Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

Description

Isabella Bird landed at Yokohama in 1878 and went north by a route the legations told her was impassable — inland through Nikko and the Aizu passes, then across Yezo to live among the Ainu. She travelled with one interpreter, a folding bed and no escort, and the book is made of the letters she sent her sister as she went.What makes it last is that she is interested in everything and flatters nothing: the pack-horse villages and their fleas, the rice harvest, a country doctor’s surgery, the exact economics of a silk farm, and in the Yezo chapters the fullest account by any nineteenth-century traveller of Ainu houses, dress and belief. Both volumes complete, with the maps and the engravings, including the frontispiece of the Ainos of Yezo.