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long before I was born. He was forty-five. My father was five.”
    â€œB-but . . . ,” I stuttered, “did he drown? Or catch a cold?”
    â€œWell, it was December.” She was speaking to me as if surprised at my surprise. “It’s religious training! If you don’t believe in the religion, don’t do it. It has to be tough, so obviously it was winter. If you go under a waterfall in summer, it’s not training, it’s called ‘nice.’”
    That was half a century ago, but the traditions are still strong. My hosts in K o ka took us to a Shugend o fire festival, where, in an open space on a mountainside, a high priest in a green mantle led twenty elderly acolytes in honoring the spirit of the mountain. It deserved respect because this mountain, Iwao, had an eminent pedigree: It was one of three where the ninth-century founder of Buddhism’s Tendai sect, Saich o , built temples and trained. A respectful audience of two dozen included five ladies in white, who would later offer light refreshments. There was much single-note, rhythmic chanting, punctuated by the sound of two conch shells being blown like bugles. Once upon a distant time I played the trumpet, so I tried one after the ceremony. It had a simple mouthpiece, and its sound was something between a hunting horn and a very resonant one-note fart, which could be briefly pushed up an octave if you felt ambitious. Everyone was in traditional costume—white shirt, baggy white plus fours, white bootees molded to divide the big toe from the other toes, a white cape, and a sort of harness with two red bobbles on the back. In the middle of the open area was a pyre of green cedar branches. After more chanting and conch blowing, a devotee picked up a bow and arrow and prepared to fire. For a moment I imagined the creak and twang of a longbow and an arrow zipping away over treetops, but it was a ritual bow and a toy arrow, which flopped to the ground after a couple of meters. Never mind; it did its symbolic job, which was to break the power of evil spirits. A ritual axe and a few ritual chops cleared the holy space of invisible trees.
    Then, despite my skepticism, the ceremony began to get to me. The high priest threw some bits of wood and paper with writing on them onto the pyre. They were messages to the god, I discovered later, to be burned like a child’s Christmas list. “It’s very, very strange,” the priest told me, “but if you make a wish, it often comes true.” Candles lit long broom-like tapers, which were applied to the pyre. Smoke poured out along the ground, like liquid oxygen in a stage show, before the heat built, and the crackling branches slowly caught and the smell of fir spread like incense, and smoke billowed around us, turning the participants to ghosts and the cathedral of trees to a faded backdrop, all this happening to the hypnotic, regular beat of a chant. Ma ka han ya ha la mi ta . . . It was, I discovered later, a Japanese version of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra.
    Afterward, I asked the high priest to explain. “We do this twice a year, in autumn and spring, wishing everybody good health and success in business. We are praying to a dragon god. A long time ago, a white snake was found here and someone heard the god saying that one should pay respects to it, because when snakes become old and die, they often become a dragon god. There is also Fud o -my o o ”—a guardian god—“which you can see carved into the stone up there, where the shrine is. Have some sake.” He gestured to a tray held by one of the white-clad women. “It is the best sake, and now purified because it has been touched by the god, which makes it taste even better.”
    The shrine, up a flight of steps, was a wooden side chapel of this natural cathedral, set on stilts. It shielded a rock face into which was carved a rough bas-relief of a man with a club over his right