The next day, by way of consolation, you walk yourself over to Onioshidashi-en, Demon Push-Out Park. In the Shinto pantheon, oni are the red- or blue-skinned demons who live in hell and carry out all manner of mischief. Oshidashi means to push out – it is also the name of the most common move in sumo wrestling, where one combatant grapples the other and simply pushes him backward out of the ring.
What the demons pushed out at Onioshidashi Park is a lot of lava.
Somewhere, a loudspeaker plays a carillon version of “My Darling Clementine,” and it is perhaps the best indicator of your current mood that you cannot marshal the curiosity to wonder why.
There is a smaller shrine to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, presented in her fire aspect, a sort of Our Lady of the Volcanoes. Here and there along the path are eruption shelters, little concrete bus stops, in case Asama should decide to pitch a few more hot rocks into the middle of your family vacation.
And there is the lava. You have seen many lava-flows along this pilgrimage of yours, but never such a fantastically twisted and tortured landscape, pines growing through rocks, roots splitting them open.
While the shine-bell ring/ it’s quiet for a minute - /the sound of the wind
wind in the grass is not the same as the sound of wind tearing through pine needles. It is not the same as wind hissing across the lava-clinker, or strumming a telephone wire, or fluttering the knots of the paper prayers tied around the bars of the votive rack, blowing across the opening of your ear.
In each of these there is an exquisitely different note of desolation.
The world is empty – / see how easily the wind / can blow clear through it