Narrow Roads

Floating

2011-08-09T19:22:00.004+01:00

I am very excited to introduce my first guest post on narrow roads. It is written by my brother who is spending a year teaching English in Japan. His enthusiasm for the country and its culture has inspired me when writing this blog and I am delighted to be able share a post from him.

A memorial print of Hiroshige by the contemporary artist Kunisada via Wikimedia.

My first intimation of falling in love with Japan, as it were, was the woodblock prints of the artist Hiroshige, particularly his masterpieces depicting the Tokaido Road, the famed Eastern Sea Road from the military capital Edo to the Imperial court in Kyoto. Ukiyō-e had become popular for the prints of great beauties and stars of the kabuki stage, but around the 1830s a combination of factors led to the runaway craze of landscape prints. The Tokugawa shogunate had started to view the licentious actors and courtesans with suspicion, believing the ‘floating world’ to corrupt morals with its message of easy life:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world…

Asai Ryoi, Tales of the Floating World (浮世物語 Ukiyo Monogatari, 1666)

This easy lifestyle was clearly incompatible with the strict code of Bushido that the government promoted. In 1842 the shogunate introduced the Tenpō reforms, in response to earthquakes, famine and external pressures. This restricted decadent urban life, especially the kabuki theatre and ukiyō-e that showed any aspect of courtesans, geisha or actors. It also banned, among other things, such dangerous habits as gaudy signboards and decorations on smoking pipes.

Another factor that lent itself to landscape art was the rise in polychrome inks since the 1760s. Though used before, it was the later generation of artists such as Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Hokusai who would really make full use of this new medium, particularly Hiroshige, whose use of the imported colour Prussian blue was so prolific that he was nicknamed ‘Blue Hiroshige’. The vivid, deep colour of this pigment was used to fantastic effect in Hokusai’s famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the one ukiyō-e that everybody knows.

Hokusai’s Wave print was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to landscapes, though. Part of the series Fugaku Sanjurokkei (Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji), this print and the others in the set were phenomenally successful, kick-starting the whole genre in 1831. Two years later, Hiroshige produced the first of his series on the Tokaido, the definitive Hoeido edition. The theme of the three stations along the post road was equally popular, and no less than 30 series were eventually produced. The prints could be bought for between 12 and 16 copper coins, less than the price of a bowl of ramen, and made ideal souvenirs for travellers. Moreover, the Japan of the 1830s and 1840s was one of the best places in the world for travellers (if you lived in the country; the shogunate’s policy of exclusion meant that travel to and from Japan was banned, except in selected ports such as Nagasaki). Guidebooks covered virtually every inch of the country, and the established post roads, particularly the Five Routes, made travel safe and easy - post stations catered to a tourist’s every whim, and sub-routes meant few places were inaccessible to the dedicated wanderer (the roads were not unrestricted, however; they required a permit to travel and at various points there were checkpoints. This did keep a tight control on banditry, though).

A Victorian photograph of the Tokaido, showing the pine trees planted by the shogunate to provide shade for travellers. Via Wikimedia.

Hiroshige’s talent was to show this teeming mass of life in all of its romantic glory and ever-changing moods. In the first print in the series, the view is invariably of Nihonbashi , the bridge in Edo that was the milestone of Japan, from which all distances were measured, and still are today. The Hoeido edition print depicts a daimyo’s procession beginning the long march home to his fief*. The long cortège tramps across the bridge; porters are followed by men bearing tall banners, and ranks of straw-hatted retainers are just visible behind the bannermen. In the foreground, the inhabitants of Edo scurry about their business, boxes of goods balanced on their heads and shoulders. To the industrious townsfolk, living in the biggest city on earth, the daimyo’s procession warrants not even a glance.

By contrast, the fourteenth print of the Hoeido series shows a scene devoid of habitation. Two ladies and their porter rest briefly, perhaps for a pipe break, under the lowering gaze of Mount Fuji. The road winds through a desolate plain of rice fields or reeds, its only occupants two herons. Dominating the print (and indeed protruding through the top of the frame) are the craggy slopes of Mount Fuji. The contrast between the hectic bustle of urban life and the quiet of the moor is striking, each conveying an enticing image, whether that of the start of a great journey or a moment’s repose on a quiet country road.

Lastly, one of my favourite prints is from the Reisho edition, published in around 1850. It shows the coast at Hamamatsu, a desolate stretch of shore fringed by wind-bent pines. Again few travellers are visible, a pair of locals and an ascetic-looking man with a satchel and straw rain hat slung on his back, robes whipped by the wind as he stares back along the path. Beyond him, an angry grey sea is whipped into choppy little waves by the wind. Boats run for shore, while a dotted line of simply-drawn black pines promises more views just out of sight. It’s one of my favourite prints because of its wildness, calling to mind the tangy smell of salt air and the crash of waves on a lonely strand. Yet the focus of the picture, the gaunt traveller, is unmoved by nature’s roughness, and is content to stand for a while, back to the wind.

However, like the shogunate itself, ukiyō-e would eventually be swept away in the chaos of the Bakumatsu and Meiji restoration. The new Japan had no time for the old ways, and ukiyo-e was passed over in favour for western art. Ironically, it was this same rejection that created the love of ukiyo-e in the west; making up for centuries of isolation, Japan was shipping vast quantities of trade goods aboard, and the worthless prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai were now used to wrap ceramics. When they arrived in Europe, the owners frequently loved the wrappings more than the goods themselves, and the art school known as Japonisme was born. Van Gogh and Whistler both did almost exact reproductions of Hiroshige’s more famous prints; the Japanese love of bold, striking colours and the asymmetric composition caught their eye, and the line-and-curve patterns often used became the precursors of abstract art. Eventually, the wheel turned full circle, and in the 1920s and 1930s the right-wing politics of the time meant that Western art was falling out of favour. Ukiyo-e and other traditional arts experienced a renaissance, and a new form known as shin hanga developed. This retained the division of labour found in ukiyo-e, wherein the printer, artist, publisher and carver all played their part. However, the strict censorship and lack of materials during World War Two resulted in shin hanga never becoming as popular as ukiyo-e.

For me, though, ukiyo-e is a quintessential expression of Japan. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, in particular, has been reprinted in thousands of tourist books, and is probably included in every major book on world art. But more than that, though, ukiyo-e is a window into a lost world of Edo life. The contrast between Meiji period Japan, when even the Emperor wore western-style, military uniforms, and the katana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katana was replaced by a cavalry sabre, is vast and not a little heartrending. Later ukiyo-e extolled the virtues of this new age, showing steamships and telegraph lines. Gone were the peaceful roadside scenes of travellers buying rice cakes, or the self-indulgent rich at a moon-viewing party. The new prints are just as historically interesting, but for me they lack the appeal of the Edo-era masterpieces. And, like its art, Japan would never be the same again.

A great resource for Hiroshige prints is this comprehensive site:

http://www.hiroshige.org.uk/index.html

And the Brooklyn museum of art has an online exhibition dedicated to “100 famous views of Edo” complete with commentary:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/research/edo/

* By law, a daimyo had to maintain two mansions; one in his territory, and one in Edo. This system was implemented by the first Shogun Tokugawa Iyeyasu, in order to limit the power of the overmighty lords who potentially might rebel, by making them live alternate years in Edo and their fief. The daimyo’s family lived permanently in Edo as hostages to his good behaviour, and as he was required to travel in state, the costs of the trip to and from the capital would ensure that any funds that might go towards plotting were spent on ceremonial – to say nothing of the price of keeping two households. See A.B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan for an evocative description of one of these processions.

Tosa Nikki

2011-07-31T21:05:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikimedia
All translations from Ki no Tsurayuki The Tosa Diary (trans. William N. Porter Tuttle Classics, 1981, Boston)

If The Narrow Road to Oku demonstrates the transformative power of travel, the next travelogue I tuned to revealed the very opposite. The Tosa Diary (Tosa Nikki), written by Ki no Tsurayuki in 935 dwells in the grittiness of travel: the tedium and discomfort that can creep into the spaces between moments of excitement and revelation and the frustrations and boredom of a long and potentially dangerous journey. Far from being a disappointment after Bashō’s transcendence, I felt grateful for Tsurayuki’s honesty and refreshed by the way the Tosa Diary revealed the quieter and more human pleasures and annoyances of travel.

The Tosa Diary is an account of a sea journey taken by the writer and nobleman Ki no Tsurayuki in 935. After spending several years as a governor in the Tosa province in Shikoku, the diary is an account of his voyage back to the then capital Kyoto and back to the house that he had left five years before. In the tenth century a sea voyage of roughly 200 miles and lasting 55 days was, as the diary shows, no small undertaking. Tsurayuki and his fellow travellers faced rough seas, capriciously inclement weather, seasickness, the threat of pirates and uninspiring provisions. Travelling in cramped and rough quarters by day and camping on the shore at night the trip must have been alternately gruelling when the ship could sail onwards and tedious when stormy weather kept the passengers on land. Buffeted both by the winds and by grief over the recent death of his daughter, Tsurayuki’s travels are physically and mentally demanding.

However this journey is determinedly anti-heroic: there is no no triumphal homecoming, no battling through tribulations. Therefore it is perhaps telling that it is written very deliberately in the voice of a woman. As a newly evolving language, Japanese had only recently added a phonetic syllabary system to the existing ideographs based on classical Chinese by the time Tsurayuki wrote The Tosa Diary. Phonetics, not requiring any knowledge of classical Chinese, became known as the woman’s language and it was this that Tsurayuki used in his travelogue. It is tempting to speculate why he should have chosen to exploit such a system in his Diary. Tsurayuki was known for his work in poetry, most notably the Kokinshū which he helped compile between 905 and 922 and for which he wrote a preface that became the first statement of Japanese poetic criticism. Using a female voice in the Tosa Diary allows Tsurayuki to achieve a certain distance from the journey and from himself as a traveller as he is described in mundane or even unflattering situations. Yet the diary also presents this conceit as a challenge, throwing down the gauntlet with the first line: “It is generally a man who writes what is called a Diary, but now a woman will see what she can do”. It is a warning that this diary confronts and confounds expectations and asks us to read and to think about travel in a different way.

The Tosa Diary dwells in the unexpectedness of the mundane, challenging our assumptions about what a travelogue should contain. The narrative repeatedly slips off key to reveal an ordinariness that undercuts the narrative: the formal leave taking of the governor is protracted and after the priest presents the governor with a present, the group get drunk:

Upper, middle, and lower classes all drank too heavily, and, wonderful to relate, there they were on the edge of the salt sea itself all useless and incompetent.

Their new year’s festivities, assembled on the hoof, are improvised and odd: they have none of the traditional items (no potatoes, no seaweed and no rice cakes) and they are forced to suck a trout head for good luck instead of the more usual mullet head; the travellers often break into poetry to pass the time but it descends into querulous squabbling over the quality of the verses. The rhythms of disappointed expectation (for Tsurayuki and also for the reader who might have expected a different kind of narrative) mirror the pulse of the journey itself.

Constantly at the mercy of the seas, the travellers are repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to make progress. The entry for 24^th February (the 19th day of the voyage) reads simply: “the weather was bad, so the boat could not start”. This is typical of the journey; bursts of movement followed by frustrating waiting that keep time alternating between speed and slowness. Placed in situations that are beyond their control (will the wind die down or will we be stuck here for longer? Will we have proper food tonight or will it be rice gruel again?) the travellers are thrown into disarray:

They were still at the same spot. As long as the sea remains rough they will never get there. This stopping place was very beautiful, whether looked at from afar or close at hand; but under the present conditions they were all too weary to take any pleasure in it. In order to pass the time, as it was hopeless to expect the boat to start, the men composed classical verses, etc., together and a ‘certain personage’ produced this:

On this sandy shore

Never cease the waves to break

Year and month alike;

Though ‘tis white as if with snow

When it fell I do not know.

This verse was like an amateur’s attempt.

Bored and listless, they fall to composing mediocre poetry to pass the time and the verse making degenerates into bickering as tempters fray.

The entry for 20^th February reads:

This day no rice and bean gruel was cooked and, as it was an unlucky day, they crawled along slowly, much to his regret. Today the voyage had already lasted more than twenty days, and they were but as so many days wasted. While all were gazing out to sea a little girl recited this:

When breezes drop

Quickly do the waves subside,

When the wind gets up

Then the waves again arise;

Comrade-like they sympathise

This is, no doubt, hardly worth giving, but it is very appropriate.

When travelling, it is often the small details that matter: the variation in food, the remembrance of unremarkable poetry that nevertheless encapsulates the mood of the moment. Particular moments stick in the mind and minor events can take on real significance. Even when the voyage yields a sight that might cheer (and would perhaps have inspired Matsuo Bashō) it is not enough to uplift the weary voyagers: “This day with difficulty they hastened on through the Sea of Izumi to the Stopping-Place of Ozu. To his eye the pine forests seemed never ending, everything seemed to have gone wrong”. How often when travelling, even on the best of journeys, do we face moment of unexpected disillusionment in the face of a beautiful sight. And even on more dramatic journeys, how often do we visit a spectacular landmark or beautiful landscape only to remember more the cafe round the corner, the unexpected kindness of a stranger or an unfamiliar taste that comforted us in a moment of dislocation. The Tosa Diary reminds us that travelling often puts us in a childlike position. At the mercy of timetables beyond our control, peevish in the face of physical discomfort and inadequate food and irritable with one’s travelling companions, our focus, like that of Tsurayuki’s, has the capacity to narrow as well as expand.

Waiting on the winds and the weather, Tsurayuki and his companions have to surrender to other rhythms of living and moving, which can be unsettling as well as liberating and which can leave even the most seasoned travellers feeling vulnerable. The travellers of the Tosa Diary see-saw between gloom when the boat does not move, and ecstatic joy when it does. As the boat passes the pine forest of Uta, the scene becomes beautiful:

The ripples lapped against the foot of each, and amid the branches of each the storks flitted about... still admiring the beautiful scene, they rowed gently forward; mountains and sea all became dim and night drew on...Those of the men who were unused to the sea began to feel gloomy and pensive, while the women laid their heads upon the bottom of the boat and cried aloud. But the steersman and sailors thought nothing of it at all and sang their boat song...On hearing the others laughing at it, his feelings were calmed somewhat, although the sea was still very rough.

This scene brilliantly captures the sometimes heightened atmosphere that occurs when travelling - moments of enjoyment swiftly turn to melacnholy; darkness brings fears and, as for a child, these anxieties can be soothed by unexpected and simple comforts - a chance song, which suddenly brings a feeling of ease. Tsurayuki brilliantly captures the moments on a journey when comfort often comes from left of field – a steaming cup of coffee becomes a bulwark against a rainy day; a cosy bistro that becomes a blanket of reassurance against the hostile night in an unfamiliar town.

Yo-yoing from despondency to excitement and back again, the boat, approaches Kyoto some 55 days after it left Tosa. So eager is Tsurayuki to reach his destination that he takes a carriage for the last stretch, moving excitedly through the streets:

These too many verses are due to his excessive pleasure at reaching the Capital. The night was growing late and some places could not be seen, but it was delightful to enter the Capital once more. On reaching his home and entering his door, the moon was so bright that he could see the state of things at a glance. Needless to say the whole place was hopelessly overgrown and ragged, even more than he had been told.

Not even the homecoming is triumphal for Tsurayuki as he returns to a house that has been thrown into disorder and disarray and the memories of the daughter he has lost come flooding back. Even on this last note, the diary still speaks to us today: whether it is returning home to a bulging inbox, a pile of bills or even just normal life after an escape into another way of living, another “could have been”, we become deflated and depressed. Even though the Tosa Diary points up so many of the unappealing aspects of travel it also comforts and reassures with its gentle and understanding presentation of human behaviour under pressure.

Yosa Buson

2011-06-25T21:00:00.018+01:00

Landscape with a Solitary Traveller by Yosa Buson via Wikimedia

I didn’t anticipate this blog being dominated by Matsuo Bashō but he seems to have made himself very much at home here. I was captivated by the story of Bashō’s hard won achievements as a poet and his honesty in looking loneliness in the face and I’m finding it hard to move on to new writers. But before I wrench myself away from the world of darkening skies, of birds calling in the melancholy dusk, and serene days spent in a ramshackle house buried in a tangle of wild persimmon trees, I wanted to point you in the direction of Yosa Buson’s illustrations of Bashō’s work. Buson (1716-1783) was a poet and painter who (like many others) had followed in the great master’s footsteps, visiting the landscapes of his travelogue and illustrating the poem.

The Yamagata Museum of Art has an excellent image of Buson’s very appealing illustrations – click here and zoom in to see Bashō and Sora in action!

Now, on to tackle the tottering tbr pile and find out what other discoveries are round the corner.

The Thin Line

2011-06-21T21:00:00.028+01:00

Matsuo Bashō by fellow poet and painter Yosa Buson via wikimedia

The Narrow Road to Oku surprised me. I hadn’t expected to enjoy the travelogue as much as I did and one aspect that I found fascinating was the figure of Matsuo Bashō himself. Having read the story about his arduous trip to the north of Japan, told with such grace, I wanted to know more about this figure. Who was he, what prompted him to set out on such a journey and to write about it in the way that he did?

The bare bones of his biography were not too difficult to uncover. Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644 in Ueno in the province of Iga into a family who were members of a low ranking samurai family. As a boy he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, a member of the local ruling family and it was there that Bashō began to develop his literary talent under his new master who took a keen interest in poetry. Following the sudden death of Yoshitada, Bashō moved away from his home town, away from his status as a samurai, and travelled, first spending time in Kyoto. There he honed his poetic skills further before moving to Edo in his late twenties. In his Matsuo Bashō, Makoto Ueda suggests that, until moving to Edo, Bashō had not completely committed to writing poetry, possibly considering other more commonplace jobs. However, from the time of his move to Edo, Bashō dedicated himself to a poetic vocation. After establishing himself as master haiku poet and teacher, participating in renku competitions (at which he was an acknowledged master), and teaching groups of students, Bashō decided to test himself through travel, going on journeys and moving centrifugally from the areas around Edo to the northern provinces of Japan. Returning from his travels, he moved around the country, often staying with friends before finally settling back in Edo where he remained until his death.

However, like many biographies, the facts of his life are not very communicative for alongside this was a story of poetic development that intrigued me with its clarity of purpose and single-mindedness. It is tempting to trace this development in a series of decisions that he made: renouncing his samurai status; leaving Kyoto, the obvious cultural centre for a poet; writing in a deliberately formal and classical style, often looking back to the graceful dictates of Chinese poetry, when other writers were drawing inspiration from the world of the chōnin; treating travel writing with as much care and seriousness of purpose as a stylised haiku; setting out on difficult and dangerous journeys. In each case, the decision seems to be to clarify and simplify, to pare down and identify what really matters.

As Makoto Ueda has suggested, Bashō’s poetic development dovetails with, and is at times part of, a spiritual quest which is engaged with the problem of living itself. Bashō’s quest to develop himself spiritually and poetically was both inspiring and cheering to read about. It was whilst he was living in Edo that he first started living at the so called Bashō hut. Near his small house was a banana tree with leaves that were soft, useless for building, and easily torn by the wind. It seems an almost irresistible symbol for a poet and Bashō was so drawn to this tree that he took the name Bashō (banana tree) as a new pen name. He has left us a haunting image of himself in this house:

A banana plant in the autumn gale-

I listen to the dripping of rain

Into a basin at night

and:

The sound of an oar beating the waves

Chills my bowels through

And I weep in the night

(both haiku from Ueda p.19 and p.45)

The years at the Bashō hut seem to have been ones of mental turmoil, full of loneliness and self-questioning. As he says “I feel lonely as I gaze at the moon, I feel lonely as I think about myself, and I feel lonely as I ponder on this wretched life of mine. I want to cry out that I am lonely, but no one asks how I feel” (Ueda p.24). But Bashō also reveals a determination to remain on the path he has chosen for himself: “I merely clung to that thin line” of poetry (Ueda p.120). The poet’s honesty as he feels his way through a troubled period in his life is immediately appealing and inspiriting.

The travels were, in part, an attempt to tackle the problems Bashō was encountering but they were also an attempt to answer the question of how one should live and write. From 1684 onwards he began to travel on a series of journeys that took him from the provinces around Edo and his home town of Ueno, gradually moving further east and north, going to destinations such as Sarashina to view the harvest moon. Ueda argues that Bashō’s travels were a way of testing both the man and the poet, forcing Bashō to reflect on his needs and his place within the wider world. Setting out on his hazardous journeys allowed Bashō to push himself out of his everyday existence and face himself head on. Bashō’s other journeys, wonderfully titled as The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel or, tellingly, The Records of the Weather-Exposed Skeleton record his attempts to shape his personal troubles into a philosophical and spiritual quest for the best way to live and into a poetic form that will communicate this new vision. “No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry” (Yuasa, p.28)

The loneliness that the poet encountered at the banana tree hut becomes, through his travels, an attempt to understand his place in the universe and express this with clarity and detachment in his poetry. It is moving to read of Bashō’s determined efforts to take his feelings of loneliness and wrestle them into something new. As Ueda argues, the importance of sabi (loneliness or solitariness) becomes central to Bashō’s maturing philosophy and poetic style. Travelling through Narumi in The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel he describes a darkening night where the calling of the birds “Invite me to stare/Into the darkness/Of the starlit Promontory (Yuasa, p.74). His detachment leads the focus away from the “me” of the traveller and towards a beautifully modulated, objective description, leaning towards the symbolic, yet grounded in real observation. Through confronting his solitude and putting the demands of the self to one side, Bashō finds a deeper connection to the world around him – one that brings clarity and also comfort. Through solitariness, it is possible to feel less alone.

The precisely observed, detached quality of Bashō’s writing fascinated me and I was intrigued to come across several expressions of his own literary theory. Bashō advocates control, detachment and a certain obliqueness, forcing the reader to work with the poet to create the meaning in the text: “the connecting link should be by means of shadow” (Ueda, p.104). There is also a real determination to see clearly: “you should put into words the light in which you see something before it vanishes from your mind” (Kato, p.159). Clarity of vision becomes poetic insight in an attempt to capture and recreate a fleeting moment.

As Bashō famously says:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one – when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural – if the object and yourself are separate then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit”. (Yuasa, p.33)

The writer must transcend the self; not only stand outside the object that is in view, but look more fully into it, opening up then eliding the gap between subject and object. In order to see clearly we must move beyond the self but also, somehow, return to it again cleansed of “subjective preoccupation”. What wise advice, both for writing and for living.

Bibliography:

Makoto Ueda Matuso Bashō (Kodansha International, 1982)

Matsuo Bashō The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin, 1966)

Shuichi Kato A History of Japanese Literature: From the Manyyoshu to Modern Times (trans. Don Sanderson, Japan Library, 1997)

Matsuo Bashō The Narrow Road to Oku (trans. Donald Keene, Kodansha International, 1996)

Oku no Hosomichi

2011-06-14T20:29:00.003+01:00

The Falls at Nikko (Urami-no Taki by Hiroshige, via www.hiroshige.org.uk. One of the early stops on en route for Bashō)

The months and days are the travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying and their homes are wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the read, and I too for years past have been stirred by sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming. (p.19)

(all quotations taken from Donald Keene’s wonderful translation The Narrow Road to Oku (Kodansha International, 1996)

Thus begins Matsuo Bashō famous travelogue Oku no Hosomichi, variously translated into English as The Narrow Road to Oku or (more alluringly) The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It seemed an appropriate place for me to start but Bashō’s beguiling prose and delicate haiku and soon ensured that this volume was picked up more for enjoyment than what it could reveal about the geography of Japan.

In 1689 Matsuo Bashō (then aged about 40) set out on ambitious and gruelling trip. Travelling on foot, he set out from Edo (now Tokyo) and travelled north along the Pacific coast to Hiraizumi, before turning inwards and travelling south along the coast of the Sea of Japan and on to Lake Biwa, finishing at Ōgaki. It was a journey that lasted just over 150 days and covered a total of nearly 2,500 km. Bashō’s journey took him through some celebrated landscapes, to temples and hot springs, mountains and places celebrated by poets. Travelling with his poet companion Sora, Bashō takes us, the reader, on a journey both into the north of the country and into the past.

Bashō’s descriptions of the landscapes he travels through are written with a striking restraint and precision:

Mountains stretched out as far as one could see. Along a valley path that led into the distance, moss dripped from the darkly clustering pines and cedars. The sky, though it was summer, was still cold. When we had passed the last of the Ten Famous Views, we crossed a bridge and entered the temple gate. (p.39)

The viewer moves out of the frame to allow the landscapes, sometimes dramatic (mountains and waterfalls), sometimes apparently mundane (horses feeding in the fields outside a small town) simply to speak for themselves. Seemingly content to present rather than describe what he sees, the writer places the view unobtrusively before the reader without striving for effect. Apparently as flat and pared down as a woodblock print, the scenes are nevertheless imbued with a distinctive, plangent atmosphere:

The sky had cleared a little after a steady rain. Under the faintly shining evening moon the island of Magaki across the water seemed close enough to touch. Little fishing boats were being rowed towards the shore, and I could hear the voices of the fishermen as they divided up the catch. (p.75)

However it is as a poet that Bashō is best known and the travelogue is studded with Bashō’s luminous verse. In this form, the haibun, prose and poetry work together caught in a perpetual dialogue. This contrapuntal technique works superbly; the journey is presented not as a report of travel but as an attempt to capture, albeit briefly, more oblique and opaque thoughts, often meditations on nature or on man’s place within it. The ascent of Moon Mountain is described factually but accompanied by this haiku:

The peaks of clouds

Have crumbled into fragments -

The moonlit mountain!
(p.108)

A view across the Sea of Japan becomes:

Turbulent the sea -

Across to Sado stretches

The Milky Way.
(p.128)

Engaged in unravelling the compressed imagery of the haiku, the reader is drawn into the experience itself, occupying the same space as the poet on top of the mountain, or looking out across the darkening sea.

This technique takes us away from what we might recognise as a travelogue and into altogether different territory. As Makoto Ueda has argued (in his Matsuo Bashō, Kodansha International, 1970), there is a strong spiritual element to Bashō’s travels as they become a journey both away from and into the self. However, what struck me as more intriguing (and immediately recognisable) was the clear sense of the journey as a literary pilgrimage. What remains in the reader’s mind is not so much the image of the landscape or of the places that the traveller has visited, but the sense of having tapped into and perpetuated a poetic tradition. On his journey, Matsuo Bashō repeatedly seeks out uta-makura (places which have appeared in poetry). Landscapes and places are continually filtered through the lens of literature. Crossing the barrier at Shirakawa, Bashō sees, not just the scene before him, but also the scenes placed in his mind by poets:

I felt I could hear the autumn winds and see the crimson leaves mentioned in their poems, and this gave even greater beauty to the green leaves on the boughs before me. (p.47)

Whether it is visiting the hut where Butchō wrote his verse or the cherry tree at Kisakata, commemorated by the poet Saigyō, the traveller is drawn to places already known through verse.

With this pilgrimage comes the awareness of a poetic tradition that endures more than any man-made structures Bashō visits or even the natural world that he travels through:

Many are the names that have been preserved for us in poetry from ancient times, but mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth, trees grow old and give way to saplings. (p.75)

This relatively common poetic motif of mourning the past whilst renewing it afresh through writing is, in this account, physically enacted in the form of the traveller poet who revisits and perpetuates that which is apparently lost. Throughout the work, we get brief (and rather endearing) glimpses of Bashō and his poet companion Sora, hats on, sandals strapped to their feet, simultaneously travelling and composing verse. If one of the themes of the travelogue is the evanescence of the world and doubts about man’s place in it, then the figure of the poet writing his way through the landscape provides a strong countercurrent to this. This piece of writing itself ensures that the past is mourned, celebrated and, through the reader, lives anew.

The Next Page

2011-06-09T20:55:00.000+01:00

If St. Augustine is right when declaring that “the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page” then I am hugely looking forward to reading what will be the next page for me. Exquisitely illustrated in pen and ink perhaps, or inscribed on wafer thin leaves of hand crafted paper, I am turning the page onto a wonderful trip to Japan later this year.

Tragic events have put Japan firmly in the spotlight this year and it has been difficult to think about planning a tourist trip amidst the turmoil and the suffering that has unfolded in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. But alongside those stories, I have been uncovering others in guidebooks and anthologies, poetry volumes, and collections of short stories. As a lifelong literature addict, books and writers are never far from my mind when thinking about any trip (or anything at all really). My speciality has always been English literature so it is with great excitement (so many new writers to discover!) and a large amount of trepidation (I know so little!) that I have put this blog together as a place to record some of my discoveries. I hope very much that you’ll stop by, say hello, and (if you are very kind) perhaps point me in the right direction.

I began my discoveries by falling under the spell of the great haiku poet and travel writer Matsuo Bashō...