I have always been afraid of the things I love.
Afraid I wasn’t good enough. Afraid I would fail. Afraid my failure would disappoint the people I love and that they wouldn’t love me anymore.
From childhood, I always chose the safest path to any destination. I followed every rule to the letter. I feared the consequences of rebellion. As an adult, I clung to safety, terrified that pursuing my dreams would only leave me broke and brokenhearted.
I loved the mountains but lived in the city. I loved to write, but my fear that it wouldn’t provide a stable income drove me onto the path my father chose (and for similar reasons): I became a lawyer and practiced law.
I had wanted to climb Mount Fuji since I first saw a photograph of the mountain when I was a pudgy, nearsighted, clumsy child. But I knew, despite the siren song of Fuji’s snowcapped cone, that such an iconic mountain lay impossibly far beyond my abilities.
Instead, I devoured every issue of National Geographic magazine, fingers caressing the vivid photographs of glowing glaciers and snowy peaks. In college, I blew my entertainment budget on mountaineering books and travelogues. My friends fawned over movie stars, but my heroes were Reinhold Messner, Tenzing Norgay, and Junko Tabei (the first woman to stand on the summit of Mount Everest).
Yet even as I imagined the exhilaration of standing atop Denali or K2, I always knew I would never dare to climb them . . . until a nearly-disastrous trip to Japan in 2015 inspired a burning desire to see what would happen if, just for once, I listened to my hopes and not my fears.
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After that trip in 2015, I remembered a mountaineering book called Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Famous Mountains of Japan), written by Japanese mountaineer Kyūya Fukada. The book became an instant classic in Japan, and since its original release in 1964, it has inspired generations of hikers to climb the 100 mountains on Fukada’s list. The mountains are not difficult by mountaineering standards—many can be climbed in a single day—but for serious Japanese hikers, climbing the hyakumeizan is a major life achievement.
I originally read Fukada’s book in college, but bought a new copy in 2015. As I read about the beautiful, wild mountains he described, my lifelong love of reading about adventure ripened into a compelling need to climb these mountains for myself.
My emotions vacillated between excitement and abject terror.
What was I thinking? I had a job. I had responsibilities. I was wildly out of shape.
And yet, something inside me believed that I could do it. Not just climb, but face my fears. Rise to the physical challenges and finally answer the siren song of the mountains I loved so dearly.
My father let his need for safety and security cage him in. He lived, and died, without ever breaking past his fears.
I did not want to spend my life in my father’s chains.
In June of 2017, I made the decision: I was going to climb the hyakumeizan—but not the way Japanese hikers do, as a long-term rite of passage.
I would climb them all in a single year.
The physical and logistical challenges were daunting. Few people—and no Western woman over 45—had ever climbed the hyakumeizan in a year, and I was a middle-aged, overweight woman who courted disaster even hiking down a single mountain. To make it happen, I would need to suspend my law practice (which paid my family’s bills), obtain notoriously tricky visas for myself and my husband Michael, move to Japan, and execute a year-long expedition in a country whose language I barely spoke. That, in addition to climbing 100 mountains, more than 30 of which are active volcanoes and several of which kill hikers every year.
“Terrifying” didn’t begin to describe the emotions this inspired.
And yet, it was also a chance to shatter the shackles of my old, “safe” life, to overcome my fears of risk and failure, and to experience the incredible sights that had made my heart sing since that awkward child first fell in love with Mount Fuji in the pages of National Geographic magazine.
Terrified or not, I was going to try.
Chapter 1
Victory—and Misery—on Misen
June 2015
I fell in love with climbing mountains the day one almost killed me.
In June 2015, my son Christopher was a university sophomore majoring in Japanese language and completing a three-month study abroad in Kyoto, the former capital of Japan. He invited me to visit him in the country he had grown to love, where he also planned to live after graduation.
I loved Japan myself—I majored in Asian studies at Tufts University before attending law school and pursuing a “safe” career in law. By 2015 I had also written three critically acclaimed mystery novels set in 16th-century Kyoto, even though I had never been to Asia. Too scared to make the 10-hour flight, I did my extensive research in books and through interviews with contacts in Japan.
Only when Christopher asked me to visit did I finally summon the courage to white-knuckle my way across the Pacific to the country I had studied, and adored, for more than three decades.
Near the end of my time in Japan, we spent the night on Miyajima, an island off the coast of Hiroshima that I’d wanted to visit since seeing a picture of Itsukushima Shrine’s Great Torii in National Geographic magazine when I was nine years old. The enormous vermilion Shintō gate stands 15 meters high. When the tide comes in around its base, the “floating gate” is among Japan’s most memorable and iconic sights.
The shrine sits directly in front of sacred Mount Misen (弥山) (535 meters), Miyajima’s highest mountain. In 806, a Japanese priest named Kōbō Daishi (also known as Kūkai) spent 100 days meditating on Mount Misen and lit a sacred eternal flame in a temple near the summit. This sacred fire was later used to kindle the eternal flame at the World War II memorial in Hiroshima Park. I desperately wanted to see Kōbō Daishi’s flame, which had burned for more than 1,000 years, but knew my middle-aged, overweight body couldn’t handle a two-kilometer climb up ancient steps to the temple near the mountain’s peak.
However, the Miyajima Ropeway carried visitors from the base of Mount Misen to Shishiiwa Observatory, just half an hour’s hike below the summit—and a half-hour climb, I thought I might just manage.
At the ropeway, Christopher and I faced a decision: Should we ride the gondola round-trip or buy a one-way ticket up and hike back down? My son suggested the round-trip ride, but riding most of the way to the top struck me as “cheating” on the climb, so I persuaded him to ride one way and hike back down the mountain on the trail.
“It will be fun,” I promised. “An adventure.”
He glanced at the overcast sky but didn’t argue.
We started up a well-marked earthen trail punctuated by flights of steep stone stairs. Shifting mist obscured the path ahead. The smell of the surrounding pines, combined with the scents of earth and mist, made my spirit sing despite the way my thighs burned from the unaccustomed exercise.
Signs on the path informed us that the trip to the summit would take about 30 minutes, but I suspected we would need a little more. In fact, it took me 35 minutes just to reach the Eternal Fire Hall, which sits in a clearing on the mountain’s shoulder. Swirls of mist drifted through the clearing as I approached the wooden worship hall. I felt the mountain’s holiness—a peace and stillness in my spirit that, for once, had silenced all my fears.
The eternal flame burned on an altar at the back of the tiny hall. Around it, rows of candles flickered, kindled from the holy fire by worshippers who climbed Mount Misen’s slopes.
After viewing the sacred flame, we continued toward the summit. The roughhewn steps were slick with mist. The lack of handrails and the dizzying drop-off