Picturing Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North
Giving in to my wanderlust, I happen upon a newly discovered masterpiece on a sweltering summer day in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto.
KYOTO — TFP, we’re happy to report, is filing this from the road—a road more than 6,000 miles away from home, in the rain, on a sweltering summer day in the ancient former capital of Japan. And we couldn’t be more grateful. In addition to the lives of friends and family, the pandemic stole our spontaneity and ability to take to the road on a whim, visit old friends, or make new ones in new places, and in so doing better understand ourselves and the places we call home.
Americans tend to think we invented the road trip. And we do love a good adventure. Think of Twain’s Huck Finn, Kerouac’s On the Road, National Lampoon’s Vacation. But, in reality, the road trip is where literature began, with Gilgamesh, the epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia written—well, chiseled, really, into stone tablets—in about 2000 B.C.
Gilgamesh is the story of the hero king of Uruk who sets out to conquer death with his wild buddy (the classic sidekick) Enkidu. I hate to spoil the story for you, but as in Homer’s Odyssey, only one man makes it home, still very much mortal but all the wiser for his adventures, victories and defeats, on the road.
At 55, my travels are far less spontaneous than they were when I was half my age. But when a long-planned trip to Japan to visit my wife’s family in Tokyo suddenly resulted in a side trip to Kyoto, I was thrilled. I hadn’t been to the city since my wife and I first met in the mid-1990s and was eager to visit its ancient temples and shrines, bamboo forests, and narrow, shop-lined streets of the Gion district where geishas and maikos in colorful kimonos—white-faced and ethereal—once roamed.
So when I heard, by chance, that an exhibit called “Picturing Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Newly Discovered Handscroll by Yosa Buson” was on display at the Kyoto National Museum, I knew I had to see it.
The piece below is about the exhibit, and more generally about Bashō, a poet I’ve long revered—as did Buson—and, truth be told, tried my best to imitate in more than a few haikus, including this one, written years ago on a mountain road to a hot spring not far from Kanazawa, the city where my wife’s parents first met:
It’s almost winter lichen won’t warm us tonight the mountain breathes in
I hope that you enjoy this piece on Bashō and Buson, and that you have a chance to indulge in some wanderlust this summer, too. I plan to continue filing stories from the road, many about Japan, some from past visits, others from this one—all, one hopes, worthy of your time, no matter where, in the summer heat, you may find yourself.
MJ
Picturing Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North
By Michael Judge
A century before Oscar Wilde said “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” the Japanese poet and painter Yosa Buson (1716-1783) had proved his point by painstakingly creating book-length handscrolls—with his own exquisite calligraphy and illustrations—of Matsuo Bashō’s masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travel diary of prose and haiku first published in 1702.
Buson, a great poet in his own right, worshiped Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) in the same way that, say, Bob Dylan did Woody Guthrie. So much so that Buson not only produced many paintings based on The Narrow Road and upwards of 10 fully transcribed handscrolls, he also took to the road and retraced much of Bashō’s epic 1,491-mile journey through the forests and remote villages in the Tōhoku region north of his home in Edo, the capital city known today as Tokyo.
Like Dylan sings in “Song to Woody,” I like to imagine Buson, too, singing out these words from the road in tribute to his hero, Bashō:
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home Walkin’ a road other men have gone down I’m seein’ your world of people and things Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
Buson, of course, wasn’t alone in his Bashō-worship, or his desire to relive the experiences of the 17th-century haiku master and his apprentice Sora in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Kenji Miyazawa, the beloved Japanese novelist and writer of children’s literature, born nearly 200 years after Bashō’s death, was right when he said, “It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it.” And even today fans from near and far flock to Tōhoku to follow “the Bashō trail.”
As the Kyoto National Museum explains, “Until recently, only four examples of the Buson scrolls have been known to survive. This exhibition introduces a newly discovered fifth version. This long-lost scroll is the earliest of the five versions and served as the starting point for his later compositions. Exactly 320 years after the original publication of Bashō’s masterpiece, this exhibition debuts the newfound scroll alongside related works from the museum’s collection.”
Its Japanese title is Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道, originally おくのほそ道), which Google translates as “the narrow path in the back.” There’s no north in the title, and my wife says the English translation we’re most familiar with loses some of the danger and mystery of the original. A title more loyal to the Japanese, she suggests, might be simply Narrow Back Roads.
The translation I’m most familiar with is from Nobuyuki Yuasa’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which also contains Bashō’s earlier travel sketches from The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (possibly the best title ever).
I fell in love with the book when I first read it in the early 1990s, before living and working in Tokyo as a journalist in the mid-1990s, for the same reasons one loves Homer or Twain, for the truthfulness of its portrayal of humanity—with all its beauty, grace, pettiness and brutality. But also because it introduced me to haibun, the uniquely Japanese art of prose and haiku working together to capture the essence of a scene or moment, as well as the aesthetic of wabi-sabi—a deep appreciation of that which is imperfect, weathered, impermanent.
Bashō, like so many great artists before and since, had what he described as a “windswept spirit” and chose—to borrow Robert Frost’s phrase—“the road less traveled.” What Buson chose was to use his talents as a poet, painter and master of sho, the art of Japanese calligraphy, to learn from, preserve and share the great master’s work in a manner that honored the original experience.
The illustrations are in the haiga style—simple representations using the same brush and ink used by haiku poets and adding color. Like the haiku poems they illustrate, haiga embody a simple but profound experience, like Bashō’s most famous haiku:
Furu ike ya [And old pond] kawazu tobikomu [a frog jumps in] mizu no oto [the sound of water]
The experience of viewing the newly discovered handscroll, more than 300 years after the first publication of Oku no Hosomichi, was similar to an Edo-era virtual reality—a feeling of total immersion and traveling back in time, reading from right to left, top to bottom, as the story literally unscrolls across the room, nearly 60-feet long, on the original scroll rod that, at about 12-inches high, can easily be held in one’s hands.
What’s important to point out here is that Buson’s calligraphy, his sho, is as much an art as the illustrations. In many ways, sho is more like a painting than the printed word—something to be experienced, not simply read.
Like its Chinese predecessor caoshu (literally, grass script), sho is far more fluid and interpretive than formal script in either language, offering the writer greater freedom and creativity. The addition of Japanese kana, the written language's two syllabic scripts, to kanji, or Chinese characters, adds another layer of complexity.
In an essay titled “Words in Motion,” the 20th century sho master Aoyama San'u provides a rare glimpse into the inner world of sho artistry. “Characters would be merely lifeless designs if they were only technically and skillfully produced,” he explains. “Sho could not have survived these millennia if they did not, in some way, arouse an emotional response and interest among the viewers."
Instead of describing the experience, somewhat poorly, it seems to me, I’ll present it to you as it was presented to me in the exhibit—with all its wondrous surprises and playfulness. What follows are segments that include illustrations from the newly discovered handscroll and others, accompanied by the museum’s brief description and a Bashō haiku that captures the spirit of that segment. I hope you love them as much as I did when I first stumbled across them on a rainy day in an ancient city.
Departure (Tokyo)
Bashō sets off from Edo with his companion Sora on the 27th day of the 3rd month of 1689. Getting off the boat at Senju, he says goodbye to his friends who see him off.
The passing of spring / birds are weeping as the eyes / of fish well with tears
Nasuno (Tochigi Prefecture)
Traversing country roads to visit a friend in Kurobane, the weary Bashō borrows a horse from a local farmer. He is then approached by two children, one a girl named Kasane, which means "layered."
Kasane must be / a name for a wild pink / with double petals (Written by Sora)
Fukui (Fukui Prefecture)
In Fukui, Bashō inquires after a local elder poet named Tosai. Arriving at Tōsai's humble cottage, he is greeted by the poet's wife. When he finally meets with Tōsai, the older poet decides to accompany Bashō to the port town of Tsuruga.
Ruins of the Satō Manor (Fukushima Prefecture)
Bashō visits the site of the mansion of ancient warrior Satō Motoharu, whose sons died serving under Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189). He then visits the family's memorial temple and weeps on hearing that, after their deaths, the sons' wives dressed in their armor to console Motoharu.
Both altar and sword / display in the fifth month when / paper banners fly
Sue no Matsuyama (Miyagi Prefecture)
The melancholy of travel overtakes Bashō as he arrives at the famous sites of Sue no Matsuyama and the seaside village of Shiogama. In the evening he listens to the performance of a blind lute player and admires the local flavor of the ballads.
Ichiburi (Niigata Prefecture)
From his bed, Bashō overhears a conversation in the next room. Two prostitutes from Echigo on pilgrimage to Ise are entrusting letters to a man who is returning to their hometown tomorrow. Bashō falls asleep to the voices of the women lamenting their place in life.
Under the same roof / just the concubines and I / bush-clovers and moon
Shitomae Barrier (Miyagi Prefecture)
Arriving at the Shitomae Barrier that leads to Dewa province, Bashō is greeted with suspicion by the gatekeepers but eventually allowed to pass. The owner of an inn finds a trustworthy young man brandishing a short sword and oak staff to serve as the poet's guide.
Swarms of fleas and lice / and then next to my pillow / is a pissing horse
Tsuruoka (Yamagata Prefecture)
The warrior Nagayama Shigeyuki welcomes Bashō to the castle town of Tsuruoka, and the two compose linked verse poetry. From there Bashō takes a riverboat to the port of Sakata and lodges with the physician Itō Genjun, a major figure in local poetry circles.
Drowning the hot sun / into the depths of the sea: / Mogami River
Picturing Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North
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