Red Letter #319
The Narrow Road to the Narrow Road. . .
another year is gone
a traveler's shade on my head,
straw sandals at my feet
A haiku by Matsuo Bashō––a poet who not only became Japan’s most famous writer, but also secured a place among the world’s literary immortals. His growing reputation in 17th century Edo (what is now modern-day Tokyo) was as a writer and teacher of renga (‘linked verse’). Fame provided his livelihood but also served to unsettle his mind. He tried Zen meditation, but it provided little relief. At the same time he was longing for a regeneration in his poetry––and he knew that few things helped soothe and center his mind more than what became his signature practice: the rather demanding endeavor that is a long walking journey. In late spring 1689, the 46-year-old embarked on his fifth and final pilgrimage around his homeland. He traveled, mostly on foot, for 156 days and covered nearly 1,500 miles. Before he departed, he sold his thatched-roof hut on the outskirts of Edo. It was, perhaps, a psychological marker that––travel at the time being rather fraught––he was fully prepared to die on the road. But surrendering to the demands of an itinerant life seemed to focus his mind and liberate his spirit. Accompanied by his poet-companion, Kawai Sora, they headed north into the rural region known as Oku, then made their way west where they would follow the coastline back south. Bashō’s intention was largely to retrace a journey taken by Saigyō five centuries earlier, a poet he greatly admired. Bashō’s haibun travel journal (a combination of prose and poetry) would eventually become his most famous work: Oku no Hosomichi––usually translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But ‘Oku’ actually means the ‘interior,’ a term similar to our ‘backcountry’––and, doubtless, the poet was aware that ‘the interior’ was a road sign pointing as much toward coastal Sendai as it did into the cerebral backroads of his expansive mind.
After a year’s planning, my wife and I have just returned from a 24-day trip to Japan. To be clear, this was not a research project but a long-desired visit to a place we’d both been interested in for many years. Karen was excited by the prospect of Japanese gardens and temples, crafts and cuisine. Since I’d been reading and teaching Japanese poetry for many decades, she knew well what I was after, and was happy to visit some of the sites depicted in the Oku no Hosomichi. But I promised not to drive her crazy seeking out highlights of Bashō’s journey––a promise, perhaps, I failed to keep. My criterion was not to simply follow in the poet’s footsteps but to seek out a few places that still resembled what Bashō actually experienced. We settled on 5 sites and 2 museums dedicated to the poet. But if you consider all five of his haibun-journeys, the poet visited almost every corner of Honshu, Japan’s main island, and even beyond. It seemed everywhere we traveled, and every guide we selected to lead us, knew of other marvelous Bashō settings. By the end, we’d visited 16 Basho sites––but thank goodness many included stunning landscapes and gardens, so I was not being too much an annoyance, and Karen became more and more of a devotee of this compelling poet.
Let me also stipulate that I am not a haiku poet––brevity is not a place I shine––but I couldn’t help but respond to some of the places we visited, and the emotions engendered, by attempting versions of those supercharged short-form poems. And so, in the spirit of haibun, I will offer two here––one from the first day of our journey, and one from near the very end. But already I’ve realized this exploration has indeed spurred both a research project and a more expansive piece of writing. I hope to set down, in a much longer essay, some of my impressions of Japan and the wonderful people we met. But I must also contend with the lessons I learned (or failed to learn) by using Bashō––his poetry and his life––as my guide.
* * *
Tokyo: gray clouds like watery ink brushed across a sheet of handmade washi. Visiting the spot in the Fukagawa section of old Edo where the Bashō-an (cottage) once stood. A Shinto shrine occupies the place now honoring the poet’s memory. We walked along the Sumida River to where a statue of Bashō overlooks the start of his most famous journey. Somewhat disconcertingly, every evening it becomes illuminated and rotates on a swivel so that it can be seen by boaters on the river or traffic on the Nihonbashi Bridge (a new steel version of the bamboo structure once made famous in a Hokusai print). And there, on a yatsuda leaf, a hotaruga (or firefly moth) stopped me in my tracks:
Fukagawa moth,
in his monk’s black traveling robes,
prepares to travel north.
We spent four days in Kyoto, an absolutely marvelous city. Unlike Tokyo, it was spared the bombing campaign during the Second World War, and so the old narrow streets still exist, now jam-packed with travelers; and over 2000 Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines stipple the city map. Too much to see and, on our final day, we planned at last to visit the Imperial Palace. My wife loves exploring grand historical sites such as this––and so I wonder if she regrets browsing the Internet and coming across Konpukuji, a small Buddhist temple founded in 864 CE in the Sakyō-ku section in northeastern Kyoto, and a spot where Basho spent much time. The grand palace or a modest, out-of-the way temple? Perhaps she saw the look in my eyes, and that helped make the decision easier. The temple was revitalized by the monk Tesshu during the Edo period, and he forged a lasting bond with Bashō, allowing a retreat cottage to be built for him on the hillside there. After the poet’s death, the cottage fell into disrepair––but decades later, Buson, one of Bashō’s great disciples, saw to it that the cottage was restored. And in fact, a little higher on that hill, Buson himself is buried, the grave marker overlooking the city both poets loved––and the surrounding landscape is dotted with dozens of other haiku poets who made that sacred land their final resting spot. How could we miss this?
Sitting there, it was easy to imagine Bashō descending the stone path toward the temple where he could smell the rice cooking and the saké warming. It was dusk now, and there was crow-laughter in tall pine, children playing in the street below. I sat there a long while until the visiting hours had passed. Motoaki Ozeki called a cab for us and saw us to the gate. A gentle man, he’s a professor of Literature at nearby Ritsumeikan University, and he and his wife are caretakers of the temple. We stood together in the dark, and enjoyed the cooling evening––this magnetic place that draws in wanderers, from near and far, in need of a measure of peace.
At the temple well,
the long-stemmed bamboo cup,
still wet at the lip.
––Steven Ratiner
