I hiked around the tree-ringed lake, blinking in the glare of sunlight off the fresh, clean snow, and found it hard to believe that it was June. The perfect winter wonderland of pristine snow and deep-green pines made my heart sing with joy.
Two months before I was lying in bed, so sick and weak and poisoned that I understood how it felt to die. Now I marched with confidence over fluffy snow beneath a deep blue sky, inhaling air that smelled impossibly fresh and clean. My chest, though often sensitive and achy, felt as if it had mostly healed, and I loved the way my shirts fit so much better than they had before my surgery. The dramatic reversal of fortune seemed impossible, but it was real.
I stared at the rows of snowcapped peaks rising up on the horizon and wanted to shout with happiness and gratitude. I felt as if I might explode if I didn’t let the emotions out, but also knew a screaming foreigner might cause a panic—so I kept my joy inside.
At the summit, an older Japanese couple offered to use my phone to take my picture with the enormous marker pole. I offered to reciprocate, but the husband pulled a full-sized tripod from his backpack, grinned, and set it up.
These two had come prepared.
My respect for their preparedness increased five minutes later, when they joined me on the observation platform and broke out a four-course lunch, complete with twenty-ounce cans of Asahi beer.
I suddenly felt far less satisfied with my croque monsieur and apple Danish.
Another couple arrived at the summit and handed out celebratory honey-lemon candies to everyone, including me. As we exchanged the customary greetings and commentary on the weather (“Very nice!”) and the view (“So lovely! Wow!”), we were joined by a silver-haired man wearing business slacks and black leather loafers. He had a large, expensive camera around his neck. Anywhere else, this might have raised some eyebrows. In Japan, it merely triggered another chorus of “Where are you from?” and “Wow, the weather is so nice today.”
The man in the loafers asked how I heard about Mount Hachimantai, and I told him I was climbing the hyakumeizan. As usual, I omitted “in a year” because Japanese hikers regard the 100 Famous Mountains as more than just a physical challenge and did not understand my compulsion to finish them within a stated time.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “How many have you climbed so far?”
I raised my right hand, fingers splayed. “Today is number five.”
As usual, my answer caused hilarity, but when the laughter ended, the man in the loafers told me, earnestly, that the hyakumeizan were difficult, important mountains, and that he wished me great success with all my climbs.
After lunch, I hiked back to the visitor center and arrived two hours before the bus was scheduled to depart. I wandered slowly through the gift shop, killing time. Near the back, I found a rack of large-brimmed, floppy hats with adjustable chinstraps and the words “Over the Mountain” embroidered on the front. I bought a tan one, put it on, and went outside to wait for the bus, feeling snazzy in my new hiking hat.
A few minutes later I received a text from my good friend Laurie, saying her beloved elderly cat Louise had died. My heart—so light with joy from the snow and summit—felt a painful tug toward the place I’d once called home. For the first time on my journey, I felt lonely, severed from the friends I’d left behind. I didn’t miss California, but it hurt that I couldn’t jump in my car and race to Laurie’s house to give her a hug and share her grief.
Before I moved to Japan, I hadn’t spent much time considering what my life would look like when I finished the hundred climbs. Now I wondered if the friends I loved would be my friends at all when the year was through.
As I texted with Laurie, doing my best to share her pain despite the miles between us, I had no answers for the greater questions: who I would be and what my life would look like in a year. I also knew that fretting would not help. The answers to my questions lay on the far side of 11 months and 95 more mountains.
And the only way to get there was to climb.
Chapter 9
No Raisins on the Summit
June 5, 2018
The morning after Hachimantai, I left the hotel at 6 a.m. to catch the earliest shinkansen to Sendai, the largest city in the Tōhōku region. As the train left Morioka and picked up speed, I realized the first few climbs had already run together in my memory. I didn’t want this year to devolve into a series of “check the box” achievements, devoid of meaning beyond a scoreboard tally. No matter how many mountains I climbed, or who I was, or where I ended up when the year was through, I would have failed completely if I had no lasting memories of the places I had been.
As Morioka shrank into the distance, I resolved to climb in a way that would imprint each mountain on my heart and mind. I would treat this year like a treasure box and fill it with a wealth of memories—wealth that no one and nothing could take away.
From Sendai, I took an express train west into neighboring Yamagata Prefecture and then a bus to Mount Zaō (蔵王山), a volcanic mountain group whose highest summit, Mount Kumano (1,841 meters), was my target for the day. Like Hakkōda, the climb to Zaō’s high point also required a secondary climb, in this case, 1,736-meter Mount Jizō.
As the Zaō Ropeway whisked me to the trailhead, I noted that the slopes—a popular ski resort in winter—were completely free of snow.
The climb from the upper ropeway station to the top of Mount Jizō took less than half an hour, up a trail of wooden steps with scrubby pines on either side. I took a photo with the marker even though the summit didn’t “count” toward my overall total. Jizō was a mountain, and I had climbed it, and I wanted proof.
While walking along the rocky alpine ridge that connected Mount Jizō with Mount Kumano, I wondered how many total mountains I would climb before my year was up. When I made my plans, I thought each hyakumeizan climb would involve a single mountain. Since I had to climb extras, I wanted to count them all, but that wasn’t the way the hyakumeizan worked.
Cairns of carefully balanced stones rose up at intervals along the trail to Mount Kumano. As I reached each one, I added a stone to the pile and said a prayer for someone I knew and loved. I felt so grateful that I had the chance to live and the strength to climb; I wished everyone was similarly blessed.
A weathered, wooden Shintō shrine stands on the top of Mount Kumano, along with a summit marker and a tall stone obelisk engraved with Japanese calligraphy. When I arrived, a group of Japanese women in colorful hiking gear were clustered around the obelisk, debating the proper pronunciation of the characters running down the charcoal-colored stone.
When I said hello, one of the women turned and spoke to me in Japanese. “Hello! Are you a student?”
I shook my head. “A novelist.”
We chatted in a combination of Japanese and charades as the rest of her group began walking down the trail. A few minutes later she said goodbye and hurried off to join them.
Alone on the summit, I sat on a dusty stone and looked across the valley toward the rows of snowcapped mountains in the distance. I opened Blue and searched for the bag of trail mix my mother bought in the hospital the night I had my biopsy. I hadn’t wanted it that night, but had brought it with me to Japan. I hadn’t eaten it because I worried that I would miss my mom even more when it was gone, but trail mix goes stale faster than memories. The time had come to eat it.
An enormous golden butterfly fluttered across the summit and came to rest on Blue, just inches from my knee. It fluttered its wings and spread them wide, at rest. Its presence reminded me that the people I loved were with me, and always would be, even if I couldn’t see