Opening Passage: From The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton:
Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyōkyō among the wails of the autumn wind.
Determined to fall
A weather-exposed skeleton
I cannot help the sore wind
Blowing through my heart.After ten autumns
In Edo, my mind
Points back to it
As my native place. (p. 51)
From The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind -- filled with a strong desire to wander. (p. 97)
Summary: What we today call 'haiku' arose out of the Japanese practice of writing linked verse. A major early form is the waka, or yamato-uta, whose basic unit consisted of two component parts written in moraic poetry (based on sound-length units, on in Japanese, or morae in English, which in Japanese largely, but not completely, correspond to syllables). One part had verses with five, seven, and five morae; the other consisted of two verses of seven morae. These began to be linked together, and the often aristocratic poets would play a game of cooperatively building linked verses of this kind, sometimes with various variations. The resulting poems eventually became known as renga. Eventually the form of this poetry settled; each one began with an opening section, called a hokku, which was five-seven-five, included a kireji, or 'cutting word', that created an emotional pause at a key point in the verse, and a kigo, or 'seasonal word', which directly or indirectly suggested the time of year. Such poetic constraints make the hokku quite challenging to write, so they were usually done by the most experienced poet, which (perhaps inevitably) led to people writing hokku on their own as well as part of linked verse. The idea eventually developed that the best hokku was one in which something is said by saying something else, and this comes to its first full culimination with Matsuo Bashō, who recognized the poem as having a surface about the world that expresses a mental and emotional deep, so that in the poem the world and the self are not separate. In Bashō's day, this was still called hokku, but, of course, it is what we call haiku today. Bashō's extant haiku are found across several different works, including anthologies of poems with his students, but perhaps the summit of his work is found in his travel sketches.
Travel in seventeenth century Japan was not a trivial matter, and thus each of the travel sketches (The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, A Visit to Kashima Shrine, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, A Visit to Sarashina Village, and, the most successful of them, The Narrow Road to the Deep North) can be interpreted as an ascetic practice of both poetry and popular Zen Buddhism, an undergoing of hardship to throw off attachment to the world, to clear the mind, and to purify the spirit. You could, of course, just read it as poetic reflections on, and reactions to, picturesque and sublime scenes, and this would not be wrong. But the travel sketches, like Bashō's hokku, are not just their surface, but also exist at the same time in the world and the spirit, saying something in the latter by saying something in the former. Throughout the sketches we find Bashō coming face to face again and again with the ravages of time and change, the impermanence of all things.
Each sketch is also, and for the same reason, an exploration in purifying oneself of attachments. The early ones, unsurprisingly, are rougher than the later ones, just as in your own self-improvement your early forays are rougher than your later ones. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the form of the sketch begins to approach perfection, flexibly and easily shifting from prose to poetry to prose, from spiritual reality to worldly image and back again. At the beginning of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, alone of the major journeys, we find Bashō going so far in unloading himself of detachments as to sell his house in Edo, and the sketch's form and presentation convey this detachment as well. Even in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Bashō returns home; our detachments from the world are, in this world, still imperfect, even if only by a very tiny thread. No longer clinging and craving is an ongoing process, that has to be improved again and again. Poetry, too, is an ongoing process that has to be improved again and again. Thus, it is perhaps fitting that the very end of The Narrow Road to the Deep North consists of Bashō setting off again, as he always will, until the final journey of detachment, which we usually call 'death':
...On September the sixth, however, I left for the Ise Shrine, through the fatigue of the long journey was still with me, for I wanted to see the dedication of a new shrine there. As I stepped into a boat, I wrote:
As firmly cemented clam-shells
Fall apart in autumn,
So I must take to the road again,
Farewell, my friends. (p. 142)
Favorite Passage: From The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel:
In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain vicotries over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly. (p. 71)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
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Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Nobuyuki Yuasa, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 1966).