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Chapter 9

No Raisins on the Summit

June 5, 2018

The morning after Hachimantai, I left the hotel at 6 a.m. to catch the earliest shinkansen to Sendai, the largest city in the Tōhōku region. As the train left Morioka and picked up speed, I realized the first few climbs had already run together in my memory. I didn’t want this year to devolve into a series of “check the box” achievements, devoid of meaning beyond a scoreboard tally. No matter how many mountains I climbed, or who I was, or where I ended up when the year was through, I would have failed completely if I had no lasting memories of the places I had been.

As Morioka shrank into the distance, I resolved to climb in a way that would imprint each mountain on my heart and mind. I would treat this year like a treasure box and fill it with a wealth of memories—wealth that no one and nothing could take away.

From Sendai, I took an express train west into neighboring Yamagata Prefecture and then a bus to Mount Zaō (蔵王山), a volcanic mountain group whose highest summit, Mount Kumano (1,841 meters), was my target for the day. Like Hakkōda, the climb to Zaō’s high point also required a secondary climb, in this case, 1,736-meter Mount Jizō.

As the Zaō Ropeway whisked me to the trailhead, I noted that the slopes—a popular ski resort in winter—were completely free of snow.

The climb from the upper ropeway station to the top of Mount Jizō took less than half an hour, up a trail of wooden steps with scrubby pines on either side. I took a photo with the marker even though the summit didn’t “count” toward my overall total. Jizō was a mountain, and I had climbed it, and I wanted proof.

While walking along the rocky alpine ridge that connected Mount Jizō with Mount Kumano, I wondered how many total mountains I would climb before my year was up. When I made my plans, I thought each hyakumeizan climb would involve a single mountain. Since I had to climb extras, I wanted to count them all, but that wasn’t the way the hyakumeizan worked.

Cairns of carefully balanced stones rose up at intervals along the trail to Mount Kumano. As I reached each one, I added a stone to the pile and said a prayer for someone I knew and loved. I felt so grateful that I had the chance to live and the strength to climb; I wished everyone was similarly blessed.

A weathered, wooden Shintō shrine stands on the top of Mount Kumano, along with a summit marker and a tall stone obelisk engraved with Japanese calligraphy. When I arrived, a group of Japanese women in colorful hiking gear were clustered around the obelisk, debating the proper pronunciation of the characters running down the charcoal-colored stone.

When I said hello, one of the women turned and spoke to me in Japanese. “Hello! Are you a student?”

I shook my head. “A novelist.”

We chatted in a combination of Japanese and charades as the rest of her group began walking down the trail. A few minutes later she said goodbye and hurried off to join them.

Alone on the summit, I sat on a dusty stone and looked across the valley toward the rows of snowcapped mountains in the distance. I opened Blue and searched for the bag of trail mix my mother bought in the hospital the night I had my biopsy. I hadn’t wanted it that night, but had brought it with me to Japan. I hadn’t eaten it because I worried that I would miss my mom even more when it was gone, but trail mix goes stale faster than memories. The time had come to eat it.

An enormous golden butterfly fluttered across the summit and came to rest on Blue, just inches from my knee. It fluttered its wings and spread them wide, at rest. Its presence reminded me that the people I loved were with me, and always would be, even if I couldn’t see or touch them.

I opened the trail mix and ate a handful of raisins, peanuts, and candy-coated chocolate pieces. The bag had gone across the Pacific and up five hyakumeizan, making it some of the best-traveled trail mix on the planet. It was delicious and I was hungry, so I ate the entire bag.

As I finished, footsteps approached me from behind. I turned to see another member of the women’s hiking group I’d met before. Her purposeful stride and the light in her eyes made me prepare for another impromptu test of my spoken Japanese.

She got right to the point. “You’re a mystery writer?”

“Yes,” I replied in Japanese, “I’m a novelist.”

She pulled out her phone. “May I ask your name?”

When I told her, she typed something on the screen and turned the phone around, revealing the Amazon sales page for my Hiro Hattori novels. “Is this you?”

I smiled. “Yes, it is.”

“Thank you very much!” After a pause she added, “Do you like Japanese mountains?”

At that moment, every word of Japanese I knew went AWOL. I couldn’t even remember the word for “yes.”

After an awkward pause, I stammered, “Hyakumeizan.”

“You’re climbing the hyakumeizan!” She lit up. “I am climbing the hyakumeizan! How many have you climbed?”

“Six. And you? How many?”

She smiled politely. “Ninety-nine, as of today.”

“SUGOI!” (That’s amazing!)

“In August, I will climb the last one. Mount Rishiri, in Hokkaido.”

My limited Japanese had returned, but I desperately wished I spoke the language better. I wanted to tell her how impressed I was with her achievement and to ask if she had any advice for me. I wanted to ask how long the challenge had taken her and which of the mountains she had found most difficult. I wanted to wish her success in Hokkaido, and to congratulate her on completing such a major feat.

I barely had the ability to return her polite goodbye.

She bowed and left to rejoin her group. I felt starstruck as I watched her go. This woman—older than me—had done the very thing I hoped to do, and even though I had barely begun to climb, she treated me like an equal and a friend.

From the summit, I hiked down the far side of Mount Kumano to see Mount Zaō’s famous crater lake. The emerald pool was flanked by smoking vents that filled the air with the scent of rotten eggs.

While taking pictures of the lake, I saw a line of hikers approaching along a nearby ridge. They walked in single file, their gear a splash of brilliant color against the muted red and gray of the volcanic rocks. One of the hikers raised a hand in my direction, and a moment later the entire group broke into frenzied waving.

“Suzan-san! Hello!”

It was the women from the summit, now returning from a hike around the lake.

I waved back, delighted. As they disappeared from view, I took a few more pictures of the lake and then began the climb back up the ridge.

The descent began uneventfully, as horror stories often do. Aglow with joy over meeting the Japanese hikers and filled with the pride of achieving my sixth hyakumeizan summit, I didn’t notice the dangerous rumblings in my belly until the pressure built to painful levels. I increased my pace, far less concerned with the volcano I was walking on than with the imminent, raisin-triggered eruption in my gut.

In my eagerness to share the summit moment with my mother through the trail mix she bought in Sacramento, I overlooked two very important facts:

First, chemotherapy slows digestion and bowel transit time, even after treatments finish, meaning more food stays inside your body and stays in longer than before.

Second, raisins are an excellent natural laxative.

And when raisins do their magic two kilometers from the nearest toilet, on a barren mountainside with nothing large enough to hide behind, “raisin magic” is dark sorcery indeed.

By some not-entirely-minor miracle, I reached the bathroom at the gondola station without staining either the mountain or my . . . reputation.

On the bus ride back to Yamagata, I found myself wishing I could remain in Tōhōku. I loved its snowcapped mountains and longed to see more of them immediately. However, with only two weeks remaining until our first apartment move, I needed to check in with Michael (and the visa lawyer). I planned to bounce into Tokyo for a day or two, catch up with my family, and head back off to the mountains before the summer typhoons arrived.

As it turned out, that was not to be.