The siren call of Japan

On journeying to the deep north to write Kokoro

When I was seventeen, Japan wrote me a letter. I couldn’t read it at first, written as it was in one of the most complex and beautiful languages in the world. I stared at it for a long while, until the kanji characters began to swim off the page and swirl around me. They settled on my skin and then melted into it. Japan does that, you see. It arrives quietly and never leaves.

Nearly three decades ago, I packed my teenage bedroom and fat new dictionaries into a single suitcase, and left for a year. On the surface I was heading east to study the language, but there was something else. Deep down, I could sense a pull, the prom- ise of an important secret hidden within the layers of Japanese life, perhaps.

When I had dropped the bombshell of an idea to ditch my well-thought-out career plan of an economics degree and accountancy for the chance of an adventure in a faraway land, instead of trying to dissuade me, my mother took me to a bookshop. We went to the travel section, which only had a handful of books about Japan. I picked up a travel guide and it fell open at a photograph of a pagoda covered in snow. Something inside me fizzed.

Later, I stretched out on my bed and thumbed through every page. Here, an open fan lay alone on dark wooden floor, next to a raked sand garden. There, a small child posed in front of a wall of huge white daikon (winter radishes, the like of which I had never seen). On one page, a gently curving red bridge crossed a rushing river. On the facing page, a long line of moss-covered statues sat in a shady forest, waiting. There was talk of volcanoes, rice fields, tropical islands and remote shrines.

I had only ever been to France, on a school trip. Japan was a world I knew only in my imagination, and yet as I lay there poring over a photograph of two silhouetted figures sitting in quiet contemplation in a shadowy temple, looking out over a bright garden beyond, I sensed something that has never left me. A hidden truth about what it means to live well.

This pull towards Japan has been a siren call throughout my adult life. In answering that call I have been blessed by many encounters with people whose ways of seeing and being have influenced the way I live for the better. It should have been no surprise, then, that when I hit midlife and sensed a rumbling beneath the surface of my highly organised days, I felt drawn to return.

Kokoro is the story of what happened next. It’s a life-changing pilgrimage in search of what it really means to live fully.

To write it, I journeyed to the deep north of Japan, to a remote and beautiful place where the spirits of the departed are said to reside, and a mountain shrine holds secrets so sacred that visitors are not permitted to speak of what they find there. I hiked ancient forests, watched the moon rise over mountains of myth and encountered a host of wise teachers along the way - Noh actors, chefs, taxi drivers, coffee shop owners, poets, philosophers and the spirits that inhabit the land.

A web of connections built over the past quarter century led me to places and conversations that would normally be off-limits, and I learnt much from what I found there. I travelled back in time to take tea with deep thinkers from long ago, and met my younger self on the shores of a lake which has been famous for moonviewing for more than a thousand years. This was a pilgrimage of sorrow and joy, darkness and light, reflection, releasing and rebirth. It changed how I see the world.

You are invited to walk this path with me within the pages of my new book Kokoro*. Together we will contemplate the true nature of time at one of the world's strictest Zen temples and nothing will be quite the same again.

Writing Kokoro changed my life. Reading it (or listening to me read it to you) might just change yours. After working on this book for five years, I can hardly believe that it will be out in the world less than three weeks from now. My work is done. I now offer Kokoro to you, as a companion on this road of life.

Note: ‘Kokoro’ is a beautiful, untranslatable word which has been alive in the Japanese language since before there was a system of kanji characters to write it down. Variously translated as ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ and ‘heart-mind’, it perhaps best approximates to the ‘intelligent heart’ and you can discover more about my search for the true meaning of this profound term within the pages of the book.

To explore the kokoro is to explore the very essence of what it means to be human in this tough yet devastatingly beautiful world. When you learn to live guided by the light in your kokoro, everything changes, and anything is possible. I hope you will read Kokoro (or listen to me reading it to you) and that the wisdom in its pages reaches right in to your intelligent heart. (

Tell me, have you ever felt a pull to a particular place during a difficult time in your life? I’d love to hear about where, and why. (If you write on Substack and feel inspired to share about this as an essay, please do let me know when you have written it as I’d love to read it).

Beth Xx

*Kokoro is out now!

Images: Bottom two by Holly Bobbins Photography. All others by Beth Kempton.