The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  “Very kind of you,” he replied, accepting the offer, sitting down and beginning to slip the skin off the roundish, furry loquat.

  Straight out of college on her first teaching post, Wada-sensei was the youngest in the department, and without a doubt the most fashionable; well-dressed, her cheeks smooth with cosmetics, her short bobbed hair tinted a trendy shade of light brown. She sat with a tartan rug over her knees. In the staff rooms and some of the classrooms, the teachers had cranked up the air conditioning to levels resembling a refrigerator. Some of the students and younger female teachers, however, complained of hiesho – an aversion to chills that Japanese women seemed particularly concerned with. Instead of disturbing their seniors with constant requests to turn the thermostat up, they brought in cardigans and blankets to keep themselves warm.

  David couldn’t help thinking of crippled war veterans every time he saw the ladies pull their blankets over their knees and sip their hot green tea.

  “Ah, David-sensei, I have to tell you there is an extra lesson added on to the Summer School schedule,” she said.

  “OK. What day is it?”

  “August the tenth. If you have time, could you come in to school that day?”

  “Sure.” David smiled inwardly at the polite phrase ‘if you have time’. In fact, it was part of his job to turn up for the Summer School in August, but the staff always made out that he was doing them some huge favor.

  He’d taught his last lesson of the afternoon, with no after-school English Club scheduled for that day; and after Wada-sensei had left for yet another department meeting, David disposed of the loquat skins and went up to the third floor.

  The school was a big, sprawling affair in the shape of a square horseshoe, with the two sides of the shoe – the East Wing and the West Wing – surrounding the sports grounds and the school bus parking area. On the horizon, beyond the trees that hid the tall metal fence, lay the ever-present mountains of the Tsugaru peninsula, and on the other side, the sea. On the third floor of the East Wing lay David’s bolt-hole for when he had a free period; the Computer Room.

  Next to the main chamber, where the students were working, was a smallish room reserved for teachers and members of staff. The main teacher’s room on the first floor had PCs on almost every desk, which meant that the only people regularly on the third floor were the IT teacher and David – when he wanted to go onto Facebook. He could have done it from his smartphone, but here, he had almost complete privacy. Nobody was overseeing his use of the computer…as far as he knew.

  Alone in the computer room, he booted up the ageing PC and stared out of the window next to him while waiting. The room was quiet, with only the hissing of the air conditioning and the muffled laughter of the girls next door…and a faint thumping against the glass. At the window, something ghostly-white dangled from a thread tied to the curtain rail; a handkerchief wrapped into the shape of a ball, with a crude face drawn on it with a marker pen. It was a teru-teru bouzu; a children’s charm to make the rain stop. The IT teacher was also the tennis club coach, so maybe he’d put it there.

  Sure enough, on Facebook there were more holiday pics uploaded from Lisa. Some bar in Lanzarote, girls with their arms around each other, bottles of beer in their hands. Lisa looked fit and amazingly tanned. He started typing a post and then stopped halfway, and looked out the window.

  Saori.

  He’d been thinking of how to describe Osorezan to Lisa and his FB friends. The whole weekend was still highly disturbing to him. He’d never really suffered tragedy in his life; why was he some sort of spectator for the tragedy of others?

  What was he supposed to do?

  He thought of Saori, of sitting with her in the gazebo, alone in that world of utter strangeness. He thought of the first time he’d met her. The JATP – Japan Assistant Teacher Program – usually discouraged teachers against having private students, but seeing as the Yoshidas were members of this school’s PTA, complaints had been scrupulously avoided. On that first evening, Mrs. Yoshida had taken him through to that study room and she’d been there, with her head down over the textbooks, revising as if her life depended on it.

  “How are you?” he said.

  She lifted up her head and stared at him from under that fringe of hers. “I don’t know,” she’d replied.

  On the keyboard he went back, deleting the post he had almost finished. I can’t explain, he thought, I just can’t. Leaning back in his chair, he stared out of the window again, gazing out into the haze steaming off the glass. Ayano Yoshida, he thought. A research project. A hospital. He called up Google and tapped in a search for malpractice in Japanese hospitals.

  Forty minutes later, his throat had gone dry. His cheeks were burning, and his head was crackling with tension. How could this happen, he thought? How could this be, in an apparently civilized country?

  Lung surgery performed on a man with a heart ailment. A woman implanted with someone else’s fertilized egg. A nurse who inadvertently put disinfectant in an intravenous drip. An anesthetist who punched a ninety-year-old patient because she wasn’t sufficiently under when the surgery began. A nurse who injected six times the required dosage of suppressant to an eighty-three-year-old man with heart problems. A woman in her seventies who had two-thirds of her stomach removed in a mistaken cancer surgery operation.

  Apart from the life-threatening blunders, the list of elementary mistakes such as leaving gauze or tubing in the patients’ body seemed to be endless.

  David had always known that Japan was an authoritarian society, but this was beyond belief. Doctors were seen as the wise, all knowing fathers of a paternalistic system, so they considered explaining treatments to patients to be beneath them. The prevailing opinion was that it wasn’t necessary to give the patients the facts because it would only confuse and disturb them. And what became of those who lost patients because of carelessness or incompetence? Most of the doctors had been reprimanded by medical authorities. A slap on the wrist, in other words. None of them had faced criminal charges.

  When he was a teenager, David’s school had received a visit from members of the charity Helping Hands for Japan. They showed slides and told stories of their time clearing debris and distributing food to residents of Ishinomaki, a town in Miyagi prefecture.

  Picture after picture showed scenes of unbelievable devastation, houses swept away, ships sucked inland and left stranded atop smashed buildings, towns wiped from the face of the earth by the tsunami. David was shocked to the core; the images never left him, and he knew they were one of the reasons he decided to apply for a teaching post in Japan, years later.

  And now…he thought of the willful blindness of Japan’s leaders, the deliberate distortion of facts to keep the old guard in power, the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness that ‘sensei knows best, and the public shouldn’t disturb others by complaining’. He saw the same attitude at work here, in the refusal of the medical profession to accept responsibility for their actions.

  Had everyone forgotten that March 11th had happened? Was life really that cheap? Would nothing ever change?

  Somewhere in his mind, he understood that he was reacting as if Japan was ‘his’ country. He had adopted it. Was that why he was getting so worked up? He was getting protective about it?

  David looked at his watch. Getting on for five o’clock. “Shit,” he said to himself, “The football.” Fifteen minutes to walk down up the hill to the station, and the train left at twelve past five. If he ran, he was going to end up sweatier than usual.

  He logged off and grabbed his bag.

  *

  Twice a week he joined his JATP colleagues for an hour of five-a-side football, or footsal as the Japanese called it, in a municipal court in Aomori city center. Ten people chasing a ball on moldy AstroTurf under harsh white floodlights, with metal and wire cages reaching high into the sky to pen them in. At least it had stopped raining.

  The bad mood stayed with David through the match. The exertion made him f
orget the details for a while, but in the habitual drinking session in a Japanese pub-restaurant afterwards, he was unable to stop thinking about it.

  The players had been joined by their girlfriends and female colleagues and were refuelling themselves with jockeys of frothing lager and numerous plates of otsumami snacks. The best of the Tohoku best, David thought. Drawn from all parts of the earth to educate provincial Japanese children. Or maybe not educate, they sometimes complained; it turned out to be more like entertainment.

  “You’ve just eaten a fish eye,” growled someone from across the table.

  Rhea, a boyish, short-haired American, looked up from the tuna head soup she was working on. “It’s full of DHA,” she explained. “Good for your brain.”

  David cradled his beer, feeling at a loss, listlessly picking edamame soybeans out of their pods.

  “You ready for another one?” asked Mike. He was a short, rotund Canadian, his protuberant eyes giving his long face a constantly surprised expression. David looked down at the amber liquid left in his glass and nodded.

  Rhea pushed back her empty bowl and picked up the laminated drinks menu. “Beer again? Get a chu-hai. Awesome summer drink. They’ve got apricot flavour, Valencia orange, lemon and Ume…”

  Guilherme, the tall, longhaired teacher from Brazil, looked up from his conversation with the young Japanese man sitting next to him and grinned laconically. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. It tastes like antifreeze mixed with soda water and syrup.”

  “You could have a cassis soda with grapefruit,” said Rhea, reading out items from the menu with a knowing smile on her face. “Or a namashibori kiwi fruit sour, that’s pretty good.”

  “Girl, just order me a good honest beer, for Christ’s sake.” Guilherme looked over at where David sat and attempted a laugh. “What’s up with you tonight, Dave? Some one died or what?”

  David grimaced and looked up from his drink. “Look, can I ask you guys something?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Does anyone know anything about Japanese hospitals?”

  Rhea looked over and frowned. “Why do you want to see a doctor?”

  “Is all that football getting to you? Too many blows to the knees?”

  “His problem is too many blows to the head, if you ask me.”

  “No, I’ve…I know someone who had a bad experience once. They’re thinking of suing the hospital, in fact. I just wondered…”

  “Oh ho ho!”

  David looked up. Most of the group stared at him with canny grins on their faces. If he were being unkind, he would have called it sneering.

  “Is your friend Japanese?” Mike asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm…that’s weird. A Japanese person suing a doctor! My lord. Things have changed.”

  “One thing, David,” someone at the end of the table said, leaning forward. A lock of black hair drooped over his sallow, handsome face. David knew him as Colin, from somewhere close to Manchester. “Stay away from the health service here.”

  “Well, this is not really about me…”

  “But still, it’s not something to get mixed up in. In Japan the doctor is ‘sensei’, he’s an authority figure, which means a wise and intellectual person. It all comes from Confucian values. You’re not supposed to argue because ‘sensei’ knows best. Patients put up with the scorn and abuse they get from doctors because that’s what they’re supposed to do – shut up and tolerate it.”

  “You know what gets me?” Mike cut in. “A couple of centuries ago, Japan opened up to the West and sent out delegates across the world to study medicine, but they still don’t get it.”

  “Oh, like you’re the expert?” Rhea said. “Expert on Japan-bashing?”

  “I’m not Japan-bashing.” He turned to the bewildered-looking Japanese man on his left. “Hiroshi, do you think I’m Japan-bashing?”

  “No, no,” Hiroshi declared. “I know what you think, you go to the hospital and it is like an assembly line. Doctors doing the diagnosis one after the other. But we have no choice. I have no medical training, so I have to trust doctors.”

  “Look, it’s the twenty-first century, Hiroshi, get on the Net!”

  “Hey, I’ve got a few friends back home in the States who are medical students, bud. One of their biggest gripes is assholes who educate themselves on the Net and think they’re experts.”

  David was beginning to get a headache. At the other end of the table, Colin was getting more and more worked up. “Ten years ago, this was happening all the time, but because we’ve got media and cameras poking into everything, it’s got harder to sweep mistakes under the carpet. But still, nothing happens to these bastards. They appear on TV, bow and say they’re sorry, and that’s it. Medicine is very difficult, the incident is most regrettable, we all must try harder, blah blah blah. Same old shit. Nothing ever changes.”

  David turned to Guilherme. “But I wish there were some way I could help…”

  He’d said it quietly, but nearby, Mike had heard, and he turned his drunken eyes toward David once more. “Well like they said in that old movie, bud – wish in one hand, shit in the other,” he announced cheerily, “and see which one fills up first.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Rebus

  41 Whitfield Street. Professor Weiss stood at the top of the building, on the landing, getting his breath back after climbing three flights of wooden stairs. He took in the smell of the building, the faint aroma of beeswax that reminded him of churches, old books, old model train sets. From the window behind him came the faint sounds of London traffic, and from the floors below, a music box from Pollock’s Toy Museum sprang into crystalline life. Pop goes the Weasel.

  Weiss reached out and opened a wooden panel next to the door. Behind it lay the familiar touch-sensitive monitor screen. Hebrew characters flashed into existence on the screen, arranging themselves into an ordered square, four up, four down. There was one letter missing at the top of the square, and beneath it, the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two letters in order. The screen was asking him to select the next letter in sequence.

  Weiss studied the arrangement, blinking rapidly, his lips twitching. He reached out and pressed Zain. The sword.

  The door buzzed loudly and opened to his touch.

  The room within could have been a standard part of any office administration; a number of modern desks with laptops and PCs on them, comfortable looking chairs, an all-in-one printer/scanner tucked away next to a grimy-looking coffee machine. The back wall, however, was taken up by a massive circular piece of metal with a window in its centre. It looked like an airlock – which was exactly what it was.

  He saw Samuel straight away; a tall, bulky man in a striped cardigan, a fleshy face to match his size, his blond hair short and swept back from his forehead. He stood up as Weiss entered. This was Samuel Huntley, or – as he was known within the Lamed Vav – Lexicus. Beside him stood Jenny Haniver, in jeans and faded sweatshirt. Brown curls framed her lean face, deep lines in the skin around her smile.

  Sam strode toward Weiss, his ruddy face beaming, large eyes behind the crimson frames of his spectacles. “Professor! So good to see you again.”

  “Likewise.”

  “I was quite worried after the reports from Poveglia. How’s John?”

  Weiss shook his head and laughed humorlessly. “He was about to walk out of the circle but Elemanzer pushed him back in. So he’s all right. Basically, he’s a bit shaken up and a bit guilty…Julia’s looking after him.”

  He walked over to the huge window, putting his face up close to it. It had no handles, and its edges were carefully lined with bioseals. To the left of the window lay the air conditioning controls, carefully monitoring the temperature, humidity, and the balance of gases within the room beyond.

  Weiss peered through the unbreakable glass. He saw books – shelves upon shelves of books. At their posts seated at the tables in the middle of the room were the readers, carefully going through the
forbidden manuscripts held in the Atheneum. He watched their earnest brows, their lips occasionally moving in sympathy with what they were translating.

  “Seven of us,” Weiss said at length. “It damn near killed seven of us, like it killed Ayin. If Elemanzer hadn’t been guarding us on the elemental plane, I wouldn’t be standing here today. Ayin had no chance on his own, the arrogant putz.” He looked down at his hands, then over to Sam. “So where’s the Codex? In there?”

  “Actually, Jenny brought it back from her lab this morning. Take a seat, Professor – can I get you a drink?”

  “A glass of milk, if you have it.”

  Weiss sat down opposite Jenny, who carefully slid the silk-wrapped sheaves of papyrus from her briefcase.

  “Well,” she began, “we’ve done radiocarbon testing and microprobe spectroscopy on the papyrus, and we’ve used X-rays to examine the trace elements of iron left by the ink. Sorry we’re behind schedule, but the X-ray beam is the size of a human hair and it takes twelve hours to scan one page. We’ve used ultraviolet and infrared filters, digital cameras and processing techniques, and so far we’ve got a sixty-eight point two percent probability that the Codex was created around the third century A.D.”

  Weiss nodded. “So it is what we think it is.”

  Sam returned with a glass of milk and two cups of herb tea, setting them on the table. “And what do you say, Sam?” Weiss asked. “Any luck?”

  Sam rocked back in his chair, his breath puffing out his cheeks. “I’m afraid there’s not much I can say, Professor. Get me a Rosetta Stone, and I’ll tell you what you need to know before the pubs open. What we’ve done so far is to create a transcription alphabet and examine the Codex with the same statistical software tools that we used on the other grimoires, looking for correlation factors.”

  “And what came up?”

  Sam’s broad face reddened further. “The problem is that the book’s written in ideograms, and we don’t know the correspondence between the symbols and the language. It could be a mnemonic aid for an oral incantation – like Dongba script or West African protective writing.”