murakami-norwood.txt

## Chapter Six ##

As soon as I woke up at seven o'clock on Monday morning, I washed my face, shaved, and went straight to the dorm head's room with out eating breakfast to say that I was going to be gone for two days hiking in the hills. He was used to my taking short trips when I had free time, and reacted without surprise. I took a crowded commuter train to Tokyo Station and bought a bullet-train ticket to Kyoto, literally jumping onto the first Hikari express to pull out. I made do with coffee and a sandwich for breakfast and dozed for an hour.

I arrived in Kyoto a few minutes before elevn. Following Naoko's instructions, I took a city bus to a small terminal serving the northern suburbs. The next bus to my destination would not be leaving until 11:35, I was told, and the trip would take a little over an hour. I bought a ticket and went to a bookstore across the street for a map. Back in the waiting room, I studied the map to see if I could find exactly where the Ami Hostel was located. It turned out to be much farther into the mountains that I had imagined. The bus would have to cross several hills in its trek north, then turn around where the canyon road dead-ended and return to the city. My stop would be just before the end of the line. There was a trailhead near the bus stop, according to Naoko, and if I followed the trail for twenty minutes I would reach Ami Hostel. If it was that deep in the mountains, no wonder it was a quiet place!

The bus pulled out with twenty passengers aboard, following the Kamo River through the north end of Kyoto. The tightly packed city streets gave way to more sparse housing, then fields and vacant land. Black tile roofs and vinyl-sided hothouses caught the arly autumn sun and sent it back with a glare. When the bus entered the canyon, the driver had to start hauling the steering wheel back and forth to follow the twists and curves of the road, and I began to feel queasy. I could still taste my morning coffee. By the time the number of curves began to decrease to the point where I felt some relief, the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, breeze flowing into the bus's open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin. The valley road hugged the riverbank, continuing so long through the trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried forever in cedar forest -- at which point the forest ended, and we came out to an open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance. Some houses had laundry drying in the sun, and dogs were howling. Each farmhouse had firewood out front piled up to the eaves, usually with a cat resting somewhere on the pile. The road was lined with such houses for a time, but I saw not a single person.

The scenery repeated this pattern any number of times. The bus would enter cedar forest, come out to a village, then go back into forest. It would stop at a village to let people off, but no one ever got on. Forty minutes after leaving the city, the bus reached a mountain pass with a wide-open view. The driver stopped the bus and announced that we would be waitin there for five or six minutes: people could step down from the bus if they wished. There were only four passengers left now, including me. We all got out and stretched or smoked and looked down at the panorama of Kyoto far belows. The driver went off to the side for a pee. A suntanned man in his early fifties who had boarded the bus with a big, rope-tied cardboard carton asked me if I was going out to hike in the mountains. I said yes to keep it simple.

Eventually another bus came climbing up from the other side of the pass and stopped next to ours. The driver got out, had a short talk with our driver, and the two men climbed back into their buses. The four of us returned to our seats, and the buses pulled out in opposite directions. It was not immediately clear to me why our bus had had to wait for the other one, but a short way down the other side of the mountain the road narrowed suddenly. Two big buses could never have passed each other on the road, and in fact passing ordinary cars coming in the other direction required a good deal of manuevering, with one or the other vehicle having to back up and squeeze into the overhang of a curve.

The villages along the road were far smaller now, and the level areas under cultivation far more narrow. The mountain was steeper, its walls pressed closer to the bus windows. They seemed to have just as many dogs as the other places, though, and the arrival of the bus would set off a howling competition.

At the stop where I got off, there was nothing -- no hosues, no fields, just the bus stop sign, a little stream, and the trail opening. I slung my knapsack over my shoulder and started up the track. The stream ran along the left side of the trail, and a forest of deciduous trees lined the right side. I had bee climbing the gentle slope for some fifteen minutes when I came to a road leading into the woods on the right, the opening barely wide enough to accommodate a car. "Ami Hostel. Private. No Trespassing," read the sign by the road.

Sharply etched tire tracks ran up the road through the trees. The occasional flapping of wings echoed inthe woods. The sound came through with strange clarity, as if amplified above the other voices of the forest. Once, from far away, I heard what might have been a rifle shot, but it was a small and muffled sound, as if it had passed through several filters.

Beyond the woods I came to a white stone wall. It was no higher than my own height and, lacking additional barries on top, would have been easy for me to scale. The bloack iron gate looked sturdy enough, but it was wide open, and there was no one maning the guardhouse. Another sign like the last one stood by the gate: "Ami Hostel. Private. No Trespassing." A few clues suggested the guard had been there until some moments before: the ashtry held three butts, a teacup stood there half empty, a transister radio sat on a shelf, and the clock on the wall ticked off the time with a dry sound. I waited a while for the person to come back, but when that showed no sign of happening, I gave a few pushes to something that looked as if it might be a bell. The area just inside the gate was a parking lot. In it stood a minibus, a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, and a dark blue Volvo. The lot could have held thirty cars, but only those three were parked there now.

Two or three minutes went by, and then a gatekeeper in a navy blue uniform came down the forest road on a yellow bicycle. He was a tall man in his early sixties with a receding hairline. He leaned the yellow bike against the guardhouse and said, "I'm very sorry to have kept you waiting," though he didn't sound sorry at all. The number 32 was painted on the bike's fender in white. When I gave him my name, he picked up the phone and repeated it twice to someone on the other end. Replying, "Yes, uh-huh, I see" to the other person, he hung up.

"Go to the main building, please, and ask for Doctor Ishia," he said to me. "You take this road through the trees to a rotary. Then take your second left -- got that? Your second left -- from the rotary. You'll see an old house. Turn right and go through another bunch of trees to a concrete building. That's the main building. It's easy, just watch for the signs."

I took the second left from the rotary as instructed, and where that leg ended I came to an interesting old building that had obviously been someone's country house once upon a time. It had a manicured garden with well-shaped rocks and a stone lantern. This property must once have been a country estate. Turning right through the trees, I saw a three-story concrete building. It stood in a hollowed-out area, and so there was nothing overpowering about its three stories. It was simple in design and gave a strong impression of cleanliness.

The entrance was on the second floor. I climbed the stairs and went in through a big glass door to find a young woman in a red dress at the reception desk. I gave her my name and said I had been instructed to ask for Doctor Ishida. She smiled and gestured toward a brown sofa, suggesting in low tones thatI wait there for the doctor to come. Then she dialed the telephone. I lowered my knapsack from my back, sank down into the deep cushions of the sofa, and surveyed the place. It was a clean, pleasant lobby, with ornamental potted plants, tasteful abstract paintings, and a polished floor. As I waited, I kept my eyes on the floor's reflection of my shoes.

At one point, the receptionist assured me, "The doctor will be here soon." I nodded. What an incredibly quiet place! There were no sounds of any kind. You would have thought everyone was taking a siesta. People, animals, bugs, plants must all be sound asleep, I thought, it was such a quiest afternoon.

Before long, though, I heard the soft padding of rubber soles, and a mature, bristly haired woman appeared. She swept across the lobby, sat down next to me, crossed her legs, and took my hand. instead of just shaking it, she turned my hand over, examining it front and back.

"You haven't played a musical instrument, at least not for some years now, have you?" were the first words out of her mouth.

"No," I said, taken aback. "You're right."

"I can tell from your hands," she said with a smile.

There was something almost mysterious about this woman. Her face had lots of wrinkles. These were the first thing to catch your eye, but they didn't make her look old. Instead, they emphasized a certain youthfulness in her that transcended age. The wrinkles belonged where they were, as if they had been part of her face since birth. When she smiled, the wrinkles smiled with her; when she frowned, the wrinkles frowned, too. And when she was neither smiling nor frowning, the wrinkles lay scattered over her face in a strangely warm, ironic way. Here was a women in her late thirties who seemed not merely a nice person but whose niceness drew you to her. I liked her from the moment I saw her.

Wildly chopped, her hair stuck out in patches and the bangs lay crooked against her forehead, but the style suited her perfectly. She wore a blue work shirt over a white T-shirt, baggy, cream-color pants, and tennis shoes. Long and slim, she had almost nothing for breasts. Her lips moved constantly to one side in a kind of ironic curl, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes moved in tiny twitches. She looked like a kindly, skilled, but somehwat world-weary woman carpenter.

"Can you play an instrument?" she asked.

"Sorry, no," I said.

"Too bad," she said. "It would have been fun."

"I guess it would have been," I said. Why all this talk about musical instruments?

She took a pack of Seven Stars from her breast pocket, put one between her lips, lit it with a cigarette lighter, and began puffing away with obvious pleasure.

"It crossed my mind that I should tell you about this place, Mr. -- Watanabe, wasn't it? -- before oyu see Naoko. So I arranged for the two of us to have this little talk. Ami Hostel is kind of unusual -- enough so that you might find it a little confusing without any background knowledge. I'm right, aren't I, in supposing that you don't know anything about this place?"

"Almost nothing."

"Well, then, first of all--" she began, then snapped her fingers. "Come to think of it, have you had lunch? I'll bet you're hungry."

"You're right, I am."

"Come with me, then. We can talk over food in the dining hall. Lunchtime is over, but if we go now they can still make us something."

She took the lead, hurrying down a corridor and a flight of stairs to the first-floor dining hall. It was a large room, with enough space for perhaps two hundred people, but only half was in use, the other half closed off with partitions, like a resort hotel in the off-season. The day's menu listed a potato stew with noodles, salad, orange juice, and bread. The vegetables turned out to be as startlingly delicious as Naoko had said in her letter, and I finished everything on my plate.

"You obviously enjoy your food!" said my female companion.

"It's wonderful," I said. "Plus, I've hardly eaten anything all day."

"You're welcome to mind if you like. I'm full. Here, go ahead."

"I will, if you really don't want it."

"I've got a small stomach. It doesn't hold much. I make up for what I'm missing with cigarettes." She lit another Seven Stars. "Oh, by the way, you can call me Reiko. Everybody does."

Reiko seemed to derive great pleasure from watching me while I ate the potato stew she had hardly touched and munched on her bread.

"Are you Naoko's doctor?" I asked.

"Me? Naoko's doctor?" She squinched up her face. "What makes you think I'm a doctor?"

"They told me to ask for Doctor Ishida."

"Oh, I get it. No no no, I teach music here. It's a kind of therapy for some patients, so for fun they call me the 'Music Doctor' and sometimes 'Doctor Ishida'. But I'm just another patient. I've been here seven years. I work as a music teacher and help out in the office, so it's hard to tell anymore whether I'm a patient or staff. Didn't Naoko tell you about me?"

I shook my head.

"That's strange," said Reiko. "I'm Naoko's roommate. I like living with her. We talk about all kinds of things. Including you."

"What about me?"

"Well, first I have to tell you about this place," said Reiko, ignoring my question. "The first thing you ought to know if that this is no ordinary 'hospital.' It's not so much for treatment as for convalescence. We do have a few doctors, of course, and they give hourly sessions, but they're just checking people's conditions, taking their temperature and things like that, not administering 'treatments' like in a regular hospital. There are no bars on the windows here, and the gate is always wide open. People enter voluntarily and leave the same way. You have to be suited to that kind of convalescence to be admitted here in the first place. In some cases, people who need specialized therapy end up going to a specialized hospital. O.K. so far?"

"I think so," I said. "But what does this 'convalescence' consist of? Can you give me a concrete example?"

Reiko exhaled a cloud of smoke and drank what was left of her orange juice. "Just living here is the convalescence," she said. "A regular routine, exercise, isolation from the outside world, clean air, quiet. Our farmland makes us practically self-sufficient; there's no TV or radio. We're like one of those commune places you hear so much about. Of course, one thing different from a commune is that it costs a bundle to get in here."

"A bundle?"

"Well, it's not ridiculously expensive, but it's not cheap. Just look at these facilities. We've got a lot of land here, a few patients, a big staff, and in my case I've been here a long time. True, I'm almost staff myself, so I get a substantial break, but still ... Say, how about a cup of coffee?"

I'd like some, I said. She crushed out her cigarette and went over to the counter, where she poured two cups of coffee from a warm pot and brought them back to where we were sitting. She put sugar in hers, stirred it, frowned, and took a sip.

"You know," she said, "this sanatorium is not a prof-making enterprise, so it can keep going without charging as much as it might have to otherwise. The land was a donation. They created a corporation for the purposed. The whole place used to be the donor's summer home, until some twenty years ago. You saw the old house, I'm sure?"

I had, I said.