Book excerpt: This bilingual edition of The Narrow Road to Oku' features a translation by Donald Keene and original kiri-e illustrations by Miyata Masayuki. In the account which he named The Narrow Road to Oku, Basho makes a journey lasting 150 days, in which he travels, on foot, a distance of 600 ri. This was three hundred years ago, when the average distance covered by travelers was apparently 9 ri per day, so it is clear that Basho, who was forty years old at the time, possessed a remarkably sturdy pair of walking legs. Nowadays with the development of all sorts of means of'