Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (43 page)

In the office, a priest named Yanagi greeted me. He had been at Sh
j
shinin for seven years. Though he was married, he spent most of his time on K
yasan, flying home once or twice a month to see his wife, who lived on the island of Hokkaido. Yanagi wore an allergy mask over his mouth. This isn’t so unusual in Japan, but during conversation, the masks are often removed. Yanagi didn’t remove his mask at all, and I had the uneasy feeling that I was being kept at a polite arm’s length.

I asked Yanagi the same questions I ask every priest I meet for the first time. Did Sh
j
shinin have a head priest? The answer he gave me was so bizarre, I was certain I had misunderstood. Yanagi
seemed to say that while Sh
j
shinin had a head priest, this man had not been recognized by the K
yasan bureaucracy, a fact that made Yanagi very angry. Even when his face was flushed red and hot with anger, Yanagi did not remove his face mask to breathe easier. I quickly apologized for asking questions. It was no matter, Yanagi said, and then told me to follow him to my room.

Though no one used the original kitchen anymore, it remained intact and untouched, with no rope or glass separating it from the hallway as we passed by. The floors were slick and black, the legacy of hundreds of feet polishing them smooth. There were mammoth pots over kiln-sized stoves, once used to boil rice and soup for guests and monks-in-training. Overhead, an open-air chimney stood ready to release smoke and hot air. The chimney was angled to collect water in a basin that would have been used for washing. There were shrines to the Shint
goddess Amaterasu and to the god Daikokuten; in true Japanese fashion, it was perfectly acceptable for one to honor the native Japanese gods and the Buddha at the same time.

The door to my room could not be locked from the outside; from the inside, one turned a screw in a hole to keep the door permanently shut. My grandparents had locked the sliding glass doors in their house like this. In the room was a
kotatsu
, the blanket that fit over a low table, like the one I had used at Empukuji. The windows opened up to a view of the Momoyama-period garden in the back of the temple, with a little pond and neatly manicured trees. A wisteria was just off to the left, though it would need another month to bloom.

A
T 5:50 THE
next morning, one of the priests rang a bell, and I rose and wended my way through the labyrinth of passageways to the
hond
. It was time for morning prayers. Five priests in brightly
embroidered robes, including Yanagi, sat on the tatami floor in front of the altar. There was a lot of chanting and bell ringing, and at one point I heard Yanagi give a special prayer for the victims of the tsunami and their families.

At the very end, one of the priests turned and bowed to everyone in the room and said in English, “Now we have concluded our morning service. Please join us for breakfast.” The guests, all foreigners, rose to leave. A moment later, Yanagi said in Japanese, “If anyone would like to visit the other rooms in the temple, they are currently open, and contain several fine sculptures of great historical importance.”

I realized he was talking to me.

The rest of the Westerners began the tricky business of putting on slippers, while I, and a Canadian girl I had befriended, made our way over to Yanagi, who stood in a doorway just off to the side.

There were two small rooms beyond Yanagi, and these were connected by a doorway. In the first room, there was a stunning Amida Buddha from the Kamakura era that had originated from the workshop of Unkei. I was shocked. Unkei is often referred to as the Japanese Michelangelo. In 2008, for example, a twelfth-century statue by Unkei sold at auction for a staggering $14.37 million.

“Technically, it’s just the studio of Unkei,” Yanagi said to me.

“But still.”

There was also an exquisite small statue of the warrior god Bishamonten. “For many years,” Yanagi said to me, “our temple was associated with the Uesugi clan. Have you heard of them?”

I certainly had. The Uesugi were one of Japan’s most famous families, and in the sixteenth century, the warlord Uesugi Kenshin was famous not only for his prowess on the battlefield but also for his wise governance over his fief. Once upon a time, Yanagi explained, each of the temples on Mount K
ya was associated with a powerful
clan, and if I looked closely, I would see that many temples still flew the banner of their feudal patron.