The Forest Hearth

The first time I went to Ōzuchi, on a cold November night, I wondered where on earth my new friends were taking me. We drove through terrifying darkness with bows of sugi (a kind of cypress) and rocks littering the wet, and possibly icy, mountain road. The shoulder dropped off steeply on the left toward a river I could hear but not see. On the right, a narrow drainage ditch looked as if it could trap a wheel, were you to swerve to accommodate a passing car. We navigated seemingly endless switchbacks, climbing farther from the ravine and deeper into the forest. No other cars passed.

That night, we arrived to a spectacular show of stars visible from a clearing with ten wooden houses arranged in a crescent, only one of which emanated a warm glow. All I knew was that we were there to celebrate a successful rice harvest—the previous year’s had been ravaged by wild boars—and that only one man lived in the