II
THE ANCIENT TOKAIDO
It was the morning of our last sleep in [seiyo-jin] beds. I dreamed that I was still dreaming in Lindaroxa’s Court. O-Owre-san shook my four-poster and begged me to consider the matter-of-factness of rolling out from my mosquito netting and taking a bite of cold breakfast. The sensuous breeze of the East, which comes for a brief hour with the first light of the sun, was blowing the curtains back from the window. I was willing to consider the getting up and the eating of the breakfast and I was willing to call both endeavours matter-of-fact, but the imagination that it was to be the first day on the highroad belonged to no such mere negativity of living.
I began packing and was inspired to improvise a wonderful ballad. It was concerned with the beginning of trails. O-Owre-san was busy and was uninterested in my stanzas. He might very well have served genius by taking them down. The all-inclusiveness embraced, I remember, a master picture of cold dawn in the Rockies, with pack ponies snorting, biting, and bucking; and I sang blithely of every other sort of first morning start, embroidering the memories of their roaring language and their unpackable dunnage. But in Japan one does not roar—or one roars alone—and I had known just what was going into my rucksack for weeks.
Our route was to be the famed Tokaido, that ancient road running between the great capitals of the West and the East, from Kyoto to Tokyo. We were to find its first stretch at the turn to the left when we should cross the bridge over the Kamo-Gawa. This river cuts Kyoto between two long rows of houses built on piles and overhanging its waters. In summer the stream is most domesticated and gives, charitably, a large area of its dry bed as a pleasure ground for fêtes, but when the snows are melting back in the hills in the days of spring and blossoms, it becomes temperamental and the peasants say that it has drunk unwisely of [saké]. It is then that the water winks rakishly and splashes the tips of its waves at pretty [geishas], who come to scatter cherry petals on the current. But we saw only the summer domesticity on our June morning. A school of children were wading in the shallow current, fishing with nets. Their kimonos were tied high above their sturdy fat legs. We leaned over the rail and they squinted back into the sun at us and called out good-morning. Then we stepped off the bridge and our boots were on the long road that leads to Tokyo.
KYOTO BACK STREETS
Hokusai has pictured the Tokaido in his prints—the villages and the mountains, the plains and the sea, the peasants and the pilgrims, the [ronins] and the priests. He did add his immortal overlay to the tradition of the highway’s immortality, but even the great Hokusai could only be an incident in the spread of its renown. The Tokaido’s personality was no less haughty and arrogant long centuries before the artist. It was built by the gods, as everyone knows, and not by man. This may be the reason why it has fallen upon hard days in these modern times, now that the race of man has assumed the task of relieving the weary gods of so many of their duties. Axes have cut down the cryptomerias for miles because the trees interfered with telegraph wires; and furthermore, a new highway has now been built between the capitals, a road of steel. For most of the way this new road follows alongside the old, although sometimes departing in a straighter line. The vaulting arrogance of all was when man took the name “The Tokaido” for a railway. The trains pass by the ancient shrines of the wayside with no tarrying for moments of contemplation. To-day a samurai, with a newspaper under one arm and a lunch box under the other—his two swords have been thus displaced—goes from Kyoto to Tokyo in as few hours as were the days of his father’s journeying.
When the feudal emperors made this pilgrimage they were carried in silk-hung, lacquered palanquins, and fierce-eyed, two-sworded retainers cleared the streets and sealed the houses so that no prying eyes might violate sancrosanctity. As for our pilgrimage we appreciated that we were not sacred emperors and that we were coming along without announcement. The inhabitants kept the sides of their houses open and stared out upon us. We felt free, discreetly, to return their glances from under the brims of our pith helmets, but occasionally this freedom felt a panicky restraint within itself to keep eyes on the road.