Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road (Vol.2: Insight and Memories)

Ichiro Asanuma's Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road (Volume 2) is still not a brochure of Japan. It resumes the same bruised, clear-eyed walk from Shizuoka toward Kyoto—carried in spare prose and his own photographs, but this time the pilgrim is married, miles broken across years, Kyoto receding behind festivals, typhoons, and the stubborn pleasure of being on the road anyway.

What you get is still not a tidy story but the journey experience of the man at the center, who halted halfway in 2006 when marriage and a failing leg brace ended his insurance-funded dream, then returned from Fuchū with his wife Irina's agreement and walked on in fragments from 2009 to 2015. From Shizuoka tea fields and Utsunoya pass through Kanaya-zaka, Kakegawa matsuri, Kuron-bō-sama, Portuguese signs in Hamamatsu, a typhoon night at Bashō's Ōhashi-ya, to snow on Nagoya's Great Buddha—the route feels stitched like memory itself. Fuji through bus windows, a shy companion; a ferry gone silent mourned; apples from a landlady who felt like family; Hiroshige's stations ghosting his negatives. I kept thinking: this is what an unfinished dream looks like when the walking, not only the arrival, must matter.

Diary-and-essay rhythm persists; Lu Xun does not return; footnotes still interrupt. Wry marital insults open the book before post towns deepen. Captions and Hiroshige's ukiyo-e from Mariko to Miya carry equal weight beside his photographs. He treats marriage and detour as directly as money and fear once were.

Volume 2 ends in Nagoya, but the lesson deepens: a road is what people make by walking anyway, now with someone beside you and years between steps. I came away moved, a little exposed, and impatient for the next volume—not for plot, but for company with a voice this candid still heading toward Kyoto.