“Honey, I’m going to take the kids down to the sand!” Alan turned to see Susan, the pretty brunette who had just called out to him, wave from start of the little trail-and-staircase leading from the highway overlook where they were parked to the brown sandy beach below. Their youngest two, a daughter named Elaine (age three), and their son Charles (aged two) held her left and right hand. Laughter and a whoop of competitive victory brought Alan’s attention to their older two children – a seven-year-old redheaded boy, James, and their oldest, age nine, Carrie – both of whom had made it to the sand and were now rushing toward the water.
The sky was clear, and the rays of sun were effortlessly hot on Alan’s pale skin, but the breeze blowing west off the Pacific made the whole air pleasant. They hadn’t had that luxury in their little rental car though – apparently, Japanese rental cars weren’t used to cooling off six people at a time, and theirs had struggled on this second day of their trip. Alan wasn’t surprised to see his wife leading their little ones down between tidal pools to cool off in the water.
The beach is deeper than I expected; I thought these were usually just little strips of sand, but that’s got to be almost the length of a football field before you get to the ocean.
Alan himself stood at the border of sun and shade, the cool green of the forest along Japan’s coastline behind him, sun and sea ahead. Shaking himself from his thoughts, he called back to his wife: “Sounds good, love. I’m going to check out this shrine for a bit first; I’ll join you down there.” She waved back over her shoulder in reply, and Alan turned towards the roadside attraction that made him stop in the first place.
Opposite the beach overlook and parking area – five spots, all empty; wasn’t Japan supposed to be heavily populated? This stretch of their journey had felt nearly deserted, with only a few other cars on the road – there was a small gazebo, with a high, pointed roof, and corners that arched upwards. “Pagoda”, Alan reminded himself. “Though, aren’t pagodas only full-size buildings? Can you have a pagoda that is just for a bell?“
Under the roof of the small - gazebogoda? – there was a huge stone bell, suspended on a metal bar as thick as tree trunk. The bell itself was probably four and a half feet across, and the carved, almost cylindrical stone body was nearly six inches thick. Alan stepped around a perfectly still, shallow reflective pool – Ah! A real Zen pond! – and looked underneath the bell briefly to find a green metal clapper made of the same material as the rod holding the entire monument? Instrument? off of the ground. The metal – bronze, Alan identified – was surprisingly intact based on the green of its age and corrosion. “Not corrosion – oxidation.” Alan corrected himself again. “Oxidation – forms a patina layer that protects it from further decay. Like a self-defense mechanism for metals. That’s why we still have artifacts from ancient China. “ Alan shook himself again. He’d been having these little mental detours a lot lately, ever since the plans had been put in place to come to Japan – where he caught himself, giddy as a child, to be learning new things about this country across the sea from his home in the landlocked Midwest. Each little Wikipedia rabbit-hole led to hours of discovery – about history – have you heard about the Sengoku period? - about culture – (Book of Five Rings was harder to get into than he expected, but got better as he read along. Kind of the opposite of the Tale of Genji - , and a thousand other topics – including metallurgy.
Alan had tried some of the more common things that people usually got excited about in Japan – anime, manga, visual novels – but none of that had held his interest. High school was long behind him, good riddance, let’s not discuss it any further, why watch or read or play games about it? But the history and literature and language had all been fascinating – all of which had led to this trip, a two-week family vacation to Japan, hopefully in advance of starting a company here and moving here with his family permanently.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Granted, his Japanese wasn’t all that great – ok, it wasn’t anywhere near professional proficiency – but the idea had always been to hire locals for his sales team, and he could read a decent bit of kanji. Like the sign next to the shrine. Alan half-bent to look at it more closely. Maybe it wouldn’t be a perfect translation, but Alan interpreted it as meaning something along the lines of:
The Stone Bell of the Gojo Waterfall
This shrine marks (? Commemorates? Indicates?) – the passageways formed by the sacred waters of the Gojo Falls merging with the waters of the sea. It is said the pool reflects(? – no, ponders? Considers?) the soul at peace – and disrupts(? Dismisses? Exiles? ) - the soul in turmoil. The bell is said to be rung together by the kami of sea, sky, and earth in times of great spiritual significance – such as at the death of the emperor, or at the end of an era.
Apart from the verbs getting in his way, Alan thought that a fair bit of translation work; his Japanese was coming along.
He stood up from the half squat and stretched his legs, then turned back towards the beach. The sun had shifted slightly during his examination of the sign, and was now in his eyes looking back towards the beach; all he could really see was the reflection on the water. Squinting, Alan realized he couldn’t see Susan or the children from where he stood anyway with the elevation difference from the shrine and the trail; he was probably twenty feet higher up than the beach proper, and from this angle, the beach looked even wider than it had before.
Alan closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and just enjoyed the sun on his face and the breeze against his skin. This was it – the start of a new life, in a new place. His family was here and happy. The kids were excited about the trip, and seemed to like Japan so far. Susan had overcome her distaste for Asian languages – she had a master’s degree in Romance languages, NOT Asian ones, as she had often reminded him – but had decided to humor him and give Japanese a try. To her surprise, she liked it, and now had surpassed him in it – first on Duolingo, and then on the JLPT exams.
Everything was good. It was all going to work out.
In that rare moment of peace, something in Alan’s mind caught him as incongruous. Alan pictured himself standing there, arms out, dopey smile on his face enjoying the breeze and the sun, standing between the bell-zebo and the reflecting pool, minutes away from joining his children in the water. It was a happy thought – but then he realized there were no ripples on the water in his imagination. Alan opened his eyes and saw that was also true in fact: the wind on his face wasn’t affecting the water.
Strange – he thought.
At that moment, Alan felt a deep vibration ripple up from the ground, up through his feet and body. It was so low as to be almost beyond his hearing, but it made his stomach turn. Alan’s hands moved to clutch his stomach reflexively, and as curled in on himself, a loud clang rang out from behind him. He turned and saw the bell – however many tons of stone, rocking forward at a snail’s pace on its support bar. The bell swung up until it was nearly horizontal, and then, again with impossible slowness, as if gravity was an a mockery that something as dignified as the bell had no need to bother with, it shifted back through it’s arc. The clapper rang again, and the bell continued until it paused – hung – at the horizontal position at the other end of its swing, but then Alan’s attention was entirely consumed with by the cries of fear that reached him from the beach.
“Alan! Alan, help! I need you!”
“Look, the wave!”
“Daddy, where are you?”
Alan whipped around – and then looked up, and up. One hundred and fifty yards ahead of him, where the beach was rapidly being consumed by the water, was a wave. It was at least twenty feet higher than his line of sight
Alan had never been to Hawaii, but the posters in the highschool administrative office had shown surfers riding massive swells there. In that moment, Alan had the split-second, incongruous thoughts that first, this wave was bigger than those ones, and second, he couldn’t remember what the caption had been – was it “Dare to be great!”?
Then the paternal part of his brain connected.
His children were there.
His wife was there.
He had to get them OUT.
NOW!
Alan’s feet moved without his conscious thought, and he tried to leap across the reflecting pool towards the car and the beach trail. If he could just get to them, they could shelter in the car maybe, and! –
And then his back shoe caught on the lip of the pool.
Alan’s forward motion swung him face first down into the water, and the last thing he heard was his family’s screams, and the rushing immensity of the wave.