Field of Dreams is set on a corn farm in Dyersville, Iowa, and the baseball field built for the film is still there. Ray Kinsella follows a voice from the cornfield to Fenway Park in Boston and on to Chisholm, Minnesota, played on screen by Galena, Illinois.
The route follows the film from the farm to the ballgame in Boston, the search for Moonlight Graham, and the closing line of headlights back at Dyersville. Some details differ from the real Graham, and the Chisholm scenes were not shot in Minnesota.
In spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku.
The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
