The Three Musketeers.  The Three Stooges.  The Three Amigos.  History’s most formidable teams are teams of three.  The Three Kings of Orient.  The Three Little Pigs.  All forces to be reckoned with.

My team of three, drawn together by a common vision of island relaxation, was as such: a tango-dancing vegan, a bearded trickster, and myself. This is our story.

The tango-dancing vegan, who went by the name Rose-Marie, owned a small blue car of typical proportion to the others of Japan’s motorpool. The car had traded many hands before it came to Rose-Marie, and the hood and roof of it were sunbleached to the color of slate, so that the car looked as if it was graying with age. The interior had the musty smell of old McDonald’s bags and hemp, and was packed to the gills with camping equipment and food. The bearded trickster, going by the name of Puck, sat in the back seat, wedged between an enormous bag of industrially manufactured sandwiches and the carpeted upholstery of the side of the car. I had shotgun, next to Rose-Marie.

I posed a question. “Let’s say you walk in to a room. The room is dark, but not so dark that you can’t see. You perceive a table in the middle of the room, with a number of chairs around it. How many chairs do you see? Blink it.” I say the last bit in reference to the book Blink, which describes the advantages of trusting your initial reactions to things.

“One” says Rose-Marie.

“Infinity” says Puck. According to the personality test of which they are yet unaware of taking, this is how many romances you’ll experience during your life.

“Next question,” says I, “You then perceive that there are several coffee mugs on the table. How many are there?”

“Two” says Rose-Marie.

“Six” says Puck. In reality these answers dictate the number of children Puck and Rose-Marie will be responsible for conceiving. Apparently not together.

“Third question. You get up to leave the room, but as you open the door to go, you see that your way out is blocked by an animal. What kind of animal is it?”

“A dog” answers Rose-Marie.

“A lion” responds Puck. What they look for in a mate.

“Next question.” Rose-Marie’s interest was dipping. “This is a personality test I gave to my students last week,” I say with a sideways look at her. I know she can’t resist a chance at self introspection, and sure enough she perks up. “Next question, you get outside of the room, and you’re walking down a road when you come upon a fork. To the right, the road goes through a meadow. To the left, a forest. Which do you take?”

They both go the route of the forest.  Pessimists.

“Two more questions.  In the middle of this forest, there is a lake.  You have to get to the other side of the lake. How do you do it?”

Rose-Marie swims.  Always challenging herself.  Puck holds on to her leg while she swims, tugged across the lake.

Last question. “Ok, you get across the lake.  There, you see a house.  What kind of house is it?”

Rose-Marie finds a messy Japanese apartment lit from the inside by Christmas lights, with a fully furnished kitchen. Puck is in a forest service cabin. Their future homes.

Mostly we sat in silence, unwilling to shout over the noise of breaking wind or roll up the windows to endure the stifling heat. We continued speedily southward passing from Kumamoto to Kagoshima through long tunnels which seemed to open up just enough to allow a glimpse of rustic little villages tucked in to narrow green valleys, with Japan’s aging population tending terraced rice fields, and then again the austere wall of another dark tunnel.

The roadies that Puck and I had finished a while ago were clamoring to have their rents paid, so we pulled in to a rest stop. Back outside of the loo, Rose-Marie was studying a Kagoshima tourism map. I lit a cigarette.

“Here is where we are.” She said, pointing to a red dot captioned ‘You Are Here.’ “And here is where you said we could stay tonight.” Her finger moved further south to Sakura-jima, an active volcanic island-turned-peninsula across the bay from Kagoshima harbor, where our Yakushima-bound Ferry made berth.

Puck lit a cigarette. “Where is Chiran?” he asked. We had planned to visit the town’s WWII memorial museum, where on display are several letters written by kamikaze pilots to their friends and family, before their last flights.

Rose-Marie scanned the map. “It’s way over here,” she said, pointing towards the southwest corner of the map. “I don’t think we’ll have time today.” I couldn’t deny it. We settled on checking out a waterfall on the way to Sakura-jima.

—

“If Ran-Chan were a disease, which disease do you think he would be?” The question was directed at Puck. The three of us were in the car again on the way to a natural hot springs bath on Sakura-jima. Puck balked at the question.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Uh, I think he would be Alzheimer’s.” replied Rose-Marie. I laughed.

We arrived at the resort which housed and appeared to have sole claim to the hot springs, and received our bathing garb – undiscriminating as the hot spring is to gender, you can’t just have both sexes walking around naked. Rose-Marie went ahead while Puck and I had a ceremonial pre-bath offering of tobacco. When we finally descended to the oceanside pool, Rose-Marie was already sitting perched on a rock at the far end, with her he legs in the water, silhouetted by a red-orange setting sun. Reminded vividly of a siren, I hesitated for a moment before wading after Puck to join her.

The water was uncomfortably hot and we spent most of our time only half-submerged, Rose-Marie sitting with her arms folded to hide herself as the white cotton bathrobes would not. After a while we got bored of the place and left for dinner.

—

Our hostel looked like a refurnished Japanese elementary school. That is to say, it looked like a prison with an air of comfort. Still, a room with a view of the bay and the imminent threat of a volcanic eruption – fit for what I’d see at the end of my lake.

—

Woken disgustingly early by an alarm from Rose-Marie’s cell phone. No traces of even pre-dawn were visible from the veranda. Puck went outside for a smoke and I went to brush my teeth. Our ferry was set to leave at 6:00, but we had to be there an hour early to check in. Before that though, we had to catch a smaller ferry to take us across the bay to Kagoshima harbor. We were up at 4:00.

—

On the Yakushima-maru, the ship that would carry our threesome plus a car to Yakushima, there are rooms to satisfy the luxury of a broad range of bourgeois. Going below deck from the private rooms with queen size beds and individual showers, we lower class passengers were corralled in to large one-room boxes, with thinly carpeted floors and a lingering smell of livestock. Walking straight through the stronger smelling of these boxes, we found floor space in a large room at the ship’s aft, looking out on the shrinking coastline of southern Kyushu.

The ferry took four hours to grind its way from Kagoshima to Yakushima, and the three of us took advantage of the constant drone of the ship’s engine to catch up the night’s sleep. As we stretched out on the hard floor Rose-Marie turned to me and said, “Make sure I don’t sleep the whole time. I’ve never been on a boat where all you can see is ocean.” I said OK, thinking that she wasn’t likely to sleep the whole time anyway.

—

I had four objectives on the island.

First, drink some beer and smoke come cigarettes. In other words, submit to my vices.

Second, keep from annoying Rose-Marie with my submission to these vices.

Third, I wanted to scale the highest mountain on Yakushima, as a gesture of domination towards the island which tried to claim my life the previous January.

Fourth, collect sea shells to make necklaces with Puck as gifts for friends back home.

The first was easy enough. Puck and I came well prepared with several packs of our favorite brands and a bottle of shochu given to Puck as a gift by a colleague.

The second was also easy, due to a combination of tactful timing and the ocean of patience welling inside of Rose-Marie.

The third objective began with another unhealthily early start at 4:30 in the morning to ensure that we could make it up the long mountain road to the trailhead. The redoubtable trail to Miyanoura-dake, the highest peak in southern Japan, was packed with Japanese tourists.

“Have you noticed that all of these groups are decked out in brand new gear?” Puck asked me during a break from hiking. He was right, and we both suspected that it was the first and last time this gear would be used. It is a common practice among the Japanese to dress for an occasion properly, even if it means spending a month’s paycheck on high quality hiking gear only to use it once.

The trail began under a dense canopy of the cedar forest which covered most of the island. As Yakushima’s claim to fame, the trees in this forest date back as far as 3000 years, but anything past that I don’t buy, whatever ‘experts’ say. For a long time the island was logged, but the operation was halted and in 1993 the island gained notoriety as a World Heritage Site.

As the trail climbed, our trio passed through the canopy to highland marshes, and eventually on to picturesque grasslands broken by sheer rock cliffs and enormous granite boulders. In four hours and 7.5k, we summited Miyanoura-dake.

—

Objective four was accomplished lazily and our attention turned quickly from collecting shells to following Puck’s lead in building cairns with the scree of white coral strewn about the beach. The highest cairn was one the three of us were building together, placed precariously on the edge of a crag, and reached the height of three stacked toddlers before I clumsily knocked it over.

—

Satisfied beyond words, the three of us made our way back on to the Yakushima-maru. Back on the mainland, our story ended abruptly but spectacularly, with the smoke erupting from the peak of Sakura-jima. As we fled the giant pillar of black billowing smoke in the rear view mirror, we wondered how hot the water in that natural hot springs was at that moment.