Kyoto– category –

I got to Nanzenji a little after six in the morning. It was late November, the height of the Nanzenji Temple autumn season, and I expected to have the place to myself. I didn't. A handful of people were already crossing the gravel, and n...

Everyone on this slope is after the same thing. Yasaka Pagoda rises over the tiled roofs of Higashiyama, five stories of dark wood against the sky, and every person walking toward it hopes to have it to themselves. I am not above this. I...

"Samuuui." A woman's voice carried across the stage. Long and plaintive, the vowel stretched the way Japanese people stretch it when the weather has offended them personally. It means "so cold." I guessed it was her first time at the Kiy...

The typhoon never came. The news the night before had warned that trains might stop, and most of Kyoto seems to have believed it and stayed home. The sky that June Saturday turned out clear anyway, and I had the Miedo, the great hall ded...

Shortly after the westbound Shinkansen leaves Kyoto Station, a dark pagoda rises off to the left. Blink and it is gone. That is the five-story pagoda of Toji Temple, and for a long time it was the only part of Toji I knew. A Pagoda I Kep...

The gust came out of nowhere. One second I was holding a freshly written slip of paper in the courtyard of Yasui Konpiragu, and the next it was skidding across the gravel with me bent double behind it, one arm out, like a man chasing a r...

The smell hit me as soon as I walked through the gate. Ginkgo. Sharp and sour, a little rude, the smell of fallen nuts splitting open on the stone path. It was September 23, and the rest of Kyoto was still dragging summer behind it. But ...

Every Japanese child learns the rule early. Tell a lie, and Enma, the King of Hell, will pull out your tongue. Nobody remembers who said it first. A grandmother, maybe, or a teacher who had heard one excuse too many. The warning settles ...

At 5:45 p.m. on September 22, I walked into Seimei Shrine thinking I was early. The yudate kagura, the first rite of the shrine's annual festival, wasn't due to begin until seven. Better too early than too late. That was the theory. Noth...

I heard it the moment I stepped through the torii. A norito prayer drifted over from the main hall, and threaded through it was the thin, high line of a kagura flute. It was a Saturday morning in September at Jonangu Shrine, in the south...