Fire on Sadogashima

CW: Natural disaster

For Reedsy by Jan. 2

Write a story where something doesn’t go according to plan.

Fire on Sadogashima

1. “The fire god, although destructive by his very nature, and feared by mortals, is not evil and does what he can for mankind, providing them with light, warmth, a means of cooking, and the heat for forging weapons and tools. However, if the people affront him by neglecting his worship, he has been known to burn cities to the ground.” (Wikipedia)

2. Sado is an island off the north-west coast of Honshu Island. In Japanese mythology it was one of the eight great islands of Japan. Now it is part of Honshu, one of the four big islands. Its full name in Japanese is Sadogashima, the latter syllables meaning island.

Ron MacDhiu changed his name when he moved to Japan, following in the footsteps of his martial arts master. There was an elaborate ceremony in Yoyogi-koen, a huge Tokyo park – his wife, Maureen, pledged to call him Rong MahDoh (mado means window in Japanese) for the rest of their lives. She liked the idea of calling him Rong especially when preceded by “you’re”. Some saké was then poured over a small Buddhist statue, one of the laughing ones. They waved some bamboo branches over the Buddha and both sat cross-legged to eat a picnic of tofu, miso, barbecued nasu (eggplant), potato fries, cucumber and shiso leaf salad, washed down with the remains of the name-changing celebration saké.

They discussed their past few years in Tokyo and decided it was time to move away from the city lights and the thrilling life. Their weeks were filled with a heady combination of 12-hour work days, martial arts training and partying at weekends. Occasionally, but not often enough for good health, calm relationship and strenuous work life, they got on a train for a couple of hours to get out of Tokyo for a day to breathe some fresh air. Now they wanted to live all the time like that in nature, leading life at its intended pace, far from Tokyo’s hum and thrum. Apart from which they were going to have a second child, their first now over three years old, and they wanted to live in a country place for nature’s beauty and a better-quality life.

They had been to Sado Island twice before; the first visit was in the big Japan holiday of Golden Week, for three days when they walked round much of the island; the second was for the popular Earth Celebration music festival held every summer. They had spotted several attractive old wooden houses there, and often talked of living simply like that, in the countryside or a village. There are numerous old houses in Japan, many of them sitting empty and selling for a song because elderly Japanese cannot afford to renovate them.

Rong did a lot of research into the move. He had sort of made mates with a local fudo-san, or real estate agent, whom he had met many times at the same nomiya they frequented for drinks and light eating. He was able to ask him about how to buy an old place, what the pitfalls were, how to get a bank loan if necessary, how to get an appraisal of such an old country place. He also made a special trip to Sado to hook up with an agent there and get some idea of what was on offer. In the end though both Rong and Maureen knew that they would just make the move to Sado and then look around.

And so it came to pass about three months later that they took the high-speed ferry over to Sado, rented a car, and went to a minshuku, a Japanese inn, to stay for a week while they made forays into out-of-the-way places on the island. They had almost given up by the fifth day when they turned into a road just out of a village and wended their way for a couple of kilometres through bamboo groves and mikan, or orange bushes and terraced rice fields until they came to a single house, a classic old farmhouse, a kominka, and fell in love with it at once. They could see their dreams coming true more easily than they expected. Also they didn’t have to buy it because it was for rent at a reasonable cost and the great beauty of it was not only in its wooden and thatched structure, but also there was no gift money required or any rent in advance, just the first month’s payment. It was dilapidated, of course. No problem for Rong because he loved fixing things and do-it-yourself work.

Within a few weeks he had removed all the unwanted livestock such as spiders and cockroaches, had made the place watertight, patched the sliding shoji doors, replaced the tatami matting, and cleaned up the kitchen, also getting the water on and the wood stove working. The following weeks he turned his energies to the garden and some surrounding fields, which the owner had said he could use if he wished to plant vegetables and sow some crops. First he would have to burn off the old grass and trash on the land, a good way to regenerate the soil.

All went well and each day Rong burned off a new section of a field. There were various safety procedures for doing this and he made sure that he checked the area to be burned, considerately told the village people what he was up to and had a supply of water on hand just in case. One particularly fine calm day Rong decided to burn off an extra big area. He rushed about lighting here and there. The tinder-dry field caught easily, burning with a crackling uneven sound as it burned down and caught anew the next piece of undergrowth.

When he had a good patch under fire and was enjoying the progress and thinking of the new ground he could till, Rong felt something change in the air, a barely perceptible movement accompanied by a slight change in temperature. He looked up and around. The sun shone, there were no clouds, the bamboo grove was still. He lit another section of field, but there was that movement again. He had known sudden gusts of wind before, but they seldom affected the fires. This time was different, it felt eerie. Rong decided not to light any more of the field.

Suddenly, as if the air was super-charged, a wind came out of the north. The bamboo shook and bent right over as if squashed. Rong rushed for his fire beater branches to try to put out some of the bigger flames. No sooner had he reached one fiery bit than another burst into life fanned by the huge draughts of warm air. Some of the fire leapt across to an adjoining field. Rong raced round over the fence and into the burning area. He grabbed some branches he kept over there for this eventuality and began beating ferociously. He looked to his side. The fire was rushing down a dried-out channel. In winter this was a raging torrent. Now it was a conduit of flame. At the end of the ditch was a huge pile of bamboo which burst loudly into bright flame, sending it up in a conflagration showering sparks over a wide area. Other places caught fire. There were too many hotspots, too many fires, all too much for one person. Rong looked in horror as various fires spread towards his house. He raced back to warn his family.

As he ran he cursed the wind, cursed the dryness, cursed the lack of provision for fire-fighting, even cursed his house being made of wood. The fire had a good start on him and it was going faster. He could only look on helplessly as it reached his house and sent exploding squibs from stacked winter branches into the thatched roof. An orange wave rolled over his home. Plumes of flame went up and booms of hot pressure burst out of windows and weak points. They seemed to beat a rhythm with his rapid footfalls, getting slower in the face of the hopelessness of preventing the destruction of his home. At least he could see Maureen standing at a safe distance but her head was in her hands, no sign of their child. Rong feared the worst.

Reactions can be strangely different for people caught in terrible events. Many go into a panic but some like Rong stay calm. His years of martial arts training had assisted with composure when terrible stress presented. For some inexplicable reason and very strangely he couldn’t help muttering lines from the 1960s hit by The Doors, "Light My Fire." Fortunately and more optimistically he was also able to remember The Move's "Fire Brigade". Then briefly there was Arthur Brown’s "Fire", and then Bob Dylan's "This Wheel’s on Fire”.

He quickly told himself this was no time to be singing much-loved old rock songs and that he needed all his strength to pray for a change of wind or some rain with it.

The conflagration zoomed up the hill about 100 metres from Rong’s place. On top of the hill was a Shinto shrine and the priest’s house. The priest saw the fire approaching and stood with his long staff shouting at the flames, “Do not come here! Go away! Do not dare touch us!” The fire as if by magic veered to the right, leaving the priest with his head tilted up and back, his hands raised to the sky, as if in thanks to some deity.

The fire raced on reaching a small group of homes. People rushed out to safety. The houses were swallowed in flames with their 400-year-old thatched roofs. The local volunteer fire brigade arrived too late. It’s a moot point if they could have done anything because the average age of the firemen was about 70, and two of the three had infirmities, limping around muttering, “Too late! Too late!” They made strange sucking sounds, the Japanese way of expressing awfulness.

Rong reached Maureen and was relieved she was all right but she had terrible news. She hadn’t been able to open the door of their daughter’s room, and the smoke and flames were hellish. She had to leave. Rong was beside himself with grief, of course thinking he had lit the fires, thinking he should have been nearer home, and he should have seen to more water in more convenient locations.

He blamed himself for everything, even for the move from the comparative safety of Tokyo. Life without his child would never be the same, small consolation that the neighbours who suffered so much at his hands, would feel for his loss. He still had to apologise to everyone, and there was the shame of facing the village elders and not being believed that it was an accident caused by the wind.

Rong hoped that they would never find out that he had a bit of a history of being involved with fires: there was one in his home photo studio once, some chemicals had spontaneously combusted and he was lucky to get out alive; there was a fire in the dressing room at his dojo, or martial arts centre, nothing to do with him really except that he was there and was involved in extinguishing it; he once helped a neighbour to put out a fire that had started in his kitchen, and that had involved dragging a couple of old people to safety. Rong couldn’t help thinking that his simple presence caused conflagrations.

The Sadogashima fire was Rong’s fourth fire experience, and he hoped fervently it would be his last. After many meetings with the villagers and the temple elders, expressing his heartfelt sorrow and apologies accompanied always by deep long-lasting bowing, Rong and Maureen returned to resume their hard-working life in Tokyo, to pick up pieces and look forward to the birth of their second child.