Bashō's Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō

Introduction: Bashō's Journey

I n t r o d u c t i o n I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions . I leaned on the staff of an ancient who, it is said, entered into nothingness under the midnight moon. It was the first year of Jōkyō, autumn, the eighth moon. As I left my ramshackle hut by the river, the sound of the wind was strangely cold. bleached bones on my mind, the wind pierces my body to the heart nozarashi o / kokoro ni kaze no / shimu mi kana —Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field In mid-autumn of 1684, the Japanese haikai1 poet Matsuo Bashō set off from Edo (now Tokyo) on a journey. Accompanied by his friend and disciple Chiri, he stopped at his native village of Ueno in Iga Province, where his mother had died the previous year. He also traveled to the Grand Shrine at Ise, the holiest site in Shinto, to Mount Yoshino famous for its natural beauty, and to the ancient cities of Nara and Kyōto. But his journey was not merely a visit to his old home or to famous scenic spots, it was the beginning of a wayfaring life. He would represent this ideal in five travel journals, the last one, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi) being one of the great prose works of Japanese literature. His travels also were an occasion for writing the prose poems known as haibun, “haikai prose.” In the West, we have become 1 accustomed to thinking of Bashō as a “nature poet,” but he was also a great prose stylist, and much of his literary prose is inextricably related to his itinerant life. This trip lasted until early summer of 1685. One result was Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field (Nozarashi kikō), his first travel journal. Marked throughout by a deep sensitivity to the impermanence of all things (mujō-kan), the journal begins with the passage quoted above in which Bashō imagines himself dead by the roadside. In the first significant episode of the journal, he comes across a baby abandoned by the roadside. He expresses great pity for the child and asks how it could have come to such a fate, then decides “this is simply from heaven” and, after tossing the child some food, leaves it behind as he continues on his journey.2 Soon afterwards we read a famous poem about his horse suddenly devouring a rose of Sharon blossom, unable to live out even its brief life of one day. Back in his home village, he is presented with strands of his late mother’s white hair. Despite all these images of impermanence, there is continuity through time, however, as in the beautiful passage in which he enters Yoshino and communes with poets of old. The journal, which had balanced prose and poetry for much of the text, ends with a series of hokku with only brief headnotes. The journal concludes on a humorous note, with the journey ended but Bashō still trying to remove from his clothes lice he had picked up on his travels. It is not known when Bashō completed the manuscript of this first journal, but it was published in 1687, the same year as his second, short trip, this time to see the autumn moon at Kashima Shrine. Kashima Journal is most significant for the amusing but complex self-image near the beginning. Bashō is accompanied by a rather pretentious monk and a simple lay person who are presented as a bird and a mouse. He then characterizes himself as a bat, someone neither priestly nor worldly but with qualities of both.3 In this journal there has no integration of poetry and prose throughout the text. It consists rather of an extended prose passage followed by a series of hokku. Bashō’s third journal is Knapsack Notebook (Oi no kobumi), the title of which refers to a wooden, lacquered backpack (oi) worn by priests while traveling. The journal concerns a lengthy trip west from Edo from November 1687 to May 2 B a s h ō’ s J o u r n e y 1688, accompanied by his disciple Tokoku. He returns again to his native village Ueno, Ise, and Yoshino, and ventures farther west to Waka Bay, Osaka, Suma, and Akashi, the site of one of Japan’s most...