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Matsuo Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North Bashō Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North Oku no Hosomichi Three genres: travelogue; picaresque; haibun ••• Bashō’s Narrow Road is, arguably, the most famous and influential work of Japanese literature. In essence, the piece belongs to the travelogue genre, being Bashō’s first-person account of a journey (or pilgrimage of sorts) that he undertook in 1689 with fellow-poet Kawai Sora (also known as Soga) as his companion. Narrow Road first appeared in 1702, after Bashō’s death (at around age 50, in 1694). Westerners sometimes refer to Bashō as the “Shakespeare of Japan.” ••• As with Voltaire’s Candide, a later work, Narrow Road conforms to the formula identified with the picaresque genre, namely: a central protagonist (Bashō) who, while experiencing a journey made up of didactic episodes (called “Stations” in this case) is informed by a mentor, also known as preceptor (or by several such individuals). Some of Bashō’s mentors are living people (e.g., Sora/Soga), but others are dead sages and poets whose influence continues to be felt at many of the sites that Bashō chooses to visit. ••• On the Narrow Road odyssey, Sora kept a journal, known as Sora’s Diary (or Sora Nikki), which was lost for many centuries until rediscovered in 1943. Details in Sora’s account sometimes differ from details in Bashō’s, suggesting that Bashō may have edited or “spun” elements of his content to make certain ideological points or even to hide certain potentially embarrassing details (e.g., a possible dalliance with a prostitute). Towards the end of Narrow Road, Sora finds himself “seized by an incurable pain in his stomach,” so he cannot finish out the journey with Bashō. 1 Bashō ••• Executed largely on foot within Honshu (the largest island in the archipelago that constitutes Japan), the journey covered almost 1,500 miles, beginning in Tokyo — then called Edo — and moving north, as far as the three mountains of Dewa (i.e. Haguro, Gassan, and Yudono, discussed later in these notes) before turning homeward. ••• In Narrow Road, Bashō presents his long trip as 44 episodes, known as “stations,” most of which concern places that at the time of his setting forth were already widely celebrated in Japan. ••• This consensus about iconic sites is comparable to how most Americans recognize as culturally important such locations as the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty. For example: Station 21 focuses on a place called Matsushima, which Bashō characterizes as “the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan.” Spared serious damage when hit by the massive earthquake-tsunami event of March 11, 2011, Matsuhima (松島)gets its name from the pine trees (matsu) on around 260 islands (shima) in a bay (see the image in the top left-hand corner of this page). ••• Critics say that each place visited and discussed by Bashō has an auratic quality — in other words, it manifests a special, almost sacred aura derived from: (1) its name (which may reflect a natural phenomenon, such as an exceptional pine tree, or a supernatural phenomenon, such as a god); and (2) a body of legends and poems. Sometimes, the poems are physically displayed at a given venue, carved into wood or stone or painted onto silk hangings. ••• Each place that Bashō chooses to visit already has meaning: that is, a semiotic configuration derived in large part from the poems written about the place by earlier visitors. While anything that Bashō adds can enhance and/or complicate the preexisting meaning, that meaning cannot be ignored. ••• When Bashō revised his travel notes to produce the final text of Narrow Road (known in Japanese as Oku no Hosomuchi), he chose a presentational style called haibun, which is prosimetric — that is, a combination of prosa (prose) and metrum (verse). In Japanese literature, Bashō helped pioneer the haibun genre. ••• Typically, a haibun work consists of a series of prosimetic units. In Narrow Road, each of these units (episodes/stations) focuses on a particular place, visited on their journey by Bashō and Sora. ••• A unit within a haibun work begins with a fairly detailed prose exposition of a happening or experience. That text is then followed by a verse, whose purpose is to distill the essence of the prose exposition. Arguably, the prose exposition expresses the “what,” while the verse distillation expresses the “so what.” ••• Many critics identify the verses in Narrow Road with the haiku tradition, to which your high school education most likely exposed you. The standard explanation is that a haiku contains three lines, the first 2 Bashō and last of which consist of five syllables each and the middle of which consists of seven syllables. While this explanation is serviceable, it requires refinement. ••• First, with reference to the Japanese language, one identifies morae (plural of mora) or individual sound- units, as opposed to syllables. ••• Second, a haiku is historically not a free-standing, short verse; instead, the term haiku referred to the first or starting verse in a long, multi-author poem, an instance of the Japanese literary genre known as linked (chain) verse or renga, which emerged in the fourteenth century. In other words: while most of us think “short” in connection with the haiku, we should instead think “long” — the start of a renga or linked- verse poem. ••• In a renga poem, a master-poet creates the starting verse (i.e. the 17-mora haiku); then, other poets add additional verses over time. In Bashō’s era, many renga poems ended up with 36 verses, although there was no official rule about potential length. A 36-verse renga poem is known as a kasen. ••• Over and over in Narrow Road, Bashō relates how he experiences not just a place but also a renga poem about it — a poem that earlier visitors to the place had produced, verse after verse, over time. In general (as we have already seen), Bashō describes, in prose, his intellectual and emotional interactions with the venue; then he produces a new, original verse to be added to the preexisting poem. The verse distills the content in Bashō’s prose description. ••• An excellent example of the above is Station 17, which centers on the pine tree with “twin trunks” at Takekuma. Bashō acknowledges that the unusual tree (or, at least, one of its ancestors] was “described by the ancient poets.” He also highlights how he “wrote … a reply” to a new verse about Takekuma, which was authored by one of his friends, “[t]he poet Kyohaku.” ••• In one instance (Station 31), at a town called Tsuru-ga-oka, Bashō and two acquaintances — the poet and fabric-dyer Zushi Sakichi; and the warrior Nagayama Shigeyuki — each compose verses for a work of linked verse. This action echoes Bashō’s giving instruction in how to write linked verse when, near the complex of three sacred mountains called Dewa, he encounters a group of “rural poets” (Station 27) unsure about best practices in the genre: “It was … a great pleasure for me to be of such help.” ••• In another instance (Station 38), at a place called Shiogoshi, Bashō determines that a five-line poem by a twelfth-century poet and Buddhist monk, Saigyō Hōshi, captures perfectly “[t]he entire beauty” of the pine tree for which the place is famous. Thus, he forebears from composing an additional verse, asserting that any attempt to do so “would be like trying to add a sixth finger to [one’s] hand.” Incidentally, the region’s pine trees were largely cut down to make possible a golf course, although many of the other locales Bashō visited remain fairly intact to this day. ••• Thousands of Japanese adopt as a goal retracing some or all of Bashō’s Narrow Road journey. A tourist industry has emerged around that desire, perhaps comparable to how many of us might attempt “the great American road trip.” Bashō and the Tokugawa (Edo) Dynasty ••• This course, World Literature Two, concerns the literatures of modernity, and Bashō’s life coincided with a significant period of modernization in his native Japan. The country evolved from being a 3 Bashō collection of quasi-independent, feudal microstates (which often fought one another) to being a unitary, modern, and largely peaceful nation-state under a central regime or shogunate, headed by a dynasty named Tokugawa. The Tokugawa family established its power-base in the coastal settlement of Edo, which would grow into the mega-city of Tokyo. Thus, “Edo dynasty” is a synonym for “Tokugawa dynasty.” ••• It made sense that, historically, Japan consisted of multiple microstates: first, the country is a collection of islands; second, it straddles a major seismic zone (the Pacific “Ring of Fire”). Volcanic activity shaped Japan’s mountainous terrain, which separates communities from each other. It was easier to move over water (i.e. the sea, rivers, and lakes) than over mountains. Narrow Road regularly alludes to Japan’s seismic character; for example, Station 4 concerns a religious shrine, Muronoyashima, associated with fire. According to Bashō, the place-name means “burning cell,” a reference to the birth there of a deity called lord born out of the fire. ••• In bringing Japan’s traditional microstates together, the Tokugawa dynasty used military force or the threat of such force, depending on the circumstances. The dynasty obliged all regional lords to recognize the central authority in Edo (i.e. Tokyo) and, even, to maintain residences in the capital city. This model is congruent with the political theory of a commonwealth under a strong single leader, advanced by the English philosophe Thomas Hobbes in his treatise Leviathan (1651). While we should acknowledge the Tokugawa regime’s military nature, its bureaucratic nature is probably just as consequential.
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