The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō(1689)
Extract
The months and days are the travellers of eternity.
A traveller sells his house, patches his trousers, and sets out on foot into the interior of Japan. Matsuo Basho's 1689 account of his journey to the northern provinces is the masterpiece of haibun, the form that braids prose and haiku into a single meditative thread. The prose is spare and luminous, moving from temple to battlefield to a farmer's hut, and then a haiku arrives like a bell struck once in a silent room. Basho walked where the ancient poets had walked before him, and the journey is as much through literary memory as through landscape. Every sight becomes layered with those who saw it first. The road leads north into remoteness, and the writing grows quieter as it goes, until traveller and path dissolve into one.
If you loved this
Thoreau practises the same deliberate simplicity, but stays in one place where Bashō walks.
Sebald walks through the same melancholy landscape, but in Suffolk instead of Japan, and the ruins are European.
Hesse sends another traveller on the same journey toward simplicity, but needs a novel where Bashō needs only a haiku.