Ridgeline subscribers —

Hello from amidst the Toyama rush of media requests. I’ve had to say no to most of them, mainly because I’ve been finishing the final final final final set of edits on the Random House edition of Things Become Other Thing. Those edits are in. The book can be pre-ordered from all the usual places. I’m running a pre-order campaign whereby if you forward your pre-order coupon to me, you get a $30 coupon (doesn’t expire) to use in the SPECIAL PROJECTS Shop.

RH-TBOT launches on May 6, and in coordination with that launch I’ll be going on a BOOK TOUR. I figure this may be the only time in my life I’ll be able to do one of these, so I’m basically willing to show up anywhere at least forty people promise to attend (Random House told me I should only do it for 100+ people, but that seems like a pretty high bar; I’ll be paying out of pocket for most of this tour so I think forty is a fine line, a nice chance to meet readers and SPECIAL PROJECTS members in person). In order to plan, I’ve made a poll. It takes two seconds to respond to it, and this will guide my tour:

• TBOT 2025 Book Tour Poll

Someone wrote in the comments on the poll: “Wow this is hilariously Anglocentric” — uhh, yeah! It’s presently only coming out in English! With the rights currently only sold to a US publisher (Random House). We’re working on selling foreign rights — if you run a publishing company in a non-English-speaking country, or non-US English-speaking country, please get in touch! (Also, if you leave a comment in the poll and want a response, please leave your email address; the poll is anonymous so I have no way to contact you.) Also also also, if you select “Other,” please write in the city name!

Thank you!

Meanwhile, in the universe of Old Road Life, good walking bud John (who makes QUITE the appearance in the new Random House edition of TBOT (yes, I’m going to be an insufferable promotional git for the next five months; you can help assuage my anxiety by pre-ordering the book)) and I drove the Tōkaidō back in November. Here are some notes on that trip:

Having walked the Tōkaidō twice (once in each direction; Nov 2021 & May 2025), it was fascinating to drive. It felt weirdly … slow. Like, you’d think driving it would have felt significantly faster, but it didn’t. We did it in seven days. We were sticking to the actual old road (the kyu-Tōkaidō) as much as possible, which slowed things down. (We could have blasted the whole thing out in an afternoon on the big highways.) And sitting all day in a car was exhausting in a different, more insidious, more worrying way, than knocking out thirty or forty kilometers on foot ever is.

The car also erased much of the “psychic pain” of walking the boring parts of the road. A car hypnotizes and lulls. Your eyes glaze as you pass the pachinko parlors or industrial hinterlands. Your attention snaps back into focus when you get to a merciful patch of matsu-namiki pines, when you find yourself driving down a well-preserved section like in Seki-juku or Tsuchiyama. And in this way — unlike with walking — the road in totality doesn’t feel so terrible, the terrible bits erased as quickly as you see them.

As such, it’s difficult for me to recommend driving it. As I’ve said before (many times before), the point of the walk is to inculcate a pervasive boredom, and from that: a heightened attention. You want to feel like you’re going to go a little nuts from lack of stimulation. It’s in that space where you begin to “feel out” the “true” shape of the road (and with that, the true shape of a country, too). Without the boredom, much of the value of the experience is lost (this is why I have my rules: solo, no podcasts, no social media, no news, etcetera).

Still, the point of our drive wasn’t to “cultivate boredom” but to look closely at a few key places along the way. It was a research drive. (John is working on a Tōkaidō book.) And in that sense, it was excellent.

We stayed in a mishmash of inns and Airbnbs and rusted, musty hotels — hotels far past their heyday. We stopped by the old honjin in Tsuchiyama (a post-town about 430 kilometers from Nihonbashi; a day+ walk from Kyoto) and John interviewed Tsuchida Kizaemon, the 14th generation owner — peppered him with questions and clarifications — who gladly showed us around.

Here’s just a snippet of John’s notes from November:

Mr Tsuchida was born in 1962. Mr Tsuchida is very knowledgeable about the history of his family’s inn. He admits that he only became passionate about the inn’s history and studied its history following his parent’s deaths. His oldest son was a fire-fighter in the local brigade. But decided to become a taxi driver in Kyoto post-Covid after Kyoto had many Kyoto taxi drivers retired during Covid and the tourist mecca put out a distress call for help. His son will likely return to the Inn after the current owner’s death and take over the management of the Honjin museum.

John had walked the Tōkaidō before, back in 1980. So he was comparing old notes to what was left. He was remembering little moments, like coming up on Shiomizaka as a bushy-haired college student some forty-five-years ago.

It’s worth quoting from John’s memory of, and diary from, the morning of his departure:

I was nineteen when I departed Nihonbashi at 4:00 a.m. on 20 March 1980. I was nervous and excited and had no knowledge of what it meant to walk the standard Edo pace of thirty to forty kilometers each day. Ignorance was bliss, and my youth carried me through what was a challenging walk. I made it to Kyoto in fifteen days. (Average timing was sixteen.) I documented in photographs and short Japanese language descriptions the conditions along the Tōkaidō. Nearly fifty years later this documentation has historic value. I wrote about how nervous I was riding a taxi to the Nihonbashi in the cold dark of pre-dawn. According to my diary I was “trembling from nerves.” I got in the taxi at 3:40am near my home in Takinogawa on the Nakasendō, a mountainous version of the Tōkaidō which I would use to walk home from Kyoto. The nine kilometers to Nihonbashi took little time at all with no traffic in the city at 3:40 a.m. I alighted at 3:55 a.m. I had time to take a photo of the Bridge, and then it was 4:00 am, precisely on time for the famous “Hayadachi,” or early morning Edo departure.

So this was the John I was driving the Tōkaidō with — a John reflecting on a long walk, done many lifetimes back. His old notes are precocious to a fault, already at twenty using kobun — ancient, classical Japanese writing — here and there. He couldn’t help himself. He has always been, simply, that much of an epic history dork, utterly committed to the authenticity of the work, delighting fellow dorks along the way with his gentle, unintentional alpha-dorkery.

As for me, on this trip I was just trying to … relax a little? 2024 had been one of the busiest, most eventful years of my life, and I had nary a second to catch my breath. I was treating this Tōkaidō drive as a chance to step back, photograph the road once again without the rigors of walking or writing every night, and to watch John at work: digging digging digging into history in a way I fear I’ll never be able to emulate.

The best place we stayed was probably Casa Watari in Kuwana. It was refined through and through. The owner is apparently very wealthy, and it’s clear profitability is not a concern. All the items placed around the room were best of class. We ate clams for dinner down the road at Choujiya, a famous clam haunt. The next morning I wrote this Ridgeline in Saboten, a glorious little kissaten. And that afternoon we took a two-hour boat ride with a whole bumbling gaggle of history dorks (some people were dressed up as samurai), replicating the crossing that walkers would have done two hundred year back. They had no idea how to place us. (Friends? Father and son? Colleagues? Lovers?) I suspect we were the first non-obviously-Japanese to partake in their once-a-year sea voyage.

The goal of the trip was synthesis, that is: the collation of — and giving of shape to — all the information being sucked up along the road. We took frequent breaks for cake and writing sessions, including a nice one in kissa Shalom near Seki.

In Shalom, a single cigarette was smoked. The owner told us he didn’t have any “food” but it turns out if you asked for toast, you would have gotten it. (Which apparently he didn’t consider food, explicitly.)

On the flip side, days later, I had another single cigarette (this is my way of “communing” with the old owners; as I found on my jazz tour, a single cigarette opens up the gruffest of dudes) and met this long-time owner of kissa Season in Shizuoka:

To my eyes, Shizuoka was bustling with the best of them. Much of the Tōkaidō was empty. Many of the towns felt like abandoned movie sets. Little life was to be found. And here in Shizuoka, it seemed as if everyone had gathered. The owner laughed when I said that to him. This? This? he said. This is not life. The shotengai around the corner was ten times more active a few decades ago, he said. But I’m glad you find it bustling.

We stayed at one of the few still-extant Edo inns along the Tōkaidō. The Tōnosawa Ichinoyu Honkan in Hakone. I cannot recommend this inn. You should not stay there. You should absolutely do everything in your power to never stay there. (Go up the road to the majestic Fujiya, a place I love with my heart.) But you should go eat a hamburger (or veggie burger, as I did) down the road at the much Google-Maps-reviews beloved BOX BURGER. The owners — two women — are incredibly patient and lovely, and the food was fabulous. Be forewarned: There may be four twenty-something tourists from San Francisco talking at volume about the most inane of inanities, screaming their banalities about crypto and life optimization to the entire restaurant, wholly without self-awareness or self-consciousness, bleating in the way only young, over-salaried, men and women making more than the GDP of a small country can bleat, filled with the confidence that they have “won” the game, mastered the universe, disease free forever, cycling their plasma, collecting Michelin-stared culinary experiences like Mother Theresa saved children, forcing the dejected (and soft-spoken, might I add) German couple next to us to roll their eyes so far back into their heads it looked like they had become zombified by chatter, as if every positive decision in their otherwise cruel lives had been nullified by this seating arrangement. Ignore those tourists (they were so “shocking” because until Hakone, there had been none, not one curious soul from abroad wandering the desolate Tōkaidō landscape, and then suddenly in Hakone: swamp children with expensive haircuts) — focus instead on the beautiful building: once a home for local geisha. Try and get a seat in the back room on the tatami. Chat with the owners. Oh, they are so charming and welcoming. Discuss the calligraphy on the wall in the tokonoma (which, of course, John can read, despite the script looking like drunken reeds in the wind, and with his ability to decipher it: one of the owners nearly falling over, now forever an ally to us two confusing patrons).

Of all the towns along the Tōkaidō, my heart most belongs to Oiso. Damn, I love Oiso. So does Murakami Haruki. You can read about Sam Anderson going for a run with Murakami in Oiso in 2011. Murakami apparently lives up in the mountains behind town. What’s special about Oiso? I wrote about it in The Return to Pachinko Road back in May:

Compact near-perfection. It makes me smile from end to end. You feel it coming; a rise in general wealth. Suddenly, appearing from the bushes, there is a well-coiffed man walking two designer rat-dogs. Not that Oiso is all big bucks. It’s mostly not, in fact. And that’s what’s nice — strange confluences between money and hippies, money and farmers. A history of politicians, a history as a second-home getaway. Nice views of the sea. The mountains behind. Hakone and its hot springs not too far away. And just down the road: A unexpectedly bustling Hiratsuka, full of shops and restaurants and feeling not unlike a displaced Kichijoji, plucked from west Tokyo and dropped by the coast.

I arrived in endless sunlight. The rains were long gone. A few pines were left, and I went and saw them at the east side of the town on my way out. But my delight was piqued by the mix of slow life being lived and real farms — quite big ones — being worked by locals, by folks who had clearly worked them for a long time (an elderly husband and wife working their plot, the wife unable to stand, sitting on her walker in the middle of the field), and also younger folks, looking to perhaps get away from Tokyo and start something new. There was a lot of that happening — earthing, dirting, whatevering. Touching the ground and eating what came out. The air was filled with the pungent scent of onions. I was filled with the desire to make vast quantities of soup. Greenhouses were in use growing things and also drying farmers’ sweatpants. Kids were being let out of school. They were singing songs in unison along the skinny dusty back lanes.

And this time, too — Oiso won me over. It’s not big enough to recommend to the Times, so it will forever be off the mega-maps. And it’s just far enough from Tokyo that almost nobody would travel there just to visit. But maybe you should? We stayed at the Prince Hotel, a bit down the road. A gargantuan, mildly-offensive thing rising by the highway next to the ocean. It was there I learned Enrique was soon to be gone, and so I recorded a final video message to him standing in the hotel’s parking look, perched on an outlook, looking back over the towards towards the mountains, stars raining down from above.

A stretch of old Tōkaidō in Oiso is lined with pines and poems and historical significance. It feels like fine, healthy lives are being lived there. The streets are circuitous and cute. The world seems like it burns and the ground shifts beneath our feet but Oiso feels like a slab of granite drilling down to the earth’s very core. I appreciate it greatly.

Some other moments along the drive.

A guy washing his truck:

John getting information at Gichuji, where Matsuo Basho’s grave is located, not too far outside of Kyoto in Otsu:

The morning view after just waking up in Ishibe (the house across the street soon to be sold, the children not wanting it, soon to be replaced by something pre-fabricated and without a tiled roof):

Birds on the boat ride:

Roots below the giant old ginko at Jyosenji:

A trip of small moments along an old road, an old road changing more than ever. Even as recently as the 50s or 60s, much of it looked surprisingly like you may have found it in the 19th century. But, today, almost none. It’s been forty-five years since John walked it, and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to walk it again in forty years myself. (I mean, what a thing to walk this in my 80s; I’d love to do it, fingers crossed, etcetera.) But it’s interesting to consider: Will it be walkable? Contiguously without transport intervention? What about in the summer? How bad will the temperatures get? How little of the true history will remain? Will the few ichirizuka maintained today still be maintained? Will it all be better than it is today? John and I discussed at length what an interesting, eccentric billionaire with proper guidance could do: Create one of the longest continuous urban/rural walking paths in the world. Stretching from Tokyo to Kyoto, rebuilding the ichirizuka every four kilometers, lining the road with fresh pines, creating shade the whole way through, buying up a couple dozen old inns and injecting them with new life. Creating chaya here and there selling mochi and doling out tea. Maybe even line the road with a spat of great pizzerias just for fun. Campgrounds. Life. Life everywhere along the road. Would walkers come? I’d like to believe they would. I know I would — I’d walk this road again if it looked and felt like that. I suspect you would, too.

C