Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (89 page)

After a few minutes, I could hear the brisk footsteps of priests crossing the wooden hallway outside, and not long after, the unmistakable swish of silk sleeves brushing against silk robes. The priests were entering. One was familiar: the man who had sung the sutras
so beautifully early in the morning when I visited in May. And then there was a figure dressed in purple, with a high black hat on his head. This would be Minami, the vice president of Mount Doom.

He struck me as unusually tall, and he had a long, pointy face and a mouth that naturally descended into a tight, pouty frown. In his body he carried years of Eiheiji training; he was precise and graceful. But his movements had a shadow, a hint of a lack of coordination. He bowed his head slightly as he crossed the threshold, as though he had long ago learned to expect low doorways. He was also extremely thin, and his fingers and thumbs were very long. He did not use his hands to speak in the wired, taut manner that so many of the priests I had met at S
jiji and Eiheiji used. His hands were often relaxed, the long fingers curled. When he unfurled his hands, I thought of a sea anemone and the way its tentacles reach out to grab at absent-minded prey. Something about his hampered physicality hinted at a pure cerebral power. He looked like a scholar who had learned to move like a monk and not the other way around. I couldn’t help but think that Minami was some form of human being I had never met before, a hint of what was to come after years of evolution.

I had heard a lot about this head priest of Mount Doom, whose family name, Minami, means “South.” His given name, Jikisai, is made up of the characters for “Direct” and “How!” or “Alas!” or, as one dictionary put it, “An archaic exclamation!” Minami trained at Eiheiji, and like all priests, he changed his name when he pursued his education. I took the name as a sign. Mr. “How Direct!” priest had a point to make and would make it directly. But he was also a scholar and perhaps even an elitist who delighted shocking people with the truth. He was not like Kaneta, whose given name, Tai
, meant “great sunshine.”

In fact, when Kaneta learned that I would be meeting Minami in person, he was immediately delighted and—intrigued.

“You know,” Kaneta gushed, “Minami chose to be a priest. He was only twenty-five years old. He graduated from Waseda, got a job in T
ky
, and then renounced the world and went to stay at Eiheiji for twenty years, before he finally left to head up his own temple. People rarely choose to go to Eiheiji and then stay there for twenty years.” Kaneta smiled. “He’s quite famous. But complicated. I wonder how you will get along.”

When I was at the Mountain Woman’s inn, I had mentioned to some of the girls in the newly opened café just outside the spa that I would be heading up to Mount Doom for a private audience with Minami. They, too, had squealed, “He’s very famous!” before adding, “He’s also very smart.”

One of the girls was in her forties, and she divided her time between Spain, where she danced flamenco, and Japan, where she came home to the Shimokita Peninsula to work during the summer months. Soon the tourist season would be over, and she would return to Spain. “I would love to meet Minami,” she enthused. “You know, he married my classmate.”

From here, the conversation in the café around me descended—or ascended, depending on your point of view—into gossip. B
daiji, the temple that oversees Mount Doom, is connected to a larger temple called Ents
ji, which is located on the Shimokita Peninsula in the town of Mutsu. The priest at Ents
ji had had only one daughter. “There really was nothing very distinctive about her,” the girls in the café recalled. “But she was the daughter of the head priest of Ents
ji, and that gave her a certain standing in our community.”

Ents
ji’s only daughter repeatedly visited Eiheiji with the intention of finding a spouse. “She met Minami and that was it,” one of the women declared. The couple got married when the woman was forty-two. “It would have been
girigiri
for having a child,” said another of the women, using the onomatopoeia for “barely and just in the nick of time.”

“They have a little boy,” someone else exclaimed. “Of course, he’s brilliant like his father. Everyone says he’s the best in the class.”

Here I tuned out of the conversation, which had now gone full throttle into gossip. I knew all about the pressure and the relief a temple family feels to find an heir, and empathized with Ents
ji’s predicament. But I was now very intrigued by this man who had graduated from one of Japan’s finest universities, gone on to have a career, and then abandoned the secular world for twenty years of Eiheiji, before leaving that haven behind to become the vice president of Japan’s Mount Doom.