Selina Xu

Kyoto in the winter feels unlike any other season. Everything stands out more: the creaking wooden floorboards in the temples as my socked feet pad past buddha statues, the bare branches looking over raked gravel and koi ponds, white snow against red torii gates, every shaft of sunlight.

I go to temple after temple but somehow each is different. There’s the Kurama-dera, nestled high up in the mountains. At its foot, soft snow starts falling, flying into my hood, landing cold on my face, numbing my lips. By the time we start climbing, the whole mountain is a land of whiteness, snowcapped branches looking like a scene from right out of Frozen. I climb each step leaning heavy on the walking stick. How long more? I wonder. Just endless blankets of snow. Suddenly a rustle on my left. I turn. A deer nuzzling at the snow-covered ground, then behind it in the bushes, another. I want to gasp but instead marvel in silence, scared to disturb them. There’s no other sound other than the fall of snow and my breathing.

There’s Sanjūsangendō Temple, with its 1,001 statues of Kannon (观音), the thousand-armed incarnation of the goddess of compassion. 28 deities stand in the front row. I linger in front of each of them, meeting their lifelike crystal eyes and spotting the minute differences in their facial features. An army of deities has an effect on one like the Terracotta Warriors, leaving one mute and somber.

And then there are the gardens. Lines, concentric circles, and waves in the white gravel, ripples radiating, a peninsula of mossy stones amid an ocean whiteness. At times, walking past on the veranda, I see an empty canvas, starkness, fields, river flowing, movement in eternal suspension.

In Hakone, on the Romancecar heading to the volcano ropeway, I stood at the front of the first carriage. As the train slowly inched forward in a dark tunnel, I saw the world as maybe how Miyazaki intended it. At the end of the tunnel was a portal of green, verdant like a painting. The moment lengthened, luscious—the slowness of the train, the stillness of the green, the siloed focus of the light, the suspension of time, the silence in my mind despite the chatter around me. In that tunnel, anything seemed possible on the other side: another world, new creatures, reality with a different flavor.

In a ryokan in Hakone, which was an otherwise uncharming town, the night was lacquered with steam and heightened each sensation: hot pools in the middle of lit-up trees, lined with black stone, early red flowers blossoming on the branches, the inky night sky full of stars, my head cool and clear and my body warm.

Japan gave me a lot of these moments. The juxtaposition of hypermodernity and tradition, velocity and slowness, materialism and zen, intensity and ennui, politeness and detachment, gritty realism and imaginative escapism. Until next time, Japan ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪