In the year we know as 1689, poet and teacher Matsuo Basho embarked on a 1500-mile walking tour of northern Honshu, Japan. Leaving his home in Edo, modern-day Tokyo, Basho and his traveling companion, Sora, explored the historical monuments, literary landmarks, religious shrines, and scenic wonders of the Tohoku hinterlands, places of deep cultural significance [utamakura] he had vicariously encountered in plays, poems, sagas, and songs. The poetic travel diary Basho published as his account of this trip, a book English-speakers know as The Narrow Road of the Interior*, secured his literary reputation for centuries so that a modern Japanesetourism industry enables fans of the book and the poet to recreate many segments of the famous journey for themselves.
One part of Basho's spring-time excursion took the 17th-century tourists through Fukushima to Sendai where they met an artist named Kaemon, who guided them on an impromptu tour of famous local places. Basho writes,
The bush clover grew thick at Miyagino; I could imagine the sight in autumn. It was the season when the pierisbloomed at Tamada, Yokono, and Tsutsuji-gaoka. We entered a pine grove where no sunlight penetrated—a place called Konoshita, according to Kaemon—and I thought it must have been the same kind of heavy moisture, dripping from those very trees long ago, that inspired the poem, "Suggest to your lord, attendants, that he wear his hat." We paid our respects at the Yakushido Hall and at Tenjin Shrine before the day ended. (Basho 615)
Basho and Sora left Sendai with a hand-drawn map Kaemon had prepared to show them the way to Shiogama and Matushima. On the road to these locations already long celebrated in Japanese culture for their historical associations, religious significance, and rare natural beauty, our travelers found "the Courtyard Monument Stone at Tagajo in Ichikawa Village," a relic of an 8th-century castle that prompted Basho to contemplate its survival against the ravages of time (615).
Although we hear about many places celebrated in verse since antiquity, most of them have vanished with the passing of time. Mountains have crumbled, rivers have entered unaccustomed channels, roads have followed new routes, stones have been buried and hidden underground, aged trees have given way to saplings. But this monument was a genuine souvenir from 1,000 years ago, and to see it before my eyes was to feel that I could understand the sentiments of the old poets. "This is a traveler's reward," I thought. "This is the joy of having survived into old age." (Basho 615)
Among its other purposes for Basho, art functioned as social memory, preserving Japan's past glories against the future's destructive tide. Among his journey's objectives, Basho counted its opportunities to see for himself the utamakura of culture and geography enshrined in literature by Japanese masters whose verses he revered and whose reputations he was striving to surmount. What he discovered upon his arrival at Shiogama at dusk, gazing at fishing boats as they rowed to harbor before a moonlit Magaki Island and rehearsing lines from another old poem as they floated to the surface of his memory, is that art was shaping his experiences on the road: because he had read about them, the places he encountered evoked feelings already associated with them by his predecessors. Sometimes, Basho's emotions interfered with his intent to update the artistic record of utamakura with his own inspired poetry. Notably, the bay at Matsushima, "the most beautiful spot in Japan" renowned for its innumerable, sometimes fantastically shaped, pine-covered islands, defeated Basho's ability to craft haiku: "What painter can reproduce, what author can describe the wonder of the creator's divine handiwork?" he asks (617). In the presence of nature's sublime beauty, visceral experiences of awe, reverence, and wonder seemed to impede Basho's immediate poetic impulses, yet months later the memory of Matsushimasupposedly gave him this prize-winning poem:
Matsushima, ah! Ah-Ah, Matsushima, ah! Matsushima, ah!
In these lines, Basho fused the personal and social dimensions of his Matsushima experience: the intense emotion they express makes sense only in the context of his culture's centuries-old adoration of a locale named as one of Japan's three most scenic places. Basho's haiku need not "describe...the creator's divine handiwork" because preceding artists have already done so. Instead, his poem succeeds because its emotional register validates the aesthetic tradition of Matsushima. Yet, the poem remains a paradox—like a koan, perhaps—because it both does and does not represent the place it names.
Basho knew the paradoxical essence of art; his Narrow Road reads like a walking meditation through a landscape where time has unmade the artifacts humans fashioned to preserve the memory of temporal endeavor against the ravages of time. Beyond Matsushima at Hiraizumi, north of Sendai in the Iwate Prefecture, Basho found Mount Kinkeizan, Takadachi, and ruins of castles that had been settings for the 12th-century rise and fall of the noble Fujiwara family. "The glory of three generations," Basho writes, "was but a dozing dream" subsumed by "[p]addies and wild fields"; the clan's "heroic deeds lasted only a moment, and nothing remains but evanescent clumps of grass" (618). Confronted with the impermanence of human creativity, Basho "wept for a long time," his emotional state exacerbated, perhaps, by lines he quotes from Chinese poet Tu Fu eulogizing the fall of the 8th-century T'ang Dynasty:
"The nation is destroyed; the mountains and rivers remain. Spring comes to the castle; the grasses are green." (618)Eventually, Basho penned his own haiku following this theme:
A dream of warriors and after dreaming is done, the summer grasses. (618)
Tragic awareness of human endeavor's impermanence haunted the rest of his journey such that, weeks and miles later along the coast of the Sea of Japan, studying Sanemori's helmet [scroll down: 4th image] on display at the Tada Shrine in Komatsu, Basho conceded time's mastery of art with this haiku:
A heartrending sound! Underneath the helmet, the cricket. (625)Described as "no ordinary warrior's headgear," this helmet was a work of art: "From visor to ear-flaps, it was decorated with a gold-filled chrysanthemum arabesque in the Chinese style, and the front was surmounted by a dragon's head and a pair of horns" (Basho 625). Reporting the helmet's status as "a gift from Lord Yoshitomo in the old days when Sanemori served the Genji" and died in battle, Basho invokes art's epic memory of human heroism. In counterpoise, his haiku offers a solitary cricket's chirping song emanating from the shelved helmet to express the "heartrending" pathos of heroism lost and art's purpose thwarted. The haiku conveys Basho's realization that art, like life, contains beauty and suffering, meaning and ambiguity, memory and forgetting.
Despite these paradoxes and the moments of contemplation they provoke, it is the traveler's lot to continue moving through a journey's succession of sorrow and joy, struggle and contentment, disappointment and inspiration. There can be no doubt that Basho used travel as a metaphor for life itself. His Narrow Road travel diary begins with this most telling paragraph:
The sun and the moon are eternal voyages; the years that come and go are travelers, too. For those whose lives float away on boats, for those who greet old age with hands clasping the lead ropes of horses, travel is life, travel is home. And many are the men of old who have perished as they journeyed. (Basho 607)It ends not with his arrival at Ogaki and his return to a society of "close friends...rejoicing and pampering me as though I had returned from the dead" but with his embarkation on yet another tour to "witness the relocation of the Ise sanctuaries" (Basho 629). To be alive is to be in motion, to be caught in the drift of time's ebbs and flows, to be perpetually renewed in season, and with this understanding I need no longer worry how Basho would react could he bear witness to the Great Tohoku earthquake's and tsunami's destructive effects on the people and culture of modern Japan and the remnants of the many utamakura he had memorialized. He would weep, render what aid he could, and write about his experiences. Now, my own desires to explore Japan in Basho's footsteps along his Narrow Road delayed indefinitely, this essay's vicarious excursion through his world has completed my simulation of his actions, and I feel closer to him for it.
Comment if you like (I will catch up with you later this evening when I return from dinner), but better yet, please donate for the relief of the Japanese people injured and displaced by the ongoing disaster. Namu Amida Butsu.
*Alternately, some English editions translate the title as The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The version of Basho's travel journal cited by this diary is found in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Vol. D: 1650-1800. Ed. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. 607-29.