He walked the mile or so south from the Tokyo JR station to Ginza, the most famous entertainment and shopping district in Japan — so he had been told; he’d never been here before. What he found was an oddly American-flavoured district of glittering, high-rise buildings laid out on a rectangular street pattern, neon signs bright enough to dazzle even by day.
Everywhere was crowded, of course, but without the sense of crush and bustle he’d grown up with in Dublin, even London; that, of course, was because of the Japanese habit of politeness and deference, all that smiling and bowing that had seemed so odd to him at first, but which now he understood as a vital social lubricant, the only way so many people could get along on this cramped little island chain.
Politeness and deference — from everyone except the school kids, attracted endlessly by the gaijin mask he could never take off.
And it was in Ginza — in a small (but expensive) shop near the Sony Building — that he found what he was looking for.
In amongst the trashy Buddhist charms and plastic fans and pictures of twelve-year-old pop stars, there was row on row of vials of ash-grey dust: rock from Edinburgh. Each vial, he found, came with a certificate of authenticity from some geology institute he’d never heard of, and a list of the uses to which people were putting this stuff. Scattering it over their Zen gardens. Putting it in their Shinto shrines. Even mixing it with milk and drinking it.
For this anonymous-looking volcanic ash had been — if the stories were true, if the ash were genuine — transformed by the ghostly touch of the Moon itself.
Declan bought three vials. Then he turned and, without hesitation, made his way back to the JR station.
Home for Declan, for the last decade, had been a small Shinto shrine called Futaarasan, which stood on the north bank of Lake Chuzenji, some hundred miles north of Tokyo. Now he retraced his journey to Futaarasan, taking the Shinkansen bullet train from the capital to Nikko, and the bus to Chuzenji.
At last, cradling his vials, Declan made his patient way back along the lake’s north shore road towards the shrine.
Chuzenji was once, probably, an attractive area, he thought. But the town had become a trashy resort, feeding off the cable-car that took visitors down the river gorge to see the Kegon Waterfall. Through the trees that lined the lake, he could see pleasure boats made absurdly in the shape of swans, Disney-style, plying back and forth.
If they had done this to a site in Britain or Ireland, he thought, everybody would have said it was a typical desecration. But the Japanese were, maybe, a little more mellow. This was a culture where monks would quietly earn a living from charging for entry to their temples and shrines — even for services — as well as rake off hundreds of yen apiece for ridiculous little charms, like something out of the Middle Ages.
With relief, he returned to the shrine itself.
The shrine was modest. Its main buildings — vermilion-painted wood topped with blue tiles — were grouped around a central square. Facing the lake was the haidin, the hall of worship, and on either side were the honden, the main hall, and the homotsu-kan, the treasure house. Declan hurried through the square to the torii gate which stood at its rear, a plain affair of grey wood, two uprights topped by two cross-pieces. Beyond the torii stood a narrow vermilion archway, and behind this a steep flight of steps soared up the hillside.
Declan paused a moment to gather his strength; he still felt exhausted from his unwelcome encounter with Tokyo. But he set his sandalled feet on the first of the steps, and began the familiar climb.
Futaarasan Shrine nestled at the feet of Mount Nantai, a green-clad volcanic cone which rose above it, reaching all of a mile and a half above sea level. Futaara was actually an old name for the cone, and the true centre of the Shrine was set at the lip of the caldera at the summit. Each August pilgrims would come this way, through the old torn gate, leaving behind the absurd world of charms and plastic swans and tourists, and climb up here to the violent, quiescent heart of the volcano, just as Declan now climbed, alone.
He knew he couldn’t wait until August; he knew he must do this now.
The climb was long and arduous, and by the time it was completed he was sweating hard, his breath coming in gasps. But the view from the lip of the caldera was magnificent: the old volcano mouth itself, the numerous mountain lakes and volcanic cones, rounded and furred over by trees, and Lake Chuzenji, blue and sleek and beautiful from this distance, a vista too remote to be spoiled by the foolishness of its visitors.
Japan was built on the junction between plates deep in the Earth, and was plagued by volcanism and earthquakes. And so everywhere you went, rounded volcanic hills stuck out of the landscape. It gave the landscape a sense of impermanence, he thought, and also a human scale.
The Japanese had been shaped by their landscape. It seemed to him you just couldn’t build a giant Gothic cathedral in the middle of all this. Japan was about continuity and reflection and calm. The Japanese even had two religions, Buddhism and Shinto, working side by side without a hint of conflict, which was quite a contrast with Ireland.
And that sense of calm had been what he’d sought when he’d come out here.
He felt a sense of that old panic, of enclosure, as unwelcome memories of the past stirred in his hind brain. But he had done those things, hurt those children, and, even a decade later, he could never remove that scar from his soul — as they would, surely, never forgive or understand, and as those in authority would never hesitate to punish him, if they could identify and trap him.
But then he was already trapped, by his own addled personality. For he knew he would do those things again, given the opportunity, the chance of secrecy. Even as he encountered the schoolchildren in Tokyo, he had felt his ageing loins stir, unable to dispel the endless calculations, the intricate maze of actions that might lead to a new release of his lust.
So he must never give himself such opportunities again.
He took out his little vials of Edinburgh dust, and smiled.
He descended a little way into the caldera, past the trodden paths and platforms, until he was walking on bare volcanic rock. Then he opened his vials of Scottish dust — they smelled, he thought, of autumn bonfires — and he spilled them, carefully, on the ground. Delicately, with his fingertips, he rubbed the ash into the rock, as if applying some gentle unguent.
The ghost touch of the Moon, brought to Mount Nantai.
When it was done, he felt a great peace. He stayed for a while, as the evening gathered, and the spectacular volcanic sunset crept over the sky.
Perhaps this offering would propitiate whatever gods resided here. Or perhaps it would destroy them.
Perhaps it would destroy him.
And that would not be such a bad thing, if it reduced the number of future days he would have to face, the days he would have to wrestle down the monsters that lay inside him.
In the caldera, where he had delivered the dust, the rock surface glowed softly.