by Kōji Suzuki
“Hey, can you navigate?” I had the directions from Ina Interchange to that point memorized, but standard maps were useless when it came to navigating the narrow mountain roads that lay ahead.
“I’ll try,” she replied without confidence. We had yet to reach our destination without issue when my wife, who had no sense of direction, navigated.
We’d received a fax with the directions to the cabin a few days ago. In the margins had been a warning: “There are zero landmarks in the area. Please be careful when you make your way here.”
According to the standard map, after the small settlement, the road simply vanished. A road doesn’t necessarily link one location to another. Like a river whose source was hidden in the mountains, a road could get swallowed up by a range and disappear. The standard map didn’t even indicate the settlement’s name, and I only learned the name “Ura” for the first time on the fax. My friend said he’d built his cabin on the site of an abandoned school outside the settlement right where the road ended on the map. I was seized by curiosity. As it was located on the western foot of Mt. Senjo, I anticipated sensing the spirit of the mountain.
Two summers ago, I felt what was referred to as the spirit of a mountain for the first time. After reading a piece that described Tenkawa Village in Oku Yoshino in a book I’d happened to pick up, I decided to go on a solo motorcycle tour.
I took the ferry from Cape Irago across to Toba and took Route 42 down to Owase, then a turn deep into the mountainous terrain of the Kii Peninsula. It was bright and sunny the whole time I rode along the coast of Kumano Nada, but as I climbed the winding mountain roads and rose in altitude, clouds descended on the summits, blocking out the sun as if the previous good weather had been nothing but a dream. The locals claimed that the weather was always fickle in those parts. Even if it was sunny downhill, they said, you were practically guaranteed to run into rain as you went into the hills.
The rain came out of nowhere and suddenly moved on without settling in any particular location. Putting on and removing my rain gear became a hassle, so every time I encountered a squall I stowed the motorcycle under a dense thicket and took shelter. That was why I wasn’t making much progress. My plan was to arrive in Tenkawa by 5:00 p.m. and to find a convenient lodging for the night. Just as I started to feel anxious over wasting so much time, I found a signpost that seemed to indicate a shortcut to the village. According to the map, the road turned into a tunnel that ran under Mt. Gyojagaeshi and went straight to Tenkawa. It seemed to pierce right through the center of the Omine Range, which was comprised of Mt. Sanjo, Mt. Daifugen, Mt. Yayama, Mt. Bukkyo, and Mt. Shaka. On the map the road was not marked red or green, which would indicate a national highway or main thoroughfare, but yellow, which meant it was a rough, unpaved mountain road. It was definitely a shortcut, but there was a risk I wouldn’t be able to pass through with a bike built for ordinary roads. I stood straddling the seat and contemplated my choices for a minute, standing right at the fork. But the decision was already made before I had time to puzzle over it—I needed to commit to moving forward. If I got stuck, I’d deal with it then. I could always turn back. I mentally readied myself and turned left.
The road condition worsened the farther uphill I traveled, and branches that leaned out into the road repeatedly scratched at my elbows and shoulders. It was quite narrow, barely wide enough for a single car to pass through. There was no oncoming traffic nor any vehicles in my rearview mirror. If I had an accident and fell into the ravine, I’d probably disappear from the world without anyone ever finding me. In fact, the bottom of the ravine must have held countless souls of travelers who had fallen in the middle of their journeys. The place had an aura that rose up unannounced that gave credence to such notions.
Large rocks were strewn across the road and the ground water sprang up from the mountainside and flowed swiftly across the road. I had to maintain a slow pace and pay constant attention to the surface. Even at such a snail-like speed I had probably covered about ten miles. Right before the Gyojagaeshi tunnel, just as I thought the stream on the right side had vanished, I discovered a landslide that blocked the road at an angle. Right at a curve in the road, the stream disappeared, buried under earth and rocks. I slammed on the brakes just in time, got off the bike, and walked closer. It seemed as if the Earth’s skin had been turned inside out. The roots of plants stuck upwards, and soil bulged high, squashing the small stream. It seemed like the landslide had happened recently as the surface of the soil still looked damp, and the smell of wet dirt traveled all the way into my helmet. It was then that I understood why there had been no oncoming cars. All traffic was cut off.
Tenkawa lay just on the other side of the tunnel right before me. The frustration that I felt diminished my desire to resume my trip. In order to pull myself together, I took off my gloves and helmet, rolled my shoulders, and took deep breaths. Just as I switched off the ignition and shut down the engine, silent mountain spirits descended.
Clouds hovered over the northwestern sky above the mountain ridge, making the leaves on the trees rustle with falling rain, while the southern sky had only a thin layer of clouds where soft sunlight filtered through the gaps. All of the overlapping light and dark clouds moved briskly.
All of a sudden, the trees in the nearby forest swayed. A warm wind blew down through the virgin woods, a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees whose roots were covered with bamboo grasses. The wind that passed through the dark, lush foliage was steeped in the smell of trees, soil, and water. A presence filled the flowing air that made me shiver, and my skin burst into gooseflesh. I stepped into the untouched forest and parted the branches to look up towards the summit. I saw a stream of gray rubble, the texture of which was totally different from the surrounding soil, snaking up the hill. Water flowed abundantly from all over, yet this particular strand of rubble appeared to be a dry riverbed. For a while I was frozen to the spot as if I’d been cursed by the mountain spirits or by the presence of gods. As I stared at the mountaintop I felt a powerful desire bubbling up inside me: If there in fact was a mysterious entity living on the top of the mountain, I wanted to walk up the ridge and come into contact with it until I’d had my fill.
One would think I’d have retraced my steps and taken a detour after running into a landslide right before reaching Tenkawa, but that wasn’t what happened. If I took the long way around, I’d have had to travel at least another sixty miles, which would waste over two hours. As the crow flies, my destination was right in front of me, just past the collapsed earth. The thought of giving up and turning back vexed me, so I decided to look for another option.
The landslide had tumbled onto the road towards the valley, skimming across the edge and stopping right where a few dead trees lay blocking the dry riverbed. I tried walking up the side of the mountain where the slide had occurred to try to cross over to the other side and to Tenkawa. As I was terrified of falling back into the valley, I leaned into the side of the mountain, using my hands as crutches as I climbed. Here and there large boulders lay exposed, their surfaces wet and slippery, but they were close, only about five yards apart. I could easily cross over on foot. If I could just leave the bike, there wouldn’t be a problem, but I couldn’t quite do that. I walked back and forth several times, checking the stability of the ground, kicking away any exposed rocks. If it was possible to cross over, I wanted to. It wasn’t in my nature to just give up and skulk away. Being single-minded, and gradually finding myself able to walk up the hill without using my hands, I was seized with the absurd idea of riding over on my bike.
But as soon as I glanced down into the valley, I lost heart. The rocks that I kicked over clattered along the dry riverbed and rolled until they were no longer visible and kept on falling, the noise of their descent echoing through the trees. If I lost my balance and fell with my bike, there was no telling how far I would tumble down the mountain. But if I kept my eyes away from the ravine and bore ahead with the same momentum as if it were a log bridge �
�� If I didn’t mess up, I would reach the other side. That was my judgment.
Later on when I told my wife about this experience, she screamed, What if you’d fallen into the ravine? Stop being so reckless! Of course, it was only because I’d made it to the other side safely that I could tell my wife a slightly embellished version of my mini-adventure in the mountains. But bragging about the thrill and my sense of triumph was silly and immature, and my wife spoke as though she were scolding a rambunctious little boy. Indeed, had I fallen, it would have been too much for my wife to bear. How was she supposed to wait for a husband who’d vanished during a motorcycle trip as though he’d been spirited away? No wonder she was livid. I stopped the car near the bridge because my wife had said, “Wait, hold on a second. I might’ve made a mistake.” It seemed that we were on the wrong road, and even if we wanted to ask for directions there were no houses in sight. “Let’s go a little further. I’ll go ask someone if we find a house.”
I doubted we’d find any houses this deep in the mountains, but I crossed the bridge and continued up the road as my wife suggested. Shortly thereafter, we came across a house that resembled a smoke hut. My wife jumped out of the car and ran in and dragged out an old man dressed in fieldworker’s clothes. As my wife spoke ceaselessly at him, he pointed back down the hill we’d just ascended. I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the closed car window, but the old man’s gestures seemed to indicate that we’d been driving along the wrong road. After getting directions, my wife bowed to the old man a few times, ran back to the car, and bowed again as she opened the door.
“We shouldn’t have crossed that bridge,” my wife informed me, catching her breath.
“But there were no other roads.”
“No, he says there’s a narrow road that goes uphill right before the bridge. We couldn’t see it because we were going downhill.”
“Okay …”
There was no space to make a U-turn, but since it wasn’t that far, I decided to reverse until we got to the edge of the bridge. The old man who had helped us with directions came to the front of the car, watching us with a worried look. I wondered what he was worried about. Was it for the safety of us city slickers? About whether we’d reach our intended destination? He was still motioning, waving a finger to the left. He meant that we had to take a left before the bridge. Even as the old man receded into the distance, he continued to energetically wave left. I noted a resemblance. Thanks to the angular line of his chin in particular, reminiscent of a stone statue of the Buddha, he overlapped in my mind with an ascetic I’d met at the end of June that year on the summit of Mt. Shaka in the Omine Range.
Having toured the Omine Range for two years in a row, my fascination with the area had deepened. I was deeply curious to discover with my own eyes the holy entity that lived on the top of the mountain, the source that breathed out the spiritually charged wind that wended through the virgin woods. When I saw literature in a bookstore about Yoshino and Kumano I’d pick it up and flip through, and if it piqued my interest I bought it in order to broaden my knowledge. One study of folklore described Mt. Omine as the birthplace of the Shugendo practice, and naturally, recalling the aura of the place, my interest expanded to include ascetic hermits and mountain worship. I wanted to go again, this time to the peak.
At long last I was able to take four days off at the end of June that year to realize my dreams. In fact, I had wanted to take part in the ascetic training hosted by the monks of Mt. Omine Temple that included walking the Omine-Okugake pilgrimage path, but it involved staying in the mountains for four nights. The path was fifty miles long, requiring at least a week to traverse, which wasn’t possible with my schedule, so my only option was to scale the mountain on my own. I was supposed to start a new job on July 1st, my first time back in full-time employment in six years.
During the previous six years, after quitting the event production company I’d worked for, I hadn’t stuck with a regular job. My wife and I both worked, but with the arrival of our first daughter, one of us had to quit or change careers. Even if we left our daughter at a daycare, they were only open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so we’d have been forced to pay for two-fold childcare. Whereas my wife had a stable income as a school librarian, the event production company I worked for was on the verge of writing rubber checks. So I yielded and said goodbye to the life of a salaryman for a while. Since quitting the publishing company I joined fresh out of college, I’d lost count of the times I’d switched occupations. Others probably saw me as a lazy bum who couldn’t hold down a job, but I was full of vim and vigor and saw taking on new jobs in new fields as a challenge. Perhaps that’s why I hardly balked at the idea of becoming a stay-at-home dad.
Taking my daughters back and forth from daycare every day and handling the majority of the childrearing duties and chores, I also put to use my physical strength, honed through judo in junior high and high school, to work as a personal trainer at a gym whenever I had free time. I had spent the past six years as both stay-at-home dad and part-time employee. It was significantly easier to have a salaried position, but what I gained during that period was significant. Bathing my daughters, washing their dirty cloth diapers, yelling in frustration over minor and major bathroom accidents, swinging between joy and despair over their behavior … The duress of raising the kids myself created a bond between us beyond the dreams of a father who could only play with his children during his free time, which in turn made my wife place even greater trust in me.
Attachment to those closest to oneself is a source of energy. The year before, when I entered a local weightlifting tournament and was on the verge of winning the competition with a 330-lb bar bell, I imagined my daughters about to be crushed by a megalith. I needed to lift it if I wanted to save them. That split-second image determined the outcome of the competition. The importance of family was no empty credo for me. I threw myself into increasing my physical strength as if to compensate for the small income I brought to the household and in order to be prepared for worst-case scenarios.
My daughters were bigger now, the elder in elementary school and the younger just turned four. They took up much less of my time, and furthermore the daycare my younger girl attended had recently expanded their hours of operation. Just as I felt it was an opportune time to go back to work, my former boss at the publishing company called to ask if I was interested in helping out at a new publishing packager he was setting up. That was in the beginning of June. By the middle of that month, spurred on by my wife, I told my former boss that I’d be honored to work for him again and made various arrangements so that I could start commuting to the office on July 1st. Since I wouldn’t be able to take a holiday for a while once I started the new job, I asked my wife if I could take the four last days of June as a break just for myself. She graciously consented, under one condition: that I would not be reckless.
I decided to take the Tomei Expressway out to Hamamatsu, and from Cape Irago I’d take a ferry to Toba. On the way back I’d take Route 25 and the Higashi Meihan Expressway to Nagoya, and from there take the Tomei back home. I would ride my bike up to the base of the mountain trail then leave the machine behind during the ascent. In order to use the four days to the fullest, considering the trek to and from the mountains, I decided a motorbike had the best mobility. The problem was deciding on which mountain within the Omine Range to climb from Yoshino: Mt. Sanjo, Mt. Daifugen, Mt. Yayama, Mt. Bukkyo, Mt. Kujaku, or Mt. Shaka. I would need four days to cross the entire span of the mountains, which wasn’t a possibility. Even if I chose two or three mountains and left the bike at the base and summited, at best I’d be able to spend only one night in a cabin on the peak. There were two options: a pilgrim’s lodge on Mt. Sanjo and a hut on Mt. Yayama. Were I to spend the night at the foot of Mt. Sanjo, that to this day prohibits women, I would have to stay in Yoshino, but the guidebook stated that the path from Yoshino to the top of Mt. Sanjo was a gentle slope all the way. On the other hand, if I stayed in the pilgrim’s
lodge in Zenkiguchi at the foot of Mt. Shaka, hiking to Mt. Yayama and back would offer magnificent views. I’d be able to get right above the Gyojagaeshi tunnel, previously blocked off by the landslide, and through an area where Oyama magnolias grew wild. I wanted to take the more precipitous path, which meant my only choice was the latter route, which automatically decided where I would stay for the three nights. I would be lodging at an inn at the base, the hut on Mt. Yayama, and the pilgrim’s lodge in Zenkiguchi in between. Only the first required a reservation—the others would house me so long as I managed to get there.
Ten hours after leaving Tokyo, I arrived at the inn at 5:00 p.m. I took a long bath to relax my muscles after the long touring and made preparations for the next days’ hike. As it was a weekday at the end of June, there were no other visitors. The place was so quiet it seemed that after dinner there was nothing else to do but go back to my room and sleep. I think I was in bed by nine.
The next day, I rose early, ate breakfast, took three rice balls and a thermos filled with tea, and left the inn. After arriving at the Zenkiguchi pilgrim’s lodge, I abandoned the bike and prepared for the hike. I removed my leather boots and changed into thick-soled sneakers. I grabbed the backpack strapped to the rear and tied a white cloth around my head.
At six in the morning, blue patches could be glimpsed in parts of the sky, but as the mountain weather was fickle, I had to diligently prepare rain gear. As it was my first time summiting, I had no clue as to the pace I needed to maintain to reach the hut on Mt. Yayama by evening. I had more than enough energy. Yet, I knew taking this mountain lightly was like begging for trouble as it was a holy peak with an aura unique enough to merit the title of sacred precinct. The inn owner had told me a story about a man plagued by spirits and lured down divergent paths who was never heard from again. Don’t do anything reckless, I repeated to myself over and over as I climbed the dry riverbed that ran parallel to a mountain stream.