by Amanda Huggins

Beth and James arrived in the Japanese Alps after yet another petty argument. It had started before they left Tokyo and then worsened when they reached Shinshimashima train station and were unable to agree on their onward bus route. When they finally found the right bus for Kamikochi, a previous disagreement resurfaced regarding their accommodation. Beth had wanted to book a hotel; James had insisted on the log cabins at the edge of the campsite. He’d won in the end, but when she was tired and hungry she started grizzling about his choice again.

Beth read in their guide book that there was a healthy population of bears in Kamikochi, but no one they spoke to at the campsite had seen one. That evening, they sat outside in the half-light of dusk and listened to the macaques chattering in the trees. Beth couldn’t settle, sure there were bears all around them, convinced they would come down to the cabins in search of food in the night, that they would rummage through the remains of barbecues and tear the lids off bins. When they went to bed, their hair scented with woodsmoke from the camp fire, she lay awake until the early hours, listening out for the slightest noise, watching the moon through the skylight.

She thought about getting up, considered taking James’s mobile from the shelf at the side of his futon so she could check his messages and calls. But Beth knew she had to start trusting him again, that she couldn’t spend her whole life suspecting him, searching his pockets, monitoring his phone, inventing scenarios in her head. He told her he had ended things with Tanya, that he wanted them to try again, that now it was up to her. So, she had several choices. She could believe him, or make plans to leave him, or spend every waking hour worrying about where he was and what he was doing. Or she could do all of those things in turn, as she had been doing for the past two months. It was easy for James to say that it was “up to her”. It was and it wasn’t. Her heart was broken, but she still loved him. He seemed to think she could click her fingers and forgive and forget, that they could move on and not look back. Beth knew it was too soon to forgive him, yet for the next three weeks she was determined to try to forget. She didn’t want to spoil the trip they’d been planning for over two years.

---

When they walked across to the café for breakfast, they noticed signs at the visitor centre which chalked up details of recent bear sightings – none – and offered safety advice: Please walk with the bell for giving bear notice!

The campsite shop was filled with a plethora of jangling kumayoke suzu and Beth insisted they bought a shiny red bell. However, they still set off unarmed, James having decided that the constant clanking would disturb the birds they hoped to see, and scare off the elusive kamoshika mountain goats. He wrapped the bell in a bandana to silence it, then tucked it in the side pocket of his rucksack. Beth was still unsure, but somehow everything seemed safer when the sun was shining and crowds of Japanese tourists were strolling back and forth along the paths.

Their day’s climb started at Taisho Pond, a place Beth found strangely haunting. Blackened, withered trees reached up out of the clear water, a reminder that the lake was formed by the last eruption of a nearby active volcano. James had picked up a map of the different walking trails in the visitor centre, and Beth followed him up the lower slopes through the trees, jumping at the snap of a twig or the whir of a bird’s wings. James climbed fast, striding ahead, and as the canopy became denser and the forest darkened, Beth became more nervous. She wanted to turn back, even though she knew she was being foolish, and she found herself constantly looking over her shoulder, then up towards where the tree line ended, convinced she could see shapes moving in the gloom.

After two hours of climbing they emerged from the forest, and Beth stopped for a few moments in the sudden warmth, catching her breath before the final ascent, any fear of bears dissipated by the sunshine. James carried on, scrambling up the scree towards the higher path. He turned and shouted to her as he reached the top of the ridge.

‘The first of the mountain huts is up here, Beth, exactly where I thought!’ He pointed with his walking pole. ‘I’ll see you there.’

She followed him up the slopes, stopping occasionally to admire alpine flowers, turning to take in the view as she put some distance between herself and the tree line. She found the marked path which led to the hut and followed the route James had just taken. As she climbed the last fifty metres she was sure she heard the brief high-pitched beep of a text notification, and the sound filled her with dread and suspicion. When she reached the plateau of flat-topped stones, she caught James slipping his phone back into his pocket. He walked towards her, his face flushed with guilt and embarrassment, and she felt her stomach twist.

‘Let’s have our rice snacks and water,’ he said quickly. ‘There’s a great place to sit in front of the hut – fabulous views.’

She followed him and sat down on the flat rocks, her heart still racing, her ribcage aching with the familiar foreboding. Still high above them were the snow-capped peaks of Hotaka, and below them the river flowed like mercury through the valley. In the distance, barely perceptible wisps of white smoke hung in the still air above the sleeping fire dragon of Yakedake volcano, and Beth found herself shivering despite the warm autumn sunshine.

‘Was that your phone I heard?’ she asked.
‘Phone? Do you really think there’d be a signal up here? You’re becoming paranoid, Beth. Don’t spoil the day.’
‘Me? Me spoil the day? It’s you who’s made me paranoid. I’m on edge all the time, wondering about every text and every call, about where you are when you’re late home from work. If you’ve nothing to hide, then look me straight in the eye and tell me she hasn’t contacted you. Better still, let me see your phone messages.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Beth.’ He laughed, but he didn’t make eye contact with her, he looked up at the mountains instead.
She held out her hand. ‘Go on, give the phone to me. Show me you’re innocent.’
‘You’re being . . .’ He suddenly faltered, lifting his hand in greeting to someone on the slope above – a man in a red jacket waving a silver walking pole.
James stood up. ‘Quit it now, Beth; this guy is heading over here.’
‘I know it’s still going on, James, I absolutely know,’ she hissed.

As she finished speaking, the climber arrived at the hut, announcing his presence with the clanking of a large bear bell. Beth managed to feign a smile as he introduced himself to them, but she left most of the talking to James. Motoki spoke little English, and when he ran out of vocabulary the three of them communicated with exaggerated gestures. They laughed too loudly and nodded too wildly, and when Beth did join in the conversation there was a brittle brightness to her words.

They offered their new acquaintance chocolate, and he offered a flask of green tea in return. Beth and James didn’t exchange a word between them as they packed away the remains of their food, and when they set off, they began their slow descent close on Motoki’s heels. As they walked in silence, Beth completely forgot about the possibility of bears, her mind still whirring, wondering if James was telling the truth and if she was simply being paranoid. After all, was it likely there was a phone signal on the top of a mountain?

Deep in thought, she was caught off guard when Motoki’s outstretched arm brought them to an abrupt standstill. They froze mid-step as though competing in a game of musical statues. When she looked up, her eye was caught by a dense black rock just above the tree line. It stood out against the pale scree, and when she refocused, the boulder became bear. She could make out the tilt and sway of his salt and pepper muzzle as he tried to catch their scent, and the glint of eyes like polished coals. When they stumbled to a halt there was a mesmeric moment as he continued to walk towards them. As he reared up onto his hind legs, Beth swore he looked her straight in the eye, poised and sure, calmly weighing up his options. Not afraid to let her see what he was thinking, quite prepared to show his cards, to be clear about his intentions.

Then Motoki jangled the bell on his rucksack, and just as swiftly as he’d turned towards them, the bear dropped to the ground and loped away without looking back.

Dizzy with adrenaline, they remained motionless, stiff as statues, until Motoki gestured down the mountainside with sweeping arm movements to indicate that they should keep moving. Beth scrambled after him, pleased to have company and not to be alone with James, happy with their enforced silence, relieved to listen to nothing more than the clamorous clanking of the bear bell until they reached the campsite.

James dropped a short way behind them to take some final photographs of the views across the mountains in the afternoon light. It was the last chance to see Yakedake before they were plunged deep into the forest again. Beth turned back at one point, reluctant to lose sight of him despite her current anger. James waved her on, told her he’d catch up with them, shaking his belt to show her he’d clipped on the bear bell they’d bought that morning.

At the edge of the trees, Beth stopped for a moment again, sure she had heard something behind her: rocks tumbling; scree scattering; a muffled cry, eerily human; a soft growl. The sounds echoed across the mountain in the stillness, and her heart raced. She tried to call out, but the words stuck in her throat, and when she listened again all she could hear was the fading tinkle of a bell.

***********************
The story first appeared in the collection An Unfamiliar Landscape (Valley Press 2022), which is available from Amazon, Waterstones online etc, or via the Valley Press online shop: https://www.valleypressuk.com/shop/p/unfamiliar-landscape

Amanda Huggins is the author of the award-winning novellas All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines and seven collections of short stories and poetry. She has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Colm Tóibín Short Story Award, the H. E. Bates Short Story Prize and the BGTW New Travel Writer of the Year. Her fiction has been broadcast several times on BBC Radio. To see her award-winning entry in the WiK Competition, please look here.

July 16, 2023 | Irish Pub Gnome, Kyoto

I’ve been thinking about tonight’s theme: Words and Music.

Seems to me we are here basically to listen—and to be gently surprised by what we hear.

Mostly we think of things we do as actions, but even taking a walk may be not so much about a transitive physical activity, but more about simply creating an opportunity to look and listen.

Anyone who noticed my ‘Local News’ piece in the recent WiK nature anthology might know that I am particularly into listening. In this spirit, here’s a short follow-up to ‘Local News,’ from a little collection I put together recently with the non-boundary-pushing title of Reflections.

Please don’t think that I imagine this to be a poem. It’s more like an amateur footnote to the Theory of Relativity, as it applies where I most enjoy spending my time:

Moments at Sakahara

Low hills shield Sakahara from the constant hum of Kyoto city. From the fields that we farm, I hear only the sounds emanating within the valley. Close by, water burbling, crickets trilling; over in the forest, birds calling.

Compared to light, sound travels slowly. A thunderclap lags behind the lightning flash; when a jet plane passes far overhead its sound is heard from empty sky somewhere behind it.

A bird call reverberates from the far end of the valley. In those few milliseconds of aural transit, that small flitting bird may have already left the branch it was perched on when it gave voice to the sound that I perceive.

In April, Yuri and I were fortunate to be able to spend some time visiting temples on the Shikoku 88 circuit. Driving, not tramping the hard roads. Part of visiting each temple (we made it as far #36, in Kochi) is chanting the Heart Sutra.

This is a rather wonderful image from the eaves of Anraku-ji, #6. You may be familiar with the famous fundamentalist monkeys seen at Ieyasu’s garish shrine in Nikko. Here is strong evidence of more enlightened monkeys, deep in Japanese monkey counterculture.

Anraku-ji and monkey mind

Anraku–ji (安楽寺, the “Temple of Peaceful Relief”), is notable for, among many sculptural features, a long frieze wood-carving of detailed scenes from the life of Kūkai  (Kobo Daish)i, including this incidental re-envisioning of the traditional image of three wise monkeys, Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru.

The Heart Sutra says:

Mu gen ni bi zesshin i mu shiki sho ko mi soku ho

—No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or mind object.

But what do monkeys know?

Seeking wisdom in the celestial persimmon orchard, these three aging monkeys have found a book, perhaps an exposition of the Dharma. Can they read it?

Who knows?

In some way they have awakened. Eager now to hear more, see more, and to debate more on the nature of wisdom, will they attain full enlightenment?

All things are possible.

The Heart Sutra also says:

Mu chi yaku mu toku i mu sho toku ko

—There is no wisdom, nor is there attainment, for there is nothing to be attained.

Monkey minds (like mine) love enigmatic wordplay.

Maybe the Heart Sutra was written (and translated) by monkeys?

Who knows?

Finally, a further reflection on openness, receptiveness:

I’ve had this wonderful anthology of Japanese poetry, From the Country of Eight Islands, ever since a blockbuster ‘going out of business’ sale at Friends World College. Somehow, I only recently noticed that it was originally donated to FWC by a Kyoto nature poet, the one-and-only Edith Shiffert, who resided here for over 50 years, from 1963 until her death in 2017, at the age of 101. We recently included several of her poems in the Flora & Kyoto issue of Kyoto Journal, including this opening quote, from The Forest Within the Gate, Heian-kyo Media/White Pine Press, 2014:

With the entire earth
drenched in flowers and fragrance
why not peace and joy?

The book contains a typed postcard dated May 27, 1981, from Burton Watson, one of the translators, and had been sent out as a complimentary copy, in respect. I’ve heard the other translator, Hiroaki Sato, was a former student of Edith’s. I assume Edith had donated this volume when she was forced to dispose of possessions when moving with her elderly husband, Minoru, to a care home.

What makes this collection of translations most deeply meaningful to me, is finding Edith’s annotations, and especially the insertion of a simple bookmark in Thomas Rimer’s introduction. This means we can virtually read over Edith’s shoulder, notably where Rimer discusses the aesthetic of Yūgen, in which “a poem was intended to remain grounded in one level on a directly felt observation of nature, behind or beyond which some intimation of the existence of a different or higher reality was suggested.”

Rimer reminds us that this essential aesthetic embedding of nature in Japanese poetry (and vice versa) has in fact been transmitted through literary history to the present. It is easy to imagine Edith finding particular resonance in discussion of the place of nature in transcendent poetry. Writing was indeed her Buddhist practice. This meditative, essentially timeless and intensely personal embeddedness was evident in most of her work, including this poem, also republished in Flora & Kyoto, originally from her book In the Ninth Decade, White Pine Press, 2005:

Shinnyodo, Yoshidayama, Graveyards

This stone Buddha too
is circled with cherry blossoms.
The sky looks empty.

Red camellias and cherry petals have fallen
over all the ground
and on the stone Buddhas.
Petals on my shoulders too.

Temple roofs too high
for drifting cherry petals,
clear sky above them.

In this vast graveyard
names meaningless, individuals nothing,
all their spent energies gone,
just ashes, of thousands from a thousand years,
quieted under the vast ephemeral space of sky
now knowing that much we fret about
is absolutely inconsequential.
Existence and beloved places, all vanishing.

Grace, grace, afloat on that only
we are blown about gently
like these dispersed and vanishing
flower fragments.

Thank you for listening…

Ken Rodgers has been managing editor of Kyoto Journal since 1993, and a member of WiK since it originated in 2013.

by Marianne Kimura

“Omigod!”, I exclaimed in a slightly theatrical, artificially loud voice to my husband Satoshi and shoved my phone in his face just as he was about to bite into a shrimp-flavored rice cracker.
“Wha..?” he mumbled idly.
“Japan’s debt is like 220% of its GDP! It’s the worst one in the world!”
Without answering, he tossed his rice cracker into his mouth and washed it down with green tea while judging me with dismay, as though I had just ventured to do an impromptu performance as a manzai comedian that could have been a lot funnier.
Across the subdued peach-colored living room, my father-in-law raised his head from the game of shogi he was playing with my teenage son, and peered narrowly at me.
I should tell you that my father-in-law is an economics professor at a large and famous national university, so I was secretly delighted that he had decided to rise to my challenge.
My point in bringing up the issue wasn’t because I actually gave a damn about the national debt crisis but because I always thought that Japanese families, when they gathered together, tried overly hard to avoid fractious debates on current events.
I wanted to remedy that.
I wanted things to be like back in the States in my own family, where we screamed and yelled a bit more about politics, where things got a little hysterical, and frankly more than a little annoying. For some reason, I missed the needling, the noise, the dramatic tears, the baiting and the passive-aggression. I know that sounds crazy, but the drama and the boisterous, generation-gap-fueled excitement of ridiculous political debates en famille, though much derided in the western press around the time of American Thanksgiving, was starting to seem to me, thanks to living so long in Japan, like a sport I’d not appreciated enough in my youth.
“I’m sure you know”, said my father-in-law, calmly leaning back in his comfortable beige armchair, “what a koma, a spinning top, is.”
I nodded, and he continued.
“A spinning top doesn’t suddenly explode or burst into flames as it comes to a stop, does it? No, of course not. It spins more and more slowly. It winds down. To do that, it needs some space to spin. That’s just natural.”
I couldn’t very well disagree with him about things like this, which were just basic physics. So I just sat there silently.
“The Japanese government is just giving it the space it needs. Of course, to you that maybe looks like some odd and treacherous game. Some trickery. But the actual opponent is our planet, also a spinning top of a kind, not any human entity. We, here in Japan, play out the game in our own way. We don’t care about following stupid human rules. This game is not a matter of human things only. Or rather, we can say that we humans are not just human.”
With that cryptic comment, which seemed to gently amuse him as a private joke, he gave me a brief and encouraging conspiratorial smile, as though surely I had grasped his elusive metaphor. Then he turned and resumed the game of shogi.
With an undisguised look of concern on her face, my mother-in-law quickly filled up my cup with freshly brewed green tea. I thanked her with a mild, mechanical nod, and with that, the calm and quietly harmonious atmosphere of the cool and collected peach-colored living room returned.
In a last-ditch effort to avoid defeat, and also because my mother-in-law had gone back to the kitchen so she couldn’t watch me like a hawk, I hissed at my husband, “But surely, he doesn’t publish stuff like that in scholarly journals, does he?”
Satoshi only shot me a brief, pained look and I gave up, concealing my humiliation by leafing through a tabloid magazine to which my mother-in-law subscribed.
The well-known periodical was filled with reports of every sort of political scandal, both domestic (the deputy culture minister had purchased 20 cases of fine amontillado sherry with public funds) and foreign (Trump was in there), and a lot of sensational gossip related to the dalliance between a female Korean pop singer and the handsome, but married CEO of a major Japanese tech company (they had been seen together at a moon-viewing party). Even the graphics were loud and splashy. Clearly, though my in-laws had a very peaceful living room, they didn’t mind these graphics and dramatic stories.
I sensed a deep disconnect, some disruption, an awkwardness, or even an impropriety under the decorous surface, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was only a magazine, after all.
Picking my way through the thicket of kanji, understanding some but not all, I began to feel sleepy and nodded off on the peach-colored sofa until Satoshi gently shook my shoulder and said “it’s getting dark, let’s go home.”
The magazine had slid off my lap and was open on the floor, exposing the midriff of an elegant fashion model dressed in a sequined bra, fur boots and a leather mini-skirt, a few downy swan feathers stuck gracefully (but how on earth?) in her long tresses of hair.
For some reason, seeing her, the phrase my father-in-law had tossed off, ‘That’s just natural’, popped into my brain. But how ridiculous! I swatted away the offensive idea. The model was just all artifice, make-up, hair-dye, photos retouched to a fare-thee-well.
Nevertheless, the same phrase taunted me that night after we’d returned to our apartment a long train ride away across the city. Looking out through our bedroom window at the midnight sky, where hardly any stars were visible due to all the lights, I heard it again.