Boso, Chiba and the Eastern Provinces

Wild sea bream rising to the boatmen's drumming at Tai-no-ura. A tent pitched on the beach at Hōjō, and a friend burned red building sand forts with the children. Boats gliding under the Twelve Bridges toward the pleasure quarter of Itako. All-night marches with a hundred city boys to Kawagoe and Chiba, a canteen of whisky and vermouth passed down the line. And the lagoon of Matsukawa-ura, seen at last after years of dreaming.

Ōmachi Keigetsu (1869-1925), the best-loved travel writer of Meiji and Taishō Japan, roamed the eastern provinces around Tokyo for more than thirty years. These pieces, written between 1899 and 1916, follow him through the Bōsō peninsula, the river ports and marshes of Shimōsa, and up the Jōban coast toward Sendai, with friends, family and a fondness for sake that never fails him.

At the heart of the book is The Shrine of Sōgo, Keigetsu's visit to the shrine of the seventeenth-century village headman Kiuchi Sōgo, crucified for appealing to the shogun on behalf of starving farmers, and his bold defense of the lord whom legend made a tyrant. The collection also includes A Winter Journey Through Bōshū, One Summer in Bōshū, From Hōjō to Ichinomiya, The Sixteen Islands of Northern Sōshū, A Night March to Kawagoe, A Night March to Chiba, River-Fish Cooking and Hills and Waters of the Jōban Coast. Each is translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese.