She may have slept again, but she wasn’t sure. Her thoughts were muddled and her head fuzzy, as if on the other side of another migraine. It was as if someone had lit a fire in her chest and, as the flames flared, they licked at her rib cage. She lay motionless, moving only her eyes as she looked up into the branches, searching for the shiny scales of the skink. Now that she knew it wasn’t a snake, Clare liked the idea of the reptile being there. She welcomed the distraction from her pain. She and the lizard could keep one another company. But she saw only dying leaves and desiccated bark.

Perhaps, she thought, looking out into the trees where the leaves were fresh and green, she should imagine she was engaging in shinrin-yoku.

“Is that like karate?” she’d asked when, years earlier, her father mentioned one of his clients had gone to Japan to learn about it.

He had laughed. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t know what it is. I nearly asked her if it was a kind of sushi. No, not karate. It means ‘forest bathing.’ It’s when you go into the forest or somewhere else in the nature to relax and enjoy the wild.”

“Like when we go for a hike in Newlands Forest? You have to go to Japan to learn about it?”

“I guess it’s similar to our hikes. But it’s . . . it’s more deliberate than that. You go to the forest specifically to meditate and consciously relax.”

“Is that new to the Japanese? Being in the forest, I mean?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just become more popular as more people work and live in tiny spaces in big cities with their noses pressed up against computer screens. It’s not as easy for everyone to get into nature as it is for us.”

“How do you say it again?”

“Shinrin-yoku,” said her father.

“Shinrin-yoku,” repeated Clare.

She’d googled it later that evening when she was meant to be writing an Afrikaans essay about the work of author André Brink. The photographs that popped up of Japanese forests and cherry trees in blossom convinced her shinrin-yoku was different from hiking in the trees around Cape Town. She would, she decided, like to try it one day. Perhaps her father would go with her. He’d be fascinated by Japanese gardens.

For years, she hadn’t thought about her childhood dream of travelling to Japan with him. She couldn’t recall whether she’d ever proposed the idea to her father. Now, as she lay alone and immobile in the trees in the Tsitsikamma thinking about forest bathing, Clare vowed to do it; she’d recover from her injury and anorexia and one day, she and her dad would shinrin-yoku in Japan.