The phone rang that evening for the first time in many weeks. It was my cousin thrice-removed (or so I immediately gathered, though he didn't say so) calling to inform me that father had died on Friday — around the time the sunlight had accosted me and changed the course of my personal history — and that his cremation had been on Sunday evening, during my final hours in the library stacks. I tapped out a brusque "thanks" into the receiver (my cousin is a fine drummer and understands the language of rhythm, fortunately) before hanging up and walking upstairs to get my coat and hat; it had suddenly become chilly outside, and I didn't want to catch cold. A gnarled stick quite similar to — or possibly the same as…? — the one the old professor had earlier been tapping on the ground lay against the chipped siding of the house, beside the back door. I dared not touch it, for the professor was a peculiar man who was known for bursting into song unexpectedly, especially when upset, and one can never be too careful. My main concern now was to unriddle the riddle I'd been given by Reiko (more about this later). I got into my car and headed west for the esoteric Shingon-sect temple Ryozenji, whose kanji are "rei" (here read "ryou," same as in Reiko's name, meaning spirit), "san" (mountain) and "tera" (temple). This was — not surprisingly, perhaps — the temple to which our family belonged, and also the place where pilgrims, or henro, begin a journey through the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage (the number 88 represents the evil passions of traditional Buddhism). "Reiko," if this was in fact her real name, had dropped me enough hints. I was on a mission.

I arrived at the front gate of the temple at 5:55 a.m. the next morning, tired both from the journey and from a lack of sleep. The sun was an orange-red colored blotch just beginning to peek over the horizon to the east — today would be warm, and I could leave my hat and coat behind in the car. First, however, I'd rest for a while. And so I did.

When I awoke it was almost eight a.m. I exited the car and, as I approached the main gate, two fierce Nio guardians glared at me suspiciously. I suddenly regretted that I hadn't taken the gnarled stick that had been left beside the back door, which now almost seemed as though it had been left there intentionally for my use. But if so, logically speaking, how could the old professor (or had someone else placed it there?) know that I'd be driving out here in order to hike up to the cemetery unless he — or whoever — had read my mind before I myself had yet made it up? Perhaps he had learned of my father's death before I had and had anticipated my next move? Father would be buried on the Ryozenji grounds — it was in his will, and as I've already explained our family has ties to this particular temple. But how many of these facts had the person who had laid the stick against the house known? Or was I taking things too far by considering all of these (admittedly remote, and certainly far-fetched) possibilities? Did any of my theories even matter in the "grand scheme" of things?

My grandfather completed the Shikoku eighty-eight temple pilgrimage three times, though he died a mere nine days before setting out to do it a fourth. His son (my father), being a superstitious fellow, had always insisted that it was because in Japanese the word for four is pronounced in the same way as the word for death: both are enunciated as "shi." What father, and so many other Japanese, always neglect to point out when claiming this, however, is that the characters for the two are completely different, which of course goes back to my assertion that spoken language is inferior to the language of symbols, be they visual or rhythmical. In any case, I know of no one else in the family line that has ever done the pilgrimage. What's interesting is that I share the same personal name as my grandfather, though I don't know whether I was actually named for him, or whether my having the same name is just an insignificant coincidence — we both have a common enough name ("Seiji"), with characters meaning "honest" (sei) and "two" (ni/ji); further, Seiji is from my mother's side of the family, so it's actually doubtful that the double-naming was intentional. At any rate, Grandfather Seiji is buried in Kyoto, at a temple that is not in fact associated with the pilgrimage (it rather belongs to the Tendai tradition, Shingon's rival for supremacy in the Heian era, c. 794-1192). The reason I had told Reiko that my name was "mu," or the "absence of," while in the library stacks is because I could find no way of representing it in the newly acquired language of symbols I was seeking out; this is also why I later traced the character for "lost" into the suffocating air of the library stacks. The two characters she had responded with, "mountain" and "death," had certainly meant that I could only rediscover my name, indeed, my entire personal history, by coming to Ryozenji — temple of "spirit mountain" — and hiking up to the place of death, where my father Keiji's ashes would soon be buried: the cemetery. Or so I had inferred.