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On a Bare Branch: Bashō and the Haikai Profession

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SOURCE: “On a Bare Branch: Bashō and the Haikai Profession,” in American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1, January-March 1997, pp. 57-69.

[In the essay below, Carter briefly examines the careers of Shōtetsu and Ino Sogi, two poets who preceded Bashō, and argues that the professional conduct exhibited by these and other literary figures had a great influence on Bashō's practice as a poet. He states that many of the choices Bashō made in his life that scholars have assumed to be intensely personal—such as deciding to take up the solitary life—can thus be seen as actions of someone at the highest rank of his profession.]

To Margaret … the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity.

E. M. Forster, Howard's End

Many things about the career of Matsuo Bashō seem remarkable. Not the least of these is his decision in the winter of 1680, at the age of only thirty-seven, to abandon his literary practice in Nihonbashi and move across the river to Fukagawa, literally opting out of haikai “high society” in favor of a life both less conspicuous and less materially prosperous. But should we take that act truly to signify Bashō's realization that, in the words of Ueda Makoto, fame “was not what he wanted”—especially when we remember that fame was what he got?1 In this paper I will attempt to think through this question by examining Bashō not merely as a poet, in the inevitably romantic sense of that appellation, but as a haikai professional.2 Among other things, this may help us to understand some of his activities—particularly his activities after 1680—in new and interesting ways.

But what does it mean to see Bashō as a professional? A useful approach to that question may be to look at the careers of two earlier poets, both of whom prefigure Bashō in some ways. The first, Shōtetsu (1381-1459), had no direct, documentable influence on Bashō's work, while the second, Inō Sōgi (1421-1502), was clearly a model to whom Bashō looked for instruction.3 Both, however, affected Bashō in the way their own professional acts affected subsequent literary institutions. More than in the texts we now refer to as their “work,” then, they, and countless others like them, affected Bashō in his approach to his literary practice—a word whose affiliations to other professional discourses I intend at least provisionally to invoke.

As is the case with many other professional artists of the late medieval age, Shōtetsu began his working life as a monk, being placed in a Nara monastery while still in his mid-teens by his father. Since the literary and clerical fields clearly shared a disciplinary border in late medieval Japan, however, it should surprise no one that in his early twenties he decided to pursue poetry as a vocation. Despite occasional clerical disparagements of poetry as “wild words and fancy speech,” Buddhist temples, especially major Zen temples such as Tōfukuji, where Shōtetsu served as a scribe for some years beginning in 1414, were literary enclaves. The progression from cleric to poet, albeit often depicted as a transgression by religious institutions, had become a common professional transition long before Shōtetsu's time and would continue to be so in the future.

When Shōtetsu made the decision to pursue poetry as his livelihood, that is, to become “a specialist who lives from his work,”4 he went through the standard motions, including rites of passage. First, he pursued training under two recognized “masters” of the uta form: the warrior-poet Imagawa Ryōshun (1326-1420) and the court noble Reizei Tamemasa (1361-1417), of whom the latter could trace back his genealogy to Fujiwara no Teika, the ultimate source of legitimacy in the late medieval age. Since Shōtetsu was not of noble lineage, he could not hope to practice his profession at court; hence it was to Ryōshun, a man of the warrior classes who offered access to a more amenable market, at least in practical terms, that he chiefly looked for guidance. Under Ryōshun's tutelage, Shōtetsu studied poetic composition and the court classics, submitted work for critique, engaged in various tests of competence and received esoteric teachings and training. The similarity of the new profession to the clerical profession must have prepared him well and made the prevailing patterns of literary practice seem familiar. Finally, he was certified by his master and designated with the professional name of Seigan Shōgetsu'an, which identified him as an authority. All this happened before 1420. Thereafter, for the next forty years, until his death in 1459, he lived in various cottages in the capital, thus signifying his affiliation with earlier monk-poets. All indications are that poetry was his chief occupation, as well as a major source of income. At a time when poets could make little from the circulation of their works, he—like most other commoner literati—depended instead on his work as a teacher and authority to make a living. Rather than selling books, he sold himself.

Shōtetsu's personal anthologies of poetry and his treatise-memoir Shōtetsu monogatari (Conversations with Shōtetsu, 1450?) offer us a clear picture of his professional duties and how he carried them out. To begin with, these texts reveal that he must have spent a good deal of his time in private study and practice of his art. Concurrently, however, they show that such work was generally undertaken in preparation for performance in a public setting, a feature of literary life in his period that should never be forgotten. Over and over again, for instance, the headnotes to his poems indicate that they were composed for tsukinamikai, or monthly poetry meetings, held at the homes of important patrons among the military clans and in temples. These were social events with ritual features that called upon Shōtetsu as an expert to provide leadership in certain prescribed ways, such as providing the set of topics (dai) on which poems would be composed or acting as lector (kōshi) or judge in questions of proper usage or vocabulary, in the same way that a court scribe might serve as a source of specialized knowledge in the context of various deliberations. A brief note—and it is one among many—from Shōtetsu monogatari speaks eloquently for his role as the voice of authority:

II, 54. For the topic “A Fire in the Brazier,” one may treat either buried embers or a burning fire, but for the topic “Buried Embers,” one may not treat a fire in the brazier.5

The source of the “rule” Shōtetsu invokes here we do not know, although it could easily have come from either Ryōshun or Tamemasa; but that he accepted it, as well as his duty to proclaim it, seems beyond question. The nature of his identity as a professional was after all to use his knowledge and skill—his proven competence—to respond to the contingencies of practice in the kind of social setting that was the primary site of poetic composition in his time. In his own chambers he could perhaps dispense with such considerations, although there is little evidence that he did; at a poetic gathering, social and genre conventions were his stock in trade. Indeed, in quotes like the following, again from Shōtetsu monogatari, he represents himself as one whose task is the maintenance of a discipline that clearly sustains a specific social hierarchy:

I, 9. The leading poem for an extemporaneous set of a hundred poems should be deferred to the person of appropriate status—the master of the house, or the most accomplished poet. However, when choosing by lot the topics for a set of twenty or thirty poems on the seasons, the leading poem may be composed by anyone.6


I, 95. On formal public occasions, the lector withdraws as soon as all of the poems by the courtiers have been read out loud. Not until these poems are being read does the sovereign take his own poem-slip from the folds of his robe and hand it to the regent or chancellor, upon which a new lector comes in. He reads the sovereign's poem seven times. For those in the imperial entourage as well, poems by the regent and the highest court nobles are read three times. Poems by members of the shogun's family have also been read three times in recent years.7


II, 14. At an impromptu poetry gathering, the poem-slips of the younger members of the group are written last and submitted first. When old and young are in attendance, one or two inkstones are pushed from one person to the next, with the elders and seniors writing first and the young ones in the lowest seats writing last. Notwithstanding, they must be the first to pass in their poem-slips to the master of the topics. No matter how quickly they may think of their poems, the junior members must not write them down before the senior members have finished. This rule must be scrupulously observed …8


II, 57. Women and girls, when they write poems on pocket paper, should not leave a blank space at the bottom. It is all right to leave any amount of blank space at the top.9

After reading such statements, one can easily imagine Shōtetsu seated in a poetic gathering with a diverse group of people—a noble of middling rank; a daimyō, or warlord, and his wife or sister; a few samurai; the abbot of a temple, a few of his own disciples, from various backgrounds—if not in this order, at least in some specific order. In such a group the professional poet would act as arbiter, source of knowledge, and master of ceremonies. And even in his own hut, sitting only with students anxious to obtain such “knowledge” along with tidbits of lore and esoteric commentary, Shōtetsu performed a similar function—all in pursuit of a literary profession that may have seemed to represent only an aesthetic tradition but in fact articulated and reinforced a highly stratified social structure. The poems he left us, which are usually “recontextualized” in collections that note only the conventional topics upon which they were composed, may only hint at this dimension of their existence; but what we know of his practice makes it clear that his “work” was often a kind of performance with social ends and social consequences.

Was Shōtetsu aware of his role? Or, more interestingly, was he satisfied with it? These are questions to which complete answers of course cannot be given. The only thing one can say with confidence is that, like any professional in any time, he must have accepted many of the conventions of his practice as at least proper and perhaps even “natural.” But comments such as the following reveal that he was sometimes impatient with the standards of his day.

II, 65. In poetry there are many vexations. Winding up loose ends and thinking of the future—things never turn out as one had intended. If one continues to compose poems of the sort that everyone else considers good, one must remain forever at that ordinary level. On the other hand, when one writes poems whose essence is profound and difficult, others fail to understand them, and this is frustrating. No doubt what is generally called good would seem to be good enough, I suppose.10

Thus, with some diffidence, Shōtetsu hints at his feelings about the status quo. And one must add that his attitude was duly noted by those at the pinnacle of poetic reputation, the court families—meaning most prominently the Asukai—by whom the discipline of poetry in the mid-fifteenth century was governed, so to speak, from the top. Already excluded from a leadership role in the upper social reaches of his profession by his lack of aristocratic pedigree, his “arrogance” resulted in a sort of banishment from poetic society for a time in the 1430s and thereafter to a life on the fringes of court society, where he engaged in stylistic experiments that often alienated him from the grand tradition as practiced at court.11 In terms of his profession, then, his attitude led to a kind of social censure—an exclusion imposed upon him externally but partially at his own request, despite his acknowledged professional skill.

Yet it is important to note at this point that Shōtetsu never gave up his activities as a master of poetry. For even in his own time Shōtetsu's critique of the status quo did not constitute a repudiation of the profession. Indeed, my purpose in evoking these statements is to show how by alienating himself from certain poetic circles he was simply opting for a change in his career that would identify him as a semi-recluse,12 allowing him to make statements such as this:

I, 1. In this art of poetry, those who speak ill of Teika should be denied the protection of the gods and Buddhas and condemned to the punishments of hell.


Teika's descendants split into the two factions of the Nijō and Reizei, and these with Tamekane's faction make up three schools … It is my opinion that a person should pay no attention whatever to these schools …13

Elsewhere I have characterized this declaration as a turn away from teachers of the present toward a teacher of the past.14 But, however one may choose to conceptualize it, Shōtetsu's act signified a professional choice, with attendant religious overtones that will surprise no student of medieval poetry and that were by his time already conventional—the choice of affiliation with a number of earlier figures whose names are specifically mentioned in Shōtetsu monogatari, including Fujiwara no Shunzei, Tonna, and Yoshida no Kenkō, most conspicuously.15 These names also constituted a kind of authority, indeed an authority that claims to be transcendent in some ways.16 That Shōtetsu seeks to identify with them is evidence enough that he still thought of himself as a professional, although a professional of an ideologically higher order. For as Pierre Bourdieu notes in a consideration of “rites of institution,” the highest articulation of professional authority often involves what looks like self-sacrifice.17 I would argue that Shōtetsu's turn away from the professional factions of his time and toward Teika and his “spiritual” heirs was just such an act of symbolic sacrifice, a self-exclusion aimed at a kind of distinction that derives from the authority of religious ideals and the special status accorded to those who find themselves on the margins.18

If historical status may be elicited as a measure of success, one must say that Shōtetsu's bold act of self-exclusion paid off. For complex political reasons, he gained the support of powerful patrons such as Ichijō Kaneyoshi (1402-81) and was able to maintain a reputation for himself, especially among the military houses. One of the ironies of his career, however, is that he succeeded in one of the most vital of professional duties—namely, self-replication—most noticeably not in his genre of choice, the uta, but in linked verse, or renga. For among his students it was the renga masters Chiun (d. 1448), Sōzei (d. 1455), and Shinkei (1406-75) that gained greatest professional prominence, eventually going on to replicate themselves in a number of other masters, including most preeminently Inō Sōgi (1421-1502).

Since I have written at great length about the topic in other places, I will say only this about Sōgi's career: that he, like Shōtetsu, came from a commoner background; that he, too, began his professional life by entering a Buddhist monastery; and than then, after choosing renga poetry as a profession in his thirties, he went on through the usual steps of instruction and initiation to receive various certificates of authority and become a socially recognized master of linked verse with numerous students, some even among the old nobility.19 Although he is well known for his affiliation with the more conservative literary families at court, he also studied under several of Shōtetsu's students, with whom he had much in common professionally and whose reputations he did much to further during the course of a long and active career.20

Unlike Shōtetsu, Sōgi never repudiated the literary factions of his day, nor was he ever ostracized by patrons or clients for arrogance. To the contrary, one might almost say that he represents those who in Shōtetsu's words are content to make do with what the world calls “good enough.” But I would contend that at least one of his actions late in life constitutes a kind of self-exclusion that links him to Shōtetsu. I refer to his decision in the last month of 1489 to retire as Steward of the Shogunal Renga Master (sōshō)—an official sinecure granted by the shogun himself that brought with it financial rewards as well as social prestige—after less than two years in that office.21

To be sure, there may have been many factors that went in to Sōgi's decision, many of which the documents of the time do not reveal to us; but it is nonetheless clear that quitting the office that was the pinnacle of the renga profession after so short a stint was an act of self-exclusion. In a word, it was an act that declared to the world a kind of “retirement,” but a retirement that, when we see it in the light of his later activities, seems not to have signalled any withdrawal from the usual professional obligations. For during the years after his resignation, Sōgi, living much of the time in his cottage in northern Kyōto, was more active than ever before as a master involved in all the primary tasks of a literary professional: teaching, collecting, copying, composing, judging, supervising.22 Moreover, he was thoroughly involved in another activity that might also be considered an extension of his profession, and one—not by chance, I would argue—that he might not have been able to pursue so fully as Shogunal Master: namely, travel, which occupied fully half of his time from 1490 to 1502.23

So prominent is travel as a literary activity (and topos) in medieval literature that one can easily forget that not all poets actually spent much time on the road. Shōtetsu, for instance, seems to have stayed near home in Kyōto virtually all of his life; likewise, Sōgi's student Shōhaku was a sedentary type, as were most court poets. Sōgi, however, was on the road constantly, on journeys that took him everywhere from Shirakawa Barrier in the north to Dazaifu in the south. In his early years such travels had doubtless been a professional necessity, for travel was after all a way to meet patrons, to test competence, to do business. But the remarkable thing in Sōgi's case is that he continued traveling long after he could have settled into a lucrative literary practice in the capital, especially after his appointment as shogunal steward. In other words, I take his later travels to be less a product of necessity than of choice: again, a signal of his desire to gain an additional measure of quasi-religious authority, in his case via symbolic affiliation not with Teika or Shunzei, as had been true of Shōtetsu, but with other patron saints of poetry who were renowned as travelers—most importantly the monks Nōin (988-1050?) and Saigyō (1118-90).

Like Shōtetsu's condemnation of petty factionalism, then, I would argue that Sōgi's later travels—whatever their practical purposes—may be interpreted, along with his resignation as Shogunal Renga Master, as symbolically potent declarations of his professional ambitions. Retiring from the highest of bureaucratic offices, with attendant duties that would have kept him in the capital much of the time, was for Sōgi an act of self-exclusion that allowed him to play the professional role of mendicant, a kind of roving recluse. And this again was a step up to a higher order, a sacrifice that brought with it the promise of distinction.

After Sōgi, the poetic professions went through a series of transformations that paralleled changes taking place in Japanese society as a whole. Increased urbanization, economic diversification, rising rates of literary, and the advent of new publishing technologies opened up new fields of discourse as surely as they created new markets. Poetic institutions, in other words, could not remain untouched by social change. One of the results of all this was a new genre, haikai renku, a form of linked verse whose formal origins can be traced back to the linked verse of Sōgi but whose immediate associations in the 1600s were more plebeian. But the old genre of renga retained its importance in the highest social circles; and some other things, too, remained remarkably the same. Still students wanting to pursue poetry as an occupation studied under masters, still those masters served as figures of authority who constituted an élite cadre of specialists. Styles and stylistic trends changed, as did relationships between the cadres and other political and economic institutions, but poetic work in the early Edo period was still directed by socially sanctioned professionals.

The man we know as Matsuo Bashō—who is known in early records as Kiginsaku, Hanshichi, Tōshichirō, Tadaemon, Jinshichirō, and, most prominently, Munefusa—was born in the fourth decade of the Edo period, in the year 1644, near the castle town of Ueno in Iga province, the son of a wealthy landholder of samurai stock. We know virtually nothing of his life until his late teens, when he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshikiyo, heir of the Tōdō clan, feudal lords of Iga. Tradition says that he served on Yoshikiyo's kitchen staff, although no positive proof of that has ever been produced. In any case, for a young man of his background to enter into such service at one level or another was commonplace; and it was just as commonplace for one in such a situation to seek out an entrée into one of the artistic professions, as the young Munefusa, who had already shown a talent in haikai poetry, seems to have done.

Tōdō Yoshikiyo was an amateur haikai poet himself, who had taken the pen-name Sengin to declare his affiliation with Kitamura Kigin (1624-1705), one of the most prominent masters in nearby Kyōto. That Sengin and the young Munefusa should develop a special relationship was therefore only predictable. Probably through another local disciple of Kigin, Munefusa himself was affiliated with that Kyōto master, an adherent of the Teimon School of haikai. In 1666, he and his patron participated together in a linked verse sequence marking the anniversary of the deathdate of Matsunaga Teitoku (1571-1653), Kigin's teacher. Thus Munefusa was poised to gain entry into haikai society.

In 1666, Sengin died, leaving his literary companion (who now called himself Sōbō, a pen-name created by simply reading the characters of Munefusa in Chinese instead of Japanese) bereft in more ways than one. For of equal significance to the emotional blow of losing a fellow poet was the blow of losing an employer and patron. Contrary to popular stories that have him wandering for some years trying to come to terms with the death of Sengin, he seems to have stayed in Ueno for the next four or five years, probably living with his family.

Although it seems certain that Munefusa continued composing poetry and that he remained in contact with Kigin, we do not know precisely what he did with his time during these years, that is, until 1672, when he presented a thirty-verse hokku awase as a votive offering to the Tenmangū Shrine in Ueno. No doubt that act had private significance as well; but to us it is important because such an offering was one of the conventional steps taken by those embarking upon the haikai profession. Before, he had remained something of an amateur; after 1672 he was clearly asking to be known as a professional haikai poet.

The steps the young poet took toward acquiring the full privileges of the profession were entirely “conventional” in the sense of that term employed by Bourdieu and other sociologists. First, he sought further instruction from Kigin, eventually receiving secret teachings that conferred upon him a socially recognized authority.24 Next, he left his hometown and went to a cultural center, in this case Edo, which was at the time still a young, lively, and open city where a young man could make a name for himself more easily than in Kyōto—a choice clearly dictated by professional ambitions.25 Then he did what Shōtetsu or Sōgi or Kigin would have counseled him to do: he practiced, in order to establish his reputation. Early on, he seems to have relied chiefly on acquaintances from Iga and other disciples of Kigin for the social connections necessary to gain access to sources of symbolic power. To make ends meet, he took several clerical jobs, one in the City Waterworks Department, another as the scribe to a senior poet.26 But records make it clear that his dedication was to haikai as a profession. By 1675, under the pen-name Tōsei, he was gaining recognition through his participation in haikai gatherings and representation in haikai anthologies and had even begun to attract students. Like most young poets of the time, he became a devotee of the Danrin school, headed by Nishiyama Sōin (1605-82). Although this was a decision some scholars want to see as deriving from purely artistic motivations, it seems undeniable that it was also a necessary move for a young poet seeking professional recognition.

In the spring of 1477, Tōsei held a thousand-verse gathering and probably put out his shingle as a sōshō, or “master.” By this time he was acting as judge and teacher, after shaving his head bonze-style, another symbolic act signaling his identity as a professional. In a word, then, he had achieved “mastery,” in all senses of that term. By 1680 he was living in the Nihonbashi area—a haven for haikai poets—and working full time as a tenja, or “marker,” a licensed haikai poet to whom work could be submitted for review and “marking” with judgments of excellence (ten). Most of his students were of course amateurs whose job in the economy of things was to provide him with a living; but a number of them were also becoming deshi or shitei, or in other words, disciples who would more obviously assure the social and cultural continuity that is essential to any professional group.

But in the winter of 1680 Tōsei did something that at first glance seems extraordinary: as noted at the beginning of this paper, he left Nihonbashi and took up residence in an area east of the river Sumida, giving up his nascent “practice” as a marker, an act that one scholar describes as tantamount to quitting the profession as a livelihood, another as an act of professional suicide.27 Concurrently, he also seems to have made what scholars characterize as other “departures” from the expected haikai pattern—turning away from the Danrin style, taking up the study of Daoism and Chinese poets, and even studying Zen under Butchō, a monk living nearby. Likewise, it was around this time that he developed new relationships with his chief students, relying on them more for material sustenance, but through an informal, less superficially “secular” mode of reciprocation that permitted both master and disciple to think of the relationship in more idealistic terms.28

The usual way to account for this turning point in Bashō's life is to see it as motivated by either stylistic or spiritual concerns, which in either case are understood as expressing a new “seriousness” of purpose—the kind of seriousness evident in a famous hokku composed by Tōsei that very year:

On a bare branch
                    a crow has settled down to roost.
In autumn dusk.(29)

This stark image is a powerful one, perhaps even powerful enough to tempt one toward a reading that sees the crow as the poet opting for an ascetic existence among the bare trees, a convenient metaphor for the modest “hut” with the plantain tree that would soon give its occupant the name Bashō. And no doubt his “retirement” did entail stylistic and spiritual changes that might be characterized as in some ways “de-professionalizing,” to use the terminology of a prominent sociologist.30 But I would like to depart from precedent and consider Tōsei's move across the river, his reincarnation as Bashō, as in fact a move that was from the beginning enabled, or made possible, by his profession. For despite the characterizations of most of his biographers, it is clear that after 1680 Bashō still depended upon haikai for his occupation. His new residence, belying its status as a hermitage (an), was not located off on a mountainside, but in the city; and he still had students—Sugiyama Sampū (1647-1732), Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707), Hattori Ransetsu (1654-1707), and others—who looked to him for guidance and were in financial terms absolutely essential to his continued practice.31 His act was not simply a capitulation, then, or an abandonment; it was, however, an act of self-exclusion, similar to the acts of self-exclusion that we saw in the careers of Shōtetsu and Sōgi and could find in the careers of many other poets before Bashō's time.

In this sense Bashō's retirement was a thoroughly professional act with implications that were no doubt communicated to the social world that was the only possible arena for his art—the world of haikai society, meaning poets, both amateur and professional, as well as patrons, publishers, scholars, and other consumers of his work. It was not, then, an unprecedented act, but one that I believe the profession allowed for: a turn away from the commercial toward what ideologically were understood as the higher goals of the aesthetic and the religious, but which was also an attempt to gain greater esteem in the professional world, to reach a place reached by only a few. In a word, it was a way to reach out for fame, although a kind of fame that was always vouchsafed under a rule of modesty and self-effacement.

To those who study patterns of professionals and their institutions, such a characterization of Bashō's action may not be surprising. As one scholar, speaking for many others, says, it is routine for professions to define themselves in ways that pretend to “transcend the self-interest of business and market relations.”32 But for reasons that are equally transparent, literary scholars have been reluctant to analyze writers in terms of the social institutions that enable their work, assuming instead that their subjects of study should be understood individually, as isolated “artists” rather than as members of preconstituted communities.33 Thus Shōtetsu, Sōgi, and Bashō often appear in literary histories as hermits in huts, bent over their writing desks in pursuit of a private inspiration that sets them apart from their contemporaries, producing “works” that are seldom analyzed in ways that relate to the concrete conditions of their professional practice.

With others, I would argue that there are many reasons to reject such a solipsistic view of literary work in any genre. But in the case of Bashō the reasons for abandoning such a view are particularly compelling. For Bashō's genre of haikai renku—a form of “linked verse” that was composed by anywhere from two ot a dozen or so participants in a communal setting—was an art form that quite literally could not be pursued in the absence of a social context. Obscuring this fact, scholars even today tend to concentrate on Bashō's hokku rather than on his sequences; but any study of his life must deal with the fact that much of his professional time was spent pursuing his art in concert with other people—professionals and laymen, of necessity. And, as said above, this was as true after his move to Fukagawa as it had been before. That he stopped working as a tenja did not mean that he stopped practicing as a poet. And we can be certain that his students, both amateur and professional, saw his choice to move out of Nihonbashi as a step up and not a step out. Indeed, I would maintain that his move may be understood as an instance of what those in the highest ranks of a profession are often wont to do, i.e., to test their competence in a wider arena, and by so doing to claim a transcendent status for themselves and their occupations.34

Records of Bashō's life make the social dimensions of his existence abundantly clear to the student who looks beyond his “works” as mere representations of stylistic ideals to what they reveal about his practice.35 But perhaps the most direct way to approach the subject is to examine his travel journals. For he wrote more of these—six, in fact—than any other major haikai poet; and, significantly, all of them were written after his retirement as tenja, indicating that for some reason—a professional one, I will argue—he felt the need to invest a good part of his time and much of his newly metamorphosed identity in life on the road. For these reasons the travel journals recommend themselves as useful resources for study of Bashō the professional.

The first of Bashō's extended journeys began in 1684, the autumn and winter of which he spent travelling from Edo to Ise, Yoshino, Nara, Kyōto,Ōgaki, Nagoya, returning to Edo via Kiso and Kai in the late spring of 1685. The next two years he spent in Edo, setting out again in the eighth month of 1687 to visit Kashima in the east, with Sora (1649-1710) and other disciples accompanying him, returning in the twelfth month of the same year. Over the next seven years until his death in 1694, other journeys—some shorter, some longer—took him everywhere from his hometown of Ueno in the Kansai to Matsushima and Sado in the north. Like Sōgi, he therefore quite literally spent half of his last years on the road, returning to Edo only for short visits, proving that, as he says at the beginning of a journal written in 1689, he had indeed fallen “prey to wanderlust some years ago, desiring nothing better than to be a vagrant cloud scudding before the wind.”36 He died—quite fortuitously—inŌsaka, in borrowed rooms, surrounded by disciples.

Bashō's earliest travel record, which he named Nozarashi kikō, or “Exposure in the Fields,” was written in 1685, as a chronicle of his first journey alluded to above. It was followed by Kashima kikō (A Journey to Kashima) in 1687, Oi no kobumi (Backpack Notes) in 1688, Sarashina kikō (A Journey to Sarashina) in 1689, and Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road of the Interior) in 1694. Saga nikki (Saga Diary), written in 1691, is the slim record of a few months spent in the Saga area of Kyōto in the early summer of that year. Thus while he stopped short of recording all of his wanderings, the extant travel writings taken together tell us much about his literary practice during his final years.

On a first reading, these records seem to reveal little that is useful to the student of Bashō as a professional. The focus is more on poems and on the aesthetic experience they represent than on the social circumstances in which those poems were created. Some pages, such as the following from Nozarashi kikō, in fact do little but record hokku with brief introductory notes of the sort found in imperial poetry and anthologies.

Chanted on the road into Nagoya:
          A madcap verse:
          A wind-battered tree—
          such is my body, just like
                    old Chikusai's.
          Grass for my pillow:
          Is that a dog, weeping with the rain?
          A voice in the night.
Walking around looking at the snow:
          Hey, you townspeople!
          Let me sell you this straw hat—
          a hat made of snow.
Seeing a traveler:
          Even a horse
                    gets a stare—when snow is falling
                              in the morning.
Spending a day at the beach:
          The sea grows more dark—
          the voices of the ducks sounding faintly white.(37)

Here, in patterns familiar to any student of Japanese poetry, we confront a record that reduces experience to the slim figures of a highly aestheticized response to natural scenes. And those same patterns are repeated constantly in the other travel records. Predictably, then, there are allusions to old poems, old places, and old poets and historical figures, along with some references to other sights along the road; but, just as predictably, overt references to the professional activities of Bashō's itinerary are scarce. In fact, reading the following passages from the beginnings of four of his most famous records one might conclude that the only motivation he admits to is a desire to see that most poetic of sights, the moon:

“Setting out on a thousand-mile trek, I have no provisions for the road—casting my lot with the emptiness of the midnight moon.” So said the man of old whose staff I took as my support as I left my hut by the river in the eighth month of the first year of Jōkyō.38

Nozarashi kikō

It seems that when Teishitsu of Kyōto went to see the moon at Suma Bay, he said this: “In a pine's shade / beneath the fifteenth moon— / the Middle Counselor.” With fondness for that same madman of old, I decided this autumn to go and see the moon in the mountains of Kashima.39

Kashima mōde

Swayed into action by the importunings of the autumn wind, I set out to see Sarashina Village and the moon over Mount Obasute …40

Sarashina kikō

I myself fell prey to wanderlust some years ago, desiring nothing better than to be a vagrant cloud scudding before the wind. Only last autumn, after having drifted along the seashore for a time, had I swept away the old cobwebs from my dilapidated riverside hermitage. But the year ended and before I knew it, I found myself looking at hazy spring skies and thinking of crossing Shirakawa Barrier. … By the time I had mended my torn trousers, put a new cord on my hat, and cauterized my legs with moxa, I was thinking only of the moon at Matsushima.41

Oku no hosomichi

Remote and ethereal, the moon is a perfect object of contemplation, as countless earlier poets had proven. To say that the desire to enjoy its light is the foremost motivation for any activity is to claim a familiar dedication to concerns that are almost wholly aesthetic.

Almost—but not all. For we should note that the same declaration also proclaims an affiliation with earlier poets, including Saigyō and Sōgi and a host of others whose names Bashō drops repeatedly. And in other ways too Bashō's travel records contain glimpses of the professional affiliations that formed the primary material and social context of his travels. As had been true in the age of Sōgi, going on the road was for any poet a way to renew acquaintances with old students and patrons, as well as create new ones. And if this makes him sound like an oroshiya, or traveling salesman, I would submit that the comparison is not entirely unfortunate. For we should not allow the aesthetic preoccupations of the verses from Nozarashi kikō quoted above to obscure the fact that at least three of them were originally the hokku, or “initiating verses,” for full sequences, composed in linking sessions in which Bashō served as master, supervising a few of his traveling companions and local amateurs of the merchant and samurai classes who were clearly patrons.42 Nor should we in our rush to get to the poems simply pass over passages like the following from Oku no hosomichi:

At Obanazawa, we called on Seifū, a man whose tastes were not vulgar despite his wealth. As a frequent visitor to the capital, he understood what it meant to be a traveler, and kept us for several days, trying in many kind ways to make us forget the hardships of the long journey.43

Precisely what Bashō means by saying that his patron Seifū (1615-1721), whom other sources describe as a dealer in silk, tobacco, rice, and dyes with the lay name of Suzuki, “understood what it meant to be a traveler” we cannot be sure; but surely as a traveling poet Bashō expected to be welcomed—with rest, lodging, and food, at the least. And we can be sure that there were expectations of Seifū's side as well. While in Obanazawa Bashō would engage in his occupation by acting as master of the art in sessions involving Seifū and other local poets and patrons. Of these sessions we have only fragments, but fragments not so small as to disguise all that is behind them—namely, the patterns of Bashō's poetic practice.44

None of this surprises students of Bashō's life, of course; scholars have always known that Bashō visited patrons on the road, and that as a poet he was involved in the world of commerce. My point in drawing attention to these activities in this specific context, however, is to argue that Bashō's reticence in treating worldly matters in his travel records, and his corresponding attention to legend, history, and aesthetic experience, result less from happenstance or personal style than from a professional imperative that is somewhat predictable. His “style,” in other words, is predetermined by a code inherited from the past—from Shōtetsu, Sōgi, and a host of others—but also observable in other times and places, a code that requires those at the true pinnacle of the profession to represent themselves as operating from “high motives of altruism, or glory, or of moral, spiritual or aesthetic commitment, rather than for mundane gain.” Not surprisingly, this “ideological covering” is seen rather routinely in many professions until this day.45

Now, this same ideology is of course observable in Bashō's activities back in Edo as well. But it is in the nature of travel records—especially so in their prose sections—to reveal both more cracks in the aesthetic surface and more overt statements of professional ideology, as in the following from the beginning of Oi no kobumi:

Within the hundred bones and nine orifices of my body is something that I will give the name Furabō—“the Monk of Gossamer on the Wind”: which is to say that it is a thin fabric easily torn by the wind. Since long ago Furabō has loved mad verses, eventually making them the means of its way through life. Sometimes it grew tired of poetry and almost cast it aside; other times it was caught up in pride, thinking it had triumphed over others. In its breast a conflict raged, for which its body suffered. For a while it sought to establish itself, but was prevented; then it studied in order to realize its ignorance, only to be defeated once more, ending up following—without skill, without talent—this one lone way. The waka of Saigyō, the renga of Sōgi, the paintings of Sesshū, the tea of Rikyū—the thing that runs through all of these is one and the same. For elegance follows creation, befriends the four seasons. What it sees—never is that not a flower; what is thinks of—never is that not the moon. If the form be not a flower—that is the same as being a barbarian; if the heart be not a flower—that is to be among the birds and beasts. Go out from among the barbarians, depart from the beasts! Follow creation, return to creation.46

Any student who has thought about professions as social institutions will not miss the signs of special pleading at work in this famous passage, in which the poet presents himself—in terms that almost deny him any volition in the matter—as dedicated to beauty, to the great poets of the past and their high ideals, and to the ultimate legitimizing power of nature, while failing to make any mention of the more mundane features of his practice. Nor will that student be surprised to read the sentence and poem that immediately follow the passage:

At the beginning of the godless month the skies were unsettled, and I felt like a leaf on the wind, destination unknown.

A traveler—
by that name will I be called,
amidst first showers.(47)

It need hardly be said that the definition of travel presented here is central to Bashō's professional aspirations. As Bourdieu might say, the amount one is ready to “suffer” is the measure of one's commitment—acknowledged or not. Clearly, Bashō was ready to “accept the sacrifices that are implied by privilege.”48 His devotion to the profession—or at least to its idealized image—was total. Another passage—this one from Oku no hosomichi—says it all:

We lodged the night at Iizuka … Thunder rumbled during the night, and rain fell in torrents. What with the roof leaking right over my head and the fleas and mosquitoes biting, I got no sleep at all. To make matters worse, my old complaint flared up, causing me such agony that I almost fainted.


At long last, the short night ended and we set out again. Still feeling the effects of the night, I rode a rented horse to Kōri post-station. It was unsettling to fall prey to an infirmity while so great a distance remained ahead. But I told myself that I had deliberately planned this long pilgrimage to remote areas, a decision that meant renouncing worldly concerns and facing the fact of life's uncertainty. If I were to die on the road—very well, that would be Heaven's decree.49

There is no reason to doubt the reality of the pain that Bashō describes here, nor the strength of the resolve that he articulates, any more than there is a reason to deny the power and beauty of his poems, whatever their status as part of his practice. But we should at least recognize that what he is communicating, to his own students, as well as to the whole haikai profession and beyond, is a particular kind of resolve that is ideologically significant: a professional resolve that is meant to connect him with the élite of the past and to show his worthiness to be counted in their number in the present. For such dedication was virtually a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to ultimate fame. What looks like self-denial, even if the self-denial is sincere, even if it is self-delusion—is in fact, then, also a claim for special status. Travel in the late seventeenth century was not as dangerous as it had been for Sōgi; but it was, in ideological terms, still a rite of passage that had to be represented as entailing hardship.

It is important to note that going on the road did, quite literally, involve trials: professional rites of passage need not be empty of real challenge in order to function as rites of passage. To borrow the words of Samuel Weber writing about professionals of another time and place, the road was an arena of real struggle—“the struggle to assimilate the shocks and intrusions of experience” according to conventions.50 But the point is that the trials were not an impediment to Bashō's purposes; they were part and parcel of those purposes. Thus, as he traveled, Bashō's competence as a master of poetry was continually tested—in linking sessions where he had to show his leadership skills, his command of rules and conventions, and his creative capacities in a way that justified both the appropriateness of his position as a professional and the appropriateness of his companions as disciples or laymen; in encounters with famous places that demanded skillful poetic responses, in addition to a thorough knowledge of the responses of predecessors in the profession; and, not least importantly, in the conversion of the raw material of experience into a travel journal that would be judged against earlier works as part of the attempt for lasting reputation. In this sense, a knowledge of the patterns of professional conventions that gave structure to his practice is no more sufficient to explain his place in history than is a knowledge of the rules of his genre of linked verse sufficient to account for the excellence of his poetry. But noting those patterns—patterns almost never explicitly revealed—is still worthwhile for the new vantage point it affords those concerned with Bashō and his world.

What, then, can an analysis of Bashō as a professional offer? First, it can help us see the patterns of his existence in terms of the institutions in which he participated. Remembering that he was a professional whose practice was in many ways like the practice of other professionals may help us understand his existence more completely. It may help us to see that his poems and other writings were not produced or read solely as aesthetic artifacts, but also as statements of status within a literary community that was socially constituted, with its own agendas. It will also show that his “works”—meaning the artifacts he left behind—should not be regarded as fully identical with his practice. Every linked-verse sequence was in the beginning a social event, albeit one that often remains for us impossible to reconstruct fully.

So the profession Bashō chose for himself was constituted by stratifications and hierarchies within which he opted at a certain point for the ultimate distinction, probably knowing the challenges and loyalties such a choice would entail. Among other things, this means that we cannot agree with those who see a desire for freedom—at least in the naive sense—as the true motive for his travels any more than we can see a desire for freedom as the motive behind his decision to leave Nihonbashi for Fukagawa.51 In fact, his motive in going on the road may have been, in a way, the opposite—to exert authority symbolically and materially, bringing new students under his sway and subjecting new spaces to his power.52 He was, after all, a Master. And this also means that we should not be surprised to find him adopting a conservative attitude on important literary issues of his day, explaining why, in contrast to Saikaku, for instance, he turned so resolutely away from the new urban market that increasingly demanded literature as entertainment rather than a tool for the education of the sensibility; or why he adhered so steadfastly to the classical canon of aristocratic literature, condemning as vulgar even recent poets in his own genre such as Matsunaga Teitoku and Nishiyama Sōin.53

Finally, to return to his travel records. I believe that a consideration of Bashō's place in the literary hierarchy of his day will help us see his “mastery” in terms that situate him and his profession more clearly in the discourses of his time. His insistence on the identity of rice-planting songs with the larger poetic tradition, his careful noting of the unexpected refinement of village urchins or farmwives, his praise for the inherent honesty of innkeepers or rural guides: all of these things, viewed in the context of the strategies that legitimized his profession, will be seen no longer as quaint characterizations or vehicles of style but rather as articulations of a conservative discourse whose genealogy can be traced back at least as far as Ki no Tsurayuki. Not surprisingly, the perceived contours of that discourse succeeded in keeping poetry out of debates—overtly, at least—on politics, ethics, and other issues of value by granting it a place “outside” the realm of more “engaged” discourses. Judging from the way Bashō and other professional poets are still analyzed, one must say that that strategy has succeeded. For scholars dealing with literary texts—and I include myself here—have long resisted the idea of “reducing” poetry to the status of political rhetoric of the sort one finds in the “popular” media.54 But to deny poetry any place in the larger discourses of its time is simply to deny its power in another way. Bashō and other poets do their best to keep their art safely in the margins, exempt from certain kinds of scrutiny, almost demanding to be viewed by what Bourdieu calls the “pure gaze”,55 if we insist on leaving it there—leaving the crow in his bare tree—we end up having to ignore the implications of statements like this, taken from a description of his 1689 visit to Nikkō, the funeral shrine of the reigning Tokugawa clan:

On the first day of the fourth month, we went to worship at the shrine. In antiquity, the name of that holy mountain was written Nikōsan [Two-Storm Mountain], but the Great Teacher Kūkai changed it to Nikkō [Sunlight] when he founded the temple. It is almost as though the Great Teacher had been able to see a thousand years into the future, for today the shrine's radiance extends throughout the realm, its beneficence overflows in the eight directions, and the four classes of people dwell in security and peace. This is an awesome subject of which I shall write no more.

Ah, awesome sight!
On summer leaves and spring leaves,
the radiance of the sun!(56)

The trees here, so to speak, are not bare, but full of social and ideological significance. Is this an endorsement of the shogunal institution? Of its dogmas? Perhaps so; perhaps not. The question of course needs further analysis. I am suggesting that one way to begin this process is to say, first, that Bashō the professional poet must have recognized an ideologically constituted affiliation with the Great Teacher, and, second, that study of the dynamics of other professions should make us pay special attention when any professional marks a subject so holy that about it he will “write no more.” I do this not to debunk but to demystify, or in other words, to begin to understand the socio-economic world in which Bashō operated as a poet, and the ideological and social dimensions of his professional work in ways not dominated by those traces we are accustomed to calling his art.

Notes

  1. Ueda Makoto, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 53.

  2. I have found the following helpful in thinking through the question of how the term “professional” might be conceptualized when applied to late medieval and early modern Japan: Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977): Michael Burrage and Rolf Torstendahl, Professions in Theory and History: Rethinking the Study of the Professions (London: Sage Publications, 1990); Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987); Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, tr. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991); idem. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

  3. Bashō's consciousness of Sōgi as a model is apparent in his famous hokku:

    To grow old is enough—
    and then to have to watch showers
    from Sōgi's hut.

    and from references in his travel records. See below.

  4. Weber, 25.

  5. Robert H. Brower and Steven D. Carter, Conversations with Shōtetsu (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, Univ. of Michigan, 1992), 142.

  6. Ibid., 119.

  7. Ibid., 104.

  8. Ibid., 122.

  9. Ibid., 144.

  10. Ibid., 147.

  11. See ibid., 26-30, for details.

  12. One could argue that this step was not available in the same way for courtier poets, whose role in the bureaucratic system made withdrawal professionally impossible. For an analysis of the phenomenon of “semi-reclusion” in Japanese Zen that helps make sense of Shōtetsu's actions, see Joseph D. Parker, “The Hermit at Court: Reclusion in Early Fifteenth-Century Japanese Zen Buddhism,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 21.1 (1995).

  13. Brower and Carter, 61-62.

  14. Steven D. Carter, “‘Seeking What the Masters Sought’: Masters, Disciples, and Poetic Enlightenment in Late Medieval Japan,” The Distant Isle: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Robert H. Brower (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, Univ. of Michigan, 1996).

  15. Although both Tonna and Kenkō were opponents in the sense that they were devotees of the Nijō school at court, Shōtetsu—predictably—shows respect for both as professionals. See Carter and Brower, 68, 95-96, 105-6, 163.

  16. Stylistically, this transcendence may have a correlative in the ideal of yūgen, or “mystery and depth,” that Shōtetsu argues “is something that cannot possibly be explained in words or distinguished clearly in the mind.” Brower and Carter, 161-62.

  17. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 117-26.

  18. Ibid.

  19. See Steven D. Carter, Three Poets at Yuyama (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, Univ. of California, 1983), 12-34.

  20. Sōgi studied with both Sōzei and Shinkei. In the 1470s he put together an anthology of linked verse by those and several other prominent students of Shōtetsu's, entitled Chikurinshō. That a disciple of the conservative Tō no Tsuneyori (1401-84) should undertake such a labor on behalf of poets such as Shinkei who were of the opposite camp is further evidence of the way professional loyalties often transcend philosophical or stylistic differences.

  21. Earlier commissioners had stayed much longer, Sōzei for six years, Nōa (1397-1471) for fourteen years, and Sōi (1418-85) for at least a decade. Sōgi's successor, Kensai (1452-1510), also held the office for more than a decade.

  22. His last personal collections appeared in 1496 and 1499, and Shinsen tsukubashū (The New Tsukuba Collection)—an imperially commissioned anthology for which Sōgi was given chief responsibility—was submitted for imperial review in 1495. During his final years he also taught a number of students, lectured in the capital and in the provinces on the court classics, and continued to act as master at numerous linked verse sessions.

  23. His travels took him to Settsu,Ōmi, Echigo, Echizen, Kii, and also the Kantō.

  24. The date given for transmission of the secrets is 1674.

  25. Yonetani Iwao, “Bashō to sono jidai,” in Bashō, ed. Imoto Nōichi, vol. 28 of Kanshō Nihon koten bungaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1975), 436.

  26. Takano Yūzan (d. 1702).

  27. See Abe Masami, 465, 472, and Kon Eizō, “Bashō no seikaku,” in Bashō kushū, vol. 51 of Shinchō nihon koten shūsei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982), 366.

  28. It appears, for instance, that his disciples literally provided him with a “hut” and with food—as gifts rather than “payments.”

  29. Matsuo bashō shū, ed. Imoto Nōichi et al., vol. 41 of Nihon koten bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1972), 61.

  30. See Randal Collins, “Market Closure and the Conflict Theory of the Professions,” in Burrage and Torstendahl, 26-29.

  31. We know that by 1683 Bashō was living in a tenement apartment—still referred to as a hut—purchased by students.

  32. Weber, 27.

  33. The desire to grant writers independence from socio-political contests may of course arise from a desire for a similar status among scholars themselves. See Scott Wilson, Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 4-8.

  34. Cf. Weber and Collins.

  35. To conflate practice with artifacts is particularly constricting in the case of haikai poets, whose “works” amount to only a skeletal record of their professional activities.

  36. Helen Craig McCullough, tr., “The Narrow Road of the Interior,” in Classical Japanese Prose (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 522.

  37. Tr. Carter.

  38. Tr. Carter.

  39. Tr. Carter. Teishitsu (1610-73) was a disciple of Matsunaga Teitoku (1571-1653). The “Middle Counselor” of his poem refers to Ariwara no Yukihira (818-893), the author of a famous poem about Suma.

  40. Tr. Carter.

  41. McCullough, 522.

  42. The first verse was composed for a session involving the Nagoya merchants Jūgo (d. 1717), Yasui (d. 1743), and Tokoku (d. 1690); the third verse for one involving hōgetsu; and the last one for one involving Tōyō (d. 1712), a rich man of Atsuta City. One of Bashō's companions at the time was Boku'in (1646-1725), a wealthy shipper from nearby Ōgaki.

  43. McCullough, 539.

  44. Bashō records four hokku written during his time with Seifū, three by himself and one by Sora. We know from other sources that he also participated in a number of haikai renku sequences.

  45. See Collins, 35.

  46. Tr. Carter.

  47. Tr. Carter.

  48. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

  49. McCullough, 531.

  50. Weber, 23.

  51. Yonetani, 441.

  52. See Weber, 18-32, for an analysis of professional conventions that draws on Peirce and Freud to see those conventions as a means of combat anxiety and the fear involved in confrontations with alterity.

  53. For Bashō's criticisms of Saikaku, see Yonetani, 442. No doubt the career of Saikaku, too, could be analyzed in the context of professional patterns, but it seems clear that in opting for the new genre of “fiction” he was openly embracing commerce in ways that Bashō did not. For an article that deals with a similar historical period and similar professional choices, see Siegfried J. Schmidt, “Conventions and Literary Systems,” in Rules and Conventions, ed. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992).

  54. I should admit also a desire to avoid two other kinds of reductivism pointed out by Michael Burrage, Konrad Jarausch, and Hannes Siegrist, in “An actor-based framework for the study of the professions,” an essay included in Burrage and Torstendahl. The first they describe as a tendency, derived from naive readings of Foucault, to treat “the professions as ‘a field of discourse’, as though they were dominated by disciplinary concerns and never had to practice their profession” (p. 216). The second, not unrelated to the first, is to treat professionals as mere agents of repression who enjoy “excessive power and privileges” and whose “ethical codes are bogus and a cover for the pursuit of their material interests and so on” (p. 223).

  55. See Bourdieu, Distinction.

  56. McCullough, 525.

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Matsuo Bashō and the Poetics of Scent

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