| Robert Sibley | |
| The Ottawa Citizen |
Sunday, July 10, 2005
|
Shuji Niwano crouched beside me on the gravelly shore, held out his arms and opened his hands to reveal a stone in each palm. "Please, which one do you like?"
I was lying down, eyes closed, absorbed in the grating wash of the Pacific Ocean as it ebbed and flowed on Katsurahama Beach. I sat up, wondering if I was being pulled into some strange Japanese game, but I played along, studying the stones. Each was the size of a large egg. The one in Shuji's left hand was light grey and ovoid, while the other was darker with glints of mica and elongated as if it had been squeezed in the middle. My impulse was to pick it up and press the ends to regain an egg-like perfection.
"Kore," I said. "This one." I tapped on the darker stone. Shuji dropped it in my hand. "It is for you," he said. "To remind you of this place."
Shuji said he would take the other stone for his bonsai collection. The Japanese have a tradition of naming stones to commemorate an event or a person. For the past two weeks, Shuji and his son Jun had been my companions on the Shikoku no Michi, The Way of Shikoku, a 1,400-kilometre pilgrimage trail that circles the island of Shikoku, following the legendary footsteps of the ninth-century Buddhist saint Kobo Daishi and leading to 88 temples.
"This will remind us of our visit here," Shuji said. "This will be Robert's stone."
"I am honoured, Shuji. And I will call this Shuji's stone."
We gathered our gear. Shuji wanted to show me the statue of a great Japanese hero, Ryoma Sakamoto, that stood nearby. We climbed a hill to a clearing. The statue was in silhouette against the grey sky. I looked back at the long curve of shoreline jutting like a finger into the sea, the distinction between ocean and sky blurred by early-morning haze. To the west, headlands thrust like fists into the blue water, the nearest dark green, the more distant faded to blue silhouettes. It was scenery from one of those Oriental prints that show tiny figures walking through an overwhelming landscape. And for the first time in a long time, peering through a gap in the boughs of a pine tree to the cliff-top shrine, I fell in love with a place.
I have several favourite places: the Kentish countryside of England, Alberta's Peace River country, the south coast of Crete, the Kootenay Lake region around Nelson in British Columbia, the Languedo region of France, and, for some odd reason, a stretch of the Yukon highway between Whitehorse and Carcross. They are the kinds of places where I imagine I could have lived another life, places to which I return -- if only in memory -- with a kind of what-if wonderment. Now I had another what-if place. Staring across the beach to the distant headlands, a fragment from Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy popped into my head: "We live here, forever taking leave."
I was embarked on my third week as a henro, or pilgrim. So far, I had visited 33 temples. The trail was often arduous, crossing at least four mountain ranges that run the length of the island. But as Katsurahama Beach demonstrated, it could also be stunningly beautiful. The park, on the south coast of Shikoku near Kochi City, is famous for its statue of Sakamoto, the son of a 19th-century samurai family who had fought to end the 200-year rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule in the 1860s.
In 1853, U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his Black Ships and forced Japan's rulers to open the country to trade with the rest of the world. That event effectively ended two centuries of self-imposed isolation in which Japan had banned foreigners (except in a couple of port cities) and barred its own people from travelling to other countries. Sakamoto was one of first Japanese intellectuals to argue that Japan had to learn the ways of the barbarians if it was to flourish. He studied western political institutions and drafted a blueprint for a constitutional government and parliamentary democracy. He also wore European-style boots instead of sandals, arguing that since a samurai must always be ready to fight, boots were better than sandals.
Sakamoto was 32 when he was assassinated by a fanatic in 1867. He was hailed as a martyr to the cause of Japan's modernization and statues were placed in his honour throughout the country. At Katsurahama Park, a stern-faced Sakamoto stands six metres tall, staring out to sea, dressed in traditional robes, gripping his swords and, of course, wearing boots.
The Japanese have for centuries celebrated Katsurahama Beach as a place of singular beauty. Its deep-green pine forests, multi-hued pebble shore and the blue Pacific inspired the poet Keigetsu Omichi to write this haiku:
Watch the moon rise from the surface of the sea,
drawing the attention of all
on Katsurahama.
Shuji came up beside me. "It is beautiful, yes?" he said. "Thirty years ago, I was here. With my wife. Before Jun was born."
"You haven't been back since?"
Shuji shook his head.
"First time in 30 years," he said, staring at the beach. "I gave Ikuko (his wife) a stone. She still has it in her garden."
I asked why he had not returned.
He shrugged.
"We moved to Tokyo after Jun was born and ... " He paused. "We never came back."
"Now, you have," I said.
Shuji offered a sad smile. "Yes, now I have."
The Japanese aren't known for public demonstrations of affection, especially the older generation, so Shuji surprised me when he put his hand on my shoulder.
"I am glad to share this return with you, Robert," he said.
"I am glad to be here with you," I responded.
And I was. I had met Shuji and Jun on the second day of my pilgrimage. We had been walking together more or less ever since. I suspected we reinforced each other's willingness to keep walking, encouraged each other to continue despite the blisters, throbbing legs and drenching rain. Shuji had to contend with Jun's illness and a periodic fatigue that left his son unwilling to continue. He had explained that Jun, who was 25, had had some kind of breakdown -- he referred to it as "Jun's condition" -- a few years earlier and had never recovered fully, becoming more erratic and occasionally violent. Jun had stopped attending school and continued to live with his parents.
The Shikoku pilgrimage was intended, in part, to rebuild Jun's self-confidence. If he could walk the Henro Michi maybe he would feel pride and purpose. Or so Shuji hoped. Now, I understood there was a more personal aspect to Shuji's pilgrimage, and I liked him even more for his nostalgia.
"It is time to go?" Shuji asked. It was 7 a.m. We had spent the night at the Ryokan Sekinoya, an inn on the outskirts of Kochi City near Sekkeiji Temple, or Temple 33. It was a lovely, old-fashioned ryokan with a rock garden and pond full of fat, colourful carp. I had slept well after a long, hot day trudging through the suburbs of Kochi, and was looking forward to the day's walking. Good thing, too. We were aiming to reach Shoryuji, Temple 36, in the foothills of Utsuga-san, a hike of more than 30 kilometres.
"Hai, ikimasho," I said. "Let's go."
Shuji took a last look at Katsurahama Beach. We hoisted our packs and retrieved Jun from the foot of Sakamoto's statue where he had been dozing.
Our eight-kilometre hike to Temple 34, Tanemaji, wound through the suburbs and into the countryside around Kochi. Long rows of plastic greenhouses covered crops of potatoes, cabbage, eggplant and green peppers. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous patchwork of rice paddies, surrounded by dirt walls and submerged in water, sparkling in the sun. Farmers in high rubber boots waded across soggy fields, hauling trays of rice seedlings to women waiting calf-deep in the muddy water. In their brightly coloured smocks and sunbonnets, the women looked like bent scarecrows as they thrust the seedlings into the muck. Wet-rice farming is known as taue ("to put rice in the field") -- transplanting seedlings from their winter beds to the irrigated paddies. Across Japan, rice fields are squeezed between housing developments, warehouses and factories.
Rice has a deep symbolic meaning for the Japanese and, arguably, forms the core of their society. As Frank Gibney, an American scholar, has written, "the hold of taue on Japan's society cannot be dismissed." He suggests the company loyalty for which Japanese workers are so well known is rooted in a deep-seated sense of being members of a village; even huge Japanese cities such as Tokyo and Osaka organize themselves like collections of small villages.
Gibney roots this attitude in the ancient traditions of a rice-farming culture that relied on complex, interlocking irrigation systems and fostered group-mindedness and co-operation. For rice farmers, water was too valuable to be controlled by any individual or institution. Hence, as Gibney writes, "the rite of taue is at the heart of this villager's instinct in the Japanese."
This rice-culture was reflected in Tanemaji, a pretty temple known as the Temple of Sowing Seeds. According to legend, Kobo Daishi visited the area and planted five types of seeds from China. Even today, local women regard the temple, built on a landfill in the middle of rice fields, as a fertility site. The courtyard is surrounded by a low wall in front of which stand dozens of weatherworn statues of Jizo, the patron protector of children and travellers.
The temple's main buildings, the hondo and the daishido, face the Jizo statues. The one exception is a small structure in front of the hondo in which resides an image of Yakushi, the Buddha of medicine and healing. The shrine is filled with hanging water-ladles, a common household item, except that there are holes in these ladles. Traditionally, when a woman became pregnant, she brought a ladle to a temple priest who would punch a hole, set it on the altar and offer prayers. The woman then took it home and kept it in the household tokonoma, or shrine. After the child was born, the ladle was returned as a gesture of thanks. The symbolism is obvious: In the same way water pours effortlessly through a bottomless ladle, a woman hopes for an easy birth. I counted seven women who stopped to pray before Yakushi.
We had lunch in the courtyard of Kiyotakiji, Temple 35, a mountainside temple overlooking rice fields and the Pacific Ocean. Sitting on a bench in the dappled shade of a maple tree, absorbed in the glinting patchwork of fields far below, feeling the ache of the morning's walk leach from my leg muscles, I was suddenly and self-consciously aware of just how much I was enjoying myself. My feet were nearly healed of blisters, my legs were stronger and, best of all, my mind seemed to be slipping into the rhythms and requirements of the pilgrimage. I remembered a line attributed to the Buddha: "You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself."
The deepest pleasures of travel, indeed, the real worth and meaning of travel, seldom involve dramatic situations, extraordinary sights or epic efforts. Rather, commonplace situations, ordinary incidents and uneventful stretches of time can be the true gifts given the traveller. There were several such moments on this day besides my minor epiphany at Kiyotakiji. I especially remember a 10-minute rest on a curb outside a Tosa City postal station while Shuji used the cash machine and Jun phoned his mother.
It was a narrow street largely empty of traffic. The only passersby were two middle-aged women who nodded and said "konnichi wa," "good afternoon," as they passed. And yet, there was poetry -- the green No. 32 bus rumbling past with children in their dark blue school uniforms leaning out the windows; the yellow curb lines bright under the sun, a spider's web of electrical wiring silhouetted against the pale sky, shining tile roofs and tidy shrub gardens, a woman's lilting voice from the dark interior of a nearby house. It all seemed to hum and glow with collective significance. I thought of the French poet Baudelaire's nostalgia in his notion of the poesie des salles d'attente. Or, as I thought, the poesie des paves.
It was also a day for the poesie des passantes: Two Buddhist monks blessed us when we met on the trail; a group of women insisted I pose with them; a white-haired fruit seller at Kiyotakiji gave me an orange as o-settai; a medical student from Kyoto, Tashiro Masahiro, who was walking part of the pilgrimage route on his holidays, provided a glimpse into the contemporary Japanese mind.
"After the war, we followed western ways in everything," Masahiro-san said as we walked between Temples 34 and 35. "But now many young people want to know about Japanese ways."
We reached Shoryuji, Temple 36, in time to get our nokyo-chos, or pilgrim books, stamped before the temple office closed. It had been a hard slog for most of the afternoon, with the rain coming down in an intermittent deluge. We were soaked. Naturally, it stopped raining as soon as we reached the temple.
The Temple of the Green Dragon is in the foothills overlooking the Bay of Usa. A lovely, tree-shrouded temple, it is built on two levels linked by a stone staircase that climbs 100 metres under a canopy of cedars. As you climb, a red-and-white pagoda appears in a grove of cherry trees, as if floating upward in a cloud of pink-and-white petals. Behind the main gate, there's a small waterfall that henro use for takigyo -- an ascetic ritual in which pilgrims stand beneath the cold water for as long as they can to pray and meditate. Already cold and wet, I skipped the ritual. I wanted to meditate over a can of Georgia Cafe au Lait, or, better still, a tokkuri filled with hot sake.
Shuji and Jun felt the same way. None of us wanted to walk another four kilometres to our night's accommodations, especially since it looked like it might rain again. Shuji begged the use of a temple phone to call our hotel. The manager was willing to come and get us. O-settai, I thought, gratefully.
Every once in awhile, I find a place
that lives up to its tourist-brochure description -- tranquil, beautiful, relaxing, friendly. The Tosa National Lodging House was one such right-time, right-place hotel. Thirty minutes after checking into Room 310 and exchanging my wet clothes for a dry yukata, or robe, I was steeping in the steaming water of the lodge's open-air o-furo, gazing at the distant headlands of the Yoko-nomi coast and the Bay of Usa.
I had the bath to myself. I lay stretched out, stomach-down in the water, my chin resting on my folded arms on the narrow ledge. The haunting landscape was almost frightening. Craggy cliffs dropped sharp and steep into the foaming ocean. Fingers of black stone probed the sea. Isolated lumps of volcanic rock appeared and disappeared with the flow of the tide. Out in the bay, bulbs of small islands poked from the water. Solitary pines, bent and twisted by salt spray and wind, clutched the rocky ridges in desperation. With only a narrow ledge between the precipice and the bath, I felt suspended over the water-thrashed rock. I understood why the southern coast of Shikoku was a favourite place for suicides, as well as the haunt of mystics and wandering holy men, including Kobo Daishi.
Staring down at the black rocks and white swirl of water, I felt a surge of vertigo that made me close my eyes and push back from the edge of the bath. Yet, there was also the undeniable lure of the plunge, of letting go forever. This was a landscape for both vision and horror, for beauty and danger.
My thoughts drifted like the hawks or kites I could see riding the air currents over the headlands. I thought of Basho, the 17th-century Japanese poet whose travel journal, Narrow Road to the Interior, was one of the few books I carried. In 1689, Basho embarked on a five-month, 2,400-kilometre trek along the coasts and through the mountains of northern Honshu, the largest of Japan's islands. He was awed by "the breathtaking views of rivers and mountains, lands and seas." But he paid a price for his esthetic satisfaction. Climbing Mount Gassan, he reached the summit "completely out of breath and nearly frozen to death." On a night-time climb on a mountainside, he "groped through thick bamboo, waded streams, climbed through rocks, sweaty, fearful and tired ... " I bet he even got blisters.
Despite his travails, Basho still attended to the frogs, cicadas, woodpeckers, cherry blossoms and falling chestnuts. These encounters were often given poetic expression in haiku. Before Basho, haikai poetry largely reflected the dilettante tastes of the Japanese aristocracy. Basho, says philosopher Thomas Heyd in a 2003 essay in Philosophy East & West, gave the art of haikai a different character, one that offered penetrating reflections on the essence of worldly experience while remaining seemingly light and simple in expression. That essence, as far as Basho was concerned, was to be found in everyday experience -- the chirp of a cicada, a leaf floating on water, moonlight on a temple roof, fog hanging in a forest. Good haikai depended on paying constant attention to the world, waiting for that sudden flash of insight.
Floating in the o-furo, I had a sudden image of myself as a boy sitting in the backseat of the car, my father at the wheel, his window open, the car filled with the hot, dusty smell of an Alberta summer as we rolled past fields of wheat, barley and oats. I remembered how I used to imagine myself running beside the car, somehow able to leap fence posts, swerve around utility poles or splash through roadside ditches.
What I couldn't remember was when I stopped imagining myself running across the landscape. I suspect those summer journeys laid the seeds for my wanderlust. Even now, the urge to travel becomes desperate if I'm stuck too long in one place. And why not? As the Buddhist Aitareya Brahmana states: "There is no happiness for the man who does not travel." The irony, of course, is that when I travel I find, like Basho, that it is the everyday things -- a curbside rest, the generosity of a stranger, the gift of a stone -- that provide the journey with its epiphanous moments.
A gust of wind pelted me with cold rain, snapping me out of my mental wandering. Daylight was fading. I paddled over to the steps and hauled myself out of the bath. I halted in my dripping tracks as I recalled a haikai that Basho wrote after a bath:
After hours bathing in Yamanaka's waters -- couldn't even pick a flower.
As I dried myself with one of the washcloth-sized towels the Japanese consider adequate for the job, I laughed at my magpie mind. Like a trunk in an attic, it was stuffed with the haphazard collection of a lifetime's reading -- patchy phrases, pieces of poetry, threads of ideas, buttons of philosophy. And every time I travelled, I could count on spilling some of the trunk's contents onto the floor of consciousness. What I could never count on was finding a coherent pattern in all those swatches of memory.
I looked in the mirror as if I would find an answer but saw only my sun-reddened, wind-burned face. My hands and lower arms had turned dark brown. While the soles of my feet still looked as if they'd been flayed, they no longer hurt. I may even have lost a few pounds. Now if I could only get my head in tune with my body.
I wrapped myself in the yukata, squished my feet into the too-small slippers and headed for the lobby. Maybe one of those little bottles of sake I had spotted in the vending machines would do the trick. I thought I would take the bottle back to my room and stare again at the crashing sea.
I had to forgo the sake when I met Shuji and Jun in the lobby. They wanted me to join them for dinner. The lodge offered teishoku, a set meal of that included tonkatsu, or pork cutlets, slices of sashimi, a broth with tofu and clams, pickled vegetables and, of course, rice. The waitress was even willing to make me a fresh cup of coffee or two.
After supper, Shuji and I sat cross-legged around the low table in my room, plotting the next day's walk. Temple 37, Iwamotoji, was about 60 kilometres west along Highways 47 and 23. It would take at least two days to get there. We figured we would walk as far as we could on the first day -- depending on "Jun's condition," as Shuji put it -- and find a minshuku, or guesthouse, for the night in one of the fishing villages. If the weather was nice, it would be a lovely walk along the coast.
I didn't count on getting sick. I blame it on a bad clam. When Shuji left, I decided to go to bed with the remainder of my Pocari Sweat and the last of my oranges. I felt a little woozy, which I attributed to the long day. I had no problem falling asleep, but I woke suddenly several hours later. I spent the next hour shivering and vomiting and swearing to Kobo Daishi that I would never eat clams again. I was most afraid I would be laid up for a couple of days (or more) with food poisoning as I had been when I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2000.
The vomiting left me doubled over with acid indigestion, but I remembered there was an ice-cream machine in the lobby. I staggered down the stairs. A young woman behind the reception desk eyed me with alarm as I shoved coin after coin into the vending machine. I tried to smile encouragingly at her -- pay no mind, I'm just a crazy gaijin with an ice-cream addiction.
Back in my room, I ate four, four-ounce containers of Haagen-Daz -- two vanilla, one chocolate and a strawberry ripple. Sixteen ounces of ice cream apparently absorbs a lot of stomach acid, or at least enough to reduce the pain to a dull ache and let me sleep for a couple of hours.
I think it baffled my brain, too. I wasn't feeling well when I arrived downstairs at 6:30, tired and shaky. Shuji was waiting to tell me that Jun had also been sick in the night. Unfortunately, he hadn't tried ice-cream therapy and still felt nauseous. Shuji wanted to let him sleep, and then take a taxi back to Tosa and catch a bus to Kubokawa. Was I willing to do the same? Shuji was apologetic in asking; we both knew we had been taking too many trains and buses. But when Jun was sick, he had little choice. I was certainly tempted. The prospect of a 30-kilometre walk when I still felt so wobbly didn't thrill me. And yet, I wasn't that sick. I knew my weakness would pass once I started walking. To give in now would be unjustifiable and, no doubt, lead to future surrenders.
I had to say no. At the same time, I didn't want break up of our henro trio. But if I walked and they caught the bus to Kubokawa it was unlikely we would hook up again unless they waited for me somewhere -- but that would be hit-and-miss at best. If I didn't go with them now, we might as well say goodbye.
Shuji had a hangdog look. It occurred to me he was afraid if I broke up our little triumvirate, they wouldn't complete the pilgrimage. I knew he and Jun sometimes argued -- the paper-and-wood walls in ryokans don't allow much privacy -- and that Jun sometimes wanted to quit. I remembered the few times on the trail when Shuji had stood back while I cajoled Jun, using the excuse of needing a language lesson or his companionship to get him moving again.
What would Basho do? Well, he wouldn't abandon a sick friend. Nor was he a prissy pilgrimage purist. He didn't reject the occasional horse ride or a spot on the back of a farmer's cart. So was I just being bloody-minded, surrendering to some evil imp of egoism? Perhaps. But I also like to think -- as I later persuaded myself -- that there was a better instinct at play, too. After nearly three weeks on the Henro Michi, I was, finally, really walking, physically and psychologically and, maybe, spiritually. I did not want to backslide.
Shuji helped me hoist my pack after I put on my rain gear and paid the bill. I said I hoped Jun would be better soon and that I would look for them on the trail. Maybe he could leave messages at the temple offices. The priests could keep an eye out for me -- there couldn't be that many foreign henro on the trail -- and pass them on. Shuji kept nodding and agreeing and saying he understood. And then I was out the door. I looked back once. Shuji was standing in front of the door. He bowed. I bowed. Then I turned and walked to the highway even though I knew I was being really, really stupid and selfish.
The next episode of Robert Sibley's pilgrimage will appear July 24.
