I will take this moment I have now to try to do some justice to the intricately sculpted land around me. Every now and then when I am not sitting at home reflecting in my dimly lit monk shack (the perfect place to reflect or simply relax), I step outside my house and go for a walk, a jog, or a combination of the two.
There are three separate roads leading from my house in three very different directions. Each one has hundreds of tiny roads jutting out from it—“the vagaries” I shall henceforth entitle them. I like these vagaries because they are often completely unpersoned, as if they were abandoned. But abandoned they are not, for the most part, because they lead to networks of rice paddies on carefully chiseled hills as well as places where the locals use logs to grow Shitaake mushrooms in the shade of the forests.
These vagaries are almost always surrounded by teeming vegetation, and for most of the day—at least during the summer—the insects make outlandish noises coming from all directions. When you walk these windy, densely vegetated roads you feel as if you are in a jungle. It is strange to think that it will all be covered in inches, and maybe even feet, of snow just a few months from now.
Not only do you encounter rice paddies, but you will undoubtedly run into beautiful Japanese gravestones that look like miniature temples rising from the ground. Some are black, but most that I have seen are grayish. Many of them appear to be made of marble. Right now they are adorned with colorful flowers and look as if they were new, as many of them probably are.
Just minutes ago I was in a race with time trying to finish an exploration of one of these little roads as the sun was lighting up the sky above me with the farewell colors of dusk. I was using my cheap and unpredictable pocket camera to try to capture some of the clouds that I could see. Surprisingly the camera is capable of capturing even more of the detail than my naked eye when photographing the clouds (it is only good in this situation, however, and is usually very bad, especially with greens).
All the while I am treading on this smoothly paved thin little trail constructed probably for the use of mini-trucks to service the rice paddies, sow the soil, and collect the rice. I stumble upon a steep valley lined with paddies going down the hillside like a giant’s staircase. On the edge of this opening there stands a black tomb and further down another tomb with a thin, tall, and picturesque pine tree.
I continue to follow the trail that starts to curve down the hillside under a thick cover of evergreens and some patches of bamboo. Near the bottom the trail turns from pavement to dirt and I remember what had been in the back of my mind during the whole trip: the Mamushi (the diminutive Japanese viper, part of one of which I recently ate) and its fangs of death. This is the season in which they are most abundant.
As I reach the base of the rice fields my eyes are directed straight down in front of my feet. Then I hear the strangest noise from above me coming from the bushy depths of the undergrowth. The sound, which mingles with the endless and full orchestra of the insects that make you feel like you are on another planet, is like a flute. The tune of the flute almost has structure. I would have almost been convinced that someone was up in the trees playing the flute. But my attentions are still mostly diverted elsewhere.
As I approach the carefully constructed rows of rice the object of my fears is spotted, just a couple feet in front of me. The snake, which is probably large enough to be a Mamushi, is darker than the one I had eaten. It is also very small. Now, after realizing that this particular snake is probably of little danger to me, I realize that the grass around my low-top clad feet makes it almost impossible to spot such a camouflaged animal as the Mamushi snake. I decide at this point that I have to pick up my speed in my race with the sunlight. I jog back up the winding path up to where the black tomb is and the lookout over the giant’s steps of rice paddies and then briskly walk down the less windy part of the road that had taken me up there in the first place. Near the entrance to this vagary I find another snake on the pavement and this one speeds from me using its body to form perfect half circles as it flees away.
This story is not meant to emphasize my fear of snakes and dying in the peaceful wilderness at the age of twenty-two, but rather it is more meant to offer you a better picture of what it is like out here in the countryside of central Kyushu. In many ways it is not at all like living in a modernized country. The land and customs are ancient and you can still drive to, and even walk to, places that leave almost no trace of the industrialization that has swept through Japanese culture like a brushfire in southern California. But this brushfire could not penetrate the lush and old forests of the past.
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