We were met at Shin Kurashiki eki (station) by a cabdriver who had grown up with Kanzaki-san, our host. No need to worry about finding us. We were usually the only two blondes around. Up the Takahashigawa River we went on a twisting mountain road to the village of Bisei-cho, whose name the children said meant “beautiful stars.”
Bisei-cho was once a way station for samurai making their requisite journey to Edo every two years, and not much about the village had changed in six centuries. The farmhouse where we were greeted by Kanzaki-san and his family—parents, sister, brother-in-law, wife, and children—was capacious, set apart from the rest of the village on a hill next to the Shinto shrine. Only recently had the traditional open-hearth-style kitchen been given an electric stove and the thatch roof replaced with a metal one, but even so, the luxury of heat or running water was absent, in keeping with strict samurai code. The priesthood is inherited from father to eldest son, but Kanzaki-san, now a forty-four-year-old sophisticate living near Tokyo and an anthropologist by profession, commutes by bullet train to give services at this tiny shrine. By his world-weary look, I suspected he didn’t always relish the duty, and when we exchanged presents, as is customary in Japan, his face lit up only when Leila gave him a bottle of Chivas Regal.
That evening all twelve of us crowded in around the low table, our crossed legs pushed under the kotatsu—a quilted skirt that extends out from under the table, where a heater glows. When I asked about what we were going to see that night, about the kagura, I was told of its legendary beginnings when a goddess, Ame no Uzume, stood in front of a rock cave holding a spear wrapped with grass and began dancing. When I asked why she danced or what the dance was about, no one knew.
The kagura started at midnight; we walked to the shrine at eleven. “Look at the beautiful stars,” Kanzaki-san’s children kept saying, but I was more impressed by the cold. Under an old tree, women from the village served a hot rice gruel, slightly sweetened. How good it tasted in the sharp air.
“Akemashite omedetoo gozaimasu,” we said in greeting to one another. I added my boots to the growing pile at the bottom of steep steps and walked in, flanked by Kanzakisan’s children. Earlier, Kanzaki-san had changed from turtleneck and trousers to an elegant robe of embroidered gold silk and a high-fronted priest’s hat. Seated in the dark recesses of the shrine, he was banging a small drum in a slow, monotonous rhythm.
The room filled with villagers; we sat knee-to-knee on tatami. A cold wind blew in from the open, wall-less front of the shrine. No fancy-dress kimonos here—only padded jackets and trousers. Two toothless obasan—an affectionate term for old women—squeezed in around the one kerosene heater with a priest and warmed their hands. The village barber, the postmaster, the grocer, and the cabdriver came in as Kanzaki-san’s drumbeat droned on. A prayer was chanted, offerings of food made; then we turned from the altar to the front of the room, where a young priest was positioning a huge drum. Outside, in the cold, I could see the masked kagura players—local farmers who had been rehearsing for months. At the last moment a girl, clutching a miniature dog with bows tied in its hair, sat down in front of me, and as she slyly took her boyfriend’s hand in hers, the farmers’ kagura began.
There were wild-eyed masks, long flowing silk robes, sword fights, and boisterous tussles with a whiskered being who looked more like a lion than a dragon; drumming and singing, sharp yells, and howls of mock misery. The play—a melodrama pantomime—went on and on. Children who had scooted to the front sat enthralled, and the obasan laughed heartily during every skirmish, despite the grim story line: a woman had been raped by a dragon and went insane; three old farmers took revenge, stirring up a brew of sake—à la Macbeth—to get the dragon drunk, then cut off his head.
Between each act lay priests threw food into the audience: mandarin oranges, packages of shrimp chips, candy. “Watch out,” Kanzaki-san had warned us. “Last year it got wild. An obasan started throwing the food back at the priest.” Oranges zinged by as children screamed with delight, grabbing food out of the air. A mikan (orange) hit me square in the forehead, juice rolling down both sides of my nose. The obasan hoarded their prizes in their laps.
The play continued. A wiry, shaven-headed man who wore a Parisian beret sang along during the play. He had once been one of the actors. During the third intermission the girl with the dog left, her boyfriend following obediently behind her as if he too were on a leash. By 3:00 A.M. heads bobbed with sleep—all except the children. “The beating drums bring the kamisama down,” Kanzaki-san’s son whispered. “Can you feel them yet?” I nodded, but he didn’t believe me. Instead, feeling pity, he laid a small blanket across my lap.
Down the mountain, over the Inland Sea, first light shot up through clouds like pieces of steel. “Akemashite omedetoo gozaimasu,” I said again as we left, pleased with myself for being able to string three Japanese words together. “It’s the Year of the Horse,” the children yelled, galloping down the path ahead of me toward the house. Then to bed for two hours under mounds of quilts and up again at seven for the New Year’s feast.
As we squeezed in around the kotatsu, Kanzaki-san’s eighty-year-old father began the festivities. A tiny red lacquer cup filled with sake blessed by the priests was passed around. “This is special sake. It comes from the kami,” Kanzaki-san explained. “You could drink this all day and never get drunk.” Even so, the women only touched the liquor to their lips. When the next, slightly larger cup was passed, Kanzaki-san’s son accidentally took a gulp. Everyone laughed. When the cup went around again, Leila made reference to the “strong drinkers” in Wyoming. Kanzakisan smiled. “A strong drinker in Japan is called a cat who has become a tiger,” he said, eyeing his son sternly as he took another gulp. He was the eldest son, and I wondered if he was in line to become a priest.
Later Kanzaki-san confided, “If that’s going to happen, he has to start studying now … and that would interfere with his baseball practice.”
When the sacred sake was gone, our cups were filled with the ordinary stuff. Secular sake? I asked. We picked through dish after dish of New Year’s food: fermented soybeans, fish eggs, pork, wild boar, rice, and a huge, freshly caught fish.
On the train going north that afternoon, I felt myself drifting away from the beginning of 1990 like a skiff passing a lighted buoy. Out the window that sentinel was Fujiyama, most sacred of all Japanese mountains, pure kami from timberline to caldera, gleaming in winter sun. Mountains are central to Shinto. The sea-surrounded, alpine landscape shaped religious acts. When Buddhism, with its philosophy of transience, fused with Shinto, religious pilgrimage through mountains expanded a sense of sacredness from specific temple sites to the entire geography—wherever the pilgrim’s feet happened to land. The journey was life, life was journey, and the transience of life stood for the process of spiritual transcendence as embodied, literally, by physical movement. Geography became internalized: the farther the sojourner walked from discursive mind and habitual thought, the closer she or he came back to original nature, to the “Buddha nature” within. The word “walk” in Japanese can also refer to Buddhist practice.
For most of my life I have thought of my home state of California and Japan as two jigsaw pieces once joined in the same puzzle. I know they were not, but something of the spirit of both landscapes makes me think they were. The coasts and mountains of each have become occasions for sojourns.
Leila and I travel north to the sacred, snowy mountains of Tōhoku, which is how the Japanese refer to northern Honshu. Remote, rugged, mountainous, wintry, the region is their frontier, their Siberia. It is the area where Matsuo Bashō wrote his famous Oku No Hosomichi, his Narrow Road to the Deep North; in its northeast corner is Osorezan, where the dead spirits of Japan live; it is the home of itako, women who communicate with the dead. Enclosed by the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean, it gets snow continually for six months, and its long spines of white mountains look weightless in cloud.
At Kisagata we are on Matsuo Bashō’s
trail. In Oku No Hosomichi he wrote of this place: “I followed a narrow trail for about ten miles, climbing steep hills, descending rocky shores, or pushing through sandy beaches, but just about the time the dim sun was nearing the horizon, a strong wind rose from the sea, blowing up fine grains of sand, and rain too began to spread a gray film of cloud across the sky so that even Mount Chōkai was made invisible.”
Out the window, Siberia pushed waves into the Japan Sea, and the ocean broke against bent pines; pines leaned into receding foam, foam washed over snow. “Path is goal, goal is path,” that is what the Buddhists say. Bashō’s nikki no michi—diaries of the road—were reminders of the ongoing spiritual process of the pilgrimage. Bashō had studied the Buddhist teachings with a Zen monk named Butchō, and the title of his book suggests a Buddhist influence. Hosomichi means “narrow path,” a term that also alludes to the Hinayana path of Zen, the narrow way in which rigorous physical discipline leads to awakened mind. Oku has many meanings: “deep,” “inner,” “interior,” “the heart of a mountain,” “the inmost depths of the mind,” as well as “a distant shrine.”
Ahead were the Dewa-Sanzan, three sacred mountains of the north, where, for a thousand years, monks and wandering ascetics called yamabushi—mountain warriors—had engaged in severe practices on the slopes of Haguro, Gassan, and Yudono. Wobbly-legged pine trees leaned out toward rough water, and I thought of Japan’s divine creation by the two gods Izanagi and Izanami, who stood on the floating bridge of heaven thrusting their penis-shaped spears into and out of the ocean until the drops that formed at the spears’ tips coagulated and fell, forming the first of the eight main islands, Awaji, then the next, Kyushu and Shikoku, then Honshu—all the smaller ones rising out of the salty foam.
I looked for the nature that lay deep inside the landscape, its workings and rhythms, wishing I had walked as Bashō had, but all I could do was name things: matsu, taiyō, awa, yuki. No verbs propelled me forward over iron rails; path and goal backed up inside my feet like welders’ sparks, blinding, burning every time I touched down.
At Tsuruoka eki we were met by a friend of a friend: a theatrical agent with pursed lips and dyed hair, whose entire job consisted of escorting us twenty-five feet from the station lobby to the bus stop, where we caught number 5 for the mountain village of Haguro. There we would be met by his friend’s friend, who would give us a place to stay.
The entrance to the pilgrims’ village of Haguro is marked by a vermilion torii, signifying sacred ground. Up from the checkerboard rice fields of the Shōnai Plain our gradual ascent began. Haguro is not an ordinary town, with shops, restaurants, and bars, but a way station for pilgrims who are climbing the Dewa Mountains.
The bus stopped in the middle of the village, where a man was waiting for us. Small, deep-voiced, he growled with disbelief at the weight of our luggage, filled with books and presents. We followed his banty-rooster stride through deep snow, with no idea where we were going, what arrangements had been made for us.
The houses looked like chalets. Shrubs and fruit trees were wrapped in woven straw to protect them from snow and cold. An old man passed us wearing an alpine hat and a fox fur around his neck. TV antennas stuck out from thatched roofs.
Down a narrow side street we were led into a pilgrims’ inn, empty during the holidays, and we were, once again, the only guests. Upstairs we were given two large rooms with a view of the sacred mountains and felt giddy with our unexpected comfort. Before we could clean up, Ota-san, the diminutive owner of the inn, who had met us at the bus stop, pushed his head through the door: “Could I come in and drink sake with you? I’ve never talked to an American before,” he said in Japanese.
Before we could speak, he plunked himself down on the floor, and the beer, sake, tea, and food began coming. We were served a wonderful stew called oden, with potatoes, bits of meat, and fish. Sake flowed nonstop. After her fourth trip to our room, we begged Ota-san’s wife to join us.
Big-boned, with a wide, amiable face, she told us she was a cousin from Hokkaido, that her marriage to Ota-san had been arranged. In turn, they had negotiated their son’s marriage into the same family. Now their son worked at the shrine on top of Haguro Mountain, as Ota-san had, and he helped his wife at the inn. During the summer, pilgrims come by the coachload—forty at a time, three buses a week.
Being inn owners, they had never traveled outside their own prefecture, until last winter, when they went on a tour to Hawaii with eighty other villagers. “We were so scared, we brought a suitcase of our own food. The food there was too rich. Made us sick. There was nothing to do. Speaking English was like having something stuck between your teeth. At night the women went shopping, and the men stayed in their rooms and played cards.”
Ota-san toasted us with more sake; we were the first Americans to sleep in his inn, and one could speak Japanese, at that! When I asked him how long his family had lived in Haguro, he thought for a moment: “Seventeen centuries. We were here when Matsuo Bashō came through.”
Early in the morning Ota-san’s son, Hajime, took us to the top of the village, where the forest lands protected by the shrine begin. The pilgrim’s path to the top of Haguro-san consists of a thousand and some stone steps almost straight up the side of the mountain. But you have to descend before you go up: through a large torii, down snowy steps, through a virgin forest of cedars whose great trunks rose branchless for the first thirty feet, so that the shaggy, cinnamon-barked trees looked like columns or spires.
I walked toward the sound of water. At the bottom of the draw, a small waterfall tumbled over a rock wall. Birds sang—some kind of swallow, Hajime said. The stream flowed past three tiny shrines called ohiraidojinga, whose weather-beaten frames protected carved images of Shinto deities. The path led me over a narrow red bridge, then upward to the top of the mountain.
There are a few places in the world whose beauty is so complete that even words, a bow, clasped hands, seem presumptuous. I walked past an ancient, snow-covered pagoda, to the site where Bashō and his friend Sora had camped for the night. Looking back toward the waterfall and the red bridge, I thought the place so beautiful it was itself a prayer.
“We don’t have time to climb these steps now,” Hajime-san said, interrupting my reverie. He stooped down to reclose the Velcro straps of his winter tennis shoes. “Besides, there’s a storm coming and you’ll get lost and we’ll be late for the food-blessing ceremony.”
Matsuo Bashō climbed Haguro on June 3, 1689, then Mount Gas-san and Mount Yudono. Three hundred years, six months later to the day, we were driven to the top in a priest’s blue Toyota. Bashō wrote: “This shrine on, Haguro is counted among the three most sacred shrines of the north, together with the shrines on Gas-san and Yudono.… There are hundreds of places where the priests practice religious rites with absolute severity. Indeed, the whole mountain is filled with miraculous inspiration and sacred awe. Its glory will never perish as long as humans continue to love the earth.”
Up the paved road we sped, skiers sliding down the slopes below, and, beyond, obscured by clouds, the peaks of Gas-san and Yudono, mountains so sacred a pilgrim is not supposed to write of what he or she experiences there.
A pilgrim knows that he must become a foreigner in his own life. Walking emulates spiritual progress; physical exertion is the literal way one can strip away personal armor, the disguises comfort and reference points provide. Of his climb, Bashō wrote: “I tied around my neck a sacred rope made of white paper and covered my head with a hood made of bleached cotton and set off with my guide on a long march of eight miles to the top of the mountains. I walked through mists and clouds, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and stepping on slippery ice and snow, till at last, through a gateway of clouds, to the very paths of sun and moon, I reached the summit.”
On top, snow came down in thick, fat flakes. Five or six temples made up the complex, plus a huge parking lot lined with souvenir shops and soba stands where one could eat soup and noodles and drink sp
ecial bitter tea. The main shrine was a vast, thatch-roofed, red-pillared structure. Inside, shoes removed, we padded around on thick red carpets and gazed out through a wall of windows that gave onto massive trees, sweeping mists, snow swirling down into the cedar cathedral.
Every shrine has its own foundation legend. “Opening” a temple site means discovering and releasing its latent power. It shows up as a “thin spot” that tickles the feet of the wandering priest. Haguro was “opened” by Shoken Daibosatsu, a young prince who had taken vows and was escaping his father’s assassins. He was led by a three-legged bird he had dreamed about and wandered hundreds of miles to the top of Haguro.
In almost all preindustrial cultures, mountains have been venerated. They are thought to be the axial pillar of the universe. With their special brews of violent weather, they seem otherworldly. But at the same time, mountains are providers: they catch clouds, shed water, give refuge, cleanse the spirit. Standing up straight, they seem to represent the highest spiritual attainment of the human; they are the natural sacred site on whose summits we express our gratitude and awe.
Hajime-san excused himself while he changed into priest’s garb: a hakama and a white silk shirt. Then we followed him down a long hall, up steep steps into the freezing-cold shrine room. Incense wafted by. After a while, fifteen or twenty monks and priests filed in, wearing white tabi socks. Their diaphanous silk robes gave the effect of men floating. After a prayer, priests carried food on black lacquer trays: on one sake; on another three eggs, followed by three carrots tied together, then a trout, its head and tail positioned by bamboo sticks to make it look as though it were jumping.
Purity, fertility, growth, abundance, cleanliness, and renewal are at the center of Shinto rites. Each tray was carried up steep steps to an altar, then brought down again and handed from monk to priest to monk, and finally carried out of the shrine room. After the ceremony we were ushered to a large waiting room and served tea.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 7
