An elderly shrine maiden,1 wearing scarlet hakama trousers and a white robe, was sitting alone, her face screened by a reed blind.
I saw her, and then I, too, began to feel as she seemed to.
Long before that, I saw two young shrine maidens in Kasuga Forest2 in the early evening. I looked to the sky and feared a winter rainstorm.
The shrine maidens that I saw in the forest were about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. They wore scarlet hakama and white robes, with white makeup covering their faces.
In the shady half-light under the cedar trees, dim white smoke arose from the burning of fallen leaves. The air in the forest, humid with heavy moisture, filled everything with an undefinable stillness in which even the whispers of the tree spirits3 might have been audible.
How curious I found the receding figures of those young—or perhaps more accurately, childlike—shrine maidens walking past me on that serene forest trail.
I kept smiling and looking back at them again and again.
But now, seeing the elderly shrine maiden sitting in a shady spot of the shrine as the cool air of the valley cast a chill over everything, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of melancholia seeping into me.
The shrine maiden had devoted her whole life to the shrine's deity. I felt the lifelong loneliness of that shrine maiden cast a sort of spell over me.
1 巫女: A shrine maiden, a priestess who performs various religious duties at a Shinto shrine. A miko is usually a young, unmarried virgin, but there are also older priestesses. ↩
2 春日の森: The primeval forest surrounding Kasuga Taisha, a major Shinto shrine in Nara. ↩
3 木精: The spirits that live in trees, according to Japanese tradition. They are called kodama. ↩
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