The Pilgrimage Road

In a general sense, things weren’t going well. Components were falling off the mainframe more rapidly than before. Shit seemed to be going down, in both personal and global terms, and so I did what I normally do. Before the oil prices got truly atrocious, I booked a round-trip ticket to someplace unfamiliar, and decided to spend two weeks amid smoking craters and fragrant citrus orchards, and tried to find some equanimitous sense of things. 

Of Japan’s five most prominent islands, Shikoku is the forgotten one. Neither connected by Shinkansen to the Japanese heartland like Hokkaido and Kyushu, nor a verdant tropical paradise like Okinawa, it exists off to the left side, without major cities. And despite numerous trips, I’d never gotten there, and so clearly it was time.

What did I know? Well, Kafka on the Shore was set there, and I know that young Kafuka Tamura makes sure to eat the udon for which Shikoku is famous, and I know that I don’t much care for udon. And I knew it as being ringed by a pilgrimage road, a sort of Japanese Santiago de Compostela in which 88 temples of historic note around the island were connected. But that was it. I’d barely even heard of the island’s largest cities (Matsuyama, Takamatsu, Tokushima, Kochi). I knew no national parks, no particular loci of the tourist industry. But I had time, and the weather was getting feverish around the Thai New Year, when I used to joke that I always summered abroad.

After a brief stopover in Kyoto mon amour – cherry blossoms over the canals, a few visits to old haunts, a few hisses towards the more uncouth tourists – and it was time to take the Shinkansen west to Okayama, sunny land of peaches and grapes, and then take a local express southwards, crossing the long causeway over the turquoise waters of the Seto Inland Sea.

 There is a pattern that sets in when one travels in Japan. It’s part of a larger pattern – the novel becoming the staid. Upon arrival in the city of Takamatsu, it’s not that different from anywhere else. Japanese provincial cities are hard to distinguish from one another. Little houses, shopping arcades, blaringly loud pachinko parlors, the inevitable foundations of a long-since destroyed castle, and even the local quirks seem standardized. The localized manhole covers simply seem to all be a variation on the same theme.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe the innate cynicism of the weary traveler – the place changes, but it seems the same – was setting in. And in the case… what the fuck was I doing here?

I liked the rhythm of things, I really did. I find my preferred hangouts, those little institutions of the sort only found in Japan – little café-bars run by solitary men (and the occasional woman), where they can express their curatorial taste in food, drink, music, cinema, and books. I met elegant lady sommeliers, I met grumpy old men who only looked happy when they were perfecting the grind on their Yirgacheffe coffee beans. There are cozy corners. There is tea.

There are the many varieties of citrus that grow on this coast, familiar and unfamiliar. Sure, this is the land of the tangerine and the blood orange and the yuzu, but I came to also know the kanpei and the iyokan, the amakusa and the hyuganatsu.

And every day, I made my way to temple or shrine, temple or shrine, whatever that might be. I climbed up mountain after mountain. Lacking in context, failing to identify the difference between Mahavairocana and Bhaisajyaguru, I simply gawked. I was unable to read the script, and while Google Lens is very good at getting across the meanings of menus at yakitori joints, it is less good at conveying the subtleties of Medieval Shingon Buddhist religious poetry. Again, what the fuck was I doing here?

Natsume Soseki, the father of realist fiction in Japan, lived here for a time as a teacher. He was abjectly miserable, and the only means of coping he found was to relax at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring resort since at least the 6th Century AD. I went there, and it was pretty nice. I had a good soak. I guess he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing there either.

The sign says “Kokoro,” the same as his famous novel. Turns out it’s a hair salon.

I take the ferry to little Naoshima, the best known of the Inland Sea’s “art islands,” the whole turned into a major art installation, save the belching smokestacks of the Mitsubishi smelter at the north end of the island, thoughtfully tucked away lest the crowd of late middle-aged French aesthetes in stylish round glasses actually have to confront the livelihoods of working people. And yet I can’t hate. Because the installations are some of the smartest, most effective pieces of contemporary art I’ve ever seen, absolute masterworks by Lee Ufan, Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. They pierced the void. Sure there were plenty of works by masturbators like Yves Klein, Jenny Holzer, and David Hockney, but what do I care? I am being given a little contemporary wagashi and a glass of sencha as I look out over the ships beyond Sugimoto’s pristine landscape architecture. Rocks and trees, sea and ships. Here at least, I am happy. Even if the veil is quickly pierced.

 

 

Throughout, I ran into a dismal number of loudmouthed American tech bros, i.e. the people I literally moved to Asia to get away from. Many of them were fascinated by my culinary journalism gig, but it quickly became apparent that they viewed visiting top-tier restaurants a bit like unlocking video game achievements. Hungry ghosts in the antique sense, beings of pure consumption that can never be satisfied. To be fair, I encountered a greater number of the lovelier of my countrymen, some of whom may be reading this right now, but a single bad vibe could take me out of my element.  I’m sitting here with an antique cocktail and trying to enjoy the cherry blossoms, and this mustache-and-Carhartt Brooklynite hiding his bald spot under a fitted Knicks cap is coked to the gills and telling me about sick business opportunities.

“This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.” – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I often describe my nature as “peregrine.” But this isn’t quite accurate. Because the term peregrine refers to a pilgrim, and I’m not a pilgrim, carefully making my way down the ordained path in search of transcendence. I’m a wanderer.

And yet I followed the pilgrimage road, diligently, even if I was sad and sick and fucked up and my life was thrown into upheaval. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I looked all the same.

At the Ishite-ji, Temple 51 on the pilgrim’s path, in the outskirts of Matsuyama, I arrived despondent. Horrible dreams woke me up early, haunted by ghosts of the present. Again, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there, but it found me.

After wandering the grounds, I see a sign. “Pure Cave.”

The sign warns you. No light. No photos.

The corridor is barely big enough for one person. I barely fit, and someone actually fat, it would have been impossible.

It twists and turns in the dark. Steps you have to feel for, walls to guide you, low overhangs that threaten to hit you in the head. You have no choice. You can only feel around in the dark.

And you almost immediately lose any sense of time, of the larger world. You are here in this dark space, and you are trying to negotiate it. It does not yield to you. The only sounds come from you. You are reduced to what you are, mind harnessed to body, alone, confronting an impassive reality.

Until you see the strobing light at the end, and the little statue of Kannon, boddhisatva of mercy.

Her light is fleeting. You crawl back through the dark into the daylight. I have never been so happy to see sunlight.

And I knew I needed to climb the mountain.

I found my way up through the abandoned cemetery, all that citrus rotting on the ground the whole way up, the perfume of the petitgrain blending with the reek of rotting oranges.

At the top, the little donation box amid the little statues is rusted. Whether the corners are curled up in accordance with the dictums of classical Japanese temple architecture or whether that’s just the metal rusting and curling, I cannot say. But I don’t think it matters, does it?

I throw myself onto the gravel and stare up at the tips of the cedars and cypresses, where the forest ends and the sky begins.

I have been here many times. The mountain itself is almost irrelevant. The point is getting here, to this apogee, because I can.

This is what the fuck I’m doing here.