On the Narrow Road to the Deep North – Journey into a Lost Japan – Lesley Downer (1989)

Over three hundred years ago the great Japanese poet Matsuo Basho set out on an 800 mile hike to Japan’s wild northern provinces. His destination was the Sacred Mountains, where the cave-dwelling Buddhist hermits , or yamabushi, performed their mystic rites. His account of his adventures, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is now a classic, read in every Japanese school.

Lesley Downer, while working in Japan and learning the language, became a Basho addict and since she possessed ‘curiosity, stamina, irrational optimism, and other qualities needful for travellers’, she decided to retrace Basho’s route, alone and as far as possible on foot, to find out what was left of old Japan.

Precious little, was her first impression. The vast, urban sprawl around Tokyo is a discouraging starting-point for a poetic pilgrimage and Downer got through it as quickly as possible by local train and hitch-hiking. Sendai, 300 miles north, where Basho arrived on ‘iris-thatching day’, had also been engulfed by Japan’s concrete desert. Even at Hiraizumi, another 100 miles north, the by-now dusty Downer and an army of neatly clad Japanese tourists filed past two small wooden buildings, enclosed in glass cases, and protected by fireproof ferro-concrete shelters. These are all that remain of the of the fabulous City of Gold, described by Marco Polo, which lured Columbus to sail west and discover, by mistake, America.

At last, in a remote valley, she found an almost untouched remnant of Basho’s Japan:

‘It was as if I had stumbled into Basho’s world. Where were the wires and pylons, the factories and pre-fab houses of modern Japan? The valley was hugged by dark forested mountains and carpeted with paddy-fields, brilliant green, slotting into each contour like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle and climbing in scallops along the slower slopes. There were farm-houses with plump thatched roofs tucked into the folds of the hills; and from somewhere a child’s voice floated up through the silence.

‘It was a magic place. For a while I stood and looked, reluctant to break the spell. I was thinking of a haiku Basho once wrote, long before he set off for the deep north. It was dawn, before cock crow, and he was riding along half asleep. Suddenly he woke to see a welcoming sight in the distance:

uma ni nete — Dozing on horseback
zammu tsuki toshi — Lingering dreams, distant moon,
cha no kemuri — Smoke of breakfast tea

The season was different, the time of day was different. But I had the same wonderful feeling of arriving, of welcome.’