The Marathon Monks of Mt. Hiei
Straw Sandals Among the many evocative black-and-white photographs that grace this wonderfully strange, if not entirely satisfying, book is the image of a row of straw sandals, hanging illuminated in the darkness. They look unpromising as protection for the feet, less like shoes than elongated birds' nests held together by bits of string. Yet these are the sandals worn by the gyoja , the so-called "marathon monks" of Japan, as they run the rocky and frequently rain-slicked paths on the five peaks that make up the mountain complex of Mt. Hiei. One pair of sandals suffices, under ideal conditions, for perhaps a single day of running. Conditions are frequently not ideal in this part of Japan. And the gyoja will run far more than a single day at a stretch. In heavy rain, the straw sandals disintegrate in a matter of hours. So something seems seriously amiss with the figure of 80 pairs of sandals that Stevens tells us is allotted to each monk per 100-day...