Once upon a time there was — well, actually there wasn’t, but people thought there was, and what people think there is influences more behavior than what is — an island. Many set sail for it. No one returned.
Its name in Japanese is Fudaraku; its location, somewhere in the southern seas. That’s precise enough. Not geography or seamanship but faith guided the pilgrim to it. He set sail alone in a sealed boat. To the skeptical modern mind it’s suicide, but this story is neither skeptical nor modern, and the reward — rebirth in the Buddhist Pure Land — was, to the devout, worth many deaths.
The priest Konko, abbot in 1565 of the Fudarakusanji temple on the Kumano coast of today’s Wakayama Prefecture, was insufficiently devout. He was a tragic victim of a tradition linking his temple to Fudaraku Island. As abbot, he was expected to make the voyage sometime in his 61st year. Novelist Yasushi Inoue (1907-91) makes him the central character of his 1961 short story, “Passage to Fudaraku.”