53 Stations of the Tokaido Road

There are a few connections fromĀ The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn at some of the stations on the Tokaido road such as Station 47, Kameyama. Seikei stops at Kameyama on he and his dad’s trip to Edo. The whole book is about the crime that was committed in the inn in Kameyama. Seikei thought that he saw a jinkininki outside of his room the night that the ruby disappeared. Judge Ooka found a tunnel in the inn that led to a monastery where a troupe of actors slept the night before. The book was built on the foundations of what happened in Kameyama… The missing ruby, a tunnel to a monastery, the fact that a troupe of actors performed a play the night before and slept in the monastery where the tunnel led, all that led up to Judge Ooka and Seikei following the theif to Edo and finding out his motives.

There are several interesting facts that I learned about the stations of the Tokaido road. I learned that the first station of the road begins in Edo and that there was a bridge in the middle of the city. The bridge is the beginning of the Tokaido road. I also learned that station 39, Okazaki, had a castle that was the birthplace of Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He also became shogun and took credit for what Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi helped create – the 66 provinces of Japan united into a feudal agreement.