The Loneliness of Matsuo Bashō
[In the following excerpt, Foard discusses the three stages of Bashō's life: his early years, his poetic and spiritual wanderings, and his life as a literary and religious master. The critic proposes that Bashō utilized his haiku in an attempt to overcome his isolation and discover his true self.]
In 1918, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, one of the leading Japanese writers of this century, wrote a miniature piece of historical fiction called ‘Karenoshō’ (‘Notes on Withered Fields’).1 It described the death of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), greatest of all haiku poets and one of the giants of Japan's cultural heritage, whose most famous verses can today be quoted by virtually every Japanese. One of those verses, reputed to be his last, gave the title to Akutagawa's short work:
Tabi ni yande
Yume wa kar eno o
Kake maguru
Ill on a journey,
My dreams over withered fields
Meander.
(KNBZ, 327)2
In his work, Akutagawa described how Bashō's disciples sincerely grieved on the occasion of his death, but grieved over the loss of their master. While they were so occupied, Bashō, the man, passed quietly away, alone in the midst of his disciples.
For over two hundred years before Akutagawa wrote this, the master Bashō had been the object of a cult which was inseparable but distinct from his literary legacy. As Bashō's school of haiku, the Shōmon, quickly became orthodox, the memories and practices of this cult spread through haiku circles all over Japan. The memories were of a wandering sage who found truth by communion with nature through poetry. The practices were of two kinds: (1) an annual worship of Bashō by groups of poets, and (2) the imitation of Bashō's wandering life by certain extraordinary individuals.
The clearest evidence of the worship of Bashō is the conferral of shingo or ‘kami names’ upon him.3 The first conferral came one hundred years after his death, in 1793, when the chief of the Shinto headquarters (the Jingi Haku) entrusted a haiku group from Kyūshu to enshrine Bashō as Tōsei Reishin.4 This granting of shingo, however, only confirmed and added dignity to ceremonies already existing throughout the country. Of greatest importance was the observation of the anniversary of Bashō's death (the twelfth of the tenth month), a normal practice for the commemoration of an ancestor or sectarian leader, probably begun the first year after Bashō's death by his disciples. This worship not only reaffirmed the ideal of a man who had achieved fulfillment through haiku, but also bound the haiku group to common loyalties by offering thanks to Bashō for his poetic legacy. The name of the annual ceremony eventually became Shigureki, or ‘Early Winter Rain Commemoration’, after an appropriate haiku ‘season word’ (kigo.)
A record of such a ceremony near Nagoya in 1793 has come down to us in some detail.5 It tells the story of a local poet called Bokuzan who, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Bashō's death, was touring all the gatherings of poets being held for the occasion. Arriving at a place called Shimogō, he found people who had preserved a musical instrument (chiku) and a portable writing desk (oi,) which they said were left by Bashō on one of his travels. Bokuzan also learned that a cedar reputedly planted by Bashō had recently blown down and was being used as a ridgepole in a woodshed. As he had been disappointed in the statues of Bashō he had seen on his tour, Bokuzan, purifying himself beforehand, took five or six feet of this wood and carved a statue of Bashō, setting it up in a special hall or zodō. Three years later there was a celebration of ‘the opening of the eyes’ (kaigen, of Buddhist origin) of this statue, a practice normally used in the dedication of a sacred image. This ceremony involved all of the major poets of the area, and the list of its food, incense, flowers, music and other components is truly staggering. The most famous participant on this occasion was Shirō (or Biwaen, 1742-1812), whose close identification of Bashō with nature, such that Bashō was even present in the rain, can be seen in the following verse composed at one such anniversary:
Yo ni furuwa
Sara ni Bashō no
Shigure kana.(6)
Falling on the world,
Afresh—Bashō's
Early winter rain (shigure).
Besides these formal occasions, the cult of Bashō worship also centered informally on places where he had written famous verses, often marked with memorial stones (kubi)7, and upon Bashō memorial mounds (tsuka).8 Such mounds were built very early in Bashō's family temple, at Edo, and in Mino province, but were soon widespread.9 We find the great Shinto scholar, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), writing before a statue of Bashō:
Futari nake
Okina nari keri
Kono michi ni
Okina to ieba
Kono okina nite.(10)
Master of whom
There is no equal;
The master who
Walked this road
Was this one alone.
Only a few people actually imitated Bashō's wandering life; the most important among them was Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). Parallel to what we will see in Bashō's biography, Issa's separation from the normal fabric of life led to his pursuit of intimacy with nature through haiku. His mother died when he was an infant and he was raised partly by his grandmother. Upon his grandmother's death, he was sent by a cruel stepmother to Edo where he studied haiku. After his father's death, Issa had a long struggle for his inheritance which prevented him from living at home. For years he wandered and was finally able to settle and marry, but his wife and four children all died in a short time. He remarried again only shortly before his death.
This tragic life drove Issa to spend more years on the road than Bashō and to write forty thousand verses compared to Bashō's one thousand. Issa's substitution of nature for family shows itself in his companionship with all living things. Instead of dissolving his self into an impersonal world as Bashō did, he personalized the rest of the world. He talked to bugs and frogs and wrote several sentimental verses identifying himself with motherless birds. His use of Bashō as a model comes across most clearly in the following verse:
Basho sama
No sune o kajitte
Yūsuzumi.(11)
Nibbling at
Master Bashō's shins—
The cool of the evening.
‘Nibbling at Master Bashō's shins’ refers to his copying Bashō. That his image of Bashō was of a sage in harmony with nature is shown by the following, written for that annual Bashō commemoration day:
Ikinaki ya
Kari mo heiwa na
Narabi sama.(12)
The old master's commemoration—
The geese, too, seem
To be mumbling together.
It might not be too rash to call Bashō a founder, then, of a small cult of poets who looked back to him as a wandering sage of nature, to be annually worshipped and occasionally imitated.
THE BIOGRAPHY AND THE MAN
Bashō's cultic position was broken, however, by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). On the two hundredth anniversary of Bashō's death in 1893, he published a short attack on Bashō idolatry. Among his irreverent lines, we find:
“The two hundred years commemoration is the two hundred years commemoration—last year was the one hundred and ninety ninth and next year will be the two hundred and first—what's different about this one? Like all the others there is this clamor of, oh, building a shrine, and wow, setting a memorial stone. And in the end the little benefit which falls on these people is just showing their red tongues while facing a portrait in the alcove, smilingly extending their gratitude to Matsuo Daimyōshin (a shingo for Bashō), while he obliviously says nothing.”13
Shiki's attack made possible a more critical appraisal by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke who, along with his ‘Karenoshō’ mentioned above, wrote two other works on Bashō entitled ‘Bashō Zakki’ and ‘Zoku Bashō Zakki’ (‘Notes on Bashō’ and ‘Continued Notes on Bashō’). In the former, he wrote about Bashō's great passion as a poet which seemed to contradict his image as a man who renounced the mundane world, and continued:
“If we must call such passion in a world renouncing man a contradiction, then a contradiction it is. But even if it is so, doesn't this bear witness to Bashō's genius? […] I love the contradiction of Bashō's not truly becoming a world renouncer. At the same time, I love the greatness of that contradiction.”14
After two hundred years of cultic memory of the master, Akutagawa was suggesting that Bashō, the man, lived in contradiction with the life ideal associated with him as master.15 Although I disagree with many of Akutagawa's observations, Bashō's life as shown through his poetry does show such a contradiction. More importantly, the difference between the life ideal remembered by the cult and the historical life of Bashō cannot be ascribed solely to enhancements within the cultic memory. Instead, this difference, as we shall see, had its roots in Bashō's life. As Akutagawa suggested, he lived the disparity of an ideal and a real life, a disparity which after his death grew into that between the cultic memory and the historical man. Most ironic of all, his initial success with his ideal led to his having an ‘official identity’16 as a poetic master, and this ‘official identity’, more than anything else, prevented him from living out his ideal.
The ideal, religious life which the cult remembered sprang from Bashō's own visions and attainments. While he attained such a life, however, he could not sustain it, and his achievement only served to create the mode of his own failure. But with the ‘charismatic hunger of mankind’,17 his disciples, devoured his attainments, and for them and the tradition which followed them, Bashō was a master. It was this master of a religious life whom they mourned in Akutagawa's sketch, and who was remembered by tradition, but it was the man who failed to sustain that very life who lay dying.
In Young Man Luther, Erik Erikson has written about a man whose solution for the problems of his own life became a solution for those of his age.18 With Bashō, we find a man whose solution for his own life became a model for a much smaller although definite tradition, but whose own life digressed from that solution, leaving him isolated from, and occasionally even bitter towards, the very life ideal which he had developed.
In becoming the master of an original haiku religious life, Bashō succeeded in discovering a world of meaning from which he later became isolated, but from which he could not escape in life, death, or even after death. His later isolation was tragically ironic, because it was precisely to overcome a sense of isolation and loneliness that he had attempted a new religious discovery. Instead, he found simply another, more profound context from which to become isolated once again.
This isolation was expressed by Bashō as loneliness, a loneliness which passed through different stages in his life. In the following pages we will be examining these stages of Bashō's life by seeing his efforts to overcome loneliness and isolation and to envelop himself, through poetry, in a meaningful, supportive world. We will not find any cataclysmic encounter with the transcendent, nor should we expect to. Bashō understood his possible religious success as providing a fulfilling life by creating a place for him in a sympathetic and immanently sacred universe. Religious failure, conversely, was synonymous with isolation from any such meaningful context. As will be discussed below, this religious goal was rooted in forces which shaped the Japanese personality of the Tokugawa period.
We will examine Bashō's efforts to create his role in a meaningful context in the three following steps. First, we will look at his early life, before his poetic wanderings. Secondly, we will consider the period when Bashō attempted to live the wandering religious ideal, culminating in his masterpiece, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Thirdly, we will look at his failure to sustain this ideal, his return to loneliness, and his attempts to create a new ideal, which were cut short by his death.
Throughout this discussion I rely mainly on the evidence provided by Bashō's haiku. Bashō wrote only about one thousand of these short verses, plus many linked verses (renku), short prose works, and critical commentaries. It may appear that I am making too much out of these slivers of poetry, but, as will become apparent below, Bashō staked his life on them. While providing us only with tidbits concerning his early life (for which I will have to rely on a general knowledge of the times), these poems became his technique for relating himself to a meaningful world. Hence they show his efforts to overcome isolation and to discover his true self.19
BASHō'S EARLY LIFE: THE CRISIS OF ISOLATION
Bashō was born after the basic social structures of the Tokugawa Period (1600-1867) had been laid down, and was a young man during or shortly after the original intellectual ferment regarding the values which were to dominate the age.20 While little is known about his early life, everything we do know suggests that he began a typical, lower-ranking samurai existence. The ultimate source of meaning for such an existence was sacred devotion to parents and lord because of a sense of enormous debt to each. While this is not the occasion to discuss Tokugawa values, we can assume with good reason that particularistic and sacred social duties shaped young Bashō's world of meaning.21 He was born in 1644 in the province of Iga, southeast of Kyoto, the son of a samurai who was reduced to farming in peacetime.22 In due course, Bashō entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, a young member of the manorial household only two years his senior, and assumed the staunch samurai name of Matsuo Munefusa.
Both Matsuo Munefusa and Tōdō Yoshitada engaged in haiku composition as a kind of elegant pastime, but what was later to be genius was at this stage only cleverness. In this period Bashō was under the influence of the haiku school called Teimon, with its elegant wit, double entendre, and juxtaposition of classical themes.23 While not without moments of sensitivity,24 Bashō chose such subjects as women's names, striking but often hackneyed beauties of nature, social occasions, and times of the year.
The comfortable, and by all indications satisfying, fabric of Bashō's world was suddenly torn open by the premature death of his friend and lord, Yoshitada, in 1666. Yoshitada's younger brother took over the family and Bashō resigned from service, forsaking forever his samurai status. As only these bare facts are known, there has been no lack of speculation about intrigues which could have led to his resignation. Professor Ueda's suggestion that he just did not fit into the circle surrounding his new lord is the least spectacular and the most probable.25
But we can be certain that, whether as cause or result, Bashō's leaving service involved a loss of that supportive context of social relationships grounded in Neo-Confucian and traditional Japanese values, which gave meaning to the life of a young samurai. In leaving his position, Bashō burned that bridge to fulfillment and began searching for a new world of meaning, though he may not yet have been aware of the search.
Details of his life immediately after Yoshitada's death are unclear. Living close to Kyoto, it is unthinkable that he would not have visited this cultural center, but we do not know if he studied or worked there.26 There is no evidence that he then thought of being a professional poet, but a few of his poems were published in local collections, and this undoubtedly gave him new confidence.27 Finally, in 1672, he published his own book, Kai Oi (The Seashell Game), in which he paired haiku, including his own, and passed a series of judgements upon them. From this we can guess that Bashō's departure from samurai service led him to improve what was formerly an avocation. Later that year, he left Iga for Edo with some ambition which must have included haiku.
The city of Edo to which Bashō migrated in 1672 was soon to reach a population of one million.28 Along with Osaka, it was the capital of a new kind of city culture, one of sophistication and gay, but refined pleasure. Bashō was probably attracted to Edo by a vision of opportunity, stimulation and adventure. Instead, he had to struggle for a few years to establish his reputation, working perhaps in some clerical capacity, and writing under the name of Tōsei.29
Having become a city man with ambition to become a professional poet, Bashō progressed rapidly in style. Two stylistic developments were prerequisites for the religious life of haiku he was later to adopt, although at this time they were strictly literary changes. The first was an expansion of his subject matter to include the commonplace and even lower sides of life. The stimulus for this development came from the Danrin school, which often applied classical allusions to mundane or even wild contexts.30 A rather extreme extension of subject matter can be found in the following:
Yuku kumo ya
Ino no kakebari
Mura shigure
Passing clouds—
Like a stray dog relieving himself,
Scattered showers.
(KNBZ,19)
The second and later stylistic development was Bashō's simpler poetic goal of setting an image for emotional impact alone, an image which would grow into an entire scene planted in the reader's mind. As Bashō began concentrating more on emotional impact, rather than on wit and double entendre, the range of sensibility in his poems expanded greatly, often into solemn or even eerie moods. The most famous poem of this type, generally considered a breakthrough, is:
Kare eda ni
Karasu no tomari keri
Aki no kure
On a withered branch
A crow settles;
Autumn dusk.
(KNBZ, 38)
Besides showing Bashō's new capacity for somber moods, this poem sets a scene which expands in the reader's mind. It also uses an important technical device, the comparison of the crow and the night settling. Later, he will use such internal comparisons to great effect.
Together with this new maturity of style, Bashō attained, by the end of the 1670s, the recognition and position he sought in coming to Edo. The year 1680 seems to mark his emergence as a professional teacher. In that year he published the first collection of his disciples' poems. More importantly, his disciples provided him with a small hut which had formerly belonged to the Shogun's fish warden. In the garden by the hut, they planted a banana tree, an exotic plant in Japan, which is called bashō in Japanese. From this, the hut's occupant took his new and lasting professional name.31
By 1680, then, Bashō had a new name and new status. He had joined the bustling new city culture and had risen to a comfortable, respectable, and creative role within it. There are a number of poems which show his ease and comfort in this new position, including the following:
Haru tatsu ya
Shinnen furuki
Kome goshō
Spring comes—
At the New Year
Five pecks of rice left
(from the old).(32)
(KNBZ, 44)
We find him also enjoying the refined pleasures of the capital:
Hana ni yadori
Hentanshi to
Mizukara iedomo
Lodging under the blossoms,
Although I must call myself
‘Mr. Bottle’.
(KNBZ, 37)
At this point it might seem that Bashō's essential biography is over. He has achieved success and enjoyment and is flexing and developing his technical muscles. In the midst of this, however, we find a definite opposing strain of loneliness, one which may have begun as poetic fashion, but which crescendoed into painful isolation by 1684. In 1680, Bashō was already writing poems which objectively set lonely scenes at his hut, and by the following year he expressed his sense of loneliness symbolically:
Bashō no waki shite
Tarai ni ame o
Kikuyo kana
The banana plant in the gale;
A night listening to rain
Drip in a tub
(KNBZ, 48)
He also expressed himself directly, writing:
“I'm lonely towards the moon; lonely towards myself; lonely towards my lack of skill. I want to answer that I'm lonely, but there is no one who will ask. Only in loneliness, loneliness—”
Wabite sume
Tsukiwabasai ga
Naracha uta
Live in loneliness;
The moon-lonely one
With his gruel song.
(KNBZ, 48)
The winter after he wrote that verse, he wrote:
Ro no koe nami o utte
Harawata kōru
Ya ya namida
The sound of oars striking the waves,
My bowels chill;
Tears in the night.
(KNBZ, 49)
His verses suggest only two reasons why he felt this way. The first is found in two New Year's poems in which he contrasts his own solitude with the family gaiety surrounding him:
Kure kurete
Mochi o kodama no
Wabine kana
The year ends, dusk settles,
The echo of rice cakes being pounded—
I go to bed alone.
(KNBZ, 50)
Gan jitsu ya
Omoeba sabishi
Aki no kure
New Year's—
When I remember, I'm lonely,
As in an autumn evening.
(KNBZ, 58)
The second explanation for his loneliness lies in four poems which show his sense of not having achieved anything. The first is symbolic of grasping for something and getting hurt instead. The others are more explicit.
Gu ni kuraku
Ibara o tsukamu
Hotaru kana
Foolishly in the dark,
Grabbing a thorn—
Firefly!
(KNBZ, 41)
Hototogisu
Ima wa haikaishi
Naki yo kana
Cuckoo,
Now is a world
Without a haiku master.(33)
(KNBZ, 59)
Tsuki jūyokka
Koyoi sanjūkyū
No warabe
The moon of the fourteenth day,
This night, a thirty-nine year old
Child.(34)
(KNBZ, 52)
Aware kiku ya
Kono mi wa moto no
Furugashiwa
Hearing hail—
I am just the same as I was,
Like that old oak.
(KNBZ, 58)
This sense of separation from social and family life, and the realization of not having changed or accomplished anything, were really two sides of the same crisis. Upon his withdrawal from samurai life, Bashō had lost that supportive, sacred context of social relations which could have offered him a fulfilling life. He did not resolve this problem directly, but pursued an ambitious career as a professional poet and teacher in the only place where this was possible, the open, bustling city of Edo. This career and its delights consumed his attention for several years, but when he reached a high level of success, its allure had run its course. Only at this point did he face his basic problem, that of the loss of a fulfilling social nexus. A sense of isolation, and hence for a Japanese of his times, a sense of meaninglessness in life, began to haunt him. For this reason, we find poems not only about loneliness, but also about an unchanged, unfulfilled life. By this time, however, Bashō had greatly expanded his poetic range in both subject matter and emotional content. When he finally faced the existential problem brought on by that fundamental loss of a meaningful social nexus, he was well armed.
Two accidental events forced his hand. The first was the burning of his home in 1682. Then, just when it was rebuilt, he received news of his mother's death in Iga (his father had died when he was twelve). Her death must have deepened his loneliness even more, for his efforts to discover a meaningful context for his life in that eventful year of 1684 were closely entwined with an understanding of his loss of that primary sacred context of Tokugawa life, the family. We have already seen him call himself a child. In one of the first passages in the diary of that year, he identifies himself with an abandoned child. Most importantly, his efforts to find fulfillment in a meaningful context began on a trip back to Iga, ostensibly to pay homage to his mother and to visit his family.35
In the fall of 1684, then, Bashō began to pursue a new life, one which he hoped would overcome the loneliness that had settled upon him. We must suspend our narrative a bit to look closely at what he was trying to do.
THE HAIKU RELIGIOUS LIFE
First, we must briefly examine the historical sources of Bashō's religious life style, that of religious pilgrimage and the recluse tradition, and look at the new religious understandings and poetic techniques which Bashō developed within that life style.
We can better understand Bashō's travelling life style by finding its sources in the Japanese traditions of pilgrimage and of recluses and wanderers. Joseph M. Kitagawa lists three types of pilgrimage in Japan: (1) pilgrimage to sacred mountains; (2) pilgrimage to shrines or temples associated with certain divinities; and (3) pilgrimage based on faith in certain charismatic holy men.36 The second type does not concern our discussion of Bashō as much as the first and third. The first type was generally, but not necessarily, a group activity under the supervision of a guide and involved the acquisition of personal soteriological power. Certain places such as Kumano and Yoshino, furthermore, were said to be a foretaste of Amida's Pure Land. This factor, says Kitagawa, ‘gives strong impetus to pilgrims to seek the religious meaning of life within the realm of phenomenal existence’.37 The third type relied on the saving power which had been actualized in a real human being. Such a holy person ‘shares every step of the earthly pilgrim’.38 From this, we can observe that pilgrimage in Japan led to discovery of the sacred in the phenomenal world of nature, tradition-laden mountains or other sites, or in the imitation of the life of an historical individual. We note the immanent accessibility of the sacred as it is indistinguishable from the fabric of a positive, fulfilling world, especially as it carries the mark of a powerful tradition.
We might also note two further aspects of Japanese pilgrimage. First, it was not necessary that everything connected with a pilgrimage be religious. A pilgrimage often involved seeing relatives, simple sightseeing, sampling famous foods, and so on.39 Secondly, it was a practice well suited to religious syncretism, for one travelled from shrine to temple to famous landmark, partaking of a veritable supermarket of deities and traditions.
The evidence that Bashō did, indeed, combine this prevalent mode of religious pilgrimage with his poetic life is strong. Rather than travelling randomly, Bashō visited many places behind which stood long, most often literary, traditions. Perhaps the clearest example of the importance of tradition in such places is found in Sarashina Kikō (1688), in which Bashō says that he was somewhat disappointed with the mountain itself, but when he thought of the old crone abandoned there according to a long literary tradition, he was filled with emotion.40 His trips to these places often took on a style of pilgrimage, a pilgrimage to visit a place of traditional power and to walk where poets of the past walked and to see what they saw. Two travel diaries in particular record such pilgrimages. Sarashina Kikō was mentioned above. Kashima Kikō (1687) records a pilgrimage to a Shinto shrine, characteristically undertaken to see the moon famous in literature. Bashō visited the popular pilgrimage sites as well. Particularly interesting to a student of religion is his account of his trip to Mount Haguro, a center for a sect of mountain priests called Shugendō which is still a popular pilgrimage site.41 Bashō even dressed as a pilgrim, shaving his head, carrying a staff, and wearing simple, monkish robes.42
A second historical source of Bashō's style of life, which merges with Kitagawa's third type of pilgrimage, is represented by the poetic recluses and wandering priests of the past whom Bashō admired. In Oku no Hosomichi, for example, he refers to Saigyō, a twelfth century waka poet, to Gyōgi, an archetypical wandering priest from the Nara Period, and to other such figures. Instead of following in their footsteps over particular pilgrimage trails, he identified with their wandering and reclusive life in general, but he did emphasize places associated with them, such as Saigyō's willow.43 While borrowing important components of his life style from these models, Bashō used a much wider range of subject matter, derived from his Danrin heritage, than these earlier poets knew. This new freedom of range was not incidental to Bashō's religious life, as we shall see.
In summarizing Bashō's life style in relation to these historical precedent of pilgrimage and the recluse or wandering life, we can say that he combined the two, extending both motifs into wider and more inclusive areas. Rather than merely following routes prescribed by a tradition (although he did so on occasions), Bashō also travelled to other places of literary and historical importance. Eventually, he treated virtually everything as partaking of an immanent sacrality conferred by the past, often seeking an ancient tradition or classical allusion in the commonest things. While not neglecting several tradition-laden paths, then, Bashō became a pilgrim in an entire world of immanent sacrality. He found himself in a sacred context wherever he went, thus pushing the wandering life into new areas of the country and new subjects of concern.
Bashō's poetry, in both its technique and goals, was well suited to the content of this expanded pilgrim's life. In every step of his travels, Bashō attempted to find some overriding aesthetic meaning in the moment and place of which he was a part. This aesthetic perception was informed by a sensibility for the sum of the many disparate elements in each of such places and moments. Such a sensibility affected his poetic technique, leading him to use methods for getting these disparate elements into his poems. Often this took the form of bringing together different senses, or in some cases, ascribing the adjective appropriate for one sense to another. A heron's screech, for example, is white above the dark sea. A more technical device, common to haiku generally, is the use of kireji, or ‘cutting words’. These are short, semantically meaningless syllables which cut off one line from the other two, thereby bringing together, without any predicated explanation, two elements of a given moment or place.
One element which must always be present in a haiku is the kigo, or ‘season word’. This will be a reference to a natural phenomenon or an adjective like ‘cold’, which places the haiku in some season. The kigo seems to be the clearest manifestation of the haiku postulate that time, rather than being homogenous, consists of different moments, each with its own particular aesthetic content.
It is the task of the poet to perceive this content and give it expression and form. If he is honest in this task, he will be willing to use virtually anything as a subject, a characteristic which sets haiku, and Bashō's in particular, apart from other Japanese poetry. Bashō brings even horse urine and lice into his poems. Furthermore, such a sensibility to the sum of particular moments necessitates a certain ambiguity, which Bashō called shiori, or ‘flexibility’. It is often difficult to define the object of the aesthetic emotion generated by a haiku of Bashō, even a haiku of one image. We might even say that his images are transparent, rather than opaque, and that through them we receive a satisfying aesthetic sense of all that surrounds and stands behind the haiku.
With this understanding of his poetry, we can see why it was coupled with the diary form. The diary structure permitted Bashō to turn his journeys into a series of rhythms and reverberations of these aesthetic sentiments. In his later diaries, he achieved a balanced interaction between the prose and the poetry, such that the prose set the elements of a scene or moment, the central aesthetic sense of which was illuminated by the flash of a haiku.
Since such an ambiguous aesthetic sense of the moment included the poet as part of that moment, we can understand how poetry could relieve Bashō's isolation. Central to this relief was the dissolution of his own emotions into these impersonal aesthetic senses of the world around him.44 A striking example is his poem at the grave of a beloved disciple:
Tsuka mo ugoke
Waga naku koe wa
Aki no kaze
Shake, o tomb,
My crying voice
Is the autumn wind.
(KNBZ, 191)
Here we can see his grief becoming part of the total moment of a chilly autumn day. More typical, however, are the haiku in which the poet is not directly mentioned. With these, one is struck by Bashō's uncanny ability to write an objective poem in which his presence is still strongly sensed. This ability to enter into the things around him he called hosomi, or ‘slenderness’.45 From all of this, we can see how Bashō was striving to use his poetry to go beyond his personal emotions or even poetic sentiments. He tried to discover through his poetic creativity an impersonal meaning in each place and moment of his travels.46
This tuning of himself to aesthetic senses of particular times and places could have been a powerful antidote for the anguished isolation Bashō was feeling by the middle of 1684. I am not suggesting that he simply tried to create a mock family or a close social nexus by this new use of haiku. I am suggesting, however, that Bashō, from the time he left Iga, had a latent thirst for a sense of belonging, of fulfilling participation in an immanently sacred context, and that this desire had roots in the early shaping of his personality. Because of its continuity in his personality, this thirst remained even when he could ignore it during his early poetic career, and could eventually be satisfied by a source different from that which had originally shaped it. In general, Bashō's case confirms a suggestion by Albert Craig that one interpretation of the Japanese love of nature ‘would be to see the Japanese ability to melt into nature as akin to the ability to melt into the social group. The openness and sensitivity to subtle cues in the group mood that the group member can miss only at his peril may be similar to the receptivity toward nature and the willingness to let it flow in on the self.’47
One further point about this haiku religious life should be made before we return to our narrative. It may seem that this life dissolves the self, making it dependent upon the vicissitudes of the environment without its own individual continuity. We miss that sense of a person discovering his identity and ‘making the environment adapt to him’.48 Our objections might very well be culture bound, however, for we have no background in the extraordinary claims made upon Japanese individuals by their social situation, claims which tend to produce a different type of self, or ‘non-self’.49 This cultural difference leads to judgments upon the West as well, as in the remark by Mishima Yukio that ‘Americans sometimes tend to over-exist. … The Japanese, nurtured as they are on Buddhism, have the curious conviction that existence is a transitory and basically unessential phenomenon, a shifting process which changes with each moment, a relative state as opposed to nothingness.’50 Whether this is entirely a Buddhist legacy is debatable, but it should restrain us from looking for a strong, continuous ego, stamping its impression on the world.
THE WANDERING POET
Bashō pursued the travelling life of haiku from the fall of 1684 through 1692, a period of over eight years. During that time, he produced five major travel diaries.51 While we cannot go into the details of even one of these works, I would like to outline briefly his development within this new life by looking at the first and the last, Nozarashi Kikō and his masterpiece, Oku no Hosomichi.
In 1684, Bashō took his first trip for strictly poetic purposes to his home in Iga and to some famous areas in that part of Japan. The records of this trip became Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather Exposed Skeleton). This trip and its diary represent only the first, alternately hasty and halting, steps in Bashō's new life of travel. In the beginning, he jumped too much into the part, striking a pose rather than finding an identity:
Nozarashi o
Kokori ni kaze no
Shimumi kana
A weather-exposed skeleton
On my mind, the wind
Piercing my body.
(NKBT, 36)
In a later part of the diary, Bashō, perhaps feeling a bit foolish for overdoing it, wrote:
“Upon setting out from the Musashi Plain, I had resolved to become a ‘weather exposed skeleton’.”
Shinimo senu
Tabine no hate yo
Aki no kure
I am hardly dead
As a result of my lodging by the road;
Autumn's close.
(NKBT, 40)
Despite such initial posturing, Bashō was able to experience and express virtually all the necessary components of his new calling. In the first section of the diary, he senses a separation from his unfulfilling Edo life, but only by a return to what can no longer be a real home. This loss of his old home is expressed in a brief but powerful section in which he cries over strands of his mother's white hair. Most of the diary, however, shows him beginning to work out that new style of life which would replace both his old home and Edo. One of the first poems concerns Saigyō, and a substantial section of the diary centers on the pilgrimage center of Yoshino, a mountain upon which Saigyō had once lived. Towards the end of the diary, there are a number of poems which show Bashō's comfort in his new travelling life:
Iza tomo no
Hogumi kurawau
Kusa makura
Let's go together
Eating wheat
With grass for our pillows.
(NKBT, 43)
In all, Bashō took great strides in Nozarashi Kikō but he still had far to go. Technically, his diary structure broke down completely, the prose serving only to name the place of each poem. His occasional dependence on, rather than use of, classical allusions gives a contrived flavor to some poems, and there are too many verses connected with the stock situations of parting and on people's names. Still, Bashō obviously increased his ability for spontaneous and imaginative observation, so important for his success as a wandering poet:
Akebono ya
Shirauo shiroki
Koto issun
Dawn—
The whitefish; whiteness
Of one inch.
(NKBT, 41)
These mixed literary achievements reflect the partiality of Bashō's first attempt as a wandering poet. By relying on his mere cleverness of former times, he demonstrated that he had not yet reached the point of using haiku to completely inform his life of the impersonal meaning of each time and place. Still, he had turned his back on his unfulfilling life in Edo, confirmed the loss of his old home, worked out the basic components of his new life style—those borrowed from pilgrimage and the tradition of wanderers—and he had found a new identity into which he could grow.52 Later, he was to write:
Tabibito to
Waga no yobaren
Hatsu shigure
‘Traveler’
I will be called,
First autumn shower.
(NKBT, 52)
In order to show his growth, we will skip over a great deal of time to 1689. This was the year of his longest journey, in which he produced his master-piece, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Beginning in the spring, he went over fifteen hundred miles though the most rustic, wild and occasionally dangerous part of old Japan, the northwest section of Honshū. Although only six months were included in the diary itself, he was away from Edo for two and a half years, this time with no destination, unless we can say that the whole trip was a destination. Above all, Oku no Hosomichi reveals a man who is ‘aware of so much—his memory and imagination swell with associations of the past—and his rapid movements of mind and heart from the high or sublime to the low reveal a very wide-eyed, knowing man’.53 We are convinced that he has attained final release from isolation and receives sustenance from the impersonal pulse of the world. His identification of his departure from friends with the impersonal flow of a departing spring can be seen in the following passage. By the last line of the haiku, Bashō images the impersonal nature of his emotions as tears within the sea:
“At Senjū, I got off the boat, and my heart swelled all the more at the thought of beginning so long a journey. At this dream-like separation of paths, my eyes filled with tears of parting—”
Yuku haru ya
Tori naki uo no
Me wa namida
Spring departs—
Birds cry; fishes' eyes
Fill with tears.
(NKBT, 70-71)
When he perfectly flowed with such impersonal sensibilities he made loneliness the most important of these sensibilities, rather than rejecting it. His term for this impersonal loneliness was sabi, a term with its own long history in Japanese criticism, which derived from the word sabishii, or ‘lonely’.54Sabi cannot be equated, however, with the loneliness Bashō felt in Edo in the early 1680s. His loneliness at that time had been the loneliness of an isolated man. Sabi, however, is the impersonal, aesthetic sense of loneliness he shared with the ever changing world of nature within which he travelled. Sabi, then, expressed the seeming paradox of an aesthetic sense of loneliness discovered in the universe, within which Bashō could find refuge from the very different loneliness of isolation.
Bashō was at the summit of his powers on this trip, and he composed verses which would stand as some of the most powerful haiku ever written:
Shizukasa ya(55)
Iwa ni shimiru
Semi no koe
Silence—
Penetrating the rocks
A cicada's cry.
(NKBT, 87)
Araumi ya
Sado no yokotau
Amanogawa
Violent sea—
Stretching towards Sado Island
The Milky Way
(NKBT, 91)
His blending of prose and poetry into the pulsating sweep of Oku no Hosomichi resulted in perhaps the greatest of such travel diaries. In his life of constant travel, participating in ever changing time and the eternity of common life and nature, all enveloped within an aura of impersonal sabi, Bashō had overcome his isolation by wrapping himself in a world of meaning so vast that only a person of his literary genius could have attained or even reached for it. Driven as he was to using his extraordinary powers to their utmost, his Oku no Hosomichi became more than a personal document; it became a literary event which has ever since been regarded as one of the pinnacles of Japanese literary history. At the same time, it recorded the attainment of a religious ideal of wandering communion with nature. Precisely because it was recorded in Oku no Hosomichi and other works of 1684 and after, this was an ideal which would survive Bashō after death, absorbing his name and memory.
THE ULTIMATE LONELINESS: THE DISPARITY OF MASTER AND MAN
After completing his Oku no Hosomichi trip, Bashō spent 1690 and 1691 around Kyoto and Iga. During this time, he continued to write a great deal, still dominated by his sense of sabi. In the summer months of those two years he spent considerable time in solitary huts, first by Lake Biwa and then overlooking Kyoto. This last stay was particularly noteworthy as he produced, not a record of a trip, but a normal diary, the Saga Nikki (Saga Diary). Also in 1691, he and his disciples compiled the collection known as Sarumino (The Monkey's Raincoat), which was prefaced by an apology for being too colorful in previous works and offered an appeal for sabi. All of this indicates that Bashō was satisfied in his perfection of both his life and poetry within the ideal of sabi for some time after the Oku no Hosomichi trip.
In 1692, he returned to the Edo he had left in 1689. Once again, he was set up in a hut with banana plants and seems to have been comfortable there, writing at the end of a long prose piece:
Bashō-ba o
Hashira ni kakemu
Io no tsuki
Banana leaves
Hung by the pillar,
The moon at my hut.
(KNBZ, 268)
This complacency did not last, however. Through his achievements in poetic wandering, culminating in Oku no Hosomichi, Bashō had become famous and was swamped with visitors. In a letter at the end of 1692, Bashō told a potential caller that he was busy on the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth, and asked if he could come on the thirteenth or the eighteenth.56 In addition, he began caring for an invalid nephew named Yūshi, who died in the spring of 1693,57 as well as a nun named Jutei and her children. She may have been Bashō's mistress in his youth.
Bashō's fame and success were entangling him in social and familial relations which were totally incompatible with his wandering, sabi life. Most distracting of all, perhaps, were the constant meetings for composition at his hut of disciples who came from all over the country.58 Along with these increasing entanglements we find a growing sullenness creeping into Bashō's poems:
Samidare ya
Kaiko wazurau
Kuwa no hata
Constant rain—
The silkworms are sick
In the mulberry fields.
(KNBZ, 66)
Bashō had come full circle. He had originally come to grips with the problem of isolation with nothing short of a massive achievement of wandering communion with nature, an achievement so great that he found the role of a sought-after spiritual and haiku leader thrust upon him. As this role ripped open again the immanently sacred fabric in which he had clothed himself, Bashō's sabi-filled world became simply another, more profound context from which he suffered longing isolation.
His first response was to rebel against his ‘official identity’ by simply locking out the world from mid-July to mid-August of 1693. He expressed his feelings at this time in a relatively long haibun, or prose piece ending with a haiku.59 In it, he shows he is slipping into impending old age, but with numerous senseless things still pulling at his mind and heart. With an overall tone of desperation, he describes how even an artist can cling to the perfection of his art, earn a living, and drown without escape in the sewer of the mundane world. As time becomes short, he feels he is being drawn into useless talk and meddling in other people's lives. He wants to discipline himself and writes:
Asagao ya
Hiru wa jō orosu
Mon no kaki
Morning glory—
At midday a lock is clamped
On the gate of my yard.
(NKBT, 209)
At first he thought that merely cutting himself off from people would permit him to appreciate the morning glory and find the intimacy with nature which he had found in Oku no Hosomichi. Eventually, however, he must have discovered that enforced seclusion was not sufficient to return him to his earlier, sabi-filled world, but only led to confinement and further isolation. He ended his lock-out with the following poem, incredible for the famed ‘nature poet’:
Asagao ya
Kore mo mata waga
Tomo narazu
The morning glory—
This, too, is no longer
My friend.
(KNBZ, 286)
Caught between his new ‘official identity’ as a haiku master and his inability to return to his earlier life of sabi precisely because he had achieved so much, Bashō became severely embittered. We find the same sense of having accomplished nothing which had gripped him in the early 1680s in the following poem:
Toshi toshi ya
Saru ni kisetaru
Saru no men
Years and years—
The monkey keeps wearing
A monkey's mask.
(KNBZ, 276)
There was nothing to do but try again. Developing his life of sabi had taken eight years. This time he had only a few months to live, and so we have only the beginning threads of the new context in which he was trying to wrap himself. Instead of sabi, the aesthetic term he emphasized was karumi, or ‘lightness’.60 This referred to a sympathetic and often humorous reflection of the lives of common people and everyday social life. From this we can suspect Bashō was taking the attitude that, if he could not escape his ‘official identity’ of haiku master, he would turn his poetic powers to that new, social life. Through haiku, he would try to find among the human beings who surrounded him a new sacred context of sympathetic communion in which to envelop himself. Due to his early death, we cannot know any more. Poems produced in this period include:
Kuratsubo ni
Kobōzu noruya
Daikon hiki
On the horse's pack
The little kid sits—
Radish pulling.
(KNBZ, 292)
With this new poetic attitude, Bashō set out on a journey back to Iga, as he had done before when trying to pull his life together in a new fashion. He may have even desired to go as far as the southern tip of Japan. In contrast to his gate shutting of the previous year, it appears that he met freely with people. He was even able to write occasional poems showing remarkable serenity:
Shiragiku no
Me ni tatete miru
Chiri no nashi
A white chrysanthemum,
Holding my eyes—staring,
Not a speck of dust.
(KNBZ, 325)
At the same time, however, Bashō was writing more poems showing a sense of unfinished business, of wanting to keep going in the face of old age and death:
Kono aki wa
Nande toshiyoru
Kumo no tori
This autumn,
Somehow I'm getting older;
Into the clouds, a bird.
(KNBZ, 324)
Kono michi ya
Yuku hito nashi ni
Aki no kure
This road
Which no one travels,
The autumn dusk.(61)
(KNBZ, 324)
These same sentiments of being alone and wanting to keep going are found even in his death poem quoted at the beginning of this essay. His road, however, was cut short by his chronic intestinal problem near Osaka in 1694, his fiftieth year. While his disciples surrounded their master, the man Bashō died, having failed to complete his reconciliation with that role they had thrust upon him.62
This last period of Bashō's life had brought on his ultimate loneliness. This time his loneliness arose not through isolation from the intimate sacrality of a social nexus, but through his isolation from the sabi-filled world of meaning he had discovered through poetry on his travels. For his disciples, however, he had become a master, having opened up the possibility of this new world of meaning for others who could perfect their haiku along his path. Ironically, Bashō's isolation from his world of sabi was in large part due to his becoming their ‘master’. In his very lifetime, then, there was a disparity between Bashō, the master of a haiku world of meaning, and Bashō, the man unable to fulfill that role, who became isolated from his own of meaning. After his death, however, the image of him as master lived on while the lonely man was forgotten, at least until that image of master was broken. The disparity of master and man in life grew into the disparity of a cultic memory and an historical man. Bashō's ultimate loneliness, then, reflects an isolation from his own legacy.
One of the important contributions the study of personalities can make to an understanding of religious traditions is the investigation of the relationships of historical individuals to the sacred life ideals remembered by traditions. The case of Bashō suggests that the impact of a personality upon the establishment of a life ideal for a tradition does not necessarily reflect the successful living of that ideal by the founder. Nor can the difference between the life ideal remembered by the tradition and the historical life of the founder necessarily be ascribed solely to the enhancements, fantasies, confusions, and so forth, of later followers. Instead, as in the case of Bashō and the haiku life ideal, the very disparity between the life ideal seen by a tradition in its founder, and his actual life, may itself have roots in the vicissitudes of that original personality.
Notes
-
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934-1935), II, pp. 105-120.
-
‘KNBZ,’ followed by a number refers to the page number in Volume XXX of Koten Nihon Bungaku Zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1961), the source for the poems in this essay.
‘NKBT’ refers to Volume XLVI of Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), the source for the prose passages and poems from the diaries.
-
‘Kami’, of course, are the Japanese deities never severely separated from the world of humans.
-
Tōsei was one of Bashō's professional names. ‘Reishin’ means literally ‘spirit deity’. Other names given, including the first one by the court, were: Hana no Moto Myōshin (Bright Deity Under the Blossoms), Shōfu Shūshi (Religious Teacher of the Correct Style), and Hion Myōshin (Bright Deity of the Jumping Sound, after Bashō's most famous haiku on the sound of a frog jumping into an old pond). For these names and their occasions, see Abe Kimio, Matsuo Bashō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1961), pp. 232-233, and the Nihon Bungaku Daijiten (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1951), VI, pp. 48-49.
-
This information, with an original text, can be found in Ishida Motonosuke, Haibungaku Ronkō (Kyoto: Yōtokusha, 1944), pp. 219-222.
-
From ‘Biwaen Kushū’, in the Nihon Haishū Taikei (Tokyo: Nihon Haishū Kankō Kai, 1927), XIV, p. 504.
-
See Abe Kimio, Matsuo Bashō, p. 228.
-
These mounds, perhaps deriving from beliefs in kami descending upon mountains, were a traditional means of enshrining a deity in Japanese folk belief. There is evidence that Shingon hijiri and wandering yamabushi also used mounds as altars. See Otsuka Minzoku Gakkai, Nihon Minzoku Jiten (Tokyo: Kōbundo, 1972), p. 459.
-
See Abe Kimio, pp. 227-228; Bungaku Jiten VI, p. 48; and especially Ishida, pp. 233-240.
-
Quoted in Abe Kimio, p. 232.
-
Nihon Haishū Taikei, XII, p. 74.
-
Ibid., p. 226.
-
Shiki Zenshū (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1930), VI, pp. 131-132.
-
Akūtagawa Ryūnosuke Zenshū, VI, p. 310.
-
In reviewing this extremely brief history of the image of Bashō, we can see the force of individual personalities in the shaping of the direction of that history. Those haiku poets who gathered annually around their statues of Bashō must have felt the pressures for group solidarity and belonging, which have been so strong in Japan, and were also drawn to a man whom they thought had found fulfillment in haiku. It will soon be apparent that there were circumstances in Issa's life which were like Bashō's. Shiki demanded an individual expression under the influence of Western thought, an idea which undercut the importance of Bashō. Akutagawa was profoundly interested in the integration of life and art, even killing himself as a supreme artistic act. This led to his fascination with Bashō, a man in whom he saw the disparity of artistic ideals and actual life.
-
Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), p. 54.
-
Ibid., p. 16.
-
Ibid., p. 74.
-
See Yamamoto Tadaichi, ‘Bashō Bungaku no Shūkyō Sei’, Bukkyō Bungaku Kenkyū, ed. Bukkyō Bungaku Kenkyū Kai (Tokyo: hōzokan, 1964), II, pp. 248, 251-253.
-
Cf. Hayashi Ranzan (1583-1657); Nakae Tōju (1608-1648); Yamazaki Ansai (1618-1682); Yamaga Sokō (1622-1685).
-
A thorough, although controversial, discussion of Tokugawa values is Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957).
-
Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 20. See also the more detailed genealogical information in Abe Kimio, pp. 3-10.
-
This school was founded by Teitoku (d. 1653). See Harold Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), pp. 11-13.
-
See, for example, his poem for the parents of a dead infant, beginning ‘Shiore fusu ya’ (KNBZ, 8).
-
For this, and the speculations of others as well, see Ueda, p. 21.
-
Later he was to claim to have desired at times to be a scholar or hold an official post, and these statements may refer to this period. See Ueda, p. 22.
-
See Abe Kimio, pp. 27-29, for these early successes.
-
George Sansom, A History of Japan, 1615-1867 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 114.
-
See Ueda, p. 23. From his poems, there is no indication that he was anything but a willing participant in city culture at this time. This contradicts an often held opinion that he was somehow separated from that gay life, as is suggested from an analysis overly based on class in Hirosue Tamotsu, Genroku Bungaku Kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan Sha, 1955), pp. 17-27.
-
This school was founded by Sōin (d. 1682). See Henderson, pp. 13-14. The ‘scattered showers’ verse is not strictly Danrin, but shows definite Danrin influence on Bashō.
-
For a discussion of the allusions involved in this name, see Donald H. Shively, ‘Bashō—The Man and the Plant’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, XVI (1953), pp. 146-161.
-
This poem was in reference to the gourd in which disciples donated rice.
-
The cuckoo was an important poetic bird about which even a poetic hack should have been able to write a poem.
-
A man was said to be fully grown at forty. The moon, of course, is full on the fifteenth day. Even so, it is strange that he should refer to himself as a child.
-
Donald Keene points out that if Bashō were moved according to formal filial piety, he should have left earlier to be in time for the memorial service. See his ‘Bashō's Journey of 1684’, in his Landscapes and Portraits (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1971), pp. 94-103. This article is also in Asia Major, VII (1959), pp. 131-144.
-
Joseph M. Kitagawa, ‘Three Types of Pilgrimage in Japan’, Studies in Mysticism and Religion Presented to Gershom G. Scholem, ed. E. E. Urbak, et. al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), pp. 155-164.
-
Ibid., p. 164.
-
Ibid., p. 164.
-
Cf. Victor Turner, ‘The Center Out There: The Pilgrim's Goal’, History of Religions, XII, 3 (February, 1973), especially pp. 204-205, where he speaks of the pilgrim's path as ‘increasingly sacralized at one level and increasingly secularized at another’. Also of interest is his observation (p. 207 and elsewhere) that the pilgrim moves from particularistic to universal bonds, such as ‘brother’. We will find Bashō doing this to an extraordinary degree as he has no particularistic bonds to return to.
-
Donald Keene, ‘Bashō's Journey to Sarashina’, in his Landscapes and Portraits, p. 124. This article is also available in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, third series, V (Dec., 1957), pp. 56-83.
-
See H. Byron Earhart, A Religious Study of the Mount Haguro Sect of Shugendō (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970).
-
His self-description is in Nozarashi Kikō (NKBT, 58).
-
NKBT, 75.
-
This discussion of technique and the idea of impersonality owes a heavy debt to Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1967), pp. 145-172. Yamamoto, pp. 257-259, describes Bashō's participation in mujōkan, or ‘transitoriness’, in somewhat similar fashion.
-
See Ueda, Literary and Art Theories, p. 156. Also, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, Haikai and Haiku (Tokyo, 1958), pp. XIX and XVII.
-
While it is true that Bashō revised many of his works, at no time did this seem to lessen the importance of experiencing everything he tried to express, and composing on the spot.
-
Albert Craig, ‘Introduction: Perspectives on Personality in Japanese History’, Personality in Japanese History, ed. Albert Craig and Donald Shively (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 23.
-
Erikson, Young Man Luther, p. 100.
-
Craig, ‘Introduction’, p. 17.
-
Quoted in Craig, p. 18.
-
Bashō, Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather Exposed Skeleton, 1684-1685, dates reflecting the time of the trip).
———, Kashima Kikō (A Visit to Kashima Shrine, 1687).
———, Oi no Kobumi (Records of a Travel Worn Satchel, 1687-1688).
———, Sarashina Kikō (A Visit to Sarashina Village, 1688).
———, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1689).
The translations of these titles are borrowed from those in Nobuyuki Yuasa's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966). In addition to travel diaries, Bashō continued to write other haiku, renku, and short sketches called haibun.
-
Several poems from this period have Buddhist overtones, but are most often composed in temple settings and can be seen as being simply appropriate to the place in which Bashō found himself. There is no evidence that Bashō had more than a very general popular understanding of Buddhism, filtered through his reading of ancient literature and Nō drama. He would draw upon this understanding during visits to famous Buddhist temples, but only as part of his general concern with historical and literary background in every place he went. At one point in Nozarashi Kikō, he seems irritated when he cannot get into the Ise Shrine because he is mistaken for a Buddhist priest. Bashō had briefly flirted with Zen in Edo under a master named Buccho. This priest, however, moved away in 1682, and, while Bashō remained fond of him, it is impossible to think that he practiced Zen for more than the shortest period of time.
-
Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 45. Here, too, is the suggestion of the whole trip as a destination.
-
Ueda, Literary and Art Theories, pp. 149 ff.
-
One version of this begins, ‘Sabishisa ya’, or ‘loneliness’. See KNBZ, 182.
-
Quoted in Abe Kimio, p. 189.
-
Ibid., pp. 15-16.
-
Ibid., pp. 186 ff.
-
Heikan no Setsu (NKBT, 208-209).
-
See Ueda, Literary and Art Theories, pp. 165 ff., and Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, Hakai and Haiku, p. XX.
-
Ueda, in Matsuo Bashō, p. 61, notes that this was written at the peak of his fame, while he was surrounded by disciples.
-
I suspect that Kyōrai, Bashō's truest disciple, did not take many students because he realized what had happened to his master.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Introduction to Bashō: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other Travel Sketches
Introduction to On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō