It's so hot, I've stripped down to my Y-fronts and with sweat dripping into my eyes and obscuring my vision I cycle east from my hotel near Sawara Station in Katori, Chiba Prefecture, along a path that runs beside the vast Tone River to my destination: Katori Shrine. It was built in 1700, is dedicated to Futsunushi, the god of swords and lightning, and is the principal Katori shrine in a nationwide network of several hundred. I'm looking for a riverside torii, which indicates where to head away from the river. In the distance I see it and accelerate toward my first goal, only to find it's a mooring station. This happens repeatedly until I think I'm hallucinating. Maybe I am — heat, hangover, exhaustion — but finally, after about an hour, I arrive at the simple wooden torii.

A signpost points the way to the shrine, so I cycle past many expansive old-style (but relatively new) houses painted yellow, blue and green and crowned with traditional multitiered roofs. I feel good, knowing the shrine is just up the road, but then I behold a depressing sight — a very steep hill. I get off the bike (it's not the mountain type) and start pushing. I'm passing through a forest thick with trees and bamboo, and the cicadas strangely fall silent while the heavy foliage cuts out the sunlight. In the gloom, a squadron of sizable crows sit unflinching on branches mere meters away, menacingly eyeing me up. I stop and try to stare them down, inviting a rumble, but soon realize that if they were to mount a coordinated attack like in Hitchcock's "The Birds," I'd stand little chance of survival, armed as I am with only a pen, and with no one in earshot to hear my cries for help. I think of the Charles Bukowski novel "Women," when the Bukowski character gets lost in the forest, and I see the headline now — DNA TESTING ON FOREST SKELETON FINDS IT TO BE THAT OF MINOR BRITISH WRITER IN Y-FRONTS. MARKS ON BONES SHOW HE WAS PECKED TO DEATH BY CROWS.

Suddenly, laughter from behind me breaks the intimidating silence and two schoolgirls pass by — on their bikes! I soldier on, pushing my steed, as mosquitoes put me to their swords. Scratching, sweating, on the verge of collapse and with no end in sight I take a cigarette break — and come under missile attack. I take a hit on an arm and it stings, and as I look up into the dense trees another projectile almost takes my eye out, hitting me on the cheek. I wipe my face and I appear to be bloodied. I look at the ground and see marble-size olive-green berries that have started raining down on me, some of them bursting open on the ground and oozing a red goo. Looking up, I expect to see the crows or a gang of killer squirrels firing them, but I can't see anything there. There's a crackle of dry twigs a few meters behind me and I imagine some club-wielding oni (ogre) is about to pounce, but when I spin around the noise stops. In a mild panic, I scamper to the top of the hill, jump onto my bike's saddle and pedal furiously down the other side. I'm going so fast that when I hit a bump I swerve toward a ditch beside the road, but somehow manage to regain my balance, apply the brakes slightly, and then, finally, just a few minutes later, I arrive at the oasislike car parking area outside Katori Shrine. I slip on my jinbei (light summer outfit) and, at one of the cheap, outdoor cafes, I eat a delicious yomogi (mugwort) ice cream and down a well-deserved ice-cold beer. I pass under a torii and walk up a gravel path flanked on either side by scores of human-size toro (stone lanterns). I come to a koi-carp-filled pond with a stone bridge spanning it, and then pass through an ornate red gate into the courtyard of the central shrine area, where the honden (main hall) is, as expected, the most impressive building — all black and gold, with a grandiose thatched roof. Beside it trees tower up to the clouds and an inscribed stone monument proudly announces that the Emperor and his son came here to pray in Showa 48 (1973).