"Rebirth"

All I can do is stare at him. 

Eguchi has a look of serene amusement on his face. The only noise out here is the sound of the boat engine and helicopter rotors. A trio of news choppers fly away in the distance, away from the storm, which follows them with strong crashes and cracks of thunder. But considering the current circumstances, the the background ambience fades into little more than a subtle static. I’m at the end of the world with a dead man. There are statues and statuettes dotting the shrine and temple - they all gaze toward me, vacant eyes, empty nothingness, years lost to time.

There’s another clap of thunder. 

“Kid, I gotta go back,” Miyagawa says. “You staying, or should I pick you up once the storm ends? Might be a day or two. This one looks something fierce.”

My mouth’s gone dry. A great, great man - that’s what Miyagawa called Eguchi. This is a man who understands the past. He is the past. He’s the man keeping the eternal flame lighted in this forgotten temple. Nobody but mountains and the occasional visitor to keep him company.

“Will you show me the Flame?” I ask.

The Governor looks at me for a moment. The rotors and boat drone on; shadows fall across his face. “I will.”

I tighten my fists as Kanako's face flashes in the nearby lightning. “I’ll stay until the storm subsides.”

Miyagawa nods. “He’ll expand your mind, man. It’s like, it’s like, Eguchi always tells me, you know - the body and its part are a river, the soul a dream and mist, something something is warfare. It’s the shit, man. This storm will change your life.”

He turns the rock music back on and revs the boat engine. Ripples cascade through the water as he turns around and heads back down the river, this time in-tune with the current. Once he disappears around the bend, that’s it - I’ve lost my last lifeline to the wider civilization. I might be the most isolated man on earth at this point. There is only the temple, only the flame, nothing outside it, nothing beyond it.

Well, we’re the most isolated men on earth. Eguchi hoists me to my feet and I follow him into the temple. He seems to glide across the smooth stone, while I struggle to keep up, needing to duck below fallen timber beams and scramble over fallen statues. Even the vacant eyes belonging to those scattered sentinels follow me as I head into the temple. Torch lights flicker up ahead as we head under another Torii gate, and then another, and another, following a long line of them up a cobblestone mountain path. The forests are thick walls on either side; I’m in a tunnel at the edge of nowhere.

“Surprised, are you?” Eguchi asks. “About my resurfacing.”

It takes me a moment to answer. I just don’t know what to say. “...how has nobody caught you?”

Eguchi crosses his arms, placing his hands into the opposite sleeves of his dirty jacket so he can walk like a monk. “Avoiding attention is the easy part. What am I really missing, Shunsuke? The decline of civilization? Our modern decadence is the false prophet. The modern age is our false religion. Our own human greed is the dragon behind it all. Things have spiraled out of control. We’ve already peaked as a species. It can only go downhill from here.”

My world is currently just the forest incline path we walk up together. The thick trees drown out all sound; Eguchi’s voice seems to echo beyond time.

“But the past isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I tell him. “You know that, right?”

“Who are you trying to prove that to?” Eguchi asks me. “Me, or yourself?”

I try to resist his voice. “I don’t know. Everyone. Something bad must’ve happened to you in the past too, right?”

Eguchi chuckles and continues to lead me uphill. “I foresaw the end, not just of Yoshiaki, but of this whole country. All civilizations rise and fall. Something needed to be done to stave off our inevitable decline. They wouldn’t listen to me in Tokyo. They wouldn’t give me the power I required. I could find that power in Yoshiaki.”

"You came back just for power?"

"I came back because I could do something for the place I love with it."

“The governorship,” I say. “And all that corruption and back-door dealing.”

He speaks calmly. Thunder rolls in the distance. “I was preserving the past. Our past. You must understand, Shunsuke. The past is the only thing that exists. Our conversation, right now, will be a memory. It already is. You’re already thirty years old. Forty. You’re already dead. The only thing you can do in life is look back and wonder where it all went wrong.”

I grit my teeth. “My third year of high school.”

“It was the 1964 Tokyo Olympics for me,” he answers. “All that wealth flowing into the capital. Not a cent of it would ever reach Yoshiaki. My childhood home would one day be swallowed up by time. I had to act. I had to preserve it.”

“By covering everything in concrete?”

“Concrete was my childhood.”

And then I remember what Eguchi told me in Mabuchi castle. About how he’s stuck to walking on stone and concrete, always afraid of grass, since his father repeatedly told him that he had planted landmines across the entirety of Yoshiaki.

“My God,” I exclaim. “That’s the reason you covered Yoshiaki in cement?”

Eguchi snorts. “Don’t ascribe a trend of history to the will of a single man. It played a part, but it was the trend of the day. But didn’t we make a beautiful world out of concrete?”

“Concrete good, grass bad.” I gaze up at him. “You’re just selectively remembering the good parts of the past over the bad. The same as I’ve been doing.”

The Torii gates and forest continue on and on. Flashes of lightning briefly illuminate the trees before they settle back into a darkness only broken up by torchlight. 

“Why would I ever remember the bad?” Eguchi asks me.

“A good friend of mine showed me that you can’t move on in life until you deal with the bad. You need closure. You need to confront it.”

“I have confronted it, Shunsuke. With a bulldozer and cement trucks.”

“That’s not actually dealing with it though.”

Eguchi stops under a gate and looks back at me. “Do you, of all people, find my methods unsound?”

I pause for a moment. The incoming storm kicks up shrill breezes that blast through the canopy around us.

“With all due respect…I don’t see any method at all.”

Eguchi wipes his weathered face and continues upward. The path finally opens up into a courtyard, a hole in the forest where sunlight could shine through, except the sun’s been beaten back by the storm. Somebody crashes cymbals together in the sky; there's a seismic orchestra of thunder, a tremendous flash of lightning, and then the heavens rain down into the clearing. Fortunately, there's a building, and we take refuge there. It’s a one-room shack; the roof leaks in a few places.

“This is a halfway house,” Eguchi explains. “We stay here until a lull in the storm. The river crossing is too dangerous otherwise.”

A downpour of Biblical-proportion smashes into the building, into the forest. I can hear screams of thunder and trees cracking under the pressure. The rain never lets up, so all I can do is lay down in spare bedding.

Miyagawa was right. It smells old.