Driving to and from my English class in Anamizu throughout the year, the roads and lanes provided a kind of seasonal calendar with the creatures that frequented their surfaces and made driving a hazardous business, not least of course for them. Winter was a fairly void period, except for the obvious dangers of snow, ice, and the occasional cat. Spring, however, sprung in with frogs. Tiny, green plastic-contents-of-a-Christmas-cracker-looking frogs, which leapt about all over the road like extras in an Old Testament epic. Frogs that played chicken as they crossed the road, causing you to swerve from one side to the other and appear around corners to oncoming tractors, on the wrong side.
On the disappearance of these kamikaze leapers, they were replaced by huge bloated bullfrogs, that while not frenetically suicidal were as static as bollards in their waiting game with karma. These amphibians were natural meditators and in no way disturbed by the approach of a motor vehicle.
As soon as the temperature rose and evenings lengthened, this became the cue for queues of snakes, some huge six-foot serpents, to lie like hoses or temporary traffic-light cables across the road, bringing your forehead sharply up against the warm glass of the windscreen as you jammed your foot down on the brake to make detours, gingerly at 3 kph, as though you feared your tires might get bitten. Most often, you sadly passed the poor creatures already gutted, dissected; their heads bruised by nothing more transcendental than a Bridgestone tire.
The snakes remained until early autumn, and although the car was furnished with the obligatory talisman from a Buddhist temple and a charm from a Shinto shrine, prayer was still a necessary adjunct. But no sooner was it on your lips than "it" appeared. Manifested in thousands of small praying forms on the asphalt before you were praying mantises, hunched like little monks on an autumnal pilgrimage.
♦ Helmet Mountain (Kabuto Yama)
Shortly after our arrival in Sora we walked to Helmet Mountain, a forested hill that juts out into the sea. It is shaped like a samurai helmet, hence its name, and is situated about equidistantly, two miles either way, between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, a village named after the hill. At the top of Helmet Mountain there is a Shintō shrine, the object of our visit.
The shrine is reached by a long flight of weathered and eroded steps, which stretch from the granite torii (shrine gateway) at the bottom of the hill to the shrine at the top. Just before you arrive at the top, there is a kind of landing or break in the flight of steps intersected by paths leading to the left and to the right. These are in fact one and the same path which forms a circle just beneath the summit of the hill where the shrine is located. I assumed that this path must have been used in some of the Shinto ceremonies, for circumambulating the shrine in a clockwise (sunwise) direction, and on a later inquiry found this to be so.
The shrine, typical of those in the area, consists of two attached buildings, one behind the other, with the larger one in front, the smaller (the inner sanctum) behind. The front part of the shrine contains the usual paraphernalia, including a large drum, the mikoshi (an elaborate palanquin-like portable shrine in which the kami, or something representing the kami, is temporarily housed while it is carried through the district over which it presides) mounted on two trestles, and a box for donations. In front of the donation box hangs a red-and-white rope at the top of which is a slit bell, like a large cow bell, which emits a dull metallic rattling sound when shaken by the rope in order to attract the attention of the kami and to concentrate and calm the mind of the worshiper before he or she prays to the kami. Above the donation box hangs a board on which are painted the names of the war dead, and to the left, a model of a fishing boat, presumably left there by the owner of the vessel for protection. Or perhaps by families of the fishermen who have already perished with the boat.
Beyond the donation box suspended between two pillars is a rope made of rice straw with strips of white paper cut in zigzags hanging from it at intervals. Called a shimenawa, it indicates that the area beyond the rope is the sacred dwelling place of the kami. At the back of this space and directly in front of the entrance to the inner sanctum, there is a large mounted mirror of polished metal, symbolizing both the numinous and pure nature of the kami as well as the fidelity of the worshiper. On either side of the mirror are ancient wooden images of two former priests.
The energy at the top of Helmet Mountain is very powerful, and it always affected my body in some way or other, at certain times more powerfully than at others. We were told by a local farmer that it had once been a nesting place of eagles. It was a place I would return to quite regularly.
A shrine like this has no resident priest living within its compound. It is only visited at certain festival or ceremonial occasions. The rest of the year it is a silent and solitary place, except for the occasional visit by a local on some personal business.
As we descended the hillside and walked through the forest, we came across a clearing where someone had made a vegetable garden. While admiring the neatly weeded rows of winter vegetables, a very ancient-looking woman who might have stepped out of a folktale emerged from the forest to one side of the garden. On seeing us, she broke into a smile and we all bowed "Konnichiwa." "Where are you from?" she asked, looking from Masako to me, and obviously surprised to see a foreigner.
"We've just moved into Sora. Into Mr. Sawada's house beside the vermilion bridge," answered Masako. "My husband is from Britain and I'm from Tokyo. But we've decided to live in the Japanese countryside."
"Ah, good. Mr. Sawada's house. Yes, I know," she said smiling. "You've come to a good place. The land here is very soft and gentle, like the people. We never have earthquakes here. In all my years I never remember there being an earthquake."
Three nights later, I had just gone upstairs and begun to undress when, as I put out my hand to hang my shirt on a large ikō (a lacquered stand for hanging kimono), it appeared to move away from me. At the same time, my body registered that certain feeling of instability that had become familiar while I was living in Tokyo. But I did not, in those few seconds, make the connection, after the reassurance we had received from the old woman on Helmet Mountain, until I realized that not only the ikō but the room, in fact, the whole house was moving—we were having an earthquake!
We hurried to the radio and waited for any reports, and learned that the epicenter had apparently been deep under the sea near the town of Wajima on the other side of the peninsula. There had been some damage to the harbor, and a car had fallen into the sea, but there had been no injuries or loss of life.
I hoped that the locals would not associate the appearance of a foreigner in their midst with the earthquake, as some form of retribution devised by the local kami.
♦ An Offer I Could Not Refuse
While trying to acquaint ourselves with the topography of the area, we were walking through the village one afternoon when something made me turn and glance over my shoulder. I just caught sight of the back of a priest in yellow-and-white robes disappearing around the corner of a house. The experience for some reason gave me a powerful feeling of déjà vu that registered in my body physically, like a shock. I had expected to see the black robes of a priest of the Jōdo Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism in the village, but this brief flash was far more exotic. Without thinking of any other Japanese sect, I had for some reason immediately associated the image with Tibetan monks, some of whose robes share similar colors of yellow and white. Nevertheless, when I thought about it I realized that this association possibly made sense, if in fact the temple in the village belonged to the Shingon sect, since there are many shared features between the two forms of Buddhism; hence, my association at some subliminal level, perhaps.
We had already decided that we should call on the temple, and I was now curious to see if my hunch was correct. A few days later we paid a visit, bearing the customary gifts, only to find that the priest was out, but to be invited back later by the priest's wife, who told us that the temple did indeed belong to the Shingon sect. A day or two later, the priest, Reverend Tani, phoned and invited us to dinner the following evening.
When we arrived at the temple,