Lesley Downer first went to Japan as an English teacher in the late 1970s.
She immersed herself in the language and culture and developed a keen interest in the Edo period, especially the poetry of Matsuo Basho.
Years later, she returned to Japan to follow the same route the poet had written about in his 17th century book Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).
In Basho’s time, the Tohoku region was the last stronghold of the indigenous Emishi people; a frontier zone where the elegant cultural life of Edo gave way to rustic Oshu.
It was fully absorbed into the Japanese mainstream by the time Downer wandered through but the region was still seen as backwards, a place of rustics who spoke an incomprehensible dialect.
Her travels took her from the drab industrial concrete landscape of the Tokyo sprawl into what was then a seldom-visited northern part of the main island of Honshu. It was also a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continue to roam between their past and future lives in search of atonement. Her book about this journey was reissued by Eland in 2024.
Lesley Downer is the author of On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan, The Shortest History of Japan, the novel sequence The Shogun Quartet, and other books. Her work has appeared in a wide range of publications including the Telegraph, Sunday Times Magazine, Spectator, the TLS and the Literary Review. She has also presented documentaries on the BBC and on NHK in Japan.
You can read more about Lesley on her website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
We spoke about Basho’s haiku, mountain ascetics and Japan’s undiscovered north.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho
We also mentioned:
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Shogun by James Clavell and the recent television series
Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene
A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach
Lesley’s BBC television show Journey Into a Lost Japan
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