A Journey in the Winter Wind

In the late-autumn wind the poet sets out from Gotemba with a straw cape over his shoulders and sake in his rucksack. He crosses the sea of trees below Mount Fuji, meets an old friend at a mountain station and loses him for half a night in an inn's lamp room, and with friends from his poetry society laughs for an hour on end in a lakeside inn while the gale strips the oaks. Then he goes on alone over the frozen moors below Yatsugatake and across the Jūmonji Pass into Chichibu, writing tanka as he walks.

Beside this long winter journey stand a walk to the tip of the Miura peninsula, a week with a stone-deaf old temple servant on Mount Hiei, and a rainy-season trip round Lake Hamana to hear the famous night bird of Mount Hōraiji. Four sketches from Bokusui's house at Numazu below Fuji complete the book: a stream and an earthen bridge, the pine woods by the sea, wild greens picked for the evening's sake, and the eighteen fruit trees his daughters counted in the garden.

Each piece is translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese, with endnotes and source information.