Hokkaido Highway Blues

sets. Sakura ga chitta.
     

18
     
    SHŌDO ISLAND HAS a pilgrimage route of its own. According to legend, Kōbō Daishi visited Shōdo Island and founded several temples which would later become the backbone of a second, smaller Eighty-eight Temple Pilgrimage. The route was laid out by Shingon priests in either 1686 or after 1764, depending on which source you consult. Where the Shikoku pilgrimage takes months to complete, the Shōdo route takes only days—and even less if you take a packaged bus tour.
    Akihira drove me back to his house. It was a well-arranged Western building turned at an angle to fit in among competing plots of land. Inside, he showed me photographs of some of the temples on Shōdo’s pilgrimage; none were singularly spectacular, yet all shared the cachet of the circle.
    “Hundreds of people still come to Shōdo every year,” he said. “But many are not real pilgrims but merely tourists. As a pilgrim, one must abstain from alcohol, one must practice asceticism and vegetarianism, one must not wander at night in search of entertainments and, most vital of all, one must call upon Kōbō Daishi with true feeling. Without sincerity, the pilgrimage is—if this is the correct word—a sham. Or is it shambles?”
    “In this case, either will do.”
    “A pilgrimage is meant to be difficult. It is meant to test you. Many of the pilgrims came for specific reasons; they were sick, or poor, or old. My family has a long involvement with the Shōdo pilgrimage. My great-grandmother used to take care of unfortunate pilgrims, tending to them free of any charge. It almost bankrupted the family, but the karma she collected has now returned, and my family has been blessed with security and longevity.”
    “Your family? Are you married?”
    “I am alone now. My wife was— Did you want coffee, or perhaps a cold refreshment?”
    He showed me some landscape prints by a visiting artist who had painted scenes from Shōdo. We sat in the clean silence of his house awhile before he said, almost as an afterthought. “She died.... Not so long ago. A year. Less, less than a year.”
    He smiled. It was a smile of sadness, an expression that is deeply Japanese. I used to be baffled by smiles of sadness, but now I think I understand. These smiles reveal emotions even as they seek to conceal them. They say, I am sad and so I will smile in the understanding that you will realize that it is only a façade that hides a hurt too deep for tears. Entire essays have been written about the Japanese smile. It is a sigh deferred, and it is far more profound than weeping sobs or streaming tears. Akihira was the second widower I had met since Sata. In Japan, where the women live longer than any other group on earth, where the men—especially the men of an older generation—rely so heavily on women and are so lost without them, in Japan a widower is one of the saddest figures imaginable.
    “I believe in Kōbō Daishi,” Akihira said. “I believe that his benevolence encompasses everything. It makes sadness and loss more bearable, don’t you think? Let me tell you of a certain incident many years ago. To be speaking more precisely, it occurred on April fifteenth, 1980. I was sitting at my desk, here, when a young and saintly man appeared hence like a ghost. It w’as Kōbō Daishi, of that I am certain, and he spoke to me, telling me to write a book in English to explain Shōdo’s pilgrimage to outsiders. This I have done.” Akihira handed a copy of his book to me. “Please have this, as a gift.”
    From Akihira’s house, we drove up the wilder east ‘coast of Shōdo, past corrugated tin shacks of uncertain structural integrity that looked more like metal tents than permanent dwellings. Akihira wanted to show me something called zannen ishi (“that’s too-bad stones”), and we found them in a forested grove near the village of Iwagatani. They were rough-hewn blocks of granite that lay tumbled throughout the woods like massive dice. Some had sunken partway into the soil and were half covered with moss and matted grass. Some bore faded kanji characters, still faintly visible, that were the family crests of once great overlords. In the 1500s the rock quarries of Shōdo had supplied the stonewall defenses of Osaka Castle (the walls still stand in Osaka, though the castle itself is a reconstruction). These jumbled stones left behind on Shōdo had been deemed imperfect or poorly cut and were rejected. They remain to this day,