CHAPTER 22

ねむらない 街

Nemuranai Machi

The Town That Never Sleeps

Hiro had skipped out of the temple and was snaking through the throngs of people in West Shinjuku, Aska by his side. He had six thousand yen in his pocket. Soji had given him the money early that morning while Jet slept.

“Here’s some money. You might need it,” Soji had said, lifting his hand from the sutra he was copying in sumi ink to give Hiro an envelope with money inside. “Cleaning a temple and studying all day must be boring. You haven’t seen much of Tokyo at all. Isn’t there someplace you want to go?”

“Actually, yes. Shinjuku,” Hiro answered immediately. He thought Soji’s request was strange. It was dangerous, even, to go. Yet, Hiro knew enough to realize that Soji must have had a plan and had wanted him to make himself scarce for a while. His uncle didn’t do anything randomly, so Hiro agreed to leave.

“You can’t take Aska on the train,” Soji said. “You’ll have to walk.” He dipped his brush in the ink and drew out a route to Shinjuku on the washi paper used for copying the sutras.

It took Hiro and Aska an hour to get to Shinjuku from Shibuya. Now they were walking on Shinjuku Dori, passing department stores where models wore expensive autumn clothes and drifting by fancy cake shops from which warm, sweet smells wafted up onto the sidewalk. Aska’s nose twitched repeatedly. Hiro had to laugh.

For long time, he’d imagined what it would be like to leave Kanabe and come to a huge city like Tokyo. He and Ojiisan had often talked about the city and its twenty-four-hour-life.

Hiro thought he’d already gotten used to the people walking quickly on the street, staring ahead as if programmed for their offices, and the fact that you couldn’t see the tops of the enormous buildings without craning your neck to the sky. He even felt desensitized to the incessant noise of cars and trains, the heavy pollution choking the air. He understood that this was city life, that living here meant accepting these things. Your body adapted to them just as it adapted to nature. But it seemed counterintuitive.

In the mountains, he felt healthy and alive because there were places of stillness, places where even the rivers and wind were silent. Though it had only been days, it seemed like months since he’d walked in the forest with Aska, chasing rabbits or skipping stones. Here, he felt disoriented, out of touch with his body and the rhythms of the earth. He concentrated on his breath—in and out—centering his awareness in the earth, somewhere far beneath the concrete under his feet. Could he still feel the earth energy there and bring it back up into his body?

Even though he was no longer in the mountains, the mountains were in him, in his blood. Perhaps that’s what Ojiisan had meant when he said that the spirit of nature was alive in the trees, rocks, dirt. Had that spirit transmitted itself to Hiro? Even if you cut the forest down, the seed could be replanted. The mountain, the river, the earth were in his skin. The spirit of nature was under his skin, in his cells, alive and breathing there.

Hiro walked more slowly, feeling the stillness of the earth spirit as he let it re-enter his body. He puzzled over the events of the last few days. He knew that Jet had tried to abandon him and Aska in the hotel room. He couldn’t say he blamed her. It was tempting to just walk away from one’s duty and start all over again.

He could do that now, with Aska, slip into the shadows of the city and never be found again. But that would be a waste. He’d given his word, and Ojiisan had died for them. They had to complete this mission. What kind of ninja was he if he just walked away from his word?

Besides which, he wondered where Jet had gone that night, and if she’d put them in jeopardy. He had a sinking feeling that she had. He shook his head in consternation. Aska hung hers low.

They walked toward Shinjuku station but didn’t go in. Instead, Hiro bought a small bunch of orange Chinese bellflowers from a kiosk on the corner. It cost eight hundred yen but he could have picked as many as he wanted in the mountains of Kanabe for nothing.

Aska walked alongside, her nose bumping into Hiro’s calf every so often as if to confirm that he were still there. She seemed to understand his feelings. They went into a dark narrow tunnel under the railroad that led to the West side.

A foul smell came up from the wet pavement inside, and when a train passed overhead, the narrow space filled with a deafening rattle. A blind man sat on a half-broken chair in the middle of the tunnel playing blues on a harmonica, but the melody was drowned out by the noise of the passing train. Hiro didn’t know the music, but the low tune hung sadly in the wet, dark air and made time stand still for just a moment. He stopped in front of the man and put a few coins in his empty red can and kept on walking.

Once out of the tunnel, they wound their way through the office buildings and luxury hotels of West Shinjuku until they hit Ya-mate Dori, a big street with down-on-their-luck lunchrooms, cramped electronic stores, and car showrooms. Hiro looked at the map that Soji had drawn for him and found “Yamate Dori” and “Honan Dori” with a circle drawn on the intersection. Hiro was surprised. Soji had understood exactly where in the vast area of Shin-juku Hiro had wanted to go. But then again, his uncle had powers. Of that, he was sure.

Hiro stopped at the intersection and put the flowers on the ground. Then he crouched and placed his palms on the concrete, feeling the warmth of the autumn sunshine on the pavement.

He knew that the trains and the subways ran deep beneath this ground, just as the water from high up on the mountaintop ran down to the village, coursing beneath Kanabe. Underneath the stillness was motion. In the motion was stillness, if you could find it. That much Masakichi had told him. Could he find the stillness in the city that never slept?

The warmth Hiro felt on his palms was his father’s warmth. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure his father’s face. Hiro’s father had gone to Tokyo as a seasonal worker, helping to construct the new subway line.

From November to March, Northern Japan was completely snowed in. If people were animals, they would have gone into hibernation, awaiting the arrival of spring from their caves. But humans don’t hibernate, and there were mouths to feed. So the men in northern Japan left for Tokyo or Osaka to get work. There, they did the dirty, dangerous jobs others wouldn’t do.

His father had never come home again. When Hiro was three years old, his father had been hurt on the job, just underneath where he now stood.

Perhaps he was humiliated that he could no longer support his family, perhaps his spirit had been crushed. Hiro’s mother had hated Tokyo for having stolen her husband. By the time she herself died, she wondered if he was even still alive.

Hiro understood his mother’s feelings and for a long time, he’d agreed with her. Tokyo represented all that had oppressed his tribe, his people, his history. Yet, nature was also to blame. Nature was beautiful, but it was also harsh and unrelenting. It created life, but it had incredible destructive power to take life away. That was the law of nature. Ojiisan had taught him that everything grows, flourishes, and dies. Kanabe had not been able to sustain the men and their families, so they had no choice but to come to the cities, where progress would give them money to sustain their old village lives. You couldn’t have one without the other. The old villages kept history and culture alive. The new cities sustained them.

Even though Tokyo had claimed his father, Hiro understood that it was filled with an energy he’d never imagined. He wanted to find a way to harness it. He felt the city rebuffed him, and yet, there was something there, something indefinable, something sparkling and alluring.

Kneeling on the ground, he asked his father’s spirit:
Where is the place earth and sky meet? City and country? Where does one root and the other branch?

He folded his hands over the deep orange bellflowers he’d lain on the street in the hopes that his father, who’d disappeared into the wet, dark underground of Tokyo, might return to the tranquility of Mt. Osore and spend a peaceful life there with his mother as spirits in the netherworld.

Then he got up and took the leash firmly in his hand, leading Aska back toward the temple, heart heavy.

I’ll never forget, he promised.