Looking back, local author and stand-up comic Paul Barach admits there were a few things he could’ve done differently when preparing to embark on the 750-mile Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan. After all, he didn’t speak Japanese. He didn’t check the weather in advance. And at the last minute, he opted to bring a pair of hiking shoes he hadn’t yet tested out.
“My feet were eaten up with blisters because the shoes didn’t fit,” Barach recalled. “Every step hurt. It was one of the many things I had to get over during the pilgrimage.”
Barach hopes to educate people on what not to do if they ever go on such an excursion when he reads from his new book, “Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains: Misadventures on a Buddhist Pilgrimage” next Wednesday, Jan. 28 at Island Books. Self-published and funded through Kickstarter, it is Barach’s first book, which he describes as a comedic travel adventure.
“Really, it’s a book about challenging yourself and dealing with disappointment and the difference between reality and expectations,” he told the Reporter. “Journeys like this change you, but never as how you promised yourself they would.”
A class of 2000 MIHS grad, Barach grew up on Mercer Island’s South-end, where his parents Roland Barach and Decky Fiedler still live. He said his interest in Japan goes back to his childhood days, “Whenever I learned ninjas exist,” he said.
He studied international relations at Carleton College in Minnesota, where while taking a class in Japanese religion and culture, saw a documentary on the Shikoku Pilgrimage, which Barach describes as “a 750-mile path that circles Japan’s most brutal and most isolated island… it visits 88 Buddhist temples all around the island and is about 1000 years old.”
Barach said while watching the documentary, he had of vision of himself there, but didn’t follow through on it. After college, he worked a few temporary jobs and did some traveling before coming back to the Pacific Northwest, eventually getting hired at Microsoft. Yet, he was bored.
So in August of 2010, Barach made the trip to Shikoku Island, one of the few Westerners bold enough to travel the path by foot. He said about half a million go on the pilgrimage by bus, bike or car, while a couple hundred go by foot. The journey took him 42 days to complete.
“A lot of the pilgrimage was just trying to survive,” he said.
Barach didn’t initially plan on writing a book, but wanted to keep a journal of what transpired on the trip so he could document everything that happened, like fighting a priest on a mountaintop.
“I’d already collapsed from dehydration, accidentally broke part of a temple and got a leg infection from a fall. I’m wondering what else can go wrong,” recalled Barach, who holds a black belt in kyokushin karate. “I climb to the mountaintop’s temple, and there was a priest who asked why my arms were so big. At that point, I lost 30 pounds in fat and gained 40 in muscle from carrying my 40-pound pack.
“I said, ‘I do kyokushin karate’ and he said, ‘I do goju ryu,’ and there was this moment where we looked at each other, and he said, ‘kumite’, which means ‘fight.’ He takes off his monk robe, I take off my gear and we just have a karate match for fifteen minutes.”
While such a scene straight out of a Kung Fu movie may sound too good to be true, Barach insists none of it was embellished. “You’ll know because the hardest part of writing wasn’t the karate match, but making 750 miles of walking by rice fields interesting,” he said.
Now tending bar when he’s not writing or performing, Barach is currently selling his book at comedy shows and plans on eventually doing a book tour. But first, Barach has a comedy tour slated to begin in March, doing a 50-state trek with comedians Morgan Preston and Jason Stuart. They’ll be trying to break a Guinness Book record by performing 50 shows in 45 days, beginning in Maine and ending in Hawaii.
As for his next adventure, Barach says he already has something in mind.
“In two years, I’d like to ride a horse across Mongolia, so I can write about how much went wrong doing that.”
