Journey to the Minakami Headwaters

In October 1922 the poet Wakayama Bokusui set out from Numazu with a notebook and a flask of sake, picking up two young friends in Tokyo. He meant to attend one poetry gathering. Instead he walked for two weeks: through the timed baths of Kusatsu, an inn that sized up his purse, a hot spring under a roofless cliff, the shrine of a crucified peasant martyr, the cedar-dark house of a farmer who wrote poems in the fields, and on up the rivers of the Tone toward their sources, until he drank from a spring that feeds them and stood on Konsei Pass.

Journey to the Minakami Headwaters gathers this title journey and eleven more: mountain cherries on Amagi, cuckoos over Lake Ashi at midnight, three rainy weeks at the remote spa of Shirahone, an out-of-season climb of the smoking volcano Yakedake, an island of the Inland Sea haunted by an exiled emperor, and a storm-tossed steamer down the coast of Izu. Prose and poetry interleave throughout, as Bokusui stops on the road to set down what he sees.

Translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information.