7Miya no koshi

ELEVATION 2,670 FEET

The bell of the Gion Temple echoes the transience of all things. The hue of the flowers of the sala tree gives warning that whoever rises will surely fall. The prideful will not last long, just like the dream on a night of spring. The bold and dauntless man will also, in the end, come to ruin, exactly like the dust before the wind.

—Heike monogatari, Book 1

THE WHISTLE of the 6:21 local train invited me to join the day, so I folded up my futon, packed everything but my toothbrush, and headed downstairs for a breakfast of poached salmon, yogurt, one fried egg in a small pot, miso soup, natto, rice, pickles, and Japanese tea—fuel for the day.

It was a cloudy, cold day, mists were moving between the mountains, and I was happy to find a vending machine right outside the entrance to the inn. Purchasing two cans of my favorite Japanese coffee—Boss café au lait—I slowly sipped down one (they are hot) and put the other in my coat pocket as a hand warmer. The o-kami-san was still bowing me off as I turned the corner onto the national highway with its trucks and cars, but the Kiso River was rushing and gurgling over river rocks below me on my right, and ahead were mountains folding into mountains, covered in reds, yellows, purples, and greens. In a short while, the Nakasendo turned away from the highway, and the path entered a dark cedar forest punctuated by streams flowing down the mountain and into the river, now on my left. With the traffic gone, the sound of water was everywhere. With his two small rattan suitcases hung over his chest and back, the shabby old loner Santoka would have traveled along this same road some eighty years ago. Two of his free haiku:

Pausing a moment,

the sound of rivers and streams

without end.

The road:

the sound of water

near and far.

The road now led through a tiny hamlet of houses and then wound through an open area of rice fields that had already been harvested, the clumps of cut stalks neatly dotting the dry ground. The Chuo-sen railroad crosses the Nakasendo here; the barrier came down, and the lights flashed on and off. I stopped and waved my hat as the train whizzed by, but the passengers were busy reading their newspapers and magazines, and only one little girl waved happily back from the coach window.

Soon I was back on the national highway, and in less than a quarter mile, it entered the Yamabuki Tunnel. Years ago, I walked with my wife and two of our friends through this long and dark tunnel on its very narrow sidewalks, small thin towels given to us by our inns as souvenirs wrapped around our noses and mouths. It was scarier than any of us cared to admit to each other until later that night over sake and dinner, and I did not relish walking through it again. Luck was with me this time, however, and I spied an old road on the other side of the highway that we had not seen before, and what looked like a wooden guidepost on which was clearly carved, “Miya no koshi, 2 km.” I scampered across the highway and found that this better route was an old narrow road, now closed to cars and open only to hikers. The Kiso River was on my left once again, the mountains very close in, and fall colors everywhere. One tree in particular stood out from the others, full of bright yellow leaves stretching almost all the way across the river. The place was lonely and very quiet, with weeds and small trees poking up through the cracked asphalt. Once again the only sound was that of the clear blue-green water rushing and jumping over rocks and boulders of all sizes.

All the streams

becoming waterfalls:

deep autumn.

—Santoka

On this road

no one goes:

dusk in autumn

—Basho

A little farther along, and I entered the hamlet of Hiyoshi, on the right of which is Mount Yamabuki. This is said to have been the residence of Lady Yamabuki, about whom the Kisoji meisho zue states:

In the Heike monogatari it says that Yoshinaka had two concubines; one was Tomoe, the other Yamabuki. During the battle of Genryaku, Yamabuki fell ill, and stayed with a doctor in the capital. However, in the Genpei suisaki, we are told that Yoshinaka’s two concubines were Tomoe and Aoi. Both were great warriors, but Aoi was killed in the battle at Mount Tonami. These two stories are not the same, and some say that Yamabuki was the wife of Saito Betto Sanemori. We still do not know the truth.

Whoever this Yamabuki was, the entire Kiso Valley, and especially this area, is imbued with the memory of Kiso Yoshinaka, his mistresses, and his descendants.

Born in 1154 in the northeastern province of Musashi, Yoshinaka was a member of a branch of the Minamoto clan, one of the two clans fighting for hegemony during the twelfth century. His father was killed in internecine warfare when Yoshinaka was only one year old, and he was taken to the Kiso to be raised by a powerful relative. Yoshinaka prospered in the Kiso, building a mansion in Miya no koshi, and commanded several thousand soldiers. In 1180, he felt his opportunity had come, raised the flag of rebellion against the Taira—the other great clan at the time—and marched to Kyoto, then controlled by Taira Kiyomori. Within two years, the Taira were defeated and Yoshinaka was the first to enter the capital, where he was greeted as a hero. Political intrigue coupled with what many in the refined and cultured capital, Kyoto, considered to be the boorishness, arrogance, and countrified ways of Yoshinaka and his samurai, however, eventually led to his ouster and death in a battle with the troops of his cousin, Yoritomo. Yoshinaka had been called the Asahi Shogun, or “Sunrise Shogun,” and was only thirty-one years old when he died.

Continuing on around Mount Yamabuki, I encountered an elderly man with a paralyzed right arm clearing rocks away from a small stone moment engraved with a poem. Without much prompting, he chanted the verse to me but mumbled so badly I could only make out the words “Kiso” and maybe “Yoshinaka.” With a large smile, he informed me that he had written the poem himself, and then devotedly got back to work. The picked flowers at his side would no doubt soon adorn his little memorial. Yoshinaka has been dead for over nine hundred years but lives on here, even in this old man’s dreams.

Yoshinaka’s other concubine—said to be his favorite—was Tomoe Gozen, also from Miya no koshi according to legend. In the thirteenth-century work Heike monogatari, we read that

Tomoe had a fair complexion and long hair, and her face was truly beautiful. She was uncommonly skillful with a bow, and was a spirited warrior when mounted on a horse. Even when on foot, when she held a sword, even the gods and demons would not approach her. She was a match for a thousand men.

Tomoe survived the battle where Yoshinaka died, but not before taking one or two more heads. She then escaped and, perhaps, became a Buddhist nun in one of the northern provinces.

After a few minutes’ walk, I arrived at the tomoe ga fuchi, where a tiny trickle of a waterfall enters a broad pond fed by a stream where Tomoe is said to have turned into a dragon as the water’s guardian spirit. It is a quiet place with a small pavilion where travelers can take off their backpacks and rest for a while. Attached to a pillar of the pavilion was a rain-spotted notebook registry for guests to sign. I added my signature but declined to try my hand at a poem inspired by the beauty of the area, which other visitors had done with varying degrees of success. There was, however, a stone monument engraved with a haiku next to the bridge that crosses the stream, and the poet was a professional, Kyoroku, who lived during the Edo period.

The mountain roses, and

Tomoe, too, come out:

planting the rice.

Yamabuki , the name of his other concubine, means “mountain rose.” Tomoe means a “whirl” or “eddy,” much as might be seen here at the waterfall and pond. Two tomoe together indicate two large commas united to make a perfect circle, perhaps a metaphor for Yoshinaka’s feelings about his concubines.

My route now became a series of uphill winding roads, as I looked for the famous Hata-age Hachiman Shrine where Yoshinaka had actually raised the flag of rebellion in this faraway place. There were few signs to go by, and when I did find it, I was still not so sure that I had. The shrine, where once a thousand men raised their swords and spears, is very small, about the size of a private teahouse. At its side is the trunk of a once-giant zelkova tree—now either mostly lightning struck or rotted, but still luxuriant with leaves—which appears to have been there since the time of Yoshinaka. Nothing else remains. His extensive mansion is said to have been next to the shrine, but now there are only dry rice fields, some white plastic-covered greenhouses, and a few recently planted pines. The atmosphere is one of mujo, or “impermanence,” the theme of not only the Heike monogatari, but a good part of Japanese classical literature. From the wooden bench where I sat, the Kiso Valley and the town of Miya no koshi were visible below, while the national highway rumbled on in the distance.

Of Miya no koshi, the Shokoku dochu tabikagami of 1847 states only that “in this area, houses made only of wooden planks are more prevalent than in Yabuhara, and there is no bamboo. This is a bad mountain district.” A few years before, Okada Zenkuro had noted,

The mountains are low in this post town, so there are places that could be opened for rice and vegetable fields. But it is still at a high elevation and intensely cold, so there are few fields, the harvests are meager, and it is difficult to make a living by agriculture. Moreover, the commercial roads to the more prosperous areas east and west are somewhat far and transportation fees are numerous and high-priced, and salt and similar items are expensive. Thus, it is difficult to make a living, and many people are in debt. . . . In years past, people raised oxen and made a living from the fees paid for transporting goods from Nagoya, Fukushima, Ina and Matsumoto. Recently, however, conditions have worsened, and the number of oxen has been greatly reduced.

At one time, this was a post town for the relay of post horses, with one honjin, one waki-honjin, and a line of twenty-one inns. Today, however, every one of those inns is gone, the last having been run by a wonderful old lady, Mrs. Kato, whose warm hospitality I received with my wife and friends a number of times. When she passed away a few years ago, her daughter kept the inn as a residence, where she now brings up her family, but she herself commutes every day to a job in Kiso Fukushima. The house is next door to the old honjin, now abandoned and overgrown with vegetation, but one imagines that Mrs. Kato’s ancestors must have had a lively business when the town was thriving.

The Kiso River runs through the middle of Miya no koshi and is spanned by several bridges before winding off to the west. A short walk from the red Temple Bridge is the Toku’onji, a Buddhist temple founded in 1169 but moved to its present location in 1776. It is a small but well-kept temple, and its copper roof was artfully replaced some years ago. While serving one of her incomparable dinners one night, Mrs. Kato remarked that each of the parishioners had had to help pay for this renovation, each according to his or her level of membership. Mrs. Kato’s contribution, she said with a grimace, was three hundred thousand yen—equivalent to more than three thousand dollars at the time—a hefty bill for an elderly woman running an inn. The temple nowadays is famous for containing the mortuary tablet of Yoshinaka (and now, no doubt, Mrs. Kato’s, as well) and is the place where visitors pray for the enlightenment of his soul. To the left of the main hall is a wooden sculpture of Yoshinaka, and behind this is his grave marker, covered with moss beneath a tree, and those of Tomoe and Yoshinaka’s mother.

I left a prayer for all of them, dropped a hundred-yen coin in the offering box, and moved on, passing the Yoshinaka Museum on my way back to the Nakasendo, at this juncture the unimposing narrow main street of town.

Except for the Toku’onji and the Yoshinaka Museum, Miya no koshi (literally, “at the hip of the shrine”) is yet another quiet mountain village—a barber shop, one grocery store, and an elementary and middle school for the entire area. Its prosaic appearance, however, hides a long and complicated history. Earthenware pottery, porcelain objects, bronze implements, and eight-cornered bronze mirrors dating from the Jomon to the Heian and Kama-kura periods have been unearthed along the bank of the river, and these, along with the artifacts and illustrations of Yoshinaka’s time, are displayed in the museum. Records show that there were large residences and even iron foundries in the surrounding area, indicating that this had once been an important source for raw materials since the earliest times—a place of mansions and commerce. But for whatever reason—the kids grow up, move to the big city, and don’t come back, or there are not enough visitors to support an inn—there are no more lodgings for travelers in Miya no koshi.

The Hojoki, the thirteenth-century essay by the priest Kamo no Chomei, laments,

The current of the moving river is unending, but the water is never the same. The bubbles floating on the surface, now come together, now dissolve, and there is not an example of them lasting for long. In this world, men and their houses are just like this. . . . Both battle with impermanence, but they are no different than the dew on the morning glory. The dew will fall and the flower remains, but though we say “remains,” it wilts in the morning sun. Or, the flower will fade and the dew not vanish, but though we say “not vanish,” it does not wait the close of day.

I struck out for the next village, Harano. The sky was beginning to darken, and I was acutely aware that my feet were not as comfortable as they should have been; but my destination—by the map—was not too far away. Nevertheless, I quickened my steps, hoping to outpace the coming rain.

About four hundred yards past the outskirts of Miya no koshi, in the neighborhood of Shinoshima, there is a deep pool on the opposite bank of the Kiso River, which the local people call the jakiri no fuchi, or the “Killing the Snake Pond.” According to the Kisoji meisho zue,

Everyone says that a long time ago there was a farmer who was cutting grass along this bank. It was tough work, so he got tired and lay down on the bank to take a nap. Suddenly, he smelled something terrible, jumped up in surprise, and saw that a huge serpent had come up and opened its mouth wide to swallow him. At that moment, he swung his sickle and cut the serpent down. The serpent floated in the water, turning over and over, and finally died. For this reason, the pool is called “Killing the Snake Pond.” The farmer put away his sickle and passed it on to his descendants. If anyone gets sick with the ague, he will recover immediately just by looking at this sickle.

Quiet pools and poisonous snakes often appear in old Japanese tales, which, often enough, do not end as happily as this one.

At the tiny unoccupied Shinoshima railroad station, I sat down on a convenient rock and looked across the river to where the pool should have been. It was a lonely little spot, just the right place to encounter a large snake, but it was just beginning to sprinkle, so I decided to move on.

The Nakasendo now continued up a steady incline, at the top of which was a splendid view of the Komagatake Sanmyaku, an extended mountain range to the southeast. According to the Kisoji anken zue,

At the top of Mount Komagatake, there is a huge boulder that resembles a colt [koma], hence the name, Komagatake, or Colt Peak. This is a high mountain; the snows melt in the sixth month, but begin accumulating again in the eighth.

My friend Ichikawa Takashi hiked with me up that mountain in July of 1969. I remember it being cold enough then, and stopping to drink from the streams running down from the peaks was like putting my lips to ice.

This was a long walk, but someone had been thoughtful enough to plant thick rows of orange and red nasturtiums along the roadside—a pleasant distraction from painful feet. Eventually the view was shut off by a dark cedar forest on the east, and the Kiso River flowed away to the west, out of earshot but not of sight. Shortly before the outskirts of Harano, there is leveled-out ground up against a small hill occupied by a number of stone monuments and some five- or six-foot stone statues, some of which are likely connected with Mount Ontake, but I could not be sure.

Most interesting to me was one I often encountered by the roadside in the Kiso, a two- or three-foot stone monument engraved with the Chinese characters (koshin). In the past, I had asked local people what the characters meant, but no one had come up with a satisfactory answer, and some just shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “Who knows?” Finally, I looked it up in my Chinese-Japanese dictionary and found this explanation: According to an ancient Taoist tradition imported to Japan, there are three worms called the sanshichu that live in our stomachs. On a certain night of the year—indicated by the calendrical term koshin, or kanoesaru—the worms travel up to heaven while the person is sleeping and inform the Yellow Emperor of all his or her bad deeds. To prevent this uncomfortable and embarrassing situation, people will stay up all night celebrating the gods and buddhas, no doubt accompanied by plenty of singing and drinking, and perhaps a few more bad deeds, to boot. Interestingly, this belief is somehow related to the three monkeys of “See no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil,” perhaps because , shin, is an old zodiac character for monkey and is also pronounced saru, “monkey” in Japanese.

Finally, the road leads into old Harano, an ai no shuku, or inbetween post town. There are still some old wooden homes built in what is called the “extended beam style,” and just a little farther ahead stands a signpost indicating the exact center of the Nakasendo. The traditional homes soon give way to more modern structures, however, and the national highway can be seen and heard up to the east. Okada Zenkuro found this to be a place of fertile fields and a number of rice paddies, and also noted that members of the Kiso clan had lived here for many generations. Still, he could see that the town was “under the shadow” of Mount Komagatake, so the weather is quite cold and the harvested crops inferior to other places.

Today, thanks to the national highway, the old resting station is quite prosperous. As I walked through a new neighborhood, I asked for directions to my inn. It was not right on the Nakasendo, I was told, and was instructed to take a left turn, cross over the national highway, and climb up the hill to the Komao (the “Colt King”), Yoshinaka’s childhood name and that of my lodging for the night. Taking the turn left, I crossed a covered culvert and noticed a small stone monument engraved with , “water god,” still revered though running underground and next to a well-traveled road. The natural elements of life are not ignored here, though unseen and passed quickly by.

The drizzle began in earnest as I crossed the national highway—heavy traffic of trucks and cars—and the climb up was again steeper than I would have liked. And, although I asked several times about the Komao, the answer was always the same: “Just another ten minutes.” At last, after passing a roadside market and restaurant and—surprisingly in this largely Buddhist country—a Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I found a large three-story modern building, with an expansive but minimalist garden, a circular driveway, and small buses full of middle-aged men and women being dropped off and picked up. This was the Komao—not a ryokan or minshuku at all, but a hot spring destination for tourists.

This was not exactly a welcome surprise—I prefer traditional inns—but I had made my reservations sight unseen, and I was wet and tired and ready to stop for a while. Despite my bedraggled appearance, the concierge greeted me with a happy smile and showed me to my second-floor room, the Niekawa, which was quite traditional—tatami, a low table, and copies of Hiroshige’s prints of the Kiso Road on the wall. There was also a television and a small porch with a writing table and chair. Purchasing an Asahi beer from the hallway vending machine, I settled in and tried to dry myself out; outside, the rain was coming down hard (or zaa zaa, as they say in Japanese).

Eventually I realized that I had not eaten since breakfast at the Isami-ya. Food is not served at the Komao until six in the evening, so I grabbed my miniscule umbrella, put on my wet boots, and headed out. The rain had let up a little, although the streams on both sides of the road were now full and rushing their way down the hill toward the Kiso. After a meal of a hot bowl of tempura udon and a vending machine “cappuccino” at a sort of truck stop/vegetable stand/restaurant, I wandered next door to a small bookstore, and I was delighted to find three slim volumes on local folktales, collected by local high school students. One of these books contained a version of the above-mentioned Killing the Snake Pond, and I anticipated that they would make for fun reading after the serious Confucius.

Putting my new treasures into a plastic bag, the store manager kindly walked out into the rain with me and directed me to the Rinshoji, formerly a Tendai sect temple but now under the auspices of Rinzai Zen. This temple was built in 1169 and was the family temple of Nakahara Kaneto, Yoshinaka’s foster father. Kaneto shaved his head and entered religion when Yoshinaka left for the capital, so he may have sensed the coming disaster. His grave marker is one of the many at the foot of the mountain.

It was a short hike, but the sidewalk along the national highway seemed dangerously narrow and close to the trucks flying by, and I was soaked again by the time I reached the temple. Once inside the main gate, six stone statues of Jizo greeted me as I entered, and facing the temple itself was a mid-sized garden with low pines, a small pond with two or three koi, and artificial hills. The noisy speed of the highway was suddenly inaudible, or at least I was not aware of it.

Taking heart, I took off my wet boots, walked up the wooden temple steps, and rang the small, round doorbell. Sure enough, the priest’s wife opened the sliding door with a smile and asked me what she could do for me. I explained that I was hiking along the Kiso Road and was interested in the cultural places along the way. She graciously showed me in, and I was once again struck as to how wealthy the Kiso Valley must have been at one time—no doubt due to its place on the Nakasendo and its role as a business route and a road for pilgrims. This temple is not particularly large but is extremely ornate, with elaborate gold-plated fixtures hanging from the ceiling and an extraordinarily embellished altar, centered in front of a gold-plated image of Kannon. The many cushions inside the hallway indicated that there is a good-sized congregation here.

Over Japanese tea and rice cakes, the priest’s wife explained that Zen temples are not always the sites of the long meditation periods and strict austerities that we imagine in the West. There are such temples, and on the Kiso Road as well, but the temples in the towns are largely supported by parishioners, whose families were required by the central government to register with one temple or another as far back as the Edo period. This parish system continues on today, and Mrs. Kato’s three-hundred-thousand-yen contribution to her temple’s repairs is a case in point. Nowadays, as three hundred years ago, the parishioners will gather at the temple for special celebratory days, funerals, or weekend sermons. The priest must also visit the homes of his parishioners from time to time and chant sutras in front of the family butsudan, the Buddhist altar, where small mortuary tablets of the deceased are honored. This visitation requires the family members to sit kneeling before the altar as the sutras are droned on, she says with a smile, during which the children often make bored faces or try to silently text their friends.

The rain let up, and I sensed that my time was up as well, so I thanked the priest’s wife for the tea, cakes, and conversation and took my leave. As I turned at the temple gate to bow once again, she was still at the top of the steps, bowing to the foreigner who had dropped in wet and unannounced.

As I hiked back up to the Komao, it was clear that all was not well with my feet. It was already four in the afternoon when I arrived back, however, and this was, after all, a hot spring, so I tucked my yukata and tiny towel under my arm and headed for the bath. The bathroom itself was cavernous, and the tiled bath itself big enough for at least five or six people. It had been a wet, cold day, and I was the only one here in the bath, so I took my time for a long soak in the hot water. Alas, it was late in the afternoon, so I was unable to follow the advice of the Ryoko yojinshu, which suggests the following.

The method of bathing in a hot spring is the following: For the first day or two, enter the bath three or four times a day. If it feels right, then go anywhere from five to seven times. The old and weak should adjust themselves accordingly.

Nevertheless, I stretched out in the very hot water and, half dozing, remembered two of Santoka’s haiku—different moods, but somehow appropriate.

The loneliness of being by myself,

soaked in the hot spring:

an autumn night.

The morning bath bubbling thick and fast;

and right in the middle?

Me!

Drying off as well as I could with the thin towel, I stayed in my yukata and haori—a mid-sleeve loose coat tied with cords—until dinner, which was served in a spacious dining room on the first floor. There were only five or six guests this evening, and I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged couple who had driven down from Tokyo for the night. He was suffering from a chronic lumbago, he explained, and frequented baths in hot springs to lessen the symptoms. By his smile, I inferred that his “lumbago” was a great excuse to leave Tokyo for hot springs—a few of which he heartily recommended to me—and his wife was a willing accomplice. Soon, our meals were brought out, and we turned our attention to the other pleasure of these resorts, which, here at the Komao, included fifteen different dishes.

At intervals during the meal, the head waiter and I talked about my plans to climb Mount Ontake in a few days, but later the conversation turned to sumo, of which we were both fans. He told me that sumo wrestlers often came to the Komao for R & R, and pointed out a large, wide framed scroll over the entrance to the dining room with red ink handprints of five sumo wrestlers, their signatures below each handprint in black. They had all stayed here some time ago—the famous Chiyonofuji, Takanohana (père), and three others—and I now understood the reason for the size of the baths.

Back in my room, I read through the folktales of the Kiso until bedtime—a lot about foxes and their fidelity to benefactors, rather than their usual pranks and habits of bewitching people, and their favorite food: tempura mouse. In all my years in Japan, I have never seen a fox, although I suspect that they have seen me, especially out on the back roads along the rice fields that border the mountains. In Japan, the fox is the messenger of Inari, the god of harvests, and lives in that liminal world between gods and men.

AT SIX IN THE MORNING, the mountains were full of mists, their colors muted to a series of light and dark pastels. The temperature was forecast to be about ten degrees Celsius (fifty Fahrenheit) in the morning and heating up to twenty degrees in the afternoon. The TV weather report was to be followed with a short piece on the newest popular Japanese rock groups, Bump of Chicken and The Funky Monkey Babies, but I opted to go down for breakfast, which this morning included dessert yogurt, eggs and bacon cooked in a flat pot over a sort of paraffin heater, tangerines, miso soup, rice, and great coffee.

After my third cup of coffee, I went upstairs, packed, took the crumpled newspapers out of my boots, checked the map, and got ready for the road. Thanking the manager and head waiter for their hospitality, I went out the front door to find my friend with the backaches and his wife waiting in their car, and they kindly offered to take me to my next destination, Kiso Fukushima. I politely declined, and we all waved each other good-bye. Later, I would wonder about the wisdom of my decision, but for now I walked back down the hill and in five more minutes was back on the Nakasendo, which shortly joined the national highway again.

This part of the road is perhaps the least scenic on the entire Kiso Road: trucks whizzing by at a high speed, a narrow sidewalk, and defunct roadhouses here and there. Somehow I missed my turnoff where the old road heads out back into a quieter district, but I quickly got a second try and was soon walking through rice fields, past farm houses, and finally over a bridge that crosses the Kiso River—narrower now but still lined with autumnal leaves and rushing over rocks and boulders of every size and shape.

Across this bridge is an old shrine tucked into the mountain and under a dark canopy of maples, cedars, and cryptomeria. Over the sliding entrance door, there is a wooden placard engraved with the characters , which can generally be interpreted in two ways: pronounced arakami, it means a rough and violent god that needs to be appeased by certain festivals and ceremonies; pronounced kojin, it is the god of the kitchen. More specifically, my Kokugo daijiten dictionary defines the god in this way:

This is a god that protects the Three Jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. He displays anger with three heads and six arms, and is deeply venerated by the members of Shugendo and Nichiren Buddhism. Among the common people he is respected as the god of the hearth, and by extension, fire. He is also believed to be a god who generally protects agriculture.

Interestingly, the dictionary also notes that his name is used as a synonym for “wife.”

With that, I returned to the map and found that I could either go just a little farther up the hill and take the old Nakasendo or go down the hill and take the road that follows the river. From where I stood, I could see that the old road was thickly lined with trees and was probably a pleasant walk, but that the one below went along quite close to the river and included some of the loveliest scenery I had seen yet. With a quick but reverent bow to the rough kitchen god, I took the low road and was rewarded with rice fields already harvested and farmhouses bordered by mountains on my right, and the purples, yellows, reds, and browns stretching over and flowing down to the river on my left. This was autumn at its very best. I murmured a thanks to the arakami/kojin god and, trying to ignore the pain in my feet, continued on.

Eventually, the road branched off in different directions, and I was lost again. Passing through a neighborhood of houses and up a hill, and I stopped to ask an elderly lady tending a garden in her yard for directions. She cheerfully let me know that I was close to my destination and invited me in for tea. I turned her down, with regrets, and in ten minutes the national highway appeared on the hill far above me, leading into a tunnel bypassing the next town. Just above the tunnel was a large sign: “The Kiso Fukushima Barrier.” Crossing the river, I turned onto the road that leads into the old post town and passed beneath the huge torii gate that straddles the road. I have always felt at home in this town—the one that Kaibara Ekiken described as “the best town, not only in the Kiso Mountains, but on the entire Shinano Road.”

COURSE TIME

Miya no koshi to Kiso Fukushima: 7 kilometers (4.2 miles). 3 hours, 10 minutes.