"When you think of a mountain in Europe," a Koyasan monk told me, "what do you see? Blue skies, sunshine, space. But here in Japan, mountains are dark, because of the trees. In Europe, people talk of mountains as 'ladders to heaven.' Here in Japan, people come to the mountains in order to die." Or, I thought, to live again, but in a pure and uncluttered way, guarded by and close to the spirits of those who have died over the past twelve centuries. I had moved, in only two hours, from what might be a comic-book canvas by Lichtenstein into a Rothko land of blacks and deep browns and stripes of gray, the occasional candle or lantern against a dark surface throwing up a blaze of gold.

Mountains are, in fact, the charged hot centers of all Japan, the only places in the often overdeveloped country where you can get in touch with a kind of aboriginal land of spirits and folklore. Perhaps this is true in many places, but in Japan, where nearly every city was rebuilt after the war—and along the Western model—the contrast is especially pronounced. As soon as you drive out of the crowded skyscraper streets of Kyoto, say, and toward the ancient slopes of Mount Hiei, only twenty minutes away, you feel something lift inside you as the landscape clears out and you enter a world of stone gates, thick valleys, and deep snow. In the mountains in Japan, you are in the realm of kamisama, or gods who are said to live in streams and hills; the mountains are where you see beautiful women who turn out to be foxes in disguise (the old stories say) or tanuki, raccoonlike tricksters who mark the end of the city and the entry into somewhere wild.

Koyasan draws on all this magnetism and concentrates it by keeping out everything else. And the first place to see when you arrive on the mountain is, indeed, the grove of giant cedars (some of them fifty feet in circumference) that surrounds the graves which lead, on a long path, to the Gobyo—the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi. Somehow the shaded walk seems always quiet, even when several groups of pilgrims are proceeding along it, and however many people there are, they are outnumbered by the small stone statues along the way—representatives, usually, of Jizo, the protective god.

The graves on Koyasan are built in the distinctive five-tiered shape of what are gorinto—reserved for high families in Japan, and drawing on the fact that here, as in China, there are five elements, not four (in part because the word for four sounds the same as the word for death): earth, fire, water, air—and wind. The Jizos often wear red bibs around their necks, and stand on behalf of those children who died too young. In one area near the great mausoleum, a giant stupa has been built from all the small gravestones that have been found discarded or abandoned along the ground here over the years.

For the Japanese, the passage through the graveyard known as Okunoin ("Innermost Sanctum") has something of the solemnity of a walk through the country's history books. Daimyo and samurai, kabuki actor and Korean soldier, are all buried here: On one side is the grave of the legendary fighter Toyotomi Hideyoshi (who, in fact, once wanted to attack Koyasan from his stronghold in Kyoto); on another is the monument that remembers his famous predecessor Oda Nobunaga (who also wanted to attack the strategic mountain). Among Kobo Daishi's many achievements (he is said by his followers to have edited a dictionary, introduced people to the use of coal, and even to have performed rain-making rites to help those suffering from a drought), he was one of the first religious figures in Japan to bring the animist folk tradition of Shinto together with Buddhism. This means that his cemetery is full of the graves of the leaders and followers of other, rival Buddhist schools, as well as a group of Chinese Christians. There are monuments here recalling those who fell in a siege in Otsu in the year 1600; students killed in World War II; the Australians, Japanese, and Borneo natives who died in North Borneo during the same war.