A curious symmetry as H departs for Tokyo, S arrives.
Hearne: It is not an easy place to settle. There is a loneliness.
Sōseki: I’ve only just arrived and do not sense desolation.
Hearne: Not desolation, a persistent stillness. As if the mountains brooding. The trees are listening. And the mists veil ghosts.
Sōseki: Well, I come here in search of solitude. Balm for my spirit. I have read your accounts, though I take them with both admiration and caution. But surely not all phantoms are malicious?
Hearne: Not malicious, no—but they are insistent. I once encountered a noodle vendor by the roadside near Suizenji. The hour was late, the fog low. He had no face. And yet he bowed courteously, and vanished.
Sōseki: A faceless vendor? A tale to chill the ink in one's brush. But you have always had eyes to see what others cannot—or will not.
Hearne: Be wary where you walk alone.
Sōseki: And I mean to walk often. These mountains—Aso, Kinpō—they beckon like pages yet unread. Perhaps if I write, it shall be to give voice to the stones, not the spirits.
Hearn: A noble ambition. But the stones have long memories, and they may speak of things you would rather forget. Japan is beautiful, but a beauty layered with sorrow.
Sōseki: What land is not? But I have grown weary of cities and the endless disquiet they bring. Perhaps the sorrow here, being older, is more honest.
Hearne: Honest, yes. But unyielding. Do not expect comfort from it. I found no companions in here—only watchers. The people are courteous, but the silence is not benign.
__________
Voice-over
Sōseki notes that Hearne is a foreigner in Japan, just as Sōseki himself was a foreigner in England which gave him a deep loneliness. They part with mutual respect, Hearne cautioning Sōseki he may wake one morning and find himself not in the year he thought it was, nor in the skin he assumed was his. Sōseki replies that he shall write to anchor himself drawing a distinction between them that Hearne walked through mists; and he, Sōseki will seek stone paths to walk.
