IT is forbidden to go to Kaka if there be wind enough 'to move three
hairs.'
Now an absolutely windless day is rare on this wild western coast. Over
the Japanese Sea, from Korea, or China, or boreal Siberia, some west or
north-west breeze is nearly always blowing. So that I have had to wait
many long months for a good chance to visit Kaka.
Taking the shortest route, one goes first to Mitsu-ura from Matsue,
either by kuruma or on foot. By kuruma this little journey occupies
nearly two hours and a half, though the distance is scarcely seven
miles, the road being one of the worst in all Izumo. You leave Matsue
to enter at once into a broad plain, level as a lake, all occupied by
rice-fields and walled in by wooded hills. The path, barely wide enough
for a single vehicle, traverses this green desolation, climbs the
heights beyond it, and descends again into another and a larger level of
rice-fields, surrounded also by hills. The path over the second line
of hills is much steeper; then a third rice-plain must be crossed and
a third chain of green altitudes, lofty enough to merit the name of
mountains. Of course one must make the ascent on foot: it is no small
labour for a kurumaya to pull even an empty kuruma up to the top;
and how he manages to do so without breaking the little vehicle is a
mystery, for the path is stony and rough as the bed of a torrent. A
tiresome climb I find it; but the landscape view from the summit is more
than compensation.
Then descending, there remains a fourth and last wide level of
rice-fields to traverse. The absolute flatness of the great plains
between the ranges, and the singular way in which these latter 'fence
off' the country into sections, are matters for surprise even in a land
of surprises like Japan. Beyond the fourth rice-valley there is a fourth
hill-chain, lower and richly wooded, on reaching the base of which the
traveller must finally abandon his kuruma, and proceed over the hills
on foot. Behind them lies the sea. But the very worst bit of the journey
now begins. The path makes an easy winding ascent between bamboo growths
and young pine and other vegetation for a shaded quarter of a mile,
passing before various little shrines and pretty homesteads surrounded
by high-hedged gardens. Then it suddenly breaks into steps, or rather
ruins of steps--partly hewn in the rock, partly built, everywhere
breached and worn which descend, all edgeless, in a manner amazingly
precipitous, to the village of Mitsu-ura. With straw sandals, which
never slip, the country folk can nimbly hurry up or down such a path;
but with foreign footgear one slips at nearly every step; and when you
reach the bottom at last, the wonder of how you managed to get there,
even with the assistance of your faithful kurumaya, keeps you for a
moment quite unconscious of the fact that you are already in Mitsu-ura.