The Southern Route

A letter from home interrupts the narrator’s newly married life in New York. Her mother needs her, and the return to Japan will divide her from her husband. Before the ocean crossing, the couple travels south through Washington and New Orleans, across Texas and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, and onward through California toward Seattle.

Miyamoto Yuriko describes railway compartments, station crowds, wedding travelers, desert colors, gardens, an old California mission, and the uneasy atmosphere surrounding Japanese immigrants. Moments of shared humor coexist with fatigue, racial prejudice, colonial assumptions, and the fear that ordinary conversations may become memories of separation.

First published in Taiyō in January 1922, The Southern Route combines travel writing with intimate reflections on marriage, family obligation, cities, and landscape. This complete English translation preserves the eight sections, diary dates, and Romanized song lyrics. Notes identify historical terminology, source ambiguities, an apparent date discrepancy, and a musical score marked in the annotated reference but absent from the supplied text. AI-assisted translation.