Travel Writings
- Aug 2, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★☆
I had, of course, heard of the Japanese poet Bashō, but did not know that he chronicled the trips he made, mostly on foot, though sometimes on horseback and boat, around Japan from 1684 to 1689. I learned about them through a piece in the first issue of Emergence Magazine, which I, in turn, learned about from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, The Serviceberry, whose life began as an essay in, where else, Emergence Magazine.
The piece, a travelogue in which Fred Bahnson, notable author and director of the Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, retraces the pilgrimage that Christian mystic Thomas Merton took in 1968 to the American West, notes that “Six months before Merton would depart for California, he read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a series of travel sketches describing the pilgrimage Bashō undertook late in his life, a journey on foot over hundreds of miles. Opening himself to the elements, the aging poet carried little more than hat, staff, and satchel. Upon reading Bashō’s travel sketches, Merton wrote in his journal that he was completely shattered by them. ‘One of the most beautiful books I have ever read in my life.… Seldom have I found a book to which I responded so totally.’”
If cycling adventures largely consumed my thirties, and nearly half of my forties was obstructed by a couple of business-related (mis)adventures and a life-altering adjustment necessitated by the death of my mother, I have, since my mid-forties, turned to hiking as my primary recreational activity. I’ve hiked in places famous and not-so-famous, and, over the years, I have increasingly longed to set out on multi-day hiking trips. Inasmuch as I’m drawn to travel narratives generally, I jumped at the chance to read Bashō’s Travel Writings.
Travel Writings, translated and edited by Steven D. Carter, and published in 2020, contains all six of Bashō’s journeys, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North (herein titled “The Narrow Road through the Hinterlands”), along with a voluminous introduction, maps tracing Bashō’s routes, hundreds of footnotes that sometimes occupy nearly half the page, and appendices that account for more than a third of the book’s total length. This definitive edition may be the only book readers will need on Bashō’s travels, but I have to imagine it must be a far cry from what Merton read back in 1968.
Bashō didn’t invent the poetic travelogue, as Japan already had a rich history of travel writing and diaries. His mastery of the haibun, however, a form that combines prose and haiku, where the prose section typically sets a scene or narrative and the haiku offers a concise poetic distillation of the moment, elevated travel writing by infusing it with deep personal reflection, exquisite natural observations, and spiritual insight. It is these qualities that certainly moved Merton, and which I, too, was hoping to find. I did, but not as purely as I’d anticipated or hoped.
I appreciated Carter’s introduction, but then each journal had its own introduction, and then every page of Bashō’s journals themselves had so many footnotes, sometimes multiple in a single sentence, that the superscripts themselves became distracting. Endnotes would have helped create an uninterrupted flow to the book—after all, even if you’re trying to avoid the references, having them right there on the page makes it much harder than choosing to flip to the back—but all those citations were like gnats flitting around my face. In the end, this felt like a book designed to highlight Carter’s academic rigor rather than the artistry of Bashō’s writings—now, amazingly, more than three centuries old.
While Travel Writings might have come up short for me from an emotional standpoint, I don’t think Bashō is to blame, nor do I think Merton was overzealous in his assessment of the Bashō he read. What it did give me, however, was a new way to see travel writing, one in which I might one day craft my own blend of narrative and poetry to bring adventures to life. Since I’m on a kick of late of reading books twice, either back to back or in short order, I’ve already requested Penguin Classics’ The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketeches, which, given its publication date of 1966, is very likely what Merton read. I’m hoping, with that edition, I can find more of what he found, what very well may have been the inspiration for Merton to head west—a desire for direct awareness, bedrock, the undistilled center of our being in God, the pure drop—and what may inspire me to stop dreaming about hiking trips and start planning one.
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