ELEVATION 2,775 FEET
When you enter the post town of Yabuhara, the atmosphere is one of wealth and prosperity. There are many things for sale, such as the o-roku combs and the chopsticks made of Japanese yew, and these products are seen in every province. Tonight I am staying at the house of a certain Mr. Komeya. The master is an honest and sincere man, and told me a number of stories. I asked him about the o-roku combs, and he told me there was once a woman by the name of O-roku who made the combs from the minebari tree.1
—Ota Nanpo, 1802
THE STORY of the o-roku combs, which are for sale in many Yabuhara shops, goes something like this:
During the Genroku era (1688–1705), there was a woman working at a certain inn in Tsumago by the name of O-roku. O-roku was troubled by headaches, but one night the god of Mount Ontake appeared to her in a dream and said that she would be cured by wearing a minebari comb in her hair. She became extremely talented in making these combs, and as a result of various efforts, invented the fine-toothed comb we use nowadays. Offering them for sale to the travelers who stayed the night at the inn, she won high acclaim and a good reputation. Because Tsumago was a post town on the Kiso Road, the people who purchased them gradually increased, and the people in the post town eventually imitated her and made their own combs. Gradually, production increased, but the kind of tree used for the comb material became scarce, and was sought in the upper reaches of the Kiso Valley near the Torii Pass. A wealth of raw material was carried off to Tsumago right before the eyes of the people of Yabuhara, but no matter how they tried, they could not create the same combs themselves. Finally, a certain Sanjuya disguised himself as a mendicant Zen priest of the Fuke sect, and, wearing a hood and playing the shakuhachi, went to Tsumago, acquired the comb-making technique, and returned to Yabuhara. For the good of the community, he then passed on the secret, the work of fine-toothed comb production spread throughout Yabuhara, which in the end wrested the market from Tsumago.
—From Kiso: Rekishi to minzoku wo tazunete
As I walked south through the town, I passed the Komeya, where I had spent a night a number of years ago. The old sign in front of the shop advertising the name of an Edo-period proprietor, Komeya Yosaemon—perhaps the one mentioned by Ota Nanpo—was still there. The inn was now closed, however, as the man who had provided me with such hospitality, good meals, and good stories passed away in 2012. The building is an historic one and will remain untouched, but his son had earlier informed me by phone that no one in the family wants to carry on the work of taking care of an old inn.
Although it was still before noon, the climb over the Torii Pass had worked on my appetite, and I searched out the Shimizu-ya, a small shop accoutered with five huge cedar-slab tables, where my wife, Emily, and I had dined some fifteen years before as we passed through. Despite the early hour, I was kindly let in by the elderly husband and wife, who welcomed me with happy smiles. I ordered an unagi-don, barbecued eel on a bowl of rice, with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer, and sat down at one of the tables that had been cut horizontally from the trunk of the tree to preserve its natural shape.
When the meal arrived, I could see that the unagi was very, very fresh and was reminded of the Buddha’s injunction against “eating meat that was killed just for you.” I felt regret but eagerly finished everything in the bowl, polished off the “beer,” and hoped that I could be a better person. As I paid my bill, old Mr. Shimizu brought me an o-miyage, a souvenir, a cedar coaster with eighty tree rings, on which he had printed his own hanga—a depiction of two horses, the date, and a poem. He made them himself, he said and, looking at my backpack, added that he hoped it would not become extra luggage.
Back out on to the street, I continued walking south and looked for my night’s lodging, the Isami-ya. Yabuhara looks much like any small Japanese mountain village but still retains a few old houses with overhanging balconies and latticed doorways. There is running water at the corner of almost every street, flowing from wooden spigots into large wooden basins, with dippers from which anyone may take a drink. The poet Santoka loved water, as much if not more than sake, and passed through Yabuhara at least three times on his unending journeys. The poem he perhaps wrote here reads,
Tasting the water,
my heart
afloat.
On this day, all of the comb shops were closed because of a folk-craft festival in Narai, but I passed one, the Miyakawa Shiryokan, which I remembered well from years ago. I had been talking to the young proprietor, when he showed me some cards hand-written by the poets Buson and Basho, the latter traveling the Kiso Road in 1685 and 1688, stopping in Yabuhara both times. Yamaoka Tesshu had also passed through during the early Meiji period and left a piece of his unique calligraphy as well. The shop had operated as an inn during the Edo and Meiji periods, and when poor but famous poets stayed, they would write their poems on tansaku—rectangular cuts of stiff paper—and leave them instead of paying the usual fare. When I asked the proprietor what generation of the family he was, his response was, “Well, you know, people here in Yabuhara still think of us as newcomers because we originally came from a few valleys over from here about three hundred years ago. I’m just the ninth generation running this shop.”
Mr. Miyagawa’s family is actually descended from warriors who served their lords during the Namboku period (1336–92) but for the last 170 years or so had been doctors who were allowed to carry swords because of their status.
Like other towns on the Kiso, Yabuhara has experienced its own ups and downs. When Okada Zenkuro made his inspection tour in 1839, he made this sympathetic report:
This post town lies at the highest elevation in the valley that is the source of the Kiso River, so the cold is extreme during the winter and spring. Agriculture is carried out only in vegetable fields bordered by low stone walls, and making a living in this way is difficult. Thus, since ancient times, the people have turned to making combs of wood and fine utensils out of Japanese cypress. Some years ago, such goods brought excellent prices, and grains were at a low price, so a good living was made by such work, and the local population increased. Because of this, the business of going and coming in the post town went well, and similar work was started by many people throughout the provinces. Sooner or later, the prices of such items fell, profits decreased, and the price of grains increased. With the poor harvests of 1837, it was difficult to make profit enough for food provisions, and gradually people were at such extremities that they could not sell their clothing, household goods, the tools of their trades, or even their rice and vegetable fields. The result was that many people starved to death or left the area, the number of houses decreased, and the post town went into debt.
The post town, however, rebounded and, with the number of people traveling the Nakasendo in the remaining part of the century and their demand for lodging and souvenirs, flourished once again.
Walking on, I finally found my inn close to the southern end of the town, but the o-kami-san was out, and no one responded to my calls at the entranceway.
Backtracking, I checked my backpack at the train station, walked back along the main street, and then climbed the hill in back of the town up to the Gokurakuji, a Zen Buddhist temple founded in 1571. Entering through the huge front gate, the traveler is struck by the massive size of this wooden temple, which is fronted by a large gravel foreyard with statues of Kannon, Jizo, and other bodhisattvas placed here and there. Unfortunately, the temple, too, was closed due to the festival in Narai, and I sat down on a low stone wall to rest.
There is an exquisite garden to the rear of this temple, which had been created in the style of the famous Kobori Enshu (1579–1647), a master of Japanese art, poetry, tea ceremony, and gardening. While walking through the grounds over a decade ago, I learned that the garden had not one, but two master gardeners—one for the garden in general and one who specializes in pines. In the center of the garden, there is a single vertical rock, around which the rest of the stones, bushes, and trees are asymmetrically arranged. There is also a large boat-shaped rock, the takarabune—the ship transporting the “Seven Happy Gods”—with a pine shaped like a standing crane growing in its center. The temple also houses paintings by Sesshu and the Zen priests Hakuin and Takuan; and on the left side of the main hall is a shrine for O-roku, where a comb memorial service is held every September 4.
It was a beautiful sunny day with a cloudless sky, and my stomach was full, so I decided to take a slow walk back through the Yabuhara Jinja, a large wooded shrine next to the Gokurakuji. Along with the dark cypress and cedar trees, the shrine was spotted here and there with fall flowers I could not identify, enough so that it was as much an arboretum as a holy place. Although the main hall was built only in 1827, the shrine itself was founded in 680 and is dedicated to the avatar of Kumano Jinja (bears again, Kumano meaning “Bear Field), extant since 81 B.C.E.
To give the o-kami-san of my inn more time to do her chores, I descended the hill and headed back north to the Ogino-ya, where I was welcomed by the proprietor, Mr. Jinmura, and a young waitress. This shop specializes in soba, or buckwheat noodles, and has the feel of an Edo-period establishment. The ceiling is perhaps two stories high, with rafters of dark wood blackened from years of smoke that rose up from the central hearth. All around this ash-filled hearth—about ten feet long and four feet wide—is a wooden deck that functions as a table, its surface also smooth and dark from years of use. A large iron kettle hangs over the hearth and emits steam heated by the charcoal below. High windows allow in an opaque light, which seems to focus on two wall-mounted kamidanas, or “god shelves”—one dedicated to the gods of Mount Ontake, the other to Mr. Jinmura’s ancestors. I ordered a tokkuri of cold sake, which was delivered on a wooden tray in a tall, unglazed open kyusu and a cup in the same style. While feeling just a little guilty for such an early indulgence, I was encouraged by this poem quoted in the Ryoko yojinshu:
As for drinking
when on a journey,
do not drink too much.
Yet just a little from time to time
is good medicine.
And Kaibara Ekiken, who no doubt stopped here to sample the local wares, wrote in the Yojokun, his notes on health, “Sake is the nectar of Heaven. If you drink just a little, it reinforces your yang ch’i, softens youthful vigor, circulates respiration, drives away depression, stimulates interest in the world, and is greatly beneficial to man.” A wood-burning stove next to me provided some additional heat.
As I settled in to my sake, which was a tokubetsu junmai and one of the best I’d ever tasted, Mr. Jinmura and his waitress served a group of four of five people who had just come in, and then came over to chat. He is an enthusiastic and cheerful man of about fifty, and explained to me that, although his family originally came Miya no koshi, the next post town, they had been at this location for some 680 years. He went on to say that before this place became a soba shop, it was a sort of convenience store (a konbini, in his words), or to use a more proper Japanese word, a zakkaya, selling various goods to people who passed by in front on the Kiso Road. A fire destroyed everything 130 years ago, but the main building and storehouse were restored after that. Many years ago, he said, it was a huge shop, with numerous employees busy at work as the feudal lord processions on their way to Edo and back passed by right in front. Yabuhara was the largest town in the Kiso at that time—which means it was the largest in frontage along the road—and so taxed heavily.
Soon, the other customers joined in the conversation, and we were informed that both the poet Santoka and the eccentric potter/chef Rosanjin had stopped by this shop in the past. After an hour of friendly talk, the other customers and I took our leave, Mr. Jinmura and his waitress bowed us out on their knees, and we were all in good spirits.
Just across the street from the Ogino-ya is the Yugawa sake distillery, with a magnificent sakabayashi (ball of cedar leaves and twigs, signifying a sake establishment) hanging over the entranceway Established in the early Edo period, it is now well over three hundred years old and still producing a fine sake called—what else?—Kisoji (or, The Kiso Road). In 1975, the proprietor was the fourteenth-generation brewery master, operating the highest-elevation distillery in Japan. Some years ago, I had been given a tour of this brewery and walked through the warehouses full of shiny steel vats of a fermenting sort of soup. You start with rice, my guide explained, clean it with the pure water of the Kiso, steam it to the consistency of gohan—the rice you eat in Japanese restaurants—cool it, and then put it into the vats. The yeast is prepared elsewhere and then added. Traditionally for local sakes, as the fermenting semiliquid glop was stirred with large paddles by hand, there was a song sung at each stage, limiting exactly the time it was to be attended to. If the stirring was finished before or after the song, the mixture would not be right. Looking at the mechanized production here, I had wondered if the old songs were still remembered by even the oldest of the workers, who were now dressed in clean uniforms and wore hardhats. It was now all down to a computerized science, but my cups of the tokubetsu junmai at the Ogino-ya had spoken quite eloquently of its continued high level of quality.
I now once again headed south, collected my backpack from the railroad station, and found that the o-kami-san of my inn, a pleasant woman of about fifty, had returned. She was happy to show me up to my room, which was on the second floor, overlooking the train station a hundred or so yards away. The station itself is not very big and, as train stations do, emotes a feeling of travel, transience, and an odd sense of nostalgia for something of which you have no clear memory. I opened up the windows to get a better view, checked out the map for tomorrow, and took a break. My calves and thighs had been sore the day before, and they were now again. More ominously, there seemed to be some very large blisters forming on my feet. Going over the pass, I had ascended about 750 feet and descended about 825. As I closed my eyes, I noticed that my ceiling had been very tastefully constructed with cedar planking and cherrywood rafters. There was a faint scent of incense coming from the first floor, and I let go and went to sleep.
Later, there was a dinner downstairs of trout, hamburger, mashed potatoes, egg soup, three or four different country vegetables, chikuwa, rice, and Japanese tea. I did my best and waddled back to my room, wondering if the o-kami-san thought I hadn’t eaten in a week. There is a washing machine and dryer in the Isami-ya, so after washing my clothes, I took a long soaking bath. Clothes dried, folded, and put back into my backpack, I finally stretched out on my futon, watched a television program on Japanese birds, and then read a little more Confucius. Sure enough, he always has something appropriate.
In dining, the Gentleman does not seek satiety.
Unable to keep my eyes open, I turned out the light to sounds of the last train pulling out of the station.
COURSE TIME
Yabuhara-shuku to Miya no koshi-shuku: 8 kilometers (4.8 miles). 3 hours, 20 minutes.