Jutei was a woman who lived in Japan in the seventeenth century and had a relationship of some kind with the great haiku master, Matsuo Basho. This is an imaginative re-construction of the life of Jutei, intertwined with the historically known life of Basho and written in the spirit of haibun and haiku.
‘What is our true nourishment? Is it not this devotion to the truth of the other? The truth so clearly stated by Esther Theiler’s authorial persona: “This is the other story, the way I see it, coloured no doubt by my own obsessions. I am not a scholar. I only know what I know. This is not the whole truth. But it is true.” This truth wins me to itself, it slips beneath an acquiescent skin, it passes right through the gauze. The miracle is that words can do this…’ - John Allison
