Contents
Title
Dedication
Copyright
Kirishima
Disturbed Weather
Tropical Depression
Upwelling
Feeder Bands
Organized Convection
The Eye
Landfall
Glossary of Japanese Words
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Fog Island Mountains
By Michelle Bailat-Jones
For Claude & Emiline
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.
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Fog Island Mountains
Copyright © 2014 by Michelle Bailat-Jones
Author photo © Danielle Libine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations for reviews or critical articles.
ISBN: 9781618031112
Kirishima
“A land where the morning sun shines directly, a land where the rays of the evening sun are brilliant. This is a most excellent place.”
—Kojiki, Japan’s “Record of Ancient Matters”
Kirishima
A small chain of volcanic mountains that dot the southern half of Japan’s island of Kyūshū. The chain is named after its second-highest peak, Mt. Kirishima.
Kirishima
The Fog Island Mountains
DISTURBED WEATHER
So this is our town, our little Komachi, this little cluster of businesses and houses settled into streets carved out of this volcanic soil, and crisscrossing each other, as we do, as our lives intersect from business to house to supermarket to hospital. And here, today, the wind has already begun to blow, a warning of the approaching typhoon. We are used to these storms, even if they have predicted this one will be big. They say this often, and often they are wrong, although I prefer to be careful, I will tape my windows and buy extra batteries for my flashlights. Because when they do hit, when they strike down on our clumsy structures and on our inept and inelegant lives, these winds do not show much mercy.
Until this great wind comes, the weather will be unstable, as we always are, not needing the excuse of pressure changes or ocean currents. We will watch the sticky, drizzly rain, the green clouds and gusts of wind that hit hard but do not build, not yet, these pre-winds will blow through town and leave us all hanging, waiting, leave us in an uncomfortable stillness, a trapped moment of matte imasu. Yes, waiting. This waiting the hardest part, and here is Alec Chester, one half of the subject of my poem, of this story that I must tell—don’t worry about me yet, we will get to me soon—and he is watching through a window, watching out to avoid looking in, watching to calm his waiting.
There out the window, a girl, a little one, and he is watching her walk from a car at the edge of the parking lot, crossing over toward this building where he sits in a room—yes, still waiting. And she is coming to the hospital entrance below him, struggling against the rising wind, holding down the unruly panels of her school uniform skirt as it twists and puffs, disobeys, here a flash of cotton panties, the pale sticks of her legs. Her other hand is gripped tight to her father’s but the man doesn’t notice her struggle and Alec wants to knock against the glass of this examination room window, wants to slide open the locked panels and stick his head out into the sky and cup his hands around his mouth to shout, Hey, over there! Yes, you! Help her, she’s yours to take care of.
“This is difficult, Alec.” So says Shingo Ishikawa, a doctor in our mountain town.
“Just tell me.” Alec’s glance now pulled from the window, now back in the room, his time for waiting over.
Ishikawa is closing a file folder, sealing Alec’s illness between the pressed stock of its hard yellow pulp, and all Alec can do is look at the man’s ragged fingernails, at the red inflamed skin of this doctor’s nail beds—how has he never noticed this nervous habit, in all the years of their friendship in this small town—but Ishikawa is stalling, is trying for more time. He’d hoped to wait for Kanae, he says, he wants to discuss this news with both of them because, and this he does not say out loud, a couple should face these words together. This is what he thinks, and what Alec feels, too, but Alec can only frown and say that she was supposed to meet him here, in this room. She was supposed to do this waiting with him, and he wonders if her presence here could prevent what is about to come.
“I don’t know where she is, maybe she forgot.” This said in frustration.
A too-quick response from Ishikawa. “She is nervous, women are fragile.”
Oh, what a statement, made worse as neither man believes it, this predictable phrase meant to comfort men with diseases and injuries, a way to trick them into thinking they are still in control, and Alec nods, only because he doesn’t want to argue with his friend, this man to whom he has taught English over the years in our small town. A friendship based on the translation of thought and idea back and forth and forth and back again, Japanese to English, English to Japanese, meaning faithfully replicated with a new sound, meaning sometimes, often, inevitably shifted. This is their friendship, a friendship based on rewording every phrase each man has ever said. But he knows, yes, our Alec knows, that Kanae is not fragile, compared to most, but especially compared to him, she has always been the stronger of the two.
“Okay,” says Alec. “Okay.” Again and again, he says this word okay.
Then a pause. A glance. A twist of hands. Those ragged nail beds.
Then, “Just tell me. Tell me. I know it’s not good news.”
So Ishikawa has no choice but to nod and pronounce a single word, a word that Alec knew he would hear but hoped he would not, and Ishikawa does not say the word again because once is always enough, and instead he begins to gesture, he circles up and around, cutting through the air of this doctor’s office, over his own body with those angry hangnails and delicate fingers, and he is saying that it has spread already, that it has moved to other places in Alec’s body. He is saying they believe it is everywhere.
Now we are watching Alec carefully, because his face is blank but his body has understood, and this is so curious, so horrific and sublime, that we can’t help but look for his shoulders to tighten, his elbows to press against his sides and his hands to come together against his belly into little claws. Hands that want to conceal the original birthplace of this cancer’s everywhere, wanting to cover it and hush it, to batten down the hatches because isn’t this what a person does when a storm is about to hit? Don’t we seal ourselves up and keep an eye out for leaks?
“I do not want to say anything else until we have more information.” This Ishikawa is a humanist of the most brutal variety. “I don’t want to give you false hope.”
Alec, still flexing his claws, is looking at the white buttons of Ishikawa’s lab coat, what courage, he is thinking, to give this information without breaking eye contact, because he—Alec—could never do this, could never be so categorical; he is thinking of his students, of his own stock phrases of “study harder” and “you’ll get it, just spend more time.” And he wonders then why he hasn’t told Mrs. Nishikokubaru, his worst student, an absolute failure at forming English words and sentences, why hasn’t he told her to give up, to get out, the whole thing is pointless, stop wasting my time, find a new hobby. Could he do this?
Over to the door, where Ishikawa turns and says in E
nglish, a testament to their friendship, “I am…I am so sorry, Alec.”
What a thing to say but Alec is nodding, yes, thank you, yes, but ashamed now, burning with shame and looking at the floor because he has never managed to help Ishikawa lose that dreadful accent.
Alone now, Alec is back to checking the window, the little girl nowhere to be seen and presumably the hospital has taken her up into its maze of healing, and so he lets out a little breath, unclenches those belly-covering claws, closes his eyes and knows that she will be safe, she will be fine. Now he opens his eyes and must reach for one of his own children, his favorite—shhh, no parent has a favorite—but wait, first quickly again Kanae, his absent wife, dialing her number, listening to the ring, no answer, where could she be, why is she late? So now Megumi, his oldest, and while the telephone beeps and hums in his ear he is wondering again about that word “everywhere” and whether he will be able to pronounce it, whether he will be able to let it inside his mouth and form upon his tongue.
“Dad, I’m running out the door. I’ve got five minutes.”
Such joy at the sound of her voice, this is his Meg, his artist-and-a-teacher-on-the-side, whose work is becoming famous on our island, her paintings with their uneasy colors and burnished silver backgrounds, her thickly painted-over fabrics and those hints of volcanic ridges and gauzy steam. He asks her about her mother, has she seen her, did they have plans? Tomorrow, Meg says, impatient—his Meg is almost always impatient, how has this happened, she was the happiest, the most exuberant of children—she needs to know if Kanae is coming to see her tomorrow.
“Is she coming to Jun’s Kendo match or not?” This said nearly in anger.
“If she said she would come, she’ll come.”
Alec’s fingers on the phone have gone tight not just at this questioning of Kanae’s promise but at the mention of his grandchild, he pulls at them with his other hand, he relaxes them with effort and pictures his Jun, this bastard child, an unnamed little man with a round belly and those chestnut eyes, this happy toddler from an unknown union, a secret his daughter is keeping from them all. It hurts, even today, even with this everywhere scraping at his vocal chords, Alec is thinking he has a right to know who Jun is, and a right to know something of the man Megumi allowed inside her body, allowed to create life in her and bring that life into their family, but these are words that cannot be spoken, words as dangerous as Dr. Ishikawa’s “everywhere” and “false hope.” So they are passing promises back and forth for a future visit, they are saying good-bye for now, both silenced with their harbored secrets and Alec now panicking to leave this room, to exit our rural hospital, to get himself out into the wind and the gathering clouds, to find his Kanae. Seconds later he is standing at the nursing station, making his appointment with Nurse Uchida who is also one of his students, as so many of us are in Komachi, and she will be kind to him, I think, I hope—and, yes, alas, Alec is going to need her kindness.
* * *
But here she is on a mountain road, Kanae Chester, we know exactly where to find her as Alec’s appointment is about to start because she is a woman who keeps her promises, she is a woman driving down a badly tarmacked road and ready to join her husband at the hospital. Her body still overheated from the thermal baths at Kurokawa, her ears still ringing with the laughter of her friends, these women who join her each Thursday for a soak in the volcanic waters, her face now tired out and sagging from the work of forming itself into a mask that would hide her worry from her old friends. She is pulling into the parking lot and she sees that little girl mistreated by the gathering winds and she wonders what this young girl’s father could be thinking about that he doesn’t notice his daughter’s one-armed resistance, but Kanae doesn’t see Alec at the window and he does not see her, and it doesn’t matter because she is already turning her car around and driving back up the same slick gray road, back up to Kurokawa Onsen and back into the hot water that numbs as it burns.
Kanae’s turn to stare out a window—counting the tips of the pine trees along the ridge of the mountain and thinking how lovely is this place, how lucky she has been to live her life amidst such beauty, and to have been such a beauty; she is not thinking this last thought but it is a secret part of her, one of the reasons for the long straight line of her sixty-four years of happiness.
Alec is sixty-seven years old.
Alec is sick.
Alec is going to leave her behind.
Quickly out of the water again and back into her car, heading off this time to fix her broken promise but she doesn’t get far, she is just as soon pulling the car into a viewpoint and then dialing, then listening, and then she is snapping shut the little clamshell of her cell phone, she is thinking, now I am sure, because this is why she has called him, this is why she’s listened to his voice, his voice after his appointment, this is why she hasn’t said a word, because his hello was enough, because now she is sure, and now she is nudging the car back out onto the road, repositioning the car in her own lane and ignoring an angry honk from an oncoming driver. What matters is the speed of her car and its position in the lane, what matters is the beat of the wipers and the hiss of hot wind against her car doors, what matters is driving carefully down a mountain road.
Kanae turns the radio on, she turns it off, she checks her rear view mirror, and with a breath she leans into the steering wheel, bearing down on the accelerator, faster and faster, following this road away from Kurokawa, driving blind, driving with only one thought—where can she stop—because hers is a jerky anxious flight, a flight of pauses and indecision. And here it is, this small noodle shop on the backside of the mountain, a cabin for tourists when the season is right, but thankfully empty tonight, when the season is wrong. Kanae pushes against the glass door and the bells jingle above her head and the owner is shouting irasshaimase! and the smells of the oil and the broth and the wheat of the noodles bear down on her and she is ashamed to feel so relieved.
Another window to distract her beside the table she has selected, and outside the starlings are gathering into a cloud against the purple sky, and they swoop and vibrate in the hot air. There are two birds out of sync with the undulating mass, and she watches, curious, as the birds fly in figures, in funnels and pressed circles, in shapes with blurred edges. She cannot think of the last time she sat in a restaurant by herself, and this thought leads to another so she wonders what else, what other phenomena has she missed by always having someone to keep her company, and now, here it is, Kanae’s intuition expressed in the movement of her hand to her cheek, in the unsteady brush of a finger toward her ear—she has understood, she quickly closes her eyes.
Out of the darkness she hears, “Endo-san?”
She is turning, opening her eyes, no one has called her this in nearly forty years, not since her wedding, not since the perfect transformation she achieved when she agreed to exchange her family name for the foreign-sounding name of Chester, and so she blinks, she doesn’t recognize the man standing at her table. He can tell.
“Your old neighbor, it’s me . . . Fumi.”
Oh yes, Fumikaze, she says, she can see him now, those watery eyes, the long bone of his nose, she is smiling—how is she smiling—but he smiles back at her, is reaching for the chair opposite and laughing at this unexpected encounter and Kanae keeps her lips stretched, bares her teeth, but she is out of step with his delight, she is watching him from behind the other side of a glass, a thin window settled in the air between them, on his side the joy of running into an old friend, on hers the escape from Alec’s appointment, the sound of Alec’s voice on her cell phone, and the future she glimpsed when she closed her eyes.
“What are you doing in Komachi?”
“Just business. I can’t believe it’s you, you’re the only person I would have liked to see here and . . . here you are.”
“You wrote me lovely letters.” She is thinking of the blue paper, the childish stickers and drawings which decorated his letters so many years ago when his famil
y moved away. “I thought you would become an artist.”
A memory now on the glass between them, images of their first meeting fifty-five years before when his family moved onto her lonely street, and a stroll in the evening as their parents spoke together for the first time, and an argument between Fumi and his older brothers, settled hastily as Kanae appeared, and then the fireflies rising up as the sun goes down, bleating through the darkness, and Fumi’s hands, Kanae’s hands, outstretched, together, capturing the creatures and locking them into little glass jars to make a lantern that throbs with light until the insects have no more air and begin to die.
From his side of the glass, Fumikaze is telling her about his family, that his mother is still alive, that his father has passed away, that his brothers have moved up north with their families, that their children are spread around Japan and around the world, and Kanae hears him on her side of the glass and sees that his hair is only mildly gray, that he has aged well, that he wants to hear her own life story and so she gives it, ignoring the ring of the cell phone in her purse, ignoring the white tips of her fingernails as she grips the edge of the table to keep herself from answering that phone, from hearing Alec’s voice again.
“You have a family, then?”
“Three children. They are all still on Kyūshū, but none of them live in Komachi.”
“Grandchildren?”
“Only one. You?” What matters is listening to this man’s story.
Watch the shimmer on the glass between them, watch it waver like it might suddenly vanish. “No. I traveled so much. I never married.”
Another memory then, an awkward kiss in the backyard beneath the tree that straddled the line dividing their properties, and the final letters they wrote when Fumi almost told her how he felt and Kanae understood anyway and told him how she felt, which wasn’t the same, and then there were no more letters. But now too many years have passed for this to matter so they are back to nothing-talk again, of nieces and travel and Kanae making empty compliments about his traveler’s existence and Fumikaze growing outwardly embarrassed but inwardly pleased, and working himself up to the one question that matters and Kanae helping him, finally, needing to mention Alec, to somehow bring him to this table, her only way of saying sorry for leaving him alone at his appointment.
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