The Hidaka Mountains are the remote wilderness in which a disgraced, blind hibakusha withdraws from Japanese society during the outbreak and, against his stated wish to die, learns to live with extraordinary discipline. Familiarity, darkness, and isolation initially make the range a chosen site of self-erasure; after an encounter with a zombie transforms that intention, the mountains become a refuge, a training ground, and the setting in which survival acquires a moral purpose.

Exile and Familiar Terrain

The narrator reaches the Hidaka Mountains after leaving Sapporo without telling his brother. Before that departure, he had lived at the Akakaze in Sapporo, first as a rejected hibakusha and later as a gardener trained by Ota Hideki, an Ainu gardener who had taken him in. When the crisis spread and rumors circulated about the dead returning to life, he traveled south from Hokkaido on the DOO Expressway with only a water bottle, a change of clothes, and his ikupasuy, a long, flat shovel that had also served him as a walking stick. The motorists who gave him rides spoke anxiously about outbreaks and the mobilization of the Self Defense Force, yet their conversations repeatedly ended in faith that the authorities would explain what to do. The last human voice he heard belonged to a truck driver who urged patience; afterward, the narrator left civilization and entered the mountains.

The range was not unknown country. Ota Hideki had brought him there every year to gather sansai, the wild vegetables sought by botanists, hikers, and gourmet chefs from across Japan. Though blind, the narrator knew every river and rock, every tree and patch of moss, and the locations of the onsen that rose naturally from the ground. This intimate knowledge made the mountains unusually suited to someone who wanted to disappear without immediately dying. He imagined an accident, a fall, an illness, a poisoned root, or starvation as possible endings, but his daily conduct contradicted his declared wish: he foraged, bathed, dressed warmly, and minded each step. The Hidaka Mountains expose the contradiction without resolving it. His desire for death is real, yet so is the practical intelligence that keeps preventing it.

The Bear and the Zombie

The narrator interprets the mountain through Shinto concepts of kami, the spirits inhabiting every aspect of existence. He believes that by exiling himself into the wilderness he has polluted nature, after already dishonoring himself, his family, and his country. When a three-hundred-kilogram bear approaches, he therefore understands it as an assassin sent by the gods and prepares to receive death as mercy. The scene turns on an abrupt reversal: the bear does not attack. It stops panting, whimpers like a frightened dog, and flees with the speed of hunted prey.

Only then does the narrator hear the moan of the actual threat. The figure is taller than he is, drags one foot, breathes through a gaping chest wound, and reaches blindly through the wet earth and air. The narrator dodges its grasp, retrieves the ikupasuy, and concentrates his strike on the source of the moan. When the creature falls, he cries out, “Ten Thousand Years!” The blow is more than a successful defense. Fury and courage drive away the shame that had governed his life, and he reinterprets the bear as a warning rather than an executioner. He does not yet know why he must survive, but he recognizes that survival itself has become an obligation whose meaning may be revealed later.

A System of Survival

For the following months, the narrator divides the Hidaka Mountains mentally into several hundred chi-tai, each marked by an object offering physical security, such as a tree or a tall, flat rock. He sleeps during the day and travels, forages, or hunts at night, refusing to grant the altered animals any advantage that might come from superior sight. The mountains are thus converted from undifferentiated wilderness into a navigable network of defensible points. Memory supplies the map, while routine supplies the discipline.

His blindness, which had been treated by society as proof of helplessness, becomes a practical form of preparation. He moves only several hundred paces at a time, then stops to listen and smell the wind, sometimes pressing his ear to the ground. He argues that sighted people often walk carelessly because vision encourages the mind to become lazy; he has no such dependence on the optic nerve. In the Hidaka Mountains, the absence of sight does not vanish or become magically cured. Instead, the environment rewards the skills he developed because of it: alertness, measured movement, close attention to sound and scent, and constant anticipation of danger.

The mountains also suspend him between ignorance and false hope. He hears distant helicopters, fighter planes, and civilian jetliners and wonders whether the crisis might already be ending. He imagines that the authorities may have won and that his departure may merely have created a vacancy at the Akakaze. This uncertainty makes the range more than a physical hiding place. It is an information vacuum in which national collapse can be mistaken for temporary disturbance, and where the narrator must act without knowing whether anyone else remains to receive him.

A Wilderness Remade by War

The dangers of the Hidaka Mountains belong to a wider ecological transformation. Elsewhere, monkeys flee the living dead by scattering, scrambling up telephone poles, or climbing over vehicles during a refugee catastrophe on the Himalayan roads. Their instinctive recognition of danger contrasts with the humans who continue struggling with luggage, boxes, and even a desktop-computer monitor while crowds push toward deadly drop-offs. The narrator’s later comparison between people and monkeys shows how the crisis unsettles the assumed hierarchy between human reason and animal perception: animals often recognize the threat first, while humans remain trapped in habits and possessions.

Postwar societies also turn animals into instruments of survival. Military and police dogs are first used for triage, sniffing out infected people from cages, though terror sometimes drives them to attack handlers and one another. Later training attempts to discipline that instinct rather than merely exploit it, producing escort dogs capable of accompanying long-range patrols through wild terrain and defending missions against feral packs. The same altered landscape contains feral dogs and F-lions, large predatory cats associated with the abundance of rats living on corpses in trees and ruins. These creatures make movement through low-infestation zones hazardous, and their presence clarifies the narrator’s own caution: the wilderness is not empty after the collapse but crowded with new patterns of predation.

The broader ecological cost extends beyond land animals. Naval forces and fishing fleets hunt whales with factory ships after using helicopter-dropped torpedoes to deafen and daze them. California grays, blues, finbacks, humpbacks, and rights disappear, while only uncertain remnants of belugas, narwhals, and orcas may survive beneath the Arctic ice or in isolated pods. Against this background, the Hidaka Mountains represent a limited refuge rather than an untouched sanctuary. Their rivers, moss, hot springs, and edible plants still sustain a human being, but the surrounding world has already been reshaped by infection, flight, militarization, and mass slaughter.

Narrative Significance

The Hidaka Mountains give physical form to the narrator’s central reversal. He enters intending to be forgotten, isolated, and alone, convinced that his life as a hibakusha has made him a burden and that death would spare others from protecting him. Yet the mountain episode does not reward him by removing his disability or restoring his former social place. It reveals instead that the same blindness associated with stigma can support a precise survival practice when the environment is approached through listening, touch, smell, memory, and restraint.

The location also complicates the meaning of nature. The narrator initially treats the mountains as sacred purity from which his shameful presence must be erased, then understands the bear’s flight and the zombie’s attack as signs that the gods have favored his continued existence. Nature is neither passive scenery nor simple healing landscape: it contains food, hot water, concealment, animals, and deadly threats, while forcing the narrator to revise the story he has told about himself. By the end of the episode, the Hidaka Mountains have changed from a destination for suicide into the ground of a renewed identity, where survival is no longer mere persistence but preparation for a reason not yet revealed.