Kifune Shrine

This guide to Kifune Shrine in Kyoto starts with a blank slip of paper handed to you by the priest, meant to be carried down and laid on the stream that gives the shrine its whole purpose. It traces the goddess Tamayorihime, said to have sailed upstream from Osaka Bay to found a shrine to the water itself, and the emperors who once sent horses here to plead for rain or ask it to stop, before turning to a heartbroken poet named Izumi Shikibu who came to this same water with a marriage she believed was already lost.