There Are No Mountains Out There

One day, as I stood near the window of our office at Canon, overlooking the massive Tokyo prefectural government building next door, I thought I saw some large purplish shapes through the thick Tokyo summer haze on the western horizon. Were they mountains, or just darker clouds?

I asked a colleague, "Are those mountains?"

"Mountains?," she replied with a laugh. "There are no mountains out there!"

I could almost hear "silly!" at the end of her response.

Years later, when I played Sunday morning baseball in a men's league on the banks of the Tama River, I could sometimes see a pink, sunrise-lit Mount Fuji rising over the suburban Kawasaki skyline on the southwestern horizon, so far away that it appeared by optical illusion like a toy Fuji, only a foot or so high.

My Canon colleague had been wrong. There were mountains out there. I wondered if she saw them now. Without the summer smog trapped between us and the mountains by the Pacific breeze, from our vantage point in the westernmost tower of high-rise Tokyo we should have seen the majestic Japanese Alps of Nagano Prefecture over the Kanto Plain.