Mount Takao in Autumn Silence

The Sacred Mountain at the City's Edge: Mount Takao in November

Mount Takao - Takao-san - rises 599 meters at the western edge of Tokyo, reachable in forty-seven minutes from Shinjuku Station on the Keio Line. That proximity is either its greatest virtue or its greatest curse, depending on whether you visit on a November weekday, when the mountain is a cathedral of red maple and silence, or a November weekend, when it is a queue in hiking boots. I came on a Wednesday, and the mountain was mine.

I took Trail 1, the main route, which begins at the Takaosanguchi cable car station and climbs through a cedar forest so old the trunks are wider than my arm span. The trail is paved for the first half - a concession to the million-plus visitors who climb Takao annually - but the pavement does not diminish the forest. The cedars are planted in tight rows, their canopies interlocking high above, and the light that reaches the trail is green and filtered, like walking through an aquarium.

At the halfway point, I passed the Yakuoin Temple complex, a Buddhist temple founded in 744 that occupies a series of terraces carved into the mountainside. The main hall is ornate - lacquered red pillars, gilded carvings of tengu, the long-nosed mountain spirits that are Takao's guardian figures - and on the morning I visited, a monk was chanting somewhere inside, the sound carrying through the cold air with the clarity of a bell. I stood on the terrace and listened, and the mountain listened too.

Above the temple, the forest transitions from cedar to deciduous hardwood, and in November this is where the magic happens. Japanese maples - momiji - turn a red so intense it looks artificial, as though someone dipped each leaf in lacquer. The trail passes through tunnels of color, and the light through the leaves turns your hands pink. I have seen autumn foliage in Vermont, in Kyoto, in the English Lake District, and Takao in November holds its own against any of them.

The summit is a broad clearing with views east toward central Tokyo, visible as a smudge of gray on the horizon, and west toward the Okutama Mountains, which on a clear day reveal Mount Fuji behind them - snow-capped, symmetrical, and so implausibly perfect it looks like a painting propped against the sky. I sat on a bench and drank vending-machine coffee - hot, canned, and deeply mediocre - and watched a hawk circle over the valley below. The coffee tasted better than it had any right to, because everything tastes better at 599 meters.

The descent via Trail 4, the suspension bridge route, is more rugged and far less crowded. The path drops through old-growth beech forest, crosses a small suspension bridge that bounces with each step, and emerges at the base in about ninety minutes. Come in November for the color. Come on a weekday for the solitude. And take the Keio Line back to Shinjuku, where the city will swallow you again and Takao will seem, within minutes, like something you imagined.