Bashō

Matsuo Bashō, synonymous with haiku, was also one of our great travelers. His pilgrimage from metropolitan Edo to the primordial Tōhoku mountains is captured in his travel sketch, Narrow Road to the Deep North. He tells a brief story about hiring a guide to take him from one village to another on the far side of a mountain. Once there, the guide tells Bashō he was lucky: the journey is rarely safe. This stray comment scares Bashō so much that he spends the next few days shaking off the fear. I felt it, too. Those dark northern forests full of unkempt bandits and unknown sounds. For a moment, I believed in ghosts. Later on in that same journey, Bashō stays with the abbot of a Shugendō temple on Mt. Haguro, one of the region’s three holy mountains collectively known as Dewa Sanzan. Last spring, I climbed that same mountain, taking the 2,500 or so stone steps all the way to the top. Along the way, I stopped at a small monument to Bashō and left the spare change I had in my pocket from breakfast. It had been raining all day. Moss covered the slick rocks, and a fog clung to the towering green cedars. At the top of Mt. Haguro, buses dropped people off outside the great wooden hall before heading back down the other side of the mountain.

Bashō got his name from the banana tree, called bashō in Japanese, planted outside a hut given to him by one of his students. When the hut burned down, his students rebuilt it. He gave that hut away before his trip to Tōhoku. He died on the road.

On the dead limb
squats a crow—
autumn night.


Faceless—bones
scattered in the field,
wind cuts my flesh.


Winter downpour—
even the monkey
needs a raincoat.


Bird of time—
in Kyoto, pining
for Kyoto.


No hat, and cold
rain falling—
well!


Skylark sings all
day, and day
not long enough.


Drenched bush-clover,
passers-by—
both beautiful.


Girl cat, so
thin on love
and barley.


How I long to see
among dawn flowers,
the face of God.