In the Library
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō, 1689
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 40 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Translated for The Daily Canon
- Original
- Original ja
- Chapters
- Chapters 45
- Length
- Length 9k words
£1.99
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The months and days are eternal travellers; the years that come and go are also wayfarers.
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About the book
The months and days are travellers of eternity, Bashō writes, and the years too are wayfarers, and then he sells his hut, packs almost nothing, and walks out of Edo to prove it. What follows is a five-month journey on foot into the deep north of Japan, set down as haibun: passages of prose that reach for a place, broken open by a single haiku that holds it still. At Hiraizumi he stands in the grass where a great clan ruled and was annihilated, and instead of mourning them he gives us summer grasses and the dreams of dead soldiers, three lines carrying more grief than any chronicle. The pleasures are small and exact, a moon over pines, the islands of Matsushima, weeks of rain on a mountain road. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the shortest masterworks ever made, and that is its claim: attend to the passing world closely enough, and the attention is what lasts.