The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  He turned on the lights and guided the boy inside. The boy made it to the middle of the room before coming to a stop. He seemed a genuine child for the first time, frozen in place beside Dr. Tauber and giving off something as vital and primitive as an odor . . .

  He saw through the boy’s eyes all of the room’s familiar objects: the aseptic gleam of the arrayed instruments; the curved chair waiting to contain; and looming above it the operatory light that a girl had once told him looked like an insect’s head. And in a moment, once he’d adjusted the mask over his face and the dental loupes over his eyes, Dr. Tauber would loom over the boy as well like something other than himself . . .

  Once a child had seen all of that: there was usually no way to bribe or persuade or trick a mouth into opening then. And he never tried. He may not have been a pediatric dentist—as the neighborhood aged, he had, if anything, by default come to specialize in geriodontics—but he had, over the years, dealt with more than his share of uncooperative children. And he ordinarily favored a no-nonsense approach. He decided, however, that in this case he would not, under any circumstances, use a bite block: he would rather risk a bitten finger than lock the boy’s mouth in place. He wanted the boy’s consent; he wanted the boy to submit willingly.

  He was curt and a bit stern without being too forbidding. Sit here. Head back. Relax. I’m going to adjust the chair now. No, hold still, it’s just a bib. The boy’s reactions were slow, disturbingly delayed. He didn’t cringe or scream or struggle the way some children did, but Dr. Tauber sensed the clamped jaw. The coiled resistance. Panic had clouded over all of the intelligence in the boy’s eyes. Relax, Dr. Tauber commanded. Which meant: Give up. Yield. He put a thumb to the boy’s chin and said, Open. And when the boy did finally yield and the lips parted, it was like a magical transformation from animal into compliant human, and Dr. Tauber felt triumphant and heartbroken. After that it was praise that worked, simple praise and he was no longer stern but cheerful and avuncular.

  The teeth were perfect. There were no fractures; no biofilm deposits; no malocclusions. Permanent dentition was developing normally, with no over-retention among the primary teeth. No sign of gingival inflammation. Not a single carious lesion. A complete absence of expected hypodontia or microdontia: each neat row was uniform and complete. Who could say when the boy had last received care? Who could say if he’d ever received care? And here it was, a miracle: a pristine mouth, immaculate, uncorrupted.

  When the boy had rinsed and the bib had been removed, Dr. Tauber took off his mask and loupes, helped the child down off the dental chair, and led him back to the reception area.

  “It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” he said to the woman. “There’s a lot of work to be done.” He waited for her son to speak, knowing the boy could be trusted now to translate correctly, then continued: “More visits will be required. Quite a few. At no charge, of course. Don’t worry though: it’s not a hopeless case. I’ve seen worse. With the right care, his teeth can be saved. I’m going to help your son.”

  He was already devising a course of action. The miracle of the perfect mouth would be maintained. For the next appointment: radiographic examination followed by routine cleaning, fluoride treatment, and instruction in oral hygiene. Then regular preventive visits to monitor incipient decay and the exfoliation of the remaining primary teeth. And in several years, with the onset of adolescence, the potential for new and interesting problems: ankylosis; ectopic eruption; the need for orthodontic care. Yes: there was a lot of work to be done. Many visits that, over the course of time, might prove necessary for the patient; many explanatory consultations with the parent . . .

  The dark oval of her face swam suddenly near. She was moving toward him. Reaching out to take his still-gloved hand with both of hers. She spoke. He didn’t need a translation to know that she was thanking him. He let her grip his hand. His own grip, he felt sure, was professionally firm and neutral. Whatever was trembling inside him didn’t reach his fingers. He’d always been proud of this ability to separate heart from hands. With age some men lost the steady touch. And Dr. Tauber had himself been younger, there was no denying it, he’d been younger and would never be as young again as at this moment, with her close, gripping him through his glove, speaking words to him he seemed almost to understand. But the hands were as solid as ever: none of the shaking that spelled the end of a career in dentistry.

  Winter Crane

  As you approach the mountain resort of Tateshina—after the final twist in the road, and just before the sudden dip that gives you your first view of the town, barnacled around the lake rim in white-gray clusters far below—you will see, on your right, a billboard welcoming you to “the home of the Silver-Crested Winter Crane, our own Loch Ness Monster!” Beside these words the bird is painted in mid-flap, beak pointing skyward, wing tips extending beyond the sign’s borders, a nice touch that, for just a second, as the sign comes into view, creates the illusion of three-dimensionality, of motion even, as if the bird is leaving the flat confines of the board for the actual unpainted sky.

  ***

  Until recently, the earliest surviving pictorial representation of the Winter Crane was believed to be an Edo-period sliding-door panel attributed to Kano Tan’yu (1602–1674). The painting, ink and color on paper, shows the bird in the foreground, legs buried in snow. Snow—depicted negatively through the simple use of blank space—surrounds the crane, filling most of the panel. It is a spare, austere painting, and has for this reason been associated with Kano’s later screen work; aside from the bird itself, the only colors are a small patch of green in the lower left corner, where snow has melted, and, to the right of the crane, a single cherry blossom petal drifting above its blue shadow. The petal suggests a sudden spring snow. Wings partly unfolded, the bird has lifted its head and opened its red beak as if to sing or to cry out. The pose is dynamic and evocative; what exactly it evokes, though, is open to dispute: it has been variously interpreted as celebrating the arrival of spring and mourning the end of winter.

  For many years the screen resided in the home of a private collector in Austria, having arrived there under somewhat shadowy circumstances. When it was put up for auction in 1998, experts examining the piece claimed it to be a forgery, created in the twentieth century. Does the original screen reside somewhere else? Was it destroyed at some point in the past? Or was the Winter Crane never in fact the work of Kano Tan’yu at all, but rather a fabrication, a myth, the creation of the forger?

  ***

  The billboard’s comparison of the bird to the Loch Ness Monster is no doubt confusing to the average tourist, coming in winter for the skiing or in summer to escape the humidity of the lower altitudes. These people know the crane, if at all, from the common folktale describing its origin; the only flying creatures they hope to see in Tateshina are the famous hang-gliders who wheel above the town in their polyester wings. Even to those arriving on tour buses for the express purpose of spotting the bird, the hyperbole of the sign may be hard to fathom. The Silver-Crested Winter Crane is, after all, not exactly a prehistoric monster. It is, however, in its own way perhaps no less elusive than “Nessie”: although Grus hiberna has appeared in countless paintings and texts, and although there are many who claim to have seen it, the bird has to date never been captured or reliably photographed. You won’t find it caged in any zoo or stuffed behind glass in any natural history museum. Officially listed as Highly Endangered, some ornithologists believe it is already extinct. And there are even those who argue that the Silver-Crested Winter Crane never existed at all, that its frequent appearance in Japanese works of art has always been as emblematic as the appearance in other cultures of unicorns or griffins.

  Tateshina’s claim on the crane is not due to actual sightings, but to the largely unsupported assertion that the folktale originated here before spreading throughout Japan. One thing is certain: the town has succeeded in promoting and capitalizing on the bird m
ore successfully than any potential rivals in the region. Ornithologists devoted to preserving the crane complain that this commercialization only damages their cause, encouraging the notion that the threatened bird is fictitious, and reducing the chance that its plight will be taken seriously. Tateshina persists, though: every day tour buses drive past the billboard and descend to the town, carrying passengers eager for a glimpse of the legendary creature.

  ***

  And it turns out your love

  Was about as real as a Winter Crane

  —chorus to “Winter Crane,” by Japanese

  salsa/speedcore band The Clicking Mandibles

  (translated from the Japanese)

  ***

  If the Winter Crane exists, it will not, most scientists believe, be found in Tateshina, or for that matter anywhere on Honshu, where agricultural development has resulted in severe habitat loss, but rather on the chain of uninhabited islands that speckle the Japan Sea. Uninhabited doesn’t necessarily mean untouched, as regularly scheduled boats take ecotourists to the islands in search of the Winter Crane and other rare animals. These are day trips; Japanese law prohibits the public from camping or remaining overnight. The only exception made is for the Japanese Ornithological Society, which has established permanent research centers on a number of the islands. Most of the researchers are Japanese, but among them is a single American, ornithologist Richard Bedrosian. He is fluent in Japanese and seems at home there with his colleagues. Bedrosian originally came on a grant from the National Audubon Society to make a comparative study of the American Whooping Crane (Grus Americana) and the Japanese Red-Crowned Crane (Grus japonensis). While there he learned of the search for the controversial Silver-Crested Winter Crane. He has been visiting annually ever since.

  Bedrosian is confident that the bird will be found. “There’s no shortage of anecdotal evidence,” he says. “Plenty of sightings. Then there’s the secondary evidence—droppings and feathers, for example—that we feel fairly sure can be traced to the crane. It’s only a matter of time before we come across a bird or a nest.”

  ***

  What is the call of the Winter Crane? Does it resemble the brassy declaration of Grus americana? Or is it, like the call of its presumed cousin, Grus japonensis, a tremulous woodwind arpeggio, a three-note query? Or something else altogether? There is, surprisingly, no mention of it in the literature, with the exception of the origin myth, where it is simply called “sad.” The crane has been painted, sculpted, described in great detail. We could draw it down to the last feather, but we have yet to hear its voice.

  ***

  The target demographic for Tateshina’s Winter Crane tour is Japanese, elderly, and middle-class; more specifically, active seniors with an interest in Japanese history and legend. The tourists are transported in tall luxury buses equipped with tinted UV-blocking windows, vibrating massage seats, and pretty, white-gloved tour guides wearing three-pointed caps and smart epauletted uniforms that make them look like anime Intergalactic Space Fleet Officers. (By contrast, the budget tours aimed at younger consumers tend to be strictly no-frills, usually packed overnight buses bound for Tokyo Disneyland, Universal Studios Japan, or one of the meticulously replicated European villages—complete with imported foreigners in period dress—that can be found scattered in unlikely spots across the Japanese countryside.)

  The tour, known as the “Winter Crane hike,” is part of a larger package with a variety of options, all presented attractively in photo-illustrated brochures. In addition to visiting Tateshina, tourists can, for instance, fill plastic bottles with the restorative spring water trickling down a mossy fissure in a roadside cliff, the water blessed by the statue of the goddess Kannon a hundred meters above; visit the reconstructed site of the ancient Princess Himiko’s palace; move in hooded raincoats through the dripping caves of Yamaguchi, where blind albino creatures swim in underwater streams; or photograph each other at the Sacred Temple of Seikenji, reputed scene of the monk-scholar Nenjin’s self-immolation (which, grand name notwithstanding, turns out to be nothing more than a broken stone altar encircled by vending machines and a rusted link fence).

  Arriving in Tateshina, the seniors descend and disembark, one after the other. The tour guide will already have stepped off the bus, and waits on the asphalt, smiling, a color-coded pennant on a stick held aloft so no one will get lost or end up following one of the other tours. But these are not doddering old fools. These seniors are, for the most part, alert and purposeful, cameras and binoculars ready. They follow the tour guide in their floppy hats and hiking boots, sturdy, genderless, leather-skinned, zippered pouches bulging from waists, like a special race evolutionarily adapted to the task of stalking the Winter Crane.

  The tour guide ushers them across the parking lot, past the souvenir shops and breaded octopus stands—on the way back they will be given exactly ten minutes to make purchases—and then, lowering her pennant so it won’t hit the branches, leads the way into the forest’s maze of crisscrossing footpaths.

  ***

  The Origin of the Winter Crane

  The Queen of the Moon had everything she might want in her kingdom of ice and snow—everything except for fish. She looked down on Man as he caught and cooked them, and the smell of the fish broiling in salt and bean oil rose up to her kingdom, filling her with envy. So she asked the River God to let her have a fish for her frozen waters, but the God refused. Incensed, the Queen waited until the full moon, when the wind blows the lunar drifts into a circle and the moonlight unfolds its broad path to the world, and then climbed down to a riverbank. As she caught a trout in her trap the River God, who had been secretly watching, rose up in a mighty splash and punished her by changing her into a crane. Her white skin grew into feathers, the rings on her fingers became silvery wing tips, and her crown was transformed into a silver crest.

  “Now you can eat all the trout you like!” he said.

  The Queen begged his forgiveness, stretching her long neck pitifully and flapping her beautiful wings until the God, relenting, said: “You may resume your true form—but only when your kingdom’s light fills the sky; and you may return home—but for only one night each month, when the moon is full.” By day she was condemned to live as a crane, remaining near the river and feeding on its creatures so she would forever be reminded of her misdeed. (In truth, the River God had fallen in love with the Queen, and wanted her bound to his side.)

  ***

  “I guess you could call it an obsession,” Bedrosian admits with a laugh. “But it’s not your typical . . . It’s an obsession that sneaks up on you.”

  ***

  At one time the Winter Crane was a common heraldic symbol. Most famously, it appeared on the coat of arms of feudal baron Hirai Masaie. Blamed for an assassination attempt on the life of regent Toyotomi no Hideyoshi, Masaie was forced to commit ritual suicide, his family was disgraced, and the Winter Crane abruptly vanished from heraldry, the regent having banned its use as a family crest. The crane, it was claimed, had been the identifying mark of the secret society formed by Masaie to topple the government. For years afterward, the Crane Society was rumored to persist, an invisible league of conspirators patiently plotting its coup against the regency. The bird had become synonymous with shame, treachery, and official paranoia. The symbol was later “rehabilitated” under the Tokugawa shogunate, and even underwent a brief vogue: flaunted as a sign of the new shogun’s victory over the former regime, the crane gleamed atop official roofs, and shone silver and white across the gold foil of court panels. But the damage was done: the bird had been darkened in the public mind by mystery and intrigue, and even today this most Japanese of symbols is absent from the crests of virtually all Japanese families.

  ***

  And so the Queen wandered the world’s rivers and streams. One morning, while chasing a frog through tall reeds, she found herself caught in a snare. When the trapper who had laid
this snare came to check on it, he was surprised to see a strange bird thrashing its long wings and snapping desperately at its roped leg until its beak was red with blood. (This is the reason why the Winter Crane has a red beak.) The trapper watched, and experienced an unfamiliar feeling: part pity, and part exultation at the sight of beauty trapped there by his own crafty hand. And in gratitude for this new feeling that he couldn’t name or understand, he let the bird go. It hopped away, graceless in its sudden freedom, then seemed to remember itself and took to the air. A hand shielding his eyes, the trapper stood there following its flight, turning slowly in place as the bird turned in the sky.

  The Queen tried to leave the place, fearing the traps that the man cared for so lovingly, coiled and sleepless things that waited in shadows, patient as snakes. But she found herself returning, watching from above as the man collected his daily catch and took it home to the hut where he lived alone on the forest edge. And she found that she couldn’t leave him, as if she were still caught in the snare and beating her white wings into the dirt.

  So when night fell and moonlight returned her to her true form, she approached his hut in what she told herself must be gratitude for having been freed. The hut was empty; the man was still out trapping in the woods. The Queen entered to wait for him. When he finally returned, he stood gaping at her in the open doorway, his catch squirming in the bag dangling from his hand.

  She told him she was lost and hungry. Once the trapper recovered, he offered to let her share his dinner. They ate pheasant and chestnuts and yams, new tastes that she relished. She devoured her food, ignoring his questions and forgetting, for the moment, her reason for coming. He gave up finally on trying to learn how this strange, pale woman had arrived at his hut. He told her she could remain for the night. When he woke at daybreak, she was gone. The next night she came again; and the next. But each morning he woke alone. The trapper, who had fallen in love with the Queen, begged her one night to live with him as his wife. She agreed, but made him promise two things: first, that he would never ask her where she went during the day or when the moon was full; and, second, that he would never try to follow her.