Meiji Jingu, Fushigi

I awake to the sound of rain on my window. "Tsuyu" has come, the Japanese 'monsoon.' I live in a rainshadow, because the north/west coast of Japan is sort of a spine of mountains, and much of what is east of that experiences less precipitation. So it's basically like Oregon weather.

I think of last Saturday. Saw Meiji Jingu shrine veiled in a light, misty rain on Saturday morning. Killing time with a close friend. Witnessed a traditional wedding procession--very similar to the "foxes' wedding" in Kurosawa's film, Dreams. Incredibly elegant, quiet, spare. The shrine is nestled in a tall, thick little forest that swaddles it from the noise and spectacle of Harajuku and Yoyogi park, and there were few tourists. The moment had all the beauty and wonder I could hope for.

One quiet Sunday back in May, I was walking home down the windy greenish street I photographed in my "second sunday" entry. Only weeks before, I had seen two shinto priests beating a small drum and processing there on a lonely evening. But this sunny spring morning I came across four thin, willowy trees, taller than myself, suddenly standing in a square on an empty lot of land. Twine was wrapped around them, filling in the sides of the square, and the little paper ladders you see at Shinto shrines were dangling from the twine, lifted reluctantly by the breeze. The next day I asked a Japanese classmate and he shrugged. Two weeks later, the grass-spotted gravel was empty again, as though the trees had been some apparition.

Two days ago, strolling amidst the shining, dripping leaves in the half-light of a good drizzle, I felt the same sensation: "fushigi," (不思議) Hiro calls it. Tangorin.com defines it as, "wonder, miracle, strange, mystery, marvel, curiosity," sometimes connoting "a quirk of fate, curious coincidence." He murmured the word often as we watched "Le Marche de l'Emperor" or whatever March of the Penguins was in French (by the way that was a bizarre experience--I hope I remember to write about it). The Saturday preceding, we had picked it up at Tsutaya, Japan's answer to blockbuster.

One of the birds, immaculately white, yellow, and black ("but they don't bathe..." he murmurs, "fushigi") arcs its neck to reach its offspring with a long, curved beak ("do they feel love, I wonder? ... fushigi") amidst a vast and lonely desert of ice (even I think that's just plain fushigi).

As we crunch crunch across the gravel that winds through the forest, I remember the trees, and ask Hiro what they meant. He explains that it was probably purifying the land before some kind of construction project. Then it occurs to me that recently, I noticed fencing around the plot, with a contractor's advertisements fastened to it.