Even romantic relationships hold little interest for me. They come and they go, without my ever feeling any real sense of involvement.
Anyway, as I worked between different temples I realized that I had become a kind of traveling calligrapher. Every time I visited a new temple and showed the chief priest and his wife a sample of my calligraphy, they would look both pleased and relieved, and comment that they could see they were in safe hands with me. Whatever kind of day it was—sunny, or rainy, or white with snow—the world seen from the temple office always looked a little distant, and tranquil, as if I were standing on the edge of the world looking in.
“What are these netsuke supposed to be?” A woman whose album I’d just signed addresses me. I’d assumed our interaction was over when I saw her tuck away the finished album inside her LeSportsac bag, so I’d tuned out. Now I have no idea what she’s talking about and feel flustered. I am rarely asked questions, and it takes me a while to gear up to answer them.
I follow the direction of the woman’s gaze and see that she is looking at the metal netsuke, arranged next to the talismans to ward off fire. The netsuke are little oblong ornaments with tiny bells attached to them, and the sections intended to signify empty spaces have been filled in with patterns, so I can see how they might be hard to identify. They look a bit like miniature slatted fences.
“Oh, those . . . They’re . . . They’re ladders.”
The woman’s face resolves itself into a look of comprehension.
“Oh, of course! This is the Oshichi temple, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The woman nods, then briskly walks away.
Visitors to this temple fall roughly into three categories:
1.people who happen to be passing and decide to drop in;
2.people who come with a purpose—maybe because they’re collecting temple stamps, or they want to pray—but aren’t really aware what kind of temple this is;
3.people who come here because of Oshichi, the greengrocer’s daughter.
You can subdivide this last category into two further categories: a) those who aren’t in love with anyone at the moment but feel a connection with Oshichi and want to pay her a visit; and b) those who have a special someone in mind and come to pray to Oshichi for luck in love.
I’ve been working at this temple for a few years now, and in this regard, it’s a little different from all the others. Visitors to other temples fall exclusively into categories 1 and 2, but because this temple has Oshichi’s grave inside its grounds, it boasts this unique third category of attendees.
I wasn’t aware of this until I started working here, but it is believed that Oshichi was an actual person, burned at the stake a few hundred years ago for arson. Allegedly, it was rare for women to be dealt that punishment at that time, but somehow Oshichi managed it. What was more, her reason for committing arson was none other than love. So badly had she yearned to see her beloved again, she’d set her house on fire so she could take refuge in the temple where he worked. Her story captured people’s imaginations, and has been retold goodness knows how many times since. Some accounts claim she didn’t actually set anything on fire, that she had merely climbed up the ladder in the village and sounded the bell and beat the drum and done all the other things that were done back in the day to alert the villagers to a fire, thereby creating an excuse to see her love. She was an old-school romantic type, you could say, definitely on the obsessive end of the spectrum. So, it follows that people who fall into the third category—those who deliberately come here to pray for luck in love at Oshichi’s temple—often seem to be of that same type. I can identify them immediately. All 3s—for some reason the 3s are almost always women—tend to behave exactly the same way.
A 3 enters the temple grounds with a determined stride and heads straight to Oshichi’s grave. Like Oshichi, her unerring gaze is fixed on one thing alone, and she registers interest in nothing else. Her prayers are protracted. Her offerings are more generous than those of other visitors. She places flowers on Oshichi’s grave or presents her with other gifts she has brought. Then she stands there for a curiously long time. Possibly she is talking to Oshichi inside her head, telling her the things that she can’t tell other people. On occasion, the length of time that a 3 spends in front of the grave will beggar belief.
When the 3 finally tears herself away from Oshichi, she proceeds to the main temple, where once again she spends a long time in prayer. She doesn’t scrimp on her offering there, either. Then she drops by the temple office, where I am sitting, and wordlessly buys up ladder netsuke and various talismans, as if she has researched them all beforehand and knows exactly what they signify. At this time, she reminds me of a die-hard fan stocking up on merchandise. Finally, the 3 calls in one more time at Oshichi’s grave, offers another protracted prayer, and then leaves the temple with the same determined stride that marked her entrance.
Watching this sequence from the temple office, I am awed. I don’t have an obsessive personality, but these women remind me a lot of certain friends of mine who are fixated on something—figure skating, a
