Ise Does It - Day 7
11.11.24
10.7Km
First things first: I need to address the four-fruit sando. This combination of the most nutrient-deficient white bread you can imagine, whipped cream, and a few pieces of fruit — kiwi, pineapple, mango, and tangerine — should be a gustatory abomination. Friends, I humbly submit that it is instead a reveltaion, a silky, chewy, sweet symphony of all that is bad about convenience store food in Japan, and therefore everything that is also good. If you come to Japan and don’t try one, you’re missing out.
My zeal for the sando might just be influenced by the fact that since Iseshi, 7 days ago now, Kalia and I have been served kaiseki meals for breakfast and all but two dinners every single day. This means we’ve made our way through countless types of fish prepared in as many different ways, pickled and/or steamed vegetables, miso, and a small mountain of white rice (now known colloquially as Bowel Blocker 3000). If we’ve been really lucky, we might secure a solitary piece of fruit to finish things off.
In general, the quality of the food has been high. In the case of Misuzu, it was transcendent. It’s not hard to see why it’s landed a place in the Michelin guide to Japan. But the meals have been largely the same. So as we made our way to Owase, I wanted for nothing more than a pizza perhaps, or a tasty steak frites. It wasn’t to be, however, as Google’s opening times for Western-style restaurants were wildly out of whack with what we saw on the street. We headed for an izakaya instead for some bar snacks. I’ve never known two people to be so happy to consume a Caesar salad, 4 chicken yakitori sticks and a few gyoza.
I was hungry for more as we left the couple behind the bar to their TV crime show, so we headed up the street to the Family Mart to find something to take back to the hotel. The last time I was in Japan, I’d clocked the fruit sando but thought myself above it. No such problem today: before long Kalia and I were winding through the streets back to Hotel Viora with said sweet sando in hand, and a pork cutlet one for good measure.
On Day -1 of this particular newsletter, I wrote of how walks allow me to pendulate between noticing — identifying something interesting, image-making, note-taking — and not noticing — simply letting the landscape unfold around me at the pace of my feet. On this walk, I’ve been aware of another kind of pendulation that has me swinging between intense emotional enquiry, typically catalysed by some piercing question from Kalia, and stretches of reflection.
Looking back over the first 6 days of the walk, I can see how the swings of this particular pendulum started small as Kalia and I got to know one another in three dimensions. But as the safety between us became established, the swings became harder, if not exactly faster, until they reached a crescendo around midday yesterday and I was moved to write about heartbreak last night.
It’s probably the most raw writing I’ve ever done in public, verging on a kind of messy vulnerability that is — as my grandmother used to saw when I farted as a kid — better out than in, but I went to bed last night wondering if it was actually better shared. I woke up this morning with a vulnerability hangover and wondering what the fuck I’d done. I’d certainly hit some kind of peak.
During a session of psychedelic therapy, there’s a period my therapist — the delightfully-named April Rains — termed the landing zone. It was, she told me, the point at which the medicine’s effects would start to ramp down and the insight of the experience would likely start to emerge. She would, she assured me, be standing by to take notes. I wonder if this is the zone that Kalia and I are now entering. Each of us have experienced our own kind of breakthroughs on this walk. Both of us have been broken open and had parts of us obliterated. Maybe, with three days of walking left, this is now the time to sit — or walk — quietly with what I’ve learned and have a think about how I’d like to carry it forward.
I started today wanting to be back out in the world and that’s precisely what I got, starting with this woman who popped out from behind her garden wall and accosted us in the street. Speaking at a million miles a minute, Kalia could barely comprehend what she was saying, but when she hurried off in to her house, Kalia turned to me and said “she was saying “bear” a lot”. When she returned, handbag in hand, she rang the bear bell she’d attached to it and motioned for me to remove it. We protested but she wouldn’t have it: we were to have her bell for the climb over Magose-toge, no ifs, buts or bears.
The climb itself was a trial of patience: I swear the stones that line the path were laid to not to help the pilgrim, but to drive them to despair. Slick with moss and sheet-like in surface, each step upon them threatened a sprained ankle or broken hip. Between the heat, the humidity and the danger, I felt the anger rising in me. I wanted to scream at these fucking rocks and slump down beside them in a sulk until I realised they meant me no ill will, and that it was only me who was fighting against them. By surrendering to these rocks as they were, the climb became — if not exactly easy — much less of a trial. At the pass, we could have taken a 4-hour round hike along a spur to a spectacular view or a 1-hour to achieve the same end. We took the latter and while the path there was, to put it mildly, vertiginous, we were rewarded with an awe-inspiring view over Owase and its harbour.
A measured pace saw us safely back down to sea level, although a kid we met at the summit was not so lucky. As he made his way back down to the pass, he had an air of the chaotic about him and, sure enough, an English/English-Japanese couple — artists — informed us he’d sprained his ankle halfway down the mountain. We waited for the emergency services to arrive and then headed in to town. Another woman ran up to us and wanted to know everything that had happened. She’d heard the sirens. She was probably thinking bears. As we approached her house, she sprinted ahead muttering mikan as she went. By the time we were level with her front door she’d reappeared with a bag of mandarins. I’ve never been so happy to see so much unadulterated dietary fibre.
More tomorrow, friends. Take care.