REBECCA SOLNIT
FROM Granta
AFTER THE LONG flight across the Pacific, after the night in the tiny hotel room selected so that I could walk to the world’s busiest train station in the morning, after the train north to the area most impacted by the tsunami in the Great Tōhoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, after the meetings among the wreckage with people who had seen their villages and neighbors washed away, after seeing the foundations of what had once been a neighborhood so flattened it looked like a chessboard full of shards, after hearing from so many people with grief and rage in their voices talking about walls of water and drownings and displacement and refuge, but also about betrayal by the government in myriad ways, after the Christian minister pontificated forever while the Buddhist priests held their peace in the meeting my hosts secretly scheduled at the end of the twelve-hour workday, after I told people I was getting sick but the meeting went on, after I left the meeting in the hopes of getting to the hotel and stood outside in the cold northern night for a long time as a few snowflakes fell, or was it raindrops, I forget, after the sickness turned into a cough so fierce I thought I might choke or come up with blood or run out of air, after the tour continued regardless, and the speaking tour at the universities, after the conferences where I talked about disaster and utopia, after the trip to the conference in Hiroshima where I walked and saw with my own eyes the bombed places I had seen in pictures so often and met with the octogenarians who told me, with the freshness of people who had only recently begun to tell, the story of what they had seen and been and done and suffered and lost on August 6, 1945, after the sight of the keloid scars from the fallout that had drifted onto the arm of a schoolboy sixty-seven years before, so that he grew into a man who always wore long sleeves even in summer, after the long walks along the beautiful river distributaries of Hiroshima and among its willows and monuments, draped in garlands of paper cranes, to the vaporized and poisoned dead, and plum trees in bloom but not yet cherries, after the one glorious day in Kyoto when I was neither at work nor overwhelmed and alone but accompanied by a pair of kind graduate students, after a day of wandering through old Buddhist temples with them and seeing the dim hall of the thousand golden Buddhas lined up in long rows, I arrived at the orange gates.
You get off the local train from the city of Kyoto and walk through a little tourist town of shops with doorways like wide-open mouths disgorging low tables of food and crafts and souvenirs and then walk uphill, then up stairs, under a great torii gate, one of those structures with a wide horizontal beam extending beyond the pillars that hold it up, like the Greek letter π, and then a plaza of temples and buildings and vendors, and then you keep going up. There are multiple routes up the mountain, and the routes take you through thousands of further torii gates, each with a black base and a black rooflike structure atop the crosspiece, each lacquered pure, intense orange on the cylindrical pillars and crosspiece. The new ones are gleaming and glossy. Some of the old ones are dull, their lacquer cracked, or even rotting away so that the wood is visible underneath.
The orange is so vivid it is as though you have at last gone beyond things that are colored orange to the color itself, particularly in the passages where the torii gates are just a few feet apart, or in one extraordinary sequence many paces long of gates only inches apart, a tunnel of total immersion in orange (vermilion say some of the accounts, but I saw pure intense orange). Nearly every gate bears black inscriptions on one side, and if I could read Japanese I might’ve read individual business people and corporations expressing their gratitude, because rice and prosperity and business are all tied up together in the realm of the god Inari, but I couldn’t. The place was something else to me.
I later read that the Fushimi Inari-taisha is the head shrine of thirty thousand or so Shinto shrines in Japan devoted to Inari. It is said to have been founded in 711 and burned down in 1468, during a civil war, but much of it seems to have been replaced in overlapping waves, so that the whole is ancient and the age of the parts varied, some of them very new. The gates seem designed to pass through, and the altars—platforms and enclosures of stone slabs and obelisks and stone foxes—for stillness, so that the landscape is a sort of musical score of moving and pausing. The altars looked funereal to a Western eye, with the stone slabs like tombstones, but they were something altogether different.
The foxes were everywhere, particularly at these altar zones. Moss and lichen grow on their stone or cement backs, so some are more green than gray and others are spotted with lighter gray. They often have red cloth tied around their necks, the fabric faded to dusty pink, and there are stones at the altar sites with inscriptions carved into them, and rope garlands. The foxes, hundreds of them, a few at a time, sit up, often in pairs, sometimes with smaller torii gates that were offerings arrayed around them, and then sometimes even smaller foxes with the gates, as though this might continue on beyond the visible into tinier and tinier foxes and gates. You could buy the small gates and foxes at the entrance and some places on the mountainside.
Foxes, I knew, are kitsune in Japan, the magical shape-shifters in folktales and woodblock prints—and manga and anime now—who pass as human for months or for years, becoming beautiful brides who run away or courtiers who serve aristocrats but serve another, unknown purpose as well. The foxes at the Inari shrine are the god’s messengers, a website later told me, more beneficent than some of the foxes in the stories. Elusive, beautiful, unpredictable, kitsune in this cosmology represent the unexpected and mysterious and wild aspects of nature. Rain during sunshine is called a fox’s wedding in Japanese.
Gates, foxes, foxes, gates. The gates lead you to gates and to foxes, the trails wind all over the slope of the steep, forested hill. Most of the literature speaks as though there is a trail you take, but there are many. If you keep going you might come to a dense bamboo forest with trunks as thick as the poles of streetlights, and a pond beyond that, or you might just keep mounting forest paths that wind and tangle, with every now and again a little pavilion selling soft drinks and snacks, notably tofu pockets—inarizushi—said to be the foxes’ favorite food. And more gates, unpainted stone as well as lacquered wood.
Arrival implies a journey, and almost all the visitors that day arrived out of a lifetime in Japan, seeing a different place than I did, traveling mostly in small groups, seeming to know why they were there and what to expect. I came directly from the grueling tour of disaster, but with a longtime interest in how moving through space takes on meaning and how meaning can be made spatially, with church and temple designs, landscape architecture and paths, roads, stairs, ladders, bridges, labyrinths, thresholds, triumphal arches, all the grammar that inflects the meanings of our movement.
I had been invited to Japan for the one-year anniversary of the triple disaster, reporting on the aftermath and talking about my book A Paradise Built in Hell, which had been translated into Japanese and published just before one of the five largest recorded earthquakes hit the country and the ocean rose up to, in places, 120 feet and scoured the shore, and the six Fukushima nuclear reactors fell apart and began to spread radiation by air and by sea. But that’s another story. The Inari shrine was not part of it. My encounter there wasn’t the culmination of that journey but perhaps a reprieve from it, and an extension of other journeys and questions I have carried for a long time.
Arrival is the culmination of the sequence of events, the last in the list, the terminal station, the end of the line. And the idea of arrival begets questions about the journey and how long it took. Did it take the dancer two hours to dance the ballet, or two hours plus six months of rehearsals, or two hours plus six months plus a life given over to becoming the instrument that could, over and over, draw lines and circles in the air with precision and grace? Sumi-e painters painted with famous speed, but it took decades to become someone who could manage a brush that way, who had that feel for turning leaves or water into a monochromatic image. You fall in love with someone and the story might be of how you met, courted, consummated, but it might also be of how before all that, time and trouble shaped you both over the years, sanded your rough spots and wore away your vices until your scars and needs and hopes came together like halves of a broken whole.
Culminations are at least lifelong, and sometimes longer when you look at the natural and social forces that shape you, the acts of the ancestors, of illness or economics, immigration and education. We are constantly arriving; the innumerable circumstances are forever culminating in this glance, this meeting, this collision, this conversation, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope forever coming into new focus, new flowerings. But to me the gates made visible not the complicated ingredients of the journey but the triumph of arrival.
I knew I was missing things. I remember the first European cathedral I ever entered—Durham Cathedral—when I was fifteen, never a Christian, not yet taught that most churches are cruciform, or in the shape of a human body with outstretched arms, so that the altar is at what in French is called the chevet, or head, so that there was a coherent organization to the place. I saw other things then and I missed a lot. You come to every place with your own equipment.
I came to Japan with wonder at seeing the originals of things I had seen in imitation often, growing up in California: Japanese gardens and Buddhist temples, Mount Fuji, tea plantations and bamboo groves.
But it wasn’t really what I knew about Japan but what I knew about the representation of time that seemed to matter there. I knew well the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in which a crane flying, a woman sweeping, is captured in a series of photographs, time itself measured in intervals, as intervals, as moments of arrival. The motion studies were the first crucial step on the road to cinema, to those strips of celluloid in which time had been broken down into twenty-four frames per second that could reconstitute a kiss, a duel, a walk across the room, a plume of smoke.
Time seemed to me, as I walked all over the mountain, more and more enraptured and depleted, a series of moments of arrival, like film frames, if film frames with their sprockets were gateways—and maybe they are: they turn by the projector, but as they go each frame briefly becomes an opening through which light travels. I was exalted by a landscape that made tangible that elusive sense of arrival, that palpable sense of time, that so often eludes us. Or rather the sense that we are arriving all the time, that the present is a house into which we always have one foot, an apple we are just biting, a face we are just glimpsing for the first time. In Zen Buddhism you talk a lot about being in the present and being present. That present is an infinitely narrow space between the past and future, the zone in which the senses experience the world, in which you act, however much your mind may be mired in the past or racing into the future.
I had the impression midway through the hours I spent wandering that time itself had become visible, that every moment of my life I was passing through orange gates, always had been, always would be passing through magnificent gates that only in this one place are visible. Their uneven spacing seemed to underscore this perception; sometimes time grows dense and seems to both slow down and speed up, when you fall in love, when you are in the thick of an emergency or a discovery; other times it flows by limpid as a stream across a meadow, each day calm and like the one before, not much to remember, or time runs dry and you’re stuck, hoping for change that finally arrives in a trickle or a rush. Though all these metaphors of flow can be traded in for solid ground: time is a stroll through orange gates. Blue mountains are constantly walking, said Dōgen, the monk who brought Zen to Japan, and we are also constantly walking, through these particular Shinto pathways of orange gates. Or so it seemed to me on that day of exhaustion and epiphany.
What does it mean to arrive? The fruits of our labor, we say, the reward. The harvest, the home, the achievement, the completion, the satisfaction, the joy, the recognition, the consummation. Arrival is the reward, it’s the time you aspire to on the journey, it’s the end, but on the mountain south of Kyoto on a day just barely spring, on long paths whose only English guidance was a few plaques about not feeding the monkeys I never saw anyway, arrival seemed to be constant. Maybe it is.
I wandered far over the mountain that day, until I was outside the realm of the pretty little reproduction of an antique map I had purchased, and gone beyond the realm of the gates. I was getting tired after four hours or so of steady walking. The paths continued, the trees continued, the ferns and mosses under them continued, and I continued but there were no more torii gates. I came out in a manicured suburb with few people on the streets, and walked out to the valley floor and then back into the next valley over and up again through the shops to the entrance to the shrine all over again. But I could not arrive again, though I walked through a few more gates and went to see the tunnel of orange again. It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge. An epiphany can be as indelible a transformation as a trauma. Once I was through those gates and through that day I would never enter them for the first time and understand what they taught me for the first time.
All you really need to know is that there is a hillside in Japan in which time is measured in irregular intervals and every moment is an orange gate, and foxes watch over it, and people wander it, and the whole is maintained by priests and by donors, so that gates crumble and gates are erected, time passes and does not, as elsewhere nuclear products decay and cultures change and people come and go, and that the place might be one at which you will arrive someday, to go through the flickering tunnels of orange, up the mountainside, into this elegant machine not for controlling or replicating time but maybe for realizing it, or blessing it. Or maybe you have your own means of being present, your own for seeing that at this very minute you are passing through an orange gate.