The Narrow Road to the Deep North

In the spring of 1689 Bashō gave away his house, put a new cord on his sedge hat, and walked north. Five months and two thousand kilometres: Nikkō; the moor at Nasu, where a farmer lends him a horse and two children run after it; Matsushima, which defeated him; Hiraizumi, where three generations of Fujiwara glory had gone back to summer grass; the Dewa mountains; the Japan Sea coast; and at Ōgaki a clam pulled from its shell. He came back with the most perfect short book in Japanese.

It is a travel diary that keeps almost nothing a diary would keep. Bashō moves days, invents a lodging, gives his companion Sora poems he may not have written, and lets a barrier guard's suspicion stand for the fear of the whole journey. The prose walks; the fifty-odd hokku stop it dead. Fleas, lice, a horse pissing by the pillow. Stillness soaking into the rock. Summer grasses, all that remains of warriors' dreams.

A complete new translation of all forty-four sections and Soryū's 1694 colophon, made from the classical Japanese. The hokku are set as verse and not forced into seventeen syllables; seventy-six endnotes cover the places, the older poems Bashō is answering, and the points where he is knowingly wrong.