SWORDS AND POTIONS 2 EVIL SHOGUN SERIES

I identified my lodgings, the Maruya Inn, from a lacquered sign. The carved wooden balconies of antique houses leaned protectively above, each one garlanded with chrysanthemums, persimmons and mandarin trees, and adorned with glowing lanterns. Not a soul could be seen in the only laneway. Modern Japan seemed even more distant when I emerged from the woods into the hamlet of Otsumago.

SWORDS AND POTIONS 2 EVIL SHOGUN SERIES

This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪ feudal procession sets out from the Nihonbashi in Edo in this 1833-34 woodblock print from the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road” by Utagawa Hiroshige. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Beautiful women walking alone were particularly dangerous, it was thought, as they could be white foxes who would lure the unwary into disaster. A Japanese guidebook I was carrying, written in 1810, included dire warnings about supernatural threats: Solitary wayfarers met on remote trails might really be ghosts, or magical animals in human form. Now I had to worry about encounters with carnivorous beasts? It seemed wildly unlikely, but, then again, travelers have for centuries stayed on their toes in this fairytale landscape. And yet, every hundred yards or so, a brass bell was hung with an alarming sign: “Ring Hard Against Bears.” Only a few hours earlier, I had been in Tokyo among futuristic skyscrapers bathed in pulsing neon. Curtains of gentle rain, the tail-end of a typhoon in the South China Sea, were drifting across worn cobblestones that had been laid four centuries ago, swelling the river rushing below and waterfalls that burbled in dense bamboo groves.

The forest trail I was hiking into the Kiso Mountains of Japan had the dreamlike beauty of an anime fantasy.

Swords and potions 2 evil shogun