Lauren Groff traveled to Kyoto to trace the life and work of Lady Murasaki, often credited as the world's first novelist. She visited temples, palaces, and museums associated with Murasaki and checked off destinations tied to the Heian era. Many of Groff's most meaningful encounters registered as sensations rather than strictly place-based experiences, including a described feeling of "living outside time" while eating. Journalist Reeves Wiedeman reported that Kyoto has become an epicenter of overtourism, with travelers rushing to take selfies at clogged sites. Groff experienced tensions between checklist tourism and deeper spiritual moments that inform her fiction.
One of the more common clich3s of modern travel is calling any trip-even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop-a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by people so devout that they were willing to endanger their lives to get there. Today, both the risks and rewards of travel tend to be lower, but the activity retains its spiritual character for some, including the novelist Lauren Groff.
Groff was in Kyoto in April; the journalist Reeves Wiedeman was there around the same time. In a feature published in June in New York magazine, Wiedeman wrote that the city has become the epicenter of the "age of overtourism": a once-tranquil historical landmark blighted by travelers racing to take selfies at a handful of clogged sites. Reading it, I wondered how Groff's essay could wrest meaning from this location-what weaving among the frequent-flying box-checkers could reveal about the Heian era of Japan,
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