As I passed through the Shirakawa Barrier, I realized that there was a very good chance I would never again see my home. When a rooster called from a rooftop, I wondered whether he called for me to stop and turn back. A wind over the fields also seemed to beckon me back.
I sat down under a tree to rest my weary legs, and, thinking of the road I’d already traveled, my Kashi-wabara village seemed somewhere over the mountains nestled in clouds. Homesick already, I wrote:
No matter how hard
I try, I can’t stop thinking
of my old village
The same thoughts written as tanka:
Memory returns
to those ancient misty trails
around my village—
but neither flowers nor love
bloom there—only my sadness.
So very gently
it won’t even disturb
the butterfly,
this soft spring wind wanders
over deep fields of new wheat.
On being idle:
Mosquito larvae
are idle—like me today,
like me tomorrow
Life is brief, desire infinite:
So many breezes
wander through my summer room:
but never enough
Mornings, the farmer
studies his green rice fields:
sown with devotion
I’ve had this in mind for a long time, trying to find a way to say it:
Even the flies
in the village of my birth
draw blood with each bite
Here as in heaven
the lotus blooms, growing tall.
But here, much smaller
A summer’s estate:
my little grass mat spread out
in the piney shade
Kijō wrote this song for children:
The new dragonfly
circles three times before
it settles in our room
The firefly departs
so quickly, so breathlessly
it leaves its light behind
The old woman
wiped her nose on the blossom
of a moonflower
Calligraphy on
a hot summer day: that boy
wrote on his face
Flitting here and there
a huge firefly dances
across the moor
After enjoying a bath in Nyoi Hot Springs in Tanaka village:
Lying here looking
at the mountains I just crossed,
I’m even hotter
When I bowed before
the Buddha, hungry mosquitoes
swarmed from his shadow
If you really must
leap, my little fleas, why not
leap on the lotus?
My home is so poor
even the resident flies
keep their family small
That cormorant’s my
favorite who surfaces
with an empty beak
A cicada, loud
in the pine—will noontime heat
never arrive?
How fortunate! I’m not
punished for dozing behind
the mosquito net
The free cormorant
scurries back to the boat when
her new baby cries
FIVE
Everyone kept telling me about remarkably beautiful peonies blooming at the home of my friend Nabuchi. People traveled miles to see them. So I stopped along my way.
Thirty-foot beds were laid under a large canopy, each packed tightly with blossoming white, red, and purple flowers—and more—an especially startling one that was rich black, and another, a strange yellow. Then, as I studied these two more closely, I began to see them as dry and stiff, unlike the vibrant peonies around them. They looked like made-up corpses among beautiful girls.
Of course, Nabuchi made them from paper and tied them to living flowers as a joke for his friends, a truly witty one at that, and without consequence. He asked no fee for viewing his flowers and even provided saké and tea. Laughing about his joke, I wrote:
Little scraps of paper
planted among the leaves:
peony faces
SIX
Children hereabouts play a game wherein they bury a live frog and cover its grave with plantain leaves while they sing:
Hey, hey, the toad is dead,
the toad is dead.
Let’s all bury it
under the plantain leaves!
Under the plantain leaves!
As it happens, an ancient Chinese botanical book, the Honzō kōmoku, refers to plantain as “toad’s skin,” which in this province somehow became “toad’s leaf.” The game, sprung from the correspondence between Japanese and Chinese common names, must have conveyed some message in earlier times.
Spindly saxifrage
bends above the toad’s grave
and its white tears fall
In Chinese mythology, a toad taught a famous hermit how to fly. In Japan, we often credit frogs with having fought bravely at Ten’nōji. But that too is ancient mythology. Today, the toad’s apparently have made peace with humanity and now live comfortably m the world. If I, for example, should roll out my mat on the ground some summer evening and cry, “Come out, Happy One,6 come out!”—out of the garden comes a fat toad to sit with me in the cool evening air. That’s the soul of a poet! And the greatest honor bestowed upon a toad was when, as written by Chōshōshi, a toad was chosen to judge the Insect Poetry Competition.
Sitting serenely,
a plump toad enjoys viewing
the mountain horizon
Kikaku wrote:
The oh-so-heavy
toad crept out to meet the light-
hearted bush warbler
And Kyokusui wrote:
You’ve fallen silent,
my toad. Is it all the words
that bloat you so?
Beginning to rain—
the old toad wipes his brow
with the back of his hand
When farmers discuss
rice fields, each thinks his own
is the very best
The mosquito flew
into a woman’s bedroom
and died there in flames7
Mimicking cormorants,
children dive more cleverly
than real cormorants
Lying in hammocks,
we speak so solemnly of
distant thunder, distant rain
While I was away,
I left the mosquito net
hanging lazily
A flowing freshet—
how the old woodcutter prayed,
deep in the mountains
Searching all this world,
there is no perfect dewdrop
even on the lotus
From high in a tree
the cicada cries after
a wandering puppy
May 28: They say it has rained annually on this day ever since 1193, when the Soga brothers avenged their father’s murder at the cost of their own lives. They say the rain commemorates the tears of Tora, wife of one of the brothers.
Ignoring Tora’s
copious tears, I got soaked,
drenched to the bone
SEVEN
In Susaka Township in Shinano Province, a certain Dr. Nakamura, with capricious nastiness, killed a pair of snakes as they were mating. Late that night he was so overcome with searing pain in his penis that it rotted and fell off and he died.
The doctor’s son, Santetsu, followed in his father’s profession. He was a big man with an enormous mushroom-shaped penis. On his wedding night, however, he was dismayed to find it hanging useless, soft and thin as a candlewick. Overcome with shame, he sought other women, as many as a hundred, hoping to make it with them in order to recover, but always with the same embarrassing result, until he eventually sought refuge in s
eclusion.
Until I heard this story, I’d never been interested in tales of the supernatural, thinking them no more than regional folktales popularized in old anthologies. But this story prompted me to consider the vengeance of snakes and how the family suffered in turn.
All sentient beings are given life, even fleas and lice, and life is equally dear to each. It is bad enough to kill, but to kill them while they are in the act of procreation is truly terrible.
Imprisoned, the fish
in its tub finds such delight
in fresh cold water
Fly into the mist!
Vanish quickly, my bird! You
are finally free
Ōemaru wrote:
As the mosquito
at equinox sucks my blood,
I sit like Buddha
Mitsutoshi’s tanka:
In its final throes,
the dying carp spins, splashing
water with its fins.
Likewise people waste their lives
in useless activities.
Toshiyori wrote:
Lured by the branches
set out to trap them, fish thrash
helplessly about.
Likewise people are enticed
by the lures of ignorance.
Written on Mount Asama:
A lone bindweed root
holds on for dear life to lava
on the mountainside
Seeing off a student of haiku:
Even prickly shrubs
will do—if you feel a breeze
pass gently through
Checking stations at mountain passes were established in ancient times to protect travelers, but now they contribute mostly misery:
The gatekeepers burn
moxa for travelers’ legs
under blooming plum
Hearing our voices,
the doe moves quickly to stand
beside her fawn
Summer’s first firefly,
winging about, ignoring
temptation’s sweet call
This slightly bent
lotus stem—appropriate
symbol of our world
The darkness beneath
the canopy of leaves belongs
to listless neighbors
Written beside a large pond:
A single leap—from
waterweed blossom to
that cloud in heaven
I heard about a fellow in a village in Echigo Province who hesitated before offering a night’s lodging to the high priest Shinran:
In Kakikazi,
even the mountain cuckoo
stutters nervously
Life in the vast city of Edo:
A dime-sized patch of grass
earns just that much of a breeze:
sweltering weather
For two yen I bought
enough water to dampen
my thirsty plant
At Kogane-ga-hara:
The mare’s vigilance:
watchful while her foal drinks
deeply from the spring
Those clouds form grandly
high in the sky, but owe it
all to passing winds
Floating together
downriver: the antiplague
sacrament and the flea
At Morin Temple I heard about a badger who metamorphosed into a tea kettle:
Here long ago
a tea kettle flew off, light
as a butterfly
When the mosquito
in cherry grove bit me,
I cursed even the blooms
This ant trail must have
begun somewhere in the clouds
in highest heaven
EIGHT
While visiting the Forest of the Mountain God in Rokugawa village in the Takai area, I picked three small chestnuts, which I eventually planted in the back corner of my garden. One sprouted, lifting up its green head in spring, happy in warm sunlight.
Shortly thereafter, my neighbor on the east remodeled his house, cutting off all the sunlight and moonlight on my chestnut, cutting off even the falling rain and dew. That year it grew little.
All winter, he shoveled the snow from his roof, piling it deep around the building until it looked as if Great White Mountain had been planted there overnight. The narrow pathway on which they carried firewood and water over the summit was steep as the stone steps ascending Atago Mountain. Toward the end of winter, the first happy signs of spring began to appear as green buds spotted the fields, and trees began to blossom. Still the great snowpile remained, deadly white and cold.
Following custom, on April 8th, I prepared to warn away spring woodworms with a poem when a warbler began singing noisily and persistently in the garden. I went out to search for my little chestnut tree buried for months under snow, only to find its broken trunk. Had this tree been human, I’d have sent its remains up in smoke, but it wasn’t long before the stump sent out a few small leaves, and by the end of the year it had regained its former height.
Again that winter—and every winter—it was crushed pitilessly by heavy snow. This has happened through seven winters. This unfortunate tree can neither blossom and fruit nor quite die. Its life is a perpetual struggle to survive at a foot in height. Hardly a life for a tree.
And yet my own life closely resembles that of my tree. The firstborn, the first blossom in our family tree, I have been pushed aside to survive among late-blooming weeds, suckled by harsh winds blowing down Stepmother Mountain. I cannot recall a single day when I could freely enjoy life under a wide sky. I don’t know how such a thin thread of life could endure fifty-seven long years. Forgive me, my chestnut tree!—I never intended, when I planted you in my garden, for you to share in my own unhappy fate!
One surviving pink,
under shady trees called
Mother Trees, helpless!
Buddha taught that all events have karmic sources. If so, my suffering cannot be without foundation. I must have brought it on myself:
Even this magnolia,
merely hanging night and day
high over my head:
in springtime it will offer
many beautiful flowers.
Other poems on this theme include Sōkan’s
All alone, the step-
child naps on a thin mattress
of woven grasses
Seishō wrote:
Sent out to sweep snow
from bamboo leaves, is that wind
a stepchild also?
Kōsetsu wrote:
I’d love to slap that
fly on the beautiful face
of my young stepchild
And Mitatsu:
All night mosquito
bites multiply the tears
of the stepchild
In an uncompleted linked verse, Bashō hosted8 in 1687:
A well-wrought petition saved
one from punishment long ago
[TOCHI]
Thus did a stepmother
gain a reputation for
courageous kindness
[RANSETSU]
From another, written by Shoshun and Mitatsu, in the 1691 anthology Gion Shūi:
The servant leaves to bury
the bodiless head in secret
The stepmother cries
through the cold, rainy night
over her dark crime
From among five linked verses Bashō left in the north country:
Stained by his doings,
he stains the blades of grasses
with bloody business
And Furyū added:
His stepmother robbed
him of his rightful life—so
cut by treachery!
NINE
Once there was a small girl, a stepchild who was not permitted to eat from a clay jar from which her stepsiblings helped themselves to rice balls whenever they fancied. When one day she heard a warbler calling near her window
, she wrote a tanka:
Little bush warbler,
what makes you cry out so long?
Do you call for milk,
enough rice from a clay jar,
or is your mother gone?
She was the daughter of Lord Tsurayuki.
TEN
I spent my time alone when I was small. I avoided the village children because they teased me. They used to sing:
Everyone knows the motherless boy;
he stands alone in the door,
chewing his thumb from hunger
I sought refuge near the woodpile out back, pitiable, hiding in dark corners, so miserable that, when only six years old, I wrote:
My little sparrows,
you too are now motherless—
come play with me!
ELEVEN
Long ago in Yamato, in Tatsuta village, there lived a particularly cruel woman. Having refused to feed her stepson for ten days, she told him as he was about to die of hunger, “Take this bowl of rice and offer it to the stone roadside Buddha. If he eats, you may also.” The boy followed the instructions. But as he sat to pray beside the stone Buddha, it suddenly opened its huge mouth and gobbled the rice almost as if it were the starving child.
The Spring of My Life Page 3