Background

Akio sat, as he was want to do, watching the sea, the floats attached to the lines gently bobbing in the gentle swell. Minami was going to be annoyed when he got back, but he’d talk her round, he always did. They’d met during his first year at Hiroshima University, and had been madly in love ever since. The problem was he knew the relationship wouldn’t last, there were too many unknowns in his life, not the least of which was, what was he going to do with it.

He couldn’t specifically identify the trigger, but not really knowing where his real father came from or who he really was, was probably a major contributing factor. Sure, he’d done all the relevant internet searches, when his mother had given him his birth certificate, but they proved as useless as the certificate itself. The search for “Arden” brings up over 20 references, the closest match to his mother’s description, being an area of Denmark, a village within a forest called Rold Skov, but it doesn’t feel “right”. A search against his father’s name yields 12 individuals with that name, all of which died between 10 and 200 years previously. He had paid to unlock a genealogy site on one Orsen Cernunnos Waldheim, who briefly had an address in Arden, Nevada, USA, but he’d died 42 years previously in Corville, Oregon.

His mother had never hidden that his step-father wasn’t his real father, but it wasn’t until he entered his teenage years that he was able to comprehend what this actually meant. Sure his step-father was great; in fact he was the only father that Akio knew. Maybe somewhere deep in his subconscious memory, were memories of his real father, but they were out of his reach. He knew from his mother that she had a short affair, just a few months long, with his biological father, and that it ended a few months after she became pregnant. It wasn’t necessarily that his father was a bastard, he had after all brought the flower shop for his mother and put it in her name, although there was a covenant on it that meant she couldn’t sell it without his permission, although he suspected that that could be legally voided, as she hadn’t seen his father since his 4th birthday, which co-incidentally was the only occasion on which his step-father met him.

His mother and step-father, had already been in a relationship for nearly a year by that point, and were planning to marry the following year. The discovery that his mother was pregnant again, this time with his younger brother, did advance the timescales by a couple of months but other than that had no impact.

He’d drifted through his school years, dabbling in this and that, but always reading precociously. In a similar way to which he had a talent for the Martial Arts, something he always remembered doing, he also had a talent for languages and the humanities (history, poetry, philosophy, and economics), something which his grade point average didn’t reflect, but which his exam successes did.

He regarded the lines and the floats, as they bobbed on the water. He doubted he was going to catch anything. The distant sound of a wind chime reached his ears, its harmonic sound in the wind suggesting just the snippet of a melody, and causing another distant memory to surface, the sound of ash raining on wind chimes. It was a sound he wouldn’t forget from his childhood.

He’d been 10 when Sakurajima-san had suddenly erupted, blowing a cloud of hot ash all over Kyushu, burying towns, and starting fires that consumed what wasn’t buried. As Japan watched the eruption on the news Onishidashi-san in central Japan erupted for the first time in 400 years. Erupted was the wrong word, exploded was more accurate, the top of the mountain vanishing in a super-pressurized gas explosion, which was followed by an outpouring of the now unconstrained Magma Lake.

Then Fuji-san rumbled in commentary. All of Japan held its breath, hoping that the great kami spirit of the mountain held sway and would protect them. The mountain smoked but didn’t erupt. Then it shuddered. The earth moved ripping a fissure in the earth that drained Fuji-san’s nearby lake. The city of Nagoya was all but flattened. Fuji-san, the nation’s beautiful benefactor, would never be the same as before.

Then the demons came. Sirens sounded, the cities, Hiroshima include, Shutdown. Gunfire echoed through the streets around the clock. He’d snuck out in defiance of both his parents and the Authorities to investigate. He’d seen a part of one battle, and one of three of the demon-things being killed. He’d wondered then and still does “where does he fit into the world?”

He was at university when Japan shuddered again, March 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. No demons this time just an unimaginable natural disaster which triggered a man-made one, the meltdown at the Fukushima Power Plant. He’d skipped class and gone fishing on that day too.

He regarded his lines once more. He didn’t really have the time for fishing. He had essays to do for University, and he needed to spend time with Minami to keep their relationship healthy. He was aware she still had feelings for her High School boyfriend, Shintaro, whom she left behind when she enrolled at the university; perhaps they still saw one another when she returned home during the holidays, he didn’t really much care, they were happy when they were together. Then there was the turn his Martial Arts studies had recently taken.

There were lots of stories relating things that Martial Arts Masters of Legend could do, run along tree tops or the tops of Bamboo, heal people with their hands, kill with but a mere touch, seemingly disappear and reappear a few feet away, or throw balls of “Mystic” energy. The problem was that he had discovered that if he were in the right meditative state, and had prepared in the right way, then at least some of these things were possible, at least in a small way.

<missing bit about some powers and possibly something else that circles back to drifting on the tide of time>

He was still drifting, much like the floats as they bobbed with the tide. Fishing with a rod and line was one thing, a life as a deck hand on a trawler was something entirely different. Reeling in the lines, he gathered his gear, if not his thoughts, and made his way back to Minami’s apartment.