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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

Japan never seems so remote from the West as when seen through the rain. Fishermen, in straw raincoats, were wading in the creeks with hand nets. The children in the villages were wading in the gutters.

The towns seemed self-sufficient and prosperous. They had captured the mountain streams and had led them away from their channels to run in deep, wide canals through the streets. Innumerable waterwheels drew upon this energy for the miniature factories. We were walking through one of these towns—the sun was shining brightly at the moment—when there was a sprinkling of giant drops. We knew that that meant another cloudburst and we turned in at the first door. It was a barber’s shop. We asked permission for standing room, but the men who had been sitting around a large brazier lifted it away and insisted upon giving us their places on the matting.

The chairs, the mirrors, the shampoo bowls, the razors, and all the rest of the elaborate paraphernalia looked so immaculate and usable that I expected O-Owre-san to decide that it would be discourteous for him to waste such an opportunity of having his beard trimmed. He surprised me by suggesting that we toss up to see which one should make the experiment of the complete surrender to all the inventions. Perhaps he was tactfully suggesting that my unkemptness showed the greater necessity, but the turn of the coin made him the adventurer.

The rain was now falling so that it swept the streets in a flood. The thunder was shaking the hills. A thunderstorm, for me, is the most soporific inducer in the world and my eyes began to waver and soon I was many times asleep. When I awoke, under O-Owre-san’s urge, the sun was out again. My joints were stiff, I was sleepy, and I was old, but the world seemed very new after its scrubbing, and nothing less than jauntiness could express the state of transformation, brought about by clippers, shears, hot towels, and everything that went with the treatment, in the appearance of my companion. The barber and his two assistants, with their huge palm fans, were bowing and smiling with an air of complete satisfaction. I was out of sympathy both with refurnished nature and the revamped man. I remarked irritably that his pursuit of beauty would be the ruination of our joint purse.

“Yes,” he said, “and the fees equalled the bill. I had to pay some rent for your taking up the entire floor for your siesta.”

The bill had been five sen and the fees had been five sen, so that altogether we had squandered five cents of our money.

Fujimi is little more than a hamlet. It is tucked away in a fold of the hills off the main paths of the trail. Its days are probably as ancient as the worship of Fuji. The view of the sacred mountain from Fujimi is a paradox of the beautiful. The sudden sight of the blue outline of the mountain against the sky comes crushingly into one’s consciousness as an extraordinary awakening and quickening, and yet the emotion is deep, reverent, and silent. Maybe it was our undue imagination but the peasants of the valley seemed marked by quietude. While Fuji-yama was cloud hidden that first day, on the long walk of the next we found the lonely labourers of the isolated farm terraces often staying their work for a moment, their consciousness lost in passionate gaze toward the sacred slope.

It was only by much questioning of the peasants whom we met on the road that we were able to find the hamlet. Once when we were unable to understand the answer, with a quick smile to disarm our protests, the questioned one turned back his steps until he could point out the path. We had been swinging along at our best pace in the hours between torrents and it was not long after mid-day when we found Hori’s bicycle outside an inn. O-Owre-san declared that our sixteen or so miles had not aroused him from the sluggishness brought on by a full day’s rest at Kama-Suwa and he was for going on, but as the rain was now falling again, this time in a settled drizzle, he had to be a martyr to enduring a roof over his head or else to seek his own drenching.

The inn was the most meagre in ordinary equipment of any that we had found. It was not much more than a rest-house, although it had evidently at one time been of more pretence. The fear expressed by our host that his house was unworthy had the ardour of conviction. In order to know better what to borrow from his neighbours for the entertainment of the seiyo-jins he suggested a scale of three prices. We chose the middle quotation of one yen, twenty sen (sixty cents). The fire was then started in the kitchen.