The Setting Sun of the Seto Inland Sea
When he reached 57 years old, Hajime Yamaura and his wife Kasumi decided that he would retire from his life-long job at the power company. The two of them would move from the rush and costs of Nagoya City back to her family’s uninhabited and decaying home high in the lonely hills of Ehime Prefecture.
No one had lived in the family house or had taken care of anything on the land for 11 years.
It would be tough, but they felt they both had enough energy to repair the main home as well as the two storage buildings on the property over time. It would take several years to restore basic standards to the property, but with Hajime’s retirement payment as well as senior citizen assistance coming on line for both of them in a few years, they felt they could make ends meet. Cost of living in those hills was minimal, and Kasumi’s family had made do there for generations with freshwater fishing and subsistence agriculture as well as unlimited firewood for heat and cooking.
As planned, on his 57th birthday Hajime resigned from his job and within a few weeks the two were on the road west to Ehime.
Hajime had been to the house 35 years earlier to ask Kasumi’s father for her hand in marriage. He remembered most the distances. The clearing the house sat on was a 40-minute drive from the nearest town. To post a letter, buy a soda, even to have a face-to-face conversation with any “neighbor” one had to first drive 25 minutes down a dirt access road originally cleared for horses by Kasumi’s great grandparents. Following that, there was a further 15-minute car drive on a two-lane prefectural highway into Ohji Town.
Her aging father was gruff but he liked the visiting suitor well enough. The old man could see that Hajime was still a boy at heart, but he was optimistic and not the type to back down from challenges.
Though of poor background, Hajime was determined to enter the electric field armed with a recently won two-year engineering diploma from a technical college in Kyushu. Importantly for the old man, he could see that Hajime and Kasumi were truly in love. Though affection and romance were hardly considered important to marriage in those days, Kasumi was his only daughter and he didn’t want to stand in the way of her happiness as well as her opportunity to see more of the world than the mountain overlooking the Seto Inland Sea.
Over the years the two never had children, though they both loved kids and tried to conceive. Maybe to fill the hole that created, they each volunteered at schools and with study programs in the three cities Hajime’s work brought them to during their marriage. Hajime taught electronic skills to elementary school age children at summer camps, while Kasumi helped out at day care centers when she learned of open spaces.
Although Kasumi traveled back to her childhood home in the hills a few times over the years—for important family holidays and then when her mother and later her father died—Hajime hadn’t been back to her family’s Ehime home since the marriage.
Eleven years is a dangerously long time for an already old and dilapidated home to stand unattended in the Japanese wilds. As the couple had feared, the disrepair was considerable when they arrived.
Half of the main house seemed to be slumping east, not as if the land had moved but rather part of the home’s cedar structure itself seemed to have buckled like damp cardboard. From the outside, too, vines and ivies clutched large parts of the structures, as if dragging the three buildings back into the hills.
The two-story main house had numerous leaks in the sheeted wood roof. Bamboo and wild grasses had begun growing through the floorboards inside the living and ofuro bathing areas, while lichens were decomposing the walls that housed the 1960s-era unit kitchen made of tin and stainless steel. Animal droppings were in the living room—most likely wild boar or bears had found a way into the home for shelter in winter months. The naga-ya storage buildings, originally built to house a few cows and oxen by Kasumi’s great grandparents, were in even worse condition.
A covered water well on the property though was clean and in full working condition. No electricity had ever run to the land—even up to her parents’ passing, candles and oil lamps as well as judicious use of gasoline- and kerosene-powered generators brought light and some space heating to the property.
Despite the hardship, Hajime and Kasumi were truly happy on this land. A romantic in her family must have originally picked this spot in the hills, as the home had an almost unobstructed panoramic view of the Seto Inland Sea to the south. The fishing island of To was closest to their coastline, yet on clear days Hiburi also appeared faint in the distance. Kasumi remembered that as a little girl she dreamt of one day sailing to both to enjoy freshly caught squid and flying fish.
Sunrises and sunsets were often golden there, and by keeping wild wisteria as well as a nearby stand of twisted pines pruned down, the two could take in the turquoise and navy-blue bay far below. On blustery days, whitecaps were visible out to the horizon.
Kasumi in particular loved to sit on the wide front porch of the house as she prepared meals. On cool Spring and Autumn evenings, the rays of the setting sun in the west directly warmed her face and neck—a last blanket of comfort before the mountain’s evening cold set in.
After the two worked together the first year to make quick, critical patches to the home, Hajime spent most of his days clearing the land for small vegetable and rice plots. The underlying soil was still vital even though decades of weed growth had long ago swallowed and camouflaged the paddies and fields. Japanese hills left to their own are thick and knotted, but after two years of beat-back the couple had more than enough sunny land to produce daily food for all seasons.
They grew tangerines, burdock root, cabbage, sweet potatoes, melons, pumpkin, daikon radish, and rice.
Neither ever complained. They knew immediately their decision to retire out of the city and to re-fashion their lives, even in a high and deeply remote spot, was right. It was much more than a shared project and the feelings of companionship that can come with such a challenge. Hajime and Kasumi were for the first time in both of their lives entirely happy. In their seventies, they were as in love with each other as the day they first met.
Kasumi fell sick in 1998, five years after their arrival in Ehime. It was entirely unexpected. The two traveled down from the mountains first to a clinic in Ohji and later as directed by the local doctor to a major hospital in Ehime City. Kasumi had contracted pancreatic cancer.
The illness, Hajime felt in retrospect, was mercifully swift. He had moved to a small apartment near the hospital so he could visit Kasumi every day through her illness and hopefully recovery. Doctors however said there was very little they could do except manage pain, and she died two months after arrival. Hajime was at her bedside holding her hand when she passed.
He stood and took several steps back. Rather than say a word, he bowed deeply three times to her body. He owed Kasumi so much more than companionship. His happiness since college and through every day in his career and retirement since was thanks to her.
It was all so unbelievable. Their life had been clipped, halted without warning. It felt like a broadcast interrupted suddenly for a breaking news announcement, never to return to scheduled programming.
Hajime felt unmoored for the first time in his life.
Kasumi’s extended family was oddly small. By the time of her death, she still had two distant cousins both living in Akita Prefecture, but Hajime knew of no one else. He notified the cousins but never heard back from either.
He had Kasumi’s remains cremated in a spare ceremony near the hospital and he took them back to the home in the hills. He drove back to Ohji Town with a ceremonial white box of Kasumi’s ashes buckled into the front passenger seat on his left—where she always rode on errands they shared. He turned his mini truck up the access road for the final 25 minutes up into the hills.
At the mountain home, Hajime placed Kasumi’s urn on a wide ledge in front of her favorite window. She would have a view of the Seto Sea every day and her loved sunset rays would bathe her before the evening cold. He cried that first afternoon, but he gathered himself as quickly as he could and slowly turned back to work on the crops and the home.
I met Hajime seven years later when I pulled a small rental car up to his home and called out, “Excuse me. Anyone here?”
Hajime came out of his house to meet me. I explained that I was an assistant director for the national TV program, “Potsun to Ikken Ya.” Not really a TV watcher, he only vaguely knew of the show so I showed him that we had found his house on a satellite photo of the area. As the program title suggests, we had come to find out why he is living alone far from anyone.
He smiled in a vaguely embarrassed way, and first showed me around the property. The day was sunny and crystal clear so we could see well past the first ring of islands in the Seto Inland Sea. The perfectly white cumulous clouds seemed bigger and taller than the mountain Hajime lived on.
He told me his story, and when I later saw a photo in the living room of him and an attractive woman both in their thirties on a volcanic sand beach, he told me about Kasumi. They were in Saga in Kyushu on one of only two vacations they were able to take together. Hajime was shirtless and Kasumi had on a one-piece bathing suit and a flower lei around her neck. Both were beaming, so very alive.
Hajime never felt a need to leave the mountain home they had shared. He built a grave for Kasumi in a small bamboo-framed clearing on the west side of the main house and he kept it carefully swept through the years. Despite the elements, the granite remained glossy...I could see myself in the stone’s reflection.
As Hajime told it, the past seven years had been lonely but he kept busy. The house and the storage facilities have no leaks and he has kept about half the crops up throughout the years. He drives down the mountain to Ohji Town once a week for frozen foods and staples as well as kerosene and gasoline when needed. He is 78 years old now and in good health.
I don’t want to leave you with a sad story of loneliness, of living out remaining years as one. There is a happy new chapter starting for Hajime that gives him excitement.
He told me that he wants to share the mountain spot with others. As he and Kasumi both loved working with kids years ago, he thinks his property could be best put to use by introducing it to others. Ohji Town recently announced that a summer youth program would be closing due to dwindling government assistance so Hajime is now preparing his home and land to be a substitute. He will open a two-week camp for kids wishing to learn about farming, fishing, and hand crafts.
He has remodeled one of his naga-ya storage buildings into a cabin for the children and will be re-clearing a portion of his cropland for projects. He told me that his only regret is that Kasumi will only be there in spirit. She would mom the kids well, he said. She wouldn’t dote or be overly permissive, but Kasumi would help communicate the beauty of this place.
He most looks forward to gathering everyone around for one of her sunsets.
Beautiful!
I haven't read anything as beautifully told as this in a long, long time.
I need to sit some place alone and think about everything here.