The Shy Mountain

At a quarter past five on the first morning of the year I was standing in the shop doorway in two jumpers, a coat, Yukari-san's spare scarf and the salmon socks, and I was well. Eighty-three days. I had counted them on the stairs.

Only Yukari-san was up, packing the New Year food into its lacquered boxes. She pressed a hand-warmer into my glove and gave me ninety points for getting out of bed. The Shiokaze Ginza was dark and shuttered, with pine and bamboo tied at every door, and the air was so cold and still that I could hear the sea from the station square.

In Tashkent, New Year happens at night: fireworks over Chilonzor, a plastic tree, a mountain of Olivier salad, and my father asleep on the sofa at five to midnight. In Shirahama, it seemed, New Year happened at dawn, outdoors, and quietly.

The beach, at half past five, was full. Half the town stood on the sand in coats and hats, talking in low New Year voices, breathing clouds. The fishermen's co-op had built a bonfire of driftwood and old boat planks, and a man in a co-op jacket was ladling amazake into paper cups. "Sweet! No alcohol! For the young ones!" It was hot and thick and tasted of rice that had decided to become a drink and had not quite finished deciding. I had two cups.

Kotone was by the fire, in a huge brown-and-green wool scarf that went round her three times and smelt faintly of incense. Her grandmother's, I learned later. She bowed. I bowed. Neither of us said anything; it was too early for words and too cold for the ones we had.

Everyone was facing east, toward the Miura hills behind the town, where the black sky was turning navy and one thin line of orange lay along the ridge. That was where the sun would come up. I faced east too, with the whole of Shirahama.

Kotone took hold of my sleeve and turned me round.

"The other way," she said.

The other way was the sea. The bay was dark, and past it there was nothing, only the darkness where the far shore should be.

At ten to seven the sky behind us went gold, and the crowd made a long soft sound, like a crowd at fireworks, only slower.

In front of me, across the bay, where for nine months there had been nothing but haze, something appeared.

First it was a pale shape, a triangle of white hanging in the dark blue, too high to be a cloud and too still. Then the sun cleared the hills behind us, the first light went over our heads and across the water, and the top of the triangle turned pink.

Mount Fuji. White, then pink, enormous, closer than was possible, as if someone had carried it across the bay in the night to surprise me. I had looked for it from the train on my first evening. I had looked for it from the beach, from Kamakura, from the school windows, from a rice ball in my bento. For nine months it had hidden. Now it simply stood there, as if it had never done anything else.

Behind us the whole beach clapped twice and bowed to the sun. I did not turn round. I clapped twice and bowed to the mountain.

"It came out," I said.

"It was always there," Kotone said. "The air just had to be clear."

I decided not to say what that reminded me of. I will say it now, where she cannot hear. It reminded me of a voice that had been there all along, behind four years of haze, and had come out when it decided to. I am aware that comparing a girl to a volcano is not romantic. Please do not tell her.

I wrote on an orange note against my knee, with fingers that barely worked, and gave it to her. She read it with the mountain behind the paper.

First light of the year—

the mountain that hid all spring

stands there, pink and plain

She folded it once and put it inside her grandmother's scarf.

At nine we climbed to Watatsumi Shrine: the Moriyamas, the Shirases and me, and most of the town ahead of us and behind.

I counted the steps aloud in Uzbek, because I have counted everything in Japan in Japanese and wanted to count something in my own language before I left. Bir, ikki, uch. "Stop counting in alien," said Mio. Yigirma. O'ttiz. At oltmish, sixty, Grandma Tae overtook me in rubber boots, swinging a walking stick she did not use. "Young legs!" she shouted, as an insult. Akiko-san laughed all the way to eighty. Kotone's father climbed beside Tetsuo-san without a word, two quiet men keeping the same pace, and Tetsuo-san came up the last twenty steps slowly, one hand on the rail.

"Slowly is fine," he said, when I waited for him.

At the top, the torii faced the sea, and Fuji stood in the middle of it like a picture in a frame.

We drew omikuji from the hexagonal box. I shook out a stick, the shrine maiden gave me the matching slip, and I unrolled it with great hope. Kyō. Bad luck. Under Travel it said: Postpone.

"My flight is in eighty-three days," I said. "The god of the sea is telling me to miss it."

Kotone unrolled hers. Daikichi: great luck, the best there is. Under The one you wait for it said: Will come.

She did not show anybody. She took my bad slip out of my fingers, folded it long and thin, and tied it to the rack where the bad fortunes are left behind, a rope strung between two posts and white with paper knots like a flock of small birds asleep. Then she put her daikichi into my coat pocket, without a word, and walked on to the plaques.

I stood there with my hands empty and my bad luck tied to a rope, and understood that I had just been given something, and that I was not supposed to say thank you out loud.

The ema were little wooden boards with a painted picture on one side. Kotone wrote hers in pencil, leaning over it with her arm curled round the wood like a girl hiding her answers in a test. I wrote mine in marker: Qaytib kelaman. I will come back. Nobody in Shirahama could read it. I assumed the gods were multilingual.

We went to the stone basin to wash our hands, gasping at the water. When I looked back, Mio was still at the rack with her phone up. Filming the camphor tree, I thought. Mio films everything.

The shrine was serving sacred sake from a stack of painted barrels, in cups the size of thimbles. Tetsuo-san held one in his work-worn fingers as if it might break.

I had been reading the air in that house for five weeks, and I had hated every day of it. On the first morning of the year, with Fuji watching, I decided to stop.

"Tetsuo-san," I said. "Are you closing the shop?"

He looked at his thimble of sake for a long time.

"Mm," he said. "On the twentieth of March."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you'd try to save it."

I opened my mouth to say that I would not. Then I closed it again, because it was not true, and he knew it was not true, and the god of the sea was listening.

Yukari-san arrived with three cups of amazake, took one look at our faces, and understood everything. She put a cup in my hands.

"He's right," she said. "You would."

Tetsuo-san drank his sake in one small swallow. "Mm," he said. "Happy New Year, Sardor-kun."

Going down, I counted again, but not the steps. Fuji was still there across the bay, as if it had decided to stay out for the whole holiday, and Kotone's daikichi sat in my pocket like a hand-warmer that did not need shaking.

Eighty-three days. I had helped save a club with one member. I had found the right rice in a city of fourteen million people. A bicycle shop on a street with a butcher, a bakery and a tofu shop that applauded when a girl shouted in it: that, surely, could be saved.

Kotone walked beside me with her hands inside her sleeves. Around step fifty she said, quietly, so that only I could hear:

"Sardor-kun. Not everything wants to be saved."

I heard the words. I did not hear what they meant. I was already making lists.

That night I wrote a plan on the back of a New Year's card from the tofu shop: SAVE MORIYAMA CYCLE. I didn't understand what she had said until the second week of January.