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A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.
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by Michelle Bailat-Jones
1. At the top of the toes, above the slender metatarsals and those little phalanges, sit three small wedge-shaped bones—the cuneiform bones—that help to create the arch of the foot.
2. Within the larger Kirishima Mountain Range, there is a smaller ridge dotted with several peaks that runs across the center of the island from Mt. Karakuni to Mt. Takachiho. The tops of these peaks rise above the forest with terrains like moonscapes—covered in scrubby plants, pebbles, and dust. Craters dot the ridge line, some dry, others filled with sparkling blue water.
3. In the 15th century, a Venetian traveler named Giosafat Barbaro visits Persia and sends back reports of a strange and indecipherable writing found on clay tablets and on the walls of ancient city sites.
Peak No. 1
taka/chi/ho/mine
high/thousand/grain or crest/summit
4. At night I pulled a needle and a thread through the blisters I got while climbing Mt. Takachiho. Wearing the wrong shoes. Walking too fast.
5. Japan is said to have begun in this place. Mt. Takachiho is where the grandson of the sun goddess stepped out of the sky and walked for the first time on the earth.
6. On both of my feet I have a little knob of extra bone—an arch spur—that has grown out from the joint between my metatarsal and one of my cuneiform bones.
7. Like late cuneiform writing, the Japanese alphabet requires the reader to negotiate both sounds and image-based symbols. For a learner, seeing a word for the first time and understanding it right away is an impossible task. The word cannot even be sounded out—it must be broken up into characters, and then into radicals, and finally looked up.
Peak No. 2
mi/hachi
honorable/rice bowl
8. As a traveler, Giosafat Barbaro mostly measures—the height of the castle walls, the length of the ancient city streets, the distance between the churches. He paces out these measurements. Gives his data in feet.
9. When you perform the Japanese tea ceremony, you must sit with your legs folded and your feet tucked beneath you, flattened against the floor.
cuneus is the Latin for “wedge” / forma for “shape”
10. When in Japan, I often forget to look at the scenery. I become singularly focused on the language, wanting to understand each new character, its relationship to the others in a compound, how together they work to create a word that has both concrete and visual meaning.
Peak No. 3
Shin/moe/dake
New/blaze/mountain
11. Since 2011, you can no longer hike directly across the rocky ridge of Mt. Shinmoe and look down into its crater. A lava dome has formed in the crater of the now-awake volcano.
12. The vocabulary of volcanoes is anthropomorphic. Volcanoes are alive, sleeping, or extinct.
13. Giosafat Barbaro stands with his guides at the gates of an ancient city. It is dawn. The sun lights up the letters pressed into the stone blocks of the gate. No one knows how to read this language anymore. It has burned out. Become extinct.
Peak No. 4
kiri/shima/yama
fog/island/mountain
14. Does anyone know why the descendent of the sun chose such a foggy place to leave the brilliance of the sun and the sky?
15. My first tea ceremony sensei held my feet in her hands and cooed over the little bumps, pressing them with her fingers and shaking her head. I would never be good enough. I would never be able to concentrate well with these bumps pressing painfully back at me.
16. Several times I stood in the silence of the cloud ocean at Mt. Kirishima, looking out across the other peaks as they floated like islands in the sky.
Peak No. 5
shishi/ko/dake
Lion/gate/peak
17. Was this because of the night sky? Can a person see Leo from the top of Mt. Shishiko?
18. Friends laughed at me for always wanting to make a concrete meaning out of the kanji. Sometimes it’s just a sound, they told me. Sometimes it once had a meaning but no one knows or cares anymore.
19. It is rare, but the character for “shishi” (lion) can also be used when talking about a sphinx.
20. In Persepolis, Giosafat Barbaro turns a corner and happens upon a stone frieze of a sphinx on the palace walls.
Peak No. 6
kara/kuni/dake
Korea/country/peak
21. I stood on my tiptoes, I climbed onto rocks, but I could not see Korea from the top of Mt. Karakuni, the highest of the Kirishima Mountains.
22. Giosafat Barbaro’s feet hurt. In the evenings he washes the red sand out from between his toes, massages his arches and the tops of his feet, pressing on the metatarsals, the cuboid bone, the navicular. Rubbing down those cuneiforms.
23. Do travelers take rubbings from stones in 1472?
wedge/form/bone
Who named the bones?
Who named the writing?
24. Couldn’t I have them removed, my Sensei asked me. Don’t they hurt? Several times I have been asked this. But I say no. You can only see them when I point my foot and they only hurt when I am reckless about my footwear. Besides, I am too fond of their symbolic meaning. The way they link me, link all of us, to something old and once-mysterious.
25. This cuneiform bone of mine has overextended its allotted space, and in doing so it reminds me to pay attention to details of word and image, to peculiar connections, to the importance of walking slowly, and to the all-too-human obsession with language and meaning.
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Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her novel Fog Island Mountains won the Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction in NYC and Audible.com and will be published by Tantor in Nov 2014. In 2013 she translated Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s 1927 Swiss classic Beauty on Earth (Onesuch Press). She is the Reviews Editor at the webjournal Necessary Fiction and her fiction, poetry, translations and criticism have appeared in a number of journals, both online and in print.