The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Bashх is probably the only Japanese poet whose name is widely recognized in the West. He is associated, rightly, with haiku, the gemlike three-line, seventeen-syllable poetic form that, for many Western readers, seems to encapsulate the Japanese aes- thetic sensibility. His best-known poem has been translated countless times:

furu ike ya Ancient silent pond

kawazu tomikobu Then a frog jumped right in mizu no oto Watersound: kerplunk

What is not so well known is that the haiku evolved rela- tively late in the history of Japanese verse, and that Bashх was one of its chief inventors.

From the late ninth century onward, Japanese poets aban- doned long verse forms and wrote almost entirely in the form called tanka (or waka), the "short poem" of thirty-one syllables in five lines: 5-7-5-7-7. (This was the kind of poem that Genji [28] wrote to his ladyfriends with such facility, and in which they replied to him.) The tanka was and is a flexible and expressive poetic form, but also a limited one; it precludes any kind of narrative or even sustained emotional development. By the thirteenth century poets regularly tried to avoid its limita- tions by composing tanka in sequential, quasi-narrative cycles of as many as a hundred poems. This led in turn to renga, or linked verse, a kind of sequential poem of indefinite length, often composed collectively by two or more poets (and some­times as a social amusement over cups of sake). To begin, someone would propose an initial triplet (5-7-5), which always included a seasonal reference; the next person would add the closing couplet (7-7), the next would contribute a new triplet, and so on, for as long as people wanted to continue. In the hands of truly skillful poets, this process could produce long poems of delightful complexity and wit, characterized by the kind of free-association that we would expect to find more on the psychoanalytic couch than in a poem.

And this explains how the haiku became a cornerstone of modern Japanese poetry. With linked verse having freed up the poetic triplet as the starting point of a long poem, it only required a poetic genius like Bashх to realize that the triplet could stand on its own. Bashх spent much of his life refining the haiku form, in particular experimenting with ways to inte- grate haiku into prose narrative. His favorite genre for doing so

was the travei memoir, of which The Narrow Road to the Deep North is his finest and most famous work.

Bashх was born into a minor and somewhat impoverished samurai family, at a time when Japan's warrior aristocracy was making a painful adjustment to a long period of domestic peace and tranquillity, a time when abilities other than swords- manship were needed to make a good career. As a young man he was appointed to a post as gentleman-companion to a young samurai from a much more exalted family, and the two spent their time mainly in studying and writing poetry. After his mas- ters early death, Bashх left the family^ service and began a lifelong precarious existence as a wandering poetry teacher and Zen lay brother. He eventually became famous and attracted a number of students who themselves became famous poets (as well as larger numbers of hangers-on seeking to bask in his limelight). But fame seems to have meant nothing to him except insofar as it assured him a warm welcome wherever he went. He apparently owned almost nothing, lived in temples or the most frugal of rented houses, and was never happier than when he was exploring the back roads of Japan on foot, trust- ing fate to provide him each day with a simple meai, a place to stay, and fellow poets with whom to exchange verses.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North records a six-month journey in 1689 that took him north from Tokyo (then called Edo), then west over the mountainous spine of Japan to the coast of the Japan Sea, then southwest and south over the mountains again, ending at the town of Ogaki (near modern Nagoya). This journey involved traveling on foot through coun- try that even today is rugged and remote, and BashĉTs travei account contains hints of some anxious days traversing narrow and uncertain roads. But the air of the book reflects mainly its authors cheerful and optimistic disposition, his love of new experience, and his conviction that things will work out ali right in the end.