I arrived at Fushimi Inari Taisha more than half an hour later than planned, having missed my subway stop. On the walk toward the shrine, there was a brief interlude: a French couple emerged from a pitch-black street corner and, in thickly accented French-English, asked me for directions. I explained which subway line they should take to return to their hotel, speaking a kind of English that had been quietly distorted over the past few days of travel—tinged, somehow, with Japanese rhythms.
Before we parted, they said merci. I replied, without thinking, Ciao.
Only afterward did I realize I had spoken Italian. I felt a flicker of embarrassment; perhaps they thought they had encountered a strange person.
Of course, the situation itself was already strange enough: a Chinese person in Japan giving directions in English to two French people. It was late at night, on a street with almost no streetlights. Had this happened in France, I would have run without hesitation. In Japan, it registered merely as a slightly surreal encounter. I regretted, briefly, having skipped my French classes since the beginning of the semester—otherwise, I might have lingered and spoken with them a little longer.
The incident made me think of a shared trait between the French and the Japanese in conversations with foreigners. Both are unusually strict when outsiders attempt to use their language. The French, upon hearing imperfect French, switch immediately to English. The Japanese do the same once they recognize a tourist—usually Americans or Chinese—even though in both cases the English spoken is so heavily accented that it rarely smooths communication at all.
By the time I reached the base of the shrine, the streetlights had long since gone dark. The faint glow from vending machines and closed shops barely outlined human figures in the distance. Most of them turned out to be scattered foreign tourists, moving upward quickly, as if the pleasure of climbing a mountain at night mattered more to them than the shrine itself.
I circled to the back and entered the passage formed by countless torii gates. The path twisted and folded in on itself. Though each torii stood separately, with space between them, the corridor felt sealed, airless, like the inside of a giant serpent. Lamps had been placed at intervals, presumably to prevent night visitors from falling. White light spilled in from outside the passage, breaking into sharp beams. The mechanism was simple, yet to eyes already adjusted to darkness, the effect was deeply uncanny.
I had brought only one roll of film. The camera with flash was quickly exhausted, and I switched to one without it. In such dimness, there was only one solution: longer exposures. I relied on my unsteady hands, crouching awkwardly, leaning backward, positioning myself in the middle of the corridor to take photographs. Had anyone seen me from behind at that moment, they would likely have chosen another route.
At first, the walk felt light. There were still people nearby—laughter, camera shutters, the occasional tourist with poor eyesight asking for directions back down. But as I moved deeper, the numbers thinned. The forest gradually filled with the sound of insects, a dense, continuous noise shaped by the contours of the mountain, until even that was overtaken by my own breathing, my heartbeat. In the end, there was only me, and the endless orange-red torii.
Moving alone through the dappled light and shadow was a peculiar experience. The repetition of the scene produced a kind of temporal collapse: a path that lasted no more than ten minutes stretched, subjectively, into hours. Without my phone, I would have lost all sense of time.
In the stretch where no one else appeared and the scenery scarcely changed, I began to think of kamikakushi—the idea, so common in Japanese cultural narratives, of being spirited away. Mountain gods, tengu, unseen beings that take those who wander alone into the wilderness, leaving no trace behind.
A sudden fear took hold of me. It felt as though I had stepped into a perfect, almost didactic example of such a disappearance: solitary vulnerability, the unknowable depth of night, the increasingly aggressive red, the torii as thresholds for communion with the divine, and a space that seemed at once infinite and claustrophobically narrow.
With every step, unease accumulated, stacking itself like the torii beside me. I began to turn my head every few steps, checking whether a white fox followed behind—had that been the case, I might not even have been afraid. What I feared most was being trapped within the corridor itself, circling endlessly, unable to exit. I refused to stop walking, afraid something might catch up to me. And yet the camera in my hands urged me on. I kept pressing the shutter as I walked, no longer caring whether the images were blurred or out of focus.
When I later reviewed the photographs, they surprised me. Compared to sharp images, these unfocused, trembling, slightly rotating frames carried something else entirely—my state of mind at that moment, and the abstract residue of a nocturnal passage through the shrine.
Eventually, I emerged onto a platform halfway up the mountain. From there, the night view of Kyoto revealed itself—unremarkable. I turned back to look at the corridor I had come through. It resembled a hole, a deep well: an elevator shaft, a mine, a factory chimney—any enclosed structure that evokes the fear of falling. A wave of discomfort passed through me, akin to lying on grass and staring at the sky, afraid of falling upward into it, only several times more intense.
The mountain path continued, but I decided to turn back. I descended by another route and encountered a pair of Americans along the way. As we walked down, we heard the sound of an animal brushing against bamboo. With a long exposure, I captured a blurred image of a wild boar. When I told them, one of the pair began waving their arms and shouting toward the forest. Afraid they might provoke it—and send all of us tumbling down the mountain—I quickened my pace and left them behind, granting them the opportunity to dance with the boar alone.
At the shrine at the foot of the mountain, I encountered a cat patrolling its territory. I hoped it might bring me some measure of luck.