Before he left Japan after several years spent in Hiroshima, the multi-award-winning English novelist David Mitchell advised me: "If you only make one trip while you are here, make sure it's to the Oki Islands." They were, he assured me (in not quite so many words), little patches of ye olde Nihon as yet untainted by pachinko, high-rise apartments or junk-food joints: perfect antidotes to big-city stress.
He wasn't kidding. A mere three-hour ferry ride across the Sea of Japan separates the Oki Islands from the coast of western Honshu, but it's as if you voyage through three centuries getting there. As my wife Angeles noted, with only the slightest hint of Spanish exaggeration: "If it wasn't for the roads, this place would be all forest."
A couple of hours after our boat cast off from Matsue, in Shimane Prefecture, we espied the first islands — black volcanic humps like debris from some cosmic collision. Soon the ferry was weaving through a veritable maze of these extrusions, some just bare rocky outcrops, others large and rugged and dark with pine trees.