If you've read Cheryl Strayed's memoir, "Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," you'll be familiar with her particular tone: a combination of lyrical feminism and gritty self-help manual. Her book chronicles the three months she spent hiking the United States' Pacific Crest Trail (fondly known among mountaineers as the PCT) in 1995 — a journey of more than 1,700 km starting in the Mojave Desert and ending at the border between Washington and Oregon.

Her journey was grueling and often unrewarding, and her months spent on the trail were defined by pain and hunger and the nagging question, "What am I doing here?"

But since the publication of "Wild" in 2012, Strayed has inspired women across four continents to ditch their cars, grab a backpack and start walking.

When she took that hike at age 27, she probably had no idea that 17 years later a book of her travels would be published, that Reese Witherspoon would pick it up for her production company (and play Strayed herself) and that the whole endeavor would become a Hollywood movie called "Wild," which was nominated for two Oscars.

Around the time a young Strayed was wandering the PCT, the majority of young Japanese women equated mountain trails with monkish, hardcore enthusiasts.

The emergence of yama girls (mountain girls) — women who go mountain climbing, either alone or with female friends — was still about a decade away, but the number of women who worked out their personal problems through physical exertion was small but rising.

Solo women hikers were such a rarity along the PCT that Cheryl was mistaken for a "lady hobo." Accidents and injuries were a constant threat, along with the persistent fear of "being raped and dismembered," she writes in her memoir.

The odds were stacked against her, but the urge to push on overpowered the urge to give up.

The hike was Strayed's method of healing herself — a way of cleansing herself spiritually and physically, and a means of getting over the grief of losing her mother to cancer.

"I'm going to walk my way back to the woman my mother wanted me to be," she says at one point in the film. In that instant, she speaks for women everywhere who have discovered the power of movement, and how personal salvation doesn't necessarily depend on love relationships.

According to a study by Naver Co., there are 8.6 million mountaineers in Japan — and an increasing chunk of them are women climbers. But unlike the muddied and grungy Cheryl, yama girls are famed for decking themselves out in cute, lightweight and colorful gear, and wearing make-up in high altitudes.

A newly emerged ¥186 billion mountaineering market is there to offer support. The average newbie yama-girl reportedly spends between ¥100,000 and ¥150,000 just to gear up for her first weekend climb, and updates the contents of her backpack every few months.

Japan is mostly mountains and there's no lack of trails, footpaths and jagged precipices for yama girls to roam and explore. Mountain inns and cabin cafes are also abundant, as well as temples and shrines that offer zazen (Buddhist meditation) sessions.

Hiking in Japan paints a different picture than Cheryl in "Wild," who walks through more than 100 km of desert before coming to a rest stop and indulging in the luxury of a bottled lemonade.

"Wild" is a formidable, deeply memorable viewing experience, and not just because it's full of scenic beauty offsetting the tale of a young woman braving this journey all by herself.

Director Jean-Marc Vallee shows the PCT as a forbidding and desolate trail, with zero amenities or foliage. Water is a constant source of anxiety since tanks for hikers are few and far between. Hot meals and showers are a distant pipe dream. Laundry? Forget the meaning of that word.

In one hilarious scene, a helpful veteran hiker inspects Cheryl's huge backpack and advises her on what she should keep or throw out. He stumbles when he finds what must be a year's supply of condoms. "You need all this?" he asks incredulously. Cheryl admits that, well ... maybe not. The Japanese yama-girl — well prepared for everything else — is rarely so hopeful.

In the United States, much of the fuss about the film centered around Witherspoon going without make-up for this role, and I frequently heard the movie described as "the one where Reese Witherspoon looks like sh—." That may be true, but more to the point, she acts like it too.

The scenes with her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) are a case in point: Cheryl describes Bobbi as the love of her life, but she was also openly contemptuous of the fact her mother was undereducated.

"I'm much more sophisticated than you when you were my age," says Strayed in the film — just one of the hurtful zingers she aims at her mom. Though her subsequent grief at Bobbi's death is genuine, you can't help but feel she could have been a better daughter or a more decent human being.

But I'm probably missing the point. At this stage in her life, Cheryl Strayed was a horribly screwed-up: just-divorced, jobless and broke, with a history of drug abuse and a tendency to sleep with just about anyone.

In a recent interview Vallee told me he was never interested in "nice people whose lives go smoothly" — he was intrigued by Strayed precisely because she was so flawed.

Yes, she's a bitch in hiking boots, a monster of masochistic self-absorption gritting her teeth under the weight of a too-heavy backpack. But the trail accepted her, and ultimately healed her.

And as all yama girls know, few men can match the extraordinary satisfaction of making it to the top of a mountain on your own two feet, and then watching the sun come up.