When I was ten—or maybe I was twelve—I visited Kyoto for the first time. I was visiting with my family. My mother was then a Master's student in East Asian Studies at Columbia University, so the visit was largely hers; my father, sister and I were along in her shadow. In addition to visiting Tokyo, Ise, Himeji, Hiroshima and Shimoda, we visited Kyoto. Two of the most indelible experiences from the visit took place in Kyoto. The two were related, and both to the Bon Festival: standing with thousands of people on a bridge spanning the Kamo River, packed so tightly that if anyone moved, we all moved, and staring at an enormous fire in the shape of a character (大, dai) burning in a black sky. This was the Daimonji Festival, and the 大 was not burning in the sky, but on the side of Mt. Daimonji, on the eastern edge of the city. It was one of five bonfires burning on one of five hills surrounding the city. I was small, so could not see much, though the fires, floating as they seemed in the ink of night, were casting after-images simultaneous to themselves in the air above, which I could see, and through the bodies and heads of the people tightly packed, swaying as though into a single, unstoppable wave, and could feel as though they were dancing in celebration of being, together, my final vision on earth. Last year—over twenty years later—I visited Kyoto again. Our first full day, Lisa and I walked for fifteen miles throughout the city. Toward the end of the day, we hiked to the top of Daimonji. It was late-July. O Bon was weeks away. The side of Daimonji had been cleared in preparation. A foundation in the shape of 大 and in the form of dozens of stone pedestals on which individual bonfires would be lit, was set into the precipitous side of the mountain, surrounded by flattened grass. By the time we reached the top, the sun was setting. The view of Kyoto was mesmerizing. We sat for awhile, drained and in awe like a humble draft rising off the incipient flames. When we started to walk back down the mountain, it was dark. Another few minutes and it was completely black. And then we were in the woods below the cleared slope. And instantly, we had lost the trail. The woods were blackness intensified. The only things that cast any light were mounds of dull whiteness, which we discovered, by running into them, were stacks of wood beneath white cloth—hundreds of stacks of ghost-wood, hovering among the black trees, awaiting their sacrifice. We eventually found ourselves in a ditch, crossed with blown down trees and mud-cold. When we travel, we do so—or as we have been—without much of a plan besides walking. No guidebook, no particular destination, the occasional landmark, some general ideas. This year in Kyoto, we've been using a map that a Japanese couple accidentally dropped while sitting in Ukimido Pavilion, in Nara Park. They had circled a couple of spots on the map—Kiyomizu Temple, Nanzenji Temple, Kinkakuji Temple. By the time I picked their map up off the floor of the pavilion, the couple was gone—away from the pond—over which the pavilion floated—and into the surrounding woods. Last night, we walked a similar path as last year, though when we reached the base of Daimonji, we turned back down into the city. From there, it was four miles to the guest house where we were staying. We walked toward the setting sun. The sun went down. The illuminated city was with us the entire way, though thinning as we went, until we were down the dimly lit and soundless, narrow street where we were staying, beside a graveyard overgrown with weeds. In the graveyard, tucked into the side of a slumbering bush, was a pile of waterlogged porn. Womens' thighs seemed simply hopeless in the abandoned graveyard. When I was ten—or again, maybe twelve—I felt, while packed tightly into the thousands of bodies on the bridge spanning the Kamo, that my life was very near not being my own. I was simply a body, at the mercy of the fires wheeling the sky, Kyoto itself a reflection of the fires, all the way back to their roots in a moment of lightning. Though the lightning there and then was life-giving. Beneath the bridge on which I became simply a body, and barely even my own, the Kamo flowed. It too was black. I've written about the fires of Daimonji and the Kamo before and since, and will, I imagine, again, without end.
