[Short aside: I’ve been writing these newsletters pretty much immediately after arriving at my accommodation for the night—mostly after purifying my body, mind and soul in the onsen—under the assumption that nothing of note will happen thereafter. Last night was an exception, and there the narration recommences.]

The Samurai Hotel may well be the least originally named hotel in the entire prefecture but the owner is nothing if not unique. He welcomes me with excellent English and invites me into the dining room for simultaneous check-in and interrogation. He wants to know where I’ve come from and where I’ve stayed and where I’m going next and where I’m going the day after that, without any suggestion of why he’s seeking this information, taking notes on my reservation form the whole time. Suspicious old me deflects and stalls and obfuscates. I’ve never watched a single Japanese police/crime TV drama but I’m pretty sure he’s the chief detective in all of them. He loses patience with my obstinance and changes tack. He invites me to take a tour of the hotel, at the end of which he will show me his “secret place”. The hotel is either in the process of being renovated, closing for the season or shutting down entirely. Those spaces that are currently usable are beautifully and traditionally decorated without being kitschy. The rest is full of cardboard boxes and piled-up furniture and sundry sporting goods. If I didn’t know better I would guess our detective is going through an amicable separation and is using the hotel as storage while the sale of the family home goes through. The hotel is huge, and only the areas in use are heated, so the tour takes me through about six changes in temperature. He leads me to the end of a ground-floor corridor and shows me the recently installed tea ceremony room. He invites me to take a deep breath and tells me the smell is the freshly laid tatami, and that the smell fades in about six weeks. I don’t tell him that my tatami at home still smells the same after two years. He is a master of suspense as well as interrogation. I’m dying to see this secret place, if only to get the tour over with and get back to somewhere with heating. He finally slides open the one door he hasn’t slid open yet and invites me into his dojo, where he tells me he practises iaido—a very specific form of sword martial art—for an hour every day. He invites me to come down and watch him train at eight p.m. sharp.

At dinner I learn, much to my relief, that there are two other guests at the hotel—a couple of Australians—and they have been invited to the iaido performance too. We head down together and take a seat to watch an old man get sweaty for half an hour. The detective goes through a dozen or so routines (or kata). I have a thousand questions but the detective is clearly following a script and holding a sword so I do not interrupt. He asks one of the other guests to volunteer to hold a sword so he can illustrate the purpose of the kata he has just shown us. I try to imagine a time when this training was done in preparation for real life-and-death situations, when existence hung by a such a thin thread that seeing the next day came down to a swordsman’s ability to draw and use his sword quicker than the enemy in front of him. I am next to be invited on to the mat for a demonstration of ritual suicide, or seppuku. He passes me a small sword [spoiler alert for the benefit of any mothers reading: it’s so blunt it would struggle to cut warm butter] and I lay it on the ground in front of me and bow. He then instructs me to unsheathe it, grab the blade and make the motion of stabbing my stomach and slicing horizontally. I resist the strong urge to act out a loud and overdramatic death. The detective rests his equally blunt sword on my neck while he explains the role of the assistant who would immediately sever (sometimes partially, sometimes completely) the unfortunate samurai’s neck to save him from a long and painful death. I place my full trust in the detective the whole time, because I have no other choice.

Breakfast reverts to its former state of mundaneness and simplicity: scrambled eggs; toast; cereal. Novelty is instead provided by winter’s first snowfall. The snowflakes are minuscule and barely worthy of the name but this is the first time one of the Australians has seen snow and she has her forehead pressed against the dining room window in childlike delight. I go and pack and make my way through the lobby/storage facility. I see a couple of golf clubs strewn around and ask the detective whether they are his. He gives a half nod and immediately starts talking about something else in a way that reaffirms his status as the sole interrogator around here.

Yesterday’s Narai was packed with tourists. Today’s Narai is deserted. For a while I’m alone on the silent main street as snowdust hangs motionless in front of dark wooden storefronts. I’m starting to enjoy the total solitude when I see a line of forty or so people lining the left side of the street about a hundred yards ahead of me. They are all looking at something across the street, obscured from my vantage point by a line of cars. I assume it’s something crass and touristy and I’m already resenting the prospect of having to faux-duck and scurry right through the middle of it. I stop in my tracks a few steps later when I see a coffin being carried out of a building and loaded into a white hearse. A monk in full ceremonial dress follows the coffin through the doorway. Everyone is observing the procedure in solemn silence. I take off my Tottenham Hotspur bobble hat and stand and watch until the procession pulls away and the crowd begins to dissipate. I walk a short stretch alongside and in lock-step with the monk until he turns up a side street to his monastery. The flurries of snowfall intensify as I leave Narai.

The day’s walk is 18km all downstream and all downhill. After seven days of the opposite my brain and body struggle to compute. Progress feels noticeably easier.

Nature calls shortly after leaving Narai. I spot a secluded wooded area over a bridge and make my way over. The near side of the bridge is cordoned off with bright yellow rope and scary cartoon bear sign that I choose to ignore and step over. If I expected to find bears on the other side of the river imagine my surprise and delight when I find a crude homespun mallet golf course instead. Eighteen holes laid out in perfect seclusion and with zero threat of disturbance thanks to the menacing warning barrier that no overly cautious local would dare transgress. Someone has even left a mallet and a ball here, so I pick them up and play holes 1 and 18 in one under par.

I walk past a furniture manufacturer where lacquered tables pile high in the warehouse. The acrid smell escaping through the open shutter makes me fear for the lungs of its employees. Snowfall has all but stopped.

Niekawa is unremarkable and unassuming until I pass an alleyway that points directly at an impressive and elegant giant statue of Kannon, or Avalokiteśvara, the Buddhist deity of compassion. I try to figure out whether the statue was placed to line up with the alleyway, or the alleyway was built to lead the eye straight to the statue.

This walk, like all the others I have done in the past, is a Pilgrimage to Nothing. There is no church or temple or shrine or icon or fountain of youth waiting for me at the end of my journey of suffering, humility and solitude. (Says the narrator who has stopped at practically every onsen, 7-Eleven, soba restaurant and pseudo-French bakery in the Kiso valley for the past week.) I therefore have to invent my own Holy Grail, my own reference point to aim for, some vague and arbitrary reason for putting myself through all of this. This walk’s landmark of great significance somehow came to be the (in)famous Edo-era painting of the Genital Inspection Grannie (bear with me), housed in the Niekawa Archaeological Museum. I first read about this painting just over a month ago and I am tingling with puerile and impatient excitement to get a glimpse as I approach the museum. An old man greets me at the reception window, takes my money and invites me inside for the tour. He speaks zero English but seems to be getting great joy out of the machine translations that sometimes make sense, sometimes don’t. I am in no mood for dallying so rather than ask him to clarify I just nod and make small eye and body movements to suggest we move anywhere to closer to the one and only part of the tour I came here for, viz. the painting of the Genital Inspection Grannie. Room one is a recreation of an Edo-period kitchen, complete with LED-fireplace. I make oooh and ahhh sounds like someone who is impressed might. Room two is the armoury, where I feign amazement at arcane spears and matchlock rifles and swords of the kind that had been resting on my neck just last night. The guide invites me to swing the sword around, and I thank the creators of Google Translate for this apparent exaggeration. I draw and sheathe the sword in ways that the guide has never seen in all his seventy years, judging by his claps and gasps of delight. We arrive at room three and there are still no paintings of the Genital Inspection Grannie to be seen on any of the walls. Instead there is a just a cabinet of genuine Edo-ero promissory notes. The guide is giving off a distinctive air of holding back and I am beginning to lose patience. He is reprieved when he asks whether I have time to see a special part of the museum and I’m thinking dude, just show me the goddam painting of the Genital Inspection Grannie already. He leads me out of the front door and down the back steps to another showroom. It is way more modern than the rooms upstairs and I already know that the painting of the Genital Inspection Grannie is not going to be down here. He shows me round a display of colour photos and woodblock prints from 19th-century Niekawa, which are actually quite something. He then shows me a one metre by one metre diorama that the himself made depicting modern and ancient Niekawa in equal parts, all encased in a perspex cube. I can tell it’s his pride and joy so I indulge him and ask how long it took him to make. He says six months. He then shows me a map of the Kiso valley that fills the length of one wall, points out every town along the way as if I hadn’t just walked through all of them, and tries to force two of the fifty-odd pamphlets on display into my hand. I have mastered the art of politely but firmly saying “no thank you” in Japanese but I haven’t figured out a way of doing this quickly. He informs me that that is the end of tour. I scan his face for irony. Nothing. I charitably give him a few more seconds to reconsider his life choices. Still nothing. There is no way I’m leaving without seeing the painting of the Genital Inspection Grannie so I pull up a picture of it on my phone and flat out ask to see it. He takes a half step back in disbelief. He asks how on earth I knew about this painting and I say I read about it. He is practically running as he leads me back through rooms one, two and three to the fourth room and, finally, there it is in all its ridiculous glory: the painting of the Genital Inspector Grannie.

Some historical context: back in the Edo era, women were essentially prisoners of the emperor and were confined to the palace grounds. After one too many women were discovered dressing up as men and slipping out and back through the palace gates undetected, getting up to who knows what in the outside world, the emperor posted a Genital Inspector Grannie to double-check anyone the guards suspected may have been one stump short of a wicket, so to speak. (Why she needed a magnifying glass for this task is an exercise I’ll leave for the reader.)

I take one last look at the painting, smile to myself and acknowledge the spiritual end of my journey. The guide bids me farewell with instructions to be very careful.

The final few short kilometres pass like a dream. Unbelievably I take a wrong turn and stumble upon yet another hobby mallet golf course. I stop to browse at a roadside antiques treasure trove. I eat at another soba restaurant. Another giant statue of Kannon waves symbolically from the other side of National Route 19 as we part ways for the final time and I walk the final few hundred metres to the binless Seba train station.

Allow me to wrap up this newsletter with a coda of gratitude.

Firstly, a thank you to a guy called Craig Mod. I’ve never met him and he has no idea who I am, but his writing about and photos of his walks in Japan were beautiful and insightful enough to inspire me to do one of my own. It was also in one of his newsletters that I read about—and instantly resolved to go visit—the painting of Genital Inspection Grannie.

Secondly, thanks to Keith and Jenny, two more people I have never met (I don’t even know their surnames) and who have no idea who I am. Keith and Jenny are two itinerant Australians who walked the length and breadth of France every (European) summer for around twenty years, documenting their adventures in beautiful detail on walkinginfrance.info for all to read and be inspired by. Having literally walked in their footsteps half a dozen times they have become my walking spirit guides. One month ago today I was still on the fence about whether to come to Japan when I received an email from Jenny saying that Keith had been admitted into palliative care. That was it—the shock of the news was a wake-up call to get my arse in gear and follow my dreams, and within 48-hours I had everything booked. Keith sadly passed away a week later.

Finally I would like to extend my gratitude to you, dear reader, for joining me on this adventure. My first thought after anything weird or wonderful happens is how to share it with you, and I imagine how each of you might react while reading it. You have been in my heart the whoIe way, and I hope you‘ve enjoyed reading this nonsense.

Until next time, please, be very careful.