SOURCE: Kenning, D. W. “What's in a Name? Earl Miner and the Travels of Basho and Johnson.” Comparative Literature Studies 35, no. 2 (1998): 191-205.

In the following essay, Kenning reviews Earl Miner's 1996 Naming Properties, a comparative study of Matsuo Basho's 1689 Narrow Roads to the Far North and Samuel Johnson's 1773 A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland.

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In 1689, the great Japanese haikai poet Matsuo Bashō embarked on a walking journey, a pilgrimage of sorts, to the relatively remote country north of Edo, then south down the “shadow” coast on the Japan Sea. In the greatest of all travel diaries, Oku no Hosomichi (“Narrow Roads to the Far North”), he writes his thoughts in a highly compressed prose (haibun) in which are set jewel-like haikai poems. Haikai are short fragments derived from linked-verse sequences (renga), often irreverent, which later were to be called haiku. The account runs no more than...