Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  72. The original version, which Bashō composed at the residence of Takano Ichiei, a wealthy shipping agent who owned a boathouse on the Mogami River, was “gathering the rains of the wet season—cool, the Mogami River,” which was followed by the wakiku, “A wharf post, tying a firefly to the bank,” by Ichiei. Bashō’s hokku praised the view of the river from Ichiei’s residence by commenting on the “cool” sight of the huge Mogami River gathering in samidare (Fifth-Month rains), the steady rains of the wet season. In the second verse, Ichiei compared himself to the wharf posts that restrain the beautiful firefly (Bashō), thereby thanking his distinguished guest for the opportunity to entertain him. The revised version in Narrow Road, which drops the word “cool” (suzushi), is no longer a greeting to a host. The Mogami River, the largest river in the province and the main artery for all the other tributaries and streams, is “gathering” (atsumete) or has been gathering over time—one interpretation is that the wet season (samidare) is already over—the rains of the entire province, resulting in a massively swollen river, the force of which is captured and condensed in the quick sound and meaning of the word hayashi (swift). Here Bashō gives a new “poetic essence” (hon’i), based on personal experience, to the Mogami River, an utamakura (poetic place) associated from the time of the Kokinshū (Azuma-uta, no. 1092) with rice-grain boats (inabune), which were thought to ply the river.

  73. Feather Black Mountain (Haguroyama), Moon Mountain (Gassan), and Bathhouse Mountain (Yudono), are called the Three Mountains (Sanzan).

  74. Kanshō and Bakuya.

  75. Both the process of sword making and the cherry trees blossoming in the cold at the top of the mountain are implicit metaphors for Basho’s ascetic journey.

  76. “Plum blossoms in summer heat” is a Zen phrase for the unusual ability to achieve enlightenment. The plum tree blooms in early spring and generally never lasts until the summer. The poem by the priest Gyōson (1055–1135) is “Think of us as feeling sympathy for each other! Mountain cherry blossoms! I know of no one beside you here” (Kinyōshū, 1127; Misc. 1, no. 521).

  77. Greetings to the spirit of the land often employed complex wordplay, homophones, and associative words, which interweave the place-name into the physical description. In this hokku the prefix hono (faintly or barely) and mikazuki (third-day moon) create an implicit visual contrast between the thin light of the crescent moon and the blackness of the night, implied in the name Haguroyama, or Feather Black Mountain. The silver hook of the moon, which casts a thin ray of light through the darkness, brings a sense of “coolness” amid the summer heat, suggesting both the hospitality and the spiritual purity of the sacred mountain.

  78. Kumo no mine (literally, cloud peak) is a high, cumulonimbus cloud that results from intense moisture and heat. The mountain-shaped clouds, which have gathered during midday at the peak of Gassan, or Moon Mountain, crumble or collapse one after another until they are finally gone, leaving the moon shining over the mountain (tsuki no yama), a Japanese reading for Gassan. The word ikutsu (how many?) may be read either as doubt, as in “peaks of clouds, how many have collapsed?” or as “a considerable number,” as in “peaks of clouds, a considerable number have collapsed.” An earlier passage stating that “the moon of Tendai insight was clear” (Tendai shikan no tsuki akiraka ni) also suggests enlightenment, an “unclouded” state of mind. Movement, in short, occurs from midday, when the clouds block the view, to night, when the mountain stands unobscured; from the heat of midday to the cool of evening; from the ephem-erality of the clouds, which disappear one after another, to the sacred mountain, which stands firm and awesome; and from mental obscurity to enlightenment.

  79. In contrast to the first two mountains, Haguroyama and Gassan, which never appeared in classical poetry, Yudono (literally, Bathhouse) was an utamakura, referred to in classical poetry as Koi-no-yama, Mountain of Love. The body of the Yudono deity was a huge red rock that spouted hot water and was said to resemble sexual organs. “Forbidden to speak” (katararenu) refers to the rule that all visitors to Yudono, the holiest of the Three Mountains of Dewa, are forbidden to speak about the appearance of the mountain to others. The wetting of the sleeves echoes the erotic association with love and bathing and suggests the speaker’s tears of awe at the holiness of the mountain. The journey over the Three Mountains, in which the traveler almost dies from exhaustion and cold before coming to Yudono, a place of sexuality and fertility, represents a rite of passage, a kind of death and rebirth.

  80. This hokku is a greeting to the host Fugyoku, using the associations of the place names Atsumiyama (Hot Springs Mountain) and Fukuura (Blowing Bay) to indicate that the view from the host’s house provides a feeling of “coolness” on a hot day—a theme further developed in the next hokku on the Mogami River.

  81. The first version was composed by Bashō as part of a kasen at the residence of Terajima Hikosuke, a wealthy merchant at Sakata: “Coolness—pouring into the sea, Mogami River.” The hokku, which is a salutation, praises the view from Hikosuke’s house, which overlooks the Mogami River at the point where the giant river flows into the Japan Sea. In the revised version, the Mogami River is pouring the atsuki hi, which can be read either as “hot sun” or “hot day,” suggesting both a setting sun washed by the waves at sea and a hot summer’s day coming to a dramatic close in the sea. Bashō drops the word “coolness” (suzushisa) and the constraints of the greeting to create a more dramatic image, one that suggests coolness without using the word.

  82. Here Bashō compares Kisagata to the famous West Lake in China, of which Su Dongpo (Su Shi, 1037–1101) wrote, “The sparkling, brimming waters are beautiful in sunshine; / The view when a misty rain veils the mountains is exceptional too. / West Lake can be compared to Xi Shi: / She is charming whether her makeup is light or elaborate” (translated by Helen McCullough).

  83. Kisagata became associated with Nōin (d. 1050) as a result of the poem “I have spent my life making the thatched huts of the fishermen at Kisagata my lodging” (Goshūishū, 1096; Travel, no. 519).

  84. The poem attributed to Saigyō is “The cherry trees at Kisakata are buried in waves—a fisherman’s boat rowing over the flowers” (Kisagata no sakura wa nami ni uzumorete hana no ue kogu ama no tsuribune).

  85. Kisagata was an utamakura associated, particularly as a result of the famous poem by Nōin (d. 1050), with wandering, the thatched huts of fisherfolk, lodgings, and a rocky shore. The traveler relives these classical associations, but in the end, he draws on Su Dongpo’s poem “West Lake” (Xi Hu, J. Seiko), which compares the noted lake to Xi Shi (J. Seishi), a legendary Chinese beauty who was employed during the Zhou dynasty to debauch an enemy emperor and cause his defeat and who was thought to have a constant frown, her eyes half closed, as a result of her tragic fate. Echoing the Sino-Japanese mixed prose, Xi Shi is juxtaposed with the delicate flowers of the silk tree (nebu or nemu) whose slender hairlike stamen close up at night, suggesting that Xi Shi is “sleeping” (nemu) or that her eyes are half closed. Dampened and shriveled by the rain, the silk tree flower echoes the resentful Chinese consort: both in turn became a metaphor for the rain-enshrouded, emotionally dark bay.

  86. Shiogoshi (Tide Crossing) was both a common noun, referring to the shallows at the mouth of a bay, and a proper name, designating such a place at Kisagata. Bashō here describes Kisagata after the rains, closing out a series of contrasts: between Matsushima and Kisagata, lightness and darkness, laughter and resentment, the dark brooding atmosphere of Kisagata during the rains and the cool, light atmosphere that follows.

  87. Hokurokudō, or Hokurikudō. The seven provinces of Wakasa, Echizen, Kaga, Notō, Etchū, Echigo, and Sado (today, Fukui, Ishikawa, Toyama, and Niigata Prefectures) on the northwestern Japan Sea coast.

  88. The distance 130 ri, about 322 miles or 520 kilometers. The city of Kanazawa, a castle town of the Maeda family.

  89. The seventh night of the Seventh Month was Tanabata, when the legendary constellations, the Herd Boy an
d Weaver Girl, two separated lovers, cross over the Milky Way (Amanogawa) for their annual meeting. Even the night before is unusual.

  90. Sado, an island across the water from Izumozaki (Izumo Point), was known for its long history of political exiles: Emperor Juntoku, Nichiren, Mongaku, Zeami, the mother of Zushiō, and others. As a consequence, the island, surrounded here by a “wild sea” (araumi) and standing under the vast Amanogawa (literally, River of Heaven), or Milky Way, comes to embody the feeling of loneliness, both of the exiles at Sado and of the traveler himself. The poem has a majestic, slow moving rhythm, especially the drawn-out “o” sounds in the middle line (Sado ni yokotau), which suggests the vastness and scale of the landscape. Bashō arrived at Izumo Point on the fourth day of the Seventh Month, but when he wrote Narrow Road many years later, he added the preceding hokku on the sixth day of the Seventh Month, thereby associating the Milky Way with Tanabata when the Herd Boy and the Weaver Girl cross over the River of Heaven for their annual meeting. In this larger context, the island surrounded by a “wild sea” also embodies the longing of the exiles (and implicitly that of the poet) for their distant loved ones. Bashō replaces what grammatically should be an intransitive verb yokotawaru (to be sideways) with a transitive verb yokotau (to lay or place sideways), implying that the Creative (zōka) lays the Milky Way sideways. As Ando Tsuguo argues, the Milky Way, laid down by the zōka, becomes like a boat or a bridge reaching out across the dark waters to the waiting exiles at Sado, that is, reaching out to the lonely soul of the poet.

  91. From an anonymous poem: “Since I am the daughter of a fisherman, passing my life on the shore where the white waves roll in, I have no home” (Shinkokinshū, 1205; Misc. 2, no. 1701).

  92. The hokku suggests Bashō’s surprise that two very different parties—the young prostitutes and the male priest-travelers—have something in common, implicitly the uncertainty of life and of travel. The bush clover (hagi), the object of love in classical poetry, suggests the prostitutes, while the moon, associated in poetry with enlightenment and clarity, implies Bashō and his priest friend, though it is not necessary to read a direct one-to-one correspondence here. The main point is that two natural images, while very different, are somehow unexpectedly linked, as the two sets of visitors to the lodge were.

  93. In one of the more famous scenes in The Tale of the Heike, Saitō Sanemori (Saitō Bettō), not wanting other soldiers to realize his advanced age, dyed his white hair black and fought valiantly before being slain by the retainers of Kiso Yoshinaka (1154–1184). According to legend, Yoshinaka, who had been saved by Sanemori as a child, wept at seeing the washed head of the slain warrior and subsequently made an offering of the helmet and brocade to the Tada Shrine. In Sanemori, a warrior nō play by Zeami, a wandering priest travels to Shinohara Village in Kaga Province where he encounters an old man who turns out to be the spirit of Sanemori and who narrates the story of his death in battle. In a passage narrated by the ghost, Higuchi Jirō (d. 1184), one of Yoshinaka’s retainers, is summoned to identify the washed, white-haired head of the slain warrior and exclaims, “Oh, how pitiful! It’s Sanemori!” In Bashō’s hokku, the traveler, presumably reminded by Sanemori’s helmet of the washed head of the slain warrior, utters Higuchi Jiro’s words, and then awakening from these thoughts of the distant past, he hears a cricket beneath the warrior’s helmet. The cricket, a seasonal word for autumn, was associated in the classical poetry with pathos and the loneliness that comes from inevitable decline, as in the following poem by Saigyō: “As the autumn nights grow old, the cricket seems to weaken, its voice fading into the distance” (Shinkokinshū, 1205; Autumn 2, no. 472). These associations of the cricket, particularly the pathos of old age, resonate with the image of the severed head of the white-haired warrior. As Sora’s diary reveals, Bashō originally composed the hokku as a religious offering to the Tada Shrine, near Shinohara, the old battlefield where the head of Sanemori had been washed. Bashō drew on the dramatic structure of nō drama, particularly the two-part “dream play” (mugen nō), in which the shite (protagonist) encounters the spirits of the dead, listens to their stories of grief, and offers a prayer in a ritual of spirit pacification. In this context, the cries of the cricket in Basho’s hokku can also be taken as those of Sanemori’s anguished soul, which the traveler, like the wandering priest in the nō play, pacifies with a poetic prayer.

  94. Masuho are small red shells found at Iro no hama, Color Beach. Bashō is initially drawn to the beach because of Saigyo’s poem on Iro no hama: “Is it because they gather crimson shells that dye the ocean tides that they call this Color Beach?” (Sankashū, no. 1194).

  95. Echoes a passage in the “Suma” chapter of The Tale of Genji in which Genji takes a boat to the beach at Suma, which became associated with loneliness as a result of a famous passage in this chapter describing Suma.

  96. In contrast to Saigyō, who was interested in Iro no hama, Color Beach, primarily for its lexical association with the word “color” (iro) and whose poem reflects Heian, aristocratic, court sensibility, Bashō saw the place as a toponym for autumnal loneliness (sabishisa), a medieval aesthetic that Bashō assimilated into haikai. Suma was an utamakura closely associated with the poetry of Ariwara no Yukihira (d. 893), who was exiled to Suma and, with the banishment of the eponymous hero of The Tale of Genji, was considered to be the embodiment of loneliness in the classical tradition. As Ogata Tsutomu has pointed out, the phrase “the loneliness of the evening” (yūgure no sabishisa) in the prose echoes the famous “three autumn evening poems” (sanseki) in the Shinkokinshū (1205; Autumn 1, nos. 361–363), which include Priest Jakuren’s “Loneliness is not any particular color—a mountain of black pines on an autumn evening.” In contrast to the “front” of Japan, the eastern side of the Deep North, which appears bright, warm, and joyous in Oku no hosomichi, the “back” of Japan, extending from Kisagata in the north to Iro no hama to the south, is imbued with a monochromatic, mist-filled, white-ish, moonlit, lonely atmosphere. In a haikai twist, the quiet loneliness of Iro no hama, an obscure beach on the “back side” of Japan, is “judged superior” (kachitaru)—a phrase reminiscent of the judgments in waka poetry contests (utaawase)—to that of Suma as well as to the famed loneliness of the Shinkokinshū. Instead of reaffirming the classical culture of the capital, the provinces have become a wellspring of poetic sensibility, a new carrier of cultural memory, that could match, if not supersede, that of the classical and medieval past.

  97. Bashō’s hokku turns on a series of homophones: wakaru means both “to depart for” and “to tear from,” and Futami refers to a noted place on the coast of Ise Province (the traveler’s next destination and a place known for clams) as well as the shell (futa) and body (mi) of the clam (hamaguri). The phrase “autumn going” (yuku aki) directly echoes the phrase “spring going” (yuku haru) in the poem at the beginning of the narrative. The passing of the season becomes an implicit metaphor for not only the sorrow of parting, which lies at the heart of travel, but also the ceaseless passage of time, the traveler’s constant companion.

  Chapter 6

  CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON AND THE PUPPET THEATER

  EARLY JŌRURI AND KABUKI

  The art of jōruri (chanting), which lies at the heart of the puppet theater (bunraku), can be traced back to the late fifteenth century when blind minstrels chanted the story of Yoshitsune (Ushimakamaru) and his love affair with Lady Jōruri (Jōruri hime), whom he met while traveling in northern Japan. (Because the story was divided into twelve sections, it was also called the Twelve-Section Book, or Jūnidan zōshi.) Jōruri, the chanting of the story, was originally accompanied by a biwa (lute), probably similar to the Heike style. During the sixteenth century, however, the biwa was replaced by a shamisen (a three-stringed banjo-like instrument imported from China in the sixteenth century), which differed significantly in tone. Then, as early as the 1610s, puppets were added, transforming the combination into a theatrical genre.

  Through the early seventeen
th century, the puppets were relatively simple, each held by one puppeteer. Later, from about 1734, sophisticated three-man puppets, the type seen on the contemporary bunraku stage, were developed. Today a puppeteer begins his career as the operator of the doll’s feet, an art that usually requires ten years to master; graduates to the manipulation of the left hand; and then, finally, after many years of experience, attains the position of head puppeteer, who controls both the head and the right arm. The main puppeteer usually wears a formal dress and has his face exposed, while the junior manipulators of the feet and left hand are dressed entirely in black with a hood covering their head and face. The bunraku dolls, whose heads are generally categorized by sex, age, and character (such as good, evil, or comic), range in size from two and a half to as much as five feet tall and may have movable eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and fingers.

  A related genre was sekkyōbushi, sermon ballads, which date back to the Kamakura period and chanted, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, stories (such as Karukaya, Sanshōdaiyū, and Oguri hangan) about the power of gods or the origins of shrines and temples. Sekkyōbushi also began using the shamisen and then puppets in the Kanei era (1624–1644). This genre reached its height in the 1660s (during the Manji-Kanbun eras) and then, at least in the urban centers, was absorbed into the jōruri tradition.