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Kota and his father visit Mount Shiroyama. Okaa-san is not invited; she's too fussy for the trails, and isn't good at keeping up; Kota's older brother is already at university, so it's just the two of them. Kota is about twelve. At this stage, his father is able to walk on his own, and is fit and strong, but as an adult Kota wonders whether his father had some precognition that one day such outings would no longer be possible, and that a whole lifetime's worth of fatherly wisdom needed to be passed down in these few brief years. The excursions are frequent and regular as clockwork.
But as a child, Kota is thoughtless and senseless, and more interested in adventure than education. He climbs trees like an agile monkey and flings himself off them to land on the ground like a cat; he falls into rivers, causing his father to have to shed his expensive hiking boots to jump in and fish him out; he gets thoroughly sunburnt and bitten by mosquitoes; he frequently gets completely lost, and once manages to spend three days wandering around the mountain certain that he's close to home, until a rescue party finds him. ("The forest people helped me," he says, when the news crew asks him how he survived.)
As they walk, his father tells him stories.
"Do you remember the story of Saigo Takamori, the famous samurai?"
Kota shakes his head, busy trying to knock down a plum from a nearby tree with a handful of rocks. The light is dappled on the thick foliage. There's a bubbling stream nearby; Kota can hear it. He wonders if they'll go fishing again.
"Saigo Takamori was the greatest samurai who ever lived. He was from Kagoshima, and he led the revolution that brought down the Tokugawa government, and restored the Meiji emperor. But despite his success, Saigo got bored of peace. He threw himself into planning an ill-fated invasion of Korea. The new Meiji government was nearly bankrupt - they didn't have the means or inclination to back Saigo's plans. But his supporters were outraged by the new government's reluctance to support their leader. So 40,000 of them marched on Tokyo from Kyushu, determined to avenge the slight. They were vastly outnumbered by the 300,000 government soldiers. Saigo was pushed back towards Kagoshima. He found refuge in a cave in Mount Shiroyama."
Kota, who has been feigning disinterest but really listening intently the entire time, gasps a little. Despite his muddling of the political terms and his confusion over the numbers, the story of Saigo's individual heroism right here in Kagoshima sparks in his mind. "But that's here! Where's the cave? Can we go there?"
Kota's father smiles. "We're going there right now. Don't you want to hear the end of the story?"
Kota nods solemnly, and accepts his father's hand when it is offered. He doesn't want to get lost on this part of the journey, now. "Saigo was a man who had everything, but he didn't care. He'd wanted another big adventure, so he'd marched on the capital. So now he gathered a handful of loyal followers and committed hara-kiri."
Kota thought about this quietly. "So he lost."
"He won, in his own way," his father says. "He died on his own terms. What more can a man ask for?"
Kota still remembers the expression on his father's face as he said this, and this cements his belief that his father, somehow, knew.
His mother flatly denies this, but the sting of the loss of his father still weighs him down every day, a loss that has sent him direction-less and spinning through life without a guide. His mother tells him to settle down, have kids of his own; his father was his age when he was married, and two years later they had Kota's brother, and she talks of all the happiness it brought them; so how does Kota begin to tell her that he's already been settled down for more than ten years, how does he begin to explain the itinerant nature of his relationship in words they can both understand to a woman like her, rigid and steadfast in nature, who's only become more traditional and wary under the twin burdens of grief and a solitary old age?
Because the truth is that he's nothing like his father: he's not steadfast, responsible or brilliant, he's not kind, forgiving or morally good; he certainly wouldn't make a good father, with his inability to stay in the same place for long, and his lack of interest in anyone other than himself or Kenny... But that'll change, she says, it'll change once you have kids. It changes everything. Aren't her other son's kids good enough for her, Kota wonders. But she must see it as a failure to his father's memory, to have this solitary, roaming son. He sees himself like that too, and sends the memory of his father apologies every day.
Beautiful, dusty Kagoshima with its tropical air and abundance of fish and sweet yams: what he wouldn't give to stay here. Kota prefers country life. He likes being greeted by old grandmas and he likes being stopped by little kids in the street and he likes driving his own car around. He likes the comforting blandness of country food and he likes the warm weather, the mountains and the sea breeze, none of the pollution and the crowds.
But after a few days of idle relaxing, he feels restless. Tokyo has the work he loves and the man he loves. So. Like Saigo, rich and content with glory, but always longing for another adventure and finally for death, he returns to the city.