Following Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior
This book invites readers to join the author on a haunting journey to Japan where they will encounter a landscape rich with natural beauty, history, literature, culture, and contemporary Japanese people. Weaving photographs, diary entries, and poems, it enters the territory of the heart—a place as ordinary as a sprig of lavender and as large as the universe. This book received an honorable mention in the 2013 New England Book Festival.
Praise for Not One Thing:
In a beautifully woven mix of poetry, prose, and photographs, Carolyn Locke shares a “diary of her heart,” a record of a journey through northern Japan following in the footsteps of the haiku poet Basho and the waka poet Saigyo who traveled before him. As she and her companions walk the paths generations of Japanese poets walked, she realizes that “wandering is like dance” and that what each contributes becomes part of “the choreography of our shared journey.” Not One Thing welcomes readers into the dance with vivid description and haunting poetry and encourages them to contribute their own choreography as they travel along in imagination.
—Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Professor of Japanese and author of Nichiren: A Biography and Kokinshu: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern
Carolyn Locke went on a magical journey in Japan, and we are privileged to travel with her in this book. Her encounters along the way, with both literary giants on the page and present-day Japanese in person, are recreated here in photographs, diary entries, and poems. Retracing the haiku poet Basho’s 1689 “road to the deep north,” she becomes an observer of and participant in Japan’s venerable religious, artistic, and literary traditions; a meditator on nature and her own inner life; and a reader and a writer of breathtakingly lovely poetry. At the end of the journey, like Carolyn, I am ready to start again at the beginning.
—Susan Schmidt, Executive Director of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese