The Gift of Rio (The Gift of the Elements) Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter One - The Month Of Mei

  Chapter Two - Secrets & Lies

  Chapter Three - Escape

  Chapter Four - Hilo & Rio

  Chapter Five - Major

  Chapter Six - Decision

  Chapter Seven - A New Vision

  Chapter Eight - Goodbye

  Chapter Nine - A Fountain Of Surprises

  Chapter Ten - Take Off

  Chapter Eleven - Serendipity

  Chapter Twelve - Unexpected

  Chapter Thirteen - Old Church Van

  Chapter Fourteen - Details

  Chapter Fifteen - Stepping Up To The Plate

  Chapter Sixteen - Spicy Beef

  Chapter Seventeen - Goodknight

  Chapter Eighteen - Before Breakfast

  Chapter Nineteen - A Fisher Of Men

  Chapter Twenty - Another Realm

  Chapter Twenty-One - Processing

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Shingu

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Family Feud

  Chapter Twenty-Four - The Akagawas

  Chapter Twenty-Five - The Tanakas

  Chapter Twenty-Six - New Direction

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - The Word Is Spreading

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Old Testament

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Witnesses

  Chapter Thirty - Seeker Of Truth

  Chapter Thirty-One - Fanning The Flame

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Heroes

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Supplies

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Waterfalls

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Kurama

  Chapter Thirty-Six - Buddha Belly

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Invitation

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - Buddhist Hospitality

  Chapter Thirty-Nine - Mysterious Ways

  Chapter Forty - Kurama Onsen

  Chapter Forty-One - The Ryokan

  Chapter Forty-Two - Shinto

  Chapter Forty-Three - Quick Exit

  Chapter Forty-Four - The Last Shrine

  Chapter Forty-Five - Sanctuary

  Chapter Forty-Six - Goodbye, CYOI

  Chapter Forty-Seven - The Bench & The Rumor Mill

  Chapter Forty-Eight - Disclosure

  Chapter Forty-Nine - Revelation

  Chapter Fifty - Renewal

  Chapter Fifty-One - Sota Tanaka

  Chapter Fifty-Two - Washed By The Water

  Chapter Fifty-Three - Tokkō

  Chapter Fifty-Four - Fugitives

  Chapter Fifty-Five - Healing

  Chapter Fifty-Six - Opening

  Chapter Fifty-Seven - Closing

  Chapter Fifty-Eight - After The Show

  Acknowledgments

  When you pass through the waters,

  I will be with you;

  and when you pass through the rivers,

  they will not sweep over you.

  - Isaiah 43:2a

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Month Of Mei

  The first few months of 1972 had been particularly difficult ones for sixteen-year-old Mei Akagawa. She was a good girl. A good daughter. A good person.

  She was barely five feet tall and very thin, giving her an almost fragile appearance. Mei was quiet, shy, and even a bit timid. She always obeyed her parents, followed the rules and generally did what she was supposed to do. Unfortunately, this meant that she had never even begun to build a life of her own. She didn’t have any close friends and she only showed interest in the things that she knew would make her mother and father happy. Until 1972, she had been content to make pleasing her parents her primary goal. But, what her father had asked of her this time had, so far, made 1972 the most challenging year of her young life.

  Mei’s father, Eito, worked at the Tanaka Corporation in the Kita Ward of Osaka, Japan. Mei wasn’t sure what the company did or even exactly what it was that her father did for them. Work was one of the many things that Eito kept to himself. But, Mei knew that the Tanaka Corporation was quickly becoming an important fixture in Umeda which was the major commercial and business district in Kita-ku, Osaka where the Tanaka Corporation headquarters was located. Now her father had asked her to marry the son of the company’s founder. It would be good for her father’s career. She understood that. And, he wasn’t forcing her. Legally, he couldn’t. But, the pressure she felt was immense.

  So, as she usually did, Mei eventually obeyed her father’s wishes and was soon engaged to someone she had met only twice. Sota Tanaka was a nineteen-year-old man who Mei found physically attractive enough. And, she could tell that he felt the same way about her. But, emotionally, he was as cold as she was shy and the combination made it very difficult for them to get to know one another. Their first two meets had involved very little conversation. In fact, the way Mei remembered them, she spent most of the time looking down at her hands and Sota was virtually expressionless, speaking in shorter sentences than anyone she had ever heard before. These meetings and the circumstance surrounding them were causing Mei a severe amount of anxiety. Had she not already been such a naturally discreet girl, her parents would probably have been able to tell that she was quickly slipping into a deep depression.

  Awaiting their third encounter, Mei was sitting on a park bench near the Osaka North Port Marina, staring out at the Yodo River and feeling as though her world was crumbling around her. She was nervously anticipating Sota’s arrival just moments before the unexpected event that would change her life forever. Instead of Sota arriving and taking a seat, an elderly woman nearly startled her into leaping off the bench as the woman seemed to appear out of nowhere and take a seat next to Mei.

  “Lovely,” the elderly woman spoke calmly to Mei in Japanese without taking her eyes off the river. “The water is just lovely, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Mei spoke back, also in Japanese, as she tried to slow her heart rate back down to a normal pace.

  “It’s no wonder God chose to cover most of the planet with the stuff,” the elderly woman continued. “Just lovely.”

  Mei nodded her head as if she agreed but she was barely paying any attention to what the woman was saying. However, she did notice that the woman spoke with a warmth that seemed unique and inviting. But, what Mei was really doing, as she nodded her head, was trying to gain the courage to inform the woman that she was meeting someone at this bench and that her seat was being saved for him.

  As if the woman knew exactly what Mei was thinking, she suddenly reassured her. “Don’t worry, Mei.”

  The woman’s use of her name startled Mei as much as her sudden appearance had. But, what the elderly woman said next truly shook Mei to her core.

  “I’ll be gone just a few moments before Sota arrives.”

  “What?” Mei asked. She was so stunned she couldn’t form full sentences. Only individual words. “How?”

  “I know things about you, you don’t even know yourself. At least not yet.”

  Mei stood up as if she was going to leave. Instead, she plucked out one of the many questions that were zipping around her brain and asked, “Who are you?”

  “I’m no one of great consequence, Mei. Just a humble messenger.”

  “A messenger? Then who exactly was it that sent you?”

  “The only one who can, my dear.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “You will. Eventually. What’s important now is the message. You need to hear this so that you can prepare appropriately.”

  “Prepare for what?”

  “You will ultimately have two children. All children are special in the eyes of loving parents. But, your firstborn, your daughter, will be truly remarkable and you will come to real
ize that she’s not just a gift to you, but to everyone.”

  Mei stared blankly at the elderly woman for what felt like minutes. Finally, she took her eyes off the woman and turned briefly to look back out at the river. What the woman was telling her sounded ludicrous. But, she had known her name and the name of her fiancé. Yet, as far as Mei knew, the woman was a total stranger.

  She spun around again to ask the woman how she knew all of this but the woman was gone. She had vanished without a trace and the surrounding area left nowhere to hide. She hadn’t disappeared into a crowd of people. She wasn’t hiding behind a building or a tree. And, Mei had not taken her eyes off her for long enough that the woman getting up and walking out of sight would have been remotely possible. Was she a spirit? Mei wondered to herself. She could think of no other explanation.

  Mei forced herself to sit back down and try to appear as if nothing had happened. She did not want to act or sound like a crazy person when Sota arrived. That could only complicate matters. But, to be fair, what this woman had told Mei would affect him, too. Surely, he would be the father of the children that this woman claimed Mei would have. Should she tell him about the encounter?

  She decided she couldn’t. At least not yet.

  That was precisely the moment Sota stepped in front of Mei, startling her even more than the elderly woman had. She quickly stood and composed herself as they bowed in greeting to one another. She forced a smile for the man she didn’t know but was engaged to marry and, with whom she would apparently, have a very special daughter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Secrets & Lies

  Although the religious lines had blurred in Japan since World War II, both the Tanaka and Akagawa families continued to identify themselves as practitioners of Shinto, the ethnic religion of the Japanese people since before Buddhism came over from the mainland in the sixth century. While the engagement between Sota and Mei was the result of an arranged introduction, a somewhat outdated method of finding a partner called “omiai,” the couple still honored the common three-year courtship period.

  Mei was not sure if she believed the elderly woman she had met briefly on the park bench. But, during her courtship with Sota, Mei decided that she could not risk having a child with him. Not if it was going to be this daughter that was a ‘gift to everyone’ as the woman had put it.

  Sota was cold and calculated. His greatest concerns were for his own success in business. Sota wanted nothing more than to rise to the top of his father’s company, ultimately making it more successful than it had ever been. He suffered from an unhealthy competitiveness with his father. It was something he kept hidden from his family but Mei had observed enough privately to recognize that a child could become a dangerous weapon in the hands of such a man. Particularly if that child was special in some way. So, she never told him about her encounter with the elderly woman. In fact, she never told anyone.

  Mei felt trapped in the engagement. There was no way to escape without suffering consequences that seemed unbearable to her. But, there was a way that she could protect her unborn child. Unfortunately, the only way she could come up with was to never conceive the child at all. So, she illegally purchased birth control pills on the black market and began to take them about five months before the wedding ceremony. Every three months she would take the bus into Japan’s largest slum, Kamagasaki, and purchase them from a man who called himself Yamashita.

  Thirty-eight months, almost to the day, after meeting the elderly woman near the Osaka North Port Marina, Sota submitted the required family registration sheet with the city hall registrar to change their marriage status and legally give Mei the surname Tanaka. The ceremony was held in the main building of the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine, approximately sixteen kilometers from the park bench where Mei had received the prophecy. Family members, very close friends, and strategic business associates of the Tanaka Corporation were in attendance. Mei was elegant, painted white as a sign of purity before the gods and dressed in the same type of black kimono, patterned with colorful flowers, once worn at weddings of the nobility during the Edo period some two to three hundred years earlier. Sota, too, looked very handsome. He wore a black crested haori jacket and loose, skirt-like hakama with a vertical stripe. The kannushi performed a ritual purification for the couple and announced their marriage to the gods called the kami. The bride and groom took three sips each from three cups of sake in a ritual called “sansankudo.”

  The dinner reception and after-party was held in the banquet hall of Hotel Granvia Osaka, about 5 kilometers away from the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine. Extended family members, more friends, and additional business associates attended, making speeches before offering gift money in a special envelope. It was everything Mei could have wanted. Everything except for the fact that she had a very deep secret she was hiding from everyone in her life. Not the least of whom, was the man she had just married. A man she knew she didn’t love. Even worse, a man she couldn’t trust to be the father of this special baby girl that she desperately wanted but was fighting not to have.

  Newly married and surrounded by family and friends, it was the loneliest Mei had ever felt in her nineteen years of life. She continued to feel lonely long after her wedding day. Family and friends went home. Her husband remained emotionally cold, having little time for anything that wasn’t work related.

  Mei slowly became quieter and more internalized. She put on a happy face whenever her husband had to take her out in public for a dinner with people he needed to impress or spent an afternoon or evening with family. But, otherwise, she mostly stayed home by herself. The one exception was the quarterly bus trip to Kamagasaki to purchase more birth control pills from Yamashita.

  As the months passed, Sota grew angry over the fact that Mei wasn’t getting pregnant. When a full year had come and gone he told her she was embarrassing him by not giving him a son to carry on his name and his business the way he was doing for his father. He tried to force her to see a doctor but she refused. He didn’t understand why she wouldn’t go and she declined to explain it to him.

  Sota’s emotional cold front turned into a volatile storm of cruelty in the year that followed. He never physically abused Mei in the first two years of their marriage. But, one night, that changed. He came home drunk and began interrogating her over her inability to get pregnant and refusal to see a doctor about it. He made her sit in a chair at the kitchen table and would push her back into the chair if she tried to stand. He yelled at her until tears were streaming down her cheeks. Finally, he began to slap her across the face as he demanded answers that she would never give him. The interrogation lasted almost an hour. And, when it ended, it was only because Mei couldn’t hold herself up in the chair anymore. He finally let her collapse onto the floor. And, once she did, he stripped her of her clothes and forced himself on top of her as he told her she would give him a son if it killed her.

  Six weeks later, Mei discovered that she was pregnant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Escape

  Mei wasn’t devastated or even really all that surprised. Although she had never missed a single dose of her birth control, deep down, she always knew this was coming. The revelation of her pregnancy did, however, immediately send her into full-fledged panic mode. Her top priority, as it had been since her one and only encounter with the elderly woman who Mei now believed to be a prophetess, had always been the protection of this daughter whom she had been told would somehow be special. Now that the baby girl was on her way, she had to figure out how in the world she was going to keep her away from Sota.

  Luckily, she was home alone at the time she learned of her pregnancy. If she hadn’t been, her frantic walking in circles would have caused almost anyone to call for an ambulance and a straight-jacket. After sitting still for a few minutes, which was forced by a short dizzy spell, she left the house and spent several hours at the bench overlooking the Yodo River, asking out loud for the return of the elderly woman. She needed guidance. And she needed it badl
y. But, unfortunately, guidance never came. At least, not in the form of the prophetess.

  Forty-eight hours later, the crazies had subsided, and a plan started to develop in her mind. Perhaps, wherever it was coming from, this was the guidance she had been looking for all along. Either way, it was the only plan she had.

  The plan began to develop from the realization that if she wanted to escape her current situation, she had already been given the means to pay for it. Sota was so focused on his one-sided competition with his father in the business world that he had placed Mei in charge of all their personal finances. That meant, she had access to every single yen that Sota brought home. Even better, that included all the assets purchased with those yen.

  So, a couple of weeks before she needed to, Mei made her quadrennial trip to visit Yamashita in Kamagasaki. But, this time, instead of purchasing birth control pills, she sat him down and laid out a plan that involved changing her identity, cleaning Sota out of every yen that he was worth, buying a plane ticket to America under her new name, and taking every yen she could wire transfer or fit in a suitcase along with her.

  Yamashita was astounded at the meticulous and devious plan hatched by the typically shy and seemingly naïve young woman. It made him smile for the first time in the years they had known each other. He told her that he could help make her plan a success, for a twenty-percent fee. Feeling more confident and audacious than she ever had in her life, Mei got Yamashita to knock his fee down to ten percent. The deal was in place and the execution of the plan had begun.

  Over the next four weeks, Mei Tanaka made sure that she saw the most important people in her life, in between trips to a few different banks, charities and Kamagasaki, of course. She never let anyone, other than Yamashita, in on her plan to disappear from Japan forever. So, her family had no idea that they were seeing her for the last time or that what seemed like a typical sayonara actually meant goodbye for good.

  The burden of her secrecy was particularly hard on Mei where her parents were concerned. She had spent most of her life trying to please them and she knew this was going to break their hearts. However, the responsibility she felt to protect the child growing inside of her at all costs superseded everything else.