Mount Yoshino

This guide to Mount Yoshino follows the monk Saigyo, a palace guard who abandoned his post nine hundred years ago to seek solitude among the mountain's cherry trees, only to spend his life writing poems that drew crowds right up after him. It traces his hermitage near the Okusenbon trail, his wish, late in life, to die in springtime beneath blossoms and a full moon, and the poet Basho who later walked the same route chasing his memory. Stand at the bend where the trail enters Okusenbon, the highest and quietest of Yoshino's blossom zones.