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Chapter 8

Horses’ Bells and Dragons’ Eyes

June 3–4, 2018

At Morioka Station, dozens of orange traffic cones blocked off all traffic to surrounding streets. Before I could figure out if this was business as usual or not, a Japanese woman in khakis and a Day-Glo vest approached me, wearing a hesitant but hopeful smile that signaled her intention to engage.

As a middle-aged, foreign woman, I make an attractive target for the surveys Japanese tourism bureaus often conduct at railway station exits. As a person in search of an interesting way to spend the day in Morioka, I considered the clipboard-wielding woman an unusual boon. I wouldn’t need to look for the visitor center; the visitor center had come to me.

“Hello,” she said in English. “May I ask you some questions about what brought you to the Kizuna Festival today?”

“Of course.” (I had no intention of admitting I had never heard of the Kizuna Festival.)

She asked the usual questions about my country of origin, job, and where I learned about the festival (my only lie: I said, “I don’t remember”). When we finished the survey, she handed me a six-page newspaper “program”—apologizing for the fact that it was written only in Japanese—and pointed up the street. “The parade is starting. You can make it if you go right now!”

I joined the stream of pedestrians and quickly found a shady spot to stand on the parade route. Groups of early arrivals had spread blankets on the sidewalks and were having festive picnics in the shade. Carts and vendors lined the street, selling festival food and adding to the carnival atmosphere. The scent of grilling frankfurters and yakitori filled the air, along with the calls of barkers hawking soda and nama-beeru (Japanese draft beer, which was apparently legal to drink on the street, at least that day).

While I waited for the parade to start, I read about the festival’s history in my program. Originally known as the Tōhōku Rokkonsai (Tōhōku Six Festivals), the Kizuna Festival was established to celebrate the Tōhōku region and comfort the souls of the people who died in the Great Tōhōku Earthquake. The 9.0 temblor struck northern Honshu on March 11, 2011, and was the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Japan (the fourth-strongest in the world since modern record keeping started). It triggered a tsunami that killed almost 16,000 people, displaced more than 250,000, and caused a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Since the festival’s inception in 2011, it has become a celebration of regional unity and diversity. Entirely by accident, I had picked the best day of the entire year to visit Morioka.

The rhythmic sounds of drums and cymbals announced the parade, and for the hour that followed I watched, transfixed, as hundreds of singers, dancers, musicians, and martial artists exhibited their skills at intervals along the road. Each group represented one of Tōhōku’s major annual festivals. Lines of chanting men carried enormous braided sandals—each one measuring 12 meters long—to commemorate the Fukushima Waraji Matsuri (Sandal Festival), where celebrants parade through the streets carrying the largest sandals in Japan. Behind them, a platoon of female drummers in colorful costumes marched and played in honor of the Morioka Sansa Odori, a traditional dance that holds the Guinness World Record for the largest concurrent performance of Japanese drums. The groups flowed by in a stream of vibrant sights and sounds that made parades in the United States seem pale and quiet by comparison.

Later I walked to a nearby park to see a few of the hundred horses that would participate in the Chagu Chagu Umakko Matsuri the following weekend. The festival celebrates the working horses of Iwate Prefecture, whose owners dress them in elaborate ceremonial costumes and parade them through the streets to a shrine, where a Shintō priest bestows a blessing on the animals.

Half a dozen enormous horses stood beneath the trees, dressed nose to tail in jingling, hand-embroidered finery (chagu chagu is an onomatopoeic word derived from the sound of the bells on the horses’ costumes). I even saw a jet-black colt who was just being trained to wear the ceremonial attire. He lay in the shade, wearing only a harness and a hand-embroidered headpiece with small pom-poms dangling from his ears.

Enormous, snowcapped Mount Iwate (岩手山) (2,038 meters) rose up beyond the city limits. The snowcapped peak reminded me that I was supposed to be climbing—not watching parades and eating apple-flavored snow cones at a festival.

“I will return,” I promised. “We will dance another day.”

* * *

The morning after the Kizuna Festival, I caught the early bus to Mount Hachimantai ( 八幡平 ) (1,613 meters), the third-highest peak in Towada-Hachimantai National Park. My online trail guide said the hike would be short and easy, but I no longer trusted the judgment of the superhuman trekkers who wrote online trail guides.

As the bus drove up the mountain to the trailhead, patches of snow appeared beneath the trees. They increased in size and depth as we gained altitude, despite the sunny day. At the visitor center, everything—including the trail—was buried under several feet of snow. A map near the bus stop claimed the summit was only a 40-minute hike from the visitor center, and the distance between the topographical lines made it appear as if the trail was almost flat.

The vast majority of visitors had come in jeans and sneakers, and were unprepared to walk on slippery snow. They slid and skidded along in unsteady groups of two and three, clinging to one another and to the pines that lined the trail.

A fur-collared woman clutched at one of the pink-topped wands that marked the route and quickly learned that half-inch bamboo wands are no match for either snow or gravity. The wand bent double and she landed in the snow, to the ill-concealed amusement of her boyfriend—who slipped, and joined her on the snow, a moment later.

Twenty minutes from the visitor center, I reached the famous Kagami-Numa, or Dragon’s Eye Pond. It lived up to its name: the ring of cerulean water surrounding a central circle of ice that looked exactly like the eye of a giant dragon hiding beneath the snow.

I hiked around the tree-ringed lake, blinking in the glare of sunlight off the fresh, clean snow, and found it hard to believe that it was June. The perfect winter wonderland of pristine snow and deep-green pines made my heart sing with joy.

Two months before I was lying in bed, so sick and weak and poisoned that I understood how it felt to die. Now I marched with confidence over fluffy snow beneath a deep blue sky, inhaling air that smelled impossibly fresh and clean. My chest, though often sensitive and achy, felt as if it had mostly healed, and I loved the way my shirts fit so much better than they had before my surgery. The dramatic reversal of fortune seemed impossible, but it was real.

I stared at the rows of snowcapped peaks rising up on the horizon and wanted to shout with happiness and gratitude. I felt as if I might explode if I didn’t let the emotions out, but also knew a screaming foreigner might cause a panic—so I kept my joy inside.

At the summit, an older Japanese couple offered to use my phone to take my picture with the enormous marker pole. I offered to reciprocate, but the husband pulled a full-sized tripod from his backpack, grinned, and set it up.

These two had come prepared.

My respect for their preparedness increased five minutes later, when they joined me on the observation platform and broke out a four-course lunch, complete with twenty-ounce cans of Asahi beer.

I suddenly felt far less satisfied with my croque monsieur and apple Danish.

Another couple arrived at the summit and handed out celebratory honey-lemon candies to everyone, including me. As we exchanged the customary greetings and commentary on the weather (“Very nice!”) and the view (“So lovely! Wow!”), we were joined by a silver-haired man wearing business slacks and black leather loafers. He had a large, expensive camera around his neck. Anywhere else, this might have raised some eyebrows. In Japan, it merely triggered another chorus of “Where are you from?” and “Wow, the weather is so nice today.”

The man in the loafers asked how I heard about Mount Hachimantai, and I told him I was climbing the hyakumeizan. As usual, I omitted “in a year” because Japanese hikers regard the 100 Famous Mountains as more than just a physical challenge and did not understand my compulsion to finish them within a stated time.

“Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “How many have you climbed so far?”

I raised my right hand, fingers splayed. “Today is number five.”

As usual, my answer caused hilarity, but when the laughter ended, the man in the loafers told me, earnestly, that the hyakumeizan were difficult, important mountains, and that he wished me great success with all my climbs.

After lunch, I hiked back to the visitor center and arrived two hours before the bus was scheduled to depart. I wandered slowly through the gift shop, killing time. Near the back, I found a rack of large-brimmed, floppy hats with adjustable chinstraps and the words “Over the Mountain” embroidered on the front. I bought a tan one, put it on, and went outside to wait for the bus, feeling snazzy in my new hiking hat.

A few minutes later I received a text from my good friend Laurie, saying her beloved elderly cat Louise had died. My heart—so light with joy from the snow and summit—felt a painful tug toward the place I’d once called home. For the first time on my journey, I felt lonely, severed from the friends I’d left behind. I didn’t miss California, but it hurt that I couldn’t jump in my car and race to Laurie’s house to give her a hug and share her grief.

Before I moved to Japan, I hadn’t spent much time considering what my life would look like when I finished the hundred climbs. Now I wondered if the friends I loved would be my friends at all when the year was through.

As I texted with Laurie, doing my best to share her pain despite the miles between us, I had no answers for the greater questions: who I would be and what my life would look like in a year. I also knew that fretting would not help. The answers to my questions lay on the far side of 11 months and 95 more mountains.

And the only way to get there was to climb.