The Hottest Day of the Year, Kyoto, 2018

July 24, 2025

By Greg Pape, poetry faculty

On the hottest day of the year, the poetry workshop of the Spalding MFA summer residency program met on the fourth floor of a building near Kyoto Station in a room with no windows. I had prepared a talk on Bashō and read from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa. Bashō came to Kyoto as a young man after the death of his friend Yoshitada. Yuasa tells us not much is known about the next five years of Bashō’s life. “It is generally believed, however, that making his abode at Konpukuji Temple, he studied Japanese classics under Kigin, Chinese classics under Ito Tanan, and calligraphy under Kitamuki Unchiku” (21).  And he wrote poems while living in a thatched hut, now called Bashō-an on a hillside of the temple grounds. When Yosa Buson, another of Japan’s great haiku masters and also a gifted painter, went looking for Bashō-an, he had a hard time finding the place. After asking around, he was eventually led to an overgrown spot on the hillside where he found the hut in ruins. But with the blessing of the priest, Shoso, and the help of some of his poet friends, Buson, in 1776, rebuilt Bashō-an as a memorial to Bashō, which seven years later, became his memorial too. In the afternoon a group of us went to visit Konpukuji.

On the hottest day of the year in Kyoto (two days later would be the hottest day ever recorded in Japan—106 degrees in Kumagaya) people sat in the shade on the banks of the Kamo River, or they waded in the shallows. Merchants handed out free fans in the street. A gray heron perched on a rock in the middle of the river under a bridge crossed by buses, bikes, street cars, and streams of walkers with bright umbrellas shading out the sun. Just to look at the clear, green-tinged water of the Kamogawa was relief from the heat, and the heron, I imagined, was the river god the people had come to honor by taking off their shoes and dipping their feet in the water. A waterfall two feet high just downstream from the bridge shimmered silver from bank to bank. Two girls in pants and blouses held up their cell phones and giggled. Two girls in flowered kimonos held up their cell phones and looked very serious. I held up my cell phone and took their picture, wondering if they were taking mine.

Later, on the hottest day of the year we walked through a neighborhood at the base of the eastern mountains. We seemed now to be the only people out walking. A flag with a bright red kanji character, a white background, frilly blue Hokusai waves, and two little blackbirds flying above, hung from the eaves of a shop. When I asked Kuniko, our guide, what it meant, she smiled so broadly her hat slipped off. “Ice!” she said, and the hot still air shivered a moment before the refreshing valence of the word itself, spoken with such conviction and instantaneous joy, could vaporize and drift off to wherever good words go. The narrow street came to an end at the stone stairs leading up the hill to Konpukuji.

Now, as some of us imagined, we were walking in the footsteps of Bashō and Buson up the stone stairs to the Zen garden and the main hall with a shaded deck that floated above the sand like a dock over water. Some of us headed for the shade of the deck to sit cross-legged like sweating Buddhas with water bottles and paper fans.

The rest of us went up the steep winding stone path to see the hut, a replica of the one where Bashō wrote, a four and a half tatami mat room, sliding screens for walls, and a foot-thick miscanthus or Susuki grass thatched roof supported by bamboo beams. Among the cedars, maples, and bushes on the mountainside, the air was a little cooler. You could turn your back on the view of the city and be immersed in the forest. You could close your eyes and hear, as Bashō heard, a cicada’s voice drilling into the rocks. Curbing an impulse to add my own haiku to those that were written here, I remembered Bashō’s story about his visit to a famous pine tree: “I went to see the famous pine tree of Shiogoshi. The entire beauty of this place, I thought, was best expressed in the following poem by Saigyo:

                                    Inviting the wind to carry

                                    Salt waves of the sea,

                                    The pine tree of Shiogoshi

                                    Trickles all night long

                                    Shiny drops of moonlight.

Should anyone dare to write another poem on this pine tree, it would be like trying to add a sixth finger to his hand” (138).

At dusk on the hottest day of the year faint pink clouds drifted above the city. Temple roofs flattened into silhouettes against the evening sky, and squares of yellow light shone in narrow lanes and alleys under a brightening half-moon. We walked along the Kamo River where small groups of people were keeping cool by wading in the shallows. Here and there the sounds of water blended with voices as the night came on. Kuniko and Yuko, our guides, had gone home to their families, and our group had split into two again and gone in different directions in search of a rumored river festival that takes place on the hottest day of the year. Our time in Kyoto was growing short. We wanted to take in as much as we could, but it had been a long day of walking, looking, and sweating. It felt good to sit down on a rock by the river in the dark as the half moon hung above us. Someone across the river lit a small fire, and we heard voices and gentle splashes. Was this the start of a ritual? The moon was a distant lantern half hidden in the dark pool of space, and on the water was another moon and another, and the thought of all the rivers with their moons and voices in the dark beside small fires—this was festival enough for me. I could sit here all night.

Then someone’s phone buzzed with news that we must hurry if we wanted to be blessed in the water at Mitarashi Matsuri. We must be inside the torii gates at Shimogamo by nine o’clock. I followed the others up the riverbank to the sidewalk. Walking fast, we passed one bridge and then another, small fires burning by the river, laughter and voices calling in the dark. We crossed one bridge and then another, and we were walking on a quiet neighborhood street with lights behind shades and lanterns among the shrubs. Then the sidewalk ended, and a wide gravel path led us into a forest, dark, with here and there a lantern or spotlight shining on a particular rock or tree. We had walked right out of the city into an ancient woods. I saw an old tree with a thick rope around its trunk, with posts and props to keep it upright. Folds of paper hung from the rope—prayers or wishes or names? Some of the trees wore wooden skirts like old Samurai warriors tired of fighting who had taken root in the sacred grove. Or were the skirts protection from tourists and pilgrims who might want to leave some mark to show that they had been here? The trees all around were still as we moved with quick steps on gravel.

Just in time we came to the torii gates at Shimogamo. A monk waved us in and closed the inner gates. We followed the others to the stone stairs leading down into Mitarashi spring pool beneath an arched bridge hung with round paper lanterns and heavy rope that marks off sacred space where the gods dwell. Someone handed me a bag for my shoes and a candle I lit from the candle of another. Orange and white koi swam among lotus flowers on the black background of a shirt in front of me. Another shirt worn by a young man on the stairs below me said in gothic script I pledge to be badass. A murmur of voices swirled up from the water and echoed under the bridge. When I stepped off the last stair into the cold spring water a rush of feeling shot up my legs, like popping the cork on a bottle of fine champagne. All around wading in the flowing water women and men in summer yukata, in white shirts and dark pants, in skirts and shorts and t-shirts, children and toddlers holding hands, and one elderly woman with a cane, all of us carrying our candles slowly across the pool, faces glowing, to place them before the shrine of the god of pure water. We said our prayers or not and went on breathing as we climbed the stairs to offered cups of cold spring water on the other side. What a sweet plateau we had come to on the hottest day of the year.

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Greg Pape is the author of ten books, including Four Swans, Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern, Sunflower Facing the Sun (winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize, now called the Iowa Prize), and American Flamingo (winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award). Greg’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry, among others. He has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, and the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award. He served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona.