~/jeffreymoro/posts/2026-01-18-hojoki

The late twelfth century was hard on Kyoto. On the twenty-eighth day of the Fourth Month, in the year Angen 3, a fire broke out in a ramshackle brothel in the southeast of the city, at the intersection of Higuchi Street and Tominokōji Street. Wind whipped the fire into a blaze, cutting a clear line of smoke and ash to the Suzaku Gate in the northeast. One third of Kyoto burned: the fire took down the Hall of State, the university, and the Popular Affairs Ministry, alongside countless homes and businesses. Three years later, so the stories say, a whirlwind rose up at the corner of Nakanomikado and Kyōgoku: it flattened four blocks. Gates and doors and possessions crashed against each other, and dust blotted out the sky. Two months later, perhaps heeding those soothsayers who saw in the fire and the wind ill portents, the emperor decreed that the capital should move. Naturally, many protested. Others, those who put their faith in the emperor, or who at least depended on their masters’ favor for their daily rice, disassembled their houses and floated them in pieces down the Yodo River. Later that winter, the emperor changed his mind and returned to Kyoto. But the houses were never rebuilt.

A few years passed. Famine struck. Drought in the spring; typhoon in the fall. Rich men turned to begging door-to-door, but there was no one left from whom to beg. Bodies piled in the streets so high that horses and carriages couldn’t pass. Then, an earthquake. The land was torn open and was flooded with the sea. All was rubble. The aftershocks went on for three months, at first twenty or thirty quakes a day, then four or five, then one or two, gradually less and less, until finally the earth lay still. But what was above it could never again be how it was.

“The current of the flowing river does not cease,” wrote the monk Kamo no Chōmei, “and yet the water is not the same water as before.” Chōmei was the son of a Shinto priest. He was lucky that his father’s position kept him north of the capital in relative comfort, but he was still close enough to Kyoto to record the various disasters that befell it. By the turn of the century, he had taken up a position in the Imperial Poetry Office. Poetry was serious business in Kamakura-era Japan. Chōmei spent the better part of three years editing and compiling official collections of waka, five-line verse, a predecessor of the haiku more familiar to Western audiences. The waka form was fixed: so fixed, in fact, that deviating from it practically disqualified one’s utterances as poetry at all. In the Shinkokinshū, published in Genkyū 2, Fujiwara no Teika wrote:

A spring night’s
floating bridge of dreams
breaks:
sky of cloud drift
parting from a mountain peak.

The same year, Chōmei shocked his friends and relations by taking holy vows as a Buddhist monk and retreating into seclusion on the slopes of Mount Hino. He built for himself a ten-square-foot hut, which he described in his essay An Account of a Ten-Square-Foot Hut. The hut nothing more than a floor, posts, and a makeshift roof. It was easily disassembled and moved; Chōmei never bought land for it. But it afforded him still a few aesthetic pleasures. He extended the east eaves three feet to provide cover for burning brush. On the south, he built a bamboo verandah. Inside, he kept a painting of Amida Buddha, another of the Fugen bodhisattva, a copy of the Lotus Sutra, a koto, and a biwa. Vines overgrew much of the forest, but his view was open to the west. He wrote:

In spring I see waves of wisteria. They glow in the west like lavender clouds. In summer I hear the cuckoo. Whenever I converse with him, he promises to guide me across the mountain path of death. In autumn the voices of twilight cicadas fill my ears. They sound as though they are mourning this ephemeral, locust-shell world. In winter I look with deep emotion upon the snow. Accumulating and melting, it can be compared to the effects of bad karma. When I tire of reciting the Buddha’s name or lose interest in reading the sutras aloud, I rest as I please, I dawdle as I like. There is no one to stop me, no one before whom to feel ashamed.

Outside my window here in Baltimore, snow is falling. I have a pot of red sauce simmering in my oven. The essence of Italian food, whether in its continental or immigrant form, is simplicity. Here is how I make my sauce:

Begin with a couple glugs of olive oil and a knob of butter. Melt them together on medium heat in a heavy oven-safe pot. Preheat your oven to 325 F while you’re at it. I like to grate a few cloves of garlic and fry them briefly with a generous pinch of red pepper flakes. Then, add in two big cans of crushed tomatoes. You can buy the tomatoes whole and crush them yourself if, like me, you prefer to do things the difficult way. Stir it all together. Halve an onion, and a couple of carrots. Put them in the sauce. Bring it up to a boil. Add some salt, but not too much. You can always add more later. Then, turn the heat off, and move the pot into the oven. Let it simmer in the oven for as long as you can manage. Two hours is minimum; three is better; four, in my experience, is diminishing returns. Stir it every half hour or so.

In a moment I will bundle myself up and trudge out in the snow to the corner store because I realized I forgot to buy more parmesan cheese when I was out earlier today. You can’t serve sauce without parmesan cheese. One more poem by Teika:

No shelter to rest my horse
or brush my sleeves,
not a shadow
at Sano Crossing
in falling dusk.