some things in order. By now you know all about that, if you’ve made it this far.
I date this letter as Independence Day, but my own independence—from the fear and loathing of my past—really depends on your help. Dating it the “4th” is symbolic anyway, like Thoreau saying in Walden that he went to live at the pond on July 4. Actually, I finished this letter and printed it off the week after the Fourth, but symbols are important, so let’s keep the date the way it is. I still believe in the efficiency of symbols, despite all I’m going through, or went through—I need to speak here in the past tense.
Do you like my small gifts? Yes, the Howells books are trifles next to Moby-Dick or Leaves of Grass, but you are one of the few people on planet Earth nowadays who can value them properly. I include Indian Summer, not because it is comparable in monetary value, but in particular because I love its title, and I sincerely hope that these things can commence a rebirth of sorts in your own remaining years. Together, they’re worth a fair amount of money, as you surely know. And now they are yours, to do with as you and your conscience see fit.
As you are about to learn, the best interests of humanity often clash with the sordid best interests of our outer shells—our biological appetites, as it were. Thus can a rare first edition of Leaves of Grass be either a blessing or a curse to you—and perhaps even a little of both, as Frodo discovered about the ring. A small gift, Sensei would tell me, as he slid a priceless book across the table toward my waiting hands.
I am a sap for romanticism and human sentiment, as you know. So are you, unless I have wildly misread you over the years. If true so far, perhaps you will go another mile. Do you remember the letter at the end of Shawshank Redemption? The one that Red, just out of prison, finds in the old cigar box buried under the tree in a New England field, next to a stone wall that seems plucked from a Robert Frost poem? His friend Andy writes:
Dear Red,
If you’re reading this, you’ve gotten out. And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to go a little farther. You remember the name of the town, don’t you?
Well, Marty, maybe you’re willing to go a little farther than the Chase Tower in downtown Indianapolis? Seven thousand miles or so further, in fact. Do you remember the name of the temple, on top of a mountain in the Japan Alps? I could use a good man like you to help me find a little redemption in all this.
Directions to the temple are enclosed. Also, thanks to Sensei, so is a bundle of cash, which will more than cover any expenses. Please do me the one favor and travel first class. Sensei would insist; he always wanted the best for his assistants. And don’t forget to take with you the talisman, the shibboleth, our little codebook that will admit you to the stash—Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. It will be our little secret, OK? Maybe it is a little corny, but anyway, that’s how I’ve arranged it. As Shakespeare wrote, “some have greatness thrust upon them.”
One last thing. Hope IS a good thing—maybe the best of things. Even in the desultory twenty-first century, when it seems like multi-tasking postmodern digital natives [read: our students] are doing everything they can to AVOID the words, burying them under something else, so that they won’t be bothered by their wordy implications any longer.
Nevertheless: I hope … It’s why we keep on teaching. Right, Marty?
Your friend,
Jack
I opened the money pouch, finding four stacks of fifty-dollar bills, bound as a bank would bind them, each bundle appearing to have a hundred bills, meaning that perhaps I held a grand total of twenty thousand dollars in my hands, courtesy of the Goto dynasty. The directions Jack provided for
finding the temple, Ryoan-ji, were clear and well-formulated for a novice like me, a man completely ignorant about Japan and its language and culture. The pages written in Japanese would appear to be further insurance, for any wayward strangers who might cross my path and willingly aid me.
And yet, despite these ample provisions, I was paralyzed by anxieties. I wish I could report that I immediately contacted my travel agent and made urgent plans to fly to Japan, but I didn’t. Again I hesitated. I’ve never been much of a traveler, I don’t like fish unless I catch it myself—much less raw fish—and I was always clumsy with chopsticks, so how might I survive? Crab brains? Oh my! The very concept sent my elderly body into convulsions of horror, as if a refined Henry James were being recruited to sail before the mast of Captain Ahab’s whaler. So I carefully gathered my booty, replaced the security box, returned to my properly parked car (with plenty of time left on the meter for the next person), drove under the speed limit back to Bloomington, Indiana, and went back into work mode, hardly even entertaining the possibility of flying off to Tokyo to attempt all that Jack had instructed me to do.
Yes, those are two of life’s most bone-chilling words—I hesitated.
There was, of course, the matter of the treasure’s safety. My cynical side assumed that the cache of collectibles might well be long gone by now. The earthquake had occurred roughly fifteen years in the past, and Jack admitted that he had no evidence that the boxes remained intact. Furthermore, he had revealed very little about what was actually contained therein. Mere innuendoes, really. And finally, there was the wrongdoing involved in attaining whatever lay hidden in that dusty old temple. Those buried words came at the cost of human lives. Blood had been spilled. Morally, it all made me a little queasy, and thus, more hesitations ensued.
Time passed. I mulled all this over, day in, day out. I found myself becoming even queasier. And then, it was March 11, 2011, just over a month after discovering the contents of the safe deposit box, when another jolt struck: 9.0 on the Richter scale, the fifth most powerful earthquake ever recorded on Earth, eighty miles off the northern coast of Japan. Over five minutes of intense shaking, followed by hundreds of strong aftershocks, a massive tsunami that devastated coastal cities, and punctuated by the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, flinging radiation far and wide and commencing a massive evacuation. The footage of disaster that became available in the days and weeks after that massive quake was surreal, and the devastation that Jack had reported, culminating in the great Kobe earthquake of 1995, was actually surpassed by this temblor. It was dumbfounding to witness further calamity, just as I was contemplating a visit, and to say the least, I was horrified and thus became even less willing to fly to Japan, in light of these latest events. I now seriously wondered if I had it in me, psychologically, to undertake these “minor tasks” for Jack.
Eventually, however, life returns to normal and one settles down. In my heart, I knew I must go—someday in the vague future. A little over two months after my deepening anxieties provoked by the destructive earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, the skies somehow opened up, and something changed inside me. To this day, I still have no concrete explanation.
I had finished all the exams and handed in my grades in mid-May. At first I was exhausted and somewhat depressed, which is increasingly how I feel every May, needing a few weeks of unwinding from a very long year. But I was also entering a period, a lengthened reprieve, due to the fact that I had been awarded a sabbatical for the 2011-12 academic year. And thus, by the first of June of 2011, when I was beginning to see my life a little clearer again, I was greeted with the happy prospect of having the next fourteen months to do whatever I pleased. I was a free man, liberated from the intestines of the academic frenzy. Indeed, I felt open skies ahead.
Yes, I did hesitate—for a long time, it is true. But all at once, earthquake-like, in early June the novel concept shook me. I must make the trip—not just for Jack, but ultimately for me as well—as he put it, for that tired old dog, too set in his ways.
I booked the flight, in the spirit of Jack’s letter, for July 4th: Independence Day. A day for riddance. A day for fireworks and ice cream, for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A day to protest the corruptive forces that rule every other day of our lives. I drove up early to the Indianapolis Airport, and parked my old Toyota in the most expensive lot, right next to the terminal, where it would await whatever I might bring back from the Land of the Rising Sun.
By the time I filed patiently off the airplane at Narita Airport outside of Tokyo, via Detroit roughly eighteen hours later, it was the 5th of July. Bleary-eyed, my back aching, I felt as though I might throw up with every footfall. I had gained a day magically by passing over another symbol, the International dateline, and so even the dates were dissimilar. The blank hallways of the Narita Airport seemed endless, a mile long each, then a corner, where one would face another mile or two. This endless maze made one consider running away in fear and loathing, back down some other interminable corridor, like the lion in The Wizard of Oz.
Entering Japan was assuredly foreboding. If Kafka were ever to pen a novel about an airport, I’m certain it would be set in Narita. The unsuspecting visitor flows with a mob through a doorway to discover a line of approximately seven thousand people at passport control, then is required to endure a seven-hour wait for luggage. Predictably, my bags were among the last to arrive. One overweight and silent official poked around for five minutes in my bags, looking for who knows what. He sniffed leisurely at my shaving kit, then finally waved me forward, all without a single word, just mute gestures. I was flushed out into the main receiving concourse of Narita, with hundreds of waiting friends and family members, pointing their digital cameras, holding flowers, balloons, large signs, babies, books, magazines, or sodas.
The two-hour ride into Tokyo, on a steamy bus being pounded by torrential rain, with no windows to open and minimal air conditioning, featured a few screaming babies nearby to make it as unpleasant as possible. As we pulled up to the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku, the baby directly in front of me vomited with great force upon his mother’s right shoulder. The tiniest amount of yellowish spittle flew toward me, landing on my left leg as I watched with a mixture of amusement and horror. I nearly vomited myself, actually tasted the bile in the back recesses of my throat. It was the end of a cosmically brutal trip from hell, an appendix to Sartre’s No Exit. When I finally got into my hotel room, it was already 5:30 p.m. the next day, so to speak, with the hot sun filling my southern-facing room/sauna. The view of Tokyo seemed to go on forever. Ten-and twenty-story buildings as far as the eye could see. But I pulled the curtains and fell face down into the bed, sleeping straight through for about ten hours.
Unfortunately, I was wide awake by 4:00 a.m. Though a bit timid to venture far from the hotel in the darkness of the middle of the night, I got up, showered, dressed, and headed down the elevator to see what I would see, determined to quit whatever complaining might crop up. It was still dark at five o’clock, but a hint of the rising sun was visible to the east.
Once outside, my timidity changed slowly as I wandered away from the high-rise quarter of new Shinjuku and vaguely into the mesmerizing alleyways of old Shinjuku, a half mile away. No cars were out yet except a few lonely cabs. Trains were already beginning to rumble inside the massive Shinjuku Station, or on the rail lines passing frequently overhead. I walked under one of the trestles and entered a new kind of cityscape, with bouncing bright lights still on even at this early hour of the morning. People still walked around here and there, men in rumpled business suits, and women in disheveled and brightly colored dresses and gowns.
An hour into my hike through the canyon lands of the city, I espied a familiar sight, with workers scurrying about inside and a few paying customers already sitting at tables: a Dunkin’ Donuts, here in the heart of postmodern Japan. I went in, pointed benignly at a few pastries, gestured for some hot coffee, and sat down for my first meal in Japan.
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Fortified by the coffee, I hiked even further afield, first into an area called Yoyogi, where I spotted a sign, in both Japanese and English, pointing toward “Yoyogi Park.” Sunshine now dominated the haze of early morning, more people bustled around, and trucks and cars began clotting some of the streets as I wandered off in pursuit of the park.
The grounds were enormous and heavily wooded with evergreens, so that the urban sprawl slowly vanished away. One path led to another, and then underneath a massive red-orange torii gate—shaped like the Greek letter pi, just as Jack had described it—I found myself in front of an extensive shrine of some sort, weathered yet elegant. One old woman sat on a bench before the building, facing away from it toward those approaching. She was patiently feeding a swarm of pigeons, as incense wafted in sheets from a massive cauldron, filling the air with a spice of purity mixed with the exotic spray of foreign gods. Behind the old lady, on one side of the building, a monk in a bluish robe, his head completely shaven, swept a long wooden deck. Another old man walked his tiny dog, which, gleeful to be outdoors, pulled him forward. Branches swayed in the light breeze, as in an ancient Japanese dance. This extended moment has become in my mind’s eye one of those cosmic spots of time wherein all is suddenly well with the world. I was here, in Japan, as Jack had planned all along.
I sat on a bench opposite the old woman, her face wrinkled and weathered, but her hands gentle and caring. She glanced my way, her luminous smile a promise of sorts, as the old man disappeared down the garden path with his frenzied dog. In this somewhat altered state, I watched the woman, the monk, and the shrine long enough for the sun to rise completely, filling the air with an assurance of another steamy summer day to come.
Back at the hotel, now midmorning, it was time to pack and head off for another massive maze: Shinjuku Station, where I would pick up the express train to the big mountains of Japan, and specifically for the city of Matsumoto. I ate a late lunch a short walk from the main station, in front of the sinister Matsumoto Castle, which was mysterious for its being black, rather than the traditional white of most Japanese castles. Above the castle were dozens of large black birds circling slowly, as if it were a place of great calamity, and in the far distance to the west were the majestic peaks of central Japan. I found the bus stop to take me up into the far reaches of the backbone of Honshu Island, the Japan Alps, first to the resort town of Kamikochi, then onward to the end of the rainbow: Ryoan-ji.