The Artist's Way

On a walking tour of the Kiso Valley, Hannah Walhout finds glimpses of the golden age of Japan's great printmakers.

- Hannah Walhout

IN THE 1830S, at the tail end of Japan's flourishing Edo Period, two artists set out to document one of the country's great roads. Crossing seven modern-day prefectures and the snowy crags of the Japanese Alps, this thoroughfare, the Nakasendo, connected the imperial capital of Kyoto with the cultural capital of Edo (now Tokyo).

The Nakasendo had been in use for centuries by the time the printmaker Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create woodblocks of the 69 rest stations along the route-a task later taken over by Utagawa Hiroshige, the acknowledged master of the form. The Nakasendō's busy towns provided ample material for their work in the ukiyo-e genre, which documented leisurely pursuits and landscapes during the last centuries of Japan's isolation from international affairs. (Ukiyo-e means, roughly, "pictures of a floating world.") Within decades of the publication of the Sixty-Nine Stations of the Nakasendo, the Edo Period would come to an end, Japan would begin to industrialize and Westernize, and the road would never see as many travelers again.

Still, parts of the Nakasendo remain intact. Last spring, three college friends and I decided to take our annual meetup a little farther afield, booking a self-guided itinerary with Walk Japan that would follow one of the more complete sections of the old road-a string of 17th-century towns in the Kiso Valley, which straddles the Gifu and Nagano prefectures. The Nakasendo at its full extent stretched 330 miles and would have taken the average traveler two or three weeks of intense legwork; our three days of walking would be easier, and much more luxurious, with our bags transported separately by car. But I hoped I would be able to pause every so often and hold up my phone to line up one of Eisen's or Hiroshige's prints with the real thing.