Part 4

Jokoji

I spread the map of Nagoya flat on my bedroom floor. For the most part, it’s the uniform urban density typically associated with Japan. The cityscape, though, isn’t the futurist vision I thought it would’ve been. It’s more like someone’s taken the drab concrete aesthetic of modernist architecture and refracted it through a 1980s vision of the future. Considering the levelling out of Japan’s GDP in the 90s, after three decades of steady economic growth, this makes perfect sense. Everything worth maintaining is maintained—and meticulously so—but very little is built.

At the edge of the urban space is a swathe of lush green hills. They form an unbroken ring around Nagoya; you can see them from virtually any spot in the city. On my first night in the city, I follow a main arterial road on foot with the expectation of reaching the mountains in an hour, ascending to the peak, and watching the sunset over the harbour in the distance. My perception of distance is optimistically skewed—an hour was about right, but on a train. Upon working out this basic relationship between time and space, I do just this, and make the train ride to the nearest hinterland nature area: Jokoji.

Jokoji is many things: a quasi-national park (this basically means the natural environment persists but you can dump your old Corolla there if you fancy); a suicide hotspot (two methods: express train or the river after a few days of heavy rain); a once vibrant 1950s holiday village (adjacent to the train station is a multi-storied hotel that’s just a concrete shell, the inside completely burnt out); and, the final resting place of an Edo era emperor. According to my students, Jokoji is a deeply haunted place. I’m told to take great care.

There are two roads in Jokoji. One cuts through the hills, connecting urban Nagoya to its outer suburbs. The other intersects with the first and winds its way uphill to a dirt car park, a bank of vending machines, and a Zen temple. Jokoji’s temple is simple, understated, and beautiful for its restraint. There are four buildings that make up the temple grounds: the central temple, an almost perfect cube of stripped back cedar; a smaller and more ornate temple for rituals; a public hall and kitchen; and a small market stall selling various talismans, prayer beads, and Zen literature. When I first visit the temple in Jokoji, the stall is manned by the head monk, Jiko-San.

The air is calm and crisp. The sun lights up a keg-sized jar of umebushi plums steeping in rice liquor. Jiko-San walks over to me without hesitation. Even in Japan, this kind of familiarity from strangers puts me on the back foot. His English, like my Japanese, is virtually non-existent. He beams, gesticulates, and name drops an odd selection of American celebrities: Michael Jackson; Angelina Jolie; Michael J. Fox. I nod, smile, and give a brief summary of the key works of each. Realising that the USA’s cultural hegemony alone won’t bridge the divide, Jiko-San disappears and returns with an interlocutor: Aya.

Aya is anywhere between twenty-five and forty. She’s short, beautiful, and Jiko-San’s apprentice. At first I thought this meant apprentice monk, but Zen Buddhism, like Japanese culture on the whole, is fluid and permeable. As such, Aya is not learning the finer points of meditation but other esoteric offshoots—ritual chant, taeko drumming, and fortune-telling. She also heads up the temple’s regular fundraisers. From the outset, Jiko-San indicates that Aya and I should marry.

The three of us drink tea in the public hall. Aya’s fortune telling paraphernalia is spread out on the table and I’m hoping she doesn’t offer to read my fortune; I’m strangely gullible with such things. I ask about Zen and explain my own nascent understanding of Buddhism. I tell Jiko-San, via Aya, that I would like to learn all there is to know. He says he’ll be Yoda to my Luke Skywalker. He collects the tea cups and heads into the kitchen. I hear him shifting chairs and opening cupboards. He returns bearing gifts: a prayer book; a jade talisman; and a large bag full of faded XXL t-shirts bearing slogans like “Save the Manatee” and “Korean Cosmetics Expo 1989”.

That night, Jiko-San and Aya treat me to dinner and an esoteric ritual. For dinner, Jiko-San gets out of his ascetic robes and into something a little more stately: a full leather pinstripe suit. Over dinner, no mention is made of the impending midnight ritual. A few of the local Zen community come to dinner; I’m either the guest of honour or the Japanese equivalent of an aristocratic folly.

After dinner, Jiko-San exits stage left and returns, half an hour later, wearing the full Zen robe, a dignified navy blue. Two hands are placed on my shoulders. My knee-jerk thought is: Abduction! A white cotton wreath is placed around my neck and I’m led through the kitchen and down a narrow trail to the smaller temple. The lights spotted around the temple grounds cast a surreal effect on the variegated autumn foliage; they render everything vivid, hyperreal, and somehow eliminate depth-of-field—I can’t tell which leaves belong to which tree. Cicadas hiss as if my tinnitus is being broadcast to the world. I listen with attention; I’m amazed at the spectrum of treble frequencies a single species of bug can come up with. I wonder: is every cicada out there, every one among thousands, making the full range drones, clicks and chimes? Or do some specialise in white-noise hiss, while others focus on the finer points sustaining a high pitched trill? As this thought unfolds I’m ushered into the scaled-down temple—it’s half a storey high; I stoop and then kneel. There’s only enough floor-space for the three of us—Jiko-San, Aya, and myself. In front of me is the vigil, which consists of a Buddha and, either side of him, a pantheon of Shinto gods arranged in order of descending height. Jiko-San lights candles and incense while Aya lays out hand drums and makes some preliminary warbling notes. Aya shows me how to assume the position for the ritual—a face-down, arms out front arrangement very similar to that of Islamic prayer.

A hush descends as Jiko-San taps out a slow and resonant rhythm. Aya waits for some time before adding her own dull thwacks on the off beat. With eyes closed—without a noticeable signal to each other—their voices harmonise in a thin and plaintive drone. I read somewhere, in regard to singing, that delivery trumps meaning every time. This always rang true for me. I feel the vibration through the floor and focus. Time contracts, the world recedes into a hazy fugue. An hour passes. Jiko-San repeats the chant’s coda in a loop, the volume lazily diminishing with each pass, until there’s nothing but the hiss of cicadas, which isn’t the wall of sound of earlier, but a constant interplay of shifting layers. The world’s sound is close, as if playing through big, ear-muff style 1970s headphones. I sense someone behind me. Jiko-San delivers a hard blow with the heel of his hand to my middle back. There’s no pain, just a weird internal resonance, as if a bell were chimed in each of my heart’s chambers. It rings out.

Afterwards, Jiko-San and Aya take a photo of me in front of the vigil, encouraging me to make the ubiquitous peace sign. Then they sign my XXL t-shirts in gold marker, their names encircled with stars and smiley faces. We make plans to meet again, and Aya offers to drive me home.

It is one thirty am and the trains have long stopped running. We pull up at the intersection at the bottom of the winding, descending road. Directly in front of us, on the other side of the river, is Jokoji station. Jokoji is not a well frequented place—even during the day only every third train stops here. Two men are on the platform. There is no conceivable reason for them being there. We drive in silence until we’re out of the lush hinterlands and in Nagoya proper. At this point, Aya turns to me.

Did you see those two men on the train platform?

Yeah, that was really bizarre.

They weren’t ghosts.