Before I hear from tyger again, I make a few peregrinations of my own. With a small backpack and a couple of travel guides, I pick my way across Kansai, staying in business hotels and the occasional ryokan. I use the local buses and trains to get around. In each town I look for places that are not to be found in the books. I don’t know why.

On one of my walks, near a place called Uchikoshi, I see a large sign pointing the way to something big or fat (I recognise the character tai but can’t read the whole message). This activates a vague memory of seeing a tourist attraction, marked on a sightseeing map, in roughly this location, so I follow the signs. A few minutes later I notice that a giant replica of the Arc d’Triumphe stands across the rice fields. Other strange stone objects lurk among the trees behind it. Separating me from these curiosities is a manned gatehouse and ticket window. No-one at the gate speaks English and they tell me they have no English leaflets. I now see that the name of this place is Taiyo Park, but nothing else makes any sense. Looking at the prices, which range from 500 to 2,000 yen, I wonder what to do. I opt for the cheapest koen dake (park only) ticket, figuring this will let me see if it is worth spending more to see more. Inside the park, I walk past stone copies of pyramids, both Egyptian and Mayan, the Statue of Liberty (a decorative favourite in Japan, especially with love hotels and pachinko parlours), the Easter Island statues, North American totem poles, Copenhagen’s mermaid, Singapore’s merlion, Belgium’s Manneken Pis, graven gods from South America, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia. Huge stone copies of coins from all over the world lie in the grass, or lean against other carvings. They are the size of cartwheels. I see a British One New Penny coin but no actual George III cartwheel penny. It is as if some itinerant stonemason had travelled the world and copied anything that took his fancy, regardless of theme, quality, or importance.

Further up the path, to one side, are three large sheds painted red, white, and blue. I look inside and am astonished to see a full-scale reproduction of Xian’s terra-cotta army, although for a minute I think it might be the real thing. The exhibition is truly gargantuan. About four-hundred statues are arranged in lines, surrounding three horse-drawn chariots. One row of statues has fallen like a row of dominoes, and lies smashed on the ground. A man beside me says this is the work of an earthquake, but I can’t be sure if this is a replica of the damage done by an earthquake in Xian, or real damage done by an earthquake here in Hyogo prefecture. The exhibition is crudely carved, ineptly staged, badly looked after and dirty, but I am impressed by the scale and madness of it. Whatever can be its fascinating story, I wonder.

Further up the hill I find several mausoleums, also copies. Lining the paths, hundreds of sculptures of figures in traditional oriental dress are arranged in rows. They are almost identical, but not quite, having been carved rather than cast. Who would go to such effort to make so many, and for what reason? On two of the surrounding hills stand thirteen-storey pagodas. A monumental seated Buddha is carved into a hillside. Even more incredible, running up and down a line of hills is an attempt to replicate the Great Wall of China. This wall wanders for some way into the distance. I get tired walking on it, so without having found out how long it is I turn back to the centre of the park.

The park is made more inexplicable by the fact that homes for the elderly and handicapped are dotted around the grounds. I struggle to find a satisfactory explanation for what I find here, but none comes.

In the warmth induced by exercise I then roam around the other remote parts of the grounds. At the top of a longish slope I find a Buddhist temple. Real or replica, I do not know. I investigate some old-looking gravestones nearby and am surprise to hear, in clear English ‘You are very welcome to come inside’. I turn to see a priest walking towards me, broom in hand. He wears the traditional two-piece working clothes of Japan, in an attractive umber, and his head is shaved to a shiny golden brown.

He ushers me inside, where he shows me around the temple altars. We ply each other with questions. He tells me that his predecessor, a priest named Moguchi Kenzo, established the park some thirty years ago. The temple we sit in is part of the park, but the real (aha! I think) temple is situated further up the hillside – another twenty-five minutes climb away.

The raisons d’etre of the park still puzzle me. When I try to learn them, my questions do not bear fruit. I have to accept that the park was created, and it is here. The priest and I exchange cards. He is Okamoto Sondo, and has been a priest since he was fifteen. He tends the temple at weekends, while during the week he teaches Social Studies at a high school in nearby Kakogawa. As we talk two women approach from the valley, and when they draw close to the temple he introduces them as his wife and daughter. I am invited to join the family for tea at the kotatsu in the corner of the temple. I sit with Okamoto-sensei and his daughter, Maya, whose English is careful but animated. Okamoto-sensei’s wife busies with the tea and cakes, and says nothing, though she laughs at all the right places in the conversation. I tell them that I would like to climb up to the other temple, the ‘real’ one, and they respond by suggesting that we all go together. We arrange to meet the following Sunday at 1 pm. They also suggest that I might like to return at a later date for a fire ceremony. I mark both dates in my diary.

When I get up to leave the family follow me out onto the veranda of the temple and all kneel to bow. Maya’s mother presses her head to the floor several times.

I walk down the hill, past the many incongruous statues and other oddities, and after a few minutes turn to look back at the temple. High above, all three Okamoto family members are still waving to me. I wave back and then turn the last bend and pass out of sight.

A few days later Okamoto-sensei calls to apologise that he cannot take part in the mountain climbing, but I return anyway for gome, the fire ceremony. The altar area has been rearranged so that a black cauldron is in the centre. People arrive in ones and twos. They take their places on cushions facing the altar while I sit at the kotatsu with Maya and she explains the proceedings. I write my wish, my name, age and sex on a soegomagi, a small piece of wood, which she then adds to a pile beside the cauldron. Like the others, it is to be fed into the flames and my wish thereby despatched to heaven for fulfilment, no stamp required.

Okamoto-sensei shows me his ochre-coloured robes and the book of instructions that he will follow. The book is like a craft manual. It shows him not just what to say, but how to move his hands, and how to pile the soegomagi in the fire.

I ask where I should sit for the ceremony and Okamoto-sensei suggests I sit among the others facing the altar. By now, all cushions have been taken, so I kneel directly on the tatami, wondering how long I’ll be able to sustain the painful seiza position. Okamoto-sensei explains what will happen, and hands me a shakujou, a large metal rattle. I automatically try to take it in my left hand but he tells me to use the right instead.

‘Shake it. Fast is best,’ he tells me.

I place it on the tatami in front of me, as other people have done.

Okamoto-sensei starts his incantations, sonorous at first, then rapid like a machine-gun, then very casual, as if he is just having a chat with Buddha. He shakes his bell – the signal for people to shake the shakujou and begin intoning the sutra that has been printed out for us. The congregation repeat the passage over and over, in a fast droning monotone. Each kanji takes one beat, regardless of whether it has one, two, or three syllables. The passage itself is very repetitive, and makes extensive use of the –u syllables, like mu, ku, tou, sou. As Okamoto-sensei adds the soegomagi to the fire, the interior of the temple fills with smoke. The rhythm of the incantation and shakujou, with Okamoto-sensei reciting a different chant, is intoxicating and I soon feel myself drifting away, despite the musically dysrhythmic woman with a sandpaper voice who chants disconcertingly beside me, and rattles her shakujou in twenty fractured rhythms, each stumbling into the next.

I alternate between a disembodied dreaminess and the harsh reality of pain in my ankles and wrist. We chant the sutra for over forty minutes, until the last soegomagi is fed to the fire by Okamoto-sensei. I want to shift my position, but it is not easy to do so without losing the rhythm of my shakujou – and I don’t want to do that. Thankfully, exactly one hour after he began, Okamoto-sensei rings his bell again and we all fade to silence. The woman to my right has managed to work herself into a heady sweat. Drops run out of her hair and dampen the collar of her kimono. She smiles at me disarmingly and I have to forgive her the aural torture she inflicted on us all. Many people walk up to the altar to waft smoke onto themselves for good fortune. Instead, I stay on the floor and try to ease my legs back to life.

Maya gives us each a large packet of tea before we leave. It is such a warm and unexpected gesture.

A week later I return. I am welcomed just as effusively as before, and stop for tea and another chat with the Okamoto family. Then I make elaborate leave-takings and climb upward in search of the real temple that Okamoto-sensei had spoken of. I soon run out of clear track and begin scouting left and right through the bush. I twist an ankle on the steep slope. By the time I reach the crest of the hill I am unsure of finding the temple, and tired from pushing up through the undergrowth. I first search along the ridge to the right. Despite finding a number of encouraging signposts I see no temple. Instead I find a geological survey marker at the summit of the ridge and, just below this, a few Buddhist idols in a small shady clearing. Turning and searching in the other direction I come across a path leading down the other side of the hill. This is not the direction I want to take, so I backtrack to the ridge and then follow a good path, the path I lost, that descends all the way back to the temple, where the Okamoto family are keen to hear about my expedition. Maya now tells me that there isn’t really a temple up on the mountain, and that the collection of idols in the clearing had been my true destination, though I hadn’t realised it. So my failure transforms into success, without anything really changing. The temple down here, far from being the sub-temple, is actually the only temple.

When I first saw Okamoto-sensei’s temple I thought it was just another surface reproduction, nothing more than one of many park amusements. Then Okamoto-sensei’s presence convinced me the temple was unique among the park edifices in being a real building. Then his story of the ‘original temple’ further up the hill suggested that this one was a derivative, or a more conveniently situated substitute. And then, the discovery that there has only ever been one temple here, and that this is it, made it seem real again. I wait in anticipation, half expecting some other negating revelation to emerge, but things appear to have reached a kind of stability, for now.

Then I remembered that as I walked up towards the temple this morning, Okamoto-sensei had hailed me from one of the mausoleums, where he had been conducting a service for the dead. Far from being copies, these mausoleums really do house corpses – mainly those of people from the nursing homes who had no surviving relatives. Things here drift so easily across the line separating the real from the unreal that I wonder if there is a line at all. And if so, what is the line, real or unreal?