In the mid-fifties, Octavio Paz and Eikichi Hayashiya, then Japanese ambassador in Mixico, worked together in a translation of seventeenth century Japanese Poety Matsuo Basho's famous Oku no Hosomichi (The narrow road to Oku), which was published in 1956. Basho's work if a sort of travel diary in a lyric key, highlighted by hai-kai verses, which was then a quite popular literary form. This bilingual edition includes the prologue that Paz wrote for the revised edition published in 1970, in itself a splendid essay on Japanese his-ku and it's influence on Spanish and Mexican poetry. It also includes the illustrations made by the painter and calligrapher Yosa Buson in the late eightteenth century. The Japanese text has been typed in modern characters for easy reading by students of Japanese.