A poet as my guide

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't really looking for a learning experience.

I was simply hoping for a September vacation that would be a bit different, something to take me far away from my only-too-familiar daily routine.

So when I heard of a walking tour offered in the rural north of Japan, I was immediately charmed. I quickly warmed to images of myself strolling through rural lanes bordered by rice fields and sleeping on the tatami mats of centuries-old country inns.

But what I hardly expected was that my vacation would plunge me deep into a book, much less a book by a 17th-century haiku master.

This is, however, what happened. Instead of just walking, I walked and read and experienced the pleasure of learning.

In the end, my best lesson would be an enhanced sensitivity to the old Japan that

lingers just under the contemporary surface. Instead of feeling distant from the multitude of travelers who had explored these roads for centuries, I came to feel instead how much I was like them.

And at the same time, I experienced the enduring power of a good book.

Walking tours have become increasingly popular with American tourists over the course of the past 20 years or so. Groups now make walking culinary tours of the Italian Alps, hike among the boundary waters of Minnesota, or even trek across a swath of India.

And while the walking tour offers many advantages, perhaps the most important is its leisurely pace. Less ground is covered – but it is covered more thoroughly. People, places, and things inch, not speed, by. And as they do, they offer "teachable moments" at almost every step.

Of course, I probably should have guessed that my trip (offered by Esprit Travel & Tours of Los Angeles) had a literary dimension when, amid flight schedules and currency information, I received a reading list. It included "In Praise of Shadows" by 20th Century author Junichiro Tanizaki – an exploration of Japanese aesthetics – and "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Matsuo Basho.

Basho, who lived in the 1600s, is one of Japan's most famous haiku masters. He was also a compulsive traveler who found pleasure in wandering Japan's north. To some extent, we would follow his path.

Unlike Basho, of course, we did not walk dirt roads in straw sandals or scale mountains on horseback. Instead, we zipped by bullet train from Tokyo to Sendai, a northern city also visited by Basho. From there we moved by bus, local train, and foot through mountains and fields, and along Japan's Pacific coast.

Yet Japan's north is still sleepy and rural compared with the south, even as it was in the 1600s. Rice farms, fishermen's homes, Shinto shrines, and Buddhist temples still figure prominently in the landscape. And just as Basho had, we slept in the region's country inns and bathed in its traditional mineral hot-spring baths.

As we did, it became easy to envision Basho's Japan. He became our guide, reminding us how little really changes when it comes to some of the basic themes of human experience, and how closely Japan's rural north still hews to its roots.

One rainy morning, for example, we hiked through rice fields to a small Buddhist cemetery. There we paused as the tour leader spoke about the Buddhist concept of death and traditional Japanese death rites. We examined the monuments, several adorned with pictures of young men in World War II-era uniforms.

I flipped through my copy of Basho's book and found the page where he pauses on his journey at a lonely rural cemetery:

"I came to the pine woods called Sue-no-matsuyama, where I found a temple named Masshozan and a great number of tombstones scattered among the trees. It was a depressing sight indeed, for young or old, loved or loving, we must all go to such a place at the end of our lives."

That sense of melancholy would return later, as we walked a winding country road, watching women in sun bonnets harvest rice. While walking, we listened via Walkman (Esprit has technology allowing the tour leader to communicate through each hiker's Walkman) to a recounting of Japan's entry into World War II.

We heard about a people still largely cut off from the outside world, believing fiercely in the divinity of their emperor and the invincibility of their island nation. We heard of their intoxication with the idea of building an empire and a confidence bred of an era of affluence and success – a confidence that led only to disaster.

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