The Traveling Tree
On sale
6th November 2025
Price: £16.99
Over half a million copies sold in Japan
In this enduring classic, Michio Hoshino shares his reflections on the natural world, and our place within it.
Beautifully written, this book is a collection of Hoshino’s writing published at the peak of his artistic prowess as a writer and photographer, only one year before his career was tragically cut short at the age of 43 by a fatal bear attack in the Kamchatka Peninsula.
First published in Japanese, The Traveling Tree is a literary triumph, available in English for the first time.
‘Hoshino’s prose sits somewhere between Henry David Thoreau’s matter-of-fact observations in Walden and Annie Dillard’s poetical musings in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.’ Asian Review of Books
Reviews
Translator Eli K.P. William renders Hoshino's playful but reverential prose into English for the first time... The Traveling Tree proves how boundless curiosity - whether for roaming wolves, Arctic glaciers or bush pilots - can breathe better, more honest, open-ended attention into the world we inhabit
Elegantly translated into English for the first time
Hoshino's prose sits somewhere between Henry David Thoreau's matter-of-fact observations in Walden and Annie Dillard's poetical musings in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.