KOYASAN HOLY MOUNTAIN | TRAVEL MEMOIR PODCAST | WAKAYAMA | New Book 2023
JAPAN
Letters to Kody: Travel Memoirs of a Tumbleweed is an upcoming author-narrated podcast of travel vignettes from an unusually nomadic life.
Book to be published early 2023.
My name is D. J. Swales, an author of fiction. This time I wish to tell you a true story . . .
In 2016, a car tragically collided with a fire truck in Kentucky. While on his way to a job at Walmart, a young man lost his life. His name was Kody. He dreamt of seeing the world.
These travel memoirs are dedicated to Kody’s lust for travel. They are an invitation from the open road, from my nomadic life following in the footsteps of my grandfather, an old Irish sea dog who was knocked down the hold of a ship in Hamburg.
Together, I hope we can carry Kody's spirit to the places he longed to see.
Dear Kody,
Half an hour ago the blizzard finally broke, as if snuffed out by magic. I’m wandering alone, here on the eight sacred mountain peaks of Kūkai, the Buddhist holy man who founded this settlement of austere Zen monasteries. The tropics of Manila, my current home, seem like another planet from this place of frozen stone and raw wood. My three nights here are the fulfillment of a dream that didn’t do justice to the reality of this enchanting place
Sunlight invades from a sky so blue I wonder if it’s real. A gentle wind whispers. I wish I could understand its secrets. Perhaps it speaks of the people whose names mark the thousands of moss-encrusted Buddhist gravestones that seem to sprout organically, as if germinated in the soil of this forest where bears hunt for honey in summer. Now, the same ground glimmers with the tiny diamonds of ice crystals, abandoned minutes before by snow blankets billowing whiter than ermine. Sun beams slice through the high branches of cedar trees that reach for dazzling heavens and crowd the mountain slopes to hidden horizons.
This morning I awoke on wooden floors hewn from the trees that now surround me. Centuries of pine and cedar oil flavours the air of every enclosed space. From the corridor, I heard the repeated swish of a monk’s broom as my heart pounded. Even barely awake, I felt so alive due to the bewitching dreams sent by the mountain moonlight. All night I had rolled left and then right on the floor, my bedtime belly bloated by successive courses of vegetarian Buddhist cuisine, all served by monks while the howling wind rattled the windows. Behind the rice paper door, the cramped corridor creaked with the arrival of each new delicacy - all part of the package I bought online in Osaka, aside from beer, which is extra. A feather duvet, attached to the edges of my low table, kept the chill at bay during dinner. On the table’s underside was a tiny heater, a perilous firetrap for a timber building, but worth the risk for such cosiness. Seated on tatami mats I’d sleep on, I paused several times as the beams of the ancient building groaned. After my years living around East and Southeast Asia, I mistakenly thought I’d tasted every texture of tofu. Handed over by the monks, each lacquer box or porcelain bowl held dishes of head-scratching artistry.
Snowflakes now alight on my skin, the blizzard returning in heavy silent sheets. They caress the high cedars of this holy place, and erase my solitary footprints. I shiver, but continue my disappearing path. I have no specific destination but to tread deeper into this painting come-to-life, some eight hundred metres above the ten thousand islands of the Inland Sea. No footprints crunch close to mine, but I am not alone in the diminished light of evening. The gaze of the trees and the dryads of Japanese folklore are palpable even for an unbeliever. In the wind are other voices, and eyes in shadows. Do any of them know me, I wonder, or are they denizens of fairy tales? I picture the goblin-spiders of Takejiro Hasegawa’s woodblock prints and Kawanabe Kyōsai’s legendary Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. “And what about the ghosts of Kwaidan?” I ask myself, thinking of Lafcadio Hearn’s beloved book of the same name. In this falling snow I could never imagine that one day I’d call Kumamoto home, the city where Hearn's old Samurai house still survives, one of the last traces of old Kumamoto among the concrete and steel.
I journeyed here to Koyasan from Nara, an older Japanese capital than either Kyoto or Tokyo, where the world’s largest and oldest wooden buildings rise next to leafy deer parks and cobbled streets of squid ball sellers. This mountain home of the Koyasan Shingon Buddhism sect was chosen for its resemblance to a vast lotus plant, a fact which compelled Kūkai, the holy man, to seek the emperor’s permission to build his first temple in 819 A.D. Many more would be constructed under the patronage of warlords and shoguns. One temple contains a copy of the Xi’an Stele, a once-lost early Christian Nestorian relic. Though now largely forgotten, the Babylonian church existed throughout China for one hundred and fifty years. Also forgotten is the Manichean religion that held both Buddha and Jesus as prophets. Anyone buried in Koyasan, near Kūkai's tomb, where the monk’s flesh is apparently uncorrupted, is guaranteed entry to paradise in the afterlife.
Kody, the monks are away to bed, resting before early morning prayers. Once more I close my eyes. The corridor creaks, but this time with ghosts. Tomorrow I leave for Kyoto, where Sister Margaret Mary, my grandparents’ dear friend, ministered for fifty years, teaching the children of the Burakumin, Japan’s untouchables. She now lives in a retirement home in Preston, Lancashire, in the north of England. From Kyoto to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the story of Sister Margaret Mary’s life could spark a biopic bidding war, with the epic film starring Angelina Jolie. The Dalai Lama himself praised her and asked her to clamber to her feet amongst the high priests of the city’s temples.
Perhaps tonight I will sense you in this temple, arriving with the scent of yuzu among pine and cedar. Perhaps I will hear your shadowless footsteps on raked gravel beyond the window.
David
DISCOVER THE ENTHRALLING BOOKS OF AUTHOR D. J. SWALES:
Don't miss the thrilling history and occult horror of the FITZMARBURY WITCHES SERIES
Be terrified by the short story, PARIS: A CURSE COMES TO THE CITY OF THE CATACOMBS
Immerse yourself in the bestselling darkness of MIDNIGHT'S TWIN: DARK POEMS PENNED IN MIDNIGHT HOURS
Be charmed by the feel-good magical realism of PEOPLE OF BLOOMSBURY
Support INDEPENDENT Creatives. If you enjoy this work please back D. J. SWALES on PATREON and PAYPAL.
FOLLOW D. J. SWALES : Instagram, Tik Tok, Newsletter.