I’m a bit tired right now. I’ve been getting ready for my trip back to America to see my brother’s graduation. I’ve cleaned a bit and sorted through my books, trying to decide which ones to take home now, which to take home later, and which to leave in Japan. In less than a week I’ll be on American soil, but in the meantime, I have a bunch of chores to get caught up on.
The main culprit has been a sudden and very thorough obsession with fanfiction. If my novel is my wife, then fanfiction is my mistress and whenever I’m frustrated with the former, it’s so easy to turn to the latter to relieve my stress.
But the problem is that my “mistress” often exhausts me. Apparently, I don’t just write fanfiction, I become obsessed with it and spend my every free moment in the throes of passion, writing, writing, writing, until I get completely burned out. My “simple” fanfiction ended up being about 25 pages per draft and went through about five drafts, which meant in the space of two weeks, I probably wrote something like 100 pages, most of which got deleted. How did I do this? By neglecting everything else. Chores. Letters. Japanese. That pesky problem with my sink…
Oh, yes, my kitchen sink was having some problems draining. I would do the dishes and it would take a few minutes for the water to drain away. I discovered a bottle of some kind of Japanese drain-o left by my predecessor and kept pouring it in, bit by bit, with limited results. In the end, I got frustrated and dumped the whole bottle in. I ran the water and foam came out. Then, suddenly, with a giant belching sound, the sink sucked up the water. I thought that solved my problem. If only.
Anyway, my fanfiction didn’t quite get completed before I ran out of time. I’d told Vickie I’d go to Yakushima with her in the last weekend of May. Friday night, I put my fanfiction aside and tried to get some things done. Packing. Cleaning. Laundry.
Ah, yes, laundry. That was when the incident with the drain reared its ugly head with a vengeance. I stepped into my bathroom to collect my wet clothes and found the floor was completely flooded. The washing machine had drained right onto my floor. I had to mop it up with my dirty towels.
Now, what did that have to do with my sink? Well, when I emptied my kitchen sink of dish water, I heard a familiar belching from the bathroom. I looked and sure enough there was a new puddle of water floating around my washing machine. Apparently, the drain to my kitchen sink connects to my washing machine as well (though not, thank heaven, to the toilet or the shower). This drain had gotten clogged with thick muck, and every time it had to drain too much water too quickly, it would vomit it back out via my washing machine’s drain. Then it would try to suck the water back in, but not before leaving a residue of foul-smelling muck all around the area near my washing machine.
Well this was a nice thing to discover the night before a trip. And this same day, I found out the back tire of my bike was flat. Besides which, two weeks of spending hours without rest writing and writing left me suddenly mentally exhausted. I couldn’t even deal with packing that night, let alone all these unexpected problems.
Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:00, packed, tidied my house, and waited for Vickie. She arrived at 7:30. Yakushima is an island, and it takes about four hours to get there by ferry from Kagoshima City, which is maybe two and a half hours from our city of Kanoya, when timing is going our way. Poor Vickie. She gets a bit seasick. I managed just fine, blasting my iPod and focusing on the music. But I did feel a little wobbly on land.
Yakushima is World Heritage Sight. It’s a mountain on an island, and it’s famous for a particular type of cedar tree called Yakusugi. This tree is a highly fragrant, light-weight wood, similar to the redwoods of California (but not quite so red). Yakushima is also one of the few places where sea turtles lay their eggs. It’s a very unique place and I’m not going to do it justice with my quick summary of what happened.
We got to shore, paid way too much to rent a car, and headed off on a forty minute drive to Yakusugi Land. While on the twisty mountain road, I had to make reservations in Japanese on Vickie’s cell phone to see the sea turtles while the reception kept cutting out. It nearly made me car sick. We went hiking for about an hour at Yakusugi Land and then drove to the other side of the island (an hour and a half) to make camp. Yes, we went camping. Vickie borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags from another ALT. After that, we went zipping down the winding coast as wild deer and monkeys popped out onto the road. Made for nice pictures. We hunted down dinner, which was no easy task; we were on the half of the island where we couldn’t even find a convenience store, let alone a restaurant. We finally found a nice little izakaya (a Japanese tavern) run by a friendly lady and ate there.
By now, we were at Nagata Beach, where sea turtles lay their eggs from May to July. Okay, I’m going to stop my break-neck pace and actually spend a few minutes describing the sea turtles, because that was cool.
They told us to come at about 8:30 at night, and while we waited, a couple of tourists showed us some fireflies near the river. There was a lecture about the sea turtles in Japanese and I could understand about half of it. To be honest, we really didn’t know what we were going to see when they walked us on the beach. But there was a turtle, sitting in a self-dug hole, laying eggs. We could see the eggs shudder out of her, in little bursts of one or two. So many soft, slimy eggs. We were transfixed.
When the turtle finished, she tried to bury her eggs. At this point our guides measured her shell and stuck a tracking device in her leg. She didn’t like that, and started slapping sand into the air and snuffing. The guides said she was a small turtle, but her shell was still as big as a breastplate, and her face looked like a dinosaur. She made her way back into the ocean and as she did, she crossed paths with another turtle, just coming out of the ocean.
You know, I can’t help but feel like our turtle somehow conveyed to the turtle just coming out of the water that there was a crazy group of people who would stare at you and poke at you—because it wasn’t very long before the second turtle turned and returned to the water as well. The turtles, as you can imagine, were very slow, and by the time we got back to the car, it was 10:00.
The next day, we went to a fruit garden and they let up sample the fruit: bananas, passion fruit, papaya, and several kinds of oranges, all naturally grown and delicious. We saw two waterfalls, did some shopping, and went to a museum. We made chopsticks. Our instructor gave up two rough sticks of cedar wood and had us carve it and sand it. The curls of wood gave off a strong, fresh smell. I felt like such an amateur and my chopsticks came out weird, but when he added a thin strip of decorative paper and put it in plastic, it ended up looking nice. The last thing Vickie and I did was take a drive, where we discovered a shrine hidden in the back of a cave. Vickie said that the cave went further back than the shrine. Who knows what could have been hidden there?
By 4:20, we were on the ferry back. While Vickie zoned out, I started reading my latest book, World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. We got to Kagoshima and—I swear this always happens on my way back—we just missed the Terumizu ferry, which goes across the bay to our side of the prefecture. So, we had to wait another hour to catch the next one. I ate dinner on the ferry; Vickie didn’t. We got home at about 10:00. I dumped my stuff on the floor, took a shower, and went to bed.
Monday, I still had to deal with a clogged drain, a flat tire, and a load of dirty towels that needed to be washed ASAP. Plus, I had to pick up my tickets to America. I couldn’t do much about the drain, but I did fix my tire and go to the coin laundry.
The weather lately has been humid and cloudy. I know that tsuyu, or the Japanese rainy season, is going to break on us any day now. Truth be told, the rain should have burst on our heads that weekend we went to Yakushima, but we got lucky that weekend: not a cloud in the sky. The rain won’t hold out much longer though. The ajisai (hydrangea) bushes look thirsty for water.
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