Before You Set Out

Journeys start months before they begin with maps and guidebooks and the metaphorical note to the milkman – No delivers ’til June, please! They start with thrill of Going Away keeping you awake and staring at the route behind closed eyelids while everyone around you sleeps. They start with an idea, sometimes so large and ludicrous you must talk yourself into it, but if you stare at anything long enough it eventually appears possible.

I first had the idea for cycling the length of Japan years ago. In my imagination I started in the very south of the country at Cape Sata and pedalled northwards. The plan never amounted to more than studying a map and trying to find a route through the mountains before giving up and thinking about other things. That was until my 50th birthday approached; not a ‘what have I done with my life?’ moment, more that my remaining 25 years was a span I could grasp in my imagination – it is approximately the same amount of time my daughter has been alive. Realising this felt like being offered the opportunity to live it well, so I wrote a list of everything I wanted to do in whatever time that was remaining to me.

While I have loved the Japanese language all my life, it has never really loved me back. I was kicked out of University when I failed to learn it to the required level and, although I found another way back in, I never felt I had learnt it properly despite living in in Japan for two years. While I could make a funny, slightly subversive goodbye speech to my friends and colleagues, I couldn’t pick up a Kawabata short story and read it or have a conversation with a stranger without feeling the dread of misunderstanding. So learning Japanese with a view to one day translating Japanese fiction was first on the list and 25 years seems like a good amount of time to fully realise it.

However, I am not the kind of person who goes to the gym but never plays sport. Nothing helps me learn a word quicker than hearing a native speaker use it and if I was going to learn Japanese I wanted to do it in Japan as far as possible, and that was when the old idea swam to the surface again.

Maybe I could start learning Japanese and then cycle through Japan and use what I had learned and expand upon it. Of course, this was completely out of the question. I had a business to run, kids, a girlfriend, a life, responsibilities and so on. Maybe I could go north to south, then, and follow the route the English writer Alan Booth took when he hiked the length of Japan back in the 70’s. That was a better idea. It lent the enterprise a patina of respectability. I’m a bookseller for whom nothing is more normal than hopping on a bike and cycling more than 3,000kms in pursuit of my favourite, sadly long dead, writer.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on En no Gyōja the founder of the mystic religion of Shugendo, attracted by the idea of practising austerities as a path to spiritual insight. When I lived in Japan, I told my friends that chances were I’d end up in a monastery rather than going back to England. The ghost of those ideas still remain, even if they are reduced to feeling that the thing I’m looking for is just a step in front of me.

I heard the legend of Kōbō Daishi, the 9th century Buddhist monk who inspired the pilgrimage around the island of Shikoku. It was said that if you walked the pilgrimage in the opposite direction you might meet him coming the other way. Maybe if I set off on this ride I would bump into someone important too, the ghost of Booth, or En no Gyōja or even my 24 year-old self full of certitude and anger and optimism and we could gently mock each other for the way things were and the way things eventually worked out.

To do this trip properly I would need to become proficient in bicycle maintenance and diary writing and using the Go Pro I had bought years ago and placed in a drawer after using once. I would need to read Geoff Dyer and Jenny Diski and Ann Wroe to heighten my powers of perception and triangulate my position as an observer and possibly a writer. Most of all, I would have to spend time with Alan Booth’s The Roads to Sata, working out his route between mainland Japan’s northernmost and southernmost tips and scouring his words for insights about where it was tough, where it was easy, and always with the thought in mind that if I read his words enough times I might eventually perceive the world in the same way as him.