23

As promised, the sun has come out. Roads are still more or less muddy bogs and the rivers are too high to cross until the flooding subsides so Isabella and Ito are only planning to go seven miles today. Which is good, because her back is giving her pain.

“… the bright blue sky looked as if it had been well washed,” she writes, and this might be a leading contender for my new favorite Isabella-ism.
Today’s horses are “limp, melancholy…and my mango was half-tipsy, and sang, talked, and jumped the whole way. Sake is frequently taken warm, and in that state produces a very noisy but good-tempered intoxication. I have seen a goo many intoxicated persons, but never one in the least degree quarrelsome; and the effect very soon passes off, leaving, however, an unpleasant nausea for two or three days, warning against excess.”

So now that you know, you can plan your drinking accordingly this evening.

“The sun shone gloriously and brightened the hill-girdled valley in which Odate stands into positive beauty, with the narrow river flinging its bright waters over green and red shingle, lighting it up in glints among the conical hills, some richly wooded with coniferea*, and others merely covered with scrub, which were tumbled about in picturesque confusion. When Japan gets sunshine, its forest-covered hills and garden-like valleys are turned into paradise. In a journey of 600 miles there has hardly been a patch of country this would not have been beautiful in sunlight.”**

Having been to other, equally lovely parts of the country, I can confirm.

As it does for most of us, the sunshine has improved Isabella’s outlook on her travel. After a brief (and unusual) argument with an innkeeper who refuses to let a foreigner stay in his property, she is given one that will, if nothing else, keep the rain off.

This experience is an outlier. In almost every place she has stayed, “there has been a cordial desire that I should be comfortable, and, considering that I have often put up in small, rough hamlets off the great routes even of Japanese travel, the accommodation, minus the fleas and the odors, has been surprisingly excellent, not to be equalled, I should think, in equally remote regions in any country in the world.”

* Every single plant she encounters is given its Latin name. I spent a fair amount of my first read through looking up plants. Britons from this era really loved their greenery.

** I went through my photos to try to find one of random, beautiful roadside scenery and failed. So here's an amusing sign for a dentist.