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Statue of Bashō at Chūsonji, Hiraizumi, Iwate

Oku no Hosomichi (Japanese: 奥の細道, meaning "Narrow road to/of the interior," but conventionally referred to as The Narrow Road to the Deep North) is a major work by the Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), and is considered to be one of the greatest Japanese diaries^[1].

The most famous quote from Oku no Hosomichi is Basho's introductory sentences:

　
草の戸も住替る代ぞひなの家

Oku no Hosomichi was written based on a journey taken by Bashō in the late spring of 1689. He and his traveling companion Sora departed from Edo (modern-day Tokyo) for the northerly interior region known as Oku, propelled mostly by a desire to see the places about which the old poets wrote; he was specifically emulating Saigyō (who Basho had praised as the greatest waka poet]]^[3] travels in that area and he made a point of visiting all the sites mentioned in Saigyo's verse^[4]. Travel in those days was, of course, very dangerous to one's health, but Bashō was committed to a kind of poetic ideal of wandering. He traveled for about 156 days all together, covering thousands of miles mostly on foot. Of all of Bashō's works, this is the best known.

The text is a mixture of prose and verse, with many references to Confucius, Saigyō, ancient Chinese poetry, and even the Tale of the Heike. It manages to strike a delicate balance between all the elements to produce a powerful account. It is primarily a travel account, and Bashō vividly relates the unique poetic essence of each stop in his travels. Stops on his journey include the Tokugawa shrine at Nikkō, the Shirakawa barrier, the islands of Matsushima, Hiraizumi, Sakata, Kisakata, and Etchū. He and Sora parted at Yamanaka, but at Ōgaki he met up a with few of his other disciples for a brief time before departing again to the Ise Shrine and closing the account.

After his journey, he spent five years working and reworking the poems and prose of Oku no Hosomichi before publishing it. Based on differences between draft versions of the account, Sora's diary, and the final version, it is clear that Basho took a number of artistic liberties in the writing - some events were fabricated or reordered to make a better story, but the essential poetic truth remains. An example of this is that in the Senjūshu ("Selection of Tales") attributed to Saigyo, the narrator is passing through Eguchi when he is driven by a storm to seek shelter in the nearby cottage of a prostitute; this leads to an exchange of poems, after which he spends the night there. Basho similarly includes in Oku no Hosomichi a tale of him having an exchange with prostitutes staying in the same inn, but Sora mentions nothing^[5].

• Britton, Dorothy, trans. Haiku Journey: Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province. Kodansha, 1974.
• Corman, Cid, and Kamaike Susume, trans. Back Roads to Far Towns. Grossman, 1968.
• Hamill, Sam, trans. The Narrow Road to the Interior.
• Keene, Donald, trans. The Narrow Road to Oku.
• McCullough, Helen Craig, trans. The Narrow Road to the Interior.
• Miner, Earl, trans. In Japanese Poetic Diaries. University of California Press, 1976.
• Yuasa, Nobuyuki, trans. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.

• Haibun
• Japanese Poetic Diaries

1. ^ "The diary genre includes some of the most beloved works of Japanese literature, by men as well as women, including Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road of Oku) by Matsuo Bashō, his account of a journey to the north of Japan in 1689." pg 8 of Seeds in the Heart.
2. ^ pg 309 of Donald Keene's Travelers of a Hundred Ages.
3. ^ In his Oi no Kobumi, "Manuscript in My Knapsack".
4. ^ pg 681 of Seeds in the Heart
5. ^ pg 772 of Seeds in the Heart

• Wikitravel: Narrow Road to the Deep North
• Narrow Road to the Deep North in translations by Nobuyuku Yuasa, Cid Corman and Kamaike Susume, Helen Craig McCullough, and Earl Miner; with extensive commentary.
• (Japanese) Original Japanese text of Oku no Hosomichi
• (Japanese) Listen to Oku no hosomichi at librivox.org
• ese.yamanashi.ac.jp/~itoyo/basho/okunohosomichi/okuindex.htm