Kyoto, Kyoto

Horses race in Heian-era costume. At Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, on the fifth of May, the Kamo Kurabeuma is run. Nearly a thousand years ago, a horse-racing rite held within the imperial court was moved here. The riders, called norijiri, wear vivid Heian robes and gallop the course in pairs. The contest is over in an instant, gone in a flash. Yet for that instant there is a long ceremony, grooming the horses, setting the costumes right, praying to the gods, all for a sprint of mere seconds. The rite dates to 1093, the reign of Emperor Horikawa, and though wars have interrupted it, the tradition has been handed down ever since. Across a course bright with new green, the colors of ancient robes flash past. A scene from a thousand years ago, still here. A rite that adorns early summer in Kyoto.

It began as a way to quell a plague. Kyoto's Gion Matsuri, one of Japan's three great festivals, is a long rite that fills the entire month of July. Its origin lies in 869, when an epidemic struck the capital and people raised sixty-six halberds to pray for the disease to depart, a tradition continuing for more than eleven hundred and fifty years. The climax falls on July 17, the procession of floats known as a "moving museum" of lavish wheeled shrines making their way down the great avenues. The most thrilling moment is the tsujimawashi, turning a massive-wheeled float ninety degrees at an intersection, bamboo laid down, water poured, men hauling the ropes as the wood groans. The night before, lanterns glow and folding screens are displayed, and the town becomes a festival evening. A prayer against disease, turned over a thousand years into beauty. A UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Characters are drawn on the mountains in fire. Kyoto's Gozan no Okuribi takes place on the night of August 16, sending the ancestral spirits that returned for Obon back to the other world. At eight in the evening, the character for "great" blazes up on the eastern mountain, followed by other characters, a boat shape, and a torii gate, fires lit in sequence across five peaks. On the dark mountainsides, giant figures glow and burn, fading away in about thirty minutes. What burns are prayer-sticks, wood on which people have written the names of the dead and their wishes, set alight on the mountains. The flames are a send-off: thank you for coming; come again next year. The exact origin is unclear, but for at least several centuries the people of Kyoto have known summer's end by this fire. When it dies, autumn enters the city.

In Kyoto, a city that is not short of temples or of maples, one name has stood for autumn for over a thousand years.

Eikando. The phrase momiji no Eikando—the Eikando of red leaves—is old, older than most of what now surrounds it, and the temple has spent a millennium earning it. The hillside grounds turn early and turn hard, the maples crowding the slopes above the halls until the whole compound seems to be burning quietly.

At its heart is an unusual figure: the Mikaeri Amida, a statue of the Buddha looking back over his shoulder. The legend says he turned to wait for a follower who had fallen behind. Climb the stone steps to the pagoda and the city opens below you, a sea of red, and in the temple's pond the leaves are reflected so completely that the line between water and sky goes missing.

The evening viewings are crowded; there is no avoiding that, and it is honest to say so. Yet before the backward-looking Amida the crowd softens, almost without meaning to, and the red, which a moment ago was only beautiful, begins to look like something closer to prayer.

You touch the clay of a thousand-year-old capital. Along the slopes climbing toward Kiyomizu Temple, the pottery known as Kyo-yaki and Kiyomizu-yaki was born—refined, delicate, painted as carefully as a scroll. It is the ware of the imperial city, made to suit the tastes of courtiers and tea masters.

You turn the wheel, and the clay shifts and rises in your hands, finding a form. You take up the brush and lay color onto the white surface, the way Kyoto's artisans have done for centuries. The gestures are old—the centering of the clay, the steadying of the hand, the patient loading of the brush—and for an hour or two they become your gestures too.

This is not a souvenir picked up at a stall. It is a few hours spent inside one of the living crafts of the old capital, your own clumsy hands tracing motions that potters have repeated here for hundreds of years. You will carry away something you made—imperfect, certainly—but more than the object, you will carry the memory of having touched, however briefly, a small fragment of a thousand years of beauty.

A kyogen with no voices.

Mibu Kyogen has been performed at Mibu Temple in Kyoto for some seven hundred years, and its performers never speak a word. The whole drama moves on percussion alone—a flat bell, a drum, a flute—and on the bodies of the masked players.

It began as a way of teaching Buddhist doctrine through gesture, a theatre for commoners who could not read, a means of showing right and wrong without text. That is why it needs no language. The players don masks and move slowly, in broad exaggerated gestures, and in one famous scene unglazed clay plates are hurled from the stage to smash spectacularly on the ground below.

It is wordless, and it is funny. Some scenes are sad. Without a single line, it carries. For seven centuries the ordinary people of Kyoto have watched this and nodded, recognizing something—something that sits just below speech, where words have not yet formed.

Once a month, someone's past gathers in a plaza. At Okazaki Park in Kyoto, the Heian Flea Market sets up on the second Saturday of every month, weather permitting, a market of old things. Old chests, chipped teacups, folded kimono, tools whose uses are no longer clear. Each once stood in someone's home, and now moves on to someone else's. There are hundreds of vendors, prices are negotiable, and you need no expertise; whether you like it is reason enough to choose it. Behind it all rises the great torii of Heian Shrine. Under Kyoto's blue sky, on blue tarps, time is laid out for sale. The selection differs each visit; the same market never comes twice. By afternoon the stalls close, and the plaza becomes a plaza again. Nothing remains, and that is exactly why you want to return.

A single thread becomes a pattern like a cosmos. Nishijin in Kyoto is the home of the luxury silk textile called Nishijin-ori. It was where the western army camped during the Onin War, hence the name, Nishijin, "western camp." For more than a thousand years, textiles have been made here, obi, kimono, Noh costumes, gorgeous cloth woven with gold and silver thread. Nishijin-ori is made by division of labor: one dyes the thread, another draws the design, another works the loom, more than twenty processes each handled by its own craftsman. A single obi passes through many hands before it is finally complete. Weaving is dizzying work, passing the thread one strand at a time, the pattern rising little by little. In the experience, you can touch this hand-weaving, facing the loom, passing the thread; even a few centimeters takes time. Knowing that labor, the weight of a single cloth looks different.

It has long been called Kyoto's kitchen. Nishiki Market runs about three hundred and ninety meters under its arcade, lined with some hundred and thirty shops. Pickles, tofu, yuba, conger eel, rolled omelette, wheat gluten, almost everything Kyoto cooking requires can be found here. The market is four centuries old; it began as a fish market, said to have thrived because abundant groundwater kept the catch fresh. Today it draws many visitors, and the calls of street-food vendors ring out. But mornings are still quiet, when chefs come to shop as they always have. An old shopkeeper trades words with a customer: this is in season now; that one, wait a little longer. They sell not only goods but the turning of the seasons. Ask the price before you buy; that, too, is part of the market's etiquette.

On the 21st of every month, the grounds of To-ji Temple become a market.
More than a thousand stalls. Antiques, old tools, vintage clothing, ceramics, potted plants, street food, and things with no category. All of it laid out in the shadow of Japan's tallest wooden pagoda.
The origin is devotional. The 21st is the anniversary of the death of Kobo Daishi — the monk Kukai, founder of Shingon Buddhism — and a memorial service has been held at To-ji on this day every month since 1239. As pilgrims began arriving in greater numbers, vendors followed. Faith produced the market.
Today the crowd includes foreign antique dealers, serious collectors with lists, curious tourists, and elderly residents who come every month as a matter of habit. Bargaining is expected, and sometimes rewarded — especially late in the afternoon when sellers begin packing up.
The January market (Hatsu-Kobo) and December market (Shimai-Kobo) draw the largest crowds of the year.
If you are in Kyoto on the 21st, go in the morning.