Surveying the Kingdom

The girl on the train is standing, an English copy of War of the Worlds open in her hands.  I too am standing, and looking over her shoulder I notice the print is large and that she has highlighted words here and there. I wonder if she had particular trouble with the name of one of the characters:  Elphinstone.  

I disembark at Tenri, like many times before, and yet again push quickly through the old arcade (one of the healthiest in Japan) to Isonokami Jinja.  Rather than turn right as usual onto the Yama-no-be, I continue straight, through a few small hamlets until I see the sign for the falls.  I begin to climb.

Coming across the okunomiya for Isonokami shrine surprises.  Smoke still wafts from the remnants of a fire in the courtyard.  Momoo no Taki falls are just above.  At least a dozen Fudō Myoō statues mark this isolated sanctuary, each one a masterpiece.  Further on still, more statues line the steep path up to Taishinji.  The heads of many of these deities are turned toward the side, something new to me.   In the courtyard is a tall, flat rock stele commemorating the temple's founding during the Namboku Wars of the late 14th century.  I can almost picture the day when the stone was raised, the incredible labor involved, not only to erect the stone, to to raise the funds in order to do so.  Nobody in the crowd that day would have assumed that not many decades later the temple itself would become abandoned.  Further up in the forest, I come to the priest's residence.  It too empty and forlorn.  Directly in front is a clue:  two newish graves, with one for the priest, now 12 years gone.      

Crumbling log bridges lead to a steep trail that will climb to bisect massive stones.  Then I'm at the crest of Ōkunimiyama, which true to its name, overlooks the valley where the Japanese shifted from hunter/gatherers to sedentary farmers, supporting an Imperial system just finding its legs. And even from these heights, the future of this system, and of these people, is less than clear...


On the turntable:  Jean-Luc Ponty, The Gift of Time"
 

Tracing ancient footprints in Old Nara

Adorning the main hall at Hōrin-ji is a trio of Buddhas. The triptych is common to the era, and to the place.  What grabs me though are the faces.  The central image, the important one, dates to the 10th Century, with the soft, round facial features of the Asian mainland.  But those on either side are from four centuries earlier, the faces darker, more gaunt.  I wonder how well these faces reflect the older natives of the time, when newer migrants and attendant culture fresh from China, from Korea, were diluting a population base that had arrived centuries earlier from the south.  

I'd passed another relic on the walk over from Hōryu-ji, a beautiful old house with ornately detailed carvings, beneath a roof of corrugated metal hiding thatch beneath.  It is abandoned, fenced in. Standing as it is at the confluence of roads, the poor feng shui probably did it in.  More dramatic perhaps are the utility lines towering above, whose own flow of power too may have contributed to the inevitable, and pitiful, end.   

I look at an adjacent utility tower that stands behind Hōki-ji, and wonder if it was here twenty-three years ago, when I did this same walk with Jordan in the cold rain of January.  I feel my dear late friend is with me on today's walk too.  I recall well our doing this particularly unattractive next section, a long slog into Nara deer park, only to find that the annual yamayaki had been cancelled due to the bad weather.  

Today too the sky is a grey slate, a far cry from the usual bluebird weather of May.  I am hurrying along, hoping to beat the rain which is forecast to fall after 1 pm.  It is meant to be a short walk anyway, only as far as Jiko-in..  I find the priest there holding court with some guests, bemoaning the loss of the varieties of tea culture.  Osaka and Kyoto used to have distinct styles of tea, but they have all been diluted by Kyoto style, as has the rest of Japan.  He says that it is a shame what is happening to the beauty of this country.  After he leaves, the old woman finds it difficult to stand, complaining that her feet are asleep.  You feel a little like a spy at these times, as no one assumes that you can understand what is being spoken about.  

Just past noon I pass a small sake shop, in front of which an uncle pops the top of his first One Cup of the day.   Though I shouldn't judge, for not much later I relish the taste of the beer I take at an Indian curry joint where I complete my walk.  And the rain begins to fall as predicted.  

On the train ride home, I muse that photography is killing my writing.  With a camera you look at things;  with writing you look through them.  And in this spirit I revisit the walk I did with Jordan back in January 1996, reading the journal entry whose prose seems drunk itself, on Snyder and Zen:

Sunday, Jan. 14 -- went to Nara, Hōryu-ji to be exact, J and I walking the long tree-lined drive, stretching upward like legs to meet the Sanmon gate, free ride back to the place of our birth, a glimpse of my parents' pre-concieved face.  The west side contains a small hall containing a lone figurine and tatami, a pleasant place to hide away, ignoring the tourists while studying, reading and watching the seasons change.  Down the hill, the walls of the main hall are streaked red from centuries worth of hands stained from hinoki pillars.  Wander jovial and mockingly through the treasure halls, then out to a narrow country road, winding, winding.    Temple-side lunch, then on to a pagoda rising from rice fields.  To Jikō-in, with green tea and garden walk in small sandals.  Walk the bamboo forest on a path bordered by water-worn Chinese scroll cliffs.  A taxi ride follows a failed attempt at hitching.  Toshōdai-ji's buildings stand somber in the winter grey.  Yakushi-ji's pagodas rise in the dimming light, one newly painted looks proud beside plain, weathered, Cinderella half-sister.  Snarling Nio, the finest I've seen, well-made up with smug oni beneath massive feet.  

Back in Nara, an explanation of directions from two young women, about whom J and I talk metaphorically, to find them following, within earshot but uncomprehending.  Post-dinner walk through rain to our hostel, no frills at ¥2400, a far cry from the $8 dollar palaces of New Zealand (which I had just visited a few weeks before.)  Having no towel, I dry myself on used linen, then turn in. Our old man roommate quiet but friendly, turns down his radio when my head hits the down, and he has the decency not to snore.

Next day, early bus to some temple in the mountains.  Confused quickly, get directions from a monk who looks just shy of a century old, his face a braille mask telling dharma stories that dance around a toothless grin.  How many years has this guy sat upon his cushion up here in the hills amidst the woodcutters?  In true Buddhist metaphorical fashion, J and I are told that we are standing astride the very path we seek.  Up into the trees, dampened blackened things which stand dense and tall, parting occasionally to allow glimpses of the village below.  At one point we are stunned to see a path of garbage extending down a hillside, no doubt the work of a single culprit, but the result is shocking, like a thin razor gash on the cheek of a child.  What the Japanese won't do to destroy their marvelous natural environment; they haven't a clue how to translate 'sustainable use" anymore.  

We drop now into farm land, tea plantations with hedgerows stretching parallel up the hillside like cornrowed hair.  A group of men stand chatting around a fire, ceasing briefly as they stare us by.  On through a village, with a souvenir shop at the far end.  Shortly after, the trail becomes a cobblestone road, dating back 1200 years.  As we descend carefully, the path slick with last night's rain, a creek leads the way past Buddhas god-knows-how-old, which appear on rock and cliff face. At the hill's base we pass through yet another village into the deer park proper.  

An okonomiyaki lunch and museum visit later, we're on a train packed with kimono-clad girls, to Osaka where we part ways.  I continue to a photo exhibit of Hollywood stars at work.  It's a shame when a gallery visit has the same mild impact as a glance at a book of the same substance.  On the way back to Yonago, run into G and C, who are painfully hungover, returning from Kobe and last night's Pavement show.  Oh, The Varieties of Gaijin Experience!  Its a shame that William James hadn't lived to write that title...


On the turntable:  The Allman Brothers, "An Evening with The Allman Brothers"
On the nighttable:  Irving Walsh, "Trainspotting"

  

Cantata

Diving deeper into the timelessness of Nara. Standing before the array of deities on the altar of Akishino-dera. The Yakushi Buddha at center sits, as he has for 1300 years. I think of all that has happened since—all the wars, disasters, migrations, civilizations come and gone. And through it all he sits, right hand raised, palm forward, saying,  It ain’t nothing but a thing. All is okay.

 
On the turntable:  J. S. Bach, "Bach 2000"

Middle of Somewhere

I've walked a great number of roads in this country, but today was the first time I've walked a road that no longer exists.  There is a triumvirate of ancient paths between Asuka and Nara, traversed perhaps when the former capital passed the baton of Imperial seat to the latter.   I'd already walked both the High Road and the Low, so I figured it was time to honor my Buddhist heroes and take the Middle Way.

The walk started at Asuka Station, with the first hour or so passing between monuments dating to a time when the wild Jōmon tribes began cutting their hair, putting on robes, and calling themselves the Yamato.   This is perhaps my favorite period in Japanese history, a time when Japan was most soulful, to judge from the ancient shrines, burial mounds, and the trendy accessories of an import called Buddhism.  (Sadly, a lot of this went away two centuries later with another import.  The Ritsuryō codes gave birth to a bureaucracy that quickly entrenched itself so effectively that it survived 1500 years of near constant regime change.)  So it was with great joy that I walked, eyes filled with some of the greatest beauty this land can offer, right down to the temporal shapes of the sakura.

I had little to go on, map-wise, except for one that was simply a single line running between the shrines that acted as way points, a map that paid no heed to the contemporary reality of house, factory or fields, passing directly through them.  And most amazingly, my path did indeed run arrow straight, like a compass pointing due north.  I found small dirt paths between new suburban homes, crossed parking lots, and tightrope-walked low berms between earthen plots.  I only had to deviate once, at a concrete ditch which my legs were a decade too old to leap. After a brief detour, north again I went.

The day was warm and fine and busy with old timers working in their gardens or preparing their fields for planting.  By contrast, the suburbs north of Asuka were near devoid of life, and the few people I did meet seemed unable to return my greeting.  Perhaps this too is part of the Ritsuryō.  Beyond these deserts, I startled a pair of mandarins who took flight from a small canal, to land again upstream. They rose with a great deal of kinetic energy, far more than it would take to say hello.  

Leaving this no-man's land I was approaching Nara, my path now called Route 53.  There were no sidewalks, so my mind grew occupied with mental martial arts maneuvers as defense again oncoming wing-mirrors. In quieter moments, my eyes sought vistas familiar from previous walks, of Mounts  Miwa and Ryozan, of the forests of Kashima Jingu and the dormitory village of Tenri, of the as yet unclimbed peaks of Nijo-zan, and Katsuragi.  

I've mentioned Tenri before so won't go into it again here.  But I'm always amazed and the size and the scale of the place (built upon the site of what had been the capital for a decade at the end of the 5th century).  I noticed today for the first time a whole section of their campus tucked up in a nook of the hills, all tall apartment flats and massive boxes that could only be auditoriums. Incredible how the visions of a middle-aged peasant woman could grow into an organization with over 2 million followers.      

Just beyond was the Nara river,  little more than a small creek of one-meter-across.  On its far shore was a small hut sheltering a couple of dozen Jizo, who found eternal shade beneath the broad branches of the chestnut tree above.  Raising my head to look beyond its upper reaches, I found some comfort in my first glimpse of Wakakusa-yama's bald pate.  Not much further to go. 

The rest of the day was a slow creep into Nara.  There wasn't much to catch the eye, so I allowed the ears their turn, offering them the voice of Allen Ginsberg to distract them with some of his poems.  All the way, cars rushed by like the ghost of Neil Cassidy. 

In Nara proper, I eased off my ever-linear northern trajectory and detoured into the warren of lanes south of the station.  Most tourism in Nara is centered around the deer park, leaving me alone to walk the narrow paths lined in wood and tile and earth, which front temples and galleries and cafes. There is a definitive Bohemian feel to Nara, albeit one grounded in the 8th century.  And as I wrapped up my stroll I felt yet again how much preferable the place is compared to Kyoto. 

This thought returned to me that evening, when I attended a small festival at Goryō Jinja, my neighborhood shrine.  Yet even at this stripped down scale there was little warmth.  Whereas most festivals I've attended in Japan gave a sense of cathartic communitas, in Kyoto they take the form of touristic processions, where the only real community participation entails standing in the heat along the route. Actors move along in fixed lines and positions, dressed in attire that was traditionally never worn by the commoner, implying a certain separation.  It inevitably culminates in a group of men carrying or dragging along a shrine or a cart or those towering yamaboko.  In Kyoto, history's weight is heavy.     


On the turntable:  Art Pepper, "Goin' Home"
On the turntable:  Toby Thompson, "Positively Main Street"

Poipourri of Strolls

I have a busy day ahead,  a series of hikes and walks splayed across Nara prefecture, which now appears bigger on maps than it had before.  I'd only be able to cover that distance by car, so I rise with the sun and drive into its fresh rays not long afterward.  This early start ensures that I beat Kyoto rush hour traffic, but I hadn't counted Nara city proper, so with a crawl I move in the long shadows of its ancient relics.

I am nearing my first destination when a sign welled up, for something called the Ancient Tang Burial Mound.  Intrigued by the name and the low tower silhouetted against the hills, I pull into the car park.  The tower is built into one corner of a man-made pond, punctuated by wooden planks used as a seat for fishing, and ringed with sakura just coming into bud. The park that surrounds it had been built in 1994, but there seems to be a bit of expansion going on, and I wondered if it were connected to the recent influx of Chinese tourism, and whether those tour groups found their way out here.  Upon approach, I find the tower was off-limits to climbing, but it makes for a pleasant excuse to stretch my legs and bladder. There is a basic information sign telling me that the tomb had been discovered in 1901, but not when it had been built.  There are photos of a few broken relics, now housed in a nearby museum, but I can't budget time to investigate further.  I am intrigued by this long dead Chinese, of a status that warranted him a sizeable tomb.   This area is rich in Korean influence, reflected both in its place names and its artistic traditions, though the Tang had come a bit later and their touch lingers to this day.   

My actual first destination is the alleged burial mound of the legendary Himiko, a shaman-queen who appears in the archives of that Tang Dynasty.  Japanese records are non-existent, so the location of her tomb is in dispute, if she had existed at all.  I had already visited one of her 'tombs' on Kyushu's Kunisaki peninsula, and a month ago I learned of this Hashinaka site.   A flotilla of ducks floats across the placid surface of the pond that bordered this reasonably sized tomb, though the lack of infrastructure gave hint of few human visitors.  There is a small rock garden and a cafe, and how pleasant it would be to sit at the waters edge and ponder what may have been.  Instead I park my car near a kindergarten on the opposite side, the laughter of the children dissolving into that of crows, feisty and active in the forested tomb above.  I circumambulate around the tomb, to the accompaniment of the usual sounds of morning, of the excitable voices of old woman greeting one another in the street, of the bangs of construction somewhere out of sight, of the canned music of a kerosene truck circling slowly and optimistically.

A short drive away is Omiwa Jinja, where I park and walk up to the adjacent Hibara Shrine. Here I am given a sash, a blessing, and a somewhat stern reminder of the rules.    I must appear impatient as I am eager to set off before the group of perhaps 60 old timers kitted out in hiking gear.  I move up quickly and steadily, legs taken aback at the steep pitch of the trail.  I overtake a few people, a family, a middle-aged woman and her less than enthused teenage son, a number of women walking alone.  The forests are wild, untouched, far more beautiful than the straight rows of cedar beyond the fences.  There are a number of features along the way, a waterfall, a spring, an ancient and majestic cypress, towering, towering.  I make good time, nearly half that as predicted by the maps, and before I know it I am standing before a large circle of stones.  This is one of Japan's oldest holy sites, and even today the mountain itself is seen as a god.  In a remote corner of the peak a woman is doing full prostrations to the god, her devotion obviously far deeper than that of the usual 'power-spot' groupie.  I descend just after her, and her sureness of foot betrays the fact that she is quite regular in her veneration.  As I drop lower into the forest, I pass another young woman, with the supple and straight posture of the yogini, feet bare to absorb every bit of prana that the gods allow.  

Onward, south to Uda, an ancient village celebrated in the Manyoshu for its light.  The sky isn't the red of the poem, but a rich blue that doesn't seem to mind that the leaves and flowers have yet to return.  This next section of walk takes me forward through the centuries, from the ancient Asuka countryside, to the mountain temples of the Muromachi, to the centralized hub of Edo town.  Visiting one temple, Tokugenji, I see that the house adjacent to the main hall is littered with drums of a variety of cultures.  Curious, I call out to whomever it is I hear washing up back in the darkness.  I expect a shaved-headed older priest, but instead I am approached by a man closer to my age, with tidy beard and long scraggly hair.  Under the pretext of him clarifying a name on the temple's historical information sign, I shift to ask him about music.  So begins a half-hour conversation about life, music, and common acquaintances.  I'm not sure from his look and manner whether he is the priest here, but his life and vision is far closer to the Buddhist ideal than the more programmed ordained.   His wife, a woodblock printer, joins us, and though I could pass the afternoon here, I need to peel off at some point.  After a quick look at the Oda clan graves in the forest above, I drop down to walk the compact and well-preserved grid of narrow street that make up the town center.  It is a beautiful and quiet place, and once again my mind begins to explore the contours of a life lived in these remote reaches.     

After a long meandering drive through the hills that border Mount Yoshino, I find myself less enthused with the town of Gojo, which is spoilt and overbuilt and hides its lovely old post town look away beside the river.  This single street is the only thing of interest here, and I don't take long to trace its length up and back.  

Then, and finally, I continue to Taishi-cho in order to trace a section I'd skirted as I walked adjacent along the Takeuchi Kaidō.  At its most extreme reach is Futagozuka Tomb, tree-covered and bored out to partially reveal the entrance to the twinned tombs within.  It is rare that you are allowed to walk atop one of these tombs, and from the summit I stand and watch the sun dropping toward Kansai Airport far to the west.  As I turn again toward my car, I see two women in an adjacent field, one lightly patting the belly of the other who has apparently toppled over.  She is quiet and breathing regularly, and I sit with them until a group of men return to help.  I stand there a moment more, wondering what, if anything, to do, until I figure that there is little I can do, and that medical attention had been called.  But the image of these woman stays with me as I too head toward that setting sun, until the traffic pulls my focus back once again to the passage of the road ahead.  



On the turntable:  Art Pepper, "Lost Life"
On the nighttable:  James Kirkup, "Me All Over"

Out in the Blue

Wes sat out front of Tenri Station, warming himself in the sun.  Someone was sitting beside him, who I thought might be a missionary from this town's eponymous sect of Buddhism, but it turned out to be a farmer, who wanted Wes to commit to nothing more than explaining what he was doing in this remote part of Nara prefecture.  As he and I walked off, a nearby pair of proselytizers kept up their rap, until the closing of the taxi door severed the flow.

I was happy that I was able to propose to Wes a hike that he hadn't yet done, as he has seemingly hiked just about everything in Japan, every step well documented in his web site, Hiking in Japan.  This particular peak of Ryu-ō-zan was for me the final hike in a book on the Tokai Shizen Hōdō, and while the mountain wasn't on the course itself, it promised a pleasant diversion.

Another goal for the day would be a gear test of sorts, as I wanted to see how a couple of new jackets would fare in preparation for a trip to Lapland later in the month.  But the 16 degree skies put an end to that, and inevitably the only thing to get tested was my patience, as a guardman tried to tell us that we couldn't walk through. He wasn't terribly persistent, as we didn't even change stride, not even for the actual workmen further on, who seemed not to see us.

A sign warning us about wild dogs was a brief concern, but they proved to be no obstacle either, probably off sunbathing somewhere.  We arrived unmolested at the first promontory of the day, upon a wide open clearing that had once served as the northern castle keep for the Toochi-clan during the mid-16th Century.  The views beneath the day's clear clear skies inspired, but were topped by the ruins of the slightly higher southern keep a short walk away.  To the south lay Hira and Ibuki, with the Omine peaks far to the south.  Osaka lay at the edge of the eye's reach, backlit by the sun.  Below, the Yamato plain was nocked and grooved with the dormant paddies of winter, their bounty once the source of economy for the great burial tombs that brought imperfection to their straight lines. 

After a quick lunch we made an even quicker descent down past the Fudo-myō statue towering over the stream at Chōgaku-ji's Oku-no-in, then past a shrine for the mountain above, with its warning about dangerous reptiles.  While exploring a slightly overgrown side path we came across the entrance for a seemingly nameless burial mound, one that puzzled as it was halfway up the mountain rather than on the plains as was more common.  As I prepared to enter, Wes warned me about wild boars, but all we found was a bricked up doorway in the darkness.

There were further mysteries on the way down, including well-kept but forbidden side trails, places for aescetic waterfall practice, and some unusually carved Jizo.  Back in the sunshine again, we passed a car that had been driven into an irrigation ditch, and sat a long while in front of a new hiker's center that hadn't been here when I passed through ten years ago.  While that had been hot stroll along a mid-summer Yama-no-be-no-michi, todays' weather was far more pleasant, even as we replicated the walk at a much quicker pace, so quick that I completely missed the burial mound for the legendary shaman-queen Himiko just to the west.

The idea had been to get to Miwa station before the train to grab a coffee.  We were literally racing the clock, and arrived just as my transport home pulled in.   But the day was too nice, the air too warm, so I decided to catch a later one and pick my daughter from school up a few minutes late.  So Wes and I leaned into our respective ergonomic grooves in the trunk of an ancient oak, reminiscing about the days when of youth, when the future was open and ripe for building the civilization that is adulthood. 


On the nighttable:  Ian Buruma,  "Anglomania"
On the turntable:  77, "Revolution Rock" 

(untitled)

Tracing figure eights in Nara:
Following the clouds of my breath,
And those centuries dead.

On the turntable:  Buffalo Springfield, "Box Set"
 

The Low Road to Nara

Standing before the concrete water basin, I am suddenly enshrouded in white.  As I was undergoing my water purification before entering Kashihara Jingu, a group of about two dozen priests surround me, and begin to go through their own ablutions.  Slightly intimidated, I move away from them, over the raked gravel that covers this wide open space.  In shrines of this scale, the sense of airiness always feels that the whole place will take flight.  Perhaps the stone covering the grounds is a way to tether it to the earth.   

In entering the shrine, I have left the Shimotsumichi, one of the three old roads that had once led to the Heijō palace from the south.  This palace was the home of the Imperial court during the Nara period, which lasted for the majority of the 8th Century, a time when that city was considered the true end of the Silk Road, its treasures having been filtered through the parallel palaces of the T'ang.  

I allow my detour to continue, swinging widely to the east, in order to visit the site of the old Fujiwara palace that preceded Heijō as the capital, though for a mere 16 years.  This site served as both a physical and temporal transition from the earlier Asuka capital a short walk south.  I love this area, so rich in history, so fertile and broad in the never-ending rice paddies and the tell-tale tufts of forest that mark the eternal resting places of Imperials dead for over a millennium.   This Fujiwara-kyō is simply massive, taking me a good half and hour to cross, passing dozens of two-meter high pillars laid out in parallel rows here and there across the plain.  Marking the locations of ancient buildings, I lean on what I expect to be wood, but find to be instead some spongy synthetic material.  The color is similar to my T-shirt, which had been orange when I put it on at dawn, but is by now sweat-soaked to a dull ochre. 

Heading west brings me to Ofusa Kannon-ji temple, its courtyard filled with roses.  Above, hundreds of glass wind chimes have been hung.  In summer, the Japanese believe that a wind chime helps to cool the body, since the sound of striker on glass is the sound of the movement of wind.   As I pass beneath however, the breeze stirs up not a delicate jingle but a cacophony of a fully-loaded tray dropped in a restaurant.

Back to the old road proper, narrow and lined with old wooden structures. A pair of old men hang paper lanterns over the road, the sign of an impending festival.  I'm on the outskirts of Yamato Yagi, a town famed for its preserved look.  Unlike the broader streets of the later Edo period post-town, these older lanes are far narrower, the structures darker and less earthen.  At the crossroads of the equally old Yokōji road, a man beckons me into what had once been an old inn and is now a very simple history museum.  The caretaker is knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but all too often his enthusiasm turns to me and just how remarkably foreign I am.  I have complained about this in the past, where I want to have an intelligent conversation about history and culture, yet the other party can't see past my eye-color and the unique structure of my nose.  I can understand the natural curiosity about 'other,' I mean, at this very moment I am seeking out that which is particularly Japanese.  But after a few basic polite questions, it is nice to move on.

So I do.  Beyond the train station, the town becomes yet another suburb, and beyond this I follow a small river.  I love Nara for its water.  Steams cross and recross, leading to and from what must be hundreds of small lakes and ponds that dot this entire basin.  I am accompanied by water the rest of the day.  The river here is alive and healthy, filled with fish and turtles and cormorants.  The lower tree branches on the far bank are bedecked with trash and debris, compliments of a pair of powerful storms that roared through the Kansai during the past two weeks.  The pillars of bridges are similarly tangled with a snarl of reeds and tree limbs. 

And so it goes for the next six hours.  Where the earlier part of the day had been a delightful stroll along the cusp of history, the rest of it is spent atop a berm, with water ever to my right, houses representing a half-dozen different generations to my left.  On such a hot day, the water should be inviting, but factory after factory shadow the canals on the far bank.  I get a short reprieve in the form of a small village completely surrounded by moats like a medieval European town, but here too the water is a suspicious hue.   

At this point, I am puzzled as to why the maker of the map I am following chooses to send me to the west, rather than on the due-north trajectory that would take me directly to the main gate of Heijō palace.  Later at home, as I look at Google Street View to see what I missed, I notice that he did me a favor in detouring me off a narrow, busy road with no apparent shoulder.  Instead, I walk the bank of a much wider river, all the way into Nara proper.  Along the way, I find a mystery.  Six stone Jizo statues are lined up nearly behind a tree, but behind them is what looks like a cemetery, though devoid of all grave markers.  Even odder is that each grave looks freshly dug, these symmetrical little piles of earth topped with a pair of tubes meant to hold flowers.  I wonder if the people at rest here have been recently moved, their old plots now earmarked for some construction project.  As we have just passed the Obon holiday, I further wonder if the souls of these people had been able to find the way to their new home. 

Further on still, I come to a small park that supposedly contains a marker for the palace's old gate.  The park is overgrown and unkept, and amidst the high grass I see only a few stones written with poetry.  Yet upon one has been carved the illegible, flowing grass-style Chinese characters that may be commemorating the old gate.  Sharing the name with its better known descendant in Kyoto, the Rashomon here is as equally absent as the newer one about which the film was made.  And where Kyoto's grand old Suzuku boulevard now goes by the name of Senbon-dōri, here, what had once been the palace's main thoroughfare is now a canal that carries away what the modern city of Nara now longer needs, serving as an ironic metaphor to Japan's relationship with its own history.



On the turntable:  "Rhythmes et Melodies de L'Inde Classique"
On the nighttable:  Donna Henes, "The Moon Watcher's Companion"