The Narrow Road to the Interior is not a guide to northern Japan. It is a universal guidebook to every kind of journey we make through life. As one of the first sentences puts it: ‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ In travel, we are reminded that the stability of a home is an illusion and that nothing is permanent. ‘With every pilgrimage, one encounters the temporality of life,’ writes Basho.

This is evident in the way that Basho responds to the various monuments and ruins he encounters. For instance, on finding how little remained at the ancient ruins of a samurai castle, Basho writes a haiku:

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams.

Powers that seem mighty, armies that are thought undefeatable, all are destined to end up fertilising the grass. This, however, should not breed cold-hearted indifference to the dreams and aspirations of the living. Basho’s eyes became glazed with tears at Maru Hill, when he saw a castle in ruins and abandoned family graves. The lesson? We should come to terms with our mortality without losing our sense of sadness at the passing of life.

Visiting ancient sites connects us with those before us. Basho captures this beautifully at a hard-to-find monument, Tsubo-no-ishibumi in northern Honshu’s Miyagi prefecture, built in 724. ‘The past remains hidden in clouds of memory,’ he writes. ‘Still it returned us to memories from 1,000 years before. Such a moment is the reason for a pilgrimage: infirmities forgotten, the ancients remembered, joyous tears trembled in my eyes.’ We stand on the same ground as people long gone: so near and yet so far from them.

Basho’s writing is filled with a deep humanity. Near the beginning of his journey at Soka, in present-day Saitama prefecture, he observes that his pack is ‘made heavier by farewell gifts from friends’ but says, ‘I couldn’t leave them behind.’ Other people create burdens in life but we should learn to carry the weight of friendship and family without complaint because the price of the hermetic alternative is too high.