A bowl of instant noodles in the mountains sounds like a perfectly good reason to go for a walk.
Hata does not need a more impressive one. He is new to hiking, has been invited by colleagues, and would like to get along with them. His previous job did not end happily. At this company, perhaps he can do the social part a little better.
That modest beginning is one of the attractions of K Sanzo Matsunaga's Bari Sankō. Before the novel asks anything difficult, it makes room for a recognizable pleasure: climb for a while, stop somewhere high, eat something hot, and go home with the group.
The mountains are near Kobe, not on the other side of the world. A weekend is enough to reach them. Monday morning is still waiting.
The company comes along
Hata is in his second year at a small building-repair firm, having moved from interior renovation. He has a wife and a young child. A reliable income matters. He is not considering an expedition away from everything he knows; he is trying to make his existing life work.
In the Japanese opening available through BOOK☆WALKER, he has borrowed work gloves from the company's supplies and turned up in ordinary clothes. Other beginners already look the part. Before the walk has really started, he feels that he has arrived inadequately prepared for the group.
It is a small embarrassment, and an effective one. Joining in was supposed to make things easier. Now there are new things to get wrong.
Matsuura, who knows more about hiking, gives sensible instructions: stay together, do not push beyond your abilities, keep the group's pace in mind. Nothing about that is unreasonable. But a collective outing can be reassuring and constraining at once. Hata has left the workplace without entirely leaving behind the effort of fitting in.
Then he enjoys himself. The social calculation does not cancel the pleasure. The outings develop into an official company club, and he finds something to look forward to beyond the working day.
The novel does not insist that an interest must begin for a pure reason to become real. Wanting colleagues to like you and liking the mountain are perfectly capable of sharing an afternoon. That is a useful permission for a reader, too: we need not wait for Hata to reject his life before taking his new enjoyment seriously.
Meanwhile, the business has its own pressures. Uncertainty about its future and changes in staffing alter the atmosphere. People who have walked together on Sunday do not necessarily want the same things on Monday.
The repair trade matters to this story. Its workers have practical knowledge, habits acquired on sites, and different ideas about how a job should be done. Their competence does not always fit neatly into what the company wants from them. The mountain is not merely a picturesque backdrop for an office allegory, but neither is the office a dull prologue to the supposedly real life outdoors.
The colleague who takes a different route
Mega is a veteran employee with a craftsman's habits. Although his work involves sales, he knows waterproofing and repairs, spends time on sites, and wears work clothes. He does not make much effort to join the social life of the company.
For Hata, who is trying hard to manage those relationships, indifference of that kind is striking. What costs one person so much attention seems to cost the other almost none.
Mega also goes to the mountains. But he does not ordinarily follow the company's routes.
The title's bari comes from variation-route climbing: in this story, leaving established paths and finding a way through less accessible ground. It is not a reference to Bali. Two employees can both say that they spent the weekend in the Rokko mountains while meaning very different experiences.
Even Mega's equipment sets him apart. When he appears among the group, his inexpensive hardware-store clothing contrasts with the outdoor brands around him. Hata sees something unfamiliar in a man he thought he already knew.
It would be too quick to turn that contrast into the moral that a true expert never needs proper gear. The point, at this stage, is the attraction of a person whose life seems to follow another measure. Cheap clothing proves neither superior judgment nor safety.
Hata wants to go with him. There is curiosity about the route, certainly. But there is also curiosity about the man. Someone who seems so little disturbed by the company might know how to live without the anxiety Hata carries around.
Or perhaps Hata wants this particular person to think well of him. Those are different wishes, and they can be difficult to separate.
Admiration is not an itinerary
In her *Asahi Shimbun* review, Mariko Yamauchi notices the male admiration at the heart of the story. Leaving the company does not end Hata's wish for a special connection with another man.
That is a much more interesting starting point than announcing that Mega represents freedom and Hata represents conformity. Both are employees. Both have lives that exceed their jobs. Their awkwardness around other people does not lead them to make identical choices.
Hata may admire Mega's concentration without wanting everything that comes with it. A person can be very good at finding a way through a mountain and less good at noticing what a companion needs. Conversely, hesitation is not automatically a weakness to be trained out of the less experienced man.
Hata has responsibilities, preferences, and limits. If those are dismissed in advance as mere timidity, the relationship has already been decided before the two men go anywhere together.
The story becomes more charged when looking at someone turns into moving alongside him. Observing Mega from a safe distance in the office is one thing. Sharing ground with him puts their different bodies, experience, and expectations into immediate contact.
What happens on that outing is best left to the book. The invitation does not depend on giving away its dangerous turns. It is enough to see why going together might not mean wanting the same journey.
In a reading essay for web TRIPPER, Akira Toshimori draws attention to two people who resemble each other without being alike. The novel gives access to inner lives that colleagues of this sort might rarely explain at work.
That observation leaves room for sympathy to move. You might recognize Hata's effort to belong in one passage and Mega's distance in another. Neither recognition requires appointing one of them as your guide for the rest of the book.
There is still a life to go home to
Matsunaga's BE-PAL interview with Hiroyuki Aino is a useful companion to the introduction. He describes choosing familiar people and familiar mountains, rather than pretending to an expertise he does not possess. Work, he acknowledges, can remain in your thoughts even while you walk.
That makes the setting especially apt. These are accessible mountains beside a city, not a distant world with a new moral system waiting at the entrance. Proximity does not eliminate danger. Nor does danger establish that everything back in town is somehow less real.
It is tempting to rank lives by the drama of their risks. A difficult slope offers a visible challenge. Keeping a job, looking after a child, or worrying about a firm's future offers no comparable photograph. But a less spectacular responsibility can still occupy the whole person who has to meet it.
The novel's premise becomes richer when we resist deciding which difficulty counts most. The mountain may alter the way Hata sees his working life. His working life may also alter what he is willing to call a worthwhile adventure.
For readers who do not hike, the physical descriptions need not be a barrier. Toshimori writes appreciatively about being drawn into the climbing despite preferring indoor life. Reading can bring us close to an activity we have no intention of undertaking. Understanding its attraction is different from accepting its risks.
This is not a route guide, and Mega's practices should not be treated as outdoor advice. The interest lies in the people making decisions, not in instructions a reader is meant to reproduce.
Expect a concentrated story of work, male companionship, and bodily experience. Someone seeking a sprawling family novel or conspicuous formal experimentation may find a different emphasis here. Family matters to Hata's choices without becoming an equally expansive strand of the narrative.
The opening's humor and practical details offer a less solemn entrance than the phrase “mountain literature” might suggest. People dress imperfectly, try to get along, become excited about a new interest, and wonder about a colleague. Those ordinary movements carry us toward the harder ones.
Hata first wants a better weekend. Later he becomes curious about another way of walking, and about the man who walks that way. The noodles were not an unworthy ambition. The unmarked route is not automatically a higher calling.
Having seen how someone else moves through the world, what will he choose for his own next step?