Yukuo Tanaka gestured for me to follow him to the temple altar. I ignored my feelings of looking foolish as he instructed me on how to hold my hands and bow my head before Amida Nyorai, the honzon, or main deity, of Emmyoji Temple. I tried to imitate him when he started to chant the Hannya Shingyo, the Heart Sutra, the most popular of Buddhist sutras, the one that is said to open the heart to the wisdom of the Buddha. Well, why not? I was here as a pilgrim, so maybe I should learn to be one.

I was beginning my sixth week as a henro, or pilgrim, on the 1,400-kilometre Shikoku no Michi, the Buddhist pilgrimage route that circles the Japanese island of Shikoku and follows the legendary footsteps of the ninth-century saint Kobo Daishi. There are 88 official temples along the route, many of which date back more than 1,200 years. I had visited 53 of them, mostly in the company of Shuji Niwano and his 25-year-old son Jun. But a week earlier, Yukuo Tanaka, a retired engineer from Tokyo, had joined our pilgrim family. We all benefited from his presence, especially Shuji.

I benefited because Tanaka-san spoke English well and I was able to learn more about Japanese culture than would otherwise have been possible. But Shuji benefited even more, becoming much more diligent about his henro duties after Tanaka-san instructed him on the necessity of following Buddhist rituals. Until he met Tanaka-san, Shuji had largely ignored the requirement for prayers and offerings at the temples. Now he performed the proper obeisances and wore the pilgrim regalia.

And now, it seems, Tanaka-san was willing to undertake my instruction in performing the rituals of a Buddhist devotee, even if, as a gaikokujin, an out-of-country person, I was too much the western rationalist to truly comprehend those rituals. On this morning, we prayed at Temple 53, the Temple of Circular Illumination, in the town of Wake. I'd received my first lesson the previous night after our evening meal. I was trying to memorize the Heart Sutra, I told my companions, but didn't know what the words meant.

"It does not matter," Tanaka-san said, explaining that many Japanese don't know the meaning of the words either. "To learn the Hannya Shingyo is to learn with your heart. You understand with your heart."

The Heart Sutra is said to be the embodiment of the Buddha in sound. To recite the words, even in ignorance of their meaning, is to kindle the presence of the divine within yourself. Did I believe that? I didn't understand the Latin in Gregorian chants either, but I liked listening to them, disappearing into their sonorous resonance. Perhaps the Heart Sutra has a similar effect. So I kept chanting: "Gyate, gyate, haragyate, harasogyate boji sowaka. Hannya-shingyo." "For those who seek the way, strive, strive constantly towards enlightenment and peace of mind."

Yet, even as I tried to follow Tanaka-san, I was more aware of the morning sun falling through the cedar trees surrounding the temple courtyard, dappling the damp gravel pathways with shifting patterns of light and shade. The air was cool beneath the eaves of the temple halls, but I felt the tendrils of warmth across my face in the occasional breeze. It was going to be a hot day.

I sneaked a peek at my watch: It was 7:15. Tanaka-san and I had left the Uematsu minshuku, or guesthouse, just after 6:30. Shuji and Jun were supposed to follow, but had yet to arrive. Jun, no doubt, was having a hard time getting moving.

After we finished our henro rituals, we trundled to the temple office to get the priest to stamp our nokyo-chos, the book of calligraphic seals attesting to our visit. It was time to hit the road, but neither of us was in a hurry to depart. It was pleasant to sit in the cool shade of the temple wall, nursing a can of hot Georgia Cafe au Lait and enjoying the smell of the overhanging azaleas as we waiting for our companions.

Tanaka-san seemed equally content. His right foot had been bothering him for the past couple of days, causing him to limp. He shrugged off my inquiry with a grin, saying "Kobo Daishi is punishing me for drinking too much shochu." I laughed. A few days earlier, after a hard climb to Temples 45, we had celebrated reaching the halfway point in our pilgrimage with a bottle of shochu, which is cheaper than sake but more potent. Tanaka-san was paying the price.

Finally, Shuji arrived with Jun in tow -- he still looked half-asleep -- and we headed down the road, following a coastal road between Matsuyama and Imabari. We had lunch by the sea at Kazahayanosato Fuwari Beach, sitting against the driftwood logs, watching freighters and tankers and ferries plying the Inland Sea between the islands of Shikoku and Honshu, enjoying the sun and the cooling wind off the emerald water.

It was much the same for the next few days. Along this part of the Shikoku no Michi, the pilgrim path hugs the northern coastline of Shikoku, cutting through suburban areas and across flat stretches of farmland and rice fields. Many of the temples were close together, separated by only a few kilometres, which meant we might visit several in one day.

I remember the days as a cluster of images: The children's shrine at Emmeiji, Temple 54, stuffed with toys and candy and bottles of juice at the feet of the Buddha statue; the packed field of haka, or family graves, and the war memorial outside Imabari; old men playing shogi, Japanese chess, in a park; the green spread of the Imabari valley and the Inland Sea blue and bright below us as we climbed to Senyuji; a group of white-vested bus pilgrims sitting in a line along a wall in the parking lot at Kokubunji, eating their bento lunches. I remember an elderly woman on her knees at Hojuji, Temple 62, weeping as she rocked back and forth in front of the statue of Kobo Daishi. I wondered what she was praying for, what sorrow caused such tears.

Shuji's bittersweet homecoming

But what I most remembered from those few days was Shuji becoming quieter and more sad-faced. Weeks earlier he had told me that he'd been born and raised in Imbari. He met his wife Ikuko there, and it was where Jun was born. He looked forward to seeing the city again after so many years.

Walking through Imabari on our way to Nankoboji, Temple 55, we detoured off the pilgrim route to follow Shuji through the streets of memory. We stopped at a school he attended as a boy. We lingered in front of the high school where he met Ikuko after her classes. We found the apartment where they began their married life. We stopped for a long time on the street across from the apartment block, a wooden, three-storey building. Shuji pointed out a second-floor room with a window overlooking the road.

"That is where we lived," he said, staring up at the window. "I wish we did not leave."

As we walked along a broad avenue and passed a Shinto shrine, Shuji-san spoke to Jun. "I reminded Jun this was the temple where we came for his" -- Shuji paused, not knowing the English word -- "hatsu miya mairi."

Japanese parents still follow Shinto customs and take newborn children to the neighbourhood shrine to be introduced to the local kami, the presiding spirit who guards the community. This visit, the hatsu miya mairi, is comparable to a Christian baptism ceremony and signals that the child has become an ujiko, or shrine parishioner. Similar visits -- shichi go san, as they are called -- occur when children are three, five and seven in order to obtain the kami's protection in the future.

We decided to have lunch in a small park near the temple. I asked Shuji why he left Imabari.

"There were no jobs on Shikoku when I was young," he said. "Everybody went to Osaka or Tokyo."

Shuji was 63, which meant he would have been a young man in the early 1960s as Japan was recovering from the Second World War. Like every other Japanese city, Imabari had been a bombing target. Did he remember the bombs?

Shuji-san nodded. "Many buildings were bombed. Even the shrine had to be rebuilt."

After lunch, Shuji went to pray at the shrine, leaving the rest of us to our own devices. Jun smoked a cigarette. I asked Tanaka-san why Japanese would be "baptized" at a Shinto shrine, but then undertake a pilgrimage to Buddhist temples.

"Japanese people are born Shinto and die Buddhist," he said. "What is the difference whether you pray at a temple or a Shinto shrine? The gods hear you wherever you are."

The Japanese, it seems, have a rather fluid attitude toward spiritual matters. They do not believe you need to adhere exclusively to one religion or another. Unlike Christianity, Judaism or Islam, monotheistic religions with one omnipotent deity, Shinto and Buddhism are pantheistic and polytheistic. For the Japanese, there are many buddhas to worship and many Shinto kamis whose help is available. Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples can be the earthly abode of several deities.

Maybe so, but most of the Shinto shrines I saw looked to be poor cousins of the nearby Buddhist temple. And few Japanese -- at least none I met -- described themselves as followers of Shinto, worshipping rocks and mountains and trees as the embodiment of guardian spirits. Nevertheless, according to Ian Reader, a British anthropologist who has studied Japanese religion, parents continue to perform the hatsu miya mairi and other memorial rites for ancestral spirits, and the crowds visiting shrines and temples grow each year. Much of this "return to religion" probably reflects a kind of nostalgic estheticism, rather than any recovery of belief, Reader suggests. People often partake of traditions not because they believe in their underlying spiritual references, but because the ceremonies foster a sense of social identity in an increasingly fragmented world.

Yet, as I listened to Tanaka-san, it occurred to me that Shinto had merely gone underground, as it were, waiting for a more propitious time to reclaim the Land of the Gods. Not surprisingly, Tanaka-san provided a clue to where it might be hiding.

'Look at the food'

That night we stayed at the Miyako Ryokan in Imabari. After our end-of-the-day baths, we donned yukatas and slipped on the outdoor slippers and trundled off in search of dinner. As usual, I had difficulty walking in the too-small slippers -- they kept falling off -- and my too-small yukata threatened to flap open and reveal more than would have been polite.

We paused outside several restaurants. Most had plastic models of the food they offered -- sushi, tonkatsu, donburi, soba, shabu-shabu -- in window displays. Looking at them made me hungry. We eventually settled on a koryoriya establishment specializing in a "small-dish" menu.

The Nisiya Restaurant occupies a small room on the second floor of a building near the Imabari train station: a half-dozen tables, a gleaming zinc-topped bar on one side of the room, polished wood walls and a wraparound picture window overlooking the street. There were only six other diners in the place: a middle-aged couple and a foursome, two men and two women. The women were stylish and pretty and I liked how they covered their mouths with their hands when the laughed. There was jazz on the stereo -- Chet Baker, John Coltrane and, to my great delight, Ben Webster. It was dining satori, to my mind.

Indeed, the meal proved enlightening, thanks to Tanaka-san. Our food came on a series of brass platters. When we finished one, another arrived. Jun supplied me with the Japanese words for the different items on each platter: morsels of fresh raw ika, or squid, tako, or octopus and muru-gai, or mussels. Then there was sliced lotus root stuffed with minced meat, deep-fried chunks of pork, spears of asparagus. A third tray offered batter-fried shrimp, slices of shiitake mushrooms and skewers of yakatori and unagi, or eel.

The waiter, a young man in black pants and a gleaming white shirt, also set a tray of sauces in white porcelain bowls on the table. Tanaka-san explained the contents: a greenish sauce made of salt and tea leaves whose name I didn't catch; another contained sour vinegar called ponzu and a garlic-tasting sauce known as ninniku. There was also a brass cup containing chopped zucchini and cabbage and slivers of raw onion bathed in a tangy sauce. Of course, we washed the meal down with a couple large bottles of ice-cold Kirin beer.

I was trying to pick up a piece of octopus with my chopsticks when Tanaka-san said "chotto matte, Robert-san." "Wait a minute."

I paused, hashi in mid-air. "Nan desu ka? "What?"

I set my chopsticks down on the hashi-oki, the little porcelain chopstick holder next to my plate. I apologized, assuming I should have wiped my hands with the oshibori, the hot damp cloth Japanese restaurants provide for customers, or offered the ritual "dewa, itadakimasu." "I humbly receive."

"No, no, look at the food," said Tanaka-san. "Look at how it is arranged. Japanese people eat first with their eyes."

I had frequently noticed that he and Shuji, and sometimes Jun, paused for a brief moment to gaze at their food before eating. I had assumed that they were offering a silent prayer. But Tanaka-san was articulating a notion that Kenji Ekuan describes in The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox: "It is poor manners to start eating the instant you remove the lid of the lunchbox. You must allow your eyes time to peruse and enjoy the food before moving on to gratify your taste buds ... The habit of enjoying things first with the eyes is an integral part of the Japanese lifestyle."

So it was at the Nisiya Restaurant that night. As Tanaka-san put it: "Every different kind of food has its own plate and is arranged to please the eye. This is very Japanese."

I saw what he meant: the four morsels of eel side by side on a small, rectangular ceramic plate, the dark texture of the seafood enhanced by the white background of the plate; the white slices of lotus root forming an upside-down crescent on a blue circular plate, reminding you of the green fronds of a bamboo tree silhouetted against the sky; the dark green of the asparagus spears made more vivid by the gleaming background of the red lacquer tray.

I looked up at Tanaka-san and Shuji. "Wakarimasu," I said. "I see." And I did: I was looking at Shinto on a tray.

My companions smiled. I had the feeling I'd passed some kind of test.

"Saa, tabemasho," said Tanaka-san. "Well, let's eat."

One of Shinto's core concepts is the notion of purity, which, as scholar Fosco Maraini writes in Japan: Patterns of Continuity, is "one of the principal inner forces of Japanese civilization." This principle, while rooted in religion, has passed from shrine to society. For example, it is reflected in the insistence on cleanliness, particularly the tradition of meticulous ablutions at the temples or in the home. But the principle of purity was also at work in the Nisiya Restaurant. As Maraini puts it: "Japanese cuisine manifests a delicate and poetic respect for the gifts of field, mountain and water as they are presented to man by nature."

Tanaka-san's lesson lingered with me for the next few days. Wherever I looked with any conscious intention, everything -- trees and temples, sea and sky -- stood out sharp and distinct from the surrounding background. Ordinary things -- a child's tricycle in a driveway, three oranges in a roadside shrine, wind ripples on a flooded rice field, green spring wheat -- resonated with an aura of significance, a corona of importance. But it wasn't only my sense of sight that was acute. The crunch of gravel, the whiff of a barnyard, the smoothness of a bamboo trunk: my senses buzzed like wires humming with electricity.

After six weeks of walking I seemed to have reached a kind of psychic plateau that left me feeling both deeply contented and, paradoxically, excited. It was as if my body and my mind had finally decided to co-operate in lining up the orbit of the world, as if some radio station in my head had tuned into a static-free frequency. Everything was sharp and clear and intense. Perhaps the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said it best in The Confessions: "Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself -- if I may use that expression -- as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot."

The next day's walk underscored the point.

Mealtime benediction

In the morning, we traipsed beyond the suburbs of Imbari, praying at the small temples of Taisanji and Eifukuji, Temples 56 and 57, in Koizumi and Tamagawa. About 11 o'clock, we stopped at a convenience store to buy food, thinking we would have lunch at Senyuji, Temple 58. Beside the usual bottles of water and Pocari Sweat, I bought a bento. It took about an hour to climb to the temple.

The hike to Senyuji was a feast for the the senses. The scent of cherry trees along a suburban street. Nodding rhododendrons in a garden behind a wall. The grinning gargoyle of a god on the corner of a tiled roof. A caterpillar crawling across the road. The circle of a hawk. The sparkle of water drops on the fila ments of a cobweb clutched to a trailside shrine. The hot diesel smell of a passing farm tractor.

The path to the temple climbs through a narrow gorge with moss-covered walls looming overhead. A canopy of cedar trees turns the sun green. Every few feet there are shrines set into alcoves in the rock face. A stream tumbles down on the right, splashing and gurgling. The air is cool and damp and fragrant. It's also a steep, exhausting climb.

After reaching the temple and performing my henro rituals, including another attempt to recite the Heart Sutra, I found a bench beneath a white-draped statue of Kannon, the goddess of compassion, where I could enjoy my lunch while admiring the valley below and the gleaming spread of the Inland Sea.

It was Tanaka-san's influence, of course, that made me pause before picking up the chopsticks. Bento are basically an all-in-one square box with compartments for different morsels of food -- everything from rice and vegetables to sashimi and tempura. You buy them at corner kiosks, railway stations and convenience stores. Mine had four compartments. One contained rolls of rice wrapped with bands of dried seaweed. Another held slices of sashimi: maguro and shimesaba, or tuna and mackerel, along with a green dab of wasabi, the hot Japanese horseradish. A third was reserved for vegetable tempura. Finally, there was a fourth section for takemoko and a piece of tomago -- bamboo shoots and sweetened omelet -- and a couple of slices of kamaboko, a fish-paste roll.

I tried to eat with my eyes, tried to see the scenery of my lunch. For a moment, I think I had it, that I was there, looking down on a microcosm of the Japanese landscape: the white rice from the valley fields, the raw fish from the sea, the slices of bamboo from the mountain slopes. I ate slowly, savouring the flavours -- the melt-in-your-mouth maguro, the crunch of bamboo, the sinus-clearing wasabi. And for the briefest time, I disappeared into the moment.

Psychologists label the experience direct perception; that is, when the normally self-absorbed ego is quiescent and doesn't immediately try to judge and analyse your actions, and, for however brief a time, there is no distance, no gap, between the experience and your perception of the experience. Direct perception might define the experience in scientific, rationalist terms, but I think the Japanese concept of yoin better captures the feeling and quality of those few seconds.

Yoin refers to a reverberation or resonance such as that made by a struck bell. Figuratively, yoin refers to an experience that stimulates the imagination but does not need to be fully articulated to be understood, a situation where insight or deep feeling is transmitted without reflection or articulation. A silent smile between husband and wife, the unstated longing of former lovers reunited after a long absence; a parent's wordless caress of a sleeping child; such situations embody yoin. As essayist Walt Kleinedler, an American school teacher who lived in Japan for many years, puts it: "A situation in which a degree of transcendent experience is possible is said to contain yoin." I like to think my bento benediction was such a moment. Admittedly, the moment lasted no more than a few seconds before my mind reasserted its nagging and chattering. But it was enough to know that it was possible to disappear, to silence the ego's chatter for even a brief time.

The day brought at least one other benediction. Tanaka-san had been favouring his right leg for several days now and his limp was more and more pronounced. So far, he'd coped with the pain. But by the time we reached our night's lodging, the Hotel Tachibana-Bekkan, about an hour's walk from Temple 59, he was grimacing with each step.

I was lounging at the window in my room, watching the ships passing on the Inland Sea, when Tanaka-san knocked on my door.

"Domo," I yelled. "Come in."

Tanaka-san hobbled into the room and sat beside me. He declined the offer of a beer and hiked up his pant leg. His right ankle was red and swollen, bulging over the top of his boot. "I do not think I am able to walk tomorrow," he said.

He said he was going to find a drugstore and, hopefully, buy something that would bring down the swelling. He was worried that if his foot didn't improve, he wouldn't be able to make the climb to Temple 60, one of the hardest hikes on the pilgrimage route. Maybe he wouldn't be able to finish the pilgrimage.

When Tanaka-san mentioned finding a drugstore, I suddenly remembered the anti-inflammatory pills my doctor in Ottawa had prescribed for me in case I needed them. Until that moment, I had forgotten about them. I rummaged through my pack and found the bottle buried in a side pocket. "These might help you with the swelling," I said, suggesting he take one now and another before bed.

The pills did the trick, it seems. By morning the swelling on Tanaka-san's ankle had subsided considerably. He was effusive in thanking me for the pills. "You have saved my walk. You are Kobo Daishi."

"My doctor, he is Kobo Daishi," I said, suggesting another pill after breakfast.

On a pilgrimage such serendipity constitutes a minor miracle.

Lost in a virtual jukebox

Despite the pills, Tanaka-san decided to give his foot a rest for the day. He would take the train to Komatsu. I was tempted to do the same. I wasn't particularly looking forward to the day's hike. We would be walking mostly along a highway through suburbs and industrial areas. But I had no justifiable reason not to walk.

I was glad I did. If the previous day's walk saw me disappear into a lunchbox, on this day I got lost in a virtual jukebox. We -- Shuji, Jun and myself -- left the hotel at 7:30 to follow Highway 196, leaving Tanaka-san to catch a taxi to the train station.

The hours blurred one into another. Whether it was the metronomic tapping of my walking staff or the steady rhythm of footfalls, after a while I found myself hearing the hit parade of my youth -- Elvis and the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Carole King. Winding through a maze of suburban streets, Carole and I sang, "So far away, doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?" Good thing I was on a busy highway; I can't carry a tune.

But the vault of memory had other, more obscure treasures. Somewhere between Kokubu and Komatsu, I was a boy again, hearing Johnny Cash and Jimmy Dean, Pat Boone and Hank Williams on the countertop radio in the kitchen as my mother stood at the sink, silhouetted against the window. Trundling past a fishmonger, the whiff of the sea sour in my nose, I recovered I've Been Everywhere and, a long-forgotten favourite, Moody River. It seemed a strange thing to be wandering around Japan as a middle-aged man singing songs from a Prairie childhood. I didn't need an iPod. I had a sound system wired into the synapses of my brain.

True, the needle of memory sometimes got stuck in a groove -- Don MacLean's American Pie and Sheb Wooley's Purple People Eater got several unwanted replays -- and required giving the virtual jukebox a mental kick, but I think of that day of musical memories as the gift of a kami with a sentimental streak and a supply of virtual nickels. As we crossed a bridge over Nakayama River into Komatsu and walked to Koonji Temple, Temple 61, Audrey Hepburn was singing "Moon River, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day." And I saw my boyhood self curled on the fat-armed chair on the porch of my grandparents' house in Hanna, reading Tom Swift and His Airline Express. I swear I could smell the coffee cakes my grandmother was baking in the kitchen.

A workingman's bar

Koonji Temple, the Temple of the Incense Garden, is the ugliest of the Shikoku pilgrimage temples. Not because it's old and rundown, but because it's new and modern. The hondo, or main hall, is a huge, western-style building that wouldn't look out of place in Toronto. It looks more like a convention centre or a government office. Hojuji and Kisshoji, Temples 62, and 63, fit better my image of what Buddhist temples should look like: tree-shrouded, raked-gravel courtyards, weather-worn.

The two temples were only a few kilometres from Temple 61, so we visited them before calling it a day and finding the Komatsu Business Hotel, where we had booked rooms for two nights. We would be coming back to the hotel the next day after our hike to Temple 60.

That night after supper, Tanaka-san and Shuji and I found a nawanoren, a traditional Japanese drinking hole. The word means "rope curtain," and refers to the small curtain, or noren, that hangs from a nawa, or rope, from the top of the door of many Japanese shops and restaurants and bars. A nawanoren is usually a neighbourhood tavern or workingman's bar. This one was definitely down-market. It was barely bigger than the kitchen in my house, with a long bench in front of stained and cigarette-burned bartop. A set of sagging shelves held rows of sake and beer and shochu. The air was thick with smoke. A half-dozen men in various states of tielessness sat around a low table laughing and yelling and banging the table as they knocked back their beers. I liked the place immediately.

We sat on the bench. Tanaka-san spoke to the bar owner, a short, round-faced woman with a missing left incisor. She grabbed a brown keg of shochu from the shelf, filled a tokkuri and set the slender bottle and three mismatched cups on the countertop. I remembered my manners and let my companions fill my cup while I filled theirs.

We didn't talk much that night, not that it would have been easy with all the noise. I inquired after Tanaka-san's ankle. "Much better, domo." Shuji expressed relief that Jun was still continuing to walk, and with only 25 temples to go -- after tomorrow's long climb to Temple 60 -- we might all complete the pilgrimage together. He was happy at the thought.

But after toasting kampai, we sat quietly, keeping an eye on each other's cups, watching the other patrons getting drunk and loquacious and thinking our own thoughts. I liked that about the Japanese: The ability to sit quietly without feeling compelled to natter. Unlike North Americans, who are afraid of silence, particularly their own, the Japanese accept silence as the unsaid part of a conversation between companions who were comfortable with each other. If there is no need to talk, there is no embarrassment in silent togetherness.

Sipping my shochu, I replayed events from the past week in my head, trying to figure out of whether my sense of their extraordinariness was merely the result of endorphins stimulated by all the mountain air I had been breathing, or the product of what the psychologist Carl Jung called synchronicity.

After four cups of shochu I was tilting toward synchronicity, the idea that, as Jung put it, there can be an "equivalence of psychic and physical processes;" meaningful relationships can exist between psychic and physical events that have no apparent causal connection.

According to the principle of synchronicity -- try saying that fast after four cups of shochu -- there is an underlying order of meaning behind seemingly random and unconnected events, an order that can sometimes be perceived in the subterranean foundations of the mind. As Jung put it, the world is filled with "meaningful coincidence."

It was a tempting concept to apply to the string of coincidence, serendipitous situations and beneficial occurrences that had given my pilgrimage along the Shikoku no Michi such a sense of significance and resonance. I thought of Haromi-san, the nurse I had met whose foot salve had, arguably, cured my blisters and allowed me to keep walking. I remembered the Buddhist nun, Miko Kamino, who gave me a ride that allowed me to continue my pilgrimage with Shuji and Jun. Even meeting them had been a coincidence that had proven beneficial. Then there was Tanaka-san: meeting him had unquestionably made the pilgrimage more meaning-filled. Especially for Shuji, I thought, remembering his soul-wrenching confession of anger and despair about Jun. Was all of this just coincidence? I set the question aside as Tanaka-san ordered a third tokkuri.

Weaving our way back the hotel, I could see the dark bulk of the mountain we would be climbing in the morning silhouetted against the evening sky above the roofline of the buildings. The only way to reach Yokomineji Temple is on foot. There is no transportation all the way to Temple 60, and the climb, according to Bishop Miyata's guidebook, is "a perilous, unpaved path that makes you fear for your life." In fact, Bishop Miyata says several pilgrims have died climbing to the temple in recent years.

I wasn't worried. After six weeks of climbing up and down mountains, I was in better shape than I had been in years. How little I knew.

The next episode of Robert Sibley's pilgrimage will appear Sept. 4.

Update: In the previous episode, Robert Sibley's companion, Shuji Niwano, revealed his d