The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Matsuo Basho (17th century). The author’s unsparing, honest, and delicate travelogue throughout his journeys by foot and horse in Japan, peppered with masterful haiku. I have read and reread and reread this one; the book has a calming, meditative quality to it. Basho wrote it so long ago that when he refers to a past dynasty or emperor who made history a thousand years before Basho himself, the world feels very big and timeless indeed and I feel very small and temporal. Basho sits in the ruins of a temple that was built by a priest or warrior forty generations his elder, scrawls out his perfect little poetic trinkets, and I might as well be on a moss-covered rock right beside him.
