As I finished, footsteps approached me from behind. I turned to see another member of the women’s hiking group I’d met before. Her purposeful stride and the light in her eyes made me prepare for another impromptu test of my spoken Japanese.
She got right to the point. “You’re a mystery writer?”
“Yes,” I replied in Japanese, “I’m a novelist.”
She pulled out her phone. “May I ask your name?”
When I told her, she typed something on the screen and turned the phone around, revealing the Amazon sales page for my Hiro Hattori novels. “Is this you?”
I smiled. “Yes, it is.”
“Thank you very much!” After a pause she added, “Do you like Japanese mountains?”
At that moment, every word of Japanese I knew went AWOL. I couldn’t even remember the word for “yes.”
After an awkward pause, I stammered, “Hyakumeizan.”
“You’re climbing the hyakumeizan!” She lit up. “I am climbing the hyakumeizan! How many have you climbed?”
“Six. And you? How many?”
She smiled politely. “Ninety-nine, as of today.”
“SUGOI!” (That’s amazing!)
“In August, I will climb the last one. Mount Rishiri, in Hokkaido.”
My limited Japanese had returned, but I desperately wished I spoke the language better. I wanted to tell her how impressed I was with her achievement and to ask if she had any advice for me. I wanted to ask how long the challenge had taken her and which of the mountains she had found most difficult. I wanted to wish her success in Hokkaido, and to congratulate her on completing such a major feat.
I barely had the ability to return her polite goodbye.
She bowed and left to rejoin her group. I felt starstruck as I watched her go. This woman—older than me—had done the very thing I hoped to do, and even though I had barely begun to climb, she treated me like an equal and a friend.
From the summit, I hiked down the far side of Mount Kumano to see Mount Zaō’s famous crater lake. The emerald pool was flanked by smoking vents that filled the air with the scent of rotten eggs.
While taking pictures of the lake, I saw a line of hikers approaching along a nearby ridge. They walked in single file, their gear a splash of brilliant color against the muted red and gray of the volcanic rocks. One of the hikers raised a hand in my direction, and a moment later the entire group broke into frenzied waving.
“Suzan-san! Hello!”
It was the women from the summit, now returning from a hike around the lake.
I waved back, delighted. As they disappeared from view, I took a few more pictures of the lake and then began the climb back up the ridge.
The descent began uneventfully, as horror stories often do. Aglow with joy over meeting the Japanese hikers and filled with the pride of achieving my sixth hyakumeizan summit, I didn’t notice the dangerous rumblings in my belly until the pressure built to painful levels. I increased my pace, far less concerned with the volcano I was walking on than with the imminent, raisin-triggered eruption in my gut.
In my eagerness to share the summit moment with my mother through the trail mix she bought in Sacramento, I overlooked two very important facts:
First, chemotherapy slows digestion and bowel transit time, even after treatments finish, meaning more food stays inside your body and stays in longer than before.
Second, raisins are an excellent natural laxative.
And when raisins do their magic two kilometers from the nearest toilet, on a barren mountainside with nothing large enough to hide behind, “raisin magic” is dark sorcery indeed.
By some not-entirely-minor miracle, I reached the bathroom at the gondola station without staining either the mountain or my . . . reputation.
On the bus ride back to Yamagata, I found myself wishing I could remain in Tōhōku. I loved its snowcapped mountains and longed to see more of them immediately. However, with only two weeks remaining until our first apartment move, I needed to check in with Michael (and the visa lawyer). I planned to bounce into Tokyo for a day or two, catch up with my family, and head back off to the mountains before the summer typhoons arrived.
As it turned out, that was not to be.
Chapter 10
Cuckoos and Chains
June 13–14, 2018
The morning after I returned to Tokyo from Mount Zaō, I woke to the violent hammering of rain against the window and the eerie wail of wind in the balcony railings. Already behind on my climbing schedule, I’d hoped the summer rainy season would hold off a little longer, but the rain outside suggested the typhoons had now arrived.
The rain continued for over a week, and every day my anxiety grew.
You’ll never finish the climbs in time, my inner voice repeated.
On the morning of June 13, with driving rain still coming down, I jumped out of bed, switched on my computer, and panic-planned another climb. Ironically, the only hyakumeizan peaks far enough away to escape the typhoon, close enough to one another to justify the cost of extended travel, and with buses running to the trailheads in early June were in Tōhōku—where I’d been the week before.
Two hours later, I sat on a shinkansen headed north through the pouring rain with a hastily packed suitcase at my feet. The apartment buildings of Tokyo soon gave way to single-family homes and then to the deep-green rice fields of the countryside. White herons stood in the flooded paddies, gazing into the distance as if contemplating life.
My thoughts drifted back to the first few climbs. I wasn’t making the clear, dramatic progress I had hoped for. One month in, anxiety still tied me in knots at every turn. If I wasn’t afraid of missing a bus, I was worried about falling to my death. If I wasn’t fretting about failing to reach my ultimate goal, I was frantic about immigration denying my visa a second time. And beneath it all, I was terrified my cancer might come back.
The difficulties were piling up. I felt my anxiety rise.
Cutting the anchors didn’t change anything. You were foolish to think it would. Instead of letting my inner voice push me into an anxious spiral, I asked myself, If you died tomorrow, what would you wish you had done differently today?
I watched the rice fields speeding by outside. A jet-black crow with outstretched wings swooped down from a tree and circled over the paddies before winging off toward the distant mountains.
In that moment there was nothing I would change.
Is that true, or just what you think you’re supposed to feel right now?
It was true. Right then I felt no need to grieve over the parts of my life I could not change.
Anxiety reminded me about my visa issues and the threat that my cancer might return, but neither of those was a thing that I could alter. I had wasted so much time and energy fretting about things I could not control. I hoped this year would teach me how to stop.
* * *
The Mount Nasu (那須岳) volcanic complex sits on the border between Tochigi and Fukushima Prefectures, northeast of Tokyo, in