On the last morning I got up early and went out with a map, on which I had marked the temples I wanted to visit. Everything was still stripped and bare. Not even the plum trees were in blossom yet, so there was nothing to bring out the hordes with their cameras, and I’d gotten used to being mostly alone in the temples and gardens, and to the silence that was only deepened by the loud cawing of crows. So it was a surprise when, having passed through the monumental entrance gate of Nanzen-ji, I ran into a large group of Japanese women chatting happily together in singsong fashion on the covered walkway that led to the abbot’s residence. They were all outfitted in elegant silk kimonos, and everything about them, from the ornate inlaid combs in their hair to their gathered obi belts and their patterned drawstring purses, was out of another age. The only exception were the dull-brown slippers on their feet, the same kind offered at the entrance of every temple in Kyoto, all of which were tiny and reminded me of the shoes Peter Rabbit lost in the lettuce patch. I’d tried them myself the day before, shoving my feet into them and gripping on with my toes while attempting to slide across the smooth wooden floors, but after almost breaking my neck trying to climb stairs in them, I’d given up and taken to walking across the icy planks in my socks. This made it impossible to ever get warm, and, shivering in my sweater and coat, I wondered how the women didn’t freeze wearing only silk, and whether assistance was needed to tie and wrap and secure all the necessary parts of their kimonos.

Without noticing, bit by bit I’d worked my way into the center of the group, so that when suddenly the women began to move in unison, as if in response to some secret signal, I was swept along down the wide and dim open-air corridor, carried by the flow of silk and the hurried pit-patter of tiny slippers. About twenty feet down the walkway, the group came to a halt and spat out from its amoeba-like body a woman dressed in normal street clothes, who now began to address the others. By standing on my tiptoes, I could just see over the women’s heads to the four-hundred-year-old Zen garden that was one of the most famous in all of Japan. A Zen garden, with its raked gravel and minimum of rocks, bushes, and trees, is not meant to be entered but to be contemplated from the outside, and just beyond where the group had stopped was the empty portico designed for this. But when I tried to make my way out by tapping shoulders and asking to be excused, the group seemed only to tighten around me. Whomever I tapped would turn to me with a bewildered look, and take a few quick little steps to the left or right so that I could pass, but immediately another woman in a kimono would flood in to fill the void, either out of an innate instinct to right the group’s balance or just to get closer to the tour guide. Enclosed on all sides, breathing in the dizzying stench of perfume, and listening to the guide’s relentlessly incomprehensible explanations, I began to feel claustrophobic. But before I could try to elbow my way out more violently, the group suddenly began to move again, and by flattening myself against the wall of the abbot’s residence I managed to stay put, forcing them to move around me. They crossed the wooden floor in a chorus of scuffling slippers.