The Most Challenging Climb Mount Kumotori

The Most Challenging Climb

Mount Kumotori

By Kateb Shunnar

Hikari Chō never asked to be a mountain climber. Honestly, she barely asked to be awake most days. And yet life has a bold way of tossing responsibilities into someone’s lap like an overeager shopkeeper insisting you take leftovers home. She lived in Edo around 1850, long before it transformed into the restless giant we now call Tokyo. Back then, things were simpler at least that’s what people like to say. But if you had asked Hikari, she probably would have told you that “simple” is just another word for “you still have to do everything yourself.”

Her parents had taken ill almost overnight, collapsing like rice stalks in a storm. Their farm modest but stubborn was built on wasabi, passion fruit, and the pure willpower of people who refused to give up land that had been in their family for generations. And so, at barely twenty, Hikari found herself juggling wasabi beds, fruit vines, cattle, horses, and two parents who needed more tending than anything growing outside.

She tried to keep her chin up; she truly did. But the thing about keeping your chin up is that when life keeps piling things on top of your head, all that does is give the pile more room to fall. So there she was overwhelmed, exhausted, pressed thin like handmade soba noodles. And frustrated? Oh, absolutely. She wasn’t throwing things or screaming into the wind or anything dramatic like that (although she considered it many times), but she carried that quiet, tired frustration that lives behind the eyes of someone who has been strong far longer than they planned.

One crisp morning, when she felt completely wrung out, Hikari shuffled to the Ginkgo tree near the edge of the farm. That tree had stood there longer than the oldest stories in her family an ancient, stubborn giant with a trunk wide enough to hide behind and roots deep enough to anchor memory itself. It had watched over her since she was a child. It whispered secrets on windy days. It dropped leaves like golden confetti every autumn, as if celebrating the fact that it refused to die.

So, naturally, that was the tree she collapsed under.

She sat down “just for a moment,” as people always promise themselves before slipping into sleep, and before she knew it, she drifted off falling into one of those unusually vivid dreams, the kind that feel less like imagination and more like someone knocking on the door of your spirit with the tip of a fan.

In that dream, she wasn’t alone.

A woman stood before her a Kenja, a sage not too tall, not too short, not too young, not too old. Just… timeless. Her presence felt like a mixture of warm miso soup and a side-eye from someone who already knows the answer to every question you’re going to ask.

“Hikari,” the woman greeted her, as if they had known each other for ages.

Hikari blinked. “Do I… know you?”

The Kenja smiled, the way a grandmother smiles when her grandchild forgets where the sugar jar is even though it’s been in the same place for years. “Not yet,” she said. Then she offered a phrase that slipped into the air like a bit of poetry:

「七転び八起き」 Fall seven times, get up eight.

“It means,” she added with a faint smirk, “you don’t stop just because life is rude.”

Hikari’s tired expression twitched, the smallest hint of amusement poking through. The Kenja reached for her hand, steady and warm, and invited her to breathe.

“Deep breath,” she instructed. “In… and out.”

Hikari inhaled.

“Huuuuuu.”

The Kenja nodded approvingly. “You hear that? That sound right there do you know what it is?”

Hikari shrugged. “Wind? Or me sounding like a tired ox?”

The Kenja laughed a crisp, bright sound. “It is the sound of life entering and leaving,” she said. “The sound of balance. The sound your soul has been begging for. That frequency call it ki, call it breath, call it whatever you like it heals. Align yourself with that rhythm, and you’ll cross over Mount Kumotori.”

Hikari stared. “Cross over? Like… physically?”

“Oh no,” the Kenja said with a wave of her sleeve. “Spiritually. Don’t worry, I’m not sending you hiking just yet. I can see perfectly well that your legs might go on strike.”

Then she added with a voice soft enough to hush an entire storm, “Climbing a mountain especially one like Kumotori is more than stepping upward. It’s transformation, girl. It’s perseverance wrapped in aching muscles. It’s that stubborn pull toward enlightenment and toward the divine, even when you’d rather just sit down and pretend you didn’t see it.”

Hikari frowned. “Sounds exhausting.”

“Yes,” the Kenja replied. “But so is growth.”

She moved to sit beside her, skirts spreading like a quiet pool of fabric. “A mountain climb physically or spiritually is a quest for something higher. It’s where challenges try to shove you back down, and you get this beautiful choice: stay where you are or climb anyway. Mountains thin the air not to punish you but to remind you to breathe differently. And halfway up, you discover something your own strength, the divine whisper, the realization that maybe you weren’t as alone as you thought.”

Hikari listened. And for the first time in weeks, something in her chest loosened.

The Kenja leaned closer. “Once your breath and your life move as one, harmony will find you. Healing will come from every direction, even places you never prayed to.”

Hikari smiled, soft and quiet.

“Now,” the Kenja said with mischievous delight, “let me tell you a story, since your spirit looks like it could use a laugh.”

This was no ordinary story. It was folklore but not something plucked from old books. No. This was the kind of tale a wandering monk might share after drinking one too many cups of sake, delivered with a wink that says, “Take this seriously, but also don’t… take this seriously.”

The Kenja began:

“Once upon a time in a tiny village so small even maps said ‘never heard of it’ there lived a tanuki named Goromaru. Tanuki, mind you, are tricksters by nature, but Goromaru wasn’t exactly the brightest lantern in the shrine. He once tried to shapeshift into a priest but forgot the chanting part, so villagers just thought he was a man with allergies.”

Hikari snorted despite herself.

“One season, every villager was climbing the local hill only a hill, mind you, not even a respectable mountain to give thanks to the spirits for a good harvest. But Goromaru? He decided the spirits didn’t need the entire village showing up all at once, so he declared himself the official representative. ‘Why climb?’ he reasoned. ‘I’ll nap, then report.’ Brilliant plan, he thought.

“So he curled up under a persimmon tree and promptly fell asleep. And in his dream much like in yours he met a goddess. A mighty, glowing, celestial being… who immediately asked him, ‘Why are you sleeping on your duties?’

“Goromaru blinked and said, ‘Well, honestly, climbing sounds like work.’

“The goddess looked at him as if considering turning him into a sandal. Then she said, ‘「努力なしでは果実は得られぬ」 Without effort, you gain no fruit. But since you insist on shortcuts, let me give you a sample.’

“And she flicked her finger.

“When Goromaru woke up, he was still under the persimmon tree but now the fruit were falling at him one by one. Constantly. For hours. Bonk. Bonk. Bonk. Every few seconds, another persimmon dropped right onto his head.

“He tried to run. The fruit followed. He tried to hide. The fruit rolled after him like determined, juicy soldiers. By sunset, the villagers found him crying under a pile of squashed fruit, begging the goddess for mercy. They laughed for weeks.

“And to this day so the story goes you’ll occasionally hear persimmons fall all at once for no reason. When that happens, people say, ‘Ah, Goromaru is learning again.’”

Hikari burst into laughter, the kind of laugh that clears cobwebs out of the soul. “So the moral is… don’t nap your responsibilities away?”

The Kenja shrugged. “Or at least do it somewhere fruitless.”

Their laughter faded into a companionable silence.

Then the Kenja placed a hand over Hikari’s heart. “Your mountain is different from Goromaru’s hill. But the truth remains: you can’t skip the climb. You can rest. You can breathe. You can cry. But the ascent is part of becoming.”

Everything around them began to grow brighter dream-bright, glowing, like dawn sneaking up on the world.

“Hikari,” the Kenja whispered, “you are far stronger than your exhaustion. You are capable of walking through fog, through stress, through frustration, and still finding light. 「心に太陽を持て」—Keep the sun in your heart. It means even when life is cloudy, keep something warm inside yourself. Something hopeful.”

Hikari nodded, feeling the dream begin to slip.

“When you wake,” the Kenja added, “look at your Ginkgo tree.”

Everything dissolved into golden light.

Hikari woke with a gasp.

The first thing she noticed was the Ginkgo leaves. They had turned yellow all of them every single one, bright as coins under sunlight. It was too early in the season for that, but there they were, an entire canopy glowing like the inside of a lantern.

Slowly, she stood up, brushing dust from her clothes. And that’s when she saw it: carved into the bark, deep and elegant, as though etched by the wind itself:

葉っぱが一枚も落ちていないのに、彼はそれを知っている。

Not a leaf falls but yet He knows it.

A wave of warmth moved through her not heat, but awareness. Presence.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at those words. But she felt something shift inside her a weight lifting not because her responsibilities disappeared but because she finally remembered she wasn’t carrying them alone.

Life was still messy. Her parents were still ill. The farm still demanded more from her than she thought she had. But something in her had changed. She had climbed something without moving at all.

Sometimes the hardest mountains don’t have paths. Sometimes they’re built from exhaustion and fear and uncertainty stacked high enough to block out the sky. And sometimes miraculously you realize the climb is not as impossible as it looked.

That night, when she returned to the house, she went about her work with a steadier hand. She breathed the way the Kenja taught her: deep, slow, deliberate. She muttered a few complaints under her breath because let’s be honest, even spiritual growth has its sarcastic commentary but she kept moving.

Days passed. Then weeks. And though nothing magically fixed itself, Hikari found she could face things with more courage, more softness, more resilience. She carried the message carved into that Ginkgo tree like a talisman.

Because climbing your mountain doesn’t always mean conquering it. Sometimes it means learning the rhythm of your own breath and trusting that the divine sees every leaf every moment, every tear, every tiny scrap of strength you didn’t know you still had.

And maybe that’s the quiet miracle: not reaching the summit, but continuing toward it.

Even when overwhelmed.

Even when frustrated.

Even when pushed from every side.

“Fall seven times, get up eight.”

Because even the leaves fall under watchful eyes and not one of them is forgotten.

Make A Donation