“Since leaving Fukuoka,” announced Nagoyan with an air of pride, “we’ve gone over the one thousand kilometer mark.” We had just stopped the car at the Nagasaki-bana Parking Garden. There were phoenixes all around us.
“Whit’s a thousand kilometers?”
“A flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka covers nine hundred kilometers; by car on the expressways it’s probably a bit more.”
There was no time to give the matter any thought, for at that very instant, I was startled by a screech, followed by a responding screech. Coming toward us were two garish birds, each with a red head, a green body, and a blue tail. We were obviously in the tropics.
“Parrots?”
“It says here that they’re macaws.”
To get to the sea we had to cross the jungle park, where we came to the zoo. Kept here were animals ranging from the ring-tailed lemur to white snakes. And they all were emitting a horrible stench. Nagoyan, something of a cursorial bird himself, was unbelievably buoyant, calling out “Come on! Come on!” to each and every horrible beast. For a hundred yen he purchased some feed and offered it to a particularly heinous bird that looked as though it were descended from the pterosaur. When an ostrich three times my size came toward us leisurely swaying its feathers, and, with a speed amazing for its bulk, poked at Nagoyan’s hand and snatched away the food, I naturally let out a screech of my own. For his part, Nagoyan was not the least frightened. He didn’t scream or shout; he merely laughed. What was he about?
At last we came through the park and came out on the cape. Suddenly we could hear pulsating through us the sound of waves. The water was bluer than that of either the Genkai Sea or Bungo Channel on the northern coasts. The mightiest of the seas we had seen on our journey was here.
When we got down to the beach, we could see the green form of Kaimondake rising straight up from across the small bay. All the way to the peak the view was cloudlessly clear, the beckoningly beautiful ridgeline distinct and solidly real, as though seen in a pencil sketch.
“What’s that?” shrieked Nagoyan in his high-pitched voice. “Is it a replica of Mt. Fuji?”
“Tha’s Kaimondake, the Mt. Fuji o’ Satsuma.”
I’d only seen the real Mt. Fuji twice, but the one here was vastly more elegant, imposing, bountiful…rising gallantly out of the sea and towering over all.
“Why is it shaped like that?”
“Dunno. Ye’d hafta ask the mountain.”
“I never imagined that when we reached the land’s end we’d be in for a sight like this.”
Nagoyan was fit to be tied. I could see clearly how furious he was at seeing his beloved mountain put to shame.
The black sand was hot and crumbly. We walked to the sea and back. Feeling the grit in my shoes, I sat down at the edge of the walkway and shook them out, breathing softly, embraced in the twilight that was already beginning to fall.
“Twenty yards of linen…”
I thought it was in my head, but it was actually my own voice. I could no longer hear G. It was a sentence I no longer needed to hear. The Limas were working.
“Ah, such a feeling of yutaa!”
“Huh?” Nagoyan was still standing, glaring at Kaimondake.
“Ye don’t git it?”
His failure to understand such important concepts was irksome…
“Oh, all right. Now I know what you’re talking about… Relaxing…”
“If ye put it that way,” I said somewhat coldly, “the mood will slip away.”
Yutaa is about wanting to embrace the whole world – and to have the whole world embrace me in return, as I let my whole body unwind and my feeling of “being alive” becomes overwhelmingly good. And yet, saying such would only cause the wings of Nagoyan’s nose to twitch, as he held forth tediously on the blah-blah “nature of existence.”
So I kept my yutaa to myself and merely asked, “Whit day is it? Wonder how long we’ve been on the run…”
“September eighteenth.” Nagoyan looked at his watch to make sure. “Actually, today was to be the date of my release.”
This was the first I’d heard of it. If he’d told me the day of our escape, I wouldn’t have brought him along. Once quite well, he could have left the hospital and gone back to work, neatly dressed in a suit and tie. If I hadn’t talked a lot of rot, there wouldn’t have been the slightest need for him to come this far with me. There were, to be sure, those recovering from depression who experienced suicidal impulses, but Nagoyan would probably have been like the many patients able to overcome these. It was all my fault. And during all this time we had been together, he had said nothing. He had not once reproved me for that. In the depths of my heart I felt for the first time a genuine sense of remorse.
“I’m sorry, Nagoyan. I’m truly sorry.”
I bowed and looked up again to see him slowly shaking his head.
“Never mind. It’s all right. What about Makurazaki? Do you want to go there later?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“I’m really tired all right,” he remarked with a grin.
“Aye.”
From time to time there were dark swells in the open sea, the light reflecting off the back of the shifting billows and stinging our eyes. Huge waves were sporadically crashing white against the rocks at the base of a lighthouse.
“Shall we go back?”
“Aye.”
“You’re lucky. You can go back to where you were born in Hakata.”
I had never thought otherwise. I wouldn’t have understood that if I hadn’t met Nagoyan, with all his mixed feelings of love for
his birthplace.
For some moments I gazed at him in profile and then deliberately asked, “Won’t it be good ta get home t’ Gokuraku?”
I had only intended to tease him a bit, but the upper part of his face now became dizzyingly distorted. He descended to the beach. Stumbling as he faced the clear outline of Satsuma’s Mt. Fuji across the blue sea, he shouted, “Not on yar bloody loony life!”