“A storm hugs the cedars of a thousand ages,” Bashō wrote. We watched a blizzard blast the great trees white. A yamabushi monk appeared at the door. Round-faced, stocky, unshaven, unwashed, he sat with us and drank tea. A yamabushi’s dress is distinct: a blue and white checked jacket over white pantaloons, pilgrim’s sandals made of rice straw, a small black cap suspended in the middle of the forehead by a plastic string. Yama means “mountain,” and bushi means “warrior.” These are ascetic mountain monks associated with the Shugendo sect—a blend of Shinto and Tendai Buddhism—whose practices are particularly severe.
I asked the obvious: “Why did you become a yamabushi?”
He gave a jovial laugh. “I’m a construction worker from Sendai. I guess I was fooling around too much, and my mother told me I better straighten up, so I came here.”
“Have you straightened up?” I asked.
He laughed. “I don’t know. All I do know is that now I’ve lost my job.”
“Are the yamabushi practices hard?”
“Yes.”
“How hard?”
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed again. Laughter is what you are left with after you strip everything away. For more than a thousand years these three mountains and their valleys have been linked with extremes of religious practice. Long fasts, continuous pilgrimages, cold- and hot-water austerities, sword-climbing, fire-walking, flying, making oneself invisible, and self-mummification—this is what the yamabushi are known for.
“Does the divine dwell in the mountain?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Does the mountain dwell inside the human being?”
“Yes,” he replied.
In Buddhist-Shinto cosmology, Haguro, or any sacred mountain, is both heaven and hell, the dwelling place of the kamisama and the dead. Its slopes are layered, like mushrooms on a tree, with hot hells and cold hells and various paradises with jeweled trees and waterfalls as tall as the cosmos—like the Tibetan bardos through which the journey of life and death is taken.
“How many straw sandals have you worn out getting here?” I asked.
“It’s not the sandals I care about … it’s my feet.”
“How many feet, then?”
Intensely physical, the severe yamabushi practices are also mimetic: when the yamabushi climbed a ladder of swords, he was enacting the difficult ascent to heaven and enlightenment; when pouring hot water on himself, he was going through the bardos of hell; walking over fire, he was showing he had become an empty vessel to absorb human suffering. These practices are a warrior’s rituals, the simplified life and sharp leaps of fearlessness jettisoning him into an awakened state.
The “tree-eating” Mount Yudono monks engaged in fasts of one thousand to four thousand days, which ended in a self-mummified death by starvation. Their restricted diet of nuts, berries, tree bark, and pine needles was gradually reduced over the days, then diminished to almost nothing—one pine needle, one berry. At this point the internal organs simply emptied out, and what was left was skin stretched over bones. Sitting in lotus position at death, they were buried for three years, then disinterred, dressed in an abbot’s robes, and are now displayed in glass cases.
Outside, we listened to the yamabushi blow his conch shell. The snow had stopped. In the distance I could see parts of Gas-san and Yudono but could only guess at their actual shapes and the mysterious practices that went on there. The sound of the conch was wild and melancholy. Dōgen, the founder of the Sōtō Zen sect, had said that body and mind must drop away in order for one to fuse oneself with the body and mind of the universe. The Mount Yudono monks had taken the idea literally. Now some skeptics say the Haguro monks are “postcard yamabushi,” not serious practitioners, here only for tourists. Who is to know? Just as the deep, oceanic notes subsided, a boxcar-sized slab of snow slid from the temple roof directly behind us. The yamabushi did not flinch, and I saw a corner of his mouth lift in a smile.
On our last morning in Haguro we drank tea with Mr. and Mrs. Ota. Hajime and his wife had gone to visit friends, and the elder Otas were lonely. Incense drifted across the TV screen, which showed a Japanese couple visiting Paris in the spring.
When it was time to meet the bus, Ota-san hefted our luggage into a wheelbarrow, and I asked him if it had gotten any lighter. He tipped his head to one side and sucked in breath between clenched teeth. As he rolled the wheelbarrow out onto the snowy road, Mrs. Ota gave me a pair of waraji, pilgrim’s sandals. “There are the last ones. The sandalmaker died just before Christmas, and there is no one to replace him.” Leila carried the gourd-shaped bottle of o-miki, a rice liqueur, blessed by the priests at Haguro Shrine. As we sped down the mountain, crossing the Mogami River onto the Shōnai Plain, I thought of the river of gifts that pass through hands in this country: from prefecture to prefecture, from priest to pilgrim to priest.
We gave the o-miki to Yamagouchi-san, the young priest who met us at Morioka eki, because he had gone on a yamabushi retreat with Hajime Ota in Haguro. When we arrived at the temple, a service for the prosperity of a new business was just ending. Suited men and women were slipping into their city shoes, and priests were stripping off robes in the shrine room, making lecherous remarks about Leila and me, thinking we could not understand.
Out in front of the temple, white chickens picked through gravel where the New Year’s food stands had been. Yamagouchi-san explained that they were kept here because a crowing rooster was the helpmate of Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun, when she brought light to the world, and the statue of a white horse wearing pilgrim’s sandals belonged to the kamisama who rode white horses while visiting the human realm.
Tall, sweet-faced, earnest, Yamagouchi-san was eager to talk. Over dinner at his best friend’s restaurant, on the temple grounds, he told us he had been born near Morioka and had always wanted to be a priest. “It is the best thing in the whole world to be,” he exclaimed, his face growing crimson from sake. “Because the priest is the go-between between the people and the kamisama. The only way to come closer to the kami is to be one yourself.”
This sent his friend into hysterical laughter. “I’d rather eat and drink,” he said, raising his glass cheerfully.
When our food came, Yamagouchi-san grew serious. “During training on Haguro, you don’t get much to eat. My body became very light. Afterward I understood how much I owe to the kamisama.”
“It helps to have a friend with a restaurant too,” his friend quipped.
“I couldn’t be happy doing anything else. When you go into a forest, your feelings change, don’t they? Because that is where the kamisama live. In the spring, when the cherry trees blossom, we feel so grateful, so happy, and we all drink sake to celebrate.”
“We’re happy in the winter too,” his friend said, filling our cups again. The more sake Yamagouchi-san drank, the gentler his voice became. I liked the lovely innocence of his face. Children are thought to be kami until the age of seven. Yamagouchi-san said it was the duty of a Shinto priest to recapture that childlike state: to be spontaneous and passionate, fresh-minded and free.
“Scientists go to the moon and say, ‘This is what is real,’ but we Japanese think that is a superficial view. Even if our culture is changing fast, our hearts stay the same. We want to live where we were born; we want to die on tatami. The sun shines and the rice grows, and that is the power of the kamisama!”
Yamagouchi-san had said that priests are the go-betweens for the people and the kamisama; itako go between the living and the dead. Early the next morning we were on our way to the northeast corner of Honshu to meet the itako, mediums who go into trance and communicate with the dead. We would also climb Osorezan, the lone mountain where all the dead spirits of Japan reside. I bought coffee from a cart going through the train, amused by the segregation of Western-style snacks from Japanese and the fact that the honorific o is used only before Japanese foods.
Out the window, Iwateyama, “the Fuji of the north,” rose abruptly from fi
elds where rice straw had been tied in bundles like conical hats or smaller mountains paying homage at Iwate’s feet. Everything I saw seemed imbued with the kamisama: the unplanted rice fields and the little gardens where winter vegetables—cabbages and scallions—had been bruised and blanched white by the cold. Even the old food vendor pushing his cart through the train chanted: “… bentō-ni … o-cha … bentō-ni … o-cha …” in a voice as sweet and clear as a priest’s.
Passing through a knot in the Ōu Mountains, snow flew. Water ran between thick hips of snow as we crossed over a gorge on an iron bridge that shuddered with the train’s weight. In this island culture, bridges occur everywhere in the literature. The frequent necessity of crossing water has come to stand for the pilgrim’s journey from this world to the next, from samsara to nirvana. “Yume no ukihashi” in The Tale of Genji alludes to the tenuous romantic ties between men and women as well as the ghostly ones between the realms of the living and of the dead. Impermanence figures so strongly in Asian religions: I wondered if it might not have evolved from a geography where islands rise precipitously out of the ocean and the earth shudders under everyone’s feet.
As the train pushed down from the mountains toward the Pacific Ocean I read this poem by Fujiwara no Teika:
The bridge of dreams
floating on a spring night
soon breaks off:
parting from the mountaintop,
a bank of clouds in open sky.
An anthropologist, Toshimi Sakuraba, was to meet us at the station, but since he didn’t show up, we walked to the sprawling, Disneyland-like spa—an onsen—where his folklore museum was housed. A friend of Kanzaki, our New Year’s Eve host, he met us at the front desk, and after arranging for rooms, we followed him on a whirlwind tour of indoor Japanese onsen kitsch. Mile-long hallways connected football-field-sized dining rooms; public baths gave way to entertainment centers loud with high-decibel video games. Couples on holiday strolled by in yukata and flip-flops, with damp towels over their arms. Small and serious, our guide moved so fast we had to run to keep up with him.
Down in the basement were the dank rooms of the Misawa folkcraft museum. After exhibits of farming and fishing tools, ancient weavings, and pottery, we found ourselves in front of a photographic exhibit of itako in trance on top of Osorezan.
Itako are not considered true shamans, because they are not called by a dream spirit and led to strange mountaintops, nor are they suddenly possessed from within. A woman becomes an itako because she is blind; blind men become masseurs. Before braille, these were the only professions deemed possible for a person without sight.
Despite the practical aspect of an itako’s calling, her apprenticeship is long, beginning when she is twelve or thirteen. Innate talents and motives vary, but it is said almost universally that people who are blind possess a gift for inward vision.
In the afternoon, Sakuraba-san took us to a small farming village to meet an itako he had interviewed before. The museum sent a car and a driver with a wide, Mongolian face and an angular nose. When he was out of earshot Leila commented that he looked Ainu or Chinese, to which Sakuraba-san retorted, “No. We are all Japanese.”
In the village of Itaya we pulled into the driveway of a well-cared-for suburban house. The itako, Mrs. Nakamura, met us at the door. Touching her hand to the wall, she went down on her knees and bowed deeply as we removed our shoes and handed over gifts. We followed her to a room, speckled and green, where she receives clients who come to make contact with the dead.
Middle-aged, she had a radiant smile and wore an angora sweater the color of a mustard field. She spoke in a sexy, breathless voice. “I’ve been blind since I was three years old, but I could see colors until I was twenty. My training began when I was thirteen. There was nothing else I could do, so I became an itako.”
Her husband, a rice farmer, brought in tea and oranges, then left the room. “The first time I heard an itako call up the dead I was scared and envious. I wanted to do it myself. A teacher was found for me, and I lived with her for two years.”
When I asked if it was difficult, she said that because she was so young she was able to learn quite fast. She told us of nights of pouring cold water over her back, hours and hours of memorization and recitation of sutras, invocations, prayers, and a long, three-part monogatari—a tale about a young girl who falls in love with a horse; rather inexplicably, this goes with an itako’s training.
Between lessons, a young itako acts as a maid in her teacher’s house, cleaning and preparing meals. Near the end of the apprenticeship, the austerities intensify: less food and sleep, more cold-water rituals, more recitations in order to go into trance and receive help from the kamisama to communicate with the dead.
When I asked her why women, not men, are itako, she thought for a moment, then said: “I think it is because women are more devoted. They can open themselves to the kamisama and let the spirits in. When I began, I did not want to be an itako. But what else was there for me to do? Now I am very pleased to be able to help people. They believe in me, and that is good.”
It was late afternoon when her husband came in to turn on the light. She laughed because she had not realized it had gotten dark. I told her we were going to Osorezan in a day or two. “I have never seen that mountain,” she said. “But I have been there.” She said she went to the mountain every year in July and again in October with the other itako. “We walk up the mountain together. It takes a long time because we never know where we are. That’s how it is when the blind lead the blind. As soon as I get to the top I can hear the young spirits crying. We line up, and people come to us. The trance lasts about ten to fifteen minutes. I can’t remember what the spirits say; I let them go on as long as they want. But if it is a young one I am calling back, I feel a tingling down my spine and a heaviness.”
Just before we left, she leaned close to me and whispered: “The dead spirits live in back of the mountain. Don’t go there, especially at night. If you do, you won’t come back.”
That night Sakuraba-san took us to one of the onsen’s dining rooms, where the food was terrible. He didn’t bother to eat. As soon as the table was cleared, we went to one of the in-house bars and ordered the whiskey. For a while he flirted with the hostess, but she had eyes for someone else. Then he wanted Leila and me to sing. It was the kind of bar that offers an open mike, with a backup tape of any popular song. The barmaid shoved a list of possibilities before us. We found a Beatles song we thought we could manage, but when she opened the case, the tape was gone. By then Sakuraba-san was tipsy, his cool anthropological demeanor gone.
A little sheepishly, he said, “The museum makes me use that driver because I get drunk every night and they’re afraid I’ll kill someone.” He looked around for a barmaid. It was near closing time, and she already had her arms around a good-looking young man with big biceps. “My wife is away,” he said. Pale and disheveled, he gave the barmaid a rueful look as we went to our separate rooms.
The next day we visited an itako in a village whose name I never knew. She lived in a falling-down, tin-roofed shack. A blind man answered the door and let us in. He showed us to a room with an earthen floor covered with crude straw mats. The smell of cat piss and human piss was breathtakingly strong. A door slid open on uneven rails, and a small hunchback woman with dark glasses crawled in on her knees. Her short, curly hair was held by a hair net, and she was missing a front tooth. “My house was once an old shrine. When the priest died, an itako came to live here. I had known her for a long time, and when she died, I took her place.”
The room looked unvisited. A huge altar took up the entire back wall. Strips of silk brocade were so dirty it was hard to distinguish any color at all. A four-foot-high candleholder in the shape of a ginkgo leaf stood on the floor next to a large drum. “This is the shrine of the Agurasama,” she said, putting on a white robe over a moth-eaten cardigan.
She threaded her rosary between her fingers and began rubbing them together
. When she sang, her voice was beautifully clear. “At Osorezan the spirits go over the bridge and out into the lake. People say they see them … but I am blind. Sometimes they sing.”
Then she drummed as she talked, right hand over left. “All the itako are dying,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen when we are all gone. The spirits will be in trouble. They will be lonely without us. They will have to return to the place of the dead, to hell, and no one will call them home. No young people are becoming itako. I’ve never had a student. I’m eighty years old, and no one has ever come to me and said she wants to go between the living and the dead.”
In Hirosaki, Leila and I visited an itako who lived in a caretaker’s shack behind the Shinto cemetery. Following a snowy footpath up a hill, we walked through half an acre of mortuary stones to get to her house. We knocked, and a tiny woman in her seventies, bent almost double by osteoporosis, greeted us. Though she was blind, she wore clear glasses. There was a bruise under one eye. “Konnichi-wa,” she said cheerfully. Sun poured into the little room, and newspaper insulated the walls against the cold. When temple bells began to ring, she cocked her head like a bird and smiled. She had been an orphan, raised by an older brother, who wasn’t kind to her. Then she married and had four children before starting her training. “It took me seven years to learn how to bring the kamisama down,” she said, “because I was already thirty-three when I began. My teacher got very mad at me and kept telling me to quit, but I kept on. Now it has been forty-five years since I first went to Osorezan.”
From her small household shrine she pulled down a square straw box and drew out her rosary, called an iratakajuzu. Strung between three hundred red soapberry beads were animal claws and teeth and ancient coins with square holes in the middle. She threaded them between her fingers, then stopped and turned to me. “You want me to call someone down for you, don’t you,” she said. I wasn’t prepared for this, but I gave her the name of a loved one who had died fourteen years before. She asked me where he lived, what day and hour he had died, the cause, and what relationship he was to me. Leila translated. Holding the beads threaded between her fingers, she began rubbing them in long, swift strokes, singing, asking for the kamisama’s help.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 8