Nikko, Honshu: Near Lake Chuzenjiko
On a postcard just retrieved from the mailbox, standing in the kitchen and breathing laboriously from the slight walk, he reads: According to statistics, 99.82% of all deceased Japanese are cremated. And the advertisement continued. The number didn’t surprise him and the ad was canned. The irony of the picture on the front of the postcard: Mount Nantai. He looks up from the postcard and out his window to see the real thing. Is this targeted marketing, or what? Mount Nantai, the volcano classified as “active” based on the fact that it erupted about 7000 years ago.
Nantai.
Also meaning “man’s body.”
Useless thing.
He studies the picture again.
It was November and cold. The nearby Kegon waterfall had turned already into a cataract of icicle scepters, stock-still flows of time and mass. Beyond and above that, the towering mouth of Mount Nantai was neatly combed downward with snow like the old man’s hair. He could for a moment imagine Nantai’s more active days: belches of ash exiting its throat, plumes upward; hot, inward earth breaking out, cascading over, disregarding humanity completely, doing what it is created to do.
It detonates naturally and burns to ash.
He recalls reading an article about how the ashes of the famous novelist Yukio Mishima were stolen in 1971, and how those of novelist Naoya Shiga were stolen in 1980. More recently, the ashes of the wife of the baseball player Sadaharu Oh went missing. (The wife!)
An interest in such things lately arose in him. Only after sake, and if ever, and then only to himself, he admitted that this interest did summit from his insidious enviousness:
To at once be rid of this world and yet be coveted by this world.
The old man flicks the postcard away; it slides to a halt across the counter with the picture of Mount Nantai facing upward, the real thing hanging in the frame of his kitchen window. He looks out the window and sees also the trees, brilliant with winter’s coming color but losing their leaves–red leaves like the vermillion of the Shinkyo Bridge, bright leaves like little paper sparrows tittering in a breath of wind.
And he thinks: I was just this scared when I was younger, but of something very different.
Current Sh*t 