Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

An adventure is an adventure in proportion to the emotion aroused. For days without end thirst had been sitting astride my tongue. Just as the Old Man of the Sea fastened his thighs around Sindbad’s neck and then kicked the poor man’s ribs mercilessly with his heels, so had my parasite tickled my throat with his toes. To have unthroned my tormentor at the beginning of his companionship would have been a sensuous satisfaction. To do so after having known the abysses of abject slavery was an ecstasy exceeding the dreams of lovers.

I flushed the ice particles around in my mouth until my eyes rolled in my head. O-Owre-san was alarmed into protests. I had no time to listen. I ordered another bowl of snow and another bottle. It was costing sen after sen but I knew in my soul that if I had to beg my rice to get to Yokohama and had to sleep under temple steps, even if the price for the snow thus beggared me, the uttermost payment could be in no proportion to the value.

The fertile plain through which the Tokaido now wound was crowded with the sight of man. A few houses always clustered wherever a rise in the ground could lift them above the water of the rice fields. The paddy toilers, digging with their hands around the rice roots, worked in long lines, men and women, with their bodies bent flat down from their hips against their legs. If they noticed our passing and looked up, we would say, “It is hot!” and they would say, “It is hot!” Finally an avenue of scrub pines brought shade and I declared for a siesta. Our first attempt gave way before a horde of ants. We tried relaying the top stones of a heap of boulders and then climbed up on that edifice, going to sleep quite contentedly. When I yawned into wakefulness I looked lazily around the landscape wondering where I was. I felt queerly and strangely alone. It was not that the sound of breathing from under O-Owre-san’s helmet had ceased. He had not become a deserter, but while we were sleeping every peasant in the fields had disappeared. There can be, then, a degree of heat under which a coolie will not labour, and we had found the day of that heat.

In the next village we discovered our labourers again. They were lying on the floors of their open-sided houses, the elders motionless except for the deep rising and falling of their breasts and an arm lifted now and then in desultory fanning. The children, however, were restless enough to be startled into gazing at the two strangers who were walking the gauntlet of the narrow street.

We had seen an ice flag over a shop at the very entrance to the town but O-Owre-san suggested that there would surely be another shop farther along. I accepted his reasoning but there was not another kori flag to be found anywhere. We had reached the last house. The sign over the shop we had passed was at least a mile back along that burning white cañon. O-Owre-san stopped in at the last house to beg some well water. I looked at the water and thought of the ice.

“If there ever was any ice back there,” said he, “it’s melted by this time.”

I was venomous. I left my luggage and started back.

The children, maybe, had been telling their parents of the sight that they had missed, a sight which might never come again. The grinding of my heels this time brought a somewhat larger audience to their elbows. They appeared appreciative of my second appearance. I staggered on and on, mopping my head with a blue and white gift towel. I felt in my limbs the exact strength that would carry me to that kori shop, but to have had to go a foot beyond might well have meant an experience in hallucinations which I had no wish to know.

An old man, who grinned toothlessly, dug down into a sawdust pit and exhumed a fair-sized cake of ice. He moved about his work grotesquely as if he were an animated conceit of carved ivory quickened into life for a moment by the hyper-heat. He at last gave me a bowl of snow with sprinkled sugared water over it. I munched the ice for a full half-hour. As I slowly grew cooler the crowd about me slowly grew larger. They stood silently staring, always staring.