I 💜 Wasting Ink → Diaries → These Walking Dreams → Day 101 (July 22, 2017)

Noheji, Aomori → 📍 Mutsu Bay → Mutsu, Aomori

Map of Aomori prefecture with author’s route from Noheji to Mutsu highlighted. 🗺 Open map in GaiaGPS →

Colorful fishing floats in a heap.

Dozens of pornographic magazines for sale in a convenience store.

A sea wall extends into the distance by a road.

Trees by a road bent by the wind. 📍 Mutsu Yokohama, Aomori

A radiant pink-orange sunset above a street.

A metallic orange Subaru made even more orange by the colors of the sunset.

Two boys, one of them dressed — and shaped — like a watermelon, play a pair of large drums. 📍 Mutsu, Aomori

A rainy seaside day turned into a candy apple sunset by the time I walked into Mutsu, to the sound of a low drumbeat hammering down its homely streets. Schoolkids were beating out a savage rhythm, practicing for next week’s festival, and I stood off to the side, my chest vibrating with the beat, the children paying me no mind. These were small drums, yet their sound filled the evening, and I imagined the giant taikos, taller than a grown man, and they must rip the world in two. The volcano darkened to indigo, I walked down to the river, and the colors drained from the sky.

A large mountain, Mount Osore, rises above a small town by the water, Mutsu, in the evening light. 📍 Mutsu, Aomori

A manhole cover shows a flock of wild geese flying above a forest. 📍 Mutsu, Aomori

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

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