Rotsu came to meet me at this port (Tsuruga) and went with me to Mino. When we rode into Ogaki, Sora came from Ise to join us, Etsujin galloped in on horseback, and we gathered at Joko's house. Zensen, Keiko and his sons, and other close friends came by day and night, rejoicing and caring for me as if meeting someone come back from the dead.
Before I had rested from the journey, it was the sixth of the ninth month, and to see the rebuilding of the Ise shrines, I boarded a boat again:
"Hamaguri no / futami ni wakare / yuku aki zo" (Like a clam parting from its shell, I part from my friends for Futami, and autumn is passing.)
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Basho, who had left Fukagawa in Edo on the twenty-seventh of the third month of 1689, reached Ogaki in Mino a little after the twentieth of the eighth month, about five months later. Here the journey of The Narrow Road to the Deep North ends.
The last verse, "Hamaguri no / futami ni wakare / yuku aki zo," answers beautifully the verse of setting out, "Yuku haru ya / tori naki uo no / me wa namida." It begins with "spring passing" and ends with "autumn passing": a journey begun with a parting in spring ends with a parting in autumn. And by punning on Futami in Ise, famous for its clams, and futa-mi, the clam's lid and body, it announces a new departure. The end of one journey was the start of the next.
Basho kept revising after the journey, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North is thought to have reached its present form around 1694, five years later. That autumn Basho fell ill in Osaka and ended his fifty-one years, leaving the verse "Tabi ni yande / yume wa kareno o / kakemeguru" (Sick on a journey, my dreams go wandering over withered fields).
By the Suimon River in Ogaki stands the "Oku no Hosomichi Musubi no Chi" memorial museum, and at the site of the old Funamachi port there are statues of Basho and the friends who saw him off.