Kumano Kodo

Five days on foot through the cedar mountains of Japan, walking a woman back to what she was before any of the life they live.

Tanabe

The train from Shin-Osaka took two and a half hours along the coast.

Her Highness watched the sea from the window seat. The Kii Peninsula begins where the Osaka plain ends, and the train follows the coastline south through fishing villages and small ports, the water a softer blue than the Pacific I had crossed to get here, the boats older. She had taken her shoes off on the seat. She had a paper cup of green tea on the small table between us. She had not spoken since Wakayama.

I had not asked her to.

We had been carried for ten days through Tokyo. A car at the airport. A car to the hotel. A car to the restaurant. A car to the gallery the curator had opened for us at eight in the evening with the lights low and the wine poured before we had taken off our coats. She had eaten in the kind of rooms that hold seven seats and a chef who does not look up from his board, and she had walked into the kind of department store that closes a floor for a client, and she had stood, three days in, at the window of the suite above Shibuya, watching the crossing fill and empty and fill again, and she had said the word she said when a city had begun to wear her down.

I had answered with a question. She had nodded once. The next morning I had told her the rest.

I had told her about the mountains south of Osaka, about the pilgrimage routes laid down by emperors a thousand years ago, about the small inns in the villages along the way and the bags they would forward from one inn to the next so we would carry only what we needed for the day. I had told her about the cedar forests and the stone steps and the wayside shrines and the hot bath at the end of each day. I had told her that the only way through was on her own legs.

She had set the coffee down. She had looked at me across the breakfast table of the suite, one breath. Then she had said, “When do we leave.”

We left two mornings later.

The train slowed into Kii-Tanabe just before noon. The station is small. The platform held a vending machine and a single bench. We stepped off into the kind of light a port town has at the end of a long coast: pale, salty, sourceless. A man from the inn was waiting at the gate with a small sign that did not carry our name, only the name of the inn we had booked. He took our two soft duffels in one hand each. He bowed at the level of the waist. He led us across the small plaza to a clean white compact car.

He drove us through the town to the inn.

The inn was four blocks from the station.

It was a ryokan of the smaller kind, a single building of dark wood with a slate roof, a low wall along the street, a paper lantern at the gate that had been replaced that morning. The okami met us at the door, a woman of perhaps sixty in a kimono of plain charcoal, her hair pulled back into a low knot, her bow precise. We stepped out of our shoes in the entryway. She brought slippers. She led us down a corridor floored in dark polished wood to a tatami room at the back of the inn.

The room held a low table, two cushions, a tokonoma alcove with a scroll and a single branch of plum, and a sliding paper screen onto a small garden of moss and stone. She slid the screen open. The garden was four meters across and contained one rock, one lantern of weathered granite, and a single old pine bent across the path of the moon. The okami left us with tea.

Her Highness knelt at the low table. She poured for both of us.

“Tomorrow we walk,” she said.

“Tomorrow we walk.”

She wrapped her hands around the cup and she looked through the screen at the garden, and she did not speak again for some time. I sat across from her. The tea was hot. The room smelled of new tatami and the faint resin of cedar from the corridor and the cleaner mineral smell of the stones in the garden under the autumn air.

I had brought one duffel for the two of us and a smaller daypack each. The duffel would be forwarded ahead by the inn each morning, taken to the next ryokan by the Kumano Travel Bureau and the small fleet of vans that run between the villages. We would carry the daypacks. Water. A rain shell. A wool layer. A bento the inns would prepare for us at breakfast. Nothing else.

I had laid out what I had packed before we left Tokyo. She had looked at it on the bed of the suite. She had nodded. She had not asked what I had not packed.

The dragons were in their case on a shelf in a closet in another country. The Hong Kong suits were on their hangers in a wardrobe in a different country still. The man I had been in Tokyo, who had stood under the gallery lights in midnight wool with the surgeon’s cuffs unbuttoned and the silver at his wrists catching the room, had not come south on the train with me. He had stayed behind in a hotel room above Shibuya. The man on the cushion across from her in the Tanabe ryokan wore a soft cotton button-down the color of bone, technical trousers in deep brown cut wider than a city trouser and built for walking, a thin merino base under the cotton, a packable rain shell rolled into the bottom of the daypack. The boots by the door were the boots I had broken in on a different mountain in a different country. The cufflinks were nowhere. The flask was in the daypack, filled with the Eagle Rare 17 I had bought in Osaka.

The okami returned, knelt at the door, and told us in slow English that dinner would be at six in the small private room across the corridor, the bath ready for me at five and for her at five-thirty, the van for Takijiri at eight. She bowed. She slid the door closed.

She had not stayed in the room a second longer than the words required.

Her Highness lifted the cup again.

“The garden,” she said.

“It is very small.”

“It is.”

“It is the right size.”

She set the cup down. She crossed the tatami in her stockinged feet and slid the screen open wider. She knelt at the threshold. She set her palms flat on the wood of the engawa, the narrow porch between the room and the garden, and she leaned forward and looked at the rock.

She held still for a long time.

When she came back to the table she was different. The work the city had done on her, the ten days of cars and rooms and lights and people who had been told her name before she walked in, had begun to lift. The pace of her had begun to slow toward the pace of the garden. I watched it happen. I did not name it. I poured her another cup of tea.

She drank it.

Then she stood, and she went to the bath at five-thirty, and I went to mine at five, and we met for dinner at six in the small private room across the corridor.

The kaiseki came in the small steady rhythm of the mountain country. A grilled fillet of ayu, the sweetfish from the river that runs through the mountains we would enter in the morning, the head still on, the salt crusted on the skin, the flesh inside white and clean. A small piece of grilled wagyu the size of two fingers, the marbling so fine the meat had begun to render before it left the pan. The local junmai, clean and dry, poured cold into a small cup.

She closed her eyes on the ayu. Once. The fish had been killed [RD1] that morning in the river we would walk along tomorrow, and the kitchen had grilled it over binchotan charcoal until the skin had crackled, and it had come to the table with a small mound of grated daikon and a thin slice of sudachi, and she lifted it from the bone with her chopsticks in a single clean motion and tasted it and closed her eyes.

I did not say anything.

I drank the local junmai the okami had recommended, a Wakayama brewery in the next valley, a sake that was clean and dry with a small note of the river it had been brewed beside. I did not touch the flask.

After dinner we walked the corridor to our room. The futon had been laid out on the tatami in our absence, two of them, side by side, a low folded yukata beside each pillow. The okami had drawn the curtain. The garden was dark beyond the screen. The lantern in the garden had been lit. The light through the paper of the screen was the soft amber of a kerosene flame.

Her Highness unfolded her yukata. She tied the obi at her waist. She knelt at the low table and let her hair down and brushed it once.

She did not look at me while she did it.

I lay on the futon and watched the lantern in the garden through the paper screen. The brush moved once, then again. The cotton of her sleeve made the smallest sound against the tatami.

“Tomorrow we walk,” she said again.

“From first light.”

The lantern in the garden burned down through the hours of the night. I slept lightly. I woke once and heard the wind in the pine in the garden. I slept again.

Takijiri

The van came at eight.

The driver was the same man who had picked us up at the station. He had been at the inn since six setting out the breakfasts of the morning’s guests. He carried our two daypacks to the van himself. The duffel had already been forwarded; the okami had walked us to the gate and bowed us out. The street was empty. The lantern at the gate had been taken down.

We drove east into the mountains.

The cedars closed in on both sides of the road.

The driver let us out at the parking lot below the Takijiri-oji shrine.

He bowed at the open door of the van. He gave each of us a small folded paper with the inn’s name written in characters and the phone number printed in arabic numerals. He told us the next van would meet us in three days at the small village past Hongū. He bowed once more. He drove away.

The lot was empty except for our boots on the gravel.

The shrine sat at the base of a wooded slope, a small wooden building of weathered cedar with a slate roof, a torii of unpainted wood at its entrance, a stone basin of running water for purification, a single rope of plaited straw hung across the threshold with white paper streamers folded into its braid. A wooden box for offerings sat at the base of the steps. A wooden plaque carved with the name of the shrine sat in the alcove above the door.

This was the start.

Her Highness walked to the basin. She lifted the bamboo dipper with two hands. She poured a small amount of water over her left hand. She switched the dipper. She poured a small amount over her right. She cupped the right and brought a little water to her mouth and did not drink. She set the dipper back across the basin with the dipper bowl down so the next pilgrim would lift it clean.

I did the same.

She walked to the steps of the shrine. She set a coin in the offering box. She bowed twice, clapped twice, bowed once. She did not speak.

She turned to me.

“Walk.”

One word.

She did not say it the way another person would have said it. She did not say it as instruction. She said it as a thing she had been carrying for ten days and that she had set down on the steps of the shrine the moment she had finished bowing. She said it as the word a body says when it has been carried too far and is ready to carry itself.

I lifted the daypacks from the gravel. I slid hers onto her shoulders. She turned her back to me and let me adjust the straps at the chest and the waist. I did mine. The boots were laced. The trail head was twenty meters beyond the shrine.

We walked.

The trail begins as a climb.

The first kilometer out of Takijiri rises steeply through the lower cedars, a stair of packed earth reinforced in places by old timbers, the grade enough to put the breath into a person’s chest within five minutes. The light filters through in vertical shafts where the canopy admits it. The air is cool and smells of the resin of the cedar and the damp of the moss on the rocks.

She walked ahead of me on the narrow stretches. She walked beside me on the wider ones. She did not talk. The grade was steep enough that talking would have cost a breath.

I watched her back.

The pack she wore was a small one, twenty liters, dark grey, a wool cap pulled over her hair, the wool of her base layer at her wrists where her shirt cuff had been pushed up, the dark technical trousers tucked into the tops of low boots in a brown leather worn soft. She had a thin red bandana tied around her neck for the sweat. Her stride was even. She had set her own pace within the first hundred meters and had not adjusted it.

A man does not always know what she looks like when she is doing a thing on her own.

I watched her climb. The runway was twenty thousand kilometers behind her.

She was finding what she had been before any of it.

I had wanted her to.

The trail leveled at the first ridge. We stopped. She turned around. She did not speak. She lifted her chin once toward the slope we had climbed, the cedars dropping away below us in their straight columns, the slate roof of Takijiri shrine no longer visible through the trees. Her face was flushed. A strand of hair had come loose from the cap at the temple. She did not put it back.

I lifted the small water bottle from the side pocket of my pack. I unscrewed the cap. I held it out to her. She drank. She handed it back. I drank. I screwed the cap on. I put it back in the pocket.

We walked.

The trail ran along the ridge and then descended into a small valley. We crossed a wooden bridge over a stream that ran clean over stones the color of slate. The water was the cold of a mountain stream that had not seen any sun that morning. She knelt at the bridge and put two fingers into the water and lifted them and let the water fall back. She stood. We walked.

Takahara is a village on a ridge.

We arrived at it just before noon. The trail climbed out of the valley and broke from the cedars into an open shoulder of farmland, terraced rice fields cut into the slope, a scatter of farmhouses with grey tile roofs, a small shrine at the center of the cluster, the whole village set on a saddle of the mountain with a long view south across folded ridges that ran one beyond the next into a haze the color of pale tea.

The view at Takahara is the view the pilgrims have stopped for since they first walked the route. The Imperial Family had stopped here. The peasants had stopped here. The monks had stopped here. The retired emperors had stopped here. The view does not change.

We stopped.

There was a small wooden bench at the edge of the ridge, set there for the modern walker by the village or by the prefecture or by some agency too modest to put its name on the bench. She sat on it. I sat beside her. We looked out at the ridges.

She opened her bento on her lap.

The okami had wrapped it that morning in a cloth of dark indigo, tied with a single knot. She undid the knot. She unfolded the cloth. Inside the cloth was a square wooden box lacquered black, two compartments. Rice with umeboshi in one. Grilled salmon, a sliver of tamagoyaki, a piece of simmered carrot, two slices of pickled daikon in the other. A pair of bamboo chopsticks in a paper sleeve.

Her Highness lifted the chopsticks. She bowed her head once over the box. She took a bite of the rice.

The umeboshi was the local one. Kishū plum. Wakayama is the country of umeboshi, and the plum at the center of this rice had been pickled in the next valley by hands that had been pickling them since girlhood, and the salt of it was clean and the sour of it was sharp and the sweetness of it underneath was the sweetness of a fruit that had spent a summer in the sun. She tasted it. She nodded once.

“This,” she said.

“Yes.”

“This is the country.”

“Yes.”

We ate. We did not say more. A small bird called from somewhere in the trees behind the bench, two notes, a pause, two notes. The wind moved the prayer flags at the small shrine across the path. From the village below us a single dog barked, and was answered by another from further down the ridge, and the two of them held a brief conversation, and stopped.

The boots of another walker came up the trail behind us. We did not turn. The walker passed at our backs without stopping, an older European man with a wooden staff, his pack the size of ours, his nod to us in passing without words. He went on along the ridge to where the trail dropped into the next valley. He was gone.

She finished her rice. She closed the box. She folded the cloth around it and tied the knot.

She did not speak. She set her hand on my knee. She held it there for a long moment. Then she lifted it.

“How much farther,” she said.

“Four hours. The inn is at Chikatsuyu. Down across two valleys.”

She nodded. She stood. She lifted the pack. I lifted mine.

We walked.

The afternoon was the descent off the Takahara ridge and the climb to the next, and the descent into the small village of Chikatsuyu in the late afternoon. The trail ran sometimes through cedar and sometimes through mixed forest, the leaves of the broadleaf trees beginning to color in the upper slopes, an occasional maple ahead of the season, the gold and the red showing through the green of the cedar like the first warning of a fire. We crossed three more streams. We passed one wayside shrine of weathered stone, a small mossy figure of Jizō with a red bib tied around its neck by some passing pilgrim, a single coin at its feet. She set a coin of her own beside it. She bowed once. We walked on.

By the time we came down into Chikatsuyu the light had begun to turn.

The village sits on the river. It is the kind of village that is small enough to count: one road, one shrine, one bridge, a scatter of farmhouses with grey tile roofs, a single grocery with a noren curtain in faded indigo. Our inn was at the end of the road, a wooden ryokan of two stories with a slate roof and a low garden in front, the okami already at the gate as we came around the last bend. She had been told by the Tanabe inn what time to expect us. She had been waiting for ten minutes.

She bowed us through the gate.

The duffel was already in our room. The bath was already heating. The okami showed us our slippers and the corridor to the room and the corridor to the bath, and she told us in slow careful English that dinner would be at six-thirty and that the bath was open whenever we were ready.

She set her pack down by the door.

Her Highness crossed to the table. She sat on the cushion. She let her head fall back against the wood and breathed out.

I sat across from her.

“My feet are warmer than my hands,” she said.

“Then go to the bath.”

She did.

I went after her. I sat in the small cedar tub for ten minutes and let the heat do the work heat was built to do, and when I stepped out the bath had taken the day off me and put a different day back.

The yukata was waiting on a shelf by the door, folded and tied with a cord.

I tied it on.

I walked the corridor back to the room. She was sitting at the low table in her own yukata, her hair down, her cheeks pink from the bath, a small towel folded across her lap. She had poured tea for both of us.

She looked up.

She did not smile. She did not need to. The corner of her mouth lifted in the private version, and she lifted the cup to me, and I sat on the cushion across from her, and I lifted my own.

We drank.

“Tomorrow we walk,” she said.

“We walk.”

That was the whole exchange.

Dinner was kaiseki. A piece of duck breast, charred at the skin and pink at the center, set over a soft mound of grated mountain yam. The junmai of the next valley, poured cold.

She ate with the steady hunger that comes after twenty kilometers across folded mountain. The okami brought each course and withdrew, and the room was quiet except for the small sounds of the meal, the river outside the window, and once, from the dark beyond the village, the call of an owl.

We slept on the futons side by side. The lantern in the garden had been lit. The light through the paper of the screen had gone to embers by the time I lay down.

I slept.