Between the helter-skelter bright-light cities of Tokyo and Kyoto runs a historic postal trail connecting remote villages in Japan’s serene, green hinterland. Writer Jonathan Bastable and photographer Alexander Barlow walk the Nakasendo Way - courtesy of our Virtuoso preferred partners Abercrombie & Kent.
At the southern end of Narai, once known as “the town of a thousand dwellings”, is a soba-house called Yamanaka. It is the sort of place that any footsore traveller would be glad to find. The slatted wooden façade dates to the 1690s – the early part of Japan’s Edo period – but the inside feels like it belongs to the 1960s. An old poster of a Japanese TV starlet adorns one wall, and a blackened kettle hangs from the ceiling. The food served here is simple: a few variations on the local buckwheat noodles with a side of crisp tempura. Coffee comes with three tiny sour plums that look like sleek green grapes. You wouldn’t think those two things would go together – caffeine and pickled fruit – but any time you drink a coffee after Yamanaka, you might well find yourself thinking of that little trinity of plums.
Low houses, all in the same Edo style, are strung along Narai’s one long street like beads on a rosary. That linear topography makes Narai seem endless – hence the “thousand-dwelling” nickname. This small town is also the mid-point of the Nakasendo Way, a road from Tokyo to Kyoto, built by the 17th-century shoguns of Japan. The highway jigged and swerved across Honshu, Japan’s main island, passing through the forested foothills and mazy gorges of the “Japanese Alps”; the very name Nakasendo means “Path Through Mountains”. Its purpose was to provide a traversable route for officials on government business, but the upland terrain naturally drew artists and poets too. The haiku master Matsuo Basho walked the Nakasendo when it was new, writing little gems of verse as he went. Two centuries later, Utagawe Hiroshige, the last great “artist of the floating world”, created a series of prints depicting each one of the 69 juku, or post-towns, that were spaced a day’s walk or less along its 332 miles.
The Nakasendo Way no longer makes an unbroken connection between Kyoto and Tokyo. Much of it has been lost or overbuilt. So it survives in beautiful fragments, like shards of a precious but shattered vase. Present-day visitors hike for a day or two, then travel by car or train to the next stretch that can be covered at a human pace. The post-towns draw Japanese city-dwellers, exploring their homeland’s rustic heart; but out in the countryside, you can go for hours without encountering any other trekkers.
If you walk it west to east, the starting point of the Nakasendo is likely to be Ochiai-juku. A section of the original cobbled footpath leads north out of town, where it wends through pale trees like an illustration in a Japanese edition of Little Red Riding Hood. This mossy path is a fine feat of roadmaking. Each cob is a flat-topped boulder placed so as to fit snugly with its neighbor – a dry-stone wall constructed on the horizontal. At intervals there are sharp-edged diagonal gaps in the paving. Designed for drainage, they make it look as if someone has taken a sushi knife to the stonework and sliced it like a side of raw salmon.
The road from Ochiai leads to Magome-juku, one of the steepest and prettiest post-towns on the Nakasendo, and most walkers’ first overnight stop. Like the samurai of old, today’s wayfarers can stay in a ryokan, a traditional inn where on arrival guests are offered a fresh yukata (a day robe or summer kimono), a filling meal, a futon to sleep on. Most ryokan also have an onsen, a hot bath in which to soak away the day’s aches. Tawaraya Ryokan in Magome is small – six people could have it entirely to themselves. Mr Kawai, who manages the inn and runs a shop selling provisions at the foot of the hill, drops by with evening bento boxes for me, my travel companion and our guide, Haithem. “This was previously a family home,” he says, asking Haithem to translate. “There is serenity to be had in these mountains; it is not like the city. Up here, healing happens before any malady arises.”
Mr. Kawai leaves us to our dinner which, when the lid comes off the box, turns out to be a feast and a work of art – or rather an art gallery of minuscule dishes: tempura of fish and leaves, roasted peppers, a savory jelly, omelette rolled up like a scroll, strips of beef with daikon matchsticks and a plum sauce, a perfect little dome of rice, date bread with a thick slice of butter, two wedges of melon. Haithem says it is customary, before eating, to say “itadakimasu”, which means “I receive”. It is not a bon appétit as such, but a mindful word of gratitude that diners address to their own selves.
First thing in the morning I take a look around Magome. Just beyond the last house is a kind of plateau where you can stand and look back. At this early hour the shadowed mountains are bottle-green, and peaked clouds move between them like ghosts of mountains. There is fluting birdsong, and the constant low roar of running water. On the Nakasendo Way, you are rarely far from those sounds. At the roadside, further down the hill, there is a row of old standing stones. Some are carved with seated Buddhas in low relief; others bear the names of long-dead dignitaries or aristocrats. Not all the names are legible – either because time has obliterated the words, or because the style of the characters is hard for a modern Japanese eye to decipher, Haithem tells me. But these tributes are everywhere, commemorating some civic Ozymandias who stopped here, or a little act of heroism that lives in local legend. It is as if the Nakasendo recalls everything and everyone it has seen down the years.
Magome is post-town 43 (they are numbered sequentially like the pages of a book). Number 42, one step closer to Tokyo, is Tsumago-juku, a slightly ramshackle settlement that has for centuries made a living from lumber and carpentry. Nearly all the shops sell wooden omiyagi – “memory gifts” for travellers to take home and present to friends and family. There are chopsticks and sake bowls and onsen buckets crafted from the aromatic wood of the Five Kinds of Tree: hinoki, sawara, nezuko, asunaro – each a different native variety of cypress – plus the Japanese umbrella pine. Beyond Tsumago, close to the town of Junikane, is the entrance to Kakizore Gorge – an afternoon’s hike that leads still further up, against the flow of a lively river. At first there are a few modest houses, most of them with a rice paddy the size of a suburban lawn alongside. These little fields are things of formal beauty: the tufty rice plants are laid out in strict military rows and columns, green pawns on a submerged chessboard. But beyond the last house, the landscape grows wilder. The river becomes increasingly raucous, and the silent woodland seems to be slowly sidling up to the road.
The sound of water leads suddenly to a little suspension bridge known as Koji No-Tsuri, “River Half-Way”. The bridge constitutes a kind of sunlit pause – a bright clearing between the thickly forested path either side of the dividing river – but it contains a giddy surprise. When two or three people cross together, it bounces as if its steel cables were made of bungee rope. This feels like a hint to tread carefully on the final leg, where the path to the falls is slippery and steep. On the far bank an open staircase, somehow pinned to the wall of the gorge, climbs almost to the top then, half a mile on, descends to the Ushigataki Falls. They are not huge – two storys high, perhaps – but seem designed to please a floating-world artist. The waters tumble out of a deep wood, over smooth rocks and into a bubbling pool that is every shade of jade. The noise is just tremendous, and the wooden viewing platform trembles like a frightened kitten.
Kakizore Gorge emerges at Nojiri, post-town number 40. Here, all the Edo-era buildings were lost in a fire decades ago, and now a modern road bridge over the Kiso river commands a view of the Central Alps. From this vantage point, they form a row of undulating peaks like a lilting tune on a musical stave. The names of the individual mountains, meanwhile, add up to a kind of spoken lullaby: Kisomaedake, Kisokomagatake, Nakadake, Kumazawa. A local train from Nojiri follows the course of the river to Kiso-Fukushima, post-town number 37. It is a curious place – full of echoes of its Nakasendo past. On one street a footbath for weary walkers has been sunk into the pavement. Lift a wooden lid to reveal a trough of hot spring water. Sit down, roll up your trousers, and soak your tired feet: it is, in effect, a cross between a bus stop and an onsen.
Not far away is a tiny antique shop run by a young woman named Fumi Furuta. Her premises are filled with objets d’art and 20th-century design: tea services and well-made tool-chests, workers’ aprons in inky indigo, an acoustic guitar. Many of these items come from akiya, the vacant rural houses that are a social consequence of Japan’s population decline, combined with the steady drift of young people towards big cities.
“It costs a lot to dispose of the contents of a home,” Fumi explains, “which is why it makes sense for owners to sell some of their possessions to me.” She is originally from the city herself – so what brought her to this little rural corner of Japan? “Nature,” she says firmly. “It is peaceful here, and the river is pure.”
The ever-present river runs through the middle of Kiso-Fukushima, right below the rooms at the back of Iwaya Ryokan. It is hypnotic to sit at the open window and watch the celadon greens of the water, the changing shapes of white surf where it breaks on granite outcrops. The whispering river is soporific at night when, as ever, a welcoming futon will be made up on the floor of the room. Iwaya is slightly less minimal than some of the ryokans on the Nakasendo route: there are the ubiquitous tessellated tatami mats and paper screens, but the toko alcoves are filled with intriguing porcelain deities and calligraphic scrolls – a cabinet of curiosities. And in the room itself there is some distinctly Japanese furniture: a legless table and some strange legless chairs in which you sit with your own legs folded beneath you.
The biggest climb of the Nakasendo Way is still ahead. It winds from Yabuhara-juku (post town 35) to the Torii Pass, which is the highest point on the road. The route leads swiftly up and out of town, then plunges into the familiar thick forest. At various points along the way there are bells on posts: the first person to get there gives it a ring. This looks like a sweet little Shinto ritual, though in fact the bell is a practical precaution, there to shoo away any curious bears. All the same, the Nakasendo by now feels like a pilgrimage of sorts. That hallowed sense is partly down to the carefully built shrines and carved Buddhas, but mostly it comes from the sanctity of the forest itself with its bird-voices, its pillars of rock, its avenues of trees like twisted aisles in some organic cathedral. Throughout the day, sunlight falls in droplets on the forest floor, creating the dappled effect called komorebi in Japanese. Occasionally, long fingers of rain pluck at branches that vibrate like strings on a harp – and it becomes easy to believe, as the Japanese once did, that everything in nature is alive and aware.
On a plateau close to the head of the Torii pass is a set of monuments to the poet Basho. An inscribed stone explains that somewhere near here a tree almost fell on him in bad weather. To mark that narrow escape he wrote a haiku: “Glimpsing the mountain, a traveller finds his path blocked; road smothers autumn.”
In typical Basho fashion, the dangerous tree is only hinted at – the moment has passed, after all. The Japanese countryside does that. A walker’s attention is held by fleeting things – the blue pompom of a hydrangea (a frequent sight) or the four gaping beaks of swallow-chicks in their nest. You could take a snap on your phone, or just consign the image to memory. Either way, the Nakasendo has put you in a haiku state of mind.
From the high cleft of the Torii Pass it is a swift descent to Narai-juku and that noodle house where the welcome is as warm as the miso broth. “People who are born around here never really leave,” says Nakada, the wife of the owner, as she brings bowls of food to the table. “And that’s because they believe that this is the best place on earth.”