| Utter silence — |
| Piercing the stone walls, |
| The cicada's cry |
| — Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) |
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| The king of the modern yatai is fresh fish, grilled or glazed, like these charcoal-grilled sweetfish. |
In the fall of 1989 I started living on the "other side of the mountain" — as former U.S. Ambassador Reischauer described Yamagata Prefecture. Over the next two years I would wander through the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan with a small volume of poems by the haiku master Basho, stopping at each point on his "narrow road to the deep north."
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