Ishiyama-Dera

The path to Ishiyama-Dera from the train station was flanked by whizzing cars arcing around Lake Biwa, and I didn’t feel like I was headed someplace significant, but more or less toward some practical destination—like a dentist’s office or a shoe store. When I arrived at the temple, the landscape transformed (in typical Japanese fashion) into expanses of lush flora and carefully raked gravel paths and gardens, along which dog-sized carp floated idly. The purification basin sat on one side of the narrow stream, and when I spilled the water over my hands it splashed the heads of the big fish, and they didn’t flinch or swim any faster than the slow current was carrying them. I wanted them to at least look up, but they pressed on as if it were going to rain.

Last Friday I took off work to visit this place, Ishiyama-Dera, the famous temple in Otsu where Lady Murasaki is purported to have written her Tale of Genji in a drab room “under the full moon light in August, 1004.” They’ve even erected a statue of the novelist, looking poised over her scroll, dampened calligraphy pen in hand. The temple was founded in 749, and the main hall, Hondou, is the oldest building in Shiga, built 850 years ago, and inside this hall is the room where Murasaki wrote the world’s first novel. Staring at the effigy of a woman entirely unknown, I couldn’t fathom poetry, scenes an artist would wish to paint, coming from her ivory hands, her bleak face.