49. In the fourth verse by Bashō, which links with the third and pushes off from the second verse, news has come from the Kyoto-Osaka (Kamigata) area that the price of rice has gone up. For farmers, such good news would be uplifting, renewing their energy as they set to work repairing the house.
50. “Awakening to the high” (kōgo) implied spiritual cultivation, a deepened awareness of nature and the movement of the cosmos, and a pursuit of the “ancients,” the noted poets of the past. “Returning to the low” (kizoku), by contrast, implied a return to the various languages and everyday, material world of seventeenth-century commoners and samurai, to those topics left out or overlooked by the traditional genres, a dimension that Bashō stressed in his later years, especially in the form of karumi (lightness).
51. If the artist follows the Creative and “makes a friend of the four seasons,” a movement governed by the Creative, the artist will respond to the movement and rhythm of nature, especially of the seasons, which provide constant inspiration for poetry and art. When the poet follows the Creative, “what one sees,” which represents the human senses, and “what one thinks,” which represents human feeling and thoughts, become the “moon” and “cherry blossoms,” which represent the beauties of nature. “Seeing” is as much an internal matter, of realizing the Creative within, as it is an external matter. The “cherry blossoms” do not exist by themselves in nature, nor do they exist solely as a figment of the poet’s imagination. Instead, they come into being only when they are “seen” by and fuse with the Creative within the poet. The poet who “follows the Creative” implicitly engages in a process of spiritual cultivation that allows the Creative within to join the Creative of the cosmos. Here Bashō draws on Daoism, especially the chapter “All Things Are Equal” in the Zhuangzi. In contrast to the natural imagery found in classical poetry, which was refined, nuanced, and rich in associations, the nature that Bashō confronted was more uncultivated, variegated in character, and often vulgar and mundane. Without realizing the Creative within, what the poet “sees” in such a world cannot become the “moon” and “cherry blossoms”; the new material culture and its heterogeneous languages cannot be transformed into poetry. Instead, they remain vulgar, like an “animal.” Without spiritual cultivation and the ability to enter into objects, the haikai poet will not have the power to discover the high in the low, to find beauty in the mundane.
52. The phrase “learn from the pine” means that the poet must cast away personal, self-oriented desire and enter into the object and draw out its subtle essence, or mono no bi (literally, the faintness or depth of the thing). This “self” (ga) in butsuga ichinyo is not the modern notion of the “self” but a selfless state free of personal desire (shii). Only such a selfless “self”—one that “follows the Creative” (zūka zuijun)—can enter into the object. If the poet’s feelings are not sincere, the heart of the subject and that of the object will not be united, and the result will be “verbal artifice” (sakui).
53. This view of the unchanging and the ever-changing suggests the cosmological view implicit in the Song Confucian cosmology: if “the ever-changing” suggests the material force (ki), “the unchanging” suggests the rational principle (ri), the metaphysical element that sustains the constant motion of the material force.
54. Hina (dolls), a new seasonal word for late spring, meant Hinamatsuri, the girls’ festival on the third day of the Third Month, when families with daughters displayed dolls in their houses. The hokku suggests that dwellings, normally associated with a sense of home, are only temporary lodgings in life’s journey; hence the time has come for even the “grass hut” (kusa no to) to become a domestic, secular dwelling, a “house of dolls” occupied by a new owner with a wife and daughter(s).
55. The birds—which cry out (naku) and/or weep (naku)—and fish mourn the passing of spring and, by implication, the departure of the travelers. Some commentators see the fish as the disciples left behind and the birds as the departing travelers (Bashō and Sora); others interpret the departing spring as the traveler. Yuku, a key word in Narrow Road, means both “to go” and “to pass time,” thereby fusing temporal and spatial passage. The seasons thus become travelers.
56. The following love poem by Fujiwara Sanekata, which draws on the homophonic association of fire (hi) with longing (omohi) and love (kohi) and uses smoke (keburi) as a metaphor for suppressed desire, is typical of the many classical poems on Muro-no-yashima. “How could I let you know of my longing were it not for the smoke of Muro-no-yashima?” (Shikashū, 1144; Love 1, no. 188). Classical poets believed that the steam from a stream in Muro-no-yashima looked like smoke or that the smoke came from an oven (kamado), an association suggested by the word muro (sealed room). However, Sora, who came from a family of Shintō priests, presents here a different explanation based on a close reading of the Records of Japan (Nihon shoki) and other early texts. Bashō suggests here that Narrow Road, with the help of a learned companion (Sora), will take a revisionary approach to utamakura, or poetic places. It will not simply follow the established poetic associations but explore both the physical place and the historical roots in an effort to renew and recast the cultural landscape.
57. By incorporating the name of the place into the poem—hi no hikari (light of the sun) is the Japanese reading for Nikkō—the hokku becomes a salute to the spirit of the mountain, to the divine insight of Kūkai, and to the “venerable light” of the Tōshōgu (literally, Eastern Shining Shrine), which was dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shōgunate, whose “light” implicitly brings peace to the land. The first version, which Bashō wrote during the journey, was “awe inspiring—reaching the darkness beneath the trees, light of the sun.” In it, the “light of the sun” reaches down to the “darkness beneath the trees” (ko no shita yami), to the people. The revised version, by contrast, eliminates the overt allegory and symbolism, focusing instead on the poet’s sense of awe before nature, on the sight of the sun shining on a rich mixture of dark evergreen leaves (aoba) and light green deciduous leaves (wakaba), with the divine presence emerging only in the overtones. The distinctive assonance and cadence that result from the repeated “a” and “i” vowels also make the revised version infinitely superior.
58. Embarking on a journey becomes synonymous with entering the Buddhist path: both imply a firm resolve and a new life, symbolized here by the seasonal word koromogae (change of clothes at the beginning of summer).
59. Ge no hajime refers both to the beginning (hajime) of summer (ge is the Sino-Japanese reading for natsu) and to the Buddhist austerities of summer (ge or gegoromi), in which Buddhist practitioners remained indoors from the sixteenth day of the Fourth Month to the sixteenth day of the Seventh Month, fasting, reciting sutras, and carrying out such ascetic and purification practices as standing under a waterfall. The traveler stands behind the waterfall, which gives him, at least for a while, the cool, pure feeling of being cleansed of the dirt of the world, as in a gegomori.
60. Natsuyama (summer mountains), a classical seasonal word for the thick, verdant mountains of summer, refers to both the mountains surrounding the temple and the many mountain peaks that lie before the traveler. At the beginning of the journey, the traveler bows before the high clogs, a prayer for the foot strength of En no Gyōja, the founder of a mountain priest sect (shugendō) and an “austerity man” (gyōja) believed to have acquired superhuman power from rigorous mountain training.
61. A poem by Saigyō: “I thought to pause on the roadside where a crystal stream flows beneath a willow and stood rooted to the spot” (Shinkokinshū, 1205; Summer, no. 262).
62. The entire passage is an allusive variation on The Wandering Priest and the Willow (Yugyū yanagi), a nō play based on Saigyo’s poem in the Shinkokinshū (Summer, no. 262), in which an itinerant priest (the waki), retracing the steps of Saigyō through the Deep North (Michinoku), meets an old man (the shite) who shows him the withered willow about which Saigyō wrote his famous poem.
The old man later turns out to be the spirit of that willow. At the end of the play the priest offers prayers to the spirit of the willow, thereby enabling it to achieve salvation. When the district officer offers to introduce Saigyo’s willow to the traveler, the passage takes on the atmosphere of a nō dream play in which the traveler encounters the spirit of Saigyō, embodied in the willow. In contrast to Saigyo’s classical poem, in which time passes as the traveler rests near a beautiful stream, in Basho’s hokku, time passes as the traveler journeys to meet Saigyo’s spirit. Most modern commentators, finding it hard to believe that Bashō would plant rice seedlings himself, interpret the hokku as having two subjects: farm girls, who are planting the seedlings in the rice paddy in the summer, and Bashō, who stands under the willow. Filled with thoughts of Saigyō, who had stood by the same tree, the traveler loses track of time, and before he knows it, an entire field of rice has been planted by the farm girls. The context of the nō play and the grammar of the poem also suggest that Bashō, imagining himself as an itinerant monk, helps plant rice seedlings in the field as an offering or greeting to the spirit of Saigyō, his poetic host and patron. Basho’s entire journey can even be interpreted as an offering or tribute to the spirit of Saigyō (1118–1190) on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.
63. The Shirakawa Barrier here exists almost entirely in the traveler’s imagination as a circle of poetic associations. Taira Kanemori (d. 990), referred to as “that poet,” was the first in a long line of classical waka poets to compose on the barrier: “Had I a messenger I would send a missive to the capital!” (Shūishū, 1005; Parting, no. 339). The following poem by Priest Nōin (998–1050), who first traveled to the Deep North in 1025, created the association of the Shirakawa Barrier with autumn wind (akikaze): “Though I left the capital together with the spring mists, autumn winds are blowing at the Shirakawa Barrier” (Goshūishū,1086; Travel, no. 518). At a poetry contest in 1170, Minamoto Yorimasa (1104–1180) composed an allusive variation on Noin’s poem that also linked the Shirakawa Barrier with bright autumn leaves: “In the capital the leaves were still green when I saw them, but bright autumn leaves now scatter at the Shirakawa Barrier” (Senzaishū, 1183; Autumn 2, no. 365). In a seemingly endless poetic transmission, Bashō follows the traces of Saigyō, Yorimasa, and others who had earlier sought the traces of Nōin, who in turn had followed the traces of Kanemori.
64. This hokku, which Bashō composed in the summer of 1689 and later placed in Narrow Road, is a greeting to his friend and host Tōkyū (1638–1715), a station master at Sukagawa, at the entrance to the Deep North (oku), the northeast region. Hearing the rice-planting songs in the fields (probably owned by Tōkyū), Bashō composes a poem that compliments the host on the elegance of his home and region, which he associates with the beginnings of fūryū (refinement, poetry). The poem also expresses Basho’s joy and gratitude at being able to compose linked verse for the first time in the Interior. Here Bashō leaves behind the web of classical associations—the white deutzia (unohana), autumn leaves, autumn wind, longing for the capital—to find fūryū in the rice-planting songs (taueuta) sung by the laborers in the fields, an ancient practice that had died out in the Kyoto and Kantō areas by the early Edo period. In a haikai twist, Michinoku, or the Interior, rather than the capital (miyako), becomes the beginnings of poetic and artistic sensibility. The Shirakawa Barrier, which stood at the entrance to the Deep North, marks not a turning back toward the capital, as the earlier classical poems on Shirakawa had, but an entry into the provinces as a poetic wellspring.
65. Shinobu, in present-day Fukushima Prefecture, was the most famous utamakura, or poetic place, in the Deep North. Shinobu mojizuri (Shinobu cloth mottling), the technique of rubbing the fronds of shinobugusa (hare’s foot fern, literally, longing grass) onto woven cloth so as to create a wild pattern or design, became associated with uncontrolled longing (shinobu), owing to the following love poem by Minamoto Tōru, one of many classical poems that helped transform the Deep North from an area associated with barbarians (ezo) into a landscape for Heian courtly love. “I am not one to long uncontrollably like the wild Shinobu cloth mottling of the Deep North” (Kokinshū, Love 4, no. 724). The traveler in Narrow Road is disappointed to discover that an utamakura that had given birth to countless poems has been neglected and abused. The damaged utamakura, however, inspires the traveler, who sees in the hands of the nearby farm girls transplanting rice seedlings a glimpse of the hands of the young women who used to press “grass of longing” onto the Shinobu Mottling Rock. Time has obscured the literary utamakura, but the powerful memory of that poetic place enables the poet to find new poetry in the mundane, in the everyday commoner life of the provinces. In a haikai movement, the refined and the mundane, the classical and the contemporary, merge momentarily in the women’s hands.
66. Emperor Shōmu (r. 724–748). In actuality, Shōmu (701–756) was not alive at the time of this memorial.
67. The four successive heavy “o” syllables in tsuwamonodomo (plural for “warriors”) suggest the ponderous march of soldiers or the thunder of battle. This hokku depends on polysemous words: ato, which can mean “site,” “aftermath,” “trace,” or “track”; and yume, which can mean “dream,” “ambition,” or “glory.” The summer grasses are the “site” of a former battlefield and of the dreams of glory of the many noted warriors who fought there in the distant past. Ato also refers to temporal passage: the summer grasses are the “aftermath” of the dreams of glory. All that is left of the once great ambitions are the “traces” or “tracks.” The “dreams of the ancient warriors” (tsuwamonodomo ga yume) are the dreams of the three generations of Fujiwara who valiantly conquered the Ainu tribesmen and built a glorious civilization only to see it disappear, and of Yoshitsune’s brave retainers, who died for their master. The ephemerality, the dreamlike nature of such “ambitions” (yume), is foreshadowed in the opening phrase of the prose passage (“in the space of a dream,” issui no yume), a reference to the nō play Kantan, about a man (Rosei) who napped and dreamed about a lifetime of glory and defeat while waiting for dinner. These dreams of “glory” (yume) have turned to grass (kusamura), leaving only the site or traces of the dreams. The traveler here takes on the aura of the waki (traveling priest) in a nō warrior play (shuramono) who visits the site of a former battlefield and then, as if in a dream, watches the ghost of the slain warrior reenact his most tragic moments on the battlefield. A similar process occurs in the Chinese archetype in Guwen zhenbao: “Lamentation at an Ancient Battlefield” (Gu zhanchang diaowen, J. Ko senjō o tomurau bun) by Li Hua (ca. 715–ca. 774) in which the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, and listens to the voices of the dead before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past. The “dreams” in Bashō’s hokku, in short, are also the dreams of the visitors, who have had a fleeting glimpse of the past, of the dreams of others. Natsugusa (summer grasses), a classical seasonal word for summer, refers to the thick, deep grass resulting from the continuous summer rains (samidare), and was associated in the classical poetry with shigeru (to grow thick), musubu (to tie blades, bond), and chigiru (to tie, make a vow of love). Through the reference to Du Fu’s noted Chinese poem on the impermanence of civilization—“The state is destroyed, rivers and hills remain / The city walls turn to spring, grasses and trees are green”—Bashō was able to transform these classical associations of eroticism and fertility into those of battle and the larger topos of the ephemerality of human ambitions. Natsugusa, in short, is both the rich, thick, replenished grass of the present and the blood-stained grass of the past, an image of both the constancy of nature and the impermanence of all things.
68. Sora’s poem, which was probably written by Bashō himself, continues the nō-esque vision. The two hokku can in fact be read as linked verses: the white flowers of the unohana (deutzia), a kind of brier, appears in the midst of a field of summer grass, from which the figure of Kanefusa rises like a ghost, his white hai
r waving in the air. According to the Record of Yoshitsune (Gikeiki), Kanefusa, Yoshitsune’s loyal retainer, helped Yoshitsune’s wife and children commit suicide; saw his master to his end; set fire to the fort at Takadachi; slew Nagasaki Tarō, an enemy captain; grabbed Nagasaki’s younger brother under his arm; and then leaped into the flames—a sense of frenzy captured in the image of the white hair.
69. Commentators are divided on whether the samidare, the long summer rains, are falling now, before the speaker’s eyes, or whether samidare refers to past summer rains, which have spared the Hikaridō (Hall of Light) over the centuries. The latter interpretation is borne out by an earlier version of the poem: “Summer rains—falling year after year five hundred times” (samidare ya toshidoshi furu mo gohyaku tabi). In short, two landscapes coexist: the samidare falling immediately before the poet’s eyes and the years and centuries of samidare, or monsoon seasons, which, while rotting houses and other buildings, have somehow, miraculously, spared the Hikaridō. The two visions are linked by the verb furu, which means both for the rain “to fall” and for time “to pass.” In contrast to the earlier version, which highlights this pun, the revised version discreetly submerges the homonym, emphasizing the contrast between the somber, dark rains of summer and the implicit divine glow of the Hikaridō, the Hall of Light.
70. Bashō, exhausted from a difficult journey, finds Seifū’s residence and hospitality to be “coolness” itself and “relaxes” (nemaru)—a word in the local dialect—as if he were at home. In an age without air conditioners, the word “cool” (suzushisa), a seasonal word for summer, was the ultimate compliment that could be paid to the host of a summer’s lodging.
71. In classical poetry, the cicada (semi) was associated with its cries, which were considered raucous and undesirable. In a paradoxical twist, the sharp, high-pitched cries of the cicada deepen the stillness by penetrating the rocks on top of the mountain. The first version appears to have been “Mountain temple—sticking to the rocks, cries of the cicada,” and the second version, “Loneliness—seeping into the rocks, cries of the cicada.” In contrast to the verbs shimitsuku (to stick to) and shimikomu (to seep into), shimiiru (to penetrate, pass deep into) in the last version implies the nonphysicality of the voice, which passes as if untouched, deep into the rocks and, by implication, becomes stillness. As the last sentence of the prose passage suggests, the stillness (shizukasa) also passes deep into the poet, making his “heart grow pure” (kokoro sumiyuku). The penetrating screech of the cicadas is suggested by the repetitive vowel “i” in the middle ku: iwa ni shi mi iru. At the same time, a paradoxical sense of stillness is created by the slow succession of “a’s” and the recurrent soft “s” consonants: shi, sa, shi, se.
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