“Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.” — Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
We tucked ourselves in at 9pm. It had been a long day of travel. Me from the east and B from the west, we met in the middle, wandered the cemetery, pissed off several monks, got into the onsen and out, cooed over some tofu and some morsels of sweet potato, got back in the onsen and out again. We needed to get to bed early, not only to make it to morning prayers, but also to rest for the week ahead. We finished packing and did a requisite “your bag is cuter than mine” exchange, y’know, the kind girls do when they’re about to embark for five days on a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage trail. Our beds on the floor were little sleeves of warmth, perfect clouds to hold us through the night. At some point I was woken up by the howling of a rain storm beating against the temple.
At 5:58 the next morning, B and I slipped down the tatami hallways and took our places before Rāgarāja, a deity of esoteric Buddhism, who’s called 愛染明王, or Aizen Myō-ō, in Japan. I chose this temple out of the fifty or so in Kōyasan not only because it’s the only one with an onsen, but because I thought B and I could benefit from spending a night under Aizen Myō-ō’s protection. He represents “the teaching that the delusions are in themselves enlightenment, that inexhaustible desire turns into an enlightened mind,” as I read at the Hanzomon Museum in Tokyo. Another description, from the Met: “the Wisdom King of Passion symbolize[s] how, in Buddhist practice, the violent energies of carnality and desire can be converted in the pursuit of enlightenment.”
I knelt in the darkness. Deliver me.
Kumano Kodō is a network of trails around 200 kilometers long crossing Nara and Wakayama prefectures. The most difficult path, the one B and I hiked three weeks ago, runs from Kōyasan, the center of Shingon Buddhism, to the world’s largest tori gate at Kumano Hongū Taisha. It's not a hiker’s hike; it’s really more of a walk, a walk that passes over seventy-some kilometers across four peaks. It requires little skill, just will, endurance, and some strength. And also good spirits in the face of bad weather.
On the first day, rain soaked through B’s socks within a few hours, and my fingers became stiff to the point of uselessness, which proved unhelpful as I tried to get lunch going on our stove, with one paranoid ear out for bears. We came across just one other group, a middle-aged man and two people we assumed were his parents. When we finally arrived the first night at our guesthouse, the mother, easily in her early seventies, waved at us from a distance with the palpable enthusiasm of someone who clearly did not think we were going to make it to our beds that night. Walking toward the house, we turned to face the peak that towered over the road. The summit seemed to twinkle in an unsettling way. “Is that…where we’re going tomorrow?” It wasn’t snow-capped; it was completely frozen over. We hurried to strip our wet clothes off and huddled into our floor pockets.
Over the next few days B and I had a very specific trip: a multi-day hike combined with girls’ trip spa getaway vibes in mountainside Japan. By day, we schlepped, exposed to the grueling elements: rain, hail, dense fog, puffy banks of snow, merciless wind, relentless sun. At night, we were warmed to the bone in onsen, wrapped in yukata, stuffed with rice, salt, and fat, then smothered in blankets, before we woke up to do it again. The two energies clashed spectacularly one afternoon when we got sidetracked from the trail for an hour and a half because we were literally talking about our periods and forgot to look for the next sign. We only realized when a weather-beaten mountain couple driving past stopped to inform us that were no longer on the Kumano Kodō, and chucked us onto the bed of their kei pickup truck to take us back to the juncture.
For the first time on the trip we were quiet, flying down the mountain to make up for lost time. We had been blithely chattering on, about the horrors of a Joe Rogan-idolizing Tinder date, about having too much of some kinds of hair and not enough of others, about crushing and being crushed. “Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting,” as Sally Rooney puts it in her new novel, we spent our time on this sacred earth shouting our thirty-something gripes to the sky, beseeching the mountains to fulfill our desires, whispering our secrets to the 33 manifestations of the bodhisattva Kannon on the last peak. I thought about all the people who had walked this path over the millennium, assumed they were similarly filled with equal wonder, wanting, and the need to pee.
By the last day, the weather had changed significantly and we had entered full sakura season in the settlement of Hatenashi. Near a slab of stone telling us the land had been designated a cultural heritage site, we came across a luxurious cherry tree standing alone in full regalia. B recognized that the three birds singing like they were getting ready to dress a princess were ウグイス, Japanese bush warblers, whose distinctive mating song, she explained, is a harbinger of spring.
Down the path a bit from our symbolic and literal breathing in of spring, this poem by 向井去来, Mukai Kyorai, was printed on a sign:
つづくりも
はてなし坂や
五月雨
with this translation:
However maintained
Endless slope and
Summer rain
B pointed at the English. “Does it make more sense in Japanese?” It didn’t, really, until I was able to think and Google back home, with the help of Ms (who often gets texts from me on Friday afternoons asking for her opinion on some odd poem or linguistic scrap. Thank you, Ms.) つづくり is, from my understanding, the toll that used to be collected for maintaining the pilgrimage trail, and はてなし, or hatenashi, is both “without end” and also the name of that hamlet, 果無. My reading of the poem is something like: “Even with the toll that gets collected to keep this thing going, there’s still the endless incline, and May’s rain.” (All things considered the given translation is a lot better than mine.)
We made it to the last stop, a tiny onsen town said to have been discovered 1,800 years ago, where the spring water gets up past 90C. There wasn’t a single scrap of clean shirt left, my face had puffed up into an impressive hard shell from sun and allergies, and the weather had turned again to a wet, cold gray. But we bathed and filled ourselves with sashimi, a bubbling nabe, a very cute cheese-covered shittake cap (and in the morning, an egg boiled in the spring water), before the long road home.
Over the next week, back in my sardine tin, I alternated between disbelief that that had been my life for six days, and the disbelief that it wasn’t my life all the days of the year.
Someone once told me that there is a hierarchy of things to make conversation about, and the lowest form is external phenomenon, like weather; then the affairs of people; then at the top, the world of abstract ideas. With apologies to my readers, it seems all my ideas are about weather and people. Forgive us our trespasses.
Ps. I don’t usually write about food because there is more than enough existing writing about food in Japan. But a quick mention should be made of the 精進料理, Japanese Buddhist monk cuisine, served at 福智院, which had us in tears:
It's always been a pleasure to be asked those questions 😁