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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

We came upon a wistful-eyed, pink-cheeked, timid fairy of the mountains. She was carrying on her back a huge, barrel-shaped basket and she bent forward as she slowly walked along, her eyes fixed on a handful of wild flowers in her fingers. Even our modest knowledge of the folklore of the land told us that she must be a princess who had been captured by ugly trolls. They had set her to impossible labour as their revenge against her beauty. A young man whose niche in the world was beyond our determining—although we thought he might be a student on a vacation walking trip—had caught up with us a half-hour before and had been measuring his step with ours. When he discovered that I wished to take a picture of the princess he assisted with such effective blandishment of speech that she halted for an instant. When I asked that I might also photograph him, he laughed and vaulted up among the rocks and disappeared.

WE CAME UPON A WISTFUL-EYED, TIMID FAIRY OF THE MOUNTAINS

A little farther along we met the six sisters of the princess. They were carrying burdens equally as large and heavy as had she, but they were not so pretty nor so wistful, albeit they were just as timid. We never could find any key to the mystery why our appearance along the highway would sometimes be as startling as if we were ghostly apparitions, and at other times it would merely bring about a casual interest and staring, if it brought any interest at all. Upon this occasion it was a panic. The six maidens beheld us, they shrieked in unison, and they jumped from the road, trying to hide behind rocks and trees. Their lithe limbs might have carried them like fawns, if their shoulders had been freed from the huge baskets, but, as it was, their flight was more like that of some new and enormous variety of the beetle tribe, evoluted so far as to wear cotton clothes and to have pretty human heads turbaned under blue and white handkerchiefs. As a son of Daguerre, I should have tarried for an instant to photograph their amazing struggle, but an upsetting obsession of chivalry hurried us on. By the time we turned to look back they had scrambled to the road, all six princesses accounted for. They, too, turned to look at us and from the safety of distance began to laugh. The comedy might thus have ended if it had not been that at that instant Hori rounded the bend of the road with his thumb pressed vigorously against the strident bicycle bell. The beetles (or, better to say, the wingless butterflies) again took flight. We awaited their second reappearance. This time they did not venture laughter until they reached the curve and made sure of no further dismay.

Hori dismounted and pushed the bicycle along and we entered into one of our unending discussions. A subject sometimes in debate was O-Owre-san’s and my intense interest—our curiosity—in the conversations that Hori had with passersby along the road or in the shops. Sometimes, when we had made some simple inquiry in a shop, Hori would ask a long question; the shopkeeper would answer; Hori would enter a counter dissertation; the shopkeeper would make his reply to that; Hori would reply; the shopkeeper would reply; Hori would reply; and then it might be that the shopkeeper would have the conclusion. Hori might then turn to us with: “He says ‘no.’”

In the port city shops where English is spoken, if there is but one clerk he will answer your questions immediately. If there are two, every question is thoroughly discussed in Japanese before answering, and if there be three, four, or five clerks, the debate goes on to extraordinary length. Again and again we asked Hori for a complete translation but it must have been that he believed within himself that he had asked the question in the simplest terms, for we seldom got a verbatim translation.

We were in the midst of some such discussion when we looked up to see an old man standing before us, leaning on a long staff. His white beard fell benignly and his steady eyes carried a message of goodwill. He returned our greetings by a dignified inclination of his head. We were at the peak of the road and, as often may be found at such points, there was a small rest tea-house for travellers. We asked the old man if he would sit down with us and share a pot of tea.

The iron pot, filled with mountain spring water, steamed hospitably on the hibachi and the fragrance of the tea was a friendly invitation to relax. Our guest stood his long staff in the corner, sat down on a cushion, and drew his feet from his dusty sandals. After the true manner of happily met travellers he was easily persuaded to tell us the tale of his wanderings. The translation is somewhat rhetorical but, as Hori explained, the tale was told in the language of etiquette.

“I was born,” said he, “in the forty-first year of the rule of the Shogun Ienari. I was young and am now old. My eighty and seven summers have seen the downfall of the once mighty before the rising to full glory of the Meiji, and now, from the Palace of Yedo, shine upon us the divine rays of the Way of Heaven. Great is the Mercy of Enlightenment. The Eternal Glory is the Way.

“As a child I knew these mountains which you see. The provinces of our land were then fortified by many castles and these roads were traversed by armed men. The castles have been razed to the ground but the temples of the gods still stand. The two-sworded warriors have gone but I, a humble pilgrim, walk the roads they once knew. The white clouds rest in the blue sky above Fuji-san as when I looked upon them as a child. The clouds will rest above Fuji when these eyes shall see them not.