佐助稲荷神社 Sasuke Inari Shrine

There is a little hiking path that arches over the back of Zeniarai Benten to Sasuke Inari Shrine, but it's not that well marked in either language. When I got to the top of the stairs behind the Benten trinket stand, an uncle carrying fishing gear told me to take the left fork in the path through a little neighbourhood street. When I got to the bottom of the lane, he called out to me to turn right. Local Kamakura people are used to all the tourists and they are quite friendly. This gives Kamakura a very small town feel.

Up the path of red flags, I met acid green spiders the size of my hand, little stone foxes bearing messages in their teeth, and the smiling priest sweeping the steps with a ratty whisk of a broom.  The shrine is dedicated to Inari after Yoritomo, the shogun who founded Kamakura, had recurring dreams about hermit who said he was at Kamakura. Yoritomo took the dream as a sign to rise up and defeat the Taira clan, his family's old enemy, and after the victory, a grotto was found in the mountain and he dedicated it to Inari, the god of agriculture. This makes sense that Yoritomo celebrated his vicotry with Inari - a shogun's wealth was counted in bales of rice.

Down the hill, through a tunnel and back to modern Kamakura to catch the train. 　江ノ島電鉄 Enoshima Railway, affectionately known as the Enoden, starts behind the JR Kamakura station. I caught these three modes of transportation while waiting for my Tokyo bound train ride.

All over Tokyo, you can see Higanbana,  either the creamy yellow or magenta variety. Higan, the autumnal equinox, the autumnal equinox, is a national holiday (as is the vernal equinox), and these flowers, a variety of amarylis, make their appearance right on time every year in the Kanto region.

The one thing that makes me desperately homesick for Japan when I'm away and brings me back every autumn is the scent of kinmokusei, the fragrant olive, which blooms in late September into October. It's nothing to look at - just miniscule, easily missed orange flowers hidden under the waxy green leaves of a hedge tree. When I walk out my front door, or up the hill to the school, the cloud of sweet perfume takes me back to the autumn of 1999 when I first lived in rural Japan, and I lose my sense of time and space, and suddenly I find myself in my mind's eye sitting seiza on the tatami of a tea room overlooking flaming maples and ginko.

Honeysuckle does this to me, too, taking me back the old farm house in White Rock, British Columbia where my family lived when my brother and I were teenagers. A breath of honeysuckle in a Kamakura lane brought me back to an August afternoon, stretching out on the porch with the family dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback, his soft, floppy ear in my hand, both of us drinking in the perfume of the honeysuckle vine that wound around the granite boulder in our garden.

Happy Autumnal Equinox. I savour all the amazing moments with my friends and teachers and students this year, and wish everybody a wonderful holiday tomorrow.

Comments

[bryce R.]

Liz-none of the e-mils I hve work-the warpmail ones-if you have a new one, send it to me, i'd post addy here, but am not fond of that idea-even though a google search will probably reveal it anyways...

[Shawn]

Happy belated NOX to you as well Liz - The Pink Cow was a brast!

[Kal]

do you know any folklore or myth about higanbana?
the origins,
pls & thanks