Echoes of Incense A Pilgrimage in Japan by Don Weiss

Chapter Thirteen, part 1

Again, Kochi

The next three days were warm and sunny, but Phyllis' mood never improved. She went through the motions of the pilgrimage, copying the Heart Sutra and writing name slips, reciting the sutra and ringing the bells at the temples, but we were like strangers, hardly talking. I was enjoying the fine weather and the walking, and that seemed to make it even worse for her, with blisters on her feet and a heavy heart.

It rained again our fifteenth day. It was raining lightly when we got up and it didn't stop until after lunch. I had called several places, looking for a reservation for that night, but the only one that said okay was neither a hotel nor a temple. I didn't know what it was. My very limited reading ability wasn't good enough for the words describing it in the walking henro guidebook, and I hadn't brought along a good dictionary, only a tiny one that fit in my shirt pocket.

We had received a lot of o-settai the past few days, mostly fruit but also some money. One henro group traveling in a van gave us over two kilos of fruit. A bus group gave us 2,000 yen. We were having a good day in spite of the rain, but I wondered about the place we were going to stay. As we approached the spot marked on the map, I started getting a strange feeling, like I had completely misunderstood where we were going. We were walking through an area of farms, with no hotels in sight. The farmhouses looked rich. The fields were mostly bare, but through the walls of the greenhouses I saw lots of peppers, tomatoes and flowers.

Phyllis kept looking around and saying, "Where is this place? What is it? Are you sure you understood the map? THERE'S NOTHING HERE!"

I checked the map again. We had arrived. A big house stood off to our right, across 50 meters of fields. The map identified a barn on our left as our accommodations. Around the corner of the barn I saw some toilets and a sign inviting henro to use them. I said, "This is it, I guess."I stood in the open door to the barn and called out, "Sumimasen!"

A man came out from an inner room and walked quickly towards us. He bowed and did gassho, then said, "Welcome, o-henro-san. Yesterday you phoned, didn't you? Please, come in!"We followed him into the barn. He had us sit down and take off our shoes, still wet from the morning's rain, and gave us plastic slippers to wear. We put our packs down on a bench and followed him into an inner room. It was a little kitchen with a low table built over a small pit, so we sat on the floor but with our legs extended down under the table.

We kept our jackets and hats on since it was very cold inside. He quickly lit the stove and started to make tea, meanwhile asking the usual questions, Where are you from? How old are you? What is your job? Do you have any children? Etc.

About this time, Phyllis started crying. I asked her what was wrong and put my arm around her shoulders, but she shrugged me off. She just sat there and cried. I asked if I could do anything for her, but all she said was, "I'm freezing and tired and this is it?"I felt totally powerless to help her. I knew much of her unhappiness was over our marriage, so in a way I was partly responsible. But there seemed nothing I could do to make her less upset about the cold and the idea of sleeping in a barn.

Our host, Suzuki-san, looked stricken and asked me what was wrong. I told him she was just cold and tired. He quickly got out a heater and set it up facing her, a meter away. Then he took her hands and rubbed them between his, saying to her in Japanese, "It's okay, o-henro-san. You will be warm in a few minutes. Please, have a drink."Then he brought out bottles of whiskey, sake, and Remy Martin XO Brandy.

While we sat and drank, Phyllis slowly recovered. Suzuki-san, meanwhile, told me about himself and why he was listed as a place to stay.

"I do Shugendo, mountain Buddhism. For me, o-henro-san are important. I want to help all o-henro-san. So I let walking henro stay in my house as o-settai. Each year about 50 or 60 o-henro-san stay with me. One time before a foreign man stayed with me, he was from Canada.

"I am a farmer. I grow flowers. Every afternoon, I send flowers on a truck to Nagoya and other cities. I cut the flowers in the morning, the next morning before sunrise they are at the flower market in the city. Business is good, but I am very busy. I cannot do the pilgrimage. Every year I go to Ishizuchi, the mountain where Temple 60 is. It's the tallest mountain in Western Japan, almost 2,000 meters, a very holy place. I do shugendo on top of the mountain. I also take care of a temple in Kochi City."

His wife and another couple came in and he introduced them to us. The two women prepared dinner. Then Suzuki-san's daughter and her boyfriend arrived. He worked as a cook in a restaurant. I suggested he should help the two women prepare dinner, but everyone laughed.

As soon as dinner was on the table, the daughter and her boyfriend started to eat, but the rest of us waited. Mrs. Suzuki lit some incense and rang a bell on a small altar set against one wall. Then Suzuki-san led us in a long prayer which included the Heart Sutra. While the others recited the sutra in Japanese, I recited it softly in English. Phyllis remained silent, she hadn't memorized the sutra. The daughter and her boyfriend ate and talked quietly the whole time. Then we ate.

The usual image Americans have of the Japanese diet is mostly vegetables and rice with a little fish and rarely meat. Actually, we rarely had a meal without fish and/or shellfish and we found that chicken, beef and pork are now very common on Japanese tables. Even at temples we rarely saw a completely vegetarian meal.

But this meal was almost all vegetables and the rice was slightly flecked with amber, unusual in Japan. It tasted better than most Japanese rice. There was one meat dish, fried chicken wings, but I didn't have any. I enjoyed eating all the different vegetables, each piled high in a big bowl. Some were fresh, the rest had been pickled or dried for the winter.

Suzuki-san asked me what I thought about the Heart Sutra. I told him that when I started studying it, the sutra seemed very mysterious to me. But gradually, I said, I began to see the different levels of meaning. Some of the ideas now seemed simple to me. Others were still difficult.

"No, no,"he said. "It is all simple. It is perfectly simple. The meaning is all broad and wide and completely easy. It is not difficult. It is all here [he held his right hand to his heart], all of it, it is already here. You do not need to search for the meaning. The words are difficult but the heart of the sutra is simple. It is all simple and it is here."He took my hand and held it on my heart and said again, "The heart of the sutra is in your heart. Here!"

We slept that night in Suzuki-san's house. The next morning was near freezing with a powerful wind. Again, we had to walk right into the wind, and a few snow flakes hit our glasses and touched our cheeks as we followed the road to Kochi. After mid-morning, the wind died and the clouds cleared away. The weather remained cool, but the sun was out and, after staying with Suzuki-san, I could almost sing with Lord Byron's character Pippa, "All's right with the world."

Two nights later, we stayed at one of the fanciest inns of our whole stay in Japan. The first two places I called were full. The third said their rate was 9,000 yen each, almost double what we were usually paying. I said, "Sorry, that's too much,"and prepared to hang up, but the clerk said, "Will 8,000 yen be okay?"I told him no, we were henro. "Oh, for o-henro-san, we have a special price, 7,000 yen."I said okay.

I was careful about the price not just for us, but also for Shimada-san. We had arranged that she and Kayoko would come down by train so Kayoko could join us for a day's walk while Shimada-san took a bus from one inn to the next.

When we arrived, Shimada-san and Kayoko were waiting in the lobby. We greeted them, arranged when we would have dinner, then went up to our room.

We had two small rooms plus a glassed-in porch overlooking the hotel garden. There was a VCR hooked up to the TV but the TV cost 100 yen per hour and videos were for rent at 200 yen each. It was nice, but 9,000 yen each?

The bath, however, was really superb, new, brightly tiled, with water tumbling in over a meter-high rock wall. At the top of this artificial cliff was a three-meter-tall statue of Kobo Daishi. I asked Phyllis later about the women's bath. It was the same, except there was no statue. I guess no men are allowed in the women's bath, even famous priests.

Dinner was one of those meals that inspired nouvelle cuisine; three very small slices of excellent katsuo no tataki, one small, perfect tempura shrimp; one snow pea, one snail, etc. We also got matcha somen, thin noodles tinted green from the special powdered tea used in the tea ceremony.

Most of dinner was inedible for Phyllis because she's allergic to shellfish and hates sashimi. Mrs. Shimada explained the problem to the waitress. They apologized to each other, then the waitress brought a plate of fried chicken. After dinner, Kayoko offered to wash our clothes for us. We thanked her but said, "No,"and went to bed.

Published by Don Weiss (henrodon@gmail.com) -- All rights reserved. You may read this electronic copy on the web or print it out for private reading but no part may be sold or included in any work for sale except for short excerpts used for review purposes.All photographs and maps are likewise copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission except for private, non-commercial use. Updated June 17, 1999.