The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  He told himself to reach out, to hold her hand and reassure her somehow. But his hand refused, as if something was blocking signals from his brain. He looked back, away from the lake and back at the rolling mounds of volcanic rock, half-expecting to see Mr. and Mrs. Yoshida strolling towards them on the path, come to check on their daughter.

  Their surviving daughter.

  Saori made the next move. She pulled a tissue from her bag, wiping away the tears, coughing the tension out of her face. She stood up, flicking back her hair, looking not at David but at where the waters met the sand. “We’d better go back.”

  Trying to shake off his depression, David followed her lead.

  Away from the shore, the path took them through a clump of scrubby rhododendron bushes – the only kind of plant that could survive in this ground, Saori explained. They were back in the barren volcanic area, the white ash pocked with tiny tufts of grass like hedgehogs.

  Before them were two inscriptions that David translated as the Inferno of Felony and the Inferno of Blood. Behind them, the decaying majesty of the Tower of Spirits who Left no Relatives Behind. He could only wonder at how Saori kept her equilibrium, kept herself from tilting her head back and screaming wordlessly at the sky. Then he wondered what kept him from doing the same thing.

  “Saori, look – can I ask you a question?”

  She still had a tissue to her face, trying to cough back sobs and was now looking intensely embarrassed. “Sure.”

  “What did the autopsy say?”

  “There was no autopsy. The head doctors said our family would feel better if we had the funeral straight away, to put our sadness behind us. Mom and Dad did what the doctors told them. The police didn’t want to get involved.”

  David stared back at her, speechless.

  Near their feet, steam and cloudy liquid bubbled out of the earth, hissing like a pressure cooker. People had left ten-yen coins as offerings on the mounds of stones lining the path; David raised his eyebrows as he saw that the coppery brown metal of the coins had turned a greenish-yellow in the corrosive air.

  Saori took in a deep, shuddering breath and coughed. “I’m sorry, David. I didn’t want to upset you by telling you this.”

  “No, no, that’s not…”

  “It’s all this death and despair, you know? Around here.” She waved her arm at the desolation that surrounded them. “And Mom and Dad going on about the Itako, as well…I wish they’d done something else. I want to remember how happy Ayano was, what a great person she was. I helped her pack to go off to college, she was going to have such a great time…” She stopped, the tears catching in her throat again.

  “Saori, why did your parents bring me here?”

  She sniffed. “I think for the same reason my mother wants you to teach me. She doesn’t want me to be alone. She thinks, if I’m alone I’ll think about Ayano, and I’ll get…I’ll get in a bad condition.”

  “Depressed, you mean. I can understand.”

  No, a sarcastic voice said inside him. No, David, you don’t understand. You’ve never lost anyone. You have no idea what she’s feeling.

  The path fell away into a narrow gulch, the grotesque stone hillocks thinning out and leading to a patch of unbroken waste ground. Beyond that were stone walls, workers’ prefab huts, the parking lot near the temple entrance. It was the end of the walking course.

  David felt like he would have nightmares for a week. He remembered what Saori had told him about Osorezan; it’s like Heaven, she said, and also like Hell.

  Chapter Seven

  The Itako

  The sudden noise in the room shocked David awake, and he jerked up from the futon like a spring-loaded toy, his hands flying to his sweat-covered face.

  An obscenely loud musical chime rang out of two speakers high on the hotel room walls. The chime ended, followed by a man’s voice, deep, rhythmical, and still at a ridiculously loud volume. David recognized the words for ‘honored customer’ and ‘six-thirty’.

  Osorezan, he told himself as he looked around the tatami room, memories coming back. This is your wake-up call, he thought ruefully.

  He struggled into a clean T-shirt and jeans as quickly as he could and left the room. His arrival in the hotel foyer caused a flurry of activity among the orange-robed staff.

  “Ah, David-san! Chotto kitte.”

  One of the priests ushered him out of the hotel, a gentle hand upon the foreigner’s arm. They walked along a covered pathway, and as they progressed David realized that the path connected the hotel and the temple.

  “Mo poku-poku,” the priest said with an embarrassed smile, making a drumming motion with his hands. “Poku-poku.”

  They entered one of the temple buildings through a small but ornate side door, and David understood what the priest’s gestures had meant. The morning’s chanting had started.

  Most of the hotel guests knelt in formal seiza position on the tatami within the dimly lit, incense-filled chamber, their solemn faces turned towards two young priests seated on a slightly raised platform. The priests chanted in deep, sonorous tones, one of them punctuating their sutra with occasional strokes on a curiously shaped drum at his side. Poku-poku.

  David’s companion guided him to a space beside the Yoshida family and Saori gave him a wan smile as he knelt down. He knelt in seiza position, coughed, and tried to concentrate upon the respectful atmosphere within the temple chamber.

  The minutes went by. David’s mind refused to keep still, led wandering away by a thousand tiny distractions. The growing ache in his knees. The grumbling in his stomach as it asked where breakfast was. The hypnotic monotone of the chant. The way the shaven heads of the priests looked like skulls in the chamber’s smoky light. The strangeness of yesterday’s lakeside shore and his conversation with Saori. The dreams that he knew had been scared off like frightened birds by the shock of the wake-up alarm.

  After the morning service had finally come to an end, the Yoshida group joined the other guests for breakfast. They sat at the other end of a long table, sharing it with thin, wrinkled pilgrims who kept glancing at David from the corner of their eyes, their mouths making loud smacking noises as they ate.

  “Shojin-ryori. This is very healthy,” Mrs. Yoshida announced. “We are very sorry, David, we do not have any breads for your breakfast. But this is very healthy, dessho?”

  “Of course,” David agreed, looking down at the plates of seaweed, tofu and vegetables that he couldn’t identify. “I know that Buddhists are forbidden from taking a life or eating meat. So no bacon and eggs, eh? My veggie friends back in the UK would love this.”

  David thought he saw the smile on Mrs. Yoshida’s face drop a tiny fraction. “Yes,” Mrs. Yoshida continued in a confused tone, “but it is delicious…and it is so healthy…”

  Although it was still the rainy season, the rain had held off for another day. The sun was lost somewhere in the misty sky, filling the lakeside with a diffuse, mournful light. They approached the campsite of the Itako, the clustering of blue tents that looked like a small village. Like the time he’d gone to Glastonbury with his college mates. Different kind of festival now, he thought.

  Once they’d found the right tent, they settled down to wait their turn, sitting in line on a row of folding plastic chairs. Mrs. Yoshida put up her parasol and passed the sunscreen to David. He accepted and rubbed the cream into his arms, face and the back of his neck.

  The family wriggled into positions they found comfortable, and Mr. and Mrs. Yoshida went into a kind of doze, like passengers on a Tokyo subway. Mrs. Yoshida had acquired a black soapwood rosary from somewhere and fingered it with a steady rolling motion.

  David took the chance to speak to Saori, leaning closer to her shoulder, lowering his voice. “So, these Itako…is it true they’re all blind?”

  “Yeah, but maybe some of them are fake blind. We don’t know.”

  “Is that necessary for the job? To become an Itako you have to be partially sighted?”

&
nbsp; “Maybe it’s more important to see places on the inside. Anyway, the problem is we don’t really know what they’re talking about, because their Tohoku accent is so strong.”

  “Yeah.” David thought about the elderly Aomori residents he’d met over the past year. “Like throwing spoons down the stairs.”

  Saori turned towards him with a smile on her face. “Do you want to hear the shortest conversation in the Japanese language? It goes like this. It’s winter in Aomori prefecture, and two people meet each other when they are walking through the snow. One of them says, Dou sa? and the other one says, Yuu sa.”

  David frowned. “So what does that mean?”

  “ Dou sa means “Where are you going?” and Yuu sa means “I’m going to the bathhouse.”

  “I’d never have guessed that!”

  “Yeah. People say the reason why the Tohoku accent shortens words so much is that the winters are so cold, nobody wants to open their mouth very much.”

  She looked at him and smiled. He was startled at how happy it made him feel. It suits her, he thought.

  If only there was something she could really smile about.

  The best part of an hour later, one of the assistants came out of the tent and bowed to them. They’d finally been granted an audience.

  It was cooler inside, and redolent with the familiar scents of incense and sulfur. The kuchiyose ritual – the calling down of spirits by the medium – was about to begin.

  The Itako – Chiyoe-san, Mrs. Yoshida called her – got up from her kneeling position to greet them. She was a short, round woman, wearing a surplice of spotless white that came down to her knees. Her eyes were concealed by large glasses with tinted lenses, and her sparse grey hair was pulled back from a high forehead and tied in a bun. She looked in her sixties, possibly even seventies.

  “Irrashaimasse,” she mewled in a thick Tohoku accent, gesturing for the family to sit. Welcome. Wooden beads clacked as she moved, dark beads strung on several necklaces around her neck. Her face was freckled with moles and liver spots, but still plump and fleshy.

  They knelt in front of a low table covered in purple flowers, incense holders, jars and pots holding curious ornaments. Around the sides of the tent were ranged inscriptions in flawless calligraphy, with a glass case at the back holding an antique Japanese doll and a child’s ragged teddy bear. The decorations only made the twilit interior of the tent even more depressingly morbid.

  Mrs. Yoshida introduced the family, the Itako looking at each one of them in turn. When David was introduced, the old woman fixed him with her smoky blank lenses and laughed, crooked teeth in withered lips.

  Mrs. Yoshida handed over the photograph of Ayano, the same one from the Buddhist altar. Chiyoe-san held it up in front of her face. “Hajimerimasu,” the old woman croaked after a pause. We shall begin. David shifted a little in his kneeling position. The Itako clapped her hands together twice, a dry, hollow sound. She began to chant – a low, throaty call, words rendered incomprehensible by her diction.

  The chant went on. David’s mind began to wander, his sinuses tickled by the thickening incense. He sensed the postures of the Yoshida family members around them, wishing he could fade out, blur into the background and cease to be noticed.

  Suddenly it changed. The old woman lifted up her face and called in a high, cracked voice, “O-kaa-san?” The Japanese word for mother.

  Mrs. Yoshida visibly stiffened.

  “Atashi wa Ayano, desu yo. Okaasan?”

  Mrs. Yoshida said yes, with a sob in her voice.

  “Aitakatta! Mama to Papa aitakatta, wa.” Mother, father, she was saying. I wanted to see you again.

  The heat and the smells of burning were starting to make David feel light-headed. He realized, cynically, that the Itako hadn’t used any names. She’d used the generic titles of Mama, Papa, little sister, nothing personal at all. The talk continued, a stream of chattering in Tohoku accent, most of it too rapid for David to understand. Mrs. Yoshida kept nodding her head, her handkerchief held close to her face ready for the tears that he knew must be getting ready to spill onto her cheek.

  Then the Itako stopped.

  She stopped in mid-sentence, her monologue coming to an abrupt halt. David looked up. The old woman was silent, but her mouth was still open wide, and her jaw was twitching, as if her vocal cords had cramped up.

  Then with a jolt, the Itako was out of her paralysis. And she screamed.

  She screamed with a high, keening wail and pitched forward onto the floor of the cabin, throwing her arms out wide, knocking over the incense holder, the flowers, the sacred ornaments that had been so carefully arranged before her. The old woman let forth a stream of incoherent babbling, too fast to hear or understand. From beneath her jersey, a stream of water from the spilled vase seeped out and flowed across the ground.

  David leapt to his feet. The Yoshida family followed him, standing up in shock and incomprehension. Mr. Yoshida bent down and started to turn the woman over, trying to avoid the woman’s fingernails as her hands violently shredded the air around her. David saw specks of vivid, yellowish-white froth at the corners of the woman’s mouth.

  The tent door opened and the assistant stepped into the cabin. There was a short and intense exchange between her and Mr. Yoshida that needed no translation. The assistant knelt down, calling the Itako’s name, trying to get a response.

  Then the old woman stopped babbling, and gripped the assistant’s arm with a strength that made the woman yelp with pain. The Itako sat up with a jerk that knocked the glasses from her face, revealing eyes rolled back in her head, two orbs of milky white staring at the gathered family.

  “BAKU KURAE!”

  The voice was high-pitched and piercingly clear; it seemed too loud, too young, to be possibly from the old woman’s throat.

  “BAKU! BAKU KURAE!”

  Then the old woman sank to the ground, the tension escaping her body and leaving her prone and still, like a big bundle of rags. The assistant, bent over the Itako, signaled for them to leave.

  Outside, David leaned against a nearby post, his body trembling. A small crowd had gathered, drawn by the screaming. The Yoshidas stood in the middle of the path, at a total loss, trying to avoid the gaze of the other pilgrims.

  Saori drew closer to him, her face noticeably paler. “I knew we shouldn’t have come here.”

  Despite the heat, David shivered. “Epileptic,” he said after a while. “She’s epileptic as well as blind. Maybe that’s part of her…act.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said pointlessly.

  “I mean, it didn’t make sense, did it,” he babbled nervously, “like that bit at the end. What did she…”

  “David, I can’t talk about this right now.” She looked at him, but her gaze was unfocussed, unable to latch onto anything. “I think I’d better take care of my parents.”

  Behind her, the Yoshidas had turned and were slowly walking away, back to the hotel. Saori followed them with David trailing behind. Better take care of her parents, he thought. A teenage girl, trying to fill the gap left by the death of her older sister, and she says she’d better take care of her parents.

  Not for the first time that weekend, he felt an unbearable craving for a beer.

  Chapter Eight

  The Third State

  Night duty was always a pleasure for Nozaki.

  It involved putting the subjects to bed and taking readings from the Sleep Modulator displays. The assistants eased the volunteers onto the flat padded stretchers called ‘sleep research platforms’, carefully checking their headsets to make sure that all of the electrodes were securely attached. Nozaki himself gave each of them a mild sedative to send them to sleep. He switched on the healing music; soft washes of ambient synthesizer and natural sounds to help them drift away.

  For the rest of the night, Nozaki closeted himself in the raised control room near the lab’s main entrance. From the large front window he could stand up and look down upon the whole lab
, but his main concern was the control desk and the two PCs showing the data being fed from the Sleep Modulators. On either side of the PCs were monitor displays from the four video cameras mounted within the lab – from these, Nozaki could obtain close-ups of each patient’s sleeping face. Next to those, on the extreme left of the large desk where he sat, were the monitor screens from the external cameras, showing the corridor outside – a security measure, Nozaki had been told. Every part of the hospital had to be in touch with every other part, and so the monitors were part of the hospital’s main CCTV network.

  It was standard practice for Nozaki and his assistants to take naps during the shift, using a camp bed at the end of the room. They dozed for ninety minutes by turn, a slumber not connected to or assisted by the Sleep Modulators, until woken by another member of staff.

  This wasn’t just a job to Nozaki; it was the subject of his research. He had spent most of his adult life at Tsugaru University, first as a student of psychology (focus on neuroscience), then as a postgraduate. The Kageyama Treatment was the subject of his PhD dissertation, with the laboratory supervisor’s post a part-time position supplementing his income from teaching seminars and marking coursework. One more year, and he would draw the findings of the project into a concrete, coherent, academically acceptable document.

  At the end of the shift, the subjects were awoken at staggered times beginning at six a.m., and they would have a fifteen-minute debriefing session with the assistants concerning their dreams. This was Nozaki’s contribution to the project; his thesis would look at lucid dreaming, and whether the Sleep Modulators could assist individuals in interpreting and manipulating their dreams. With the data from the new technology they were using, it was possible that every event during the sleeping hours could soon be assessed.