In Japan on New Year’s Day morning, you must see the sunrise otherwise daemons will take your soul.
I don’t remember if this is from Shintoism or Zen Buddhism, or was just local tradition.
An old Shinto monk told me this on a cold New Year’s Eve night as my wife and I partied on the snowy grounds of his temple, a stone’s throw from our house in Misawa.
Time continued, the night matured to early morning, and the sky showed twilight as the party lost its vigor, and we took our Subaru Legacy onto Japan National Route 338 for the fifteen-minute drive north up the Shimokita Peninsula to a beach access park just near Veedol Beach where the wide waters of the Pacific Ocean meet the east coast of Honshu, and as I drove she asked me if I believed the old monk.
We arrived on the beach. The sun had still yet to rise against a pre-dawn sky, wide and a deep indigo; to the East grew the bulge of red light, low on the horizon where the ocean met the sky.
She and I left the Subaru and climbed the steep embankment of a manmade berm that during the summer afforded us a nighttime view of the brightly-lit squid boats just off the coast at the drop off, and the berm’s sand was cold, but the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean were quiet and flat, almost like the surface of a lake.
A cold breeze swept past us, coming off the water of the Pacific; the red light in the east progressively grew, and there was freshness in the air, the smell of ocean salt and seaweed.
I took the flask from my coat pocket, offered it to her, and then took a pull of whiskey myself, and felt its warmth, and overhead the sky was bright in the East, graduating westward to that deep indigo, a blue so deep I felt as if I would fall up into it.
And in the fading twilight, a few other people, all Japanese, joined us on the berm, and we knew we would bear witness to something that was beyond all of us, yet shared by all of us, and I offered my flask and the offer was accepted and someone handed out cold skewers of chicken yakitori in sweet soy sauce wrapped in aluminum foil that was the best I’d ever eaten, and I drank hot sake from a thermos, and we all laughed when we realized we didn’t speak a common language but we spoke anyway, and we were all Humanity’s Children, joined.
And, without warning, a bright slit of light emerged from that place to the East where water and sky met, and the other people who’d joined us gasped as did we, and for a moment, just a brief, brief moment, I saw the Rift Between Day and Night open like a gate unfurled, a gate to the land where the Spirits haunt and where it is neither Day nor Night, but just Is and a human man would get lost if he wasn’t careful; and then just as briefly as it had appeared, the Rift closed only to be replaced by the brilliant Sun, its rising crescent edge spilling light over the Pacific waters and onto us, all of us, and it was warm on your face.
And day overran night.
We left after an interval, making our way back to our house by the Shinto temple, and we drove in the bright morning light on this first day of the new year.
And we breakfasted on poached eggs, a rasher of ham, skillet potatoes, biscuits, and an apple fritter, washing it all down with warm sake from a fired-clay decanter that she’d warmed in a hot water bath in a small pot on the stovetop before I lit the kerosene heater and turned it low, and both of us plunged onto the futon to sleep under heavy blankets until we woke up.
And knowing that our souls were safely secure for another year.
mattlaneydotcom 