Andrew Innes came to Himeji in 2002 when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom and the Hanami parties were in full swing. He now works at three universities in Hyōgo and edits the online journal, The Font, where extracts from his book can be found. In his free time, he enjoys hiking and traveling. 

Spider lilies. Everyone who lives in Japan, especially in an area with rice fields, is familiar with the clouds of red (and, occasionally, pink and white) knee-high blooms that suddenly appear, most often on the verges of rice fields, around the Autumnal Equinox – in fact, their name in Japanese, higan-bana, refers to this time of year. Higan refers to “the other shore” and this is a time for reflection upon the relationship between this world and the “other world” of enlightenment. This unusual lily (Lychorus radiata) comes up year after year in the same spot, from underground roots, and is gone within a few weeks. 

In English, the name “spider lily” has a distinctly creepy sound. It’s really nothing to do with spiders, unless you count the hairlike projections that ring the central blossoms, which make it look a little tingly, as though it would brush the back of your neck similarly to a spider walking along there. Arachnophobia is a major fear for millions of people, and this feeling of irrational creepiness is inherent in the word. 

One thing that is decidedly creepy about these lilies is that they are poisonous, especially the roots, and they can be used in the garden as a deterrent to pests (as long as you don’t make a habit of touching them!) In the first story in this book, “Spider Lilies”, some of the facts and legends surrounding this flower are recounted. Among them is a story that the poisonous quality of the flower is responsible for another name for the flower, () hand rot (probably referring to the idea that you shouldn’t touch the flowers or bring them into the house). 

Readers of this website may remember The Short Story Collective; 13 tales from Japan, by the same author, which was reviewed here (2021, by John Dougill). These stories are modern, for the most part, dealing with various facets of life in Japan, from pachinko parlors to the world of J-pop singing groups, and the scenes are modern too, from uninhabited buildings in the city to small night open food stalls. There are, as usual, a number of references to smartphones and other modern technology. But what struck me in these stories was the theme of women’s rights and opportunities vs. the (in many cases) antidiluvian powers-that-be in Japan, both urban and rural, and how this affects both high-class art and ordinary lives. Many of the major characters in the stories are women trying to live their dreams (and often being punished for it). 

The men who appear in the stories may be organized crime personalities or affiliated with them; they may be accused of sexist crimes; they may be offhand with women trying to pursue what have traditionally been men-only pastimes; they may be helpful. Some of them come to sticky ends, some are protected by their position. Some are motivated by alcohol, others by their innate place in society, which makes it, in many cases, a no-brainer to discourage women. 

The stories are quite involved, and require some concentration to keep characters and plot straight. But all are entertaining, and deal with scenes and happenings that shed light on various aspects of Japanese society in the age we live in. They are creepy too. 

Edited by Ken Rodgers and John Einarsen (Tuttle, 2025)

This beautiful work, in hardback with a color photo spread and many black-and-white photos and drawings throughout, is dedicated to Ken Rodgers, who died suddenly last year at his home. The dedication reads:

This book is dedicated to the memory of Ken Rodgers (1952-2024),
poet, farmer, impresario, pilgrim, doting grandfather, and managing
editor of the Kyoto Journal for nearly forty years.

We all miss Ken, and are glad that this book will bear this dedication, and all our thoughts of him and his life’s work as a very knowledgeable pillar of Kyoto’s ideas and feelings, go with this volume.

The book contains eighteen stellar essays on the subject of ma — the list of contributors at the back is a compendium of contemporary writers, artists and photographers on the subjects of Kyoto and Japan. Each, in his or her own way, has thrown some light on this quality of Japanese aesthetics — some academically, others artistically.

The collection opens with an Introduction by Alex Kerr, “What is Ma?” in which he says, “this collection is perhaps the most definitive book yet published on the subject.” He enumerates three kinds of ma, according to a play-turned-novel he is working on, inspired by his friend and late admired Japanophile, David Kidd: Primal, Artistic and Cultural Ma, and provides tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the three. It is an excellent and readable introduction to this in many ways formidable topic. I myself eagerly look forward to this novel.

The second essay, by Gunter Nitschke, “Ma — Place, Space, Void” (three translations of the word into English), gives a comprehensive view of the character ma 間 as it is used in various words, with their origins and meaning, explained as The Domain of Objectivity, the Domain of Subjectivity, and the Domain of Metaphysics, each divided into several realms.

I won’t enumerate the content and thrust of each essay here, except to say that the essays deal with the concept of ma in such disciplines as tea, martial arts, the Heart Sutra, calligraphy, gardening, photography, and more.

My own experience of ma, in the Japanese discipline I know best, the tea ceremony, is my favorite moment: the sudden cessation of sound occasioned by the pouring of a ladle of cold water into the hot water of the kama (kettle) at the end of the last part of the ceremony, that of usucha (thin tea). As a matter of fact, this part of the total chaji (tea gathering) which also includes a meal, sweets, and koicha (thick tea), could be seen as a way of rejoining the ordinary world after having one’s awareness raised above it by previous experiences in the chaji. The deep and spreading silence of the cessation of the whisper of boiling water (that sound referred to as matsukaze, “the wind in the pines” which has unobtrusively accompanied activities throughout the chaji), occasioned by the addition of cold water, serves to remind us, as we come back down to the level of regular life, that this august realm is always available through encounters with the most ordinary material things. This is the essence of ma, which encompasses both the spiritual realm and the material one. At least this is how it has always seemed to me.

Another aspect of ma dear to my own heart is the phenomenon of yoin 余韻, an aesthetic word describing the carefully timed short silence at the end of performances, be they music, dance, or drama, to name a few, after the last motion has been achieved, or the last note has died away. This is ma at its finest, in my opinion.

As you can see from these examples, for me ma is intimately connected with silence, freely given, noticed or not, which is indeed a form of space. I guess I am a silence aficionado. Ma is essentially a wordless idea. We human beings do require words in order to approach this wordlessness, however, and this review is no exception.

This book provides many different aspects of ma, and those of us who live a long time in Japan have our favorites. In the end, ma is an experience shared between oneself and the material world, which cannot be put into words, and this book is a very well-written introduction, including many visual examples, which to me are essential for developing the concept in the mind. It is indeed, as the book’s superscription says, “an invitation to awareness.”

Shōren-in ancient calm
butterfly in the bamboo
wistful lotus screens
far away from bustling crowds
I feel my spirit settle

calm serene teien
stone basin bamboo and moss
by the flowing stream
small bee rests on ajisai
the hornet must be sleeping

Jissō-in

hello rock garden
come to ponder your mysteries
just like our first day
resting near the high stone wall
a cricket in mossy green

Ryōan-ji

Orinasu-kan
fabric of a thousand years
stories yet to tell
fragrant old tatami floors
garden freshens in the rain

climbing the steep hill
the waka stone rests serene
in a cedar grove
I thank the poet for hope
and feel a soft breeze answer

Kifune-jinja

Lea Millay
Kyoto, October 2025

Mike grew up in San Francisco, and attended USF as an undergraduate before earning his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at MIT. While there, he helped co-found MIT’s literary magazine Rune and studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley. In 1977, he was named a Luce Scholar with an appointment to Kyoto University. Mike and his wife translated They Never Asked, a collection of senryu poetry written by Japanese-Americans incarcerated during World War II, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2023. Mike’s most recent book is a translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, published by Tuttle. Mike has been an active member of Writers in Kyoto for some years.

A New Year’s holiday evening in the 90s, and in our home, a Hyakunin Isshu tournament is in progress. The drone of my mother-in-law reading the poems and repeating the all-important last two lines; the silence as the card is searched for; the slap of the card as it is taken from the floor; the barks of triumph and the moans of defeat. I listen to the familiar sounds from the kitchen where I am washing dishes. My upper-elementary-school-age son, who is in the card team currently being coached by a local priest, is involved in the game. This traditional New Year pastime, called One Hundred Poems in Japanese, involves, to win the game, taking more cards with the last two lines of the poem printed on them than your opponent. The poems are in the traditional waka format, 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per poem. To be really skillful means memorizing the first half of the poem so that you can find the card with the last two lines quickly. In our house, the “answer” cards are splayed as for the card game “Concentration,” but in a real game between experts, such as one sees on TV at this time, they are lined up between the two contestants, who sit facing each other. It’s really a two-person game, but anyone can join in, the way we play. I used to try, but it is really too hard for me to read the archaic hiragana script of the cards, so I mostly just listen.

One Hundred Poems from Old Japan would be a welcome addition to any Japanophile’s bookshelf. Handsomely illustrated with Edo-period woodblock prints specially commissioned from artistic masters Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada, each opened page consists of an illustration, the number of the poem, the author and sometimes court title (from the Emperor’s court during the Heian period, around the tenth century), the English translation, the Japanese original, and the romaji (alphabetic rendering) of this last, arranged beautifully over the space.

Michael Freiling came to Kyoto in his youth, and his big project as a Henry Luce scholar in 1977 at Kyoto University was translating the One Hundred Poems into English, several of which graced the pages of the 4^th Anthology of Writers in Kyoto, Structures in Kyoto. As one of the co-editors of that anthology I was glad to see his translations of other poems as well, the complete work in fact, in this book. I knew that these poems can be read on many levels, and it was interesting to see how the translation, in many cases, included nods to these various levels. For example, my favorite of the collection, No. 66, ends with the lines, hana yori hoka ni / shiru hito mo nashi (“No one sees the blooming of the mountain cherry except the flowers themselves”), which is one level, that of a natural scene; another is a lament by the author, the former Archbishop Gyoson, for his loss of status; as translated by Freiling, “…for both of us [me and the blossoms]/ no other friends are left.” It is true that these levels of meaning have not been, by and large, arrived at by asking the poets themselves, but by inference through information about their lives and preoccupations provided by their friends, later commentators, etc. But it is interesting to be aware of them. The levels are arrived at naturally using poetic words and images which have more than one meaning in this poetic framework. It would be interesting and educational to see translations of the poems from the viewpoints of some of these several levels in the same place, for comparison purposes.

The Introduction, which is fascinating, covers such themes as “Court Life in the Heian Period,” “The Merry-go-Round of Love,” and a very interesting portion which lists localities in modern Kyoto which are associated with the poems, “Modern Kyoto and the Hyakunin Isshu,” as well as short biographical notes about some of the more well-known poets featured in this collection. The Ogura Hyakunin Isshu collection was originally made by Fujiwara no Teika, a member of the very important court family Fujiwara. Works of several members of this family, who were poets as well as public figures at that time, can be found in the collection, including a poem by the compiler himself, No. 97. It is to be noted that many of the included poems were written by women, including Sei Shonagon and Lady Murasaki, women being a very important part of the literary and cultural life of the Heian court. Lady Murasaki Shikibu, particularly, is famed for writing the novel The Tale of Genji, which sheds much light on the court as it was at the time of these poems.

The illustrations are full of life and wonderful in design, which one would expect from such experts in the field of woodblock printing and artistry. I confess that I was a bit confused at first by the juxtaposition of the illustrations and the poems – “what are they supposed to be illustrating anyway?” I thought. I should have read the Introduction first, which states, in the words of the author/translator, “The … illustrations… are from the series The Ogura Imitations of One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets (Ogura nazorae Hyakunin Isshu)… The print series was made specially to illustrate this volume of poems, and the imagery in each print is based on scenes from Kabuki theatre that relate to the theme of each poem.” Thus the illustrations, although all showing human beings, are not of the poets themselves (this was the initial source of my confusion), and sometimes the theme connecting the picture to the poem is rather difficult to grasp for a modern reader, but those that, for example, include the moon (No. 59), maple leaves (No. 24) or snow (No. 15), are self-explanatory. (The compendium of illustrations is described as “playful” by one Google commentator, not particularly serious that is, but one would have to be conversant with a lot of literature and literary figures to feel the playfulness.) It would be nice to know which Kabuki play and which scene are being referenced, but such information is not within the scope of this book. One also must keep in mind the discrepancy in period between the poems (around tenth century) and the illustrations (around eighteenth century). Still, the illustrations are impressive, and beautifully rendered.

This edition includes a link to free audio recordings of the poems at the end of the Introduction.

He bowed to Mrs Okada in the shop, remembering how the boys vied for her attention in high school. On the way out he greeted an old workmate who insisted they went for a beer. ‘Could be our last chance, Hitoshi — we’re in our twilight years now!’ 

He’d been out two hours when he finally set off for home, but Hitoshi knew his wife would still be waiting outside. He tucked the cane underneath his arm so he could carry a shopping bag in each hand. When he reached the corner he placed them on a neighbour’s wall, then brandished the stick to signal all was well. Michiko waved her arms and rolled her eyes as though she thought him an old fool. It was a game they played every day.

A petal had caught in her hair, and he pictured the bloom of her skin when they first met; her body an unfurling flower on their wedding night; their hanami honeymoon in Kyoto.

She took the shopping bags from him — talking, talking. He nodded distractedly, returning to that perfect week: Tetsugaku no Michi clouded with blossom; moonlight on cobbles; swaying lanterns; laughter, sweet as temple bells; the light in Michiko’s eyes as they stood on the platform at Kiyomizu-dera. 

‘Look, Hitoshi,’ she’d said, ‘the city of flowers is spread out at our feet, stretching into the distance like our life together. We’ll live well and long — in fact we’ll live forever.’ 

He reached forward now and plucked the petal from her hair, unaware of the tear on his cheek.

‘You daft old man,’ she said, shaking her head.

We enjoyed a trip through the sites and statues of ancient Europe, all in one giant bath complex! If you can get over the fear of being naked, it’s pretty nice.

Pass through the automatic doors
        and the motion-activated water
jets to a life-size Trevi fountain
        bathed in the blue light the dome

above casts down. But rather than
        throwing a coin to ensure your
return to the Eternal City,
        toss yourself into the pool

of hot water to temporarily
        cleanse yourself of whatever
circumstances brought you here. Date.
        Divorce. Last-ditch attempt

to rekindle a passionate love
        of the Self. Next to the milk bath,
enter the Blue Grotto for a glimpse
        of an airbrushed Tyrrhenian Sea

engulfed in manufactured mist—
        for what is the Real if not
a parlour trick performed by upper
        management? And like Sontag’s sense

of camp, everything here has
        quotation marks around it.
After a brief stop in a bath
        with “Spain’s” plastic bullfighter,

settle beneath four caryatids
        carrying a “Greece” still under
construction (where actual men
        stroke each other off while trying

to avoid the security camera’s
        Cyclopic eye). Tropical fish float
stoically in a murky aquarium
        mimicking our own predicaments

and predilections. And for reasons
        having more to do with space
than time, Michelangelo’s Mary
        emerges from the wall, stripped

of her slain son. Unblinking, she
        stares at us in our mandatory
nakedness with our faults on full
        display—from the way middle age

puts its fingers on the scale
        of the testicles’ balancing act
to stomachs spirited away
        from the unrelenting gaze

of mirrors that want us to see
        we’re not the younger versions
of ourselves we imagine ourselves
        to be. Tangled triangles of pubic

hair float on bodies disembodied
        from themselves sitting in the Salt
Sauna where we rub our skin with
        a purifying grit until the steam

dissolves everything into a cloud
        of visible invisibility and I’m
free to return to the changeroom
        where my valuables are kept

in a locker under lock and key
        for the price of a single coin
that’s returned, spent but somehow
        still the same as when I arrived.

Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (fineperiodpress, 2024), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis). Originally from Saskatchewan in Canada, he currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.

Image credit: Photo-illustration produced by Rick Elizaga using material generated by Firefly Image 5 and Gemini 3 AI models.

Ode to Elemental Breathing

Ode to the Earth
which holds our bodies
no questions asked

Ode to the Water
massaging loosening
our boundaries

Ode to the Fire of Truth
transforming petty self
into comforting Light

Ode to the Wind
stretching the mind
caressing the Universe

Ode to Ether
entwined with my breath…
I sneeze and know you exist.

Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Four elements tied together by the fifth, Ether. Though I have known most of these elements since my childhood days, it was encountering the teachings of the mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan in the late 1970’s that made them a precious part of my life. 

Known to the Inayatiyya as the Purification Breaths* (see Reference Notes below), these simple daily breathing practices, have been a part of my life for 45 years and counting. As I continue doing them, they take me deeper and deeper, create balance, and keep me healthy most of the time. Though it’s a personal practice, it is also universal. More and more, these days I feel the importance of doing these practices for the Earth and Gaia, as a Healing for Humanity. Starting by doing them for myself, the breath flows naturally to a wider world.

Love Letter to Gaia

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I taste your breath
On my lips

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I grab your power
With hands and feet

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I conjure your mind
In my heart

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I rest in your bosom
As if we are lovers

Gaia Sweet Gaia
For me there is
no other.

As a photographer and writer, a gardener and sometimes traveler, I have the good fortune to tune to the actual elements. I live in the countryside in “the other” Kamogawa on the Boso Peninsula, with a big natural garden and a view of the hills and mountains; the ocean is less than 3 kilometers away. My home is in Japan but looks much like the east coast Blue Ridge Mountains in my home birth state of Virginia. Doing these breathing attunements outdoors in the elements is a special blessing. But there are also days when I do them in a hotel room looking out the window or standing on the platform before catching an early morning train. In the 1980’s when I lived in Tokyo, I mostly did them on my morning commute to the station, walking along the Tamagawa Josui canal on a dirt path with big trees. 

Knowing Kyoto for 45 years, it’s easy to see it as conducive to attuning to the elements, whether in the pure nature of the surrounding mountains, the Kamogawa River in the middle of the city, various walks and pathways, or the myriad of shrines, temples and gardens. In fact, they are so entwined, I find it difficult to say which special spot symbolically embodies a particular element the best. Though I gave it some thought for this essay, I know readers will have their own ideas and favorite element-connecting locations.

One of my favorite places is Otagi Nenbutsu-ji on the outskirts of Arashiyama. I like to rent a bicycle at the station to make the mostly uphill journey, a healthy warming up of my elements. I’ve visited many times over the years with a variety of cameras. It’s a very earthy place with big trees hanging on the slopes and lots of stone Buddhas tucked into the mountain hillside. There is not a whole lot of sunlight except at certain hours, which makes that more precious, only trickles of water, but the air is damp and clean, and a feeling of ether-like prayer pervades. Part way into the grounds is a medium-size temple gong. Visitors are encouraged to stand under its roof and ring it, vibrating for peace or your heart’s desire, or both! I always feel refreshed on the way back to “town.”

Kyoto is blessed with so many places to connect with the elements that one can only start by stating the obvious ones like the Philosopher’s Walk, Nanzenji, Daikokuji, the Kamogawa and Takano Rivers, the small water canals here and there (I personally love the Takasegawa Canal area right in the heart of the city life — day or night). With the main area of central Kyoto being flat, it’s quite easy to see a sunrise and sunset without venturing too far. Being attuned to the sun and knowing where the warm sunshine will be on a cold day or shade in the summer, knowing where or when to go to let the wind blow on you or not. I have only experienced one fire festival in Nara, and never seen the mountains and other places in Kyoto “on fire” so I can only imagine the power of those spectacles. I would love to hear what places in Kyoto (and around the world) others find especially connect them to any or all the elements. 

Bringing it all back to earth so to speak, I have shared what I know about these Purification Breaths at writers’ conferences, poetry gatherings, photography workshops, on Nature Meditation walks, and with a variety of activists to help them tune to nature and awaken creativity. I also work as a fashion model and like to think that this attunement to the elements aids my presence before the camera and the viewers of the resulting photos. As a writer, I find that of most of my inspirations come while doing or soon after finishing these morning practices, which in addition to the Purification Breaths, includes prayers and mantras.

I am currently a member of The Japan P.E.N Club. When I heard they had an “environmental committee” I thought to join that, but friends who were on the committee told me, “All they discuss is nuclear issues” — important yes, but not necessarily my focus (though they recently sponsored a lecture on Climate Change which was excellent.) I believe it’s places like these that could be enriched by these simple breathing practices and some other Nature Meditations in addition to their “harder” activism issues. I hope to reach out more to this kind of group and other venues. In the meantime, I keep up the daily practice as much as possible, enjoying what it does to me personally, the people around me, and those far and wide who need our positive energy more than ever.

Spirit of the Elements

Spirit of Earth
deep in the dirt
a grounding flirt

Spirit of Water
for any fool
wet and cool

Spirit of Fire
burns a hole
in my ego

Spirit of Air
blows me away
but here I stay

“Spirit of Ether,”
the breath said to me,
“How can that be?”

Reference Notes:

*Purification Breaths — Elements Breathing Practice

Earth
Breathe in and out through the nose — imagining yourself as a tree helps, breathe in roots down into the earth drawing energy up, breathe out branches up and outwards spreading, fruitful.

Water
Breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth — breathe in touching the source of Water, breathe out Water falling from above.

Fire
Breathe in through mouth, breathe out through the nose — breathe in Fire, breathe out Light. “Burn the ego,” become Light.

Air
Breathe in through the mouth, breathe out though the mouth — the breath as a two-way bridge between Self and the Universe — giving, receiving.

Ether
Breathe gently in and out through nose — the Essence of Being, touch of sacredness, unity, oneness.

Usually done in the morning before eating. Four or five breaths for each element. 

Note: when inhaling and exhaling through the mouth, just open slightly, feeling the breath though the lips. Standing or sitting by an open window or outside is recommended. Each breath’s suggested images are just that, to get one started.

“Salutations” Spoken aloud (optional)

All productive Mother Earth, I humbly offer my homage to Thee**
All purifying Water, I willingly offer my homage to Thee
All consuming Fire, I wholeheartedly offer my homage to Thee
All pervading Air, I gladly offer my homage to Thee
Oh Ether, essence of All, I humbly offer my homage to Thee

(** Feel free to adapt the “old fashioned” Thee as you like.)

Optional hand movements with the salutations:

Earth: Hands by your side, palms down toward the earth
Water: hands above head fingers wiggling mimicking falling water.
Fire: hands raised above the forehead making a triangle shape with the thumb and index fingers.
Wind: hands above forehead, touching and waving gesture.
Ether: Hand clasped in prayer position.

More WiK articles by Edward Levinson: https://writersinkyoto.com/tag/edward-levinson/
Edward’s Photo Website: https://www.edophoto.com 
Edward’s Memoir/Essay book website: https://whisperoftheland.com/

On my first visit to Kyoto fifteen years ago, I was enchanted by the lively scene along the river. Friends, families, and dogs enjoyed picnics and socializing, but I was most charmed by the couples. Were they on first dates or were they established couples completely at ease with each other? These thoughts led me to imagine someone reminiscing about a first date, enjoying the memory of an innocence we can only experience once.

I remember how we packed our bentos for our first picnic and how you carefully prepared everything so lovingly. Onigiri, carrot salad, rice, sliced fruit, rolled tamago.
I remember how you snuck glances at me, your shyness one of your greatest attractions.

I remember how we walked along the banks of the Kamogawa. How I wished I could hold your hand. How we picked a spot not too close to other people. How the old man warned us about the tonbi. “Watch your food,” he said, pointing to the sky. How we nodded and dismissed him, because of course we would watch our food.

I remember how we nibbled at our snacks. How we talked awkwardly, pretending we weren’t nervous, trying to muster an appetite. How your hand brushed mine as you passed me the onigiri.

I remember sipping mugicha from the same thermos and how I felt connected to you with that gesture. How we both eagerly opened our bags with our special donuts. The ones we had traveled out of the way for—taking two buses, and missing the connection. Gourmet donuts. Crème Brûlée for you. Chocolate raspberry for me.

I remember how the tonbi swooped down and grabbed them right out of our hands before our first bites. How we laughed and laughed until our sides hurt and we collapsed on the blanket. How the old man turned and started to scold us. Then smiled and left us to our private moment.

I remember how we sat there quietly when the laughing was over. How the silence was loudest of all. And how much we understood about each other, about us, in that moment.

I remember how you gently took my hand and led me away from the river.

The passage up to Seki is filled with lingering snow. I’m riding what’s called the Shinobi Train, geared to tourists, with the word shinobi written in Roman letters, though only a Japanese speaker would know what that means.

Seki is perhaps the best-preserved post town on the Tōkaidō, yet just off this main street of machinami row houses, a new housing development is being laid out on a tell-tale grid à la California suburb. Before long I come to the torii gate that marks the start of the Ise Betsu Kaidō, the connective tissue that extends out toward the grand shrines of Ise. From here, the true machinami begins. 

With the wind and the faded paint of the old buildings, I feel like I am a gunfighter strolling into a frontier town of the Wild West. The bank is constructed in a nice classic look in keeping with the rest of the town—an effort that won it the Mie prefectural architecture award. Directly across the street, incongruous to all, is a restaurant that despite a traditional frontage, announces its specials in a garish neon scroll. 

I time the start of my walk to coincide with the opening of a pair of old homes that now serve as historical museums. They contain the usual artifacts, though I do learn a few things, namely that the feudal post road system ended in 1872. One museum has done up a room with a futon and a set of lacquerware to display the hospitality a traveler could expect during a sojourn down the old road. The real charm of these places, and others, is the architecture, all solid beams and darkened corners. The best displays can be found in Seki’s guest house, decorated with items from the previous century: telephones and motorbikes and a long row of sake bottles. As I am examining the latter, I notice an odd form not far from my left foot. A guest has been given a space in the hallway, his bearded face barely visible in a sleeping bag tightly cinched. Seki must have been busy this holiday weekend. And cold.

I brave the latter as I continue to wander the town. They’ve done some nice things here, in creating small parks, sitting spaces, and a balcony overlook providing a different view of the town. While my initial impression of Seki was that it was a bit of a sterile museum piece, the more I poke around the more it charms me. I begin to see that the residents have gone to great lengths to preserve the history here, the usual blemishes aside. But they have also found ways to engage with the life of its current residents. In that way Seki is different than the truly preserved post towns of the Kiso Valley, where there is little to do but admire the pretty look of things, and one finds oneself quickly bored. But here there are ample cafes and abundant galleries, including one shop specializing in fossils. It is interesting to see how they have adapted these centuries-old spaces. The best perhaps is the flea market held in the open courtyard of Jizo-ji temple. Other temples and shrines similarly offer their vast environs for the good of the community, and I find the sight of a new children’s playground on the grounds of a shrine refreshingly optimistic.

It was easy to see why Seki was chosen as a barrier station, as the tall jagged mountains ringing this narrow valley offer good natural defense. I move toward them, as the sky darkens and threatens rain. I feel a drop now and again, and I want to believe that the weather will hold off as the gods debate awhile just what form the precipitation will take on such a chilly day. The forecast had promised sunny skies, but the current temps are near freezing, especially with the strong wind that keeps up a constant tattoo upon my face. In fact, it was the forecast itself that had encouraged me to leave the house at all.

The weather finally compromises on frozen rain. This goes on for a while, but at one point I notice my shadow moving out in front of me again. It points me toward a trio of walkers just ahead. From the way they keep glancing at their book I know that they too are walking this old road. Tokyo-ites, they have been walking it in stages for over a decade. The oldest man in the group is interesting to talk to, and we discuss awhile the Tōkaidō and its best sections. The woman, probably his daughter, is merely interested in the usual inane questions about where from and how long. The guy I take to be her husband couldn’t be bothered with me at all. So I push on.

I parallel a small river for a while. It is lined with an array of viper warning signs, compliments of the PTA, which I presume are more about keeping school kids away from the water. The clouds ahead to my left look equally vicious, and sadly I am heading into their waiting jaws. Just ahead, I notice a small rise lined with 53 posts, each emblazoned with the name of one of the stations on the Tōkaidō. Near the top of the rise is a beautiful old building that still serves as the community center. A guy is working in the garden out front, in a light sweater vest, bearded and pony-tailed. I greet him and receive a smile in return, and though I never break stride, I am half hoping that he’ll invite me for a warming cup of tea. I am curious about him, for beards in Japan generally signify an interesting character, one who has opted out of the comfort of mainstream society and found an alternative way to pay tribute to their dreams 

I am alone now, moving steadily toward Suzuka Pass. As I am puzzling out where to leave the road and enter the mountains proper, I see a couple just up the road, carrying the same guidebook as me. Thus set straight, I move into the forest and take a side trip to explore the ruins of a shrine. The road steepens from here, and I find out later that this is one of Japan’s 100 passes, whatever that means. It was always considered one of the hardest sections of the Tōkaidō, sharing infamy with Hakone in the East. Though hard going, all is peaceful in the lightly falling snow, and upon arriving at the top, I find myself surrounded on all sides by rows of freshly dusted tea bushes. 

Going downhill now, the weather too. The roads remain free, but the countryside, and more worrying, my clothing, are coated in white. I think that if the storm worsens that I will call it a day, but I don’t really have an escape plan as there are no trains or buses nearby. The steady traffic tempts me to hitchhike, but I convince myself that the weather will improve once I am out of the mountains. 

A long walk through blowing snow brings me to the beginnings of a town. I cross the bridge that appears in Hiroshige’s corresponding woodblock print, and rather than the cold I would happily settle for its title, “Spring Rain at Tsuchiyama.” Over the bridge is the sprawling Tamura Shrine, atmospheric with its stone bridges over twisting brooks. It holds a close second in interest to the thought of lunch, for it is getting late in the day. I find a convenience store nearby and as I warm myself inside, the sun comes out, to accompany me for the rest of the afternoon.

This section of the Tōkaidō through Tsuchiyama is over two kilometers long, and even as it leaves the town proper, it will maintain its distinctive traditional look for the day’s remaining 10 km. I imagine that this is how things had always looked back then, and as my overall distance on the day lengthens, this thought keeps my spirits high and my body strong. I nearly forego a detour to the Tsuchiyama’s Tenmakan, which appears at first to just be a simple rest stop for walkers, but has secreted away a pair of incredible exhibitions on its second floor. One room has prints of Kurosawa Shigekazu’s “revisionist” print series on the Tōkaidō, and in front of each of the 53 prints are plastic replicas of the food best known from that particular town. In the opposite room hang Hiroshige’s prints, the scenery of each reconstructed in a bonsai-type bowl by a local pair of confectioners. Once again, I will express amazement at such simple but unsung works of art hidden away in the recesses of this country. 

The lateness of the afternoon and the waning light spur me onward. I match step with another walker, who will finish his own Tōkaidō walk tomorrow in Kusatsu. Later, an old man begins to talk with me as he walks to a neighbor’s house somewhere up the road. On the outskirts of Minakuchi, a quintet of aging Zen monks do their begging rounds, their age dictating the use of a flute rather than the usual deep resonant chants of their younger counterparts. Two young children in happi accompany them as they go. Rows of tea bushes fill the gaps between houses. And finally then the train line, serviced at irregular intervals by a single old rattling carriage. Today it is filled with young riders, a completely different demographic than expected. I am the oldest person on board and must look it, as I shuffle aboard on legs weary from 27 km and sub-zero temps.

Amanda Huggins is the author of the novellas The Blue of You, Crossing the Lines and All Our Squandered Beauty, as well as six collections of short stories and poetry. Her work has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Mslexia, Popshot, Tokyo Weekender, The Telegraph, Traveller, Wanderlust, the Guardian, and many others. Three of her flash fiction stories have also been broadcast on BBC radio.

She has won numerous awards, including three Saboteur Awards for fiction and poetry, the Kyoto City Mayoral Prize, the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award, the H E Bates Short Story Prize and the BGTW New Travel Writer of the Year. She has placed in the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, the Costa Short Story Award, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and been shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Prize. 

Amanda lives in Yorkshire, England and works as an editor. She is a frequent visitor to Japan and a member of Writers in Kyoto.

The present novel, The Blue of You, is a romance set in the northeast coast of England, a small fishing village which is the hometown of the protagonist, Janey. She has come home after some years living in London, and is haunted by the tragic events that happened here one Christmas time long ago. She wonders if she can lay those ghosts to rest and follow a new love, which would mean she would get involved with projects that try to preserve tradition, in the form of fishing methods and others, at the same as they discourage the coming of strangers who would end up destroying what was originally picturesque about the place. In this way the author touches on a theme which has popped up all over the world in recent years: Is it more important to preserve tradition, or to go with the flow of human progress, watching many things change from traditional to modern, with the danger that all tradition will be lost? Can tradition and newer ideas exist side by side? Is it important that they should?

Janey ponders these questions as she wonders whether it is better in her own life to go back to an old love or to go toward something new, ironically in a place she knows best, her hometown. The story jumps to different times, different years, which are indicated at the beginning of chapters, which it is essential to notice when reading in order to understand what is flashback and what is happening “now.” The tragic events of that faraway Christmas blend with the present as Janey finds out various pieces of the puzzle from people that were with her then, and learns which of those people were her real friends.

As usual Amanda Huggins provides plentiful word pictures, often riffing on the title of the book by describing different kinds of blue, for example: “The was something mesmerizing and hypnotic about the rough purr of the engine, the gentle slap of wave after wave, the way the water curled and parted as we chased the horizon…the vast, infinite blue, the way the light changes, they way it dances on the water.” Or this: “I bought a tasselled blue suede jacket… I stood up to try the jacket on, twirling around … I could see myself in every mirror, reflected over and over again in an infinity of blue.”

Speaking for myself, I have only recently discovered the pull of the color blue in all its manifestations, and realize that this particular color has a romantic rhyme, “blue-you” unlike any other color name in English. The title is of a fictitious song that comes up periodically in the story.

Like most of Amanda Huggins’ writing, this book has a romantic cast, not very Japanese perhaps, but with a butterfly-light touch that reminds one of Amanda’s years-long love affair with the country.

Instead of barging in with a mid-morning snack, he entered his office and settled at his desk in his ergonomic chair, ready to delete the hundreds of emails sent to Mitsuki by fans around the world. He would read them all, of course, and reply to a handful. And he would share anything that he thought might amuse, intrigue, or inspire her.

The fan mail was a warm-up for the more serious business — the licensing agreements, the press queries, the gallerists, and the billionaire art collectors seeking to buy her work. As Mitsuki Ono’s personal assistant, he dealt with all that.

The first twenty messages he opened that morning were from fans, expressing their awe and delight at her work. One included a selfie of herself taken with “Sparkle Pony,” which was a repurposed carousel horse that Mitsuki had covered with pink paint and glitter. “It changed my life,” the woman wrote. “After I saw it, I gave up my job as a legal secretary and trained to become a manicurist.”

Aki chuckled. Mitsuki might get a kick out of this one. He printed it out and set it aside for later.

There were a couple of marriage proposals in the day’s batch of emails as well — one from a man in Iceland, another from a woman in Brazil. Aki deleted these without replying to them, but he sent a sweet letter to a woman in hospice care who wrote that her last wish was to receive a message from her art-world idol.

He sent standard rejections to bloggers and YouTubers who wanted to interview Mitsuki on their platforms, though he couldn’t blame them for trying. After all, only the scrappy survived. For inquiries from more prestigious publications, he would check with her first. It always depended on her mood. For example, she’d said “yes” to that celebrity magazine sold at supermarket checkouts in the United States a few months ago, but a week later she’d said “no” to The New York Times. With her name or image on the cover, the issue would sell out, or elicit tens or hundreds of thousands of clicks. Her very name was clickbait.

He breezed through dozens more, until he paused upon a note with the subject “Are you my mother?” It was from a woman named Kayla Brown who lived in South Carolina. She and her twin sister had been abandoned as babies in front of a fire station in Tennessee. Whoever had left them there had tucked a garland of origami cranes in the box with them, which made them believe that their birth mother was Japanese. Aki felt a pang in his chest when he read these words. She had included a photo of herself sitting in a restaurant before an array of stemmed glassware and gold-rimmed plates. Her chestnut hair was piled on her head, a few curls falling across her forehead, but he could just make out her widow’s peak. Her eyes were large, luminous, and set off by eyeliner and shimmery brown eyeshadow. She was smiling, her full lips parted slightly revealing perfectly aligned teeth. Pretty. But she’s an American. Nevertheless, he printed out the message, photo and all.

Just before noon, the door to the studio burst open, and Mitsuki shouted out, “Aki-chan, tea, please!” By this time, he had finished going through the emails. Whatever came in during the rest of the day, he would deal with tomorrow. He minimized the screen and went to the kitchen to prepare a bowl of matcha.

Although he been trained in tea ceremony, he didn’t bother with all the rituals for Mitsuki’s tea. Instead of sliding around on his knees on tatami, he stood at the counter and opened a cannister of powdered green tea. He used a bamboo spoon to scoop tea into a ceramic bowl, added hot water from an electric dispenser on the counter, and whisked the tea with deft motions of his wrist. He put the bowl of tea on a lacquer tray along with a sweet made of mochi and mashed, sweetened adzuki beans settled on a small plate. Then he carried the tray to the living room where Mitsuki was sitting regally on an embroidered cushion at a low table, taking a break.

“Here you are, Mother,” he said.

She smiled, her whole face lighting up. “Thank you, Aki-kun.”

She bowed slightly, lifted the bowl, and settled it on the palm of her left hand. With her right hand cupped around the side of the bowl, she turned it three times toward her before slurping it down.

“Ahh. That hit the spot,” she said, stabbing the beancake with a tiny wooden knife.

Aki waited until she had swallowed the last tiny bite before presenting her with the messages that he had printed out. He’d also made copies for himself, in case she didn’t feel like reading them.

“Shall I begin?” he asked.

Mitsuki nodded. She made no motion to lift the pages, closing her eyes instead. It helped her to concentrate.

He went through the various invitations and media requests.

“Art in America?”

“No.”

“Brazilian Vogue?”

“Yes.”

“The Japan Times?”

“No.”

Aki sorted the messages into two piles. Next, he read the letter from Kayla Brown. Sometimes, bored by the ramblings of strangers, she would cut him off. But this time, she listened to the end. When he got to the part about the fire station in Tennessee, he thought he heard her gasp. Halfway through, her eyes opened, and she gazed intently at the wall. Aki glanced over, expecting to see something there — maybe a spider, or a shadow. Or a ghost. By the time he reached the end of the message, her lower lip was quivering. She pressed her hands on the table in front of her as if she were bracing herself against something.

He paused for a moment after reading, “Regards, Kayla Brown.” Somehow bringing this to her attention suddenly felt like a terrible mistake.

“Invite her to come visit,” Mitsuki said in a steely voice, still staring at the wall.

“Pardon me?” There was no way that this woman and her sister could be her daughters. Or could they be? He looked over at the portrait of Mitsuki and Joseph Heinz, one of only two photos that she displayed on the credenza —the other was of her as a child with her enormous family — and tried to discern a resemblance between them and the woman. Yes, both this woman, Kayla, and Mitsuki had a similar hairline, a widow’s peak, and her nose was sort of tall and hooked like his. Joseph had been the love of her life, her only love. And they had never had children. Or at least that’s what Mitsuki had always told him. Had she been lying?

Now, Mitsuki looked straight at her son and said, “Book a ticket for her as soon as she can come. We will welcome her.”

Aki tried to remain stoic. Sure, she had enough money to fly some stranger over at a whim, but this Kayla person might be some sort of con artist. Maybe she was trying to get access to Mitsuki for a book or an article or some ridiculous podcast. He couldn’t imagine welcoming this random American woman into their midst. Did Mitsuki intend for her to stay with them under the same roof? Finally, he took a deep breath, and let it out in a long stream before replying. “Shall I tell her that you are her mother?”

“No.” Mitsuki laughed. “Tell her that I would like to offer her a job.”

Aki could only nod. He had no idea what kind of job she had in mind for this person, but he knew that his own job was secure. He also knew from experience that she would never change her mind.

Now that their business was out of the way, Mitsuki softened, morphing into her maternal role. “Do you have any plans for this afternoon?” she asked.

Aki nodded. “I’ll be going to visit Kono-san in the nursing home.”

“You’re a good boy,” she said, reaching over to pat his shoulder.

He accepted her praise, but they both knew that his sitting by the old woman’s bedside, listening to her ramble about the past, wasn’t entirely altruistic. He was being paid by the woman’s son, who was working for a bank in London, to visit his mother and pretend to be him. He had met the man via video and mastered a few of his quirks and stock expressions. His mother, Kono-san, who was in the latter stages of dementia, seemed to accept that Aki was her son. Or at least she pretended that she did.

Aki had other acting jobs as well. Although when asked, he said that his job was working as Mitsuki’s assistant, he considered acting his real job. He had actually appeared in a film, one made on the streets of Kyoto by She, Whom He’d Rather Forget. He even had an IMBD page as evidence of his participation. He rarely mentioned that, though. And most of his work involved showing up at real life events and participating in someone else’s deception. He’d been a mourner at a funeral more than once, sort of like those hired wailers in the Middle East. He’d escorted women who’d lied about having boyfriends to family gatherings. And he’d once pretended to be a little girl’s father at a PTA meeting. Sometimes he would become so engrossed in his role that he would forget that he was Aki Ono, lonely boy. Strangers would hug him and clap him on the back. They’d fill his cup with beer or sake, and hand him gifts as he made his exit. He would begin to believe that he was surrounded by dozens of family members and friends who truly cared about him, that his life was, and always had been, overflowing with love. Maybe someday he really would find someone who was related to him, who would say, “I’ve been looking for you all of my life.”

Naosuke Togawa (1917–2010)¹, a film critic, contributed not only to Japan’s famous film magazines including Kinema Junpo and Eiga Hyoron, but to English-language publications: The Education of the Film-maker: An International View issued by Unesco Press and International Film Guide, to name a few. In honor of his great contributions to the film industry, he was given the 13th Kawakita Award² in 1995. (The first winner was Donald Richie, who toasted Togawa at the award ceremony.³) 

Back in late 1945, Togawa made a visit to Kyoto. He recorded what he had seen and felt there, which ended up appearing in the December 4, 1945, edition of the periodical Jiji Tsushin Eiga Geino. His report, titled “Shusengo no Kyoto (Postwar Kyoto),” started as below: 

“Kyoto, the only megalopolis that was free from war damage, is so fortunate that it looks like it used to be and shows no signs of fatigue — which is a totally superficial view. Indeed, its scenes of nature remain the same, but the city does nothing but show us that people there are in the terrible plight of a defeated nation.” 

Togawa kept on dealing with the city’s miserable situation, referring to these two things. 

• More than 500 street people rushed from Osaka and Kobe to Kyoto every day. 
• There was also an influx of war evacuees, who were a few hundred times as many as the above-mentioned homeless. 

According to Togawa, the downtown of Kyogoku and the vicinity of Minamiza were jammed with lethargic or absent-minded people. Regarding the Kyogoku area, the critic added an explanation: 

“The theaters are fully packed, and Teikoku-kan⁴, which screens The Gift of the Fox⁵, has such long lines of moviegoers that I feel pity for them.” 

In Teikoku-kan, he saw a great number of people standing on tiptoes along its passages to watch the film. However, the film was shown in such a bad environment that it made him think: 

“Even a train trip without a seat can take us to any place as long as you pay the fare. That said, it is extremely unreasonable that people have to pay the same amount of fee even if a film cannot be seen or heard.” 

Togawa went on to lament the extremely poor performance of singers, dancers, and theater people on stage. Furthermore, he complained about the cost of going to the theater as below, comparing it to that of buying something to eat: 

“Food stalls have been made in a row on lots that were vacant due to building evacuation. They sell a dish of almost rotten vegetables cooked in soy sauce for one yen. If it costs a yen for something we can eat in 20 seconds, then can we think it less expensive to spend time at a theater for two hours even if it costs 10 yen? No, it is a wrong idea.” 

Incidentally, before visiting Kyoto, Togawa wrote an article about the cruel situation in postwar Osaka⁶. He found heaven and hell next to each other in the Dotonbori area: 

“Street children, whose parents had been killed in the war, were vending a bun for six yen, their voices getting hoarse. Inside the huge theater behind them, meanwhile, young women of the Takarazuka Revue Company were performing Pinocchio under the dazzling lighting. At the neighboring theater, The Gift of the Fox was so popular that there was a line of people.” 

Yuki Yamauchi came across the 1945 articles of Naosuke Togawa while looking for articles on filmmaker Akira Nobuchi, about whom and whose film he has written articles: 

Notes

1. He often used the pen name Naoki Togawa, but did not for the articles regarding postwar Kyoto and Osaka.  ︎
2. An annual award given by the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute to “an individual or an organization (local or foreign) who has significantly contributed to the development of Japanese cinema and/or to the diffusion of Japanese culture over the years through films.” Reference: https://www.kawakita-film.or.jp/kmfi_english.html  ︎
3. The photograph of Richie and Togawa can be seen here: https://www.kawakita-film.or.jp/kawakita_award_3_13.html  ︎
4. Teikoku-kan opened in 1913 at Nishiki-koji Agaru, Shinkyogoku, Nakagyo-ku. It was closed in 1971. The photographs of the theater in 1935 and 1938 can be seen here: https://www.nfaj.go.jp/onlineservice/digital-
   gallery/dg20140408_006/ ︎
5. The Gift of the Fox (Kitsune no Kureta Akanbo in Japanese) is a film released on November 8, 1945. It was Tsumasaburo Bando’s first starring role after the end of WWII. ︎
6. The article, titled “Shusengo no Osaka (Postwar Osaka),” appeared in theNovember 29, 1945, edition of Jiji Tsushin Eiga Geino. ︎

WiK member Stephen Mansfield’s newly released book, The Modern Japanese Garden, is explored in an in-depth discussion with Amy Chavez for her Books on Asia podcast.

The following extract is taken from my forthcoming book Spider Lily: Six Toxic Tales from Japan, which comprises six darkly themed stories, each centred around a symbolic flower. The book explores themes of sexual discrimination, power harassment, and other social issues.

This particular piece was inspired by the concept of hana kotoba—the language of flowers. For example, red camellias are associated with passion, while the spider lily (the title of one of the other stories in Spider Lily: Six Toxic Tales from Japan and the subject of the attached photo taken last October) is linked to farewells, among other meanings.

“The Language of Flowers” revolves around the female proprietor of a flower shop in feudal-era Kyoto who wishes to teach ikebana but is held back by the patriarchal structure of the time: instruction was passed down the male family line, and flower arrangement, according to my research, was regarded as a male pursuit designed to prepare men for the battlefield.

In addition to these obstacles, the proprietor is gaslit by her assistant, Taro, who tries to convince her that she is losing her mind in her old age.

As will hopefully be apparent upon reading, to those familiar with regional accents around the UK, Taro speaks with a Yorkshire lilt. He frequently drops his articles and employs the glottal stop (something frustratingly difficult to capture in writing). This stylistic choice was intended to convey the roughness of Taro’s Banshū dialect against the old lady’s refined Kyoto style. Perhaps if I’d been born American, Taro would’ve spoken with a Southern drawl, or if Australian, an Aussie twang. 

Anyway, that’s all I’ll say for now. Hopefully, the extract will speak for itself and the spider lilies will be in bloom again in just a few weeks. 

Thanks for reading.

—Andrew Innes

A flower shop with a thatched roof stood on a dirt road that curved past a dense bamboo grove. It was an old wooden structure with sliding paper doors and a tiled roof, nestled among several other businesses on a quiet street in rural Kyoto. A small river wound through the neighbourhood, and several ducks were now navigating their way around the partially frozen surface of their home.

The wooden walls were adorned with hanging baskets of seasonal flowers: bright pinks and yellows that sparkled in the last of the day’s winter sun. Inside, an old lady was putting the finishing touches on an arrangement commissioned by an extremely important customer. The wind chime by the doorway signalled the arrival of a customer as a shy-looking young lady pushed open the sliding door and started browsing. She wore a faded indigo kimono and kept her eyes low; her cheeks flushed after the chill of Kyoto’s winter streets.

“Hello. Do you need any help, dear?” asked the old lady.

“I’m just looking, thank you.”

The old lady smiled and returned her attention to the arrangement. A few minutes passed, with the young lady occasionally leaning forward to read a label attached to an arrangement or to smell the perfume of something that caught her eye. The air inside the shop had a different quality to it—warm and somehow alive.

“Can I ask a question?”

Most customers got down to business and asked for what they wanted the moment they walked through the door: an arrangement for a funeral or a wedding, or perhaps flowers to say thank you for something. Yet, occasionally, a customer danced around what they really wanted to say, lost for words as the old lady waited patiently for what she knew was coming—matters of the heart.

“Yes, dear. How can I help?”

“There is someone in my village. A man whom I respect and admire.” The young lady turned to inspect a bunch of pink flowers as she spoke. “We have courted a couple of times, and, well, surely that would mean that we are on the path to becoming husband and wife?”

The old lady nodded as the young lady walked around the shop, inspecting the leaves of an exotic plant that towered over a water feature in the corner before stopping to gaze out of the window at the snow that fell outside.

“He acts as though we have all the time in the world to get married, and yet I am already twenty-one! It’s like he’s more interested in fishing with his friends or playing shōgi at all hours. At this rate, I’ll end up an old spinster.” The young lady turned from the window to face the old lady.

“Well, dear, sometimes flowers speak when words fail us.” As the old lady said this, her assistant emerged from a door at the back of the shop carrying a bowl of ramen noodles. Taro was a lanky lad in his twenties who spent most of his shift leafing through a book of haikus when he thought he could get away with it, and yet his manner with customers was less than poetic.

“Nosegay.”

“I beg your pardon?” the young lady said.

Taro took a long slurp from the bowl. “Don’t pin it on’ right side o’ yer cleavage, though. Gives a bloke’ wrong idea.” Taro placed both hands on the bowl to warm them, his fingers poking out from the tips of his cotton gloves. The young lady cocked her head to the side and shot him a quizzical look.

“Signifies friendship, nothin’ more.” Taro traced a hand through the air. The customer looked over at the old lady as though she could shed some light on what this unruly young man was talking about. “Pin it right over yer ‘eart. Now that’s an unambiguous declaration o’ love.”

Taro didn’t speak with the same soft dialect of Kyoto as the old lady. His turn of speech suggested that he’d grown up in the rural parts of Banshū, where people rolled their Rs, and the main event of the year was the Fighting Festival, held down by the port.

“Oh, that’s just a fad that’s sweeping Europe right now, dear. They say it’s less about the language of flowers and more about covering up the smell of death and disease that pervades the streets.”

“Well, from what I ‘eard on’t grapevine, that famous kabuki actor, ‘Aseba Satori’s been sayin’ the trend’s gonna tek Japan by storm, ‘n ‘e should know. Ee’s at all the parties these arty types go t’.” Taro raised his eyebrows and gave a quick nod while holding the young lady’s gaze.

“Haseba Satori says a lot of things, and not a lot of them comport with reality. Besides, this young lady needs our help.”

“Flowers for a man y’ like, eh? Red camellias should do’ job. They signify love, don’ they?” Taro leant on the counter and gestured with his eyes towards the bucket by the door, where a few glossy red blooms floated in shallow water.

“Red camellias mean love, yes. But alone, they’re too bold, bordering on boastful. They speak of love, but they can overwhelm someone who’s not ready for such directness. She doesn’t want to scare him off now, do you, dear?”

“No.”

“Okay, whaddabout them bright yellow chrysanthemums over there? Cheerful, right? They’ll show ‘im she’s happy t’ be around ‘im.” Taro tipped his bowl in the direction of the flowers, steam curling past his grin as he downed the ramen broth with a loud slurp.

“Yellow chrysanthemums can signify neglected love. Are we trying to send out the message that this woman is happy to be ignored?” The old lady shot Taro a quizzical look.

“All right, then. Hold me ‘ands up.” Taro flicked his hands up. “Roses. Y’ can’t get more direct than a rose, can yuh?” Taro shot the young lady a quick wink.

“You’ve been listening to Haseba Satori and his obsession with Western conventions again, haven’t you? This is supposed to be the first whisper of a lifelong romance, not the final act of a kabuki play.”

“Alright then, yuh got me stumped. What’d you suggest, boss?”

The old lady nodded outside to a cluster of flowers that were weighted down with snow.

“White camellias?” Taro screwed up his face like he was being force-fed a raw onion.

“White camellias’ endurance through the cold winter months symbolises the quiet strength of unspoken admiration. Pink camellias represent beauty and love, while red camellias signify humility. Harmony, dear, something you’d do well to study.” She tweaked a blossom, her eyes never leaving the display.

“All right, all right. Well, how about throwin’ in a couple o’ yellow tulips?” Taro snapped his fingers a few times, trying to recall what they meant. “Unrequited love!” he burst out, jabbing a finger toward the old lady.

“Your arrangement would be more of a presentation than a whisper. A white camellia hints at a romantic interest but without overwhelming the recipient. It’s a patient, respectful message that shows that the intention is untainted by ulterior motives. Again, something you’d do well to study, dear.”

“What’s this fella do feh’ livin’, anyway?” Taro narrowed his eyes and scanned the young lady’s face.

“He’s a gardener.”

“A gardener, you say?” The old lady’s face lit up at the mention of the suitor’s profession. “Well, that explains a great deal. I hold a special kind of respect for someone who shapes nature with their hands.”

“He’s very skilled. He tends to the pine trees at the daimyō’s estate. His pruning is so precise. It’s like art.” The young lady gazed out of the window as snow fell onto the plum blossom trees, their buds still hiding from the cold.

“Then he must be conversant in the language of flowers, and you must match his craft with a gift that speaks to his passion and skill, dear. Wait here.” The old lady grabbed a pair of gloves and headed out into the garden.

“You mist mitch his craaft with a gift thit speaks to ‘is passion ‘n skill,” Taro pulled a face as he mimicked his boss’s voice. “Right, never mind the old bag. This chap clearly knows ‘is roses from ‘is daffodils. If you really wanna capture ‘is attention, you gotta go big, show ‘im you’ve done yer research. Here …” Taro started picking various flowers from around the room and placing them on the counter.

“Mountain azalea shows ‘is connection t’ earth.” He nodded, his eyes wide as he locked eyes with the young customer and grabbed a cluster of the pale pink blooms from a nearby vase. “Sturdy little things, grow right outta’ rock, they do. Perfect if y’ want t’ say he’s grounded, dependable. If e’s as sharp as ‘e seems, e’ll take it as a sign t’ mek a move. You wait,” Taro said with a wink.

He checked a chart on the wall titled The Language of Flowers and ran his finger down it while licking his lips in concentration. He found what he was looking for and gave it a couple of taps.

“Pine. Right, this symbolises longevity ‘n steadfastness. A sprig or two’ll show ‘im that yer thinkin’ of a lastin’ bond, not just a quick frolic on’t tatami.”

Taro checked the chart again while making a tutting sound. “Let’s throw in a coupl’u daffodils; just a hint t’ warn ‘im not t’ get too comfortable in case ‘e turns out t’ be a wrong ‘un. A few roses to hammer the point home in case ‘e’s a bit thick, tie it all up with some gold ribbon, and if ‘e don’t take the bait, e’s not wuth bother, anyway.”

Taro leaned back and cracked his neck from side to side like a boxer readying himself for a prize fight. The young lady frowned at the assemblage of flowers of different sizes and colours laid out on the counter as Taro consulted the chart and began totting up the bill with a wooden abacus.

As this was taking place, the wind chime over the door tinkled as the old lady walked back in, holding a bunch of white camellias. She swept Taro’s flowers out of the way, laid hers on the counter and placed a single pink one in the centre.

“Now, dear, in ikebana, we call this the Earth Line. It represents the foundation of your message, in this case, unspoken longing.” She added a sprig of pine needles, arranging them to arc delicately above the blooms.

“Pine,” the old lady said, “shows him that your feelings are not fleeting, like clouds passing across the sky.”

She then took a few plum blossoms, their soft pink buds still tightly closed, and positioned them near the camellias but slightly apart.

“Plum blossoms are the Man Line. They add depth and harmony. They say, ‘I wish for a future with you that is as beautiful as the spring.’ The closed buds show that your relationship is about to blossom but needs warmth.”

The final touch was a single purple iris that stood tall and proud in the arrangement. The old lady placed it with deliberate care, allowing its height to draw the viewer’s eyes upward.

“The iris is the Heaven Line and represents future aspirations. Together, they form a balanced composition that reflects the interconnectedness of all things. If he’s conversant in the language of flowers, it should encourage him to find the courage to make his intentions clear.”

The young lady clasped her hands together, her face glowing.

“It’s perfect,” she whispered.

Taro shrugged and swept a few leaves off the counter onto the floor, muttering something under his breath as the old lady added the finishing touches to the display.

“How much is that?” she asked.

The old lady gave a price that was well below what the arrangement was worth. The young lady paid the money and left the shop, a cold breeze blowing inside as Taro stared in disbelief at the measly pile of money on the counter.

“I’m never gonna earn a decent livin’ at this rate,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothin’,” Taro said as he stuffed a couple of the crumpled notes into a wooden money box and turned the key before pocketing a couple for himself. “Although, don’t you think an arrangement like that is wuth just a bit more? Y’ could’u charged ‘er twice as much ‘n she’d’uh no more batted an eye than bitten yer’ ‘and off.”

The old woman’s fingers hovered above a half-trimmed camellia stem, her gaze steady on the arrangement. “A proprietor must weigh more than aesthetics, Taro. Reputation, yes, but also a customer’s means.” She raised her eyebrows again. “Had the young lady been betrothed to the gardener’s father, the daimyō himself, I might have reconsidered.”

Taro scratched the back of his neck and grimaced. “That’s not really what I’m gettin’ at.”

She snipped the stem with a crisp click. “Then explain.”

He shifted his weight, glancing toward the doorway where sunlight shone across the floorboards. “I mean, you’ve got these big ideas about teachin’ ikebana’n all that, but don’t yuh think focusin’ on’t financial side o’ things would be f’ best?”

She turned slowly to face him. “And what, in your estimation, would be ‘f’ best’ from a financial point of view?”

He gave a shrug, his eyes drifting to the flower arrangement by the door as if it might explain things for him. “Dunno. Japanese haute cuisine.”

The old lady tilted her head slightly, one brow lifting as she reached for a fresh stem. “You mean kaiseki? I’m not following.”

Taro lifted both hands, as if tracing a narrow alley. “Ponto-chō, Shijō Dōri. All them little restaurants that cost a fortune. You’ve seen ‘em: paper lanterns, polished counters, some feller wi’ topknot bangin’ out fancy grub.”

The old lady sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Now think how hard it is to set up shop there. Not just anyone gets in. You’ve got to be’ best or not bother.”

“Could you please get to the point, Taro?”

He leaned forward, elbows resting on the counter. “Right. Those fancy kaiseki places charge a fortune, but their overheads are also sky ‘igh. Now, one street over, Tanaka-san’s got his udon stand. Nothing fancy. Just bowls o’ simple food that fill a feller’s stomach of a night. That’s the kind of thing common folk queue fuh.”

She looked down at the chrysanthemum in her hand. “Not everyone is just looking to fill their stomach, Taro.”

He gave a crooked grin. “Maybe not. But they all eat, ‘n the question you’ve gorra ask yerself is this: are you gonna be forever tryin’ t’ be the fancy kaiseki gaff or just accept things ‘n settle for the udon stand?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘accept things and settle for the udon stand’? Is that a metaphor for my business?”

Taro shrugged, pushing the broom across the wooden floor with slow, deliberate strokes. “Just sayin’. Folk line up for udon ‘cause it’s simple.”

The old woman narrowed her eyes.

Taro kept sweeping. “Maybe sell this place ‘n try a stall at the market. Buckets o’ blooms, cheap and cheerful. Pile it ‘igh, sell it cheap. I mean, when was the last time some rich samurai ‘ad one of ‘is servants rock up ‘n commission an arrangement fer ‘is decorative alcove, anyway?” Taro asked as he nudged a clump of fallen leaves towards the corner of the shop.

The old lady nodded towards the arrangement she was working on.

“What do you think this is?”

“Impressive.” Taro stuck out his bottom lip and nodded. “Just so long as ‘their payin’ y’ the kaiseki rate, mind.” Taro held the old lady’s gaze and nodded his head. “Anyway, there’s summat else I wanted t’ talk t’ you about.”

“Oh, lucky me,” the old lady said as she checked the various aspects of the arrangement.

Taro hesitated before sighing. His broom stopped mid-sweep. “How can ah put it?” He bit his bottom lip, his eyes scanning the worn floorboards as if the right words might be hiding in the grain. “You’ve, ah, dropped a few clangers recently.”

The old woman straightened a stem in a vase, her hands pausing. “I’ve dropped a few clangers?”

“Right, ‘ear me out.” He lifted his hands. “That couple last week. Y’ gave ‘em wrong flowers. They wanted ‘n arrangement wi’ white lilies, but y’ gave ‘em yellow chrysanthemums.” Taro counted out a one on his thumb.

“An’ then, there were that temple order f’ New Year. Y’ sent plum branches, when thid asked f’ pine. The bald bloke in charge said not t’ worry, but ‘e looked a bit taken aback.” Taro held out a second finger.

“And I did, once you’d pointed it out.”

“Well, yes. Just, mibbe think about slowin’ down a bit.” Taro let the broom handle rest on his chest. “‘N ‘ave a think about changin’ business style.” The old lady tilted her head and pretended to inspect the arrangement for just a little longer as Taro walked outside.

Grass encrusted with ice like diamond dust sparkled in the sunlight and crunched underfoot as Taro headed over to a small shed. His breath rose into the air in white clouds that dissipated above the plum blossoms as he grabbed a shovel and began clearing the snow off the path. As he busied himself outside, the old lady gazed out through the frosted glass of the window and thought about what Taro had said.

She would never admit that she was losing her touch, but had Taro really been right about the monk and the couple, not to mention the merchant’s wife? She was aware that Taro had his sights set on taking over the business and sometimes got the feeling that he was trying to speed the process up.

It was time for a cup of tea …

The 6th edition of the annual Writers in Kyoto anthology invites us to consider the future of this storied city through evocative haiku, thoughtful short stories, and analytic theses; from the literal to the speculative and aspirational.

From the Foreword by Rebecca Copeland:

“Complex and layered, Kyoto stretches across a temporal spectrum: past, present and future… The creative works gathered here imagine that future. Some contributors venture into speculative realms, envisioning a vertical city suspended in space. Others root their predictions in historical sediment. Still others reflect the city through the lens of contemporary life, tracing emerging families, re-imagined identities, and inventing Kyoto futures grounded in the here and now.

“What is the future, after all, but a projection? A time not yet experienced but always imagined—a realm of dreams, uncertainties, prophecies, and hopes.

“To speak of Kyoto’s future is, paradoxically, to invoke its past. This collection invites us to do just that: to imagine what lies ahead while honoring what was always there.”

Paperback (174 pages, 6 x 9 in.) at Amazon stores worldwide, including:
Amazon US | Amazon Japan | Amazon UK | Amazon Canada

Digital (PDF) version at Gumroad

Edited by
Suzanne Kamata & Felicity Tillack

Contributors:
Sara Aoyama • Licia Braga • Adam Clague • Tina deBellegarde • Abigail Deveney • Lane Diko • Hamish Downie • Mike Freiling • Carter Hale • Amanda Huggins • Mai Ishikawa • Suzanne Kamata • Mayumi Kawaharada • Kirsty Kawano • Marianne Kimura • Elaine Lies • Nathan Mader • Stephen Mansfield • Lea Millay • Dave Tampus Pregoner • Anne Roskowski • John Savoie • Lisa Twaronite Sone • Edward J. Taylor • Hayley Noel Wallace • Isabelle Wei • Yuki Yamauchi

Designed by
Rick Elizaga

Contents

Foreword — Rebecca Copeland

Introduction — Felicity Tillack and Suzanne Kamata

Elements — Lea Millay

Fruitful — Lisa Twaronite Sone

The Knife Salesman — Amanda Huggins

Neo Kyoto — Hamish Downie

The Future of Filmmaking in Kyoto — Yuki Yamauchi

京のうつろひ | Drift of Kyoto — Mayumi Kawaharada

Limbo — Licia Braga

The Persimmon Tree — Sara Aoyama

Orpheus and Eurydice in Shiga-ken — Marianne Kimura

Trying to Understand — Kirsty Kawano

Togetsukyo Bridge in the Rain — Isabelle Wei

Angels Watching Over Us — Mike Freiling

On Repeat — Abigail Deveney

A Foreign Visitor — Mai Ishikawa

Zen and the Art of Italian Cooking — Tina deBellegarde

Basho in Love — John Savoie

The Great Buddha of Kyoto — Kirsty Kawano

The Deposit — Elaine Lies

What Remains To Be Seen — Dave Tampus Pregoner

Confluence — Nathan Mader

map — Hayley Noel Wallace 

Umbrella Store — Carter Hale

Memory Card — Stephen Mansfield

While the Lacquer Dries — Adam Clague

Butterfly — Anne Roskowski

One for the Ages — Edward J. Taylor

Kyoto: Where the Cuckoo Calls — Suzanne Kamata

Afterword — Szabó Renáta

Notes on Contributors

The cultural center is located in Fujisawa, a Tokyo bedroom community, and Hasegawa has talked about the “liquidity and diversity” of her sites, of the process of planning and conceiving architecture as a “work of making topography.” That fluidity and inclusion of landscape contouring is evident in the conflation of silvery surfaces, cage-like panels of steel, perforated aluminum trees, a riverbed made from tile, stained glass, vine-hung stainless-steel pergolas, and a set of cosmic spheres. 

Hasegawa was the first woman to win an architectural competition of this type, and reactions among the older male fraternity of Japanese designers were less than flattering, with one well-known architect comparing her plan to a “naïve child’s drawing;” another deriding it as “gaudy, pop, idiosyncratic, and eccentric.” There are certainly playful elements in the design, with sea shells embedded in its floors and concrete walls, tile pavers embossed with animal tracks, and green and blue marbles placed above perforated ceiling panels. This is a garden very much within the public domain. When its winding stream, made from artificial tiles, is filled with water, children magically appear to paddle and play, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale village in the midst of a cluttered urban residential zone. Unbeknown to the gamboling toddlers, the yari-mizu, or winding stream, is an ancient garden component.

Interestingly, the completion of the project was also a small but significant triumph over gender discrimination. Hasegawa recalls obstructionist male local officials treating her, “as if I were a radical social activist.” As a woman, she recalled, the local bureaucrat assigned to supervise the project, felt that “like the sumo wrestling ring, women should not be allowed to enter a construction site.” Hasegawa prevailed, and the project was completed in 1990.

The absence of natural materials does not appear to have diminished the popularity of the site, or its recognition by locals as a garden. This raises some interesting questions. If the unstated intention of the contemporary landscape artist is to create a modernist utopia, a futuristic garden prototype, is it possible to do so by means of purely synthetic materials? 

WALKING THE SHORE OF LAKE BIWA NEAR OGOTO ONSEN

BLUE HYDRANGEAS BLASTED

Blue hydrangeas blasted
By headlight after headlight
Next to the expressway
Remain unmoved like
Carnations on the lapels
Of our dead prom kings
The expressionlessness
Of their formal beauty
A cloud of unknowing
That keeps saying nothing
Is everything in the interior
Where fields of flowers
Bloom and the cicadas’
Shed exoskeletons gleam
In memory’s memory
Like gold-plated armor
On the plains of Troy

YOU SAID I SPOKE IN TONGUES WHILE I SLEPT

Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (2024), published by fine. press and shortlisted for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 (Biblioasis).

Rossiter is himself a poet and the founder of Isobar Press, which recently published a handsome edition of Hubbell’s selected poems. He started his talk by using extracts from his own scholarly 38-page introduction to this volume to familiarise us with Hubbell. Hubbell’s mother had a passion for the theatre and often took him to see local productions of Shakespeare. Hubbell must have been profoundly influenced by this, because he said that he started reading Shakespeare at the age of eight, and by the age of ten, had not only read all of the plays, but memorised them too.  

Yoko Danno the founder of Ikuta Press, which published Hubbell’s work after he came to Japan, was greatly encouraged by Hubbell at the start of her own career as a poet. She shared some amusing recollections of him, including her first meeting with him in 1967, at his house in Kyoto. Her anxiety at meeting the famous professor was soon dispelled by his playful yakuza-style greeting when he opened the front door and his admission that, because his house had no bath, he had taken up the offer of the proprietress of a nearby “lovers’ inn”, who had said he could use her hot spring facilities to take a bath after midnight. He did this before his usual bedtime of 4.00 or 5.00 a.m.

Rossiter followed this with readings of Hubbell’s poems, moving from the early, short and formal rhyming verses in the style of the New York poets of the 1920s, through the greatly expanded range of the work of his mid-thirties that followed a time of personal crisis. It was during this period that he produced the modernist “Long Island Triptych”, which Rossiter considers to be a masterpiece and one of the few cubist poems in the English language. Hubbell moved to Japan in 1953, at the age of 52, after which his poems became more relaxed and often humorous, though still technically precise:

KAMAKURA (1967)

After fourteen years the loudspeaker blaring jazz had gone.
The bars and the soft drink stalls had gone with time.
The G.I. whores who climbed on the statue to be photographed  
Were superseded by a sign that said: DO NOT CLIMB

ON THE STATUE. Japan had reasserted itself.
Reverence had returned to the place.
But to the Buddha it was as if nothing had happened.
There was no change in his face.

Hubbell, who lived to the age of 93, spent the last few years of his life bedridden in a hospital ward that he had to share with some other elderly patients — the only lucid mind in a roomful of senility. A private room in a Christian hospital was procured for him, but he refused to move into it, saying he was dedicated to Shinto, not Christianity.  

Paul Snowden, who met Hubbell in 1969 through his wife who was a student of Hubbell’s at Doshisha University, was also moved to come forward and share some stories about him. He recalled visiting him at his small house in Nishinomiya, near the Hanshin baseball stadium, and said that he was charming and generous, sending the Snowdens, from that time onwards, a copy of every volume of verse he had published.

After the readings we looked through the wide selection of Isobar Press publications at temptingly reduced prices which Rossiter and his wife had brought with them, and the Ikuta Press pamphlets that Yoko Danno had brought with her to give away.  

Some of us then headed to a nearby Italian restaurant where Paul told us a lot more about his experiences with publishing.  

Walking back to Kyoto station after dinner, with others who had come from faraway locations such as Kobe and Gifu, with a stomach full of beer and pizza and a backpack full of new books, I felt that it had been in many ways a very nourishing day.   

© Michael J. Freiling, 2025. All rights reserved. Permission to publish brief quotes or excerpts is hereby granted, provided the quote or passage is attributed as follows: “Michael Freiling, in Observations from Kyoto.”

The year was 1978. The month was late August or early September. The place was Ryoan-ji, site of the best-known rock garden in Japan. I was well into the last month of my Luce Scholarship year in Kyoto, not to return for at least six years. So it was time for farewells — farewell to my dorm mates in Yamashina, and farewells especially to the places I had come to know and love in Kyoto. Ryoan-ji was one of those.

The rock garden of Ryoan-ji is in some sense the “queen of all rock gardens,” the quintessential exemplar against which all others are measured. If you were to open a book on Japanese rock gardens, you’d only see it as one among many, perhaps not even the most attractive. But open any other book on Japan, Japanese culture, Japanese Buddhism, or what have you, and flip through the book until you come to a picture of a rock garden. I’d wager the odds will be heavily in favor of discovering a picture of Ryoan-ji.

What accounts for the respect accorded to this rock garden? Could it be a sort of “branding effect?” Once anointed the queen of all rock gardens, photographs abound and time-pressured content creators have simply gravitated toward the most accessible source? 

Could it be that this garden’s very simplicity and abundance of negative space lends itself to modern photography in a way that others do not — whether the photographer wishes to focus on a single formation, or create the illusion of sweeping vistas in a space that, once seen up close, appears remarkably confined?

Or could it be that Ryoan-ji hits some sort of sweet spot between the representational and the non-representational — call it “almost representational” if you will — capable of becoming a sort of tabula rasa on which the viewer is invited (or even tempted) to assign representations that fascinate because they are deeply personal?

During my scholarship year, I developed just such a fascination. One of the abiding advantages of Ryoan-ji is the gallery of bleacher seats, situated slightly above the garden, from which the visitor can sit for a while and contemplate an unimpeded view of the entire space.

So here I was, sitting on the lowest level of the gallery bleachers, quietly contemplating the rocks, hoping this time to fathom their mysterious significance, since it might be a long time before I would have the opportunity to do so again.

As I sat there surveying the scene, I began to hear some discussions going on behind me. The conversation was in Japanese, and conducted quietly. In those days, most of the tourists were themselves Japanese, and not prone to loud commentaries so much as quiet expressions like eh… or so desu ne.

Listening more closely, the dialog was taking the form of a question and answer session, the questions being posed by an older, deeper voice, and the answers given by small groups, likely families.

The question seemed to repeat itself over and over — doku iku? Where are you going? Each time the question was asked, it was answered by a litany of several of the more famous tourist spots in Kyoto — Kinkaku-ji, Nanzen-ji, Kiyomizu, Fushimi Inari, punctuated by the older voice interjecting with an ahh … or a naruhodo, as appropriate.

An odd conversation, to be sure. Or rather, an odd sequence of conversations. Almost like I was listening to a quiz show, waiting for the contestant who could come up with the prize-winning answer. But no, the questions went on and on, the contestants came and went.

Finally my curiosity got the better of me, and I twisted my upper body around to get a better sense of what was going on. Back behind the gallery, in the flat strip that opened into a hall of temple rooms, I saw a Zen monk, fully robed, speaking with a Japanese tourist family. He asked the question, they provided the answers. He would nod sagely, mutter his aahh . . . or naruhodo, and move on.

On closer scrutiny, it became clear that the monk was having a very good time of it. As he moved from family to family, his sage and earnest face would dissolve into an impish grin. The grin lasted only a moment — then the sage was back, stalking his next quarry.

Was it a hobby? Was it a sport? Was he trying to teach a lesson? If so, just what exactly was the lesson? Pondering this question over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that “lesson” comes the closest, but it was not an immediate lesson he was aiming for. Rather, it was a sort of deferred lesson, one intended to lie latent in the soul, ready to spring into bloom at the appropriate time.

The question itself can be asked on many levels. In its most quotidian sense, it is roughly equivalent to “What do you plan to do next?,” which is the way most of the tourists he talked to chose to interpret the question. But of course, there are many other dimensions. Where are you going to school? Where are you going in your career? Where are you going in your life?

To those who search for universals among the world’s manifold spiritual paths, the deepest sense of this question — Where am I going? — ranks as one of the three questions that drive every spiritual search, the others being Who am I? and Where did I come from?

Its surface simplicity masks the fact that it is the most trenchant of the three, the one that demands an answer right now — an answer in the form of action. It is immediately recognizable as the “Quo vadis?” of the Western tradition¹. These four simple words (just two in Japanese) burn themselves into our soul, hounding us for an answer. And not just any answer — an answer that speaks to the heart of who we are.

This deeper meaning represents what I believe were the monk’s true intentions. Acting as a kind of spiritual Johnny Appleseed, planting small seeds of insight and self-realization that he would not see germinate — that would reach fruition in some unknown time, in some unknown place, in a parent or a child. A time and place where the question “Where are you going?” might emerge from the depths of the unconscious with irresistible urgency.

I like to imagine a young boy or girl, aged 6 or 7 at that time, listening to the question and not realizing that a seed has been planted. Perhaps some 20 years later, the full impact of these two Japanese words comes into view, compelling this young person to embark on a serious search for a suitable answer.

Our monk at Ryoan-ji was certainly playful. But was this a sustainable playfulness, or was he simply in a good mood that day? To put it differently, what would happen if we tried to knock the monk off balance with a question of our own that he could not answer? Or an insult, or an accusation? How would we evaluate his response?

The literature of Zen is full of stories that illustrate what we might expect. But in the end, we would each have to make up our own minds as to what qualifies as evidence of sustainability. I’ve tried a number of thought experiments to determine my own criteria, and I usually get to the same place.

Let’s say somebody walks up to the monk, gets in his face, and says something like “You know, you really are a fraud. Walking around with that look on your face, like you were Dogen or Eisai². Trying to impress everybody with your faux-erudite question.”

What would we expect him to say, if he were truly the man we hoped him to be? The best answer I’ve come up with is that the monk gets that impish grin again. He does not argue, or even try to refute. He simply says “You’re right! Sometimes I disappoint myself,” shrugs his shoulders and walks away.

But as he moves on, he breathes a silent prayer to Kannon for mercy on that poor guy who seems so much more concerned with the monk’s soul than he is with his own.

Notes:

1. An adaptation of this story for Western readers unfamiliar with Zen may be found at shimenawa.org. ︎
2. Dogen (1200 – 1253) was the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism. Eisai (1141 – 1215) founded the Rinzai school of Zen. ︎

In the different homes I’ve inhabited in England, Spain and rural France, I’ve always inherited someone else’s garden. In Japan, we were able to buy a used home in the decidedly uncool city of Funabashi in Chiba prefecture, where I could start to make a garden almost from scratch. This video shows the result: the work of a determined, but flawed amateur.

By Japanese urban standards, the plot, at around 250 sq.m. was decently proportioned. The L-shaped house took up roughly half the space. The former owner, a cheerful widow in her sixties, was to be commended for her efforts in creating a garden, but tastes differ, and the more I looked at the design, the more I wanted to replace, or superimpose a new design, one that would loosely follow the principals of a Japanese-style garden. 

First off was creating privacy, by planting 18 maki (podocarps) along three sides of the garden. Over time, the trees would grow together, creating a green ikegaki (living fence). Stones of different sizes and heft would be placed at the front rim of a slightly elevated earthen section at the back. Aesthetically pleasing rocks can cost a fortune, so we shopped around to get a good deal, eventually bringing them in from Gunma prefecture. This was the point where I needed some help. Under my directions regarding placement, a local garden company took over, using a traditional pulley system to lower the stones. Logs placed under the rocks were used to haul them from the truck. This was also a chance to remove some of the previous owner’s possessions, such as ornamental cement logs and plastic garden furniture. One of the garden crew was delighted to come into possession of a row of garden gnomes. Everyone was happy.

Most of the original garden was covered in gray sand, not unlike industrial road gravel. Although it was early spring when we moved in, I could imagine mosquito-infested puddles forming in the summer and dust whorls blowing up on dry days. The whole area was covered in turf, 400 pieces in all, creating another tonal graduation on the theme of green, one that would also cool down the garden.

Last in were the plants and miniature trees: fragrant olive, Japanese yew, junipers, fatsia, azalea and cycads, with mondo grass and ferns as ground cover. The only ornamental touches were a row of border-creating inverted roof tiles, two old mill stones, some ceramic basins for water hyacinths, and a small stone basin.

This, more or less, is what you will see in my first YouTube video, ‘An Englishman’s Japanese Garden (in Japan)’.

“Ting….. . . . . . .”

His singing bowl rang but not everyone was ready to hear it. When the talk lulled:
“Ting….. . . . .  .   .” again.

Focus. Cautioning us against negative thoughts, hoping for comments based on ‘appreciative inquiry’, he encouraged us to make eye contact with each person in the room. This was repeated later.

Now we were receptive, after showing pictures of Classically Balanced Imposing State Buildings (my styling, my impression) in Washington DC, a city he could not warm to as a child, he downplayed the forms of connected rational, one-thing-leading-to-another composition structures that our educators inculcated into our minds. On the fringes of states, communities with different narrative traditions survive. Children here find it hard to sew text with classical threads.

Likewise, translators from Japanese into northern European or Romance languages, have problems making comprehensible, to target readers, newspaper op-ed content written in ki > shō > ten > ketsu form.

Presenting asymmetry, Andy showed pictures of ikebana, ink drawings, a gable wall with higgledy-piggledy — sorry, “asymmetric” — windows in his house. The important thing in such arrangements is the space between elements and clustering…

Space             mind      play
         where            can 

Japanese art, they say, does not impose something finished on the observer, reader, or listener: during its reception, a response emerges, a process towards perfection. Andy likes the concept of emergence. And what’s not to like?

Now we were clued into asymmetry and space, the writing could begin.

Lists. Things you want and don’t want to write about. Today’s Categories: Faces, Scenes, Ideas, Feelings. Under those, any Items that come out of your pen.

Prompted by our items, we wrote for thirty-five minutes.

While the first volunteer read a long and fluent passage, Andy took notes. Afterwards, he shared a list of seemingly random words culled from the text. The effect was poetic and impressive. From a comment Andy made, such lists may hint at the interpretation that a receiver of communication makes during reception.

From my dump of disparate items, I read a personal, chronological passage that jumped locations. When I read it aloud, it had story. Andy read back his word list:

“Tch! He didn’t get it”—at-the-same-time—“Ah, openness, and textual non-completion.” He had engineered showing not telling. Reception. I was learning.

Hanging out with differently like-minded people, writing along with others, hearing feedback on their writing and my own… a rewarding afternoon. I’m glad I bothered.

Andy Couterier’s website, theopening.org has relevant articles:

• Ikebana Asymmetry and the Mind (PDF)
• Asymmetry Writing & the Mind (PDF)

His book, Writing Open the Mind, is available on Amazon and elsewhere.
On YouTube, Andy has posted a Zoom session of the same type of workshop.

After class this morning, over delicious muffins, Aimi joined Benoît, me, and José, who leads an ideal life: spring and fall in Kyoto, winter in India, and summer in Luxembourg. As ingenuous as she is beautiful, Aimi is frequently the butt of Benoît’s teasing. When Aimi told us she was twenty-four, Benoît told her why he came to Kyoto exactly twenty-four years ago: “I heard you were coming.”

The conversation revolved around colours. Aimi had led us in a visualization meditation in which we were asked to imagine the colour emerald green, which Aimi told us was the colour of love. José complained he couldn’t keep the colour in his mind, it kept changing to magenta, then black. Aimi told us that, contrary to most thinking, black is a good colour. “It certainly is,” said José. “As you can see, all my clothes are black. So that I don’t have to wash them as often.” Aimi averred that she mostly wears white, but that gradually she too is leaning to black.

We discussed our real age and how old we actually felt. Clearly, we were all feeling younger than usual this morning. I rattled on about the subjectivity of time in the noh play I saw last week, Kantan. I told her the plot, about how a young man in China who is on his way to the capital to write the civil service examination stops in Hantan (Kantan in Japanese). The lady at his inn bids him rest from his travels while she makes some gruel for him. She gives him a magic pillow, and he dreams that a messenger comes from the capital announcing that he has been chosen as the next emperor of China. There follows in his dream a lifetime that only gods and emperors can enjoy: fine food, sweet music, beautiful companions … Fifty years flash by in the blink of an eye. Then the old lady wakes him from his nap. “A magic pillow?” Aimi was intrigued.

Benoît steered the conversation back to colours. “I have a story,” he said. “So, José and I were having this debate over white and black—which is better? He said black, I said white. It went back and forth. Finally, I convinced him to buy my black and white TV, saying it was colour.”

Aimi was bemused. “Don’t you know he’s pulling your leg?” said José. “I’ve known this guy for ten years and still can’t tell when he’s being serious. Why, just yesterday, Benoît told Eri I was opening a kakigōri shop this summer in Luxembourg and she laughed at me. But the fact is, I really am!”

A shop selling Japanese snow cones in Luxembourg? Maybe the joke was on José. But no, I find out, the joke’s on us: José is spiking his snow cones with alcohol, like frozen daiquiris.

A year later, Aimi left for greener pastures, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say she took a piece of my heart. This morning for the first time I returned for the morning class with her replacement, Tina. As I entered, the ladies behind the counter told Tina that this was the guy they’d been talking about (kore ga uwasa no Cody) “Huh?” (nan ya sore?) I replied. God knows what they’ve been saying about me.

In Tina’s class I ran into an old friend of Aimi’s whom I hadn’t seen in months, Nanami. The last time I saw her she’d told me she was tired of life with her old partner; they didn’t have the same interests. “You’re young,” I said, “maybe it’s time to move on and find someone who lights the spark you need.” Today, she thanked me for my advice. Not only had she broken up with the old boyfriend, but she’d found another guy and they got married! She’d brought him to class with her and introduced me to him as the man who had brought them together. I felt conflicted, both cupid and homewrecker, but it was clear that she was happier than before.

The studio is on the third floor. On the second floor is a smaller studio and the cafe and shop selling hippie things. At the back every Sunday morning is Yūko, baking muffins. I ordered a cup of chai from her and, delivering it, Yūko said she approved of the advice I’d given Nanami. “Cody’s everybody’s dad here” (Cody wa minna no otōsan da), she concluded. Well, I thought. There are worse things to be.

Homewrecker

A family of pigeons have made a home out of one of my pocket balconies ever since I moved in. Last spring two pigeons became five: I discovered that they’d nested under the heat pump fan. The building manager was on at me for all their shit that was landing some ten stories down on the pavement, right in front of Wasabi, which is frequented by my drinking buddies Odani-san and Oi-chan. This spring, as I sat on my couch I looked out and mom and dad were at it again, fucking on the fan. Here we go again, I thought. On the manager’s urging, I contacted my landlord, and he sent over a crew to install some netting to prevent the birds from roosting there. Mother pigeon had already laid five eggs. I felt like the guy who’d sent a hitman to do a job. “What did you do with the eggs?” I asked. “We disposed of them,” the foreman said, but I noticed later they had left one. Mom was back this morning, perched on the netting looking at the one child left behind, looking at me, askance in the way pigeons do.

A Yoga Sex Comedy

Mark and I had gone to see the comedian Issey Ogata perform at the Kyoto Prefectural Center for Arts and Culture. We noticed a young foreign guy having an avid conversation with a young Japanese woman after the show. In the bicycle parking lot, Mark started chatting with him and we ended up inviting the lad to dinner with us. Joseph was from Boston and had a BA in Computer Science, but he was currently working for an NPO in Mongolia. He was visiting Japan to give a couple of talks. The woman at the theatre was a circus acrobat and had invited him to a party in Osaka that weekend.

 Joseph had spent his gap year between high school and university in Florianópolis, an idyllic beach resort in Brazil. Mark, who had once had a boyfriend from Brazil, plugged Joseph about Brazilian sexuality. It was Mark’s sense that Brazilians were highly sexed, yet their sexuality existed along a non-binary spectrum, the object of one’s desire being entirely situational, fluid.

We took ourselves to Que Pasa on Kawaramachi, which is run by a Japanese guy who learned on YouTube to make his quite authentic Mexican dishes. Another young fellow, a Filipino American from San Diego, was also working in the kitchen. A student at Ritsumeikan, he was a serious foodie. Simé, an Argentinian woman with a lot of tattoos and piercings, was serving us. Two other friends, Josh and Chris, presently joined us, making it a table of four middle-aged white men and one young, twenty-three-year-old white boy. We had been the first bunch into the door and had ordered our food early, but Simé had evidently lost the order, because we watched latecomers getting their dinners and leaving before we even got our food. The drink service was quicker, and the men were getting liquored up. A crude joke about the taco’s resemblance to the female genitalia had a Chilean friend of Simé’s, who was sitting next to us eating a burrito, rolling her eyes.

Josh invited Joseph to his guitar gig in Gion on Friday night. “Are you free?”

“That depends on what night the acrobat invites me to her birthday party in Osaka,” said Joseph. “My plans are a little liquid at the moment.”

“Fluid, you mean surely,” said Mark.

“I was trying to avoid that word,” said Joseph, parrying Mark’s earlier remark about gender and sexual fluidity among the Brazilians.

“More liquid, like I spilled my drink on the floor.”

We were all trying, each in our own way, to make the new boy our pet. Joseph was smart, well read, and adventurous. Who wouldn’t want his company?

Joseph, on the other hand, was looking for a good exit. This came when Josh noticed an attractive young woman at the next table. Josh eyed me. “Don’t you think she’s got a yoga body?” he asked me. “I’m gonna introduce her to you.”

“Hello, young miss? Senorita? My friend and I were having a debate here. I was saying you must be a yogini, but my friend doesn’t believe me. This is my friend Cody. He’s seriously into yoga.” Nice opening, Josh.

The girl turns and smiles. No, she doesn’t do yoga, she says. We all introduce ourselves; her eyes vaguely survey us, then turn to Joseph, who is sitting closest to her. Her name is Nanaho. Why are there so many Nanas passing through my life? The two young people immediately connect.

“You’ve been to Brazil?” asked Nanaho. “I’ve been to Brazil! You play the drums? So do I!”

The two of them immediately connect on whatever social media platform they use and take their party elsewhere.

Hanachan

One Sunday afternoon I attended another class at my downtown studio. There were just three of us, the instructor, who had lived in Toronto, and Hanachan, a young woman with whom I had taken classes before. The last time I saw her was on a retreat in Ishigaki this spring and she threw herself into my arms when I left. After class she told me she would be returning soon to Nagano where her husband awaited her. She has been periodically shuttling between Kyoto, where her mother is, and Nagano. “I bet it’ll be cooler in Nagano this summer,” I said. Not so, she said. Where they lived sat in a bowl surrounded by mountains just like Kyoto. Matsumoto? I wonder. That’s where Aimi was from. Maybe the girl of my dreams lives there, not in Kyoto. As I was leaving, she said, “give me a hug,” and we embraced warmly and for a long time. “I may not see you till next year,” she said regretfully.

I am too old (if not too wise) to fool myself into thinking there was anything romantic budding between us. Chalk it up to some paternal charge I gave off, or some unaccountable bond that sometimes Japanese people pick up on—袖擦り合うも他生（多少）の縁. In other words, perhaps it was karma from another life or something. Whatever it was, it made me unaccountably happy for the rest of the day. It is good to love and be loved.

Memento Mori

How I am feeling today. Life has its ups and its downs and sometimes its spills. A couple of weeks ago I sprained my left shoulder, then last night, trying to avoid an old couple, this old man slipped, riding his bike over a wet manhole cover. I managed to right the bike without falling over but tore my rotator cuff in the process. Where’s Hanachan when I need her? In Nagano no doubt.

These topics came up at a writers’ weekend hosted by longtime WiK member Rebecca Otowa on May 10-11th. Rebecca’s home deserves a special mention: her husband is the 19th generation of his family to occupy the 350-year old farmhouse in rural Shiga Prefecture. (For more on this, I recommend Rebecca’s book At Home In Japan – Tuttle, 2010.) They recently acquired the property next door and refurbished it as guest quarters, where our small group stayed.

Among the many experiences my fellow WiK members Rebecca, Karen Lee Tawarayama, Jann Williams and I share is that all of us have co-edited past WiK anthologies. We had coped with similar challenges of how to juggle the logistics of the project with our own busy lives — and we came to the same realization that prioritizing time for ourselves was not just an indulgence, but was vital to allow us to continuously approach our editing tasks with a fresh mind.

The weekend’s weather cooperated, and the predicted rain never fell. The four of us were able to take long walks around the village of Otowa, from which Rebecca’s family took its name. We foraged in their spring garden for snap peas, which Rebecca fried into exquisite tempura. 

But writing remained the focus, and our conversations somehow always returned to it. Rebecca suggested we do a series of exercises to unleash our creative energy — to stretch our muscles, so to speak.

My favorite of these involved selecting a book from her large library, opening to a page and writing down a random sentence to be the first line of a story — and then passing around the paper, for others to take a turn adding their own sentences. The results were surprisingly more coherent and compelling than I had expected.

In some ways, this exercise imitated life: all of us are born into random situations, and we then make our own marks before handing everything on to those who follow us to complete. Of course, in real life, we don’t always get to read the endings — instead, we have to imagine them, and understand that we’re just a single part of a long, unbroken circle.

I set the scene for the interview with my own recent experience of silence in an abbey in Belgium.

It is ultimately a simple wooden door, utterly discreet, that marks the passage between the outside and the inside. I had rushed to secure one of the few remaining parking spots along the road leading to Orval Abbey, a touristic and spiritual landmark in southeastern Belgium. On this weekend, a steady stream of visitors poured into the abbey shop and then on to the medieval ruins. Beyond the simple door, a paved courtyard awaited me, which I crossed to reach the monk-host’s office. Like dozens of people every day, I had come here for a retreat—a secular one in my case—to rediscover a state of mind that we tend to forget even exists, yet which we may well need: inner silence.

As I make my way to my monastic cell, which is reduced to the essentials (a bed, a table and a toilet), I cross the large courtyard, which has been landscaped into a park with a pond. A wall separates this haven of peace from the public part of the abbey, from where I can hear the joyful buzz of voices filtered through the distance. The few people I meet there avoid eye contact, while some offer a faint smile as we cross paths. Everyone is here for the same reason: to learn what silence can teach us.

Learning from Silence is precisely the subtitle of the book written by Pico Iyer that I brought with me. Released earlier this year, Iyer’s book with the main title Aflame recounts his very personal experience with silence during his 35 years of retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California. Iyer, who does not claim any religious affiliation, is best known for his travel writing, which has taken him from California to Nepal, North Korea to Japan, always in search of that connection between inner and outer worlds that seems to be the driving force of this modern-day nomad. In Aflame, Pico Iyer stops and withdraws from the world to observe a small community of monks and the visitors they welcome. Occasionally, he drives down the dusty roads of California to visit his friend, the late Leonard Cohen, who has retired to a Zen Buddhist monastery. Like Iyer, the famous troubadour and composer of “Hallelujah” dedicated a significant part of his life to spiritual retreat rooted in silence. And they are by no means the only ones; throughout history, countless men and women have embraced silence in order to reconnect with themselves and the world. I spoke with Iyer to clarify some questions that arose from reading his memoir.

Pico, what would you say to Blaise Pascal if you were to meet him?

I love this question, Robert, and not a single soul has mentioned Pascal in all the interviews I’ve done so far. But if I were to meet him, I would say, “thank you for putting your finger on the heart of the human predicament, 300 years or more before the rest of us were waking up to it. Thank you for reminding us, all those centuries ago, that ‘distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries’ and then continuing, ‘and yet it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.’ Thank you most of all for living all the truths you pronounced and finding a way to help science illuminate some aspects of our life.”

Originally, I confess, I had lots of Pascal in this book, in part because this great mathematician and man of science, credited with inventing the hydraulic press and even the mechanical calculator, rejoiced in being able to feel “a sense of peace and the passion of fire” at the same time. Few thinkers have dwelled so intently and with such rigor on the inner life; a copy of the Pensées sits always beside my desk here in our tiny apartment in Japan. And maybe most of all because of his “night of fire”—perfect for a book entitled Aflame”—in which he collapsed into almost wordless cries of joy, and sewed his testimony into his jacket so he would never forget it, the great epiphany that put all his other discoveries into perspective.

If Pascal sensed this need for an inner life and quiet even in the 17^th century, how much more urgent is it in our age of constant updates, texts, beeps and breaking news? One reason I have never used a cell phone is that I feel I have more than enough data and distraction in my life; what I lack—and deeply need—is the time and space to make sense of all of it. I only wish I could have included more on Pascal—and many others—here. But my self-imposed mission was to condense 4,000 pages of notes, taken over 33 years, into something as short and direct as a haiku.

Withdrawing from the world, as monks do and as you have done during your retreats in Big Sur, may be seen by people who have never had such an experience as an escape from the challenges of the real world. What is your view on this? In your book, you argue that retreat is not so much an escape as a reorientation and a reminder. So does paradise on earth exist anywhere other than Baudelaire’s artificial paradises?

I only believe in a paradise that exists in the middle of the real world, that takes in mortality and pain and shadow and that is available to everyone, not only to those who subscribe to a certain belief. But for me, to go on retreat is a way to see what is truly real and to step behind the performances and surfaces of everyday life. As I go through my days, chattering away, driving to the bank, taking care of my taxes, I always have the feeling that this is not the whole of life, nor the end of the story. Most of us sense that there is something more, beyond our daily routine, what T.S. Eliot called “the life we have lost in living.”

Beneath my social and chattery self is a silent self and it contains the best of me, the part that lives beyond words and that, as Meister Eckhart notes, is “the part of the soul that has not been wounded.” And behind the pantomime of daily life lies a deeper truth that we sense now and then—when we’re in love, when we’re terrified, when we step out onto a terrace in Tibet—but that we misplace along the way. It’s only when I go on retreat that I feel I’m encountering something real—a lens cap has fallen away—and that reminder allows me to see my life in the world in its proper proportions. As I cite in the book, a friend asks me, wisely, if it isn’t selfish—a flight, as you say—to go on retreat. And I tell her that for me it’s the only way I can learn to be a little less selfish.

Otherwise, I’m captive to my unthinking habits and unexalted responses and can never step back far enough to see through them or beyond them. I’m keenly aware that many people don’t have the time or resources to go on retreat regularly as I try to do. But I think nearly all of us sense that we need strength and clarity to deal with the world and we need to build up our inner resources, or what I think of as our invisible savings account. So, if you can’t go on retreat, I think you’ll only be a better friend and a deeper person if you take a long walk, if you visit a friend without your cell phone, if you find some way to ground yourself in what is best and clearest in yourself.

I used to think monks were fleeing the world; but after spending 34 years in their company, I realize they’re actually moving towards what they regard as most real—and in fact giving their lives to an unsparing regimen of hard work, prayer and caring for others. I know few people who work so hard and without a break, in the very real world (I’ve come to think of monks as emergency-room physicians “in a way”).

My fundamental question of myself is “what can I bring to the intensive care unit in a hospital where I and most that I love are likely to find ourselves at some point?” I don’t think driving along the freeway, babbling to my friends, and following the Kardashians online is really going to give me the strength and confidence to deal with such urgent moments. But sitting quietly in silence might.

Many religious traditions praise silence, but it is also promoted almost as a doctrine by many secular thinkers and philosophers, from Seneca to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche to Rousseau, and finally Henry David Thoreau, who, in his essay Life Without Principle, advocates inaction based on the findings of scientific and medical research. How do you relate your own “mystical” experience to all these traditions, and what is the connection here, if there is any?

Again, this is the perfect question, Robert! I took great pains to take all my quotations in this book from people not generally associated with religion, and not part of any formal religion, starting with some soaring mystical words from no less than Nietzsche! But from Henry Miller to Camus, from Emily Dickinson to Etty Hillesum—to, as you say, Wittgenstein and Marcus Aurelius and Admiral Byrd, I wanted to show that anyone who sits quietly alone now and then, just as Pascal recommended, will come to the same conclusions.

None of this is particular to any religion, or corner of the world, which is why, in a book about Benedictine monks (written by someone who’s not a Christian), I worked hard to include the Zen monk Leonard Cohen, the Tibetan Buddhist monk the Dalai Lama, a Zen abbess in San Francisco, a Hindu nun. At a time when our world and our nations seem so furiously divided, I wanted to bring us to a place where men and women from every tradition—or none at all—all voice the same truth. Henry David Thoreau is a perfect example, drawing on the wisdom of Persia, east Asia and India and bringing it all into the heart of America. His essays are to me the great American scripture, in part because they cannot be limited to any one doctrine. They’re neither Christian nor non-Christian.

He also is the perfect answer to your last question. What people often forget about Thoreau is that he retreated to his cabin at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days mostly so as to be a more productive member of society and a better friend to those around him. His first lecture at the Concord Lyceum was not on the subject of “solitude,” but “society.” He was known around town as a kind and gregarious neighbor who looked after Emerson’s wife and children for ten months at a stretch while Emerson was on tour, who held melon parties every year, who fixed people’s ovens. And while he was living alone, he was completing a book that was in essence a love letter to the brother who had died in his arms. At its center is a 23-page ode to friendship beyond anything I have seen elsewhere.

I write about silence in a world of contention and anxiety because it sits on the far side of all our beliefs and ideas and, I think, can offer medicine to anyone. And Thoreau has been such a gospel for me, for almost fifty years now, that I take words for him as the epigraph to almost every book I write.

I wonder what you think about the link between solitude and silence. It’s interesting to note that the vast majority of people who seek silence don’t isolate themselves completely, but instead are often part of a supportive community. In your case, for example, you could have chosen to rent a log cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but you chose a cell in a monastery. Thoreau met the residents of Concord during his stay in the woods (and even his mother for Sunday lunch, as you mention!), Buddhists have the sangha. So how important is the support, even indirect, of a group, and how can the experience of our fellow human beings influence our own lives?

Community is everything, just as you perfectly suggest. And silence and solitude, as Thoreau exemplified, are only a means to a richer sense of companionship and compassion. I recently read how Ananda, the Buddha’s favorite disciple, once said, “admirable friendship is half of the holy life.” To which the Buddha replied, “wrong! Admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life.”

Your question is so beautifully put, and certainly speaks to my sense that I’m never alone when alone. As Thoreau had it, “why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” I happen to be someone who loves being by myself—an only child who chose to be a writer because it allows (in fact forces) me to spend many long hours alone each day at a desk and who loves to travel because that too enables me to wander alone around the world, in beautiful conversation with it. So when I found myself in a little room above the radiant Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California, with all my needs taken care of, and nothing required of me—for thirty dollars a night—I was in heaven. But then I started staying with the monks in their “enclosure” and saw that they could seldom afford to be silent or alone. They were working hard, all day, to look after one another and to tend to their fifteen or so guests. And all the time spent alone was simply a means to clearer and kinder action in the world.

I sometimes think that I would never have chosen to get married had I not spent time in that solitary monastic cell, which told me that the point of solitude is companionship. And in truth I felt and felt close to my loved ones much more in the undistracted silence of the cell than when we’re in the same room with the TV on, or when I’m hurrying from supermarket to pharmacy. The beauty of spending time alone, for me, is to realize that one’s never alone, and never needs to be. So yes, my time in intense solitude was really a training in the value and beauty of companionship.

You quote R.H. Tawney in stating that, traditionally, humans were spiritual beings who took care of their material needs; today, more and more of us are materialistic beings who occasionally take care of our spiritual needs. Is there a way to go back, knowing that there may not be a way back?

It is a central point and, once more, you are the first person to mention it. I suspect, when the “death of God” was announced in the late 19th century, many found that they had thrown out the baby with the bathwater, as we say in English. To this day, many people rightly find fault with the church, in its dogmatism, in its intolerance, in its hypocrisies, its humanness. And yet we all long for something beyond—and there seems to be a deep human need, as you suggest above, for community, for ritual, for meaning.

Certainly, for a sense that we are not the center of the world and are, in fact, a tiny part of a much larger picture. Which is one of the reasons many people—like yourself, perhaps—go on long walks, and others go to places such as Big Sur, where human beings look very tiny and mortal in the presence of tall redwoods, a huge unbroken stretch of ocean, high cliffs and much else that will be around long after we are gone.

If we put our mind before our spirit—or, even more crazily, our body before our mind—we’ll always feel lost when reality makes a house call. None of us can survive without inner resources and a close connection with our inner landscape (sometimes quickened by an encounter with the outer landscape). Some people call this “god,” some people call it “reality,” some don’t feel the need for words at all. But in every case, we need this inwardness if we are to survive. And my worry about the current moment is that the external world is so deafening and intense, so everywhere, that it threatens to crowd and drown out the inner and leave us entirely lost.

To quote Meister Eckhart again, from many centuries ago, “so long as the inner work is strong, the outer (which I take to mean one’s career, one’s relationships, one’s connection with one’s ‘better self’) will never be puny.” But to put the material, temporal world before the spiritual is akin to buying a gleaming Ferrari and not caring that it doesn’t have an engine.

Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer is published by Riverhead Books (January 2025).