He went straight up the slope to the top and began slowly climbing the stairs to the shrine, noticing along the way that the village had not been totally destroyed. The two or three houses closest to the peak had survived, as if under the shrine god's protection. And he found some solace in the fact that the giant cedars on both sides of the staircase remained.
A drum sounded to signal the beginning of a dance offering, recalling for him the summer of his first year of junior high school, the morning after his first arrival in Togakushi to stay with the Tendohs, when the sound of the drum had for some reason frightened him. Now, so many years later, each beat filled him with inexpressible emotion.
He reached the top of the stairs just as the shrine maidens were preparing to come on stage. Four young girls in white tunics over crimson pantaloons, wearing gold crowns and shaking sacred bells in each hand, came across the boardwalk and around the veranda. When they had performed their ritual worship in front of the shrine and taken their places at the corners of the stage, a flute began to play a peaceful tune. The drum beat out a monotonous rhythm and the girls shook their bells in time to it, as they spread their long sleeves and began a serene dance.
He had stopped, his eyes fixed on the stage, thoughts crossing time and space to see Taki once more as a child on that same stage. She had been far more graceful and beautiful than any of the other dancers. No one could compete with her for beauty as a dancer. The dance was usually monotonous, but it never seemed so when she was performing it. The other three dancers had always seemed merely to be following her lead. Taki herself would be in a sort of trance. She had once told Tachibana that she forgot everything when she was dancing.
And now he had been told she was dead. In spite of himself, he began to cry, and the shrine maidens on the stage became but a haze.
More than thirty years had passed since that last visit. Tachibana had thought that what had happened to him at Togakushi had been locked tight away in the recesses of his consciousness, along with his war memories. In the mid 1950s he had gotten his position at the university, and in 1957 he had begun a calm, uneventful marriage. He had gone neither against the trends of the times nor with them, but had spent his whole life in mediocrity. He and his wife had never had any children, probably because of the malaria he had contracted, and she had died just before their silver wedding anniversary.
Shortly before her death, she had expressed pity for him, but when he asked her why, her response had been only a faint smile. After her funeral, he had recalled the incident and wondered why it had never occurred to him before that perhaps she had known—while pretending not to—that a part of his heart was elsewhere.
* * *
The golf-course meeting was held at the largest hotel in Togakushi, the Koshimizu Plateau Hotel, a smart, three-story, North-European style building facing West Peak across the Togakushi Plateau, splendidly located with the Togakushi Ski Slope on Mt. Kenashi right behind it.
The promoters spent from 3 P.M. to about 4:30 P.M. explaining their aims. Then came a reception starting shortly after five. July had just begun, and there were not yet many visitors to the Togakushi Plateau. Toward dusk, it began to look like rain, but there were no complaints about the weather. Guests who had disparaged the hotel as a place way off in the mountains at which they could not expect a decent meal were more than satisfied by the feast of top-quality beef dishes, as well as fresh crab and shrimp from the Sea of Japan.
Shimizu introduced Tachibana to one local person of influence after another. Tachibana exchanged perfunctory greetings with all of them. But one person bothered him a little, a man introduced as the head of the Takeda Firm. Glancing at his face as they exchanged cards, Tachibana had the feeling they had met before, though the name, Kisuke Takeda, did not ring a bell. He was a man of strong features and solid build, a little over sixty, with his scalp visible through thinning hair, neatly parted on the side.
Something must have struck Takeda as well, because he looked strangely at Tachibana, and his hand seemed to be shaking as he received the card. But his greeting itself was perfunctory, which seemed to indicate that he did not, after all, think they had met. At the time, Tachibana thought they must have been mistaking each other for someone else, or had perhaps just met somewhere in passing. But later he found himself unable to forget Takeda. Something about the man kept on bothering him. From time to time during the party, he glanced at Takeda, often to find that Takeda was looking at him. When their eyes met, both of them would quickly look aside. But after several such incidents, Takeda suddenly disappeared from the party.
"Is something the matter?" asked Shimizu, coming over to fill Tachibana's wine glass. "You don't look like you're having a good time."
"Oh yes, I am," replied Tachibana, putting on a smile. "By the way, who exactly is that gentleman, Kisuke Takeda?"
"I say, you do have an awfully good eye, don't you? That fellow is right at the center of the financial world of northern Nagano Prefecture. He's got especially strong ties to Representative Shishido. Fact is, Shishido is reluctant to show himself at the head of this golf course business, so he's using Takeda as a sort of front. They say this Takeda has a lot of power behind the scenes in Nagano politics. We'd better get him on our side, too."
"I see," said Tachibana absentmindedly, gazing in the direction in which Takeda had disappeared.
At about nine that morning, five co-eds got off a bus at the Imai bus stop. They had come from Nagoya the day before last, and had been staying at a tourist house in Kinasa, shut in by the rain. Now they were finally out to take the hike they had been waiting for, though they had been told that the mountain trail might still be impassable. They wanted at least to get far enough to see the Demoness Maple's Cave.
After walking for twenty minutes from Imai, they came to the Ashitagahara information sign, located on a rise that gave a good view of the scattered houses of upland farmers. The sign said that the Demoness Maple had use to come here every morning because it reminded her of her native Kyoto. Another twenty minutes or so beyond that, walking uphill along a narrow farm road, they reached the Arakura Campground, on a pleasant plateau surrounded by white birch and larch trees. Normally it would have been covered with tents and lively with crowds of young people, but they had all been chased away by the three straight days of rain. After a brief rest in the office at the campground entrance, the five girls started out for the Demoness Maple's Cave. Just two-hundred meters along the trail was a sign which told them that this place was known as "Poison Plain" because it was here that the Demoness Maple had served poisoned sake to the enemy general, Taira no Koremochi.
"Plain, huh? Must be talking about you, Miyuki," said the girl first in line, making a malicious pun as she started out again. She took one step and fell down with a little scream.
"See? Say things like that and you get what's coming to you," said the leader, coming over to help her up.
"Over there, over there," whispered the girl, pointing at something as she reached for the hand offered.
Just twenty or thirty meters ahead of them, against the base of a thick tree, a man was sprawled as if dead drunk, in a sitting position on the bare ground. He was dressed in a well-tailored summer suit, but it had gotten all wet and hadn't had time to dry out.
The leader gasped. One by one, the other girls froze in their tracks as they reached the spot. Taking strength in numbers, though, they did not flee.
"He's dead, isn't he?" whispered one of them.
"He can't be!"
"Ssh, he'll hear you!"
But the man could not hear them. His hearing, along with all of his other senses, had long since ceased to function.
"He is dead!" declared