A Haiku Journey: Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province (English and Japanese Edition)

In the seventeenth century, the pilgrim-poet Basho undertook on foot a difficult and perilous journey to the remote northeastern provinces of Honshu, Japan's main island. Throughout the five-month journey, the master of haiku kept a record of his impressions in a prose-poetry dairy called Oku no Hosomichi, "The Narrow Road to the Far North." That dairy was to become one of the classics of Japanese literature. In A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature, J. Thomas Rimer writes of this classic: "[The wry and human touch Basho brought to his haiku] ... may well serve to disguise for the casual reader the fact that Basho was a profoundly serious artist, whose work can be read and pondered for spiritual depths, however pleasant it may be to splash around in his shallows. Nowhere can these qualities be better seen than in his long poetic diary The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), first published in 1702, eight years after his death. It is the longest and, in received opinion, the greatest of his travel accounts, although several of the others ... contain passages in prose and poetry of the highest accomplishment. Basho wrote the diary as a literary re-creation of an actual journey he made to the then remote reaches of northern Japan, a trip begun in 1689 and lasting for over two years. In this diary, which he kept reworking and revising until his death, he mixed fact, fiction, poetry, and prose to create the record of a journey that moves both geographically and spiritually, one strand mixing with the other on virtually every page. Read and reread with care, The Narrow Road to the Deep North can reveal more qualities still basic to Japanese cultural attitudes than perhaps any other work in the whole canon of classical literature. For once, the highest of reputations is truly deserved."