Haiku on the Classroom Wall
The poet and diarist Basho lived from 1644 to 1694 in the Early Modern period before Meiji. You were first exposed to Japan, outside of video games and television, by lessons on haiku in middle school.
We read a couple of haiku, wrote our own, and created classroom posters. We put together a series of impressions–a moment–into a haiku’s five-seven-five syllable structure. This was our glimpse into its qualities of loneliness, tenderness, and economy that appear in many of Basho’s.
Perhaps Basho’s most famous haiku:
a very old pond, then!
a frog jumps and falls within:
the sound of water
Basho is more than a national writer, but almost a spiritual progenitor of a nation’s cultural worldview.
Journey of self-discovery
A solitary journey in search of who you are. How this journey is expressed in Japanese culture owes plenty to Basho’s work and life. His early poetry reflects the wit, playfulness, and everyday language that characterized the freedom and activity of first Kyoto, where he learned the classics and calligraphy and had a lover, and then the relatively young city of Edo (Tokyo).
Something seemed to rebel in him to this life in “the floating world”: the pleasure-seeking, worldly realm. He left to live in a house built by one of his admirers in an isolated spot. These years were peaceful on the outside, but internally painful as he meditated in solitude and put himself through strict self-scrutiny. During this time, he did come to know a famous priest and practiced Zen under his guidance. After two years, his house burned down in a giant fire that swept through Edo.
His subsequent works show a change in consciousness. He drops off possessions, says good-bye to friends, and embarks on long, dangerous journeys on foot with one or two disciples.
In The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694), Basho seeks a vision of eternity in perishable things. So, it appears that restoring his identity apart from the world and then seeing eternity in the world are complementary and are initiated by the trial and pleasure of the journey. When Basho achieves symmetry between himself and eternity, he writes: his testament is poetry.
Whether morphed, re-contextualized, or rebelled against, Basho’s work stands. Basho’s work prefigures the dominant literary form in the Meiji period, the shishosetsu or Japanese autobiographical novel. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a delicate and fine mixture of prose and poetry, a form called haibun. This work has three marks of the Japanese autobiographical novel: It is a first-person account where (1) there is a clear identification between writer, narrator, and agent; (2) an artifice of sincerity that informs the reader of the writer’s character; and (3) an end goal of surrendering to nature.
Stunning beauty
Basho expresses the traditional qualities of Japanese aesthetics, such as the pervading transience of human endeavors and the unity of opposites. And given his ambition and dedication, he has gone beyond cultural limitations and created a rare work of universal appeal.
Basho foregrounds two haiku with his account of traveling one hundred and thirty miles on nine, hot and humid days to see the sight of the smaller island of Sado, a place traditionally associated with political exile. In the first haiku, Basho states that “the night looks different” because it is the night when the stars Shepard (Altair) and Weaver (Vega), normally separated by the Milky Way, meet once a year. This tryst is celebrated as the Tanabata festival when streamers are hung from eaves.
The next, second, haiku is:
A turbulent sea
To the island of Sado
Is: The Milky Way
In the first haiku, the two lovers separated by the Milky Way are about to converge. In the second, Basho’s sight follows the rough sea and the arc of the Milky Way as they converge at Sado, the unseen intersection point. The calm Milky Way (Ama no gawa: heaven’s river) is reflected in the water of the sea.
The connection between Basho & Sado and Shepard & Weaver as bridged by the “water” in the sky and earth is a multifold interlocking metaphor of outstanding beauty–an absolute stunner. The sound of the language parallels the words. The first line “Ara umi ya” is spoken in the natural unstressed rhythm. Next is “Sado ni yokotau” which has longer vowels and gives the impression of pausing over the scene. The last sentence “Ama no gawa” has the repeated “a” sound which gives the impression that a spell is being cast. Each “a” sound appears like a star linked by consonants and a preposition.
Ara umi ya
Sado ni yokotau
Ama no gawa
No matter how you try to break this poem down and analyze it, something in it stubbornly refuses. The vision is cosmic unity. In other poems, Basho “transposes” one sense impression onto another to convey this. Here, he uses the dual water imagery and its parallel merging of lovers to a similar effect. While we may see separate patterns, this poem seems to say they are all one.
It is as if Basho sees his journey enacted in the stars and reflected to him in a moment of awe. While his journey moves as the night sky moves, it is also girded by a pattern fixed long ago as the lovers, who are separated by fate, have their one night together.