In January 1683, a year after Bashō moved into his Fukugawa hut, a fire swept through much of Edo. Bashō survived only by jumping into the river, using a soaked reed mat to shield his head from the heat and smoke. He was forced to move into a patron’s house, far from the city. Then, that summer, his mother died. In the fall, his students found him new lodgings in a run-down house not far from his burned one, and supplied him with household items, a few clothes, and a large hollow gourd to hold rice, which they regularly filled. When the New Year (early spring, in the traditional Japanese calendar) arrived, Bashō marked it with this haiku:
I’m wealthy—
going into the new year
with 20 lbs of old rice
waretomeri shinnen furuki kome goshō
Bashō later replaced the self-description of the haiku’s opening line with something plainer. Bashō revised his haiku, haibun, and journals throughout his life. Not infrequently the direction was toward a diminishment of self, but there are also poems in which he experimented with various alternative verbs or subject lines to feel their effects. Should a poem be about “loneliness” or “stillness”? Should a sound “soak,” “pierce” or “stain”? These alterations show that even his most seemingly unstudied and artless works were often produced by a method quite unlike what is sometimes described as a “Zen” “first thought, best thought.” The revised poem:
spring begins—
going into the new year
with 20 lbs of old rice
harutatsu ya shinnen furuki kome goshō
A few years later, another haiku seems to recall that rice-storing kitchen gourd, though here it appears to be empty:
My one-possession
world,
a lightweight gourd
monohitotsu waga yo wa karoki hisago kana
The words do not reveal the poet’s attitude about the situation. I myself lean towards the interpretation of a liberating portability of existence: this poem was written during the time of Bashō’s travels, by a man used, by then, to many losses.
Not long after the fire, Bashō published the first collection holding the work of his followers. Its title, Shrivelled Chestnuts, points towards Bashō’s aesthetic of valuing the valueless; he said of the book’s “shrivelled chestnuts,” “they may be small, but their taste is sweet.” Yet along with his increasing success as a poetry master, Bashō grew, it seems, increasingly unsettled. When he received an invitation to visit some former students, he began preparing for a lengthy trip. He shaved his head, put on the robes of a mendicant monk, and in the fall of 1684 set out with a friend on a seven-month-long journey by foot, horseback, and ferry. The trip would include a visit to his mother’s grave before going on to places made famous by earlier Japanese writers. It was the first of five such trips, each recorded in a published journal mixing poems written during his travels with prose descriptions of places, people, and events.
Bashō called his account of this early trip The Journal of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton, and its first sentences and opening haiku set the tone:
I set out on a trip of a thousand miles without any supplies, my walking-stick the staff of an ancient said to have vanished one night under a midnight moon. […] As I left my run-down hut, the wind’s sound over the river was odd and cold.
roadside-skeleton-thoughts:
wind penetrates
through to the heart
nozarashi o kokoro ni kaze no shimu mi kana
One Zen saying proposes, “Live as if you were already dead.” Bashō’s journal’s title seems to carry that spirit. But the effect of the haiku itself is quite different. Chilled from the first moment of his departure, the poet felt cold winds going through him as if through a skeleton’s exposed ribs. Travel was perilous, Bashō’s health not strong, and the image of himself as that skeleton, its bones left out to weather by the road, would haunt him throughout the journey.
Another reminder of death’s omnipresence appeared soon after, when Bashō saw a small child, perhaps two years old, abandoned by the road. The early 1680s were years of famine, flood, fire, social turmoil, and desperate poverty, and the sight was not uncommon. Still, for a modern reader, this incident is the most difficult to accept of any in Bashō’s life: he tossed some food to the child and rode on, thinking about fate, finally deciding that, however sorrowful, the child’s abandonment was “heaven’s will.” The haiku he wrote afterward, though, is an undisguised rebuke—to society, to poetry, and to the writer himself:
The cries of monkeys
are hard for a person to bear—
what of this child, given to autumn winds?
saruwo kiku hito sutego ni aki no kaze ikani
Shortly afterward in the journal, the theme of impermanence appears yet again, though in a different mood:
the roadside blooming
mallow:
eaten by my horse.
michinobe no mukuge wa uma ni kuwarekeri
These three haiku, placed near one another at the start of Bashō’s journey, have the effect of reminding the reader, and perhaps the poet himself, that all things vanish, sometimes tragically, sometimes ridiculously. When he reached Ueno, his brother showed him a lock of their late mother’s white hair. The haiku he wrote in response:
if I took it into my hand,
would hot tears make it vanish?
autumn frost
teni toraba kien namida zo atsuki oki no shimo
Leaving Edo required crossing a high mountain pass. Famous for its view of Fuji, it was the vantage point of many earlier poems. Here is Bashō’s contribution:
Mist, rain,
not seeing Fuji—
an interesting day!
kirishigure Fuji wo minu hi zo omoshiroki
The haiku’s response reflects the spirit of Bashō’s early teachers, who suggested that haiku’s essence was to find, in the face of the long-familiar, something not yet said. The poem might almost be translated, “Mist, rain, not seeing Fuji—what luck!”
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During the ten years of journeys that filled his forties, Bashō stopped to record his responses to temples and shrines, the sites of historical battles, ruined huts where earlier Buddhist poets had lived. He met and separated from friends, shared his sleeping quarters with fleas, prostitutes, and pissing horses, and his robes with lice. He participated in linked-verse gatherings, returned home and repeatedly set out again, published haiku, renga, and the five major journals describing his travels. Various haibun describe briefer trips to places famous for moon-viewing and retreats undertaken in two borrowed houses, “The Unreal Hut,” on Lake Biwa and “The Villa of Fallen Persimmons,” near Kyoto. The best known of all Bashō’s journeys is the 1500 mile expedition recorded in the journal Narrow Road to the Far North. The title is sometimes rendered as “Narrow Roads to the Deep Interior”—the word oku carries both geographical and metaphorical meanings (as it does in English, when we refer, for instance, to the “interior” of both Alaska and the self).
Bashō’s traveling was an exercise in response and immersion. Each day in a new place brought changed circumstance and the possibility of a new subject, particularly for a poet seeking to bring into Japanese poetry ordinary objects and activities previously ignored. While visiting a temple—and perhaps assisting in the kitchen, since kitchen practice marks both good Zen and good guests— Bashō wrote:
coldness—
deep-rooted leeks
washed white
nebukashiroku araiagetaru samusa kana
Any cook knows that cleaning the soil from leeks requires much time, and the coldness here is in the leeks, in the icy winter stream water they were washed in, and in the reader’s own hands, all at once. Even the leeks’ whiteness enters the reader’s body: chilled hands grow pale.
This transparency of boundary is one of haiku’s most basic devices and instructions, and the permeability of self to non-self is made explicit in another poem from this period. At a river crossing, Bash
ō’s host treated the traveler with kindness, then asked for a written memento of the now-famous poet’s visit. Bashō wrote:
in rented rooms
signing my name:
“cold winter rains”
yadokarite na o nanora suru shigure kana
Renown had come to Bashō as a teacher as well as a poet during these final ten years of his life. The increasing support for his ideas and poems must have gratified; yet the ensuing demands also distracted and, at times it seems, clearly annoyed. To one aspiring student, he sent some sharp words counseling independence, along with this haiku:
don’t copy me,
like the second half
of a cut melon!
wareni niru na futatsu ni wareshi makuwauri
At other times, Bashō reminded his disciples of the 9th-century Buddhist teacher and poet Kukai’s words: “Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.” However strong his opinions and theories, Bashō’s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, “If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don’t worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.”
As he turned 50, Bashō, living in what was now his third Bashō Hut, famously closed his brushwood gate. At the year’s start, he wrote in a letter, “Crushed by other people and their needs, I can find no calmness of mind.” He was caring for his ill nephew Tōin, who now had a family, having married a former nun, Jutei, and fathered three children. Students and fellow poets dropped by to ask advice, exchange poems, and talk; invitations to poetry gatherings were ceaseless. In April, Tōin died. In mid-August, Bashō shut himself off from all visitors, resolving to find a way to free himself from outward obligation and its accompanying exhaustion and resentment. Two months later, he cut through the morning glory vine overgrowing his hut’s entrance, and emerged with a new philosophy, in life and in haiku. He called it karumi: “lightness.”
Bashō’s transformation of spirit can be seen by comparing two haiku. The first—preceding Bashō’s retreat into seclusion—was written on New Year’s Day, 1693:
Year after year,
the monkey’s face
wears a monkey’s mask
toshidoshiya saru ni kisetaru saru no men
The second was written the last day of that year:
year-end-thought:
one night,
even a thief came to visit
nusubito no ōta yo mo ari toshi no kure
The earlier, New Year’s Day haiku is a portrait of entrapment within the social. Beneath persona, it says, there is only more persona—a street entertainer’s monkey doing the same tricks over and over, or a man (as Bashō commented to a student about this poem) making the same mistakes repeatedly, in an unchanging life. The second, haiku written a year later, surely refers as well to the overly social life Bashō had been leading, but here, bitterness has vanished, and the poet seems less rueful than amused. It reminds of the story of a Zen master who, finding his hut has been robbed, goes running after the thief with a last pot in his hand: “Thief, stop! You forgot this!”
A few more poems from this time:
New Year’s Eve cleaning—
the carpenter hangs a shelf
in his own house.
susuhaki wa ono ga tana tsuru daiku kana
spring rain—
roof leak drizzling
through a hanging wasps’ nest
harusameya hachi no su tsutao yane no mori
cool, cool:
noon-napping,
feet on a wall
hiyahiya to kabe wo fumaete hirune kana
morning glory:
a day-flowering lock
bolts my gate
asagaoya hiru wa jō orosu mon no kaki
in morning dew
smudged, cool,
a muddy melon
asatsuyuni yogore te suzushi uri no tsuchi
lightning—
a night heron’s cry
flies into darkness
inazumaya yami no kata yuku goi no koe
In February, 1694, Bashō wrote a friend that he felt his end was near, but he nonetheless made plans for another journey. Illness prevented his leaving until June, and even then he was able to travel only because accompanied by one of Jutei’s sons and by Sora, an old road-companion and friend. Carried by litter, he arrived at Ueno too weak to see visitors or to teach. While he was there, Jutei died, and he sent her son home. He and Sora continued on to both The Unreal Hut and The Villa of Fallen Persimmons, places of refuge familiar from earlier trips. In late August, Bashō returned to his family home, where his students built him a small grass hut behind his brother’s. This visit, he was stronger. He continued attempting to communicate his new ideas to students, whom he worried were not comprehending well his encouragement to see and write “the way a clear, shallow river runs over a sandy bed.” In October he went on to Osaka, continuing to teach and participate in renga gatherings despite headaches, fever, and chills.
The haiku from the time of these travels show Bashō fully aware of the seriousness of his condition. Yet they maintain his renewed aesthetic of transparence and lightness:
this autumn,
why do I grow old?
a bird entering clouds
konoaki wa nande toshi yoru kumo ni tori
white chrysanthemum:
not one speck of dust
meets the eye
shiragiku no me ni tate te miru chiri mo nashi
clear moon,
a boy afraid of foxes
walked home by his lover
tsukisumu ya kitsune kowagaru chigo no tomo
deep autumn—
my neighbor,
what is he doing?
akifukaki tonari wa nani wo suru hito zo
Bashō spoke of the need to turn his thoughts from the life of this world to Buddhist teachings, but said he could not—poems continued to come. His final haiku was written November 25th, a few days before his death:
on a journey, ill,
dreams scouring on
through exhausted fields
tabini yande yume wa kareno wo kake meguru
Having written it, he immediately composed another poem describing the wanderings of his dreaming mind, and called in Shikō, one of his students, asking which he preferred. Shikō failed to catch the first line and, too embarrassed to ask, simply said he thought the earlier one unsurpassable. Bashō answered, “I know I shouldn’t be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I’ve thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I’m captivated by the mountain stream’s interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.”
On November 26th, Bashō wrote letters, including one in which he apologized to his older brother for dying first. The next day, he asked the students who had gathered around him to compose poems, but added that he wouldn’t comment on them: “You must understand, your teacher no longer exists.” He mostly slept after that, but on the 28th, woke up during a warm mid-day to find his students quietly trying to catch the many flies that had gathered on the room’s shoji-paper walls. He laughed, and said of the flies, “They seem happy about this unexpected gift.” The comment is characteristic. A few hours later, he died in his sleep.
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His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer. As with so many of his images, the statement can be taken in more than one way. It can be read as a praise of uselessness, saying that poetry, like the bashō tree, is a thing to be loved precisely because it has no utilitarian purpose—by Bashō’s own account, that is what he meant. But the description can also be read as an advocacy of intensification: whatever a person’s exper
ience, bringing it into a poem will strengthen it more. In some subtle way, these two ideas are not so disconnected as they at first may seem.
What does knowledge of Bashō offer a contemporary Western reader? Foremost, the poems themselves. Bashō’s haiku, once read, stay in the mind and return there at odd times, bringing their unexpected expansions to moments of heat or thirst, of aging teeth or a sudden experience of coolness in mid-August, of the first wintry rains. Next, perhaps, there is the proof they offer that even the briefest form of poetry can have a wing-span of immeasurable breadth. Bashō’s seventeen-syllable haiku, looked at closely, are much like Emily Dickinson’s poems: they are small but many (both poets left behind over a thousand poems), and the work of each of these poets crosses implausibly variable and precise terrains of mind and world. Bashō’s haiku describe and feel, think and debate. They test ideas against the realities of observation; they renovate, expand, and intensify both experience and the range of language.
The Heart of Haiku Page 3
