I rode a bullet train to Kyoto. I climbed the stone path of the Fushimi Inari shrine, up the mountain under ten thousand blazing orange gates. I visited the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, rebuilt in 1955 after a mad monk burned it to the ground (Mishima wrote a novel about this). I visited the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, weirder and more mysterious because it is not actually covered in silver but was only intended to be. I spent a hundred yen on a vending-machine fortune that told me to be “patient with time.”
