In the novel 1Q84, Haruki Murakami describes a woman who, while stuck in Tokyo traffic in a taxi, "bolts from the cab, walks onto the elevated Tokyo expressway, descends an emergency ladder to the street below, and enters a strange new world." This seemingly simple, prosaic and brief journey, not unlike Alice's down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, catapults her into a world like our own, but subtly and strangely different; an alternate form of reality.
Murakami, in his novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, tells a similar kind of story, about a disaffected Tokyo urbanite who descends to the bottom of a dry well at a vacant property and stays there for three days, the modern equivalent of a vision quest. From forty feet underground, entirely cut off from normal reality and its everyday concerns, he is able to access an alternate form of reality. In this world of spirit, or perhaps intuition, he is able to perceive events in this world differently and gains insight into what things really mean and how seemingly disparate phenomenon are all interconnected.
When one hikes up to the shine at Nagusa one is struck by a similar sense of having left the mundane world of routine everyday existence (admittedly a uniquely Japanese everyday existence that includes such things as ubiquitous conveyor-belt sushi restaurants, city crosswalks that chirp like insistent birds, and Japanese hotels that serve only French cuisine) and enter into an alternate form of reality.
From the moment we passed beneath the enormous Shinto torii gate, which marks the boundary between the realm of the sacred and the everyday, a hush descended upon us. The air seemed laden with moisture and the sky was obscured behind a dense vaulting forest canopy. The trees seemed to extend upward for a hundred feet or more. They were densely packed in a way not usually seen in America and seemed ancient and enormous. They gave the impression of being wild and alive, not cultivated or controlled. (I had a similar feeling at the Meiji Shine in Tokyo which is surrounded by what looks like an old growth forest. But there the effect is artificially produced since that forest was crafted by hand specifically to give that effect. This is another example of the Japanese skill at creating simulacra.)
After an hour or more of walking we reached the shrine. Standing there, one can feel immediately the presence of the timeless and the sacred. One can feel the ordinarily solid boundary between worlds stretched thin. Staring at a jumble of logs arranged in a pile like a giant child's plaything or an enormous granite boulder neatly cleft in two one cannot but be struck with a sense of awe and wonder (and perhaps terror*). Natural beauty exists in such abundance and is observed with such reverence throughout Japan that I often feel as if, like a character in a Murakami novel, I am rubbing shoulders with the divine, the miraculous, the sacred. It is a feeling that is both inspiring and unsettling. The border between worlds has been rubbed thin and if not careful one might slip right through.
* Images of an arranged pile of sticks appear frequently in American horror settings as an epitome of an unknown but ancient and malevolent power of nature. The film Blair Witch Project and the first season of the television series True Detective feature similar designs as does the famous horror story by Carl Edward Wagner, "Sticks."
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