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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

We had an hour to kill before dinner and we were irritably moody against the foreign windows which gave us no breeze. “It’s housely hot,” said O-Owre-san, and he sighed pathetically for the cool mats of an inn floor where there would be a pot of freshly brewed tea at his elbow and a green garden to look out upon. I was studying a map of Japan, tracing out its rivers and mountains.

I have an inordinate passion for maps. Surely Stevenson had some such passion. I venture that he first thought of the pirate’s chart of “Treasure Island” and after that first imagination the story simply wrote itself. Particularly does passion find satisfaction in one of the old Elizabethan maps, printed in full, rich colours, the margins portraying the waves of the sea with dolphins diving, and with barques straining under bellied sails. Some are headed for the Spanish Main, and others are striking out for the regions marked “Unknown.” Those old Elizabethan maps could have been drawn only in the days of hurly-burly England when the deep-chested seamen under Raleigh and Drake sang savage sea songs in the taverns and the tingling life in a man’s veins was worth its weight in adventure. No wonder that to-day, with our pale, lithographed maps telling us the exact number of nautical miles to the farthest coral island we have become analytic and scientific. As Okakura said, “We are modern, which means that we are old.” Nevertheless, a pale, errorless, unemotional map is better than no map at all.

The particular map of Japan which I was studying had had a few mysteries added in the printing which were not to be blamed upon the geographer. The different colours had been laid on by the printer with marked independence of registration. It was difficult to trace even the old Tokaido, but imagination from practical experience told me that when it followed the coast it led through miles and miles of rice fields. Farther up on the map, in the mountain ranges above Nagoya, I saw a blurred word and turning the sheet on end I read “Nakescendo.”

The word brought a remembrance. I began trying to piece together what that memory was. At last I assembled a forgotten picture of a Japanese whom I had once met on a train. In the beginning I had thought him a modern of the moderns until he told me of his sacred pilgrimages. It was my surprise, I suppose, in his tale of his tramping, staff in hand, with the peasants that had made me so distinctly remember his earnestness as he mouthed the full word “Nakescendo.” I rolled over on the bed with my finger on the map and asked Hori if he had ever heard of the Nakescendo.

Hori looked up in surprise as if I had rudely mentioned some holy name. “All day,” said he, “I have been thinking of the Nakescendo.” Then he told us how the Nakescendo road enters the mountains through the valley of the beautiful Kiso river and, following the ranges first to the north and then to the east, takes its way to Tokyo. In the era before railroads it was a great arterial thoroughfare and in those feudal days the daimyos of the north and their retainers journeyed the Nakescendo route with as much pomp as did their southern rivals along the Tokaido. Nevertheless the Nakescendo now exists in history as the less famous thoroughfare of the two. Hori suggested that the dimming of its fame may have come because its ancient followers had cherished its beauty with such intensity that they did not allow their artists to paint it nor their poets to sing of it to the world, in the belief, perhaps, that all objective praise could be but supererogation.

I had most of this imagining from Hori’s understatements rather than from anything definite that he said. He is of the samurai and his ancestors learned the art of conversation in a court circle devoted to the graces. The incompleted phrase of the East so subtly makes one an accessory in the creation of the idea involved that we, of the West, who live in a world of overstatement, find ourselves disarmed to deny. One cannot discount words that have never been uttered.

I added to Hori’s words some definite phrases from my own imagination. These were to influence O-Owre-san if possible. I knew that it had been his long held dream to walk the Tokaido from end to end, but I had not realized until I saw his dismay at my suggestion of a change how ardent his dream had been. I had recklessly prophesied the mountains of the Nakescendo to be the abode of spring among other praises. It could not be denied that whatever the Tokaido was or was not, the rice fields that had to be crossed would not be springlike.

We slept over such argument as we had had. The next day burst in the glory of a burning sun, which was rather an argument on the side of the mountain faction. The breakfast butter melted before our eyes. O-Owre-san finished his marmalade and pushed back his chair, and then casually capitulated. “Well,” he said, “if we are going to the mountains, what are we waiting for?” What indeed? I ran upstairs to our room and pulled off my hotel-civilization clothes and stuffed them into the bag and labelled it for Yokohama. There was to be no more formal emerging into the seiyo-jin’s world for us until we should reach that port of compulsion. O-Owre-san was less exuberant in his packing but he cheerfully whistled some air—which was indeed forgiving—and as usual was ready before I was.

Hori’s travelling kit had evidently bothered him not at all. A half-dozen collars, two or three books, one or two supplementary garments, and a straw hat were tied up in a blue and orange handkerchief and this [furoshiki] was tied to the handlebars of a bicycle. Until we met the bicycle we had talked of the problems and plans of the three of us, but from the instant of production there was no gainsaying that there were four of us. Further, the really colourful and unique personality among the four partners of the vagabondage was that diabolical, mechanical contraption.