Walking the Nakasendō Through the Kiso Valley

The road is paved in stones that were laid, in places, four hundred years ago, and it climbs through a forest of cypress so tall that the canopy closes overhead and the light comes down in pieces. On a clear morning in early summer the path is a moving carpet of it: coins and ovals and long shivering bars of sun, sliding over the stones as the wind moves the branches. There is nobody else on the road. A bell hangs from a post, with a sign asking you to ring it to warn the bears, and you ring it, and the sound goes off into the trees and the light keeps moving.

This is the Nakasendō — the "central mountain road" — between the post towns of Magome and Tsumago in the Kiso Valley, and it is where I would send anyone who wanted to understand komorebi (木漏れ日), the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through leaves. Not because the phenomenon is rarer elsewhere. Because here, for eight kilometres, it is the only thing to look at, and the road was built to be walked slowly enough to see it.

Two roads to Edo

In the Edo period there were two great highways between Kyoto, the imperial capital, and Edo, the shogun's city. The Tōkaidō ran along the Pacific coast and was the busier, flatter, faster route; it is the one the bullet train follows now. The Nakasendō went inland, through the mountains, and was longer and harder and, for many travellers, preferable: no wide rivers to ford, fewer checkpoints, and a reputation for being safer for women, who travelled it in enough numbers that it was sometimes called the princesses' road.

Sixty-nine post towns lined the route, each a day's walk from the next, each with inns, stables, and an official honjin where lords and their retinues stayed on the compulsory journeys to and from Edo that the shogunate imposed on them. The road was the country's central nervous system for two and a half centuries. Then the railway came, in the 1880s, and it went quiet.

In the Kiso Valley — a deep, forested corridor in Nagano Prefecture along the Kiso river — the quiet lasted long enough to save it. By the 1960s the post town of Tsumago was half-empty and falling down, and its residents did something unusual: instead of modernising, they decided to restore. They agreed not to sell, not to rent to outsiders, and not to demolish. They took down the power lines and buried them. They rebuilt the wooden inns in the old style. Tsumago became the first town in Japan to preserve itself deliberately as a whole, and the stretch of road from there over the pass to Magome was cleared and repaired and left as it had been.

The walk

Most people walk from Magome to Tsumago, because Magome is higher and the road descends overall, though it climbs first. It is about eight kilometres, three hours at an easy pace, on a path that is variously stone, packed earth, and short stretches of quiet road.

Magome sits on a steep slope with its single street of restored buildings climbing the hill; it is the more visited of the two towns and can be busy by mid-morning, which is a reason to start early. The road leaves the top of the village and climbs through farmland and then, quite suddenly, into the forest.

The Kiso forests are famous. The cypress, hinoki, that grows here is the finest in Japan, and for centuries the shoguns and the Owari lords who controlled the valley guarded it with a rule that became a proverb: one tree, one head. Cut a cypress without permission and you were executed. The forests were protected for the timber — Ise Shrine's twenty-year rebuilding uses Kiso cypress to this day — and the protection preserved, incidentally, the canopy under which the road runs.

Halfway along is the Magome pass, at about eight hundred metres, with a tea house. Past it the path descends beside a stream, past two waterfalls, through the densest and darkest part of the forest, and this is where the komorebi is thickest — where the trees are oldest and the canopy highest and the light, when it comes through, comes from so far above that it arrives in narrow bright shafts you can see the dust moving in.

There is a small rest house near the waterfalls, staffed on most days by a volunteer who offers tea and, if you sit long enough, conversation. There is a hamlet, Ōtsumago, of a dozen old houses. And then Tsumago, in the valley bottom, its street of dark wooden inns and shops lit at dusk by the lamps that replaced the power lines.

What the light does on a road

I have written elsewhere about komorebi as a word — what it means that Japanese names this and English does not. The road is where the word stops being interesting and starts being true.

On a forest path you are, for hours, inside the phenomenon. The light is not a thing you glance at through a window. It is on your hands, on the stones, on the back of the person walking ahead, and it changes constantly with the wind and the angle of the sun and the density of the trees. After an hour you stop seeing the path and start seeing the light on it. After two you find that you have been walking in step with its rhythm without deciding to — slowing in the dark stretches, moving through the bright ones.

The Edo travellers, who walked this road for weeks, must have lived inside komorebi for much of the journey, and I suspect that the word — first recorded, as far as anyone can tell, around their era — came from people who spent their days under the canopy and needed a name for what they were walking through.

Staying

Stay in Tsumago, in one of the minshuku — family inns — along the main street. Dinner is served at a fixed hour and is local: river fish grilled on a skewer, mountain vegetables, gohei mochi (pounded rice on a stick with a sweet walnut-miso glaze, the valley's signature snack), and soba. The inns are old, the walls are thin, and the quiet after dark is complete.

In the morning, before the day-trippers arrive from the station, walk the street. The town has no cars on it during the day, no vending machines, no signs that were not there in 1850. It is one of the few places in Japan where the past is not reconstructed or performed but simply, stubbornly, kept.

Then take the bus or the train onward — the Chūō line runs up the valley, with stops at other post towns, Narai in particular, which has the longest preserved street of them all — and carry the light with you.

The bear bell

I rang every one. There were perhaps eight of them along the road, brass bells on posts with a hammer hanging beside, and I never saw a bear, and I rang them anyway, because the sound was a good sound in that forest — a single bright note, absorbed at once by the trees, and then the birds again, and the water, and the coins of light sliding over the stones.

That is the Nakasendō. A road for walking, through light with a name, toward a town that decided not to change. It is three hours long and it stays with you for years.