Status
Available
Genres
Collection
Publication
Summit Books (1989), 280 pages
Description
The author retraces the journey in 1689 of Matsuo Basho, described in his Oku no hosomichi = The narrow road to the deep north.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Seajack
British author retraces the footsteps of legendary 17th Century Japanese writer Basho. She does a good job of contrasting the past and present, though the literary/historical references did bog down things slightly at times for me; readers with a background in those areas should find this book a
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real treat! Show Less
LibraryThing member Welshwoman
I love this book and have read it so many times over the years. Lesley Downer's travels in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho are touching and amusing at times.
LibraryThing member missizicks
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North is Lesley Downer's first book, a travelogue that reveals small town and rural Japan in the late 1980s, a place that's a world away from the Japan of popular thought. Downer had lived in Japan a decade earlier, and had studied the language and history of the
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country. Her depth of knowledge coupled with her engaging writing makes this a gem of a book. She takes her lead from the poet Matsuo Basho, following in his footsteps 300 years after his pilgrimage into the Deep North. On her trip, Downer lets go of the comforts and reassurances of modern life and allows herself to experience Basho's world. She is welcomed into the homes of different people, experiencing the joy of being made a part of their lives for however short a time. I loved the way this book transported me out of my immediate surroundings and into another world. That's what all good travel writing should do. Show Less
LibraryThing member antao
Doing things out of chronological sequence as I frequently do. Have just finished “On The Narrow Road To The Deep North” by Lesley Downer, a re-creation in 1989 of a journey made 300 years previously by Matsuo Basho, and I have now started on the latter, being the original.
Basho was a traveller
Downer’s primary motivation was to see whether any vestiges of the hermit priest way of life encountered by Basho in the north of Honshu still existed. She certainly found communities far removed from the glossy, hi-tech supercharged Japan of the 80s/90s, villages where subsistence farmers assumed that all foreigners were richer then Japanese people, and were astonished to learn from Downer that most foreigners viewed the Japanese as among the wealthiest people on earth. Downer has no qualms about walking and hitch-hiking her way around Japan, and is met with almost universal kindness and interest, lodging with and being fed by families who have in some cases little to share. Recommended.
Now back to 1689 where Basho is sitting outside his lodgings in the evening:
“The voices of plovers
Invite me to stare
Into the darkness
Of the starlit promontory”
Liza Dalby is another excellent writer on Japan. I adored her imaginative recreation of the life of Lady Murasaki Shikhibu, the writer of the first novel it is suggested, “The Tale of Genji”. The novel The Tale of Lady Murasaki hits that perfect note of melancholy and poetry characterised by much written around that 11th c period. The book is gentle and slow, full of poetry and nature, and might be a healing antidote for COVID times. Dalby also wrote Geisha. She was the first, maybe still the only, non-Japanese woman to become a geisha. A really interesting view from inside the geisha world.
Basho was a traveller
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and poet whose Haiku (17 syllable poems) made him nationally famous in seventeenth century Japan and whose travels provide an insight both into urban and remote rural life in the country during that period.Downer’s primary motivation was to see whether any vestiges of the hermit priest way of life encountered by Basho in the north of Honshu still existed. She certainly found communities far removed from the glossy, hi-tech supercharged Japan of the 80s/90s, villages where subsistence farmers assumed that all foreigners were richer then Japanese people, and were astonished to learn from Downer that most foreigners viewed the Japanese as among the wealthiest people on earth. Downer has no qualms about walking and hitch-hiking her way around Japan, and is met with almost universal kindness and interest, lodging with and being fed by families who have in some cases little to share. Recommended.
Now back to 1689 where Basho is sitting outside his lodgings in the evening:
“The voices of plovers
Invite me to stare
Into the darkness
Of the starlit promontory”
Liza Dalby is another excellent writer on Japan. I adored her imaginative recreation of the life of Lady Murasaki Shikhibu, the writer of the first novel it is suggested, “The Tale of Genji”. The novel The Tale of Lady Murasaki hits that perfect note of melancholy and poetry characterised by much written around that 11th c period. The book is gentle and slow, full of poetry and nature, and might be a healing antidote for COVID times. Dalby also wrote Geisha. She was the first, maybe still the only, non-Japanese woman to become a geisha. A really interesting view from inside the geisha world.
Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original language
English