"So I traveled the world to retain only these flickering images like specks of dust dancing in the morning light. At first glance, one does not see the relationship between the Haitian novelist and the Japanese poet. as much as they were born a few centuries apart. We wonder then how they are going to do to take the road together. What do they have to say to each other? If Bashō makes the landscape speak, Laferrière questions the faces. What connects them, it is first of all the fact of being islanders, of knowing how to dance on a shaking earth and this immoderate taste for tiny things. Bashō is a contemplative who does not hesitate to cross Japan to go see a sunset, while Laferrière's universe is chaotic, urban and oppressive. He has already claimed that he was a Japanese writer. It is not surprising then that between Kerouac, with whom he shares an America of speed , and Bashō who goes like a snail on the narrow road of the northern districts of Ja pon, he chose to travel with Bashō."- back cover.