The Town Where Journeys End
On 'The Inland Sea'
The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first phase of what comes after growth. They are truly the dead of winter. All that is left for them is their immolation at the hands of their farmer, most likely a grandmother in a floral handkerchief and sunglasses. Beside and above these wrecked fields rise the maroon branches and black-green leaves of mikan trees, only just harvested, the round gaps where their fruit hung still traced by supple foliage. They are about a meter tall and stand perfectly distanced the way Japanese preschoolers do when they go out on the town for an excursion. Unlike rice, which is harvested, crushed, burned, then replanted every year, the mikan trees last around three decades. They are the favorite children of Ehime, doted on by aging farmers across the prefecture and yielding mikan juice, butter, jam, lotion, jelly, and sake.
But I am not riding the train from Matsuyama to Imabari just so I can look at orange trees. The fields and orchards collapse into another forest interlude, and then, with that cool suddenness with which a train journey can reveal a famous capital as though it were only another hamlet, half of the window beside me bursts into blue. The sea is a field of heaping waves. Far from violent, their small white peaks kick out like baby feet. Heavy-tiled roofs in the small towns along the sea turn towards each other at perpendicular angles and swallow the narrow alleyways between. A harbor casts white, blue, and yellow fishing boats into a bay. Behind these boats their larger, more permanent cousins, the islands of the Inland Sea, stand in layered gradient, with the nearest rank a tropical green laced with gold, the middle strip a pale blue, and the furthest dissolving into ghostly white. In the sky a corresponding archipelago of woolen, flat-bottomed clouds opens over the islands like the template of a linocut being pulled from the print itself.
I have passed over the Inland Sea many times before, and ventured to an eastern island — Naoshima — once. Most recently in December I stared out over it from a bus window and found that its beauty had become too great a force in me to let alone. And so I have rallied two friends with me and set out on the Shimanami Kaido, the 70- kilometer biking route that leads from Imabari, Ehime Prefecture to Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, and passes through a network of bridges across six of the Inland Sea’s three thousand unique islands.
There is a short, six-kilometer stretch from the bike rental in Imabari to the first bridge. The sea disappears once more, and one is back in small-town Japan. Then a spiraling trail splits off from the main road and leads up through more pines and nude cedars, ending above the sea on the back of a white-beamed suspension bridge, the Seto Ohashi. The bridge’s towers reach into the clouds while the piers sink into the sea and islands below, and the stiff winds that have been blowing all morning whistle or bellow through the cables, playing the anthem of this impossible region, this archipelago-within-an-archipelago.
And the first thing to catch my eye, which from up here is spoiled for choice, is a small island, little more than a couple rocks with a bush on top, rising from the sea. It is hardly wide enough for a person to stand on its uneven peak, and indeed no one does.
Of course I am not the first to come here and be moved to writing. The Inland Sea with its many islands — enough that you and everyone you know could have one to yourself — has long served Japanese poets in search of an image to match their solitude or loneliness. In more recent years it played an eponymous role in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, which is largely set in the city of Takamatsu on the sea’s east side. There is one book in English, The Inland Sea by Donald Richie. These days it stands at the doorway to becoming a classic in its genre, and it is certainly the most complete guide to the region one can find. I read it with the intent of deepening my travel — I did not want the Inland Sea to escape me.
One cannot write about The Inland Sea without first introducing Donald Richie, who was and is widely regarded as the foreign intellectual in Japan. He spent most of his life in the country, first arriving after World War II and staying until his death in 2013. As a film critic for the American military newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes, Richie was among the first Westerners to write about Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu, and Paul Schrader judges that “whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie.” This is hardly hyperbole when one considers that Richie translated subtitles for many of Kurosawa’s films himself and coauthored the first book-length study of Japanese cinema. One need only consider all the filmmakers who were inspired by Kurosawa and Ozu — Lucas, Coppola, Scorcese, Schrader himself — and Richie’s name quickly becomes unforgettable.
Though his film criticism has had the widest impact of any of his work, Richie also wrote book-length studies of Japanese fashion, flower arrangement, and Zen, as well as fiction. Among these varied volumes stands The Inland Sea, widely regarded as a classic of travel literature and what I hoped would be the perfect introduction to the region before I made my own journey. It is made up of a string of notes taken in 1962, notes which were then expanded slightly over the following years until the book’s original publication in 1971. It is a chronicle of an extensive trip through the region, what Richie introduces in the opening pages as his “search for the real Japanese, the originals… [t]he ur-Nihonjin.”
The first island, Oshima, is known for its masonry. It is an island traced by sheer quarries with their blank faces open to the sun. Low and intense shadows spill out beneath the shrubbery that grows in the sand-soil. Cézanne, if he had come here, would have never left.
After a brief stop at a shrine in the middle of the island, we continue to the northern town of Miyakubo. Our goal is the Murakami Pirate Museum, dedicated to the clan of pirates who controlled the Inland Sea for hundreds of years. Reaching the museum requires a brief detour from the cycling route that will take us down Miyakubo’s beachfront and offer another panoramic view of the Inland Sea. Once we reach Miyakubo we stop and roll our bikes onto a patch of sidewalk to confirm the route. A heron putters around in a canal emptied by low tide while a falcon lazes through wind currents only a few meters above our heads. Despite the fact that we appear to be in the center of the village, these two birds are the only living things in sight.
Our detour down the beach is a procession of darkened storefronts, their dusty windows gone the color of snakeskin. A Coca-Cola sign above one of them is barely recognizable beneath the grime and rust, a symbol of international recognizability turning vague with little but earth, wind, and sun to erase it. A traffic light runs through its course with no one to obey it. There are boats in the harbor, but even though it is a fine day no one stands in their hulls. I have been down similar streets many times before, but this one in Miyakubo is meticulously free of life. The bare minimum — a snack bar, one of the major convenience store chains, a basket of freshly-picked fruit set out beside the front door — is promised around every slight bend of the bay, but these never appear. Aidan, who rides ahead of me, looks around, glances over his shoulder in search, no doubt, of the same signs I am looking for. He shakes his head and furrows his brow in a mixture of unease and bewilderment. Whoever lives here, they must live inland.
The pirate museum, when we reach it, is well-kept, bright, even new, in utter contrast to what we have just seen. It looks out on the two islands where, hundreds of years before, the Nohshima branch of the Murakami clan built their fortresses. The faux-ramparts of its architecture hail back to this now-vanished wonder. The museum houses all the expected artifacts — armor, swords, scrolls. The Murakami pirates, the placards inform us, were far from swashbuckling villains. They composed collaborative renga poetry, sat for portraits, and enjoyed tea and incense like proper gentlemen, and their succession seems to have been orderly enough that it has continued into the modern day. In the early 20th century, the head of the Nohshima branch donated his family’s collection of artifacts to found the museum.
There is something else remarkable about the museum, something which has little to do with poetry or piracy. What qualifies as “busy” on an island like this it is hard to say, but there are certainly groups of people. And my fellow museumgoers are all, without exception, elderly. Come to think of it, so were the people who sold us our tickets. Between 2003 to 2023, the population of Miyakubo decreased by a third from roughly 3,000 to a little over 2,000 today. As is the case with however many of these withering towns, most of the people living here are in their final years.
Oshima has been home to pirates, villagers, a relatively modern town, but may soon be home to no one. If Cézanne would have loved Oshima, this is doubtless one of the things he would have captured. There is nature, and buildings are numerous, but the landscapes he would paint here would be, like his French landscapes, void of people. They would be neither natural nor primitive, but post-human, quiet. Withering and woundingly scenic.
Most travel books take a place as their subject, and if its people are treated at length, they are treated as either individuals — characters who come to aid, torment, charm, or bedevil the narrator — or else as human instantiations of the genius loci possessed by the manners and fashions of the land. One is suspicious of Richie’s quest from the get-go; setting aside its whiff of race essentialism, it poses too wide a goal, one too diffuse, too intellectual to follow. When Bruce Chatwin ventures in search of Brontosaurus in In Patagonia, there is enough material reality to his quest that it can serve to direct his observations. When Patrick Leigh Fermor sets out on the journey described in his European trilogy, we are told it is because he thinks the experience will somehow help him become a writer; the proof is in the book itself. How is the reader, presumably with no firsthand knowledge of Japan, to know whether Richie’s quest has succeeded? The “search for the real Japanese” feels vague and dishonest even from the outset, and develops into something worse in what follows.
Yet one may stow their doubts and move along into the journey itself, eager now to see what Richie’s page-one panorama — one of the book’s highlights — describes as “this valley-like sea where the waters turn green or blue with the season, where the islands stand black against the horizon or lie like folded fur under the noonday sun, where the blue and silver of towns and villages merge with the rich yellows, browns, and greens of the patchwork land.”
Whenever such pleasurable writing reappears one can understand why the book has been proclaimed a classic of 20th century travel literature. Richie is a talented sentencesmith and has the eye for landscapes his genre requires. As the journey wears on, however, these passages become subdued by other elements in his writing. One wishes they had been given the primary role in his work. Yet strangely Richie limits himself in the book’s middle, and such description becomes rare up until the closing pages.
Another of the charms of The Inland Sea are Richie’s portraits of those he meets along the way, a varied cast of island and city folk alike. These include a 19-year-old butcher boy overflowing with curiosity about Jane Fonda; a would-be gangster, neck vibrant with the red ink of cherry-blossom tattoos, who has been sent by his family to work on an island shrine; and the inhabitants of a leprosarium where even those cured are forced to live out their days in relative isolation due to the stigma surrounding the disease. Richie at one point dubs Japan a “land of incongruity,” something which can be felt whenever such characters appear on the scene. But there is also a feeling of unity between all these encounters, something opposed to incongruity. In their openness with Richie, they dissolve some of the sense of foreignness that many Westerner readers instinctively feel when confronted by Japan, or East Asia in general. Richie is not always willing to acknowledge this dissolution — a failing I will discuss in greater detail later on — but it speaks to his journalistic abilities that he nonetheless brings this aspect through.
We end our first day of cycling on Hakatajima, just north of Oshima. The first sight of the island reveals a beach and boardwalk with a large cafeteria and, across the street, a Lawson convenience store. The model upon which this street was built appears to have been a Southern Californian beach. The Inland Sea shares a latitude with Los Angeles, and the resemblance comes through in the palm trees, the golden sand, the wide street. But it isn’t quite Venice Beach. For one thing there is the lack of music, for another there is, as there was earlier on Oshima, a lack of people.
Passing the beach, we pedal up a hill behind a shipyard. It puts into perspective the colossal scale of the cranes that perch over the many ports of the Inland Sea. From the top of the hill one can see in greater detail the hinged apex of the machine, the pistons and cables by which the operator communicates with however many tons of weight. Here on Hakatajima the cranes are a minty green, as opposed to the more standard white or red cranes that we saw in Imabari. These cranes may seem out of place on such a modest, low-cut island, but it is just the opposite. As long as they sit in calm silence it is as though they, too, are meditating on the sea, the islands, the sun, as a palm tree might.
At the bottom of the hill sits our hotel for the night. From the outside it is clear that it has been renovated, that the frame served an earlier life as another hotel or perhaps a small apartment complex. Inside there is neither sight nor sign of staff nor guests; the reception, if one can call it that, is a pair of iPads in front of a curtained window with the words “CHECK IN HERE PLEASE” stenciled in cursive font. The renovation has been carried out only at eye-level. The floors are unfinished concrete. The ceiling is similarly exposed, a grid of rafters with wires weaving through the dark space between the beams. But our room, at the very least, is furnished to satisfaction.
That night we walk twenty minutes to the nearest restaurant. Much of this walk is made up of strange revelations. I notice, for example, that even though Hakatajima has so far proven just as depopulated as Oshima, nearly all of the trees that stand outside of buildings and houses are pruned remarkably well. At the same time the mikan groves here lie unguarded and wild. Most of the bulging fruit has fallen already and is beginning to rot in piles over the tree’s roots. Crows now carry out the harvest. We see one with an orange as big as its head pinned to the edge of its beak flying from a grove into the woods. “Just like the garden of Eden,” Aidan remarks, and there’s something immediately true about what he says. But it is not, perhaps, just like man’s first home. The abandoned houses with their collapsing roofs lie low to the ground like stains of sadness, not quite monuments or memorials but reminiscent of something all the same.
Q: What is the meaning of a ghost town?
A: That everything will eventually be a rock, tree, or river.
If he is painting the islands or conveying the eccentricities, ironies, and anxieties of the local people, Richie demonstrates a properly artistic devotion to his subject. Though he never reaches the intellectual or historical depth that, say, Patrick Leigh Fermor does in his travel writing, Richie’s best passages are often the result of an admirable perceptivity, the kind which is the result of both talent and time. Though one is never taken to the point of calling Richie a master of the genre, he is certainly more than a mere journalist.
But modern travel writing is not concerned with place alone. It requires an element of memoir. The modern travel writer invites us on a trip with them. They share opinions, reflect on travel not through objective revelations but by means of their own subjectivity.
Donald Richie, as he portrays himself in the pages of The Inland Sea, is an unpleasant travel companion.
It turns out that a good portion of Richie’s travel philosophy is tied to his libido. “Certainly a part of my quest is devoted to seducing the natives,” he pontificates, “a travel adjunct observed by traveling foreigner and traveling native alike.” This declaration comes apropos of a scene where, after his advances towards a fifteen-year-old girl are rebuffed, Richie sits in his room and mopes about how he “want[s] to take without hurting.” His reflection on this attempt is pithy (“in the case of fifteen-year-old girls you would be wise not to”) and ends with him finishing in thought what could not take place in reality. This particular scene, the first of his many “encounters,” sends tremors which never cease throughout the rest of the book.
Though Richie claims his friskiness is a means which will help him achieve his goal of better understanding the “original” Japanese spirit, one begins to see that things are the other way around. His remarks on the “ur-Nihonjin” theme often tend towards a fetishization of the Japanese body (“perhaps nowhere on earth is there more beautiful skin than in Japan”) which bleeds into his more general remarks on culture and custom. There is, for example, Richie’s recurring claim that in Japan “reality is skin deep because there is only skin,” that the Japanese “know that in appearances lies the only reality.” Even as he chides the exoticizing of Japan in the hands of other Western writers, many of his attempts at describing a Japanese “character” in The Inland Sea devolve into dehumanizing, pseudo-intellectual grunts about a people who “literally have no conscience.” In one of several sections “celebrating” Japanese skin, Richie refers to it – tellingly, sickeningly — as “the skin of children, the skin of animals.” One suspects that, instead of trying to capture any kind of Japanese essence and failing, he is rather fortuitously discovering his erotic ideal of a country with no strings attached, no minds besides his own, populated with bodies and bodies only.
Besides this overgrown eroticism (or perhaps scattered among it) there is Richie’s egotism, an over-reliance on the first-person pronoun that disrupts otherwise beautiful landscapes. He comes off as distracted, unfulfilled by the Inland Sea despite his self-presentation as a man of pastoral sensibilities. Traveling alone, he pacifies himself by expulsing barely tangential jets of opinion which only serve to cloud an already fragmentary narrative. There is hardly a page of uninterrupted travel in the entire book, and by the end what travel there is has come to be more of a tease than a treat.
There is a scene around halfway through the book where Richie’s then-wife visits him. His view of marriage is uncompromising — he expects her to turn a blind eye towards his sleeping around, to be eternally grateful that in marrying her he hasn’t turned her into a housewife. This arrangement is, human relations being what they are, untenable, and when she allows herself the faintest hints of protest, Richie is quick to remind the reader that “she had chosen [life with me] herself.” This then leads to an insight which balances self-awareness with narcissism. Richie observes that, “approving of something attractively distant (romantic adventurer) and then living with it (philandering husband) uncomfortably near were quite different.” Simply change “husband” to “author” and this becomes a concise description of what it’s like to be disappointed by The Inland Sea.
There are other faults in the book (internal rhyme plagues its latter half, and in over 300 pages a sense of the region’s history is never really given), but The Inland Sea could have remained worthwhile in spite of these. Beneath Richie’s flood of fetishism, however, the book sinks. What is left is a man navigating the wastes in a ferry made purely of ego. One cannot expect such a vessel to go anywhere meaningful, and indeed, in the end it does not.
We wake early, knowing that fifty or so kilometers remain for today, and return down the hill to the Lawson to buy breakfast. The weather is fine — no wind, clouds well-kept and innocently drifting — so we eat with our legs dangling down a seawall, facing some of the islands we will cross today. The sea is so beautiful and calm that you can hardly imagine speaking. And for a while none of us do. We eat and think of the route ahead only a little. But mainly we do what everyone hopes to do when they set out on a trip like this, which is look at something straight on, the way you can’t in normal life.
At times like this it is impossible to imagine anything but nature, because the nature ahead annihilates everything else within you. Great seascapes are like this, I have learned. Hiking a mountain, one reaches the top and looks out over a valley which in some way has become a map for the self, as though every step to the top diffused ego into the ground. A brilliant seascape, such as this one on Hakatajima, is the very opposite. You can look, but you cannot touch, you cannot contaminate. It teaches you something about your limitations, and this is no less beautiful than a mountain view.
I set out for our second and final day of cycling with an almost opposite feeling from the day before. The emptiness of the landscape has become a lightness within myself. Making one last ascent up the hill to the bridge, I feel the pedals rotate beneath my feet with greater ease than they had only the day before.
If the Inland Sea is known abroad, it is known either through tourism or through movies. The aging mother and father in Ozu’s Tokyo Story hail from Onomichi, and those who have seen the film will remember that it is not in Tokyo but in the quiet, snug hills of that seaside town that the story ends. Just as or perhaps even more recognizable than Tokyo Story is Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, the setting of which is based upon the town of Tomo-no-Ura in Hiroshima Prefecture. (Incidentally, a live-action adaptation of Kiki’s Delivery Service was also filmed on the island of Shodoshima, in eastern Kagawa Prefecture.)
And once again, there is an American offering to pair with all the native tributes. Once again, it involves Donald Richie. Though he is not the director of the documentary The Inland Sea (1991), his book serves as guide to the film’s actual director, Lucille Carra, and his narration accompanies many a montage. The intention appears to have been an adaptation of the 1971 travel memoir, following Richie’s footsteps for the most part but occasionally wandering where Carra pleases.
It is an hour-long documentary about rural Japan which originally aired on PBS; speaking in terms of permanence, the odds are not in its favor. But The Inland Sea is currently distributed by Criterion, and this fact alone gives it relevance to a large section of cinephiles. It, like Richie’s book, seems to rest for the moment in that semi-canonical limbo from which art and artists are either “rediscovered” and graduated into permanence, or (as is most often the case) left to become trivia. In its flashy blue case, stamped with Criterion’s seal of cinematic chic, it floats with uncertainty down the River Lethe.
This film adaptation of Richie’s work is an improvement on the source. Its greatest strength is, predictably, its images. Cinematographer Hiro Narita has not only captured the places and people, but has crafted them from a dazzlingly saturated array of greens, blues, and reds reminiscent of a Hasui Kawase print. There is one shot early in the film of the sun setting behind thick-but-permeable clouds, clouds like bundled cloth through which long red rays plummet, splashing into the sea, lighting an island on fire. It is one of the most spectacular sunsets I have ever seen in a film. The life and color one heard about in Richie’s book is right there before your eyes, even at home.
But The Inland Sea — the film, not the book — is too short. The runtime doesn’t even pass the one-hour mark, and this brevity prevents Narita’s images from coalescing into more than snapshots. Interviews begin, end, and are left behind before their subjects have a chance to say much besides “I like calligraphy” or “I like Frank Sinatra.” Richie’s narration darts from topic to topic, launching questions which seem only half-posed. Ultimately the film is split between quiet immersion in the landscape and Richie’s conspicuous interpretations of it. It has all the beauty and all the depth of a postcard. A brilliant red seascape, one senses, will not be enough to stop it on its course towards irrelevance.
The bridge to Ikuchijima ends and immediately we are sloping and swooping through an island of lemon groves, hills dappled with yellow, bushes shining waxy beneath the overcast sky. Along the road there are steel carts about the size of apple boxes. They are all paused at the top of their course, which runs on thin metal rails over the hilly grove so that harvesters can send the picked lemons up and down with greater ease. These carts are all empty; the lemon season hasn’t come quite yet, though we do see some movement among the bushes where stooped farmers inspect the ripening fruit. Any day now, perhaps.
Donald Richie says that the characters for Ikuchijima – 生口, “living” and “mouth” respectively — are an outdated euphemism for “slave,” and refer to the island’s first inhabitants, who were sent by feudal lords to mine salt here. One can hardly believe this was ever the case looking at Ikuchijima today. In comparison with Oshima and Hakatajima, it is far more domestic. Again the local population seems rather aged, but they are at the very least out and about. We happen to arrive at the same time as the annual Setoda Marathon, held every year on Ikuchijima, and old men decked out in visibility gear direct us away from the racecourse. When we reach Setoda, the main town, the shopping streets are positively crowded from the event. How many of these people are natives and how many are visiting it is difficult to say, but the majority of license plates are stamped with the names of cities in Hiroshima Prefecture.
In addition to lemon groves, Ikuchijima is also home to a famed cultural site, which is Kousanji. It is a Pure Land Buddhist temple of modern and sentimental origin: founded in 1936, the industrialist-turned-priest who dreamt it into being dedicated it to the memory of his own late mother. To express this love he chose to replicate none other than the Toshogu shrine in Nikko, the immaculate mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu and one of Japan’s foremost architectural marvels. A placard quotes the priest, Kozo Kanemoto, stating that as he poured years of work into his replica he began to feel something like the love a mother does for her child.
Kousanji is made up entirely of replicas of buildings at temples and shrines from throughout the country. When Richie visited in 1962 there were talks of importing deer from Nara to replicate the famous deer parks there, or of creating something like the famous Matsushima Bay on the grounds of Kousanji. These two ventures have not come to pass, however, and today Kousanji begins to show signs of wear that the Toshogu shrine would not, given that the latter is made of materials which are more resilient than Kousanji’s plaster and paint. The edges of its many eaves show splinters, the glass frames over painted depictions of the Buddha grow cloudy. For all its Japanese-ness, Kousanji has aged in a way familiar to anyone who has traveled through Nevada and seen some of the sadder landmarks that dot its desert.
But Kousanji, at the very least, remains staffed and landscaped, and one suspects that the residents of Setoda would like it to continue to attract domestic tourists to their island. It won’t decay anytime soon. As long as something as tacky and bizarre as Kousanji survives, a town like Setoda survives, too.
I wanted The Inland Sea to open doors to the region which I, covering only six islands in two days, could not reach. It turned out to be something like bitter medicine, unenjoyable but stimulating, and I owe Richie a certain sort of gratitude. Without his book I would have quickly fallen back into the habits of tourism, would never have managed travel, something which is always becoming more of a struggle to enjoy, especially in Japan where the economic temptations of mass tourism are more than just an easy buck for locals — they are, especially in the countryside, the most reasonable means of survival.
We need travelogues, need them desperately. Whether by pen or by camera, we need records which are more than just enthused copywriting about “adventure” or shouty vlogs about street food. Though Richie may have been wrong to interpret it as he did, he was justified in the basic feeling of passage which lies at the center of his project — that all things are going, parting from us, peeling away like dry paint or growing mute as stone. The traveler who passes through beauty for a short and vivid span knows what Rilke meant when he urged us to “be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.”
Because what the traveler knows but the tourist cannot is that there is such a thing as the genius loci, the guardian spirit of a place. It is on fire. It cannot last — man, nature, and time all collude against it. The traveler cannot watch it go by in silence, however, otherwise their life is one of mere passivity, not much better than that of the TV addict who fills their existence with interesting pictures. True travel describes a circle, where the physical act of going forth into the world curves from one pole to the other, and the creative act of memorializing the destination curves back to complete the form. Even marred attempts save something from the blaze.
Onomichi is a city in frames. This is first apparent when seen from Mukaishima, the last island on our route. From there, Onomichi is enclosed by the harbor on bottom and an overcast sky on top. Then, taking the ferry and standing in the harbor, templed mountains cover the historic downtown with a green hood. We soon find ourselves in the covered shopping arcade which, as we progress down the street, reveals a little more of the rest of the city through the arch that delimits it. Even the alleyway where our hostel sits is another frame which captures a vertical strip of the bay and a small bronze Buddha in its range.
It feels like the kind of town where journeys end. There are many people in the arcades and along the harbor, probably weekenders from nearby Hiroshima and Okayama Prefectures who have come to enjoy the bay, eat oysters, and climb to one of the temples on the mountain. It is a very pretty town, and yet the sight of rain on cement sidewalks saddens me greatly. Everything has come and gone so quickly — the pirate island, the palm-like cranes in the shipyard, Kousanji’s kitschy stoicism. I could turn around now, but they would not come back.
William Lambert writes about travel, Japanese literature, and other phenomena at his Substack
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