The accident in “And then”

How Japan’s most famous modern novelist borrowed from a real-life mountain disaster

Natsume Soseki

Few would argue that Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was greatly into extreme sports. So it’s all the more surprising to happen on a reference to modern alpinism in his novel Sore kara (ably translated as And then by Norma Moore Field). This occurs in Chapter XV, when Daisuke, a typically perplexed and troubled Sōseki hero, is leafing through a “certain popular foreign magazine”:

In one number, he had come across an article entitled "Mountain Accidents" and had been alarmed. The article recounted the injuries and mishaps that befell those adventurers who crawled up high mountains. There was a story of a climber lost in an avalanche whose bones appeared forty years later on the tip of a glacier; another described the plight of four adventurers who, about to pass a flat, vertical rock that stood halfway up the side of a peak, had piled one on top of the other like monkeys; but just as the highest was about to reach for the tip of the rock, it had crumbled, the rope had broken, and the three, doubled one upon the other, had plunged headlong past the fourth into the abyss. In the midst of these accounts were inserted several illustrations of human beings glued like bats to a mountainside as sheer as a brick wall. Daisuke, imagining the wide sky and distant valleys that lay beyond the white space beside the precipitous cliffs, could not help re-experiencing the dizziness brought on by terror.

On reading this account, Daisuke reflects that “in the world of morality, he stood on the same ground as those climbers”. At the same time, he is unwilling or unable to break off the budding liaison with a friend’s wife that is leading him towards moral and social destruction. For the fate that Sōseki has in store for his hero will be every bit as annihilating as the accident that befell the “four adventurers” in the fictional magazine.

Or was that magazine really fictional? Except for the number of people involved, the accident it describes closely resembles the one in August 1899 that ended the career of the English rock-climbing pioneer Owen Glynne Jones (below) and three guides on the Ferpècle Arête of the Dent Blanche.

The original O G Jones in action (photo by George D Abraham)

In that notorious episode, the lead guide tried to surmount a rocky obstacle by standing on an ice-axe held firm by his colleagues. When he slipped, he pulled Jones and two other guides to their deaths. The fifth member of the party, a Mr F W Hill, survived only because the rope joining him to the others snapped under the strain. A detailed post on OG Jones’s life and death can be found on Summitpost.

Could Sōseki have heard of this accident? The dates seem to work. In 1901, only a few years after the Dent Blanche disaster, he was sent to England on a Japanese government scholarship to improve his knowledge of English literature. During his stay, Sōseki unquestionably fulfilled his mandate, spending most of his time closeted in libraries or his lodgings, reading voraciously. It seems possible that he also stumbled across a magazine – but which one? – containing an account of Dent Blanche accident.

The Dent Blanche, as featured in "And then"

Sōseki’s English sojourn was the making of his career. Returning to Japan, he took up an appointment at the First National College in Tokyo and later became the professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Novels started to tumble out at a rate of one a year. Yet his memories of England were more bitter than sweet: ”The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves.”

A few of Sōseki’s English friends did their best to alleviate his misery. His last set of landladies, the Leale sisters of Clapham, “successfully urged him to get out more and take up cycling”, or so Wikipedia asserts. Had the sisters been a bit more successful, one could imagine a kind of alternative history in which Sōseki parlays his newfound cycling fitness into a general enthusiasm for the outdoors, returning to Japan just in time to join the nascent Japanese Alpine Club, as quite a few other contemporary writers would do.

You know, it might almost have happened – in Sōseki’s Kusamakura, published in 1906, the year after the Japanese Alpine Club was founded, the narrator opens his account walking down a spring mountainside towards a remote hot spring village. We learn that he is a painter on a hiking tour, not unlike the real-life artists Nakamura Seitarō and Ibaraki Inokichi, who both became keen Sangakukai men.

At least one caution is in order here. A novel's narrator is not necessarily the same sort of person as his author. Thus, although the protagonist of Kusamakura may have been a likely candidate for Japan's new alpine club, this doesn't mean that his creator ever considered joining. Come to think about it, it’s a mercy that Sōseki didn’t sign up as a pioneer alpinist. Japanese literature would in all probability be much the poorer for it.

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October 20: with only the afternoon to spare, we need a low mountain. Monju-san, a few kilometres south of Fukui, fits the bill. It has just one metre of altitude for each day in the year. Height, though, is not the same as stature, as Fukada Kyūya points out in the afterword to his most famous book. For this is a mountain that no meizanologist should miss.

Monju was “opened” by Monk Taichō himself, in the first year of Yōrō (717). Presumably, he was warming up for his pioneering excursion to Hakusan in the same year – the climb that Fukada somewhat adventurously identifies as Japan’s first high-mountain ascent. Actually, it is surprising that Taichō didn’t climb Monju sooner, since he was born in Asōzu, the village at its foot, more than three decades earlier.

Be that as it may, Monju’s Meizan status cannot be disputed. Like any self-respecting sacred mountain, it has three peaks, identified on the hiking map as Little Monju, Big Monju and the Inner Sanctuary (Oku-no-in). But the first and last ones are known additionally as Murodō and Ōnanji, names that also adorn the equivalent places on Hakusan and Tateyama. This suggests that people once saw Monju in the same terms as those two other sacred peaks.

Some centuries after Taichō, Monk Saigyō, the all-terrain poet of the Heian era, distinguished the mountain in a deft tanka:

越に来て富士とやいはん角原の文殊が岳の雪のあけぼの

                     In Koshi, over yonder
                     Is it Fuji there, I wonder?
                     So bright the daybreak glows
                     On Tsunohara-Monju’s snows
                   

Indeed, you can still climb Monju via a “Tsunohara course”. And it may be that the mountain really does look like Mt Fuji from that western aspect. Though, when we step out of the Sensei’s van at the foot of the normal route, it is a straggling ridge that rises above us rather than a shapely cone.

In the carpark, we brush up on Monju’s history from a signboard. On its battered paintwork, a tiny frog is contemplating a vertical direttissima. A few minutes into the woods, we encounter a sign warning that bears might leap out at us. The Sensei is unfazed, but I deploy her bear-bell all the same. It’s always best to err on the safe side when dealing with these ursine types.

In fact, the trail presents a greater hazard – it is broad but slippery, the mud polished to a mirror glaze by the passage of a millennium’s worth of feet. About half-way up our hill, the Sensei tires of it and launches into the woods on our right. Trust me, she says, there really is a path. So, chiming rhythmically, we start our own direttissima across the mountain’s north face. A strip of red tape marks the way for those who would brave this route in mid-winter.

In front of us, the leaf litter rustles as something leaps for cover. Fortunately, it is an order of magnitude or two smaller than a bear. Instead, we find a fat brown frog palpitating by the side of the track– pregnant with eggs, says the Sensei, who knows about country things. Perhaps it is taking the warm weather for the start of spring.

We come up on the ridge close to a pavilion that houses a Kannon, or so at least a gaudy banner suggests. Nearby is a tree wearing a sacred rope, suggesting that nobody ever tried very hard to disentwine Buddhism and Shintoism here, as they did on Ochi-san. Even today, the Sensei tells me, it is a temple at the foot of the mountain that looks after the shrines up here.

High on the ridge, we pass a lightning-scarred tree. Monju, one of the four great Bodhisattva (Bosatsu), is sometimes portrayed with a thunderbolt (vajra) in his hand. He seems to toss them down with considerable liberality on his namesake mountain.

A few minutes later, on the summit itself, we see a tree-stump that a lightning strike has completely burned out. Probably one should avoid Monju during thunderstorms.

Below the Oku-no-in, the path leads into a rift between the two halves of a gigantic boulder. You should only pass through if you have a clear conscience. No impure thoughts now, says the Sensei. Or the rocks will clap together and swallow you up.

I hesitate for a moment. I mean, suppose there were an earthquake. Then, surviving the passage unscathed, we circle back through the woods towards the middle peak.

Guarded by a row of jizō statues, the summit shrine is silvery with age. Its timbers must have looked fresher when Fukada Kyūya, then in his fourth year at Fukui Middle School, came up here with three companions on November 27, 1919. Another noticeboard gives us these details.

As fellow students had helped to clear the path a year or two before, Fukada and his friends might have felt a proprietary interest in Monju-san. At any rate, all four felt entitled to inscribe their names on the shrine.

Where the future Hyakumeizan author left his mark
(Photo: Fukui Shimbun)

Ninety-nine years later, I look here and there for the graffiti, without success – sorry, says the Sensei, they carved their names inside the shrine, and you can only see them when the doors are opened for the annual festival.

The view makes up for any disappointment. For its height, Monju must afford one of the best all-round vistas in the prefecture. Through gaps in the trees, we look westwards to Ochi-san and the coastal hills. In the opposite direction, Hakusan and all those other famous mountains of Hokuriku loom through the haze. Mountains, as any meizanologist will testify, are places that let you see further.

Tomorrow, we would have to head back to the Big Slope. There were friends to meet and a flight to catch. We’d take the view from Monju with us, though.

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October 20: watching NHK’s weather feature over breakfast, we’re finally able to put some numbers on our observations. We’ve noticed how warm it is this October - how could we not? In our student days, October mornings used to be crisp, cold affairs out here in the Fukui countryside.

Autumn as it should be (Kurobe valley)

In those days, the leaves would already be red and gold up on Hakusan, frost pillars would be pushing out of the ground, and, if you didn’t look lively, you might be mugged by a sudden snowstorm. All that is unimaginable this year. There isn’t even a dusting of snow on Hakusan, the trees are still more or less green and the bears are still wide awake. As for snowstorms, you’re much more likely to be bitten by a viper.

Now NHK explains why. “Autumn has been shortened,” the announcer says. The average temperature in recent Octobers has been 1.9°C higher than the average temperature for the month during the 1980s. (I’m not sure whether he’s talking just about Fukui, or for the whole country.) Of course, recent Decembers have been warmer too, but by a lesser margin – only 0.9°C warmer than in the 1980s. The figures don’t look that alarming, until you consider that the world today is only a few degrees warmer, on average, than during the Ice Ages.

Exploring the moulin in the Kuranosuke coire

On another morning, NHK reports on a deep hole or “moulin” that has appeared in the Kuranosuke snowfield high up on Tateyama’s eastern flank. This is the first one that has appeared in these parts for eleven years.

The Kuranosuke snowfield
(photo: Tateyama Caldera Sabo
Museum)

The savants of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum are shown boldly roping down into the shaft, taking measurements as they go. On the way down, they encounter a layer of shattered boulders, evidence of some ancient rockfall centuries ago.

“Moulin” usually refers to the deep blue pits that drain surface streams down into the icy depths of alpine glaciers. Several thousand years ago, there would have been a real glacier in the Kuranosuke corrie.

But a survey in the 1980s did discover hard-packed ice layers at the bottom of its permanent snowfield that were 1,700 years old. Let’s hope the moulin closes up again before that ancient ice is all washed away.

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October 19: a lunch of hisashiburi-sashimi at a beachside restaurant just east of Shizuoka with Mark Hudson, the environmental archaeologist Junzō Uchiyama, and two colleagues. Mark and Project Hyakumeizan were dōhai at London University several eons ago, since when we have hardly met up.

After many years as professor of anthropology at the University of West Kyushu, Mark was recently appointed as professor at the Mt Fuji World Heritage Center and Museum of Natural and Environmental History in Shizuoka. Due to open next year, the museum will be housed in a splendid pavilion, designed by the star architect Shigeru Ban.

A pleasure-dome by Shigeru Ban, with caves of glass

After lunch we took a stroll on the black basalt sands of Miho no Matsubara – the pine grove by the sea is possibly the most far-flung of the twenty five “cultural assets” that together comprise the Mt Fuji World Heritage site. There is supposed to be a fine view of Mt Fuji from here (see below). Alas, after baring just a corner of his triple-crowned head, the top meizan slid behind a raft of cumulus.

View (with Meizan) from Miho: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Curiously, the world will soon have two Mt Fuji World Heritage Centers – one in Shizuoka and the other on the mountain’s eastern side, in Yamanashi, each supported by its respective prefectural authorities. The duplication echoes the age-old rivalry between the pilgrimage towns of Fuji-Yoshida and Fujinomiya.

You know, a little competition may be no bad thing. I will be watching with interest to see what kind of exhibitions, events and papers come out of the new World Heritage Centres. A revolution in Mt Fuji-related meizanology might just be in the offing.

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October 18: The answer is the snow-covered summit of Jiigatake. At last, I can reply to the question so many people have asked me – that is, from which vantage point in the Japan Northern Alps did Peter Skov take the photo that adorns the cover of One Hundred Mountains of Japan?

The question can now be answered because Peter and I have met up at last, in a station coffee shop at Higashi Omiya, close to his workplace. I say, at last, because – incredible as it may seem – this is the first chance we’ve had to actually meet, although Peter several years ago volunteered his magnificent image for the book’s front cover (left), sight unseen of the publisher or translator.

Taken on a mountain hike in late 2007, the original picture (below) also appears in Peter’s first photo book, The Japan Alps and in an online album. The view is westward, across Obuchizawa, towards Harinoki in the foreground and Yakushi in the far distance. For me, and I hope the book’s readers, it captures the essence of the Japan Alps: “vast, mysterious, sublime, as if wrapped in some purple cloud”, as another mountain artist expressed it.

Afternoon cloud sea, by Peter Skov

Sipping a less than sublime iced cocoa from a plastic receptacle, I put the inevitable question – what kind of camera did you use? It seems that Peter, like this blogger, decided to stay aloof from the mediocre early generations of digital cameras. So this picture was taken through a 24-85mm zoom lens on an old-fangled Minolta SLR with Fuji Velvia film, which may at least partly account for the subtlety of the image’s colours and tones.

A book prominent on both our bookshelves is Mountain Light, a kind of photographic manifesto by the late but still inspirational Galen Rowell. As Peter points out, pictures like this one amply vindicate Rowell’s claim that, if handled with care, 35mm film cameras can produce printed images that give larger formats a run for their money.

Peter’s freezer is still full of film, but these days there is less time to use it – the arrival of a baby daughter, the Skovs’ second child, has ruled out long mountain weekends for now. So what does a mountain photographer do when he can no longer get to the mountains? Peter’s answer was to change both focus and medium.

Picking up a used Sony digital camera – handier than film for dealing with weak early-morning light – he started photographing scenes on his way to work in Saitama. Appropriately, the inspiration for this project came as he was descending from one of his last mountain hikes, on Ryōgami, a member of the Hyakumeizan.

The resulting collection, Little Inaka, is a reminder that you don’t need to visit a national park to find camera-worthy scenery in Japan. And Peter demonstrates that you can apply the same skills to the woods near your house as you do to the Japan Alps, alternating the broad panorama with season-by-season micro-landscapes worthy of Elliot Porter, another influence on his work.

I also appreciate the colour palette of this collection. It’s lively enough to sustain the images, even on the printed page of the Blurb edition, but stops well short of the spectral and tonal shoutiness that seems to have overtaken so much landscape photography these days. One sign that Peter has hit the right note is that it’s all but impossible to say, if you didn’t know already, whether the original medium was film or digital. These are colours that you'd recognise in nature.

Early morning fog, Saitama, by Peter Skov

The Sakitama burial mounds – a group of tumuli from the third to the seventh centuries – appear several times in Little Inaka – indeed, one is on the cover. Their enigmatic forms run through the seasons as a kind of unifying theme, rather like the school belfry in Maeda Shinzō’s Seasons of a Hilltop Tower.

Alas, there won’t be any more images of Sakitama for the moment. Last summer, the Skov’s moved house, taking the burial mounds and other Little Inaka sites out of early-morning stroll range. But Peter is already scouting new locations for the next photographic project. And, who knows, NHK may be back with another idea for a mountain documentary – the last one took Peter back to the Northern Alps.

“When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine,” said Picasso. I could talk about turpentine – or cameras, lenses and locations – all afternoon with Peter. But the next appointment beckons, far across that vast abyss of time and space that men call Tokyo. I remember only when I’m on the train that I forgot to take a photo of Peter. So this post will have to do with a screenshot from his NHK page. Mōshiwake arimasen....

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October 16: “Ara-mah!” The Sensei’s exclamation of surprise is more than justified. For what could be more improbable than a chance meeting, well into the twenty-first century, on a local train somewhere in Hokuriku, between the instigator of Nihon Hyakumeizan, a book first published in 1964, and its translators more than half a century later.

Yet, without a doubt, the figure balancing carefully towards us along the swaying railcar is none other than Ohmori-san – who, as a young magazine editor back in 1959, saw fit to commission a series of essays about one hundred selected Japanese mountains. We first met him last year, at the Japanese Alpine Club in Tokyo.

The Fukada Kyuya Museum at Daishoji

The three of us are on our way to Daishōji, the small town between Fukui and Kanazawa that numbers the Hyakumeizan author as one of its most famous sons. We’ve been invited to a seminar on the book’s translation by officials of the Fukada Kyūya Yama no Bunkakan, a museum to the writer’s memory.

The Bunkakan is a graceful old wooden building, shaded by a magnificent gingko tree in its courtyard. In Fukada’s youth, it housed the offices of a textile firm. In an aery first-floor room, floored with tatami, I expound on the role that the “white mountain” Hakusan played in the Englishing of Japan’s most famous mountain book.

Hakusan was Fukada Kyūya’s native mountain. It was the first high one he climbed – indeed, the same is true for his translator. While a student in Kyoto, I climbed Hakusan with the Sempai.

Then, when I was at a loss on how to research the book’s introduction some years ago, it was the Senpai who brought me a copy of Heibonsha’s “Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka” (Why do people climb mountains?). This very readable history of Japan’s mountaineering history was co-edited by a certain Ohmori Hisao. Yō no naka wa semai, na …

After the seminar, we are invited to pay our respects to Fukada’s grave. The Sensei and I decide to walk there, taking in the author’s childhood home on the way. There is still a small printshop at the address, just as there was in Fukada’s day, although the business has since passed out of the family. A photo at the Bunkakan shows a young Fukada (with bicycle) standing in front of the house.

The Fukada family's printing shop, then and now

Daishōji is still a quiet country town where, if you listen carefully, you can catch a few echoes from Fukada’s evocation in Nihon Hyakumeizan:-

My native mountain is Hakusan. You could see it from the top floor of the house where I was born, from the gates of our primary school, from the banks of the river where we used to catch minnows, from the sand dunes of the beach where we swam, in short from just about anywhere in our town. There it was, right in front of us, noble and beautiful. As the name promises, it was a white mountain for fully half the year.

We wander into a shrine on the wooded hill that bounds Daishōji’s southern edge. Entering the peaceful grove, we realise that, not for the first time, we are uncertain of our position.

Back in the street, a random passer-by must be accosted. Fukada Kyūya’s grave? Certainly – you’ll find him up that flight of stone stairs, through the gateway. It’s good to be in a town where everybody knows your favourite author.

Fukada’s gravestone is a simple granite stele. You could see Hakusan from here, our guide tells us, until yonder pine tree grew up. We then walk to Enuma Shrine to visit another, more elaborate, memorial to Fukada.

The stone panel is engraved with one of the author’s best-known poems.

Before supper, we have a few minutes in the Yama no Bunkakan’s museum.

Ohmori-san and I linger beside a cabinet with one of Fukada’s manuscripts, a copy of Bungei Shunjū, one of Japan’s leading critical monthlies, and a 1959 edition of a now-defunct mountaineering magazine. Together, these items sum up the genesis of Nihon Hyakumeizan, but it’s best if Ohmori-san tells the story:-

As Hōbundō was a small company, I had to do everything by myself. While editing books, I also had to help edit magazines. Thanks to this, I acquired the necessary skills on the job. One day, the editor of the monthly magazine Yama to Kōgen (Mountains and Highlands) retired, and I was asked to take on this work.

Just then, I came across Mr Fukada’s essay on “Uncrowded Meizan – in pursuit of repose and solitude,” which he’d written for a special issue of Bungei Shunjū. It was in this article that he first floated the idea of ‘a hundred famous mountains of Japan’. “That’s it!” I thought to myself – this would definitely make an excellent project.

You see, I wanted to make something more of this magazine than just something for outdoor or mountaineering club members. And the literary prowess and the mountain experience that Mr Fukada brought to the table was exactly what I had in mind. So I called on him at his home in Setagaya, did some negotiation with him, and got his agreement to write.

Regrettably, you won’t find this history in the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan – that’s because I only learned it after we went to press. But I hope to correct this omission, if there is a chance to reprint the book one of these days.

Over supper – we are now in a fine ryōtei – we are introduced to Oki Masato, a retired professor of architecture, who has recently published an authoritative book on the Indian Himalaya. Even without this information, I can see by Oki-sensei's bearing that I’m sitting opposite a veteran of the Greater Ranges.

In the early 1960s, Oki-sensei was one of many young climbers who visited Fukada Kyūya at his Setagaya home to seek advice on unclimbed Himalayan peaks. In 1965, as a member of the renowned Meiji University mountaineering club, he took part in a first ascent of Daulaghiri II (7751m). It is probably no coincidence that Fukada reminds us in his Hakusan chapter that Daulaghiri is the ‘white mountain’ of the Himalaya.

Our conversation is momentarily drowned out by some lively demonstrations at the other end of the table. One of our hosts is to be heard toasting Ohmori-san on commissioning Nihon Hyakumeizan. Ohmori-san brushes aside the compliment: “It was the obvious thing to do.” Our host is unabashed: “It’s a book that brings people together” he insists. And with that nobody can cavil.

The passport issued to "Kyuya Fukata" for his Nepal expedition

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October 14: A shrill “Kyaaah!” from up ahead tells me that the Sensei has met a snake. Bears, by contrast, leave her unfazed. By the time I get there, the hapless viper has wriggled off into some hole. It’s unseasonably warm; in our student days, no self-respecting snake would have sunned itself on a mountain path in mid-October.

OK, at 613 metres, this isn’t a very high mountain. We’ve chosen it so that we can get away with a late start. A more meizanological reason for climbing Ochi-san is that it was the first mountain to be “opened” by Taichō, the monk who later pioneered Hakusan (2,702 metres) in the first year of Yōrō (717).

The start of our own climb is marked by a modest signboard, showing Ochi-san as it was in the heyday of mountain pilgrimages. We zig-zag up through a dense plantation of sugi (cryptomeria). Unlike the one on Genanpō, this grove is well-tended. We exchange good mornings with a quartet of foresters, who are preparing to shin up the trees with spiked boots and climbing gear in order to trim off the lower branches.

Sultans of silviculture

Above the sugi, we start meeting with the labels – each new variety of tree is labelled with its Japanese names and in English too. Unwisely, I start photographing every one, slowing me up so much that I’m far behind the Sensei when she sees the viper. Thus I miss my chance to meet Gloydius blomhoffii.

In the shadow zone

The labels underline Japan’s astonishing biodiversity. I remember a conversation with Ben Jones, the curator of Oxford University’s Harcourt Arboretum. Unlike other temperate regions, he explained, the Japanese islands were never scraped clean by the ice ages. This let a whole herbarium of plants survive that were razed out in more northerly climes. A year or two ago, Ben was in the Chichibu mountains collecting seeds from one of these old survivors for Kew Gardens. (And, for true plant otaku, here is a day-to-day account of that trip.)

Under the greenwood tree

The path leads onto a straggling ridge. I’m surprised to meet the first beech trees at just over 300 metres – that seems low for this part of Honshū, but perhaps their lower limit has been “downshifted” by the hard Hokuriku winters. Signs marking the “stations” (gome), just as on Mt Fuji, remind us that we’re on a sacred mountain.

Effacement

Just above the fifth station, we take our first break at a pavilion that enshrines jizō statues. Some are missing their heads. The Sensei says they lost them during the Meiji government’s campaign to separate Buddhism and Shinto in the 1870s. I look at a date scratched on one of the headless figures – perhaps the third year of Tempō (1832). The post-Meiji ones seem to be intact.

Spring time

After dropping down to a spring that issues from a rockface, we start on a steeper section of ridge. The sunlight filters through a mixed canopy of beech, maple and hornbeam. We pass a Japanese stewartia (natsu-tsubaki) romantically entwined with a Korean whitebeam (azuki-nashi).

A little later, a cherry tree afflicted with witches’ broom disease (tengusūbyō) hints at nature’s darker side.

Now slippery with moss, the path tops a rise and drops into a level glen of fir trees (momi). A torii heralds the main sanctuary.

From the engawa of a building that combines the shrine itself and a mountain hut, an elderly man seems to be waiting for us. “Did anything leap out at you on the way?” he asks – could he have heard the Sensei’s “Kyaah”, I wonder. Then he invites us in for tea.

We make our way past a shed full of jizō figures (these seemed to have kept their heads) to a flight of stone steps leading to the summit sanctuary. As Ochi-san is an eminence in Fukui’s coastal range of hills, the view is all-encompassing.

Westwards, a band of fog elides the boundary between sea and sky while, inland, a single sweep round the skyline takes in all of Hokuriku’s famous mountains, from Hino to Arashima, Kyō-ga-take and Fujisha.

Beyond them lies the district’s highest Meizan, still without a shred of snow. “It was from here that Taichō first saw Hakusan,” the Sensei says. This seems right. Any meizanophile would see the distant mountains beckoning to them.

We present ourselves again at the door of the priest's house. When we have settled ourselves around the irori, a traditional sunken fire-pit, Otani-san serves out bowls of miso soup, while we share the celebratory red rice presented to us by the Senpai’s wife yesterday evening. They go well together. Dessert is a blackened banana each.

Between April and November, Otani-san lives up here for ten days at a time, going down intermittently to stock up on food. Fortunately – he is over eighty – you can drive all the way up the mountain. The eldest sons of his family have been priests for thirty-one generations; his daughter, a primary school teacher, will carry on the tradition. Before taking over from his own father, he worked for JR and the city administration.

The duties of a priest are various. Once, he had to take down a small shrine that stood in the way of a housing development and haul it all the way up here. Today is quiet but tomorrow a hundred schoolchildren will visit the mountaintop. If they want to read up about the shrine’s foundation, Otani-san has a short print-out ready for them.

Ascents of Ochi-san book-end the story of Monk Taichō’s life. A plausible date for his birth is the month of June in Hakuhō 11 (682), in the village of Asōzu, now part of Fukui City. Curiously, one of the Sensei's relatives was born there too.

The dates are deduced from a biography, the Taichō wajō denki that was published some centuries later. As a child, Taichō is said to have fashioned Buddhist images out of mud and, at the age of fourteen, he climbed Ochi-san for the first time, where he venerated the Eleven-Headed Kannon.

In 716, when Taichō was thirty-four, the goddess of Hakusan appeared to him in a dream, and the following year he climbed the mountain. According to Nihon Hyakumeizan, this was the first ascent of a high mountain in Japan for religious ends. On the summit, the goddess appeared to him again, this time in the guise of the Eleven-Headed Kannon.

In 722, he journeyed to Nara, the capital, and cured the Empress Genshō of an illness. In 736, he visited the capital again, and received from Monk Genbō a copy of an Eleven-Headed Kannon sutra. The following year, the ninth of Tempyō, he performed a rite of repentance to ward off an outbreak of smallpox that threatened the capital. For this he was raised to the high monastic rank of “wajō”.

Returning to his home province, he climbed Ochi-san again in the second year of Tempyō-Hōji (758) and retired to a cave to meditate. He died in 767 at the age of eighty-six.

It's time to go. We bow to the priest at his door, receive his blessing, and start down. One tends to forget that, even if autumn days are now unseasonably warm, that doesn’t make them any longer than they used to be. Shadows are lengthening by the time we reach the Sensei’s van.