I Walked Japan’s Kiso Valley and It Felt Like Stepping Into a Woodblock Print

In the 1830s, at the tail end of Japan’s flourishing Edo Period, two artists set out to document one of the country’s great roads. Crossing seven modern-day prefectures and the snowy crags of the Japanese Alps, this thoroughfare, the Nakasendō, connected the imperial capital of Kyoto with the cultural capital of Edo (now Tokyo). 

The Nakasendō had been in use for centuries by the time the printmaker Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create woodblocks of the 69 rest stations along the route—a task later taken over by Utagawa Hiroshige, the acknowledged master of the form. The Nakasendō’s busy towns provided ample material for their work in the ukiyo-e genre, which documented leisurely pursuits and landscapes during the last centuries of Japan’s isolation from international affairs. (Ukiyo-e means, roughly, “pictures of a floating world.”) Within decades of the publication of the Sixty-Nine Stations of the Nakasendō, the Edo Period would come to an end, Japan would begin to industrialize and Westernize, and the road would never see as many travelers again.

Still, parts of the Nakasendō remain intact. Last spring, three college friends and I decided to take our annual meetup a little farther afield, booking a self-guided itinerary with Walk Japan that would follow one of the more complete sections of the old road—a string of 17th-century towns in the Kiso Valley, which straddles the Gifu and Nagano prefectures. The Nakasendō at its full extent stretched 330 miles and would have taken the average traveler two or three weeks of intense legwork; our three days of walking would be easier, and much more luxurious, with our bags transported separately by car. But I hoped I would be able to pause every so often and hold up my phone to line up one of Eisen’s or Hiroshige’s prints with the real thing. 

In Hiroshige’s rendering of Nakatsugawa, now a city of around 80,000, white egrets hide in tall river grasses, and hikers are protected from the rain by wide straw hats that mirror the pointed thatched roofs of the village behind them. The river views are different now: descending from Naegi Castle, the 16th-century fortress where our route began, we wound through a bamboo forest before coming across a construction crew working on a new bridge. But we’d seen similar thatched roofs at Nagataki, our inn the previous night, a collection of traditional houses set among the trees.

We continued out of the city center, first on quiet streets and then tree-lined paths where suburbs and farmland intermingled. Today’s Nakasendō is often more of an idea than a physical route, at times indistinguishable from modern roads. But the stone lanterns on the wayside were reminders that walkers passed through long before these paths were paved with asphalt.

Eventually, we arrived at Guest House Motomiya, where the owner, Keiko, waved to us from a small plot where she was harvesting bamboo shoots. We ate this spring delicacy for dinner, along with maitake tempura and salt-crusted river fish, then took a Polaroid selfie and pinned it to a corkboard overflowing with pictures of past visitors. 

We met Keiko’s son Daisuke the next morning at Hillbilly Coffee Co., his tiny café in the village of Magome. Sipping my cold brew, I studied the woodblock version of the town. Nothing I could see looked anything like it, but I did see a place once again alive with travelers passing through. 

From Magome we ascended up and up, glancing back at the mountain valley panorama behind us. Every so often, a bend in the trail would reveal a burst of pink from the last of the cherry blossoms, or a solitary bell—an old-fashioned method of warding off bears. Did Eisen and Hiroshige have bear bells? I guessed they didn’t have Pocari Sweat, Japan’s popular electrolyte drink, or the regularly spaced vending machines where we would chug two bottles each. 

Vending machines and many other markers of modernity are still banned in historic Tsumago, one of the best preserved of all the Edo Period towns. At a tiny bakery called Wachinoya we bought oyaki (skillet-fried buckwheat buns) filled with bitter wild mugwort. Sitting down for soba at Yamagiri Shokudou, we were excited to spot goheimochi: white rice wrapped around a stick, brushed with soy sauce, and grilled over a fire. The flat, oblong mochi shape common in the Kiso Valley is styled after waraji, the straw sandals unmistakable on the feet of Hiroshige’s and Eisen’s woodblock hikers.

Sweaty and content after another hour of walking, we caught a short local train to our next guesthouse, Urara Tsutaya, where we were drinking plum wine and eating trout sashimi when a small earthquake rumbled the dining room. We soaked off the seismic tremors in the quiet onsen, which is fed by alkaline springs and warmed by heat from beneath the ever-shifting mountains.

One of the highest points on the Nakasendō is Ontake Yohaijo, a shrine dedicated to Mount Ontake. But when we reached the shrine on our last day, the mountain was small in the distance, more than 30 miles west. It was historically off-limits to many of its acolytes, who had to worship it from afar, from perches like this. I wondered how they could derive any spiritual sustenance at such a distance. 

Eisen’s version shows not the shrine but a nearby clearing, a still pool of water, and a stone slab displaying a verse by the Edo poet Matsuo Bashō. Only later did I remember the nearby clearing where we’d stopped to rest. It hadn’t looked like much. In a way, I’d known since the moment we’d set out that I, too, was seeing something from afar without quite being there myself. But upon descending into the picturesque town of Narai, we saw a giant red comb marking the entrance of Matsuzakaya; Eisen’s print of Narai shows a comb workshop, too. 

The ukiyo-e Nakasendō exists only on paper. But there were many moments along the way where I felt a portal open: a waterwheel turning; white streamers blowing from the entrance to a Shinto shrine; my friend bending down to tie her shoe, mirroring a bald, blue-clad man in one of the prints doing just the same. Now, when I look through the Sixty-Nine Stations of the Nakasendō, what stands out most to me is the people—eating noodles, asking directions, walking uphill with their backpacks and high socks, not so different from us after all. 

Self-guided four-night Kiso Wayfarer itinerary with Walk Japan from $1,250 per person, including lodging, breakfasts, dinners, and luggage transfers.

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “The Artist’s Way.”