Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road

Ichiro Asanuma's Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road (Volume 1) is not a brochure of Japan. It is a bruised, clear-eyed walk along the old highway from Tokyo toward Kyoto, carried in spare prose and his own photographs from the trail.

What you get is not a tidy story but the journey experience of the man at the center, nearly folded by accident and bureaucracy, who buys his miles with insurance money and keeps going toward Kyoto after once failing to finish a rehab slope in the cherry wind. From Nihonbashi through the coast towns he moves on assignment, photographing signs and shrines because city language is part of the trail. Hakone snaps the solitude: Suzuki-san, resting by the road, shields him from traffic and doubt until rain, pride, and a fall remind him how thin confidence is. He detours home (parents, doctors), then walks on alone past factories, shrimp banners, and a shy Fuji, Hiroshige's stations ghosting his negatives. A local's barb, that they are privileged wanderers, still aches in the chest the way true things do. I kept thinking: this is what stubborn return looks like when nobody is watching.

The writing combines diary-style passages with essay sections on signs, shrines, and the celebrated Chinese writer Lu Xun. Captions accompany photograph sequences along the route, and the Hiroshige appendix places ukiyo-e of each station beside his images. He treats money, fear, and ego directly. Footnotes and historical asides appear throughout; readers who want an unbroken line from post town to post town will notice the shifts in pace.

Volume 1 ends in Shizuoka, but the lesson is already clear: a road is what people make by walking anyway, that is, Lu Xun's metaphor in hiking boots. I came away moved, a little exposed, and impatient for the next volume, not for plot, but for company with a voice this candid.