I'd have never thought that a crossing guard, a cigarette, a turtle and a spider would lead me to a woman who could see a ghost floating behind me under a tree in Maui, but that's exactly what happened. It began, innocently enough, on a side street near Shibuya station in Tokyo, on my way to my job trying to re-invent the umbrella. I was working for one of the heads of the Israeli Mafia there as a designer and general gofer, a position which had once led me to selling vegetarian falafels to carnivorous Arabs in Richard Nixon masks with a Rastafarian Swedish guy who spoke English with an Australian accent from the back of a truck parked in Roppongi.(It was Halloween.) Life can be strange sometimes.
I passed a young crossing guard every morning on my way to work and unlike most Tokyo people, he smiled and said hello. I began having my lunch with him, improving my Japanese and his English skills. It turned out he was from Kyushu, which I soon learned was the reason for his un-Tokyo-like friendliness. I was preparing to leave Tokyo soon for a couple months of sightseeing and exploration within Japan, I needed to get to Korea to renew my visa anyway, so I decided to travel to where the friendly people were. A fter a month of hitchhiking, a 10 day trip to Korea and a new visa, I set out to explore Kyushu Island. I got a few rides, camped on a couple beaches up north and the word was that the warmest water and the best bodysurfing was to be had in Miyazaki Prefecture so south I went. A ride from Kushima got me to a tiny fishing/farming village named Toi-no-miazki. I went into the village vegetable store and reluctantly paid 800 Yen for a small watermelon, hiked down to the beach to eat it and have a look-see.
"Tobacco-wa Arimasuka?" the rice farmer asked. I was cutting thru the rice fields to save myself a few hundred yards of walking back into Toi-no-Mizaki after slurping down the last of my watermelon on the beach. "Hai, arimas, dozo" I said as I fished around in my shirt pocket for what was, as I then discovered, my last cigarette. I gave it to him anyway, for as I had discovered early on, the phrase you're supposed to learn about where the nearest tobacconist's is was totally useless as there is a cigarette machine every 100 yards throughout Japan, right next to the hot and cold running coffee machines, just down from the battery and beer machines.
My poor command of their language obviously gave the older man in the field great confidence to display his entire English vocabulary in one proud sentence; "Youth hostel parent desu". All the while pointing at his nose, grinning like a horse, nodding his head in the manner of one of those dogs in the back window of a '65 Dodge Dart in South Dakota. Work in the rice field had come from a slow roll to a stop except for the threshing machine which was still chopping and chomping, shaking and screeching, spitting brown rice into the white plastic gunny sack. I had never witnessed a rice harvest before and it had obviously been a long time since an unshaven Gaijin with long blond hair had cut across that particular rice paddy on a very minor peninsula on the southernmost island of Japan.
I thought about it for a while while Uehara-san (Ken) smoked my last cigarette, decided to blow some money on a nice room wherever it was. I usually camped on whatever beach or in a rural bustop or forest wherever my last hitch of the day got me to. I went to work helping with the rice harvest. This was so agreeable to them that they only worked another 15 minutes or so and then we all piled into the back of the minitruck and drove the 10 or so km to the youth hostel. I would heartily recommend it as it sits near a lighthouse on the end of the Kyushu peninsula.
I cleaned up, ate dinner and went into the common area of the hostel, only to find that Ken had gone home and brought
several packs of cigarettes, appetizers and several bottles of sake and proceeded
to get trashed with the hostel owners, all the time speaking a rapid fire
Kyushu dialect which even a girl from Osaka could not understand. She did speak
English however, so she and I struck up a friendship, went outside to see the sights,
and I ended up introducing her to the constellations I knew. (Growing up in Osaka, one
doesn't see the stars too often.) When we returned to our sakied friends inside, arrangements were made for Ken to take
the two of us sightseeing the next day.
The next morning dawned clear and bright, Ken showed up only slightly hungover, and proceded to take us to the other lighthouse
the Wild Horse Park, the Monkey islands, the primary focus of which seemed to be to wonder why they loved to sit in the middle of the road, blocking traffic
in both directions on the only road around the peninsula. The monkeys had the intellligence to hang mostly
on their island homes. I believe are these are the monkeys in the famous "101 monkeys" story by Ken Keyes.
However, the monkeys we saw didn't need to wash their food as it was primarily bananas thrown to the side of the road
by drivers trying to get them out of the middle of the road. After lunch, coffee, returning the Osaka girl to the hostel, and driving me to Aoshima beach.
Ken walked down to the beach with me and spent the night at my new camp.
When we awoke the next morning, tracks in the sand bore evidence that a large sea turtle had laid its nest of eggs 10 feet from our feet! I was excited, Ken was interested and I set about building a protective structure around the nest area as this was a beach where the local kids could drive their 4x4's. Ken and I went to the local fisheries office where we learned that it was probably a rather endangered turtle which had a gestation period of 45 days so I decided it was up to me to save this particular batch of baby turtles. Besides which , the waves were good and the food stores were only a couple blocks away. I was tired of the road, I had made a friend and these were good enough reasons for me.
Over the course of the next 45 days, Ken returned over and over to my camp, usually taking me to his home in Toi-no-Mizaki, where we worked on his new house, then to the rice paddy, and on to an afternoon and evening of coffee shop and karaoke bar carousing. His favorite coffe shop was named Umekobo (House of Dreams), where the owner, Hiroko-san took up a liking to me and always put extra corn on my pizza. I had never had corn or octopus pizza before this, and now a pizza with corn is the only way I make them. Octopus I prefer very fresh and served raw. (It gets too chewy otherwise.)
One day Hiroko-san asked if I would like to meet a local girl who spoke English, so the next day Ken and I walked in to be shyly greeted by Mayumi Nobes-san. Her English was far better than my Japanese and so we talked a lot. Hiroko-san set up a date for us (properly chaperoned by Ken) to take her children to see the fireworks display that weekend. After this proper introduction, Mayumi asked me to lunch , I asked her to go bodysurfing which led to hugging to warm up and our romance had begun.
Three months of living, working and travelling together, she confessed that she was sure we had spent several lifetimes together before and that on the night we'd met, she returned home and could only see my face. Our love in this life grew as summer changed to fall, as we drove the back roads and camped on the beaches, travelling steadily north.
By the beginning of the fourth month, we were living in Tokyo, both of us working for my previous employer, she as a secretary, when she got a spider bite on her leg in Yokohama. Mayumi's habit of scratching insect bites at first led me to believe that the growing hole in her leg was simply an infected scratch. I tried hydrogen peroxide and aloe vera to heal it to no avail. In my pocket Japanese-English dictionary, the word for infection was--bikin?? so I told Mayumi thats what it is. She disagreed with certainty and I never understood why until much later when, in a larger dictionary, I discovered that bikin?? meant infectious disease. My concern grew with the size of the hole which within a week or so was 1" in diameter. At my insistence she went to an herbalist in our building who diagnosed it as a spider bite and gave her some medicine which had little effect. I wanted to go to another doctor but she seemed resistant until a former Israeli Army medic with whom we worked looked at it one day and showed great concern and recommended seeing a doctor. I later learned that most Japanese will tend to dismiss their loved ones diagnosis and worries as they are emotionally involved, giving more weight to a co-worker's opinion. With in an hour, we were seeing the doctor at a nearby hospital. Again, the diagnosis was a spider bite, medication was prescribed and we went back to work. Neither of us had liked the doctor's bedside manner or lack of thoroughness and as my visa would soon expire along with my 1 year return ticket, we booked a flight to Honolulu.
Within a couple days of arrival, Mayumi was admitted to Queen's hospital where she was impressed with the vastly less condescending manner of American doctors. They did much more testing, discovering that the spider bite was aggravated by her previous medical history of Lupus and we were referred to the finest specialist in the islands. His recommended course of treatment worked well and she was improving daily.
I had found a nice apartment a mile or so from Waikiki, and after dismissal from Queen's, we moved in and I changed her bandages and brought her fresh flowers from the neighborhood plumeria trees daily. We took a sightseeing bus trip around the island, watched sunsets on Waikiki, and our days passed languidly and uneventfully.
One saturday morning, Mayumi looked at me and said "I am going to die". Shocked and having just seen the doctor on friday, I reassured her that she was doing very well. She dropped the subject, I remained concerned but now more about her mental state. I went to work that night, returning late to find her sleeping peacefully. When I awoke, Her breathing was shallow and raspy, and she was weak. I went to the health food store, consulted the Materia Medica, got an appropriate remedy, returned to the apartment, gave it to her and she seemed to improve and feel better. I laid down beside her and almost immediately fell asleep. When I woke, her right hand was on my arm, I sat up and looked into the eyes of a dead woman for the first time in my life. I screamed "NO!!", ran to the neighbor to have him call the ambulance, returned to the room and began CPR. The ambulance seemed to take forever, the scene became an organized chaos as they arrived to take over CPR, using a shock machine to try to start her heart all the way to the hospital, where the same things were done for 30 minutes until her body was once again breathing and her heart pumping, assisted by modern technology. A doctor told me that I should accept that she was dead and that these measures would not bring her back, it was just what they had to do. He explained that her kidneys had given out, and every cell wall in her body was loosing its ability to hold its structure together, as if a billion cuts had been made internally.
I followed her body to intensive care ward, sat with her all afternoon and far into the night,I was holding her hand when her body went through two more deaths and they brought her back. At one point her hand gave mine a squeeze. At four in the morning, they insisted I leave as I was falling aslep in the chair. I did so reluctantly, went home, showered and returned to the hospital at nine to find her disconnected from all the machines, her body cool to the touch. I held her hand, said my goodbys, and gave her a parting kiss. Tears were flowing from my eyes and as I looked at her, a single tear slid slowly down her cheek as well. She hadn't wanted to go yet.
The next few weeks are a blur now, but mysterious things began to happen to me. I had returned to Maui, and one night in Nahiku, a picture of her fell over one day, revealing a picture of her with a bigger smile I had behind it. I began to scratch my arm in her manner, I got an infection on my leg in the same spot as hers had been. My ability to speak Japanese grew, as I spent my days doing Sumi-e paintings under the Banyan tree where many Japanese tourists congregate in Maui. I often felt her presence and I had remembered what Mayumi had told me in explanation for her not wanting to camp near cemeteries in Japan during our road trip. She had said that Japanese believe that when you are asleep, the spirits of the dead can enter your body. Finally, one day a middle aged Japanese tour guide came up to me. We had never met, I had never told her this story, but within 30 seconds Chiyoko-san told me she could see the spirit of a young Japanese woman floating above me, smiling at me She saidif I was willing to let her go she would perform a ceremony she had learned from an American Indian Shaman. I agreed (even though I had already done this in my own mind), she held my hands, concentrated and said something in a language unknown to me and it was done.
To this day I at times feel her presence and now feel honored by Mayumi's having chosen me in life and in death. Aloha nui loa Mayumi Nobe.
