The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"He was a 17th century haiku poet, and this is the record of his journey through the Japanese countryside. He is so fed up, so cold and so beset by fleas, noisy travellers, the rain and the heaviness of the journey. What he does is simply record his life through haiku. A haiku is a tiny poem. It looks like a fragment of a poem but in fact it’s complete. It has a certain number of syllables in it, so it’s a very formalised structure. It captures a single image or a single perception or a single moment of the world – and they are very beautiful. They slow you down. It’s not an attempt to tell the world in some kind of epic form, it’s just catching sight of something beautiful or something odd, like the expression of a fellow traveller, or a cheering glass of sake at a particular moment. It has that sense of encounter with something very particular. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This book is a very beautiful travelogue. I love it because it rings true with how you travel – that feeling of fed-upness, coupled with moments of complete surprise and delight. I have travelled a lot in Japan, and it’s difficult for me to travel there without Basho near me. No, not particularly if I’m honest. You don’t get the density of the language, because when you read haiku [in Japanese] you also see the Japanese characters – which are dense with visual meaning as well as with literal meaning. But it’s still worth it. You don’t have to learn Japanese to enjoy Basho. They are wonderful poems."