In November 1274 a Mongol and Korean fleet landed on Tsushima, a mountainous Japanese island halfway to Korea, and overwhelmed its few defenders. Sucker Punch's 2020 game drops a fictional samurai, Jin Sakai, into that invasion: he survives the massacre on the beach and turns into "the Ghost", a guerrilla who breaks the samurai code to drive the invaders out.
The designers visited Tsushima twice but did not copy it one to one. This route visits the real places behind the game's opening battle, its castle and its shrines, most of them featured in the island's own guide for players. Jin, his clan and his battles are fiction; the landing, the fortress and the mountains are not.
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.
