Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road (Vol.3: New Beginnings)

Ichiro Asanuma's Walking along the ancient Tokaido Road (Volume 3) still refuses the brochure. What you hold is the last leg of a Tōkaidō walk sixteen years in the making—his trail notes and photographs, with digressions that will not hurry for Kyoto. The final miles run from Kuwana to Sanjō Ōhashi, where a pilgrim at last crosses the old checkpoint after sixteen years of walking in fragments.

What you get is still not a tidy arrival but the last leg of a dream deferred since 2006: in April 2022, between jobs, Ichiro walks from Kuwana toward Kyoto with Irina through cherry blossom nights and post-COVID shutters. From Yokkaichi's Ōnyūdō and a wrong turn on Suzuka Pass—they grabbed tree trunks hand in hand—to Kameyama spaghetti, Shigaraki tanuki, and a lonely lunch at Lake Biwa, then the inward miles. Schoolboys with a dead cat leave him ashamed; a woman in dark Ōtsu gets waved off by tired pride; rain at Semimaru-jinja as Hyakunin Isshu stones line Ōsaka-yama. Kyoto swallows them at last. I kept thinking: this is what finishing looks like when arrival was never the whole story.

The familiar diary-and-essay rhythm holds, but Volume 3 turns essayist, slowing the walk into cultural argument between stations: tanuki folklore, inverted swastikas, and whole chapters on municipal plans and misread strangers. Ōsaka-yama opens into Zen, Hyakunin Isshu, and Hiroshige's passing figures. Captions still carry equal weight beside the images; footnotes still interrupt. He treats regret, marriage, and municipal PDFs with the same blunt honesty he once gave insurance money, fear, and ego on the trail.

Volume 3 ends at Sanjō Ōhashi, and the trilogy with it: a road is what people make by walking anyway, now proved across sixteen years. I came away moved, a little exposed, and grateful—not for plot, but for company with a voice this candid finally reaching Kyoto.