Steam finds you before the gate does.

It is the first week of December in Kyoto, and the cold has already taken up residence — the particular basin cold that seems to rise from the ground rather than fall from the sky. In the courtyard of Senbon Shakado, iron pots have been set over flame, and inside them, radishes are simmering. They have been simmering since before dawn.

The temple is older than most of what surrounds it, and it carries the unhurried air of a place that has outlasted several versions of the city. The custom is old too. Radishes cut into rounds, marked with Sanskrit characters, offered up, then boiled, then given away.

You join the line. Everyone joins the line — office workers on a break, a woman with a shopping bag, students who have come mostly for the photograph. A bowl is placed in your hands and the warmth arrives through your palms before anything else.

The radish is soft to the point of surrender. It tastes of the broth it has spent the morning in, and faintly, underneath, of itself.

Nobody says much. There is not much to say. You eat standing up, in the cold, among strangers doing the same thing, and something in the chest loosens.

Outside these walls, Kyoto is bracing for the end of the year. Inside them, it is simply lunch. A very old lunch, eaten quickly, on the way to somewhere else.