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Ron Peters's Reviews > The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa)
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"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself home."
This is a collection of travel stories written by the seventeenth century Japanese poet, Bashō. World-weary and self-doubting, he set out for the wild country on foot, boat, and horseback. It combines passages of text with poetry, and there are pleasant illustrations. Here is some of the text:
“I wandered by myself into the heart of the mountains of Yoshino. White masses of clouds were piled up over the peaks, and all the valleys were filled with smoky rain. Tiny houses of woodcutters were scattered among the mountainsides, and the sound of an axe on the western slope was echoed by the mountains on the east. The bells from various temples struck deep to the innermost part of my being.” (p. 56)
The simplicity reminds me of Cormac McCarthy. This is interspersed with poetry:
I picked my way
Through a mountain road,
And I was greeted
By a smiling violet. (p. 62)
Not everything is glorious views and landscapes, though:
Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
A horse urinating all the time
Close to my pillow. (p. 120)
It is thoroughly and unmistakably Japanese in tone and content. The novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa, speaking of The Deep Road to the North, once said, “It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it." The text breathes a lovely calm, making you think you are floating through the book.
It contains many insider references to historic Japanese culture and, although the Penguin edition is quite well footnoted, it distracts from the reader’s flow to flip back and forth trying to figure out who or what is being referred to.
Reading this made me want to re-read Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility tetralogy.
This is a collection of travel stories written by the seventeenth century Japanese poet, Bashō. World-weary and self-doubting, he set out for the wild country on foot, boat, and horseback. It combines passages of text with poetry, and there are pleasant illustrations. Here is some of the text:
“I wandered by myself into the heart of the mountains of Yoshino. White masses of clouds were piled up over the peaks, and all the valleys were filled with smoky rain. Tiny houses of woodcutters were scattered among the mountainsides, and the sound of an axe on the western slope was echoed by the mountains on the east. The bells from various temples struck deep to the innermost part of my being.” (p. 56)
The simplicity reminds me of Cormac McCarthy. This is interspersed with poetry:
I picked my way
Through a mountain road,
And I was greeted
By a smiling violet. (p. 62)
Not everything is glorious views and landscapes, though:
Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
A horse urinating all the time
Close to my pillow. (p. 120)
It is thoroughly and unmistakably Japanese in tone and content. The novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa, speaking of The Deep Road to the North, once said, “It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it." The text breathes a lovely calm, making you think you are floating through the book.
It contains many insider references to historic Japanese culture and, although the Penguin edition is quite well footnoted, it distracts from the reader’s flow to flip back and forth trying to figure out who or what is being referred to.
Reading this made me want to re-read Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility tetralogy.
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