The Life and Travels of Isabella Bird by Jacki Hill-Murphy;

Author:Jacki Hill-Murphy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

The town’s name, translated as ‘red hot water’, derives from a story in 1093. It is said that the feudal chief of Mutsu Province, Minamoto no Yoshitsuna, took a wounded soldier to a hot spring bath, where his blood immediately turned the water red and the wound closed. It also is the home of Eboshiyama Park, regarded as one of the top 100 cherry blossom viewing sites in Japan. People flock there today as they were did then, bringing prosperity to the area. Further on, at Yamagata, Isabella notes the ‘prosperous, progressive, and go-ahead; the plain of Yamagata, which I entered soon after leaving Kaminoyama, is populous and highly cultivated, and the broad road, with its enormous traffic, looks wealthy and civilised. It is being improved by convicts in dull red kimonos printed with Chinese characters.’

At the Sakamoki river she stopped to admire a lovely new stone bridge and met the architect who entertained her and showed her his drawings. Later, at Yamagata, now a huge city, she noted that the streets ‘are broad and clean, and it has good shops, among which are long rows selling nothing but ornamental iron kettles and ornamental brasswork.’ She was, however, annoyed at the mixture of vitriol, fusel oil, bad vinegar and ‘I know not what’ being sold as Martel’s cognac and Scotch whisky, condemning their sale out of hand.

Isabella was making better progress; the tracks had widened into roads for stretches but she doesn’t mention to her sister whether she is riding or in a rickshaw. The style of the buildings had changed; instead of wood the houses were built with heavy beams and walls of laths and brown mud mixed with chopped straw, which looked very neat. There was a drawback though: ‘There are no ceilings, and in many cases an unmolested rat snake lives in the rafters, who, when he is much gorged, occasionally falls down upon a mosquito net.’ Then she passed through Shinjo, which she described as horrid, and stayed in a room where ‘There was a hot rain all night, my wretched room was dirty and stifling, and rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers.’ She ate sago and condensed milk for supper that night (the ubiquitous Carnation condensed milk is still an ultra-sweet but necessary fallback for travellers abroad today).

The good road came to an end the next day and they crossed a beautiful, steep ridge amongst pointed hills and reached Kanayama, situated at the base. Ito found a chicken for her to eat, the first since Nikko, but that didn’t stop the fleas and mosquitoes from invading her in black clouds. She was in so much pain and fever from the stings and bites that at Shinjo, a bit further on, she had to consult a Japanese doctor. ‘Ito, who looks twice as big as usual when he has to do any “grand” interpreting, and always puts on silk hakama in honour of it, came in with a middle-aged man dressed entirely in silk, who prostrated himself three times on the ground, and then sat down on his heels.

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