Yuko had given us a presentation earlier that morning on Shugendō, the region’s syncretic tradition, standing in the aisle of the bus while it was moving. We’re born Shinto and we die Buddhist, she told us, explaining that each religion offers a more appealing lens than the other on the respective matters of life and death.

When I returned from the stone stairway, Tatsu was making a phone call in formal Japanese. He came over to where I was sitting and asked if I wanted to visit a hospital that afternoon. I said I was alright and he nodded, turning back around and taking a seat. He looked through the window, watching the bus ascend once again into mist.

The speck of conversation made the silence palpable between us. I leaned forward and asked in Japanese if he was from here, if he had family – no, and yes, a wife and daughters – and remarked how the scenery was silvery green. Kirei desu, I added, noting its beauty. Behind his glasses, his eyes cast around for English. He then agreed it was a very nice area.

Quiet mountain hut

by a rice patch… till a deer’s cry

just outside startles me

and I move… so startling him:

we astonish one another!

(Saigyō, trans. William LaFleur, 2003)

I’d only been speaking to our guides and local staff in Japanese, partly because there was almost no one around. I struggled when the script of polite conversation went off on a tangent. Listening was difficult – the local Kansai accent is jazzy, with off-beat stresses and pitch shifts. But I was shyest with constructing sentences, which required perceiving the world through an entirely different syntax. In English, Yuko said to me the day before, “You leave the most important part of the sentence until the end! I’m always waiting, thinking, what, what?”

We joined Yuko and the others at the Kumano Nachi Grand Shrine, which sits to the fore of Seiganto-ji along a path. Its base has panoramas of the surrounding mountains, forested with cedar and cypress that soften their brow. I felt a kind of weightlessness – from the sweeping vista, my flu, my sense of awe – although the experience must be different having earned the view after hiking. The Kumano Kodō pathways are a death realm in Buddhist ideology, where suffering interlocks with beauty. It’s a pilgrimage after all, a purification, and famously arduous in travel literature.

There was a modest crowd making its way down to Seiganto-ji, which followed the curve of the hill. It appeared suddenly, bright and precise as a postcard, Japanese landscapes often seeming in frame, infinite but wrapped in boundaries. Waka can feel contained in the same way. It’s easy to read them reductively, but the words, and spaces around them, reflect endlessly like rooms of dark mirrors.

The next day, we went down to the Hiki-gawa river to cross its channel on a small boat, which is a requisite along Kumano Kodō’s Ōhechi route between the Tonda-zaka and Hotoke-zaka passes. Three older men were waiting to help us cross the bluish-green water, although swimming in it would probably be incredibly good for you. No one else appeared to be around far into the distance.

The men wore navy fleeces and matching wellington boots, white trousers and matching gloves. They laughed while talking with our guides; their voices had deep, hoarse registers. I picked up a sound like yōka several times, so they were possibly talking about something happening in eight days, or their spare time, or something melting. One slapped his hands at his sides as if to playfully express futility. He was wearing a straw hat with the character “安” (usually pronounced either an or yasu) printed on its side. It might have been part of the word for calm, cheap, more likely safety – actually, it was the beginning of the settlement’s name, Ago – but he didn’t turn around enough for me to see.

In the empty field leading up to the boat, we’d also passed a rock with this name debossed in calligraphic font. While looking at it, the other journalist remembered a trend on TikTok where photos of the most mundane parts of the United States are edited to place their signage in Japanese, making the image suddenly aesthetic. I’d fall for that; I’m Barthesian that way. When I learned the word “空港” (kūkō), sky and harbour, I was completely arrested, and then I remembered the composition of the word “airport”.

The landscape in Kii is heavily annotated: waka engraved on stones along Kumano Kodō, kanji glossed on the doorways of caves, wish plaques at shrines, graffitied sandstone on the coast of Shirahama. The graffiti was easiest to read, even though at first, the sparse strokes of katakana characters looked like scratches. Yuko had started testing me on various characters and words after I translated a whisky menu at one of our first dinners.

She explained to us, while we were being rowed, that the river had been a pilgrimage route for centuries, but this crossing had only been restored several years ago after decades of inactivity. Communities of yamabushi (mountain ascetic hermits) continued to live across the peninsula, but travellers were less common. For most of the last century, the whole pilgrimage had turned quiet, and sections almost vanished into forest.

The steep trail on the other side of the river, with a sharp drop to the side, was overgrown and covered in rubble. Still, it was remarkable: we were enshrouded by red cedar trees, slim and endless. The wider map of Kumano Kodō was restored in the 1990s, which led to its recognition in 2004 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s a curious patchwork of routes, with some passing through people’s gardens.

Cloudfree mountains

encircle the sea, which holds

the reflected moon:

this transforms islands into

emptiness holes in a sea of ice.

(Saigyō, trans. William LaFleur, 2003)

In a garden in the Hatenashi settlement, we met another guide named Hanako. We were higher up the mountains now, in the Yoshino District, en route to Nara. A light snow had begun to fall, and the joy I felt was close to adrenaline.

Hanako had lived in Yokohama prior to moving to Totsukawa, the larger village containing Hatenashi, as part of a government initiative bringing younger people to the region. Alongside her tourism work, she ran a café with her husband, and a car service for Totsukawa’s ageing population, bringing groceries to their homes along the hills. A community bus runs once a week in Totsukawa.

We followed her in the car to her café, named Labo, to have lunch with her and her husband, Tarek. After eating, the couple walked us to the Tanize Suspension Bridge, hanging over a canyon, long and empty apart from the Totsukawa River and a cluster of concrete tetrapods. It was still snowing, windlessly, but the bridge swayed below us while we talked.

We spoke more about the ageing population of Totsukawa, and the extinction of similar nearby villages. I touched upon how jarring Tarek’s relocation from San Francisco must have been, but quickly let the subject go, as if it were a wound. I may have been projecting, or thinking of Saigyō, his noble solitude and maddening loneliness, his agitations of syntax. More than cherry blossoms, what defines him as Kii’s poet is fever. There is something to the region's atmosphere that intensifies withdrawal rather than resolving it – the density of stillness and beauty feels impenetrable.

I asked if many young travellers came by here, and Hanako replied by asking if I knew the term hikikomori, the reclusion of Japanese youth, which I did as a person of the internet. It was a different loneliness to the one that prompted soul-searching in the 1990s. Even by the flatness of her voice, it seemed that today’s loneliness took a plainer form, happening without the animations of spirit, of the entire landscape holding you.

Hanako was planning to escort us to Dorogawa Onsen, a retro hot spring town in Tenkawa Village at the foot of Mount Ōmine, apparently a cool spot among young travellers, scarce as they were. It was an hour away and still almost totally empty on arrival, but this was perhaps its allure, with its resemblance to the thumbnail of a lo-fi mix. Once night had fallen, we dined with more guests, more attachés with little English, who were quiet while the table was overtaken by our language. Then we wandered outside, us glowing with alcohol, the streets with lanterns. We were 820 metres high – twice the altitude of Labo earlier that afternoon.

My room at Koryokuen Nishisei, a local ryokan (inn), was glassy like ice, everywhere except the tatami floor, which was mounded with electric futons and a kotatsu (low, blanketed table). I left for the onsen to warm up. It was open air, moonlit and empty, apart from a woman in the changing room. The limestone-infused water was scalding, yet the steam was not entirely unpleasant.

I liked when I was alone and disconnection felt deliberate and inevitable. My conversational shortfalls were depressing me. It sat like a kind of grief, as if the impasse were absolute. And so when the woman, now brushing her wet bob, turned around to talk to me once I’d dressed, the steam felt thick between us.

Were the people I was with earlier today all friends? Perhaps the alcohol had slowed time enough for me to perfectly understand her question. I said it was a work trip and that I wrote things, which Yusuke had told me sounded more humble than calling myself a writer. She asked what I was writing, and I said I was interested in Japanese ideologies. Yusuke had said this was an unnaturally grand word, but I felt grand. I was happy, because I’d wished for snow. Also cherry blossoms, I added, the joke not really landing. She replied, either describing cherry blossoms as luminous, or something about trees being set alight. I said this was amazing, and we both smiled and nodded in a way that looked like we were silently laughing. Shortly after, we said goodnight.

I stayed up and read, wrote, reviewed Japanese flashcards, and looked at the moon. When I woke up the next morning, there was a snowstorm. I watched from the veranda as it got heavier. A school bus arrived playing a jingle, then left with a boy running behind it.

We shimmered from the excitement of snow that morning, though we worried at breakfast with Hanako about how she might get home. We’d leave sooner than later to walk to the Ryusen-ji temple for a fire ceremony, so she could make it onto the road early. The rest of our group would drive to Nara, and go our separate ways. I’d already packed, so I stayed behind at the table, which was covered with trays, pots and portable stoves. In the space between the sliding doors, the snow made everything pale.

I looked it up: cherry blossom, fire, light and Kii in many combinations. The woman from the night before may have been referring to an annual winter display in Kuwana’s Nabana no Sato Flower Park, in which cherry blossoms are recreated with lights, the snow on the branches absorbing the pigment. The images online of the park were low res, but it appeared that on misty nights, the trees’ luminescence overrides the landscape, smoothing its textures baby pink.

As I gazed into the pinkness, a staff attendant came into the room to ask a question. My Japanese recall was so atrocious that I couldn’t find the words to say that I couldn’t speak Japanese. Daijōbu desu, I eventually said. I’m OK. Nihongo jōzu, she replied.

Yoshino Mountains:

down here it is cascades of

water spread with

white petals; up there on the peaks

it starts out running under deep snow.

(Saigyō, trans. William LaFleur, 2003)

The snow fell heavier as we walked to the temple; it got in our eyes, and only the red accents of Shinto architecture passed through the filter. We walked over the Yamagami River into the base of the shrine, which was landscaped with ponds and statues rippled with snow. No one spoke, as happens at enormous moments in our lives.

In waka, snow is still and solemn. But the snow that morning, the swell. How it shredded walls and trees so the world was breaking open. It stopped while we were inside the shrine for the ceremony, and our goodbyes to the attachés and Hanako. When we went back outside – because the view was white and blinding – I noticed this first with my skin.

Snow has fallen on

field paths and mountain paths,

burying them all,

and I can’t tell here from there:

my journey in the midst of sky.

(Saigyō, trans. William LaFleur, 2003)

It’s been several months since returning and the trip has started to feel distant. The same is happening to the language: I’d been meaning to restart conversation lessons, and shortly after travelling, I lost the habit of daily flashcards. Some vocabulary will be forgotten.

It feels good stepping away from the rote tasks of learning a language, especially one so bottomless. Learning Japanese is like getting to know Kii – the more I ruminate, it recedes. To be honest, studying Japanese is painful. I don’t want to stop, but I’d like to acquire the language while doing nothing. I want to feel the glide, the snow – sometimes I have. Sometimes while reading, I sense the characters are no longer made of strokes, and I’d know them even if they were blurry. .