Elise's 5x5 Challenge: Tales From Fukuyama and Other Stories

Tales From Fukuyama

Smoke Against the Mountain

The first time I saw Fukuyama I thought the village was on fire.

After arriving at the JR Gifu station from Nagoya I had taken the N86 bus north to the tiny mountain village of Fukuyama. For anyone else the ride from the JR Gifu station would have been boring with the bus slowly ascending the winding road through the mountainous countryside. However, for me it was a new experience and thus exciting.

I had never spent much time outside Nagoya. Certainly I knew what the countryside was like. I had seen enough travel shows on TV to be familiar with the concept. But I had never seen rural Japan in the flesh. It is one thing to see something on TV but quite another to see it for yourself with your own eyes. I imagined I must have looked like a small child with my face pressed against the window as the bus passed by grandmothers and grandfathers out struggling in their vegetable gardens or homemade greenhouses; weathered neighborhood shrines perched on mountainsides; and the rude huts of roadside vegetable stands stacked with bags of persimmons, green onions or daikon.

When the bus had left the station it had been perhaps half-full. By the time we had left the city limits the number had dwindled to less than half of that. Most of those remaining were elderly grandmothers or middle-aged aunts who had gone shopping downtown, most likely at the Yanagase shopping arcade, and were returning home by bus after a busy day of bargain hunting. At every tiny village along the way the bus would make a brief stop and a weary shopper, arms loaded with her hard-won treasure, would exit the bus, pausing just long enough to drop money into the fare box swipe or her Ayuca bus pass over the reader.

By the time the bus reached Fukuyama I was the only passenger left. “Fukuyama-guchi!” the driver announced as the bus pulled into a small dirt parking lot and came to a stop. I stood up, lifted my large duffel bag and slung it over my shoulder before stepping into the aisle and making my way to the front of the bus where I dropped eight hundred yen into the fare box. “Thank you!” the driver called out as I stepped out of the bus onto the dirt parking lot and stood next to the bus stop shelter.

I watched as the bus backed up, swung around and pulled back out onto the road and turned in the direction it had come from. Fukuyama was the end of the line. I turned to get a good look at Fukuyama for the first time and I noticed smoke rising from between the grey clay tile roofs of the village before being caught by the breeze and pushed against the slopes of the mountain behind the small village.

That was my first impression of Fukuyama: a village on fire. I stood and took in the view. I had to admit it was picturesque with the thin grey veil of smoke against the red, orange and gold autumn foliage on the mountainside. This was to be my new home but if it burned down it wasn’t going to be much of a home.

Fukuyama. Happiness Mountain. Certainly it was a mountain but was it really a mountain of happiness?

I pulled a piece of paper from my jeans pocket and looked at the map drawn on it. With a village as small as Fukuyama I didn’t think I’d have a hard time finding the proper house but neither did I want to knock on every door in town until I found the right one.

The road the bus had come up and returned by was a two lane road but became a single narrow lane as it passed through the village. From that single lane a small web of even more narrow streets branched out through Fukuyama. It wasn’t a village built with automobiles in mind. I set off down the road into Fukuyama. One hardly needed a car to get around in a town that could be walked from end-to-en

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