Mt. Myōgi

Mt. Myōgi.

Mt. Myōgi's silhouette is unmistakable. From the Kantō plain it looks impossible — a wall of pinnacles, blades, and shattered towers of rock rising suddenly from the lowland, as if a mountain range had tried to break out of the earth and only succeeded in pushing up its sharpest pieces. Local people call the silhouette by the same word for a folding screen: a row of vertical edges, an architecture of refusal.

The Edo-period yamabushi who built the chain routes here understood the mountain's nature. Climbing Myōgi was never about reaching a clean summit. There is no real summit — just a tangle of severe rock pillars connected by exposed ridges. The chain routes, the kusari, were installed to make passage possible, but they did not make it safe. People still die here every year, on the same ridges, in the same places. The mountain is a serious place.

The Tōzan-ha lineage of Shugendō, headquartered far to the south in Kii, used Myōgi as a training ground for the more demanding chain practices of Ōmine and Ishizuchi. It was the boot camp before the real ascetic test. A young yamabushi who could pull himself up the iron links of Myōgi's third pinnacle — gripping with both hands, foot scraping for purchase on cold sloped rock — was considered ready for what came next.

The lower routes are gentler. A meditative walk through pine and lower rock leads to Myōgi-jinja at the foot of the cliffs, whose main hall is a beautiful red-lacquered building backed directly against the rock face. The shrine deity is Haya-Susanowo, the storm god — appropriate for a mountain that looks as if it were carved by storms. Beside the main hall, a fierce stone statue of Daikokuten, the mountain's secondary deity, leans into the wind that always blows through this notch.

To climb Myōgi by the kusari is to confess. The route forces you to grip with both hands, to commit your whole body, to surrender every reserve of pride. Halfway up the chain you cannot let go; you must go on. Pine and wind grind together near the upper ridge. The mountain does not soften you. It scours you.

What comes back down the trail is lighter than what went up, because the rock has kept whatever was unnecessary. Myōgi performs this subtraction more efficiently than most mountains in Japan. It does not pretend to be kind. The kindness, if there is any, is the kindness of a sharp tool, used well, that has removed exactly what needed removing.