Late in the afternoon — it always seems to be late afternoon for me, if not actually twilight — I finally had a chance to visit Senkaku-ji and the graves of the famous Forty-Seven Ronin, the Ako Gishi, who waited two years before staging a covert attack on the mansion of Kira Kozukenosuke, the shogunal official whose insults allegedly led their proud young daimyo Asano Naganori in 1701 to commit a capital crime by drawing his dagger within Edo Castle. 

The Ako Gishi area, a perennial place of pilgrimage adjoining the temple, is a small set of terraces past the famous well where Lord Kira’s head was washed by the ronin and entered through a gate salvaged from the Asano mansion. The graves themselves consist, for each of the interred except the lord and his lady, of a stone stele and accompanying wooden sotoba, wooden strips that act as a kind of vestigial Buddhist stupa inscribed with identifying information and prayers. To walk among the monuments one must spend 500 yen on a bundle of a hundred green-blue joss sticks, which the attendants will helpfully light and place in a section of halved bamboo. 

There are in fact fifty graves in this special section of the cemetery: forty-six belong to the Asano retainers sentenced to seppuku in 1703 by the baffled shogun, one to a retainer who committed suicide before the attack on Kira’s mansion, one to the ronin sent home to Ako to report the success of the vendetta (and who was subsequently pardoned by the shogun on his return to Edo), one for Lady Asano the widow, and of course one for Asano Naganori himself. 

So reasonably, one should place two of the little burning sticks in front of each monument. Circulating among the graves and through the drifting bluish scented clouds of smoke in the growing shadows, I found myself preoccupied with anxiety that I was going to run out sticks before I ran out of graves. Had I “done” this monument — or that one — already? What if I short-changed one or more of the vengeful ronin? Would they be offended?

Offended? Who did I think was there to be offended?