The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Bashō
Published 1702 · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Travel, Classic Literature
How hard is The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches to read?
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Dense with Japanese place names, Buddhist and Shinto terminology, seasonal words and allusions to classical poets, most of which require the annotation that good editions supply.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Compressed haibun prose that omits subjects and connectives in the Japanese and reads in English as a sequence of short, elliptical observations.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- The travelogue carries a continuous Buddhist argument about impermanence and about the poet's dissolution into landscape, stated only through what he chooses to look at.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Every stop carries historical, literary and religious allusion — to Saigyō, to the Tale of the Heike, to specific temple foundations — packed into a few lines of prose and a seventeen-syllable poem.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- Bashō reports almost nothing about his own feelings, invents and rearranges episodes for effect, and leaves the emotional content of the journey to be inferred from which ruin he stops at.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- Summer grass over dead warriors, the cicada's voice soaking into rock, the moon over the pass, the willow Saigyō sat under — the poems are almost entirely image working as thought.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- A gentle self-deprecation runs through the prose — the poet who cannot write at the most famous view, the fleas and horse piss beside his pillow — set against the seriousness of the pilgrimage.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The journey ends mid-motion with Bashō setting off again for Ise, and the great sights produce silence rather than statement.
- Structural complexity: 56 out of 100
- Alternating prose and verse in fifty short sections, with a chronology Bashō altered freely from his companion's diary, and modern editions that gather several travel sketches together.
How The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches is regarded
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.