Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award 1990. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a travel narrative, or poetic diary, written by Matsuo Munefusa (also known as Matsuo Bash) during the Edo Period. It was the basis for a film by NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting corporation, entitled ‘Journey of the Heart.’ On the Narrow Road to the Deep North was filmed by Channel 4 and WNET as ‘Journey to a Lost Japan’.
It is one of those rare books that provide a window into a vanished world. Rich in atmosphere and history, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North evokes both the chaos and concrete of the new Japan and the simple aesthetic of the old. She stayed in farming villages, composed poems with the poets of a lonely northern town and finally she too arrived at the Sacred Mountains. Walking and hitchhiking towards the Sacred Mountains with their legendary priests, meeting people who had never before seen a westerner and dining on flowers and sautéed grasshoppers, she found herself in a world which many Japanese believe vanished centuries ago. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is an encyclopedia of death and compendium of love Love comes like a strike of a lightning, electrical and doomed love at first sight, a brief love affair with a lifelong echo A wild, almost violent intensity took hold of their lovemaking and turned the strangeness of their bodies into a single thing. Three hundred years later, inspired by Basho’s writing and her passion for Japan, Lesley Downer followed in his footsteps.
0 kommentar(er)
