Random the Book

In Japanese Shinto shrines it appears fairly common to find the opportunity to put your fate to a lottery.

For a few yen, you get to shake a  metal or wooden box with a hole in one end. Out of the hole pops a numbered stick. The numbers correspond to a series of draws in a big cabinet, each containing printed slips of paper on which are printed fortunes of one sort of another.

I’ve tried this exercise in randomising fate a couple of times so far on this trip.

The first time didn’t end particularly well. At the colossal Sensõ-ji temple I got dealt bad luck.

Thankfully there was a rack where I could tie it up and that would ensure the bad luck wouldn’t follow me out of the temple.

Sure enough at the glorious Meiji Jinku shrine the next day I was able to receive a poem that feels like good advice for this book- writing process. Ah, the power of apophenia…