13Tsumago

ELEVATION 1,800 FEET

Thinking of those old days,

were they a dream or real?

At night I listen

to the steady sound

of the autumn rain.

—Ryokan

ALTHOUGH TSUMAGO was at the junction of the important road to Ina and bustling with travelers, when Okada Zenkuro passed through, he assessed it as

much colder than Magome, with few rice or vegetable fields. The maintenance of the post town is poor, and many of the town leaders are in debt. The lower classes get by by guiding the people and horses that pass through; during the seasons of official logging, many of them work on a daily employment system.

When the Japanese railway Chuo-sen was constructed through the Kiso River valley in 1911, Tsumago even lost its role as a post town and gradually turned into a deserted village. Photos from the forties, fifties, and even the early sixties show dilapidated buildings and muddy streets and reflect the economic and psychological depression the commercial bypass had inflicted on the town. Still, the lack of real modernization turned out to be the town’s salvation, for a movement to preserve historical structures after the styles of the Edo and Meiji periods was started in 1968, and in the next three years some twenty structures underwent repair and restoration. Since that time, the entire village has been brought back to nearly its original post town appearance with the removal of electricity poles and TV antennas. The old road—narrow and winding and off-limits to cars and trucks—is lined with trees and in full view of the mountains. Tsumago is now the jewel of the Kiso Road. The Konjaku nakasendo hitori annai describes the town in this way: “The town of Tsumago is just like a movie set. It has a row of stores and houses that brings the long ago back to the present.”

It is, however, not a movie set at all, so there are no ninjas, samurai, or geishas on the streets—only people going about their jobs, Japanese visitors wanting to stay a night or two in inns where their grandparents and even more distant ancestors might have lodged, and a few foreign tourists who have fled the hypermodern big cities of Japan and gotten off the beaten track. The souvenir shops still offer many of the items they sold to travelers back in the Edo and early Meiji periods—lacquerware boxes and chopsticks, handcrafted children’s toys, oiled paper umbrellas, and medicines concocted from mountain herbs—and the small, often open-air restaurants still serve the soba noodles and gohei mochi that beckoned pilgrims, samurai on official business, and sightseers four hundred years ago. The buildings, too, are as they were two or three hundred years ago—wooden two-story structures, with wood-slatted windows and small balconies that overhang the narrow street, the old Kiso Road.

With a last look at the koi iwa, I passed by the site of the Kuchidome bansho, a barrier established in 1602 to control movement on the Kiso, Mino, and Ina Roads. It was abandoned in 1620, its function presumed by the barrier at Kiso Fukushima, and is now nothing but a small open field surrounded by low stone walls suggesting great age. Shortly to the right is a large, old wooden notice board, announcing information for the traveler and marking the northern entrance to the town. To the left is an ancient waterwheel—there are one or two others on the walk over from Midono—and an adjoining hut, furthering the rustic feeling of the place.

In a three-minute walk I was at my inn, the Fujioto, a nice blend of the old and new. It was established in 1905 but has been modernized enough to make it quite comfortable for the Western traveler: thick, soft futons, Western-style toilets, a large wooden bath open from noon, and a dining hall where guests are seated on chairs. Foreign travelers like this place for all these reasons but also because the proprietor, Yohei, who now greeted me with a big smile at the entranceway, speaks some English, Italian, French, and German. A friendly balding man in his mid-fifties, he checked my backpack and, looking sympathetically at my wet clothing, told me that the bath was almost ready. I thanked him for his kindness and told him that I would be back soon but first wanted to walk around town.

Which was not quite the truth because I now headed back up the street to the Ko Sabo, a comfortable coffee house occupying a reconstructed Edo-period structure and now provisioned with low Japanese cypress tables, zabuton (cushions used for sitting on the floor), displays of local traditional artwork, and koto music wafting from an upstairs room. The o-kami-san, Yasuko Matsuse, greeted me with a happy laugh—it had been two years since my wife, Emily, our eight-year-old son, Henry, and I stopped by—and, after glancing at my clothes, launched into a children’s song about the rain: “Ame ame fure fure, Kaa-chan wa . . .” I joined in the chorus, and she then quickly brought me a cup of hot coffee.

Yasuko and her husband are both quite knowledgeable about the Kiso—he is on the preservation board, and it was he who restored the old building that is now the Ko Sabo. We talked a bit about the ancient culture of the area, and she expressed the opinion that modern Japanese have gone astray with their diet and manner of living. Better, she said, would be the Jomon way of houses low to the ground and a more natural cuisine. The Jomon were for the most part hunters and gatherers, and the first identifiable people in Japan, living along the Kiso and elsewhere until about 200 B.C.E., when they were pushed north by the new Yayoi agricultural culture. I suggested that the Jomon were actually precursors of the Ainu—the “native” people living mostly in the northern island of Hokkaido—but Yasuko would have none of it. I noted the interesting similarity between the elaborate pottery designs of the Jomon people and the cloth markings of the present-day Ainu, and Yasuko countered with the fact that the Ainu make no pottery today. I conceded her point and asked for another cup.

At last, the rain had stopped completely, but there were no other customers at the Ko Sabo, and Yasuko suggested that we drive back to the Tokakuji to see if the priest had returned. We locked up the coffee shop, in a few minutes Yasuko drove up in a new Toyota, and off we went up the winding roads back to Midono. I was once again surprised—and just maybe a little alarmed—at the speed people drive on these narrow one-way streets but tried to look calm even when we suddenly encountered a car coming straight for us from the other direction. Both drivers stopped in time; the driver of the other car backed up into one of the many turnarounds and allowed us to pass. A side-glance at Yasuko revealed the same happy expression she has when serving coffee, so I guessed this was common fare.

After a few more hair-raising turns, we passed through the town of Midono and pulled up in front of the Tokakuji. At the entrance to the priest’s quarters, Yasuko rang the bell, but still no one was at home. She is a good friend of both the priest and his wife, and I had been hoping for a little extra tour, but not this time. We turned back to the glass-encased shrine with the Enku figures, and I noticed for the first time that behind them were statues of Emma-O and the “Ten Kings of Hell.” These are the deities that pass judgment on a soul when it has descended into the nether regions after death and are almost always depicted with scary open-mouthed faces and holding something like a pitchfork or sword. Emma-O, the ruler of hell, sits behind a table with documents in which are recorded all your sins. You’ve had it; there’s no escape. Still, very often there will be Jizo—the bodhisattva of compassion—peeking out from farther back, letting you know that it’s all an illusion, and all you have to do is wake up. In the case behind the kings here at the Tokakuji, however, there is no Jizo, but Amida Buddha, who more or less delivers the same message: give up your idea of self, and there will be no one to be in hell.

After bows and coins in the offering box, we got back in the car and headed for home, stopping at the stone monument inscribed with a poem written by the poet/monk Ryokan (1758–1831) as he passed through. The monument is located fifteen or twenty feet from the road up a wet, weed-choked path, but we stumbled up the incline to take a look. The dark stone—about three and half feet high—was soaked with rain, and the calligraphy was difficult to make out, but we were finally able to decipher it, and I wrote it down on my notepad.

In the loneliness

of this evening

the young male deer

calls for his mate

among green leaves.

Ryokan was known for his poetry in Chinese and Japanese, his simple living, and his whole-hearted participation in games with village children. He seems to have been lonely but happy, having an involvement with only one woman in his life, and that at the age of sixty-eight. It is easy to imagine him wandering through the Kiso in his tattered robe, begging as he went, enjoying the natural beauty of the place, and no doubt sleeping in the poorest of inns.

As for myself, I was happy to be staying the night at my comfortable inn with its gracious host, view of distant mist-covered mountains from my window, and the promise of an excellent dinner. Ryokan would likely have had none of these but would have been pleased with whatever his accommodations might have been.

In a few minutes’ drive, we arrived back at the Ko Sabo. I thanked Yasuko for all her trouble and headed down the street to the Fujioto, where Yohei greeted me once again and showed me up the old wooden steps to my room on the second floor. Tea and rice cakes had been placed on the low table, and I was ready for a short rest.

The bath at the Fujioto is much like the one at the Yakiyama no Yu, but without a view. Floor, walls, and tub are all made of wood—probably cedar—and an antechamber for disrobing was separated from the bath by sliding frosted glass doors. The tub is a small one—just big enough for two people—so there is a lock on the door to guarantee privacy. After putting my clothes in the wooden cubby, I entered the bathing room, washed myself completely down, and rinsed. Then I slowly slid into the hot water and let go of everything—blisters, steep inclines, rain, overstuffed backpack, and editors back home who would want to know how I was spending my time. Well, this was it: quietly singing Japanese children’s songs to myself as I soaked into semiconsciousness. What better way?

Back in my room, I leaned back, opened my pretty copy of the Analects to see if Confucius said anything about relaxing in a bath. Nothing about a bath, but there was this:

When the Master relaxed, he was at ease and with a radiant smile.

The Analects, a record of the words and deeds of Confucius, has set the standards of behavior for people in the Far East for at least two thousand years, and with this phrase I felt that even sinking into a pleasant bath, I was on the path of the Master. Checking my Chinese-Japanese dictionary for the meaning of “relax” , I found that it originally was to suggest the flight of a swallow, the perfect image of easy and graceful flight.

Yohei soon called me down to the dining room for dinner, which consisted of several kinds of river fish, eggplant covered with a thick miso sauce, two small plates of mountain vegetables, rice, miso soup, and Japanese tea. I asked for and was served a small container of hot sake and dined quietly by myself. Two other tables were seated with foreigners—Germans and French, I thought—and the rest were Japanese tourists, who, by their looks, were quite pleased with their accommodations.

It was dark outside by the time I finished my sake, and although the others guests all seemed to be returning to their rooms, the rain had completely cleared up, and I decided to take a walk through the post town before bed. The road through Tsumago is narrow—more so than in the other towns—and the tiny overhanging balconies, big enough for a potted plant or two on the second floor of the old wooden buildings, shut out most of the night sky. Still, there are almost no street lamps, and the light coming from the inns lining the street all comes muted through sliding paper-and-wood doors and windows. As I looked up through the dark, I saw that the thin strip of sky was full of stars. The haiku poet Issa could have been standing in the same spot when he wrote,

Flowing right in

to the Kiso Mountains:

the Milky Way.

Although the streets are busy during daylight hours, the shops close a little after sunset, and no one was about. The evening meals had been finished at most of the inns, the guests had gone to bed early, and there was just enough light for following the winding road through the town. At the southern outskirt, there was one small shop that was still open, a bar with only four or five stools where the few customers could sit and have the last beer or sake of the night. There is no other such shop in Tsumago, the local council having declared that such establishments would not add to the flavor of the post town. Nevertheless, Yohei had explained to me previously that the operator of this shop, a Ms. Aoki, was a single woman with two children whose husband had been killed by a bear some years ago. The family was an old one in Tsumago, and no one was willing to see the woman moving elsewhere to an unknown fate, so an exception was made, and she was able to eke out a living there on the edge of town. Red lanterns were hung on either side of the sliding opaque glass doors, and the tiny slatted wooden building seemed so old that it might fall down at any moment. Two two-foot-tall stone statues of local gods stood on either side of the entranceway, perhaps guarding the family from any further misfortune. Quiet voices were coming from inside, and I turned back to my inn, just beginning to shiver from the cold. I was ready to get to my futon and, after a quick fifteen-minute walk under the river of stars, descended the stone steps to the Fujioto, wished my host—who was still there at the front desk—good night, and turned in.

AFTER A FINE JAPANESE BREAKFAST, I went back upstairs, straightened up my room, and headed out onto the street. Yohei had been thoughtful enough to stuff my rain-soaked boots with newspaper the night before, and they were now passably dry. And after a good night’s sleep, I was ready to walk the town.

A large part of the northern end of the post town had suffered from fires at different periods, but the rebuilding and preservation efforts were accomplished with care and attention to detail, and as I walked south, it was difficult to notice any change in authenticity.

After I passed the line of old shops, private houses, and inns, the old waki-honjin on my right was the first place of note, behind the stone gate of which was included the commission agency and the residence of the village headsman. Reconstructed in 1877, the building had once included a sake brewery and thus had a number of material assets that added to its prosperity. The three-story structure now includes a samurai entrance and garden, and, as a surprise attraction, there is a small two-tatami bathroom—read, toilet—especially made by two carpenters called in from Kyoto, for the exclusive use of Emperor Meiji when he passed through on his tour of the Kiso.

The interior of the waki-honjin is spacious, with a central hearth, which is kept filled with burning embers, all the rafters dark with the smoke of generations. After sitting on the tatami floor with some Japanese tourists and listening to the explanations of our guide, we all walked around the building, admired the garden that ran parallel to a long veranda, viewed the emperor’s toilet, and finally followed the signs to the attached museum. This is worth the meager entrance fee even for the non-Japanese-reading visitor. There are a number of displays of the old tools and implements used by the foresters during the Edo and Meiji periods and some cautionary scrolls depicting the fate of those unfortunates who were desperate enough to try to take lumber or even just branches of the trees for themselves. The customary rule of “one branch, one head” was illustrated clearly enough. The Owari lords were quite serious about preserving the forests for their own needs and were not hesitant to make examples of offenders. Other happier exhibits included the pottery and material remains of the Jomon people who had once lived in the area and, at the very end, behind shatterproof glass, a number of small statues by Enku.

Back out on the street, I wondered again about the people who had passed along this road for the last two millennia: the Jomon hunters and gatherers who made such intricately designed pottery; Yoshinaka’s troops as they marched to Kyoto; the poets Saigyo, Basho, Ryokan, and Santoka; the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi; all the feudal lords and their serious samurai; the merchants and happy pilgrims; people escaping from village drudgery just out to have a good time; the emperor Meiji—and all on such a narrow road. In the company of so many from the past, one rarely feels alone.

Continuing to walk in toward the central part of town, on the right I passed the miniscule post office that has been in operation since Meiji times (ATM available), and then, on the left side of the street, I dropped in at the tiny tourist office where the traveler can purchase postcards with pictures of nineteenth-century woodblock prints of the Kiso, a walking stick, and kumayoke—the small brass bells to warn bears of your presence. This last item is “rented” to walkers but with a two-thousand-yen deposit to be returned upon arrival at the next town. To my knowledge, no one, including myself, ever returns these little bells but keeps them as souvenirs of their safe trek across the Magome Toge, the last pass if walking in a southerly direction. This is implicit at the tourist office—an old wooden structure up some rough-hewn stone steps—and the people working there are sure to point out that each bell has a different timbre, encouraging you to try a few before choosing your “rental.”

I purchased some postcards and chose a bell—the lady in the office behind the window making sure that I got the right one—and then navigated back down the stone steps to the street and passed through the old masugata, a square-shaped village center common to most of the post towns on the Kiso, built to slow down any enemy invasion. Here, the road splits in two—an ishitatami path to the right, which is the old Kiso Road, and a continuance of the narrow paved road to the left.

A few more paces, and once again on the left there is an old stone wall that marks the site of a former stronghold that existed sometime in the mid-1500s. I climbed the stone steps along this wall, passed a five-hundred-year-old cherry tree growing from a level part of the old fortress, and arrived at the Kotokuji, a Rinzai Zen temple said to have been founded in 1500, but at that time in a different location. Entering the main gate on the left, one finds a sandy open ground facing the main hall, established in 1725. The floorboard is of the uguisubari type, constructed of boards that sound like a nightingale when walked on, so to make the priests aware of intruders at night. Such devices were usually used in the residences of daimyo, their advisors, and aristocrats, and one wonders why they might be needed in a Buddhist temple. Over the temple doors is a huge wooden placard engraved with the characters—kotokujiden—brushed by the swordsman/artist Yamaoka Tesshu. Hanging just inside the entrance to the priests’ quarters on the right is a unique palanquin—one with wheels—supposedly invented by the man who was abbot there between 1830 and 1844. As I chatted with the head priest, he told me that the abbot loved this palanquin so much that he had once ridden it all the way to Kyoto. I expressed the hope that the good abbot had had a lot of cushions, and he laughed and agreed that it must have been a very bumpy ride.

Outside of the temple gate, I noticed a small monument—a place to pray and make offerings for the souls of deceased “beasts, birds, and fish.” This is not exactly a dog or cat cemetery, but I’m unaware of there being such a place dedicated to small animals at any church or temple back home. I stopped for a moment, put my palms together for all the dogs and cats I have been blessed with in my life, left a hundred yen in the offering box, and went carefully back down the steep stone steps.

At the bottom of the steps is a small temple dedicated to Jizo (the Buddhist protective saint of children, travelers, and small animals) and next to it a large stone engraving of Kanzan and Jittoku, two eccentric Chinese Buddhist monks from the T’ang period who confounded people with their antics and poetry. Interestingly, the sign next to this stone explains that this large stone was found after an earthquake in 1984 and was thought to be an engraving of dosojin. Why it was in the Tsumago area, who carved it, and when are unknown.

Taking the ishitatami-laid old Nakasendo path to the right, I passed the Matsushiro-ya, one of the oldest inns on the Kiso Road. The two-story structure is of slatted wood, and the wide entranceway is almost always open; what would be the wall to the left consists of two large sliding paper doors, which are also almost always open. This provides the traveler a look inside and gives the place an airy, open atmosphere, and facing the entranceway is a bank of large red-orange azalea bushes. The interior of the inn is also all wood with tatami floors; there are no telephones or television sets, and the only modern convenience is a pair of Western toilets. The old signboards inviting travelers to stop can still be seen on the upper story over the entrance to the inn. When I stayed there with my wife and some friends once years ago, I asked the proprietor what generation master he was, and he replied, “Well, I’m the nineteenth generation in this building, but the inn burned down and was then rebuilt in the Edo period, and all the old records were lost. So we really don’t know how many generations we go back before that.”

I tried to recall how many of the generations of my own family line I could identify: six at the most. I thought of Mrs. Hotta and the mortuary tablets of the generations of her ancestors in Agematsu, and of Mineko’s husband’s ancestral graves in Kiso Fukushima, and wondered how different their sense of place must be than that of my own.

Beyond the Matsudaira-ya the line of shops and inns continues for perhaps an eighth of a mile. One or two of the cheaper inns for travelers and their horses have been preserved but are only showcases now. Accommodations were simply raised wooden platforms next to the stalls, and looking in, a haiku by Basho came immediately to mind.

Fleas and lice,

the horse pissing

next to my pillow.

It was now late in the afternoon, but I continued to walk past the old shops, each with double-wide open entrances, so the traveler can get a better look at their wares. Here is a place offering boxes and chopsticks made of cedar wood; there, a tiny store with kimonos and yukata made of antique cotton and silk; and another with displays of traditional toys all made locally from local wood and paper. There is also a fine sake shop with rows of the very best—my favorites being Masumi, “True Clarity,” from a brewery established in 1662 and Nanawarai, “Seven Laughs,” which has been making people happy since 1892. Finally, at the edge of town, Ms. Aoki’s izakaya was still closed and quiet, and I turned back toward the Fujioto, another long bath, and a rest before dinner.

At six o’clock, Ichikawa-san, his daughter Seiko, who speaks perfect English although she has never been to the States or Great Britain, and his sometime English teacher, Motoko, arrived at the inn for a ten-course dinner. I met my friend Ichikawa-san in 1967 when I taught my first English classes at the Nagoya YMCA—something like a country club in Japan—and thought from his youthful expression that he must have been a rather erudite sixteen-year-old. It turned out that he was thirty-four and a teacher of Japanese literature at night school. His weekends were reserved for mountain climbing, an avocation he continued through his seventies. Now in his eighties and in declining health, he practices yoga, continues to study English, and, as he did back in Kiso Fukushima, is always ready to help out his old friend whenever he can. We ate, laughed, and talked, mostly about the mountains we had climbed together—Ontake, Komagatake, Fuji (where I had been scared half to death by a passing lightning storm), and Hakusan, where, had Ichikawa-san not taught me the proper use of an ice pick as a restraining device, I would probably still be buried under thirty feet of snow and ice. And, of course, we shared cup after cup of sake. Finally, the evening drew to a close, Ichikawa-san sneaked out to pay the entire bill, and he, his daughter, and friend drove off into the night. Humble and generous to a fault, he has taught me more about Japanese culture and literature than I have learned from all the books I’ve ever read, and, as I watched the red taillights of his car disappear around the bend, I wondered if this would be his final friendly gesture and goodbye. Living alone in his tiny hut deep in the forests around Mount Ena, he was as at ease as Confucius’s swallow in the mountains he loves so much. I waved, yelled, “Sayonara,” and headed upstairs to bed.

I WAS UP EARLY, with no sake headache from the night before, the forecast was for a sunny day, and the clouds beneath the western mountains across the valley were a bright white from the just rising sun. The Kiso River turns away to the west at Midono, but there is a small tributary, the Hosono River, that flows by on the west side of Tsumago. I was still in a country of mountains and rivers.

Just outside of my window, there were some cherry trees filled with Japanese house sparrows and a few small buildings of weathered wood, with white clay and tile roofs. Directly across from me was a kura, the traditional whitewashed clay private warehouse, also with a tiled roof, and above the mist in the valley was the steep Shiroyama, where the small castle had once stood. I was once again impressed that any “moats” must have been empty ditches as it would have been extremely difficult to channel water up there.

At seven thirty, I went downstairs to a breakfast of orange juice, a banana, milk, toast, yogurt, marmalade, an egg and ham cooked over a karo, and coffee. I was talking with Yohei when a young woman came up and asked if she could have the same fare, but the master apologized and explained that such Western breakfasts were prepared for the night before only for guests who spent more than one night at the inn. She was clearly annoyed, but since I had one slice of bread left, I offered it to her, it went into the toaster, and everyone was pleased. Later, she pronounced, “I’m French, you see, so I can’t get used to these Japanese breakfasts,” and I was left to assume that we Americans must have a reputation for far less than discerning palates.

Back up in my room, I rearranged my belongings and got ready for the last walk of the trip. I would check my pack with the people at the tourist office, and they would have it transferred to their office in Magome, a nice convenience that assures an easier hike over the Magome Toge—not as steep as the Torii Toge, but longer and including a number of ascents and descents. There was only one problem: I had now obtained a hardbound copy book of the Konjaku nakasendo hitori annai, an invaluable source of information about the Kiso Road, complete with geographical descriptions, poetry related to the road, local tales, and just about everything I had been looking for. Now I was loath to let it out of my sight even for a moment, but I could hardly carry it in my hand over the pass. Back downstairs, I spoke to Yohei about my conundrum, and without hesitation he whisked me off to a shop that specialized in traditional cotton shoulder bags, the perfect solution. It was still too early for the shop to be open, but Yohei knocked on the glass entranceway, and the proprietress came out all smiles when she saw his face. A transaction was quickly made; we bid the woman good-bye and headed back to the Fujioto.

It was time to go. As I prepared to settle the account for my stay, Yohei explained with a smile that Ichikawa-san had not only paid for last night’s dinner but also for my entire fare at the inn. I was left speechless, but Yohei, his wife, daughter, and the rest of the staff were lined up bowing me off, so with many a thank-you all around, I turned and walked the stone-paved incline up to the old Kiso Road.

When I checked my backpack at the tourist office, I was given another dose of Japanese generosity. While doing research for this trip back in Miami, I had run across a reference to the Kisoji meisho zue, the master guidebook to the Kiso Road written in 1805. Somehow, I was able to find a copy on Japanese Amazon and, although it was rather pricey, quickly placed an order. In less than a week, a boxed hardbound edition arrived at my doorstep, and in great anticipation, I unwrapped and then opened the book. It was a reprint of the original but written entirely in grass-script calligraphy, which would be unintelligible for most modern Japanese, not to speak of myself. With a sigh, I placed it up on the bookshelf and went back to other sources.

As I handed over my backpack and signed the paper forms, I recounted this sad tale to the man behind the office window, a Mr. Fujiwara Yoshinori. He listened with a sympathetic expression, disappeared back into the office for a moment, and then returned with a book in hand. “You mean this?” he asked and opened it to reveal the same book but entirely in modern Japanese print. I was floored and inquired how and where I might purchase a copy. “Here, take this one,” he said and placed it into my hand. I tried to fight off this remarkable gesture (yes, only halfheartedly) but knew that it would be a futile effort. We talked a while longer about the Kiso Road—he had walked it in its entirety a number of times. I stuffed this second volume into my new handy shoulder satchel, walked down the stone steps, and with a deep bow, headed south.

Tsumago has its own distinct charm in the early morning, and photographers are often out just before sunrise to catch just the right shot. Mountains line either side of the village and then seem to bring it to an abrupt stop where the road turns. Tea bushes and azaleas grow alongside the road here and there, a brightly colored maple obscures a white-stucco kura, and the slatted wooden balconies are still dark with the early-morning dew. In a few moments, the mountains to the west will grow brighter with the rising sun, still hidden by those on the opposite side of the road. A few shop owners will be beginning to open their wide sliding glass doors on the possibility of an early customer, but most tourists are still in their inns either finishing a late breakfast or packing up their belongings up in their rooms.

This morning, no one else was on the road, the air was cold and crisp, and most of the clouds had gone to wherever it is they go on a day like this. I passed through the village with only the sound of my walking stick on the pavement and the little kumayoke bell tied to my shoulder satchel. Shortly after the Aoki izakaya at the edge of town, the road narrowed and passed through an ancient graveyard; the river appeared on my right, and again there was the sound of water. The sun was now coming up, and steam was rising off the already-harvested, cramped rice fields. Presently, the road went up an incline and then down a decline, but mostly, it seemed to me, the former. Without my pack though, I kept up a pretty good pace and quickly caught up with two young Chinese women out for a short hike. They were foreign-language students from Shanghai studying in Nagoya, they explained, and had wanted to spend a weekend in the Japanese countryside. The two of them looked at my little bell, declared it to be kawaii (“cute”), and asked why a grown man would wear such a thing. I did my best to explain what it was for without sounding alarming, and they giggled a little but then decided that they’d walked far enough and would turn back to Tsumago. We waved each other good-bye, and I carried on.

I now crossed the Otsuma Bridge and, as the road went steadily uphill, turned into a short length of ishitatami and ascended through a dark forest of cedar and cypress trees. There was a large kumayoke bell attached to a wooden post at the side of the path, which I rang vigorously. Farther up the steep path was a stone monument engraved with some Buddhist deity, blessing the oxen that had had to plod up and down this route with heavy loads. It was hard for me to imagine any four-legged animal navigating this path—although I knew that the warlords and others passed through on horses—and I wondered again what it must have been like for the abbot bouncing along in his wheeled palanquin. I was happy to be on foot.

Soon I passed through the old neighborhood of O-tsumago where there were koshin monuments that looked like ancient tombs and a number of very old inns. A large white dog was tied up at the entrance of one of these, but it paid no attention to me, as hikers were not exactly rarities on this stretch of the road.

In another one hundred yards, the slope became even steeper and then descended into the small hamlet of Kudaritani. In another few yards, there was another monument and the small dilapidated Kurashina Shrine. According to the Konjaku nakasendo hitori annai, the story connected with this shrine goes as follows:

In July of 1585, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi was commanded to take the office of kampaku, the master of Matsumoto Castle, Oga-sawara Jokei, sent gifts of gold, silver roosters, silkworms, cocoons, and swords with his vassal Kurashina Shichirozaemon. However, thieves who had found out about [the transport of] these treasures, killed Shichirozaemon and stole the gifts. Later, his wife visited the area, planted chestnuts there, and said, “May my husband’s enemies be cursed with his spite to the number of these chestnuts.” After that, there was a landslide there that swept away a village in the valley below. The villagers feared that this was due to the curse of Shichirozaemon, and thus built a small temple to enshrine his spirit.

A little farther on, a narrow path branched off to the left through the woods that led to the otoko taki and the onna taki, or the “Male and Female Falls.” These are the waterfalls made famous in Yoshikawa Eiji’s novel Musashi and are supposedly the falls under which Musashi and Otsu, the fictional woman who relentlessly and amorously pursued the famous swordsman, sat in meditation. The Male Falls, as one might suspect, are larger and with a generous flow of water, while the Female Falls are delicate and more of a cascading spray. According to the old guidebooks, the pools at the bottom of the falls were buried by earthquakes during the Edo period, but it is a refreshing and quiet place to stop and rest. The climb over the pass was not going to get any easier soon.

On my feet again, I climbed up some wood plank reinforced steps, and the path came out to a narrow highway and a now-abandoned chaya, where fifteen years ago my wife and I had eaten gohei mochi and drunk green tea. I walked to my left up the highway, crossed a narrow wooden bridge, and was on the old Kiso Road again. The cedar-lined path was now rocks and tree roots, now sand, now short wooden bridges, or now ishitatami. How did early travelers do this in straw sandals? The warlords must have chosen their men for this trip very carefully.

At last, toward the top of the pass, stands the ichikokutochi chaya, a wooden building over two hundred fifty years old, dark and smoky, entirely open at the front. There are large tables at which to sit, and an old man passes out free tea and candy (donations are not prohibited) and will wood burn the name of the chaya on walking sticks if travelers so desire. The chaya had been moved here from lower in the valley between 1748 and 1751 and repaired with unfinished wood. Where there was once a small barrier, there is now a large spreading cherry tree and, beneath that, a shrine to the Kannon of Easy Childbirth.

I sat down at one of the old wooden tables, received some tea, and asked the old man to wood burn my walking stick. Seated across from me was a young German couple walking toward Tsumago and then returning by bus. They were enjoying this short hike and asked about the Kiso as it headed toward Narai. They would try the entire road next year, they said.

Leaving a few hundred yen in the donation jar, I said good-bye to the German couple and carried on up the old road—really just a dirt path at this point. The old man had reminded me that the imperial princess Kazunomiya had made an unprecedented journey from Kyoto and stopped here in 1861 on her way to marry the fourteenth Tokugawa shogun, Iemochi. There is a story that she was secretly assassinated on the way and replaced with a commoner woman—Iemochi had never seen her—to prevent the union of the shogunate and imperial families and thus hasten the shogun’s downfall, which came only few years later. Six years after Kazunomiya’s procession, the “Ee ja nai ka” craze that had sprung up in Nagoya spread through the southern Kiso. The adherents of this movement danced wildly along the road to the accompaniment of flutes and drums, chanting “Ee ja nai ka, ee ja nai ka” (“Ain’t it great? Ain’t it great?”), dropping off their amulets here and there for the good fortune (and wonderment) of the locals.

But instead of enthusiastic dancers and singers, as I climbed steadily up the hill, I was met with some three hundred fifty high school students and their harassed-looking teacher chaperones out on a field trip. I answered cheerfully to their “Harro!” a couple of hundred times, but they soon disappeared down the old path, and, at last, I arrived at the top of Magome Toge, an elevation of 2,628 feet. At the side of the path is a teahouse, and there is a wooden road marker engraved with Masaoka Shiki’s haiku:

White clouds,

green leaves, young leaves,

for miles and miles.

From here, it was all downhill, and from the sand-filled courtyard of the large Kumano Shrine, I looked out to see the Nobi Plain. The end of the mountains! I continued to walk down the hill, past a neighborhood of farmhouses that had escaped all the fires since 1753. Beans and other vegetables were being dried on front porches, and long strings of persimmons were hanging from Edo-period wooden balconies. Just beyond the houses is a small graveyard with some stone monuments engraved in a Chinese script that no one but scholars can understand anymore. About three hundred yards farther down the path is a rest area and a barely legible stone monument engraved with a quote from Ikku Jippensha, the Edo-period writer whose accounts covered both the Tokaido and Nakasendo. A Japanese couple and I peered at the monument and finally were able to read the difficult script:

I don’t see any good-looking women here,

but their chestnut rice is famous!

Continuing down the hill, there is still more ishitatami, and the path is lined with persimmon trees. At this time of year, they were bare of leaves but loaded with bright orange fruit, one of which fell and barely missed my head as I passed underneath. Down a little farther, and there was a weathered dosojin monument, and I made a small offering in thanks for being able to finish this walk. Finally, the path opened up to a place for viewing Mount Ena, a sacred mountain where the umbilical cord of the sun goddess Amaterasu is said to be buried and in the foothills of which lives my friend Ichikawa-san. It was a beautiful, clear day, quite a contrast to the first day of slogging through the rain up the steep road to Niekawa. Unwilling to take even a short rest, I continued down the hill to Magome, the southernmost post town on the Kiso Road.

COURSE TIME

Tsumago to Magome: 8 kilometers (4.8 miles). 2 hours, 50 minutes.