Retracing notable footprints is a noble enterprise, and various are the pilgrimages, religious, literary or otherwise. In Japan, retaking known paths is something of an avocation and many a courtly romance finds a ramble dignified if it has the illustrious precedence of some prince or poet.
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I do not know how many people have attempted to duplicate Basho's various poetic journeys, but I do know of several attempts by foreigners. Donald Keene once told me that he tried, but the melee of trucks and billowing exhaust that he met just getting out of Tokyo was enough to discourage him. Lesley Downer, on the other hand, actually completed the narrow road to the deep north and lived to write about it, but only by skipping the truck-filled first part.
Among other foreigners undertaking famous journeys was Alan Booth, who in the second of his books about walking Japan, traced the footsteps of Saigo Takamori through the mountains of deepest Kyushu. And now we have another Englishman, Patrick Carey, setting out to walk the Tokaido, taking the same course as Hiroshige did when he went to sketch the stages of that famous post road, a journey that turned into the best-known of all Japanese woodblock series.
This is no idle stroll. Back in Hiroshige's time, a man was expected to walk from Edo to Kyoto in 12 days (a woman was supposed to take 15), though there were expectations of something more speedy from couriers -- six days for ordinary runners, three and a half for the two-legged Tokugawa equivalent of the shinkansen.
Carey allowed himself 17 days, "but losing the way, stopping to talk, and the difficulty of finding accommodation all slowed me down." So did his feet, unused as they were to being used to this extent. Blisters began early.
Not yet in Yokohama, he found his feet "agonizingly painful." Though he had gone out of his way to visit the grave of an unfortunate compatriot, Charles Richardson, who was cut down by an irate samurai in 1862, once there "huge trucks roared past in an unending stream of exhaust fumes and I could think only of my own blisters."
Nonetheless, he bravely battles on and as the journey progresses we hear less about feet -- though, perhaps consequently, we hear more about beer. Like Booth, Carey is a beer-drinker and many of the disappointments of the day are dissolved in the froth of his favorite brew.
Not that he allowed himself many disappointments. Carey is a good traveler, he rarely frets, and if he mistakes his way (constantly), he is equally energetic in setting it right. Nor does he often allow himself to get down in the dumps (as Booth does) and when he does he can at least identify them. "Then came the pleasures of masochism. My feet became suffused with a slow, throbbing ache which reminded me of the bittersweet sensation five minutes after being caned at boarding school."
Perhaps equally painful was seeing what the Tokaido had become. Walking with old maps and a series of small reproductions of the Hiroshige set, he would compare what he saw with what Hiroshige had seen, and then take a photo. At Hodogaya, "Hiroshige would weep, for this was where he once drew a rustic riverside." Still, lamentable as are the changes that a century of progress can bring, Carey is usually also anxious to find out why something happened.
Oliver Statler's famed "Japanese Inn," the Minoguchiya, had been closed since 1985 and the author pounded on doors until this was explained to him. He remembered Statler closing his first chapter with the words "I fell asleep with the sound of the sea." But Carey, now sitting in the same room, "looked in vain for the sea. . . . instead there was a tall hedge from behind which came the relentless zip, zip, zip of passing traffic . . . bulldozers had carved a route for the expressway" and the old inn had no place "in the economic rationalism of today's Japan."
At the same time, as a believer in the half-full cup (in contrast to the half-empty one), the author rejoices in what is left. "A fifth, perhaps, has already been lost to the bulldozer, but most of the rest is still recognizably the old road." Among the reasons for this preservation is benevolent neglect. "Almost all of it is untouched by tourism."
And so, having left wife and well-wishers behind at Nihombashi in Tokyo, he fell into their arms 480 km later, more or less on schedule, at the Great Sanjo Bridge in Kyoto. Mission accomplished -- with sore feet and a delightful book to show for it.
It would show even better if the designer had not crammed all the Hiroshige plates and same-site Carey photos into the first signatures of the book. Consequently, when we are reading about, say, the Mishima shrine on page 50, we must leaf back to page 12 to find plate and picture. How nice it would be to have them on the same pages, But such is the economic rationalism of today's England that this was apparently impossible.
This is an argument with the publisher, not the writer. His is a winning book. It may be acquired through Global Books, fax: 01303-243087, e-mail: [email protected]. The publisher's Web site address is: simplyglobalbooks.com.
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