<\/p>\n
On my second day in Kumano Kodo, I came across an unsettling sight nestled into the mountain ridge: a moss-choked shrine to Jizo, the guardian of travelers. This spot in Kumano Kodo marked the place where, in 1854, locals had come across the corpse of a lone pilgrim.<\/p>\n
The mossy Jizo reminded me just how alone I was. I’m not easily spooked but the day had been against me from the start, with the torrential downpour that kept every other sensible hiker indoors except for myself.<\/p>\n
I’d spent about an hour and a half trudging alone before I came across the Jizo. The Kumano Kodo is lined with shrines, from the simple to the ornate, but this was the first I’d seen that marked someone’s passing. On top of that, the Jizo appeared to block one of the trail’s painfully narrow passes, just about a foot wide. One wrong step would drop me 1,000 feet down the slope of a forest canopy. One of the guidebooks I’d read at the guesthouse in Tanabe had warned that the trail becomes dangerously narrow in parts and tricky to navigate in wet conditions. Check and check.<\/p>\n
Unlike this unnamed man, memorialized in stone, I wasn’t a pilgrim in the traditional sense. I was just a hiker who had been drawn to Kumano because of its beauty. The pilgrim route is located in the Kii Peninsula south of Kyoto, a wild and rugged mountain wilderness that for centuries had drawn mystics, aesthetics and pilgrims looking to escape the material world.<\/p>\n
Today, the \u201cwild\u201d and \u201crugged\u201d of the peninsula are synonymous with natural splendor. The Kumano is a land of quiet trails, hidden shrines and lovely waterfalls. It’s one of the rare places where humans have left an imprint on nature that is harmonious rather than intrusive. Shrine temples blend with the forest while Jizos carved from mountain rock wait patiently to be reclaimed by wilderness.<\/p>\n
But the peninsula’s beauty wasn’t what had drawn early mystics and pilgrims. For them, the wilderness had been a place of constant danger. <\/p>\n
Kumano refers to a network of trails connecting three Grand Shrines important to Japan’s syncretic Shinto\/Buddhist tradition. All trails traverse heavy forest and steep mountain ridges, and many early pilgrims would have set out on foot for a round-trip journey from Kyoto, Ise or Koyasan. The journey would have taken weeks, if not months. Aristocrats and royals looking to earn karma points for their next lives would have made the journey with the aid of guides and perhaps an entourage. For the not-so-affluent, the journey would have been far more lonely. How easy it would be to lose the trail and get swept up in a sudden shower or fog.<\/p>\n
For me, the hike was far less treacherous and much shorter. Only two of the Grand Shrines — at Hongu and Nachi — are still accessible on foot, for a total journey of about 40 miles. Hikers begin the journey in Tanabe where they catch a bus to the trailhead at Takijiri-oji shrine for what is at most a 5-day trek along the Nakahechi Route, or \u201croyal road\u201d, made popular by long-ago nobles. Hikers reach Hongu by the end of the third day and Nachi at the end of the fifth. The trail is maintained by the local Kumano Tourism Bureau<\/a>, and a network of guesthouses interspersed in the peninsula’s mountain villages provide home-cooked meals and shelter to hikers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the dangers are still very real. Although I could be reasonably sure I wouldn’t die, serious injury wasn’t out of the question. I started that morning from the village of Takahara, and I’d been warned by just about everyone at the guesthouse that hiking in the rain was \u201cNot good.\u201d I met only one other hiker there, a Kyoto-born woman named Azusa, who had briefly considered hiking out with me that morning until we stepped outside. Azusa had decided to catch a bus to the next village. I continued alone.<\/p>\n I regretted the decision almost immediately, with the trail starting out as a steep climb out of Takahara over a mountain ridge. Because of the rain, the trail had turned into a tiny, swirling torrent of mud that soaked right through the running shoes I’d foolishly chosen instead of more sturdy hiking boots. I could feel the water sloshing through my socks with each step, while the trash bag I’d shrouded my pack in did little to keep it dry.<\/p>\n After about 45 minutes in which I’d somehow ascended 3 1\/2 miles, I came to the first bright spot, metaphorically speaking. I arrived at the first landmark on my map, the Jyuten-oji shrine, where a nearby sign informed me that the court writer, Fujiwara Munetada, had stopped here on a rainy day in 1109. I knew nothing about Fujiwara Munetada, but the fact that he had hiked this route in the rain suddenly made him feel like a kindred spirit.<\/p>\n But Fujiwara Munetada had been a court writer, not some anonymous pilgrim like the one whose passing was marked by the Jizo I came to only 20 minutes after passing Jyuten-oji. According to a sign the Kumano Tourism Bureau had placed near the shrine, the man had likely died of starvation, a common way for the lone pilgrim to go.<\/p>\n Kumano is steeped in legend and in tragedy. In Japanese mythology, it’s the land of death. The Japanese creator god, Izanami<\/a>, was buried here after dying in childbirth. Her lover, Izanagi, traveled Orpheus-style to the Kii Peninsula in order to retrieve her. However, upon seeing her animated but putrefied corpse he fled in terror.<\/p>\n Life and death are rarely separated easily, as the still-animated Izanami can attest to. The notion of pilgrimage is rooted symbolically in death, with the pilgrim removing herself from the physical world in order to journey spiritually to the next. As Buddhism evolved in Japan, Kumano became associated with the Pure Land, the equivalent of paradise that one reaches after achieving some level of enlightenment. Pilgrims who journeyed to the shrines at Kumano would symbolically die, only to be symbolically reborn.<\/p>\n The need for symbolic rebirth outweighed the fear of actual death. Physical death couldn’t be all that tragic if one’s spirit lived on. And in Kumano, spirits lived on in the creepiest ways possible.<\/p>\n Many of these tales are chronicled by the Heian-era monk, Kyokai. His Miraculous Tales of the Japanese Buddhist Tradition<\/a><\/em> includes legends of monks and other aesthetics lost to the forests of Kumano. Pilgrims would report hearing sutra-chanting voices that, despite thorough searching, always proved disembodied. In a grisly twist, those recovered were found in the skeletal state, all bone except for still-fresh tongues, endlessly chanting the devote monks’ sutras.<\/p>\n