Les Cygnes sauvages

Les Cygnes sauvages is part of Kenneth White’s waybook series — literally “books of the way.” With this work, which is both a travel narrative and a collection of haikus, the contemporary thinker takes us, in the late 1980s, from the sprawling city of Tokyo to the wild island of Hokkaidō.
In his signature “white flying” style, and under the guise of a light yet sharp observation of Japan’s mass culture, the reader is drawn into a pilgrimage retracing the very path once walked by Bashō, who had journeyed north three centuries earlier.