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Penguin Classics Narrow Road To The Deep North by Matsuo Basho
- GenresPoetry
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About the author
Matsuo Bashō
318 books587 followersKnown Japanese poet Matsuo Basho composed haiku, infused with the spirit of Zen.
The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_...
The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_...
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December 9, 2025
I’d heard about this book for a long while before locating a copy and actually reading it. Japan seems to have many stories of pilgrims, priests, Artists, Samurai, and just plain travellers who made journeys in Japan and documented their travels. Travelling from shrine to shrine, staying at temples, or wayside inns. And certainly, the country lends itself to this sort of travel: lots of water for travellers from rivers and streams; wonderful scenery, (though this comes with mountains to scale) and lots of villages along the way. Still, As is pointed out in this book, “travels in his day had to be made under very precarious conditions, and that few people, if any, thought of taking to the road merely for pleasure or pastime”. I found the book fascinating both as a travelogue and as a book of poetry.
I think the translator is well aware of the impossibility of really translating Haiku. The kanji used in Haiku create pictures in the minds of the readers even before their brain takes in the meaning. I see this many times with my own wife who is Japanese. She can grasp in an instant the basic subject of a passage; See a fish restaurant at 100m. Will use English for some conversations that are impossible to broach in Japanese. So the idea that the English translations capture the essence of the Haiku is probably far-fetched. Still....I feel that I can glimpse the Haiku through the translation. (It’s about a frog!). A bit like saying “War and Peace” is about Russia.
But I loved the combination of the travel text with the Haiku. And I’ve visited some of the places that Bashoo visited so long ago. I guess they have changed....the narrow road has been replaced with a Shinkansen. But the love of nature shines through in both the text and the poems. A few themes seem to recur: cuckoos, loneliness, silence, water, rain, forests. But some passages are mundane :
Behind, a woman tearing
The meat of a dried codfish.
It wasn’t all five star accommodation. He complains frequently of filthy surroundings and of fleas and lice. And in one point....almost casually describes an abandoned 3 year old child. He gave him some food but then pressed on his way ...leaving the child crying by the river bank. To me: a horrific scene. But, I guess these were tough times.
The veneration of poets survives in Japan. My mother in law was a “Disciple” of some poet who was, apparently, almost, but not quite, a “National Treasure”. And we have some of his hand-written poems framed around the house. Unfortunately I can’t read them.
Bit, I’m inspired enough to maybe try my own hand at some poetry writing on similar themes. Though without the Japanese characters they will never have the same impact and multiple meanings.
I’ve extracted some passages below, really to help me remember the book and some of the passages that impacted me. But also to try and capture some of the essence of the book; Basho himself
Introduction
Bashō seems to have gained an increasingly firm footing in the poetic circles of Edo, for in 1675 when Sōin came from Ōsaka, Bashō was among the poets who were invited to compose linked verse with him. The encounter with Sōin must have been an epoch-making event for Bashō, for upon this occasion he changed his pen name from Sōbō to Tōsei. Deep respect for Sōin, as well as his marked influence, can be felt in the linked verse he composed in the year after.....What Bashō learned from Sōin is the special value in poetry of the humble and unpretentious imagery of everyday life, as he himself testifies by saying: ‘If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as linked verse of a higher order. Linked verse of a lower order, however, must be used for more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy.”
In 1682, when Bashö's house was only two years old, it was destroyed by a fire that swept through a large part of Edo. So Basho sought a temporary abode in the house of Rokuso Gohei....In the summer of 1683, Bashö's mother died in his native place, and in the winter of the same year, a new house was built for him in Fukagawa by his friends and disciples.
What must be borne in mind in reading the travel sketches by Bashö is that travels in his day had to be made under very precarious conditions, and that few people, if any, thought of taking to the road merely for pleasure or pastime....he took to the road, “caring naught for his provisions”....This tragic sense is given beautiful expression in the opening passage of The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton......It is written in haibun, prose mixed with haiku, but the two are not perfectly amalgamated.
Basho returned to his home in Edo in the summer of 1685 after about nine months of wandering......In 1686 two anthologies, Kawazu Awase (Frog Contest) and Haru no Hi (A Spring Day), were published. The former is a collection of poems on frogs by Basho and his disciples. The latter is traditionally counted as the second of the Major Anthologies, though there are only three poems of Basho in it......Let me quote it here [probably Basho’s most famous haiku]...once again with a comment by one of his disciples.
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water-
A deep resonance.
This poem was written by our master on a spring day. He was sitting in his riverside house in Edo, bending his ears to the soft cooing of a pigeon in the quiet rain. There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two petals of cherry blossom were falling gently to the ground.
Now and then in the garden was heard the sound of frogs jumping into the water.
One of the disciples sitting with him immediately suggested for the first half of the poem, Amidst the flowers
Of the yellow rose.
Our master thought for a while, but finally he decided on
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond.
The disciple's suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful but our master's choice, being simpler, contains more truth in it. It is only he who has dug deep into the mystery of the universe that can choose a phrase like this.....The pond is, indeed, a mirror held up to reflect the author's mind.....Basho explains this himself in the following way. Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn......Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one.
It seems to me that there is an air of an 'étude' about The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, and that it should be read as a kind of stepping-stone for the subsequent travel sketches.
A Visit to Sarashina Village is the shortest of all travel sketches by Bashö. It carries on, however, the wonderful tragi-comical effect of the concluding passages of The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel. In its fine polish, in particular, it is unrivalled and shines forth like a gem.
Basho returned from his expedition to Suma and Sarashina in the autumn of 1688, and already in the spring of the following year he left on the third of his major journeys.....Basho's third major journey brought him The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), the last of the travel sketches translated in this book. Leaving Edo in the spring of 1689, he spent more than two and a half years on the road.....In the imagination of the people at least, the North was largely an unexplored territory, and it represented for Basho all the mystery there was in the universe......It seems to me that there are two things remarkable about The Narrow Road to the Deep North. One is variety. Each locality, including the little unknown places Bashö visited in passing, is portrayed with a distinctive character of its own,
The other remarkable thing about The Narrow Road to the Deep North is its unity. To use Bashö's own classification, variety, being the temporary, changeable element (ryükö), is in the substance (jitsu) of the work. Unity, on the other hand, is the permanent, unchangeable element existing in the essence (kyo) of the work......Scholars have pointed out that in his attempt to achieve unity Bashö took such liberty as to change the natural course of events, or even invent fictitious events. The result is a superb work of art where unity dominates without destroying variety.
In the present travel sketch, however, Basho has mastered the art of writing haibun so completely that prose and haiku illuminate each other like two mirrors held up facing each other......This is something no one before him was able to achieve,
The retreat of my disciple, Kyorai, is in the suburbs of Kyoto, among the bamboo thickets of Shimo Saga-not far from either Mount Arashiyama or the Oigawa River. It is an ideal place for meditation, for it is hushed in silence. Such is the laziness of my friend, Kyorai, that his windows are covered with tall grass growing rank in the garden, and his roofs are buried under the branches of overgrown persimmon trees.
During the two-year period we are now dealing with, two anthologies of great importance were published. They are Hisago (A Gourd) and Saru Mino (A Coat for a Monkey), the fourth and fifth of the Major Anthologies.....It is generally believed that those two anthologies demonstrate the mature style of Basho (shöfü) at its highest pitch. To quote some poems (hokku) from this period:
With a friend in Omi
I sat down, and bid farewell
To the departing spring,
Most reluctantly.
Hardly a hint
Of their early death,
Cicadas singing
In the trees.
Under the bright moon,
The children of the vicinity
All lined up
On the porch of a temple.
With your singing
Make me lonelier than ever,
You, solitary bird,
Cuckoo of the forest.
if one broods upon these poems long enough, one realizes that they also have a symbolic quality. This symbolic quality inherent in the poem is called by Basho sabi (loneliness), shiori (tenderness), and hosomi (slenderness), depending on the mode of its manifestation and the degree of its saturation......Sabi is in the colour of a poem......If a man goes to war wearing stout armour or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that. It is in the poem regardless of the scene it describes-
Basho says that in his case the link is provided by what he calls the aroma (nio), echo (hibiki), countenance (omokage), colour (utsuri) and rank (kurai) of the preceding poem......When you hit something, the noise comes back to you in a matter of an instant. This is what I mean by hibiki. In the following pair, for example, the second poem is a perfect echo of the first.
Against the wooden floor
I threw a silver-glazed cup,
Breaking it to pieces.
Look, now, the slender curve
Of your sword, half-drawn.
It is indeed by virtue of this imaginative linking technique (nioi-zuke) that Basho was able to achieve an unprecedented degree of perfection in his linked verse.
Basho returned to Edo from his third major journey after two and a half years of wandering, in the winter of 1691, and in the spring of the following year a new house was built for him. Basho spent the next two and a half years in this house......My solitude shall be my company, and my poverty my wealth.....Already a man of fifty, I should be able to maintain this self-imposed discipline.
Only for morning glories
I open my door-
During the daytime I keep it
Tightly barred.
In the poems Basho wrote during this period, however, there was a strange sense of detachment from life.....For example:
The wild cries of a cat
Having been hushed,
The soft beams of the moon
Touched my bedroom.
The voice of a cuckoo
Dropped to the lake
Where it lay floating
On the surface.
In the sky
Of eight or nine yards
Above the willow-
Drizzling rain.
In the spring of 1694, Bashö left on the last of his major journeys.
This time he was determined to travel, if possible, to the southern end of Japan. He was already fifty......The poems he wrote on this journey suggest something almost like a shadow of death. For example:
Autumn drawing near,
My heart of itself
Inclines to a cosy room
Of four-and-a-half mats.
Ancient city of Nara,
Ancient images of Buddha,
Shrouded in the scent
Of Chrysanthemums.
Deep is autumn,
And in its deep air
I somehow wondered
Who my neighbour is.
While Basho was lingering in Ösaka and its vicinity, he fell victim to what seems to have been an attack of dysentery.
Seized with a disease
Halfway on the road,
My dreams keep revolving
Round the withered moor.
Later I [Donshuu] was summoned by our master, who told me that he had in mind another poem which ended like this:
Round, as yet round,
My dreams keep revolving.
Thus died on 12 October 1694 one of the greatest geniuses in Japanese literature, and five years after his death, the last of his Major Anthologies, Zoku Saru Mino (A Coat for a Monkey, Continued), was published,
His travel sketches, in particular, show him at his best or on his way to his best......I have used a four-line stanza in translating haiku.....I shall not, of course, try to defend my stanza, for it is an experiment, and just as any other experiment in literature, the result alone can justify or disqualify it.
The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton
I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyōkyō among the wails of the autumn wind.
After ten autumns
In Edo, my mind
Points back to it
As my native place.
I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.
As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself,
I gave him what little food I had with me.
The ancient poet
Who pitied monkeys for their cries,
What would he say, if he saw
This child crying in the autumn wind?
The day I wanted to cross the River Oi, it rained from morning till night, and I was held up by the swollen river.
A long rainy day of autumn,
My friends in Edo
Are perhaps counting the days,
Thinking of us at the River Oi
I visited the outer shrine of Ise one evening just before dark.
In the utter darkness
Of a moonless night,
A powerful wind embraces
The ancient cedar trees.
I am indeed dressed like a priest, but priest I am not, for the dust of the world still clings to me. The keeper of the inner shrine prevented me from entering the holy seat of the god because my appearance was like a Buddhist priest.
I visited a poet at his hermitage.
An ivy spray
Trained up over the wall
And a few bamboos
Inviting a tempest.
At last I reached my native village in the beginning of September, but I could not find a single trace of the herbs my mother used to grow in front of her room. The herbs must have been completely bitten away by the frost.
[Passing through the mountainous villages of Imasu and Yamanaka] I went to see the tomb of Lady Tokiwa, the ill-fated mistress of the wicked Lord Yoshitomo
The autumn wind,
Resembling somewhat
The frozen heart
Of Lord Yoshitomo.
Tired of sleeping on a grass pillow, I went down to the seashore before break of day.
Early dawn,
Young white fish
Shining in ephemeral white,
Hardly an inch long.
The end of the year came, while I was thus travelling here and there.
With a hat on my head
And straw sandals on my feet,
I met on the road
The end of the year.
There was a plum orchard.
Blanket of white plum,
I wonder what happened to the cranes,
Stolen or hidden
Behind the plum blossoms?
I crossed a mountain on my way to Otsu.
I picked my way
Through a mountain road,
And I was greeted
By a smiling violet.
I stopped at a certain shop for lunch.
A branch of wild azalea
Thrown into a bucket,
Behind, a woman tearing
The meat of a dried codfish.
A roadside scene:
Wild sparrows
In a patch of yellow rape,
Pretending to admire
The flowers.
A Visit to the Kashima Shrine
Among the bush-clover were other wild flowers in bloom, such as bellflower, valerian, pampas large and small, all tangled in great confusion.....We reached the town of Fusa on the banks of the River Tone towards nightfall. The fishermen of this town catch salmon by spreading wickerwork traps in the river, and sell it in the markets in Edo.....Shortly before day break, however, the moon began to shine through the rifts made in the hanging clouds. I immediately wakened the priest, and other members of the household followed him out of bed. We sat for a long time in utter silence, watching the moonlight trying to penetrate the clouds and listening to the sound of the lingering rain.
The following are the poems we composed on this occasion:
Poems composed at a farm-house:
A solitary crane
In the half-reaped paddies,
The autumn deepens
In the village.
Written by Tōsei (Basho)
The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
In this mortal frame of mine....there is something called is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name......This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business......Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another.......The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature......I could not help feeling vague misgivings about the future of my journey, as I watched the fallen leaves of autumn being carried away by the wind.
From this day forth
I shall be called a wanderer,
Leaving on a journey
Thus among the early showers.
What’s my overall take on the book?
Well I really liked it. Enjoyed the travelogue text and enjoyed the interspersed Haiku poems. It evoked a beautiful, bygone Japan. Five stars from me.
I think the translator is well aware of the impossibility of really translating Haiku. The kanji used in Haiku create pictures in the minds of the readers even before their brain takes in the meaning. I see this many times with my own wife who is Japanese. She can grasp in an instant the basic subject of a passage; See a fish restaurant at 100m. Will use English for some conversations that are impossible to broach in Japanese. So the idea that the English translations capture the essence of the Haiku is probably far-fetched. Still....I feel that I can glimpse the Haiku through the translation. (It’s about a frog!). A bit like saying “War and Peace” is about Russia.
But I loved the combination of the travel text with the Haiku. And I’ve visited some of the places that Bashoo visited so long ago. I guess they have changed....the narrow road has been replaced with a Shinkansen. But the love of nature shines through in both the text and the poems. A few themes seem to recur: cuckoos, loneliness, silence, water, rain, forests. But some passages are mundane :
Behind, a woman tearing
The meat of a dried codfish.
It wasn’t all five star accommodation. He complains frequently of filthy surroundings and of fleas and lice. And in one point....almost casually describes an abandoned 3 year old child. He gave him some food but then pressed on his way ...leaving the child crying by the river bank. To me: a horrific scene. But, I guess these were tough times.
The veneration of poets survives in Japan. My mother in law was a “Disciple” of some poet who was, apparently, almost, but not quite, a “National Treasure”. And we have some of his hand-written poems framed around the house. Unfortunately I can’t read them.
Bit, I’m inspired enough to maybe try my own hand at some poetry writing on similar themes. Though without the Japanese characters they will never have the same impact and multiple meanings.
I’ve extracted some passages below, really to help me remember the book and some of the passages that impacted me. But also to try and capture some of the essence of the book; Basho himself
Introduction
Bashō seems to have gained an increasingly firm footing in the poetic circles of Edo, for in 1675 when Sōin came from Ōsaka, Bashō was among the poets who were invited to compose linked verse with him. The encounter with Sōin must have been an epoch-making event for Bashō, for upon this occasion he changed his pen name from Sōbō to Tōsei. Deep respect for Sōin, as well as his marked influence, can be felt in the linked verse he composed in the year after.....What Bashō learned from Sōin is the special value in poetry of the humble and unpretentious imagery of everyday life, as he himself testifies by saying: ‘If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as linked verse of a higher order. Linked verse of a lower order, however, must be used for more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy.”
In 1682, when Bashö's house was only two years old, it was destroyed by a fire that swept through a large part of Edo. So Basho sought a temporary abode in the house of Rokuso Gohei....In the summer of 1683, Bashö's mother died in his native place, and in the winter of the same year, a new house was built for him in Fukagawa by his friends and disciples.
What must be borne in mind in reading the travel sketches by Bashö is that travels in his day had to be made under very precarious conditions, and that few people, if any, thought of taking to the road merely for pleasure or pastime....he took to the road, “caring naught for his provisions”....This tragic sense is given beautiful expression in the opening passage of The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton......It is written in haibun, prose mixed with haiku, but the two are not perfectly amalgamated.
Basho returned to his home in Edo in the summer of 1685 after about nine months of wandering......In 1686 two anthologies, Kawazu Awase (Frog Contest) and Haru no Hi (A Spring Day), were published. The former is a collection of poems on frogs by Basho and his disciples. The latter is traditionally counted as the second of the Major Anthologies, though there are only three poems of Basho in it......Let me quote it here [probably Basho’s most famous haiku]...once again with a comment by one of his disciples.
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water-
A deep resonance.
This poem was written by our master on a spring day. He was sitting in his riverside house in Edo, bending his ears to the soft cooing of a pigeon in the quiet rain. There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two petals of cherry blossom were falling gently to the ground.
Now and then in the garden was heard the sound of frogs jumping into the water.
One of the disciples sitting with him immediately suggested for the first half of the poem, Amidst the flowers
Of the yellow rose.
Our master thought for a while, but finally he decided on
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond.
The disciple's suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful but our master's choice, being simpler, contains more truth in it. It is only he who has dug deep into the mystery of the universe that can choose a phrase like this.....The pond is, indeed, a mirror held up to reflect the author's mind.....Basho explains this himself in the following way. Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn......Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one.
It seems to me that there is an air of an 'étude' about The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, and that it should be read as a kind of stepping-stone for the subsequent travel sketches.
A Visit to Sarashina Village is the shortest of all travel sketches by Bashö. It carries on, however, the wonderful tragi-comical effect of the concluding passages of The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel. In its fine polish, in particular, it is unrivalled and shines forth like a gem.
Basho returned from his expedition to Suma and Sarashina in the autumn of 1688, and already in the spring of the following year he left on the third of his major journeys.....Basho's third major journey brought him The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), the last of the travel sketches translated in this book. Leaving Edo in the spring of 1689, he spent more than two and a half years on the road.....In the imagination of the people at least, the North was largely an unexplored territory, and it represented for Basho all the mystery there was in the universe......It seems to me that there are two things remarkable about The Narrow Road to the Deep North. One is variety. Each locality, including the little unknown places Bashö visited in passing, is portrayed with a distinctive character of its own,
The other remarkable thing about The Narrow Road to the Deep North is its unity. To use Bashö's own classification, variety, being the temporary, changeable element (ryükö), is in the substance (jitsu) of the work. Unity, on the other hand, is the permanent, unchangeable element existing in the essence (kyo) of the work......Scholars have pointed out that in his attempt to achieve unity Bashö took such liberty as to change the natural course of events, or even invent fictitious events. The result is a superb work of art where unity dominates without destroying variety.
In the present travel sketch, however, Basho has mastered the art of writing haibun so completely that prose and haiku illuminate each other like two mirrors held up facing each other......This is something no one before him was able to achieve,
The retreat of my disciple, Kyorai, is in the suburbs of Kyoto, among the bamboo thickets of Shimo Saga-not far from either Mount Arashiyama or the Oigawa River. It is an ideal place for meditation, for it is hushed in silence. Such is the laziness of my friend, Kyorai, that his windows are covered with tall grass growing rank in the garden, and his roofs are buried under the branches of overgrown persimmon trees.
During the two-year period we are now dealing with, two anthologies of great importance were published. They are Hisago (A Gourd) and Saru Mino (A Coat for a Monkey), the fourth and fifth of the Major Anthologies.....It is generally believed that those two anthologies demonstrate the mature style of Basho (shöfü) at its highest pitch. To quote some poems (hokku) from this period:
With a friend in Omi
I sat down, and bid farewell
To the departing spring,
Most reluctantly.
Hardly a hint
Of their early death,
Cicadas singing
In the trees.
Under the bright moon,
The children of the vicinity
All lined up
On the porch of a temple.
With your singing
Make me lonelier than ever,
You, solitary bird,
Cuckoo of the forest.
if one broods upon these poems long enough, one realizes that they also have a symbolic quality. This symbolic quality inherent in the poem is called by Basho sabi (loneliness), shiori (tenderness), and hosomi (slenderness), depending on the mode of its manifestation and the degree of its saturation......Sabi is in the colour of a poem......If a man goes to war wearing stout armour or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that. It is in the poem regardless of the scene it describes-
Basho says that in his case the link is provided by what he calls the aroma (nio), echo (hibiki), countenance (omokage), colour (utsuri) and rank (kurai) of the preceding poem......When you hit something, the noise comes back to you in a matter of an instant. This is what I mean by hibiki. In the following pair, for example, the second poem is a perfect echo of the first.
Against the wooden floor
I threw a silver-glazed cup,
Breaking it to pieces.
Look, now, the slender curve
Of your sword, half-drawn.
It is indeed by virtue of this imaginative linking technique (nioi-zuke) that Basho was able to achieve an unprecedented degree of perfection in his linked verse.
Basho returned to Edo from his third major journey after two and a half years of wandering, in the winter of 1691, and in the spring of the following year a new house was built for him. Basho spent the next two and a half years in this house......My solitude shall be my company, and my poverty my wealth.....Already a man of fifty, I should be able to maintain this self-imposed discipline.
Only for morning glories
I open my door-
During the daytime I keep it
Tightly barred.
In the poems Basho wrote during this period, however, there was a strange sense of detachment from life.....For example:
The wild cries of a cat
Having been hushed,
The soft beams of the moon
Touched my bedroom.
The voice of a cuckoo
Dropped to the lake
Where it lay floating
On the surface.
In the sky
Of eight or nine yards
Above the willow-
Drizzling rain.
In the spring of 1694, Bashö left on the last of his major journeys.
This time he was determined to travel, if possible, to the southern end of Japan. He was already fifty......The poems he wrote on this journey suggest something almost like a shadow of death. For example:
Autumn drawing near,
My heart of itself
Inclines to a cosy room
Of four-and-a-half mats.
Ancient city of Nara,
Ancient images of Buddha,
Shrouded in the scent
Of Chrysanthemums.
Deep is autumn,
And in its deep air
I somehow wondered
Who my neighbour is.
While Basho was lingering in Ösaka and its vicinity, he fell victim to what seems to have been an attack of dysentery.
Seized with a disease
Halfway on the road,
My dreams keep revolving
Round the withered moor.
Later I [Donshuu] was summoned by our master, who told me that he had in mind another poem which ended like this:
Round, as yet round,
My dreams keep revolving.
Thus died on 12 October 1694 one of the greatest geniuses in Japanese literature, and five years after his death, the last of his Major Anthologies, Zoku Saru Mino (A Coat for a Monkey, Continued), was published,
His travel sketches, in particular, show him at his best or on his way to his best......I have used a four-line stanza in translating haiku.....I shall not, of course, try to defend my stanza, for it is an experiment, and just as any other experiment in literature, the result alone can justify or disqualify it.
The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton
I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyōkyō among the wails of the autumn wind.
After ten autumns
In Edo, my mind
Points back to it
As my native place.
I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.
As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself,
I gave him what little food I had with me.
The ancient poet
Who pitied monkeys for their cries,
What would he say, if he saw
This child crying in the autumn wind?
The day I wanted to cross the River Oi, it rained from morning till night, and I was held up by the swollen river.
A long rainy day of autumn,
My friends in Edo
Are perhaps counting the days,
Thinking of us at the River Oi
I visited the outer shrine of Ise one evening just before dark.
In the utter darkness
Of a moonless night,
A powerful wind embraces
The ancient cedar trees.
I am indeed dressed like a priest, but priest I am not, for the dust of the world still clings to me. The keeper of the inner shrine prevented me from entering the holy seat of the god because my appearance was like a Buddhist priest.
I visited a poet at his hermitage.
An ivy spray
Trained up over the wall
And a few bamboos
Inviting a tempest.
At last I reached my native village in the beginning of September, but I could not find a single trace of the herbs my mother used to grow in front of her room. The herbs must have been completely bitten away by the frost.
[Passing through the mountainous villages of Imasu and Yamanaka] I went to see the tomb of Lady Tokiwa, the ill-fated mistress of the wicked Lord Yoshitomo
The autumn wind,
Resembling somewhat
The frozen heart
Of Lord Yoshitomo.
Tired of sleeping on a grass pillow, I went down to the seashore before break of day.
Early dawn,
Young white fish
Shining in ephemeral white,
Hardly an inch long.
The end of the year came, while I was thus travelling here and there.
With a hat on my head
And straw sandals on my feet,
I met on the road
The end of the year.
There was a plum orchard.
Blanket of white plum,
I wonder what happened to the cranes,
Stolen or hidden
Behind the plum blossoms?
I crossed a mountain on my way to Otsu.
I picked my way
Through a mountain road,
And I was greeted
By a smiling violet.
I stopped at a certain shop for lunch.
A branch of wild azalea
Thrown into a bucket,
Behind, a woman tearing
The meat of a dried codfish.
A roadside scene:
Wild sparrows
In a patch of yellow rape,
Pretending to admire
The flowers.
A Visit to the Kashima Shrine
Among the bush-clover were other wild flowers in bloom, such as bellflower, valerian, pampas large and small, all tangled in great confusion.....We reached the town of Fusa on the banks of the River Tone towards nightfall. The fishermen of this town catch salmon by spreading wickerwork traps in the river, and sell it in the markets in Edo.....Shortly before day break, however, the moon began to shine through the rifts made in the hanging clouds. I immediately wakened the priest, and other members of the household followed him out of bed. We sat for a long time in utter silence, watching the moonlight trying to penetrate the clouds and listening to the sound of the lingering rain.
The following are the poems we composed on this occasion:
Poems composed at a farm-house:
A solitary crane
In the half-reaped paddies,
The autumn deepens
In the village.
Written by Tōsei (Basho)
The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
In this mortal frame of mine....there is something called is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name......This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business......Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another.......The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature......I could not help feeling vague misgivings about the future of my journey, as I watched the fallen leaves of autumn being carried away by the wind.
From this day forth
I shall be called a wanderer,
Leaving on a journey
Thus among the early showers.
What’s my overall take on the book?
Well I really liked it. Enjoyed the travelogue text and enjoyed the interspersed Haiku poems. It evoked a beautiful, bygone Japan. Five stars from me.
March 7, 2025
My favorite work from my favorite poet. This short book is a lovely travelogue of the poet Basho's late-in-life journey through the towns and landscapes of Edo period Japan. The narrative is regularly broken up by Basho's haikus, which explore trees, animals, fellow travelers, tiny towns, and his own sadness and mortality. This was, in fact, the final journey of Basho's life, and there is a tenderness throughout his writing that fosters a wonderful, bittersweet feeling. I cannot recommend this book enough.
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