Takahashi raised his eyebrows at this. Glancing at his wife he said, “Yuki and I promised each other never to go there again if we could avoid it.”
“I’ve told Mariko that I’ll only go back if her husband and stepson are no longer living there,” Yuki declared.
“I see,” Sedge said, surprised at the strength of Yuki’s pronouncement. “Where exactly does she live?”
“Haven’t we convinced you to stay away?” Takahashi’s voice held a note of anger.
“It doesn’t matter if we tell him,” Yuki said gently to Takahashi. “After all, he could ask anyone working here, or even Mariko herself.” Turning to Sedge she explained, “She lives a few doors down from Tokushōji temple. Directly across from the prefectural woodturning workshop.”
“Be careful what you commit to,” Takahashi said to Sedge. “Maybe staying in Yamanaka Onsen temporarily makes you feel like nothing you do really matters. But for everyone else here, this is where they’ll live the rest of their lives. This is where they’ll die.”
“I don’t plan to make trouble for anyone.”
“I know you don’t. But people talk. Especially in small towns where the outside rarely intrudes.”
Sedge understood that he wasn’t to make life any more difficult for Mariko. But surely she knew the risks better than he. Why would she have invited him to teach her at her house if she hadn’t thought these things through?
He appreciated Yuki and Takahashi’s candor, in any case. Nozomi was no longer around as an informal teacher or liaison, and increasingly Sedge found himself lost and questioning everything that fell into his path. Where his in-laws were concerned, he wished he could trust them unquestioningly. If Nozomi were here, he was sure she would tell her brother and sister-in-law not to worry.
6
On Saturday morning, Sedge borrowed a bicycle from the ryokan and rode in the direction of Kayano-machi. He wanted to see Kayano Ōsugi, one of four sacred cryptomeria trees on the grounds of Kayano Sugawara Shrine. Yamanaka Onsen had several two-thousand-year-old ōsugi trees; there was another in Daishōji, but this was the oldest of them, dating back over two thousand three hundred years. Some people revered the ancient trees as survivors of a prehistoric forest, while others thought that Jōmon-period relics excavated on a nearby hill suggested the trees had been planted as offerings to Shinto gods. For all the significance Kayano Ōsugi had, on previous visits Sedge had found the site empty of other people, which was one reason he wanted to visit it again.
When he arrived at Kayano Sugawara Shrine he was relieved. Though only a twenty-minute trip from the ryokan, at some point his front bicycle tire had punctured and he’d been thumping along uncomfortably for the last half-kilometer. As he’d expected, there was no sign of a bicycle store or repair shop in this village. He dismounted and gave the flat tire a cursory look.
He hadn’t eaten all his breakfast, and now, at midmorning, he felt hungry. He regretted not stopping at the roadside station he had passed ten minutes ago and buying something. But then he saw the small shop across the street with “Ōsugi Chaya” engraved on a wooden signboard above its entrance and pushed his bicycle there. The shop specialized in mugwort rice dumplings. It was a local landmark, and he had heard somewhere that it had been in business for eight hundred years.
Buying two sticks of green kusa or “grass” dango, he ate them on a bench outside the shop while gazing at the shrine opposite him. A grayish white streak entered his vision from the edge of the shop’s roof—with its wings outstretched, a heron descended to the long wooden bridge extending from the torii entrance to the shrine. Standing up as he continued to eat, Sedge watched it cautiously proceed across the bridge to just before the steps to the shrine. Again it flapped its ungainly wings, this time lifting to the tiled roof. From there it peered at its surroundings, its head turning slowly toward a bamboo stand on a hill to the side.
As Sedge stood there, the middle-aged woman running the shop came outside, trailed by a younger man. Dressed in the baggy tobi pants of a carpenter, as if he’d just been pulled away from work, he walked straight toward Sedge’s bicycle and squatted to check its tires.
“After you asked me about a bicycle shop, I went to get my son,” the woman said. “I told him about your flat tire and he came out to fix it. I don’t know what he can do, but since he maintains all the bicycles in our family I thought he might have a look.”
“Thank you,” Sedge called to the young man, who didn’t react to his words. “I’m sorry to put you to the trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” the woman answered. “He was in the back of the shop reading manga, not doing anything important.”
Sedge noticed her glance at the naked stick in his hand. “The dango was delicious. I’ve never had mugwort dumplings before.”
As she bowed to thank him, the phone rang inside her shop and she hurried away to answer it, leaving Sedge and her son outside. Her son had opened a small box of tools and begun removing the front tire. Not wanting to hover over him, Sedge decided to cross the street and approach the heron on the roof of the shrine.
“Why do you speak Japanese?” the young man said as Sedge started to leave.
Sedge turned back to him. “I’ve lived in Japan a long time.”
“In that case, you’ve probably married a Japanese woman.”
“There are more of them in Japan than from anywhere else.” He’d said it as a joke but didn’t know if it had come across that way.
There was a long silence, then the young man asked Sedge what had brought him to Yamanaka Onsen.
“I’m staying here for a while. I used to live in Kanazawa.”
“Yamanaka’s good,” he said. “But there’s not a lot to do.”
“Maybe that makes it better than other places. There’s enough for me in its beauty.”
The young man glanced at him, half-smiling. “What’s beautiful about it?”
“Lots of things,” Sedge said. He nodded to the shrine. “The ancient trees across the street. Also, there’s a heron on the roof of the shrine. One doesn’t see that every day. At least I don’t.”
The young man left to get a bucket of water. When he returned, he ran the tire tube through it, searching for bubbles escaping from the puncture.
“Do you mind if I go across the street?” Sedge said.
“Not at all.”
Sedge crossed the road to the torii. Bowing before walking through it, he thought the heron, if it understood human ways, would think he’d honored not the gods of the shrine with his bow but itself.
Halfway toward the shrine hall, Sedge came to the ancient cryptomeria climbing into the sky. The Kayano Ōsugi was said to be 180 feet tall, its girth so wide that seven people could wrap their arms around it together before their fingers touched. Sedge gazed into the massive branches high above him. Reaching over the railing of the bridge, he patted the cool damp bark of the tree while glancing at its sacred shimenawa rope slightly overhead before continuing slowly forward. He didn’t want to scare away the heron.
The heron stood directly on the middle tile above the long hanging rope that worshipers shook to get the gods’ attention. The heron seemed to be watching Sedge—like the god on duty that day, deciding what to do about this strange-looking foreigner. They watched each other for a minute. Then, as if bored by Sedge’s presence, the heron bent slightly before pushing itself into the air. It rose to the tops of a cryptomeria and disappeared in its enormous green canopy.
Sedge climbed the steps to the shrine, tossed a few small coins into the offertory box, then rattled the bell on its rope and made a quick prayer for the welfare of Yamanaka Onsen. Glancing across the street and seeing the young man still working on his bicycle, Sedge squatted on the mossy steps and watched sparrows chase each other around the pebbles on either side of the shrine path. Down the street, crows cawed distantly to each other.
“How was the shrine?” the young man said when Sedge returned. He had patched a hole he’d found and was already replacing the tire on its frame.
“Magnificent. By the way, do herons nest on top of the ōsugi?”
