On the Road Again

Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho (1644-94) is considered one of Japan’s greatest
poets. The son of a low-ranking samurai, Basho abandoned his
trade in 1666 to pursue a different lifestyle. After some
traveling, he settled in Edo (Tokyo) in 1672. It was there that
he began studying Zen Buddhism and making a life for himself
not as a monk, but as a poet of the Japanese style known as
haiku. Basho took on students and called his profession the
“way of elegance.” His haiku aestheticized the sense of mu or
nothingness that is a central feature of Zen philosophy. After
his hut burned to the ground in 1682, Basho entered a period of
pilgrimage that generated much of his great writing, including
Narrow Road through the Backcountry. Prone to wanderlust, he
died of illness in 1694 en route to Osaka. The photograph
depicts a monument of Basho as he is remembered today, garbed in the simple robes and staff of
the traveler, his face inscribed with the timeless expression of deep contemplation evoked by his
writing.

Narrow Road through the Backcountry

In 1689, Basho began his third pilgrimage in five years. The trip lasted more than two years and
is recorded in his travel diary titled Oku-no-hosomichi, which translates roughly as the Narrow
Road through the Backcountry or the Narrow Road to the Interior. Like his other trips, Basho is
profoundly interested in sites that resonate with sacred, historical, or personal meaning. He is
also deeply affected by the raw experience of natural phenomena. While Basho’s journey does
not broach the themes of global travel, exploration, and contact like Shakespeare’s Tempest, what
it does offer is a more subtle and profound illustration of the personal, philosophical, and
aesthetic dimensions of life on the road.

A map of Bahso’s journey is included on p.127 of the Bedford Anthology. The circuitous trip
took place entirely in the north-central part of Japan’s Honshu province. In addition to the map
in our textbook, I encourage you to peruse the personal website of Dennis Kawaharada. The
website documents his trip in 2006 in which he copied Basho’s footsteps. Like Basho, he
records his experience using a combination of prose descriptions and poetry. But he also takes
advantage of modern visual media to illustrate places that Basho visited with photographs.

Basho wrote his travel diary in a traditional Japanese form called haibun, which combines short
prose passages with haiku, short poems of three lines that generally have a 5-7-5 meter (syllables
per line). This style of writing strikes a balance between objective prose narration and poetic
pauses that add an emotional and psychological dimension to the narrative.

The highly impressionistic quality of the diary communicates an understanding of temporality

and the mutability of life. We are immediately faced with this motif in the first line where the
passing of time is allegorically described by the motion of the traveler on the road.
 The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a
boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the
journey itself is home. (from the Sam Hamill translation, p.3)

The travel diary also communicates the power of memory and the sublimity of nature.
Reflecting on memory, Basho recalls how even though “the past remains hidden in clouds of
memory. Still it [an ancient monument] returned us to memories from a thousand years before”
(Hamill, p.15). In another place, he notes “the breathtaking views of rivers and mountains”
(Hamill, p.26).

Natural imagery permeates the many haikai (plural of haiku) that litter his travel diary. For
instance, at the beginning of his trip he writes

Spring passes
and the birds cry out—tears
in the eyes of fishes

The passing of spring, together with the cry of birds and tears of fish, convey the feeling of
sadness that overwhelms his heart as he describes a fond farewell. It also evokes the sense of
impermanence that colors the journey.

The Haiku
In the twentieth century, western literary critics appreciated Basho’s haiku as examples of
Japanese Romanticism. His use of simple verse and natural imagery to record deeply subjective
experiences resembled the aesthetics of William Wordsworth and European Romanticism in
general. Basho’s work has also been compared to mid-nineteenth-century French symbolism and
the imagism of twentieth-century modernists like Ezra Pound.

Basho began as a practitioner of the haikai no renku form. This was a type of cooperative poetry
in which one poet would compose a three-line poem with 5-7-5 meter (syllables per line) known
as a hokku, and another poet would complete the poem by adding two lines of 7-7 meter.
However, Basho and later poets began adapting the form, dropping the last two lines and
changing the name of the remaining three-line stanza from hokku to haiku.

Since 1892, the writing of haiku has followed two simple rules:

1. The haiku has 17 syllables spread out over three lines with a 5/7/5 meter.
2. The haiku includes a kigo or seasonal word in the first or third line that indicates the season
in which the haiku is set. For example, cherry blossoms indicate spring, snow indicates
winter, and mosquitoes indicate summer. But the seasonal word isn't always that obvious.

The haiku does not use Western literary devices like similes, metaphors, and personification.
Instead, it uses imagery to express its main idea or theme. In a poem, imagery is the use of the
five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste) to create a picture in your head. Sometimes
imagery operates synaesthetically, which means that one type of sense is used to describe another
type of sense (as in “the smell of victory”).

2
Here’s an example of a haiku I wrote:

A late summer squall

the birds whoop and reel—making
shadows on the ground

Can you identify the seasonal word? What theme do the images develop?

Try writing your own haiku. Form it around an experience and try to use as few words as
possible to convey your meaning.