Takachiho, Miyazaki

The gorge is deep, and the depth is the first thing you feel.

Takachiho was cut by water through old lava—the volcanic rock of Aso, sliced over millennia by the Gokase River into a narrow canyon of columnar cliffs that lean in from both sides, their basalt fluted into vertical pillars as though the stone had been combed. Between them the river runs, green and cold.

From the cliff top the Manai Falls drop seventeen meters straight down the rock face, and in autumn the trees around the rim color and frame the white of the water. You can take a rowboat to the very base of the falls and look up, and what you see is a long thin slot of red leaves and falling water and sky, the world narrowed to a single bright seam overhead.

This is also a place of myth, said to be where the grandson of the sun goddess first descended to earth. Standing at the bottom of the gorge, with the cliffs closing the sky to a ribbon, you understand the choice of setting. If a god were going to come down anywhere, it would be somewhere this deep, and this quiet.

In the land where the myths were born, people dance through the night. Takachiho in Miyazaki is held to be the place where the gods descended to earth. In winter, each village begins its night kagura, welcoming the local deity into a home or community hall and dancing thirty-three acts from evening until the next morning, all night long. Among the acts is the myth of the Heavenly Rock Cave, the story of Amaterasu hiding away and plunging the world into darkness, the gods dancing and clamoring before the cave to lure the goddess out. Onlookers ring the hearth, sharing shochu as they see the night through, the sacred and the relaxed coexisting. The tradition is old, danced in this land for at least several centuries. Myth is not a tale of the distant past here; tonight, too, it is being danced.