Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (18 page)

In the morning, Isao prepared elaborate cherry blossom–themed
bent
s
, cutting rice balls into the shape of flowers and entwining our seafood with blossoms. We ate our
bent
s
under the canopy of cherry blossoms by the ruins of an old castle. Later, we went for a late-night walk. Our route—up a hill here, a turn to the right, down a slope, a turn right again—felt haphazard, as though we were stumbling through a maze and not purposely moving toward a clear destination. My boyfriend was tired and hungry, and we wanted to stop to eat, but we were urged to keep walking. It was dark, and men and women were already drunk in the parks and asleep under the trees. The weekend was coming. In the morning, friends would arrive with food and drink. It was the job of the most stalwart member of each party to choose a prime location for blossom viewing and to secure it by sleeping there.

Most of these campers were men; appreciating good food and drink under a cloud of flowers is not just women’s work. In the dark, they drank, laughed, and rolled over on their blue tarps, the heavy plastic crackling under their weight. Occasionally an island of light punctured the darkness. Sometimes it would be a cluster of food stalls, selling grilled squid or octopus balls and ringed by red lanterns so the air took on a ruby hue. At one point on this dark walk, a massive, weeping cherry tree had been lit up from below by professional theater lighting designers. The bright-pink chandelier arms hanging down, trembled against the indigo night. It looked like some otherworldly creature, thrust up from the earth to dance in the breeze for us, displaying its flowers and occasionally sending stray petals into our hair. I forgot I was hungry. The adrenaline in my body began to flow.

We climbed up a hill in pitch darkness. The Japanese don’t seem to fear lawsuits the way Americans do, and if a street must be dark to maintain atmosphere, then it is dark. We came across a mammoth vermillion
tor
gate, expertly lit up again, a bright, rectangular bulwark against the night sky, like a Rothko painting brought to life. Now we were on a dark set of stairs again, climbing even higher. We were heading to Kiyomizu, a famous Zen Buddhist temple set on a hillside and supported by 139 wooden pillars hewn from the trunks of the zelkova tree. The temple was founded in the eighth century, though its original structures were damaged many times due to earthquakes and fires. The current temple dates from the seventeenth century.

As we rounded the temple balcony, I saw a doorway ahead flanked by massive wooden pillars. Peeking through this, through the darkness, was a shocking bright-pink light. Cherry blossoms. Around me, the air felt electric. We passed through the doorway—through the portal—and were suddenly in another world. The temple
seemed like a ship suspended on the waves of hundreds of pink flowers both above and below us. These illuminated cherry trees glowed like the strange, ethereal gases you see in photos of distant nebulae.

“Oh my god,” my boyfriend and I said over and over again. This was one of the highest highs I have ever experienced. Here we were, floating on this alien ship, our spirits buoyed by the ecstatic energy of hundreds of other people, all equally awed and excited by the sight of something so singularly beautiful. Below us, the city of Ky
t
spread out and down into a basin, and then up into the hillsides on the horizon.

T
HE CHERRY TREES
of Ky
t
are iconic, but they are not the only
sakura
in Japan. True cherry-blossom aficionados will watch the weather forecast closely beginning in January, to see when the blossoms will first open in Ky
sh
, Japan’s largest island to the south. They will take their cameras, and go and photograph these blossoms, then follow the wave of pink as it washes over all of Japan, finally cresting in Hokkaido some time in May.

When I was in Japan in 2013, the city of Sendai experienced a rare phenomenon when the cherry trees were not only in full bloom but also covered in snow. Photographers raced to snap pictures of the pale-pink beauties shivering in the cold.

“The poor blossoms,” I said to my mother’s cousin.

“No,” he said. “The snow is good for the flowers. It means they will stay on the trees longer. Like they are in a refrigerator.”

The adoration of the flower is a quintessentially Japanese trait. A taxi driver in Ky
t
once said to me, “People who love flowers are kind people.” My mother, who was riding in the car with me, nodded vigorously; she understood this feeling implicitly. It’s an
attitude pretty much every Japanese I have ever met will agree with, for the Japanese obsession with the beauty of nature, and the drive to cultivate it, has its roots in Shint
, Japan’s indigenous religion.