mono no aware

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Mono no aware: subtleties of understanding
C.B. Liddell

QUOTE
©　Japan Times June 2013

Normally, The Japan Times likes to cover exhibitions in the earlier part of their run, rather than 10 days before they close; but, in this case, our tardiness may be strangely appropriate, because the essence of the show at the Suntory Museum of Art is the appreciation of things in the shadow of their future absence.

The “Mono no aware and Japanese Beauty” exhibition brings together a range of works, including paintings, ceramics and lacquerware, that seek to explore one of the more complex and interesting aesthetic ideas in Japanese culture.

Pregnant with nuance and connotation, the term “mono no aware” inevitably loses something in translation, but the direct meaning — “the sadness or pathos of things” — is a starting point. This refers to the heavily Buddhist culture of the Heian Period (794-1185), when the term first arose, and implies the transience of carnal and material life.

But this is also misleading, as the phrase, especially through the work of the Neo-Confucian scholar, poet and artist Motoori Norinaga (1730 -1801), has come to stand for “sensitive, exquisite feelings experienced when encountering the subtle workings of human life or the changing seasons,” as the catalogue phrases it. In Norinaga’s interpretation, the phrase included not just sad or fleeting emotions but also joy and intense appreciation.

The exhibition opens with a few elegant, timeworn scrolls from the Heian and Kamakura (1185-1333) periods, depicting the lives of the bygone aristocracy. These include a lotus sutra on a paper fan, a depiction of an insomniac noblewoman, and a scroll showing a retired emperor visiting the town of Ono (in what is now Fukushima Prefecture), to view the snowy scenery.

This selection suggests slightly guilt-ridden, restless nobles with perhaps too much time on their hands, seeking solace in beauty. The reference to Fukushima, one of the prefectures hardest hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, also hints at a modern relevance for the idea of appreciation tinged with sadness.

The next part of the exhibition focuses on Norinaga, and includes a self-portrait at the age of 44 and examples of his brush calligraphy. The poetic inscription on the portrait also sounds an important theme in the exhibition, namely the communication of mono no aware through poetry and art.

Mono no aware is usually defined in terms of an experienced sensation or emotion, as something passively enjoyed. But if it were only this then it would be a solipsistic pleasure lost in solitary contemplation rather than the long-running cultural thread that it is. To exist as a cultural phenomenon it has to have a social aspect, so much emphasis is given by the exhibition to communicating mono no aware to others through art and poetry.

For this reason, it is represented by a rich symbolic language that many can share. This ranges from aspects of nature to certain poets and stories.

The exhibition takes a rather indiscriminate view with regard to symbols from nature. Most of the well-known seasonal varieties of birds and flowers are included. There are bowls enameled with cherry blossoms, a saddle inlaid with a bush-clover design in mother-of-pearl, and folding screens adorned with snow-clad evergreens. And in all this profusion, the selectivity of the aesthetic principle seems somewhat lost.

Luckily, certain motifs of nature, such as moonlight and autumn grasses, are more in evidence. These seem particularly representative of the concept in question. The autumn full moon about to wane, symbolic of the “adult activities” of the aristocratic culture, was thought to evoke mono no aware. A hanging scroll ink painting by Nagasawa Rosetsu of a moonlit landscape presents this most effectively.

The most prominent motif at the exhibition, however, is autumn grass. The show boasts a wide array of items adorned with this comparatively low-key, but very evocative element.

Of particular interest is a pair of six-paneled Edo Period screens covered in gold leaf, with a quails and pampas grass design. As we look at them, the elegant brush strokes of the dense pampas grass seem to bend and undulate, giving us a sense of a gently blowing wind.

Such elements of nature are also very important in the stories most associated with the concept. These include the “Tale of Saigyo,” about a famous itinerant poet, who sought out scenic beauty to inspire him, represented here by two picture scrolls. More famously is the “Tale of Genji.” According to Norinaga, this tale with its frequent recourse to moonlight was written specifically to make people conscious of mono no aware.



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Tokyo literary festival

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Tokyo literary festival writes its opening chapter
by Sandra Barron

QUOTE
source: Japan Times February 2013

Every time David Karashima took a Japanese author to New York or London to do a reading, the local audiences would ask two questions: “Who’s the next Haruki Murakami?” and “Why isn’t there an international literary festival in Tokyo?”

“Finally I thought, OK, let’s make this happen,” Karashima says.

He can’t predict the next breakout Japanese novelist, but Karashima is uniquely positioned to address Tokyo’s lack of literary events. He is the manager of international projects at Read Japan, a division of the Nippon Foundation dedicated to promoting Japanese literature abroad. Now, as the director of the first Tokyo International Literary Festival, to be held March 1-3, he is bringing to Japan a dozen English-language authors. They will participate in three days of readings, conversations and workshops alongside some 30 Japanese authors at venues ranging from coffee shops to universities, and even a nightclub.

The increased interest in Japanese literature abroad, in part due to the popularity of Murakami’s most recent opus, “1Q84,” is one of the reasons that Karashima says now is a good time to host Japan’s first international literary festival. Another is that, he says, readers are increasingly looking to connect with writers and with other readers.

“Readings and book-discussion groups are just starting to take off, though it’s mostly been for business books,” he says. “We want to grab those readers who are already looking for that shared experience and expand the kinds of books they reach out for.”

Literary fiction isn’t necessarily an easy sell. Demand has declined in Japan, he says, and there’s a mistaken impression that it isn’t for everyone. “With literary fiction, there are walls up that don’t need to be there. We’re hoping that bringing in foreign authors helps break that down,” he says. “We’re trying to mix things up.”

All of the Japanese authors have some work translated into English, and most of the visiting authors have some work translated into Japanese. The authors include Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee and Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz as well as Nicole Krauss, who was named one of Granta Magazine’s best writers under 40, and her husband Jonathan Safran Foer, who has earned the same recognition from The New Yorker.

Many of the visiting writers have strong connections with Japan. Journalist Pico Iyer and novelist David Peace have both made their homes in Japan at different times. Iyer has written extensively about life and travel here, while the books in David Peace’s “Tokyo Trilogy” are fictionalized but deeply researched crime thrillers set in the aftermath of World War II.

The festival will be the 11th trip to Japan for Díaz, who won international acclaim for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” about a Dominican immigrant teenager who lives in the U.S. and has a socially crippling love of all things nerdy. Díaz will appear at a session called “The Otaku’s Guide to Love” with Risa Wataya, who won her first literary prize while still in high school. His writing is often related to immigration and assimilation. He will also join Peace and Fukushima native Hideo Furukawa at a session on “Writing Home away from Home.”

Karashima says that Nobel laureate Coetzee is a tremendous influence on contemporary Japanese writers, even if they don’t explicitly acknowledge it. And while, true to his taciturn reputation, the South African author is expected to deliver his keynote reading while shunning any audience interaction, he was quick to agree to make the trip from Australia.

“Coetzee just loves Japan,” Karashima says. “It will be inspiring for the Japanese authors to have him here.”

And that’s part of the point of the festival. The invited authors are mostly in their 30s and 40s. They have all achieved recognition and success but are still at a point where they are open to being influenced by being in an international environment, Karashima says.

All of the sessions will be presented with simultaneous interpretation in both Japanese and English. But the idea of “mixing things up” goes beyond translation. Editors, publishers, translators and cultural commentators will be speakers and moderators, talking about different aspects of what goes into internationalizing fiction. Renowned cover illustrator Chip Kidd and manga artist Naoki Urasawa will give presentations and appear in conversation, and actor Shosuke Tanihara will perform in a reading. And video and performance will mix at an event called “Night on the Galactic Express,” a multimedia evening at subterranean Roppongi club SuperDeluxe, a venue not often associated with the quieter pleasures of reading.

That’s not an accident. Yoshitaka Haba, one of the presenters and organizers, works as a “book director.” He moves book collections out of bookshops and into other urban environments, such as cafes and bars.

“I don’t want books to be a rare luxury item — I want them to be something people have with them all the time,” he says. “I want them to be in places where books have been forgotten.”

In the same spirit, the festival will bring literature into other unexpected places. Haba will also take over the loudspeaker of one of Shinjuku’s largest department stores (to be revealed soon) during the festival and replace the usual announcements to shoppers with Japanese poetry.

He will take part in a panel discussing the future of books on the last day of the festival. Novelist Safran Foer, illustrator Kidd and literary critic Makoto Ichikawa will join him on stage at Waseda University.

At the same time, novelist Shinji Ishii will be taking his work to the streets — or, rather, to the rails. Ishii is known for his sonoba shōsetsu, or “fiction of a specific place.” He creates short works of fiction on the spot, inspired by the place he’s in, whether it’s a cafe, a temple or the stage of a former strip club. He writes longhand and reads out loud as he goes. He will live-write a piece in the most novel of the festival’s venues: a fully rented-out carriage on the Toden Arakawa streetcar. Parts of the mobile writing experiment will be broadcast live to the panel at Waseda.

While the festival doesn’t have a specific connection to the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, it’s something that won’t be too far from anyone’s mind, as the event takes place just a few days before the second anniversary. Several of the Japanese authors appearing at the festival contributed to “March Was Made of Yarn,” a collection of fiction inspired by the disaster and edited by Karashima. Furukawa, Peace, Natsuki Ikezawa, Mieko Kawakami and Mitsuyo Kakuta will talk and read about writing as a part of rebuilding and responding to calamity. Karashima says, “Fiction allows us to explore the aftermath of a disaster in a way that nonfiction doesn’t.”

At an evening session at Roppongi Hills, Foer, Kawakami and Peace will read and talk about how fiction can confront disaster in “Rebuilding Narratives.” All authors are well known for fiction they wrote in the aftermath of disasters close at hand: Foer for the post-9/11 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and Kawakami and Peace for writing about Japan’s recent and historical natural disasters.

With Hollywood movies losing popularity in Japan and fewer people studying abroad each year, is Japan really looking for international literary influence? “Japan could very easily slip into becoming more insular. That would be a shame,” Karashima says, adding that from a business perspective, Japan literally can’t afford to close itself off. “Literature is something that works on the individual level to counter that tendency toward insularity,” he says.

Díaz agrees that books connect people across cultures. He says that on his many trips to Japan it has always struck him as “a reading society.”

“The sheer amount of books and magazines I encounter during my trips to Japan always leads me, a writer, to feel like I’m in my kind of place,” he says. “Given how little space literature is given at a global level and how necessary literature is for all our well-being, it’s always a good time for a literary festival.”

Tokyo International Literary Festival will take place March 1-3 at various locations in central Tokyo.

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Read Japan

The Read Japan program aims to make a wide variety of books from Japan available to foreign audiences by working in partnership with libraries, publishers, authors and translators.

Read Japan is comprised of the following three projects:

1.Book Donations
2.Translation Support
3.Translator Training


source : www.nippon-foundation.or.jp


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Place Names David Cobb

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The Value of Iconic Place Names in Western Haiku
by David Cobb

QUOTE
©　www.poetrysociety.org.nz

Because of the general tendency in the West to try to replicate the Japanese use of kigo (season words) our haiku are easily misinterpreted as 'a poetry of nature'.

This is to overlook the double significance of the season word: to spotlight a moment in the writer's existence on Earth, yes, but also to remind the reader that it happens during the eternal cycle of life, to be repeated each time that particular season comes around, albeit never in the same identical way.

So, as Thomas Hemstege argued in a useful article in Modern Haiku (Vol 35 No 1), it would be just as reasonable to refer to haiku as 'a poetry of time'.

But now I want to go a little further down that road. For us humans, time and place may sometimes seem inextricable. Partly because many places we see, and particularly like to see, have a history attached to them: a history that may well arouse emotions, such as sorrow, pride, regret, triumph, or a variety of other feelings. Just as cherry blossom is present in nature to evoke emotion, and Christmas is there in time to evoke emotion, the Pyramids are there for ever as a source of emotion in space/ place. Place names give off a poetry of their own.

Let's look now at Japanese practice. The power of place names to release feeling is well known to Japanese poets. Some names of places and festivals are even included in the traditional saijiki (almanac of season words.) Even more so in the almanac used by haijin of the modern or avant-garde school.

We can divide them into different types:

uta-makura - places that almost any educated person is likely to know something about and that are definitely iconic
hai-makura - places that are lifted into that aura by their mention in a well-known poem.

In English poetry we have an example in Adlestrop, where the poet Edward Thomas wrote:


Yes. I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly.



Read the full poem here.

Place name haiku can be subdivided again into:

Places famous for their beauty
Places possibly not very beautiful to look at, but remembered because of some historical event, or legend or myth, attached to them, or because of a famous or heroic person who once lived there.

When Bashō started out on his celebrated journey along 'the Narrow Road to the Deep North', memorialised in the haibun (more accurately, nikki, or travelogue) known as Oku-no-hosomichi, he had a sort of cultural map in his head, with dozens of 'pillow places' where he intended to rest his head. So in that travelogue we can find examples of both uta-makura and hai-makura, though it has to be said his normal practice is to mention the place names in the prose, thus setting the context for a haiku that doesn't include a place name.

Matsushima is a place celebrated for a bay containing many beautiful islands. The sight of it rocked Bashō into writing

The cuckoo would need
the wings of a crane to span
the isles of Matsushima

An example of literary and historical reference is

Across the rough seas
stretching to Sado Island
the Milky Way

because the Japanese reader will be familiar with The Tale of Genji. Sado Island is where exiles were sent, including Prince Genji, 'the Shining One', as punishment for an illicit affair with a lady of the Imperial Court. (Incidentally, this haiku is an example that reminds us, if our aim is to create literature, the 'unvarnished truth', meticulous veracity, is far from a requirement of haibun. Researchers have calculated that, looking out from the vantage point where Bashō actually stood, and at the time when he stood there, it would have been impossible for him to observe the phenomenon he records. We can nevertheless accept the poetic 'truthlikeness'.)

I am tempted to think Bashō's mind was infused with feelings similar to those of spectators at a Japanese Noh play. Typically, in dramas of this genre the main character is a man or woman who suffered some unkind fate long ago. He or she appears in the first act, in a way that might remind us Westerners rather of the Ghost in Hamlet. His/her sorry tale is told to a wanderer, this time reminding us perhaps of the man in The Ancient Mariner, who 'stoppeth one in three', constantly telling and retelling his story to anyone who will listen to him.

The wanderer is invited to say a prayer for the unhappy spirit, so that it may have rest; and a Japanese audience finds itself drawn into this prayer by the actors, so that they experience a sort of 'communal catharsis'. They have a feeling of inheriting some of the guilt of their ancestors which it is their responsibility to expiate.

The interest in place names continues to this day, so we find the 'grand old man', of contemporary Japanese haiku, Kaneko Tohta, referring to Hiroshima:

Round the A-bomb Dome
buckling in the heat
a marathon

Now let us turn to the situation in the West with regard to the mention of place names in haiku.

I trawled through three major anthologies of British haiku and found almost none.

One explanation for this may be the idea that you sometimes hear, that it should be possible for as wide a readership as possible to make sense of the experience the poet describes. So a common noun like 'river' or 'mountain' might be preferred to a proper noun like 'Thames' or 'Rockies'.

There may be occasions when that is true. But I want to suggest that there are other times when something important, something truly poetic, is lost if we avoid the proper noun. Some place names actually are poetry. Let me try to give you an example.

I was on holiday once in Scotland and my little daughter, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, was with me. We visited a battlefield where the traditional life of the Highland clans was more or less snuffed out. I could have written:


my daughter searches
for four-leaf clovers
on the battlefield


But what I actually wrote was:


my daughter searches
for four-leaf clovers
on Culloden Moor

Not only because the history of 'Culloden Moor' penetrates the British heart deeper than many another battlefield, but also because of the gloomy, falling sound produced by those two words: Culloden Moor has a dying cadence.

Here is another example. This time I'll give you only the first two lines and then pause while you try to think of a place name that, coming in the final line, might turn a rather inauspicious beginning into something far more poetically powerful:

a man with a torch
goes looking for a name -

No, it isn't a tourist who has put up for the night at a guest house, been out to the local pub, and now has a problem finding his way back to his bed.

a man with a torch
goes looking for a name -
the Menin Gate


I hope you will agree with me, the name 'Menin Gate' has iconic power and poetic force for which there's no substitute. (My Australasian readers might well think of Gallipoli.)

Now, I don't wish editors of haiku magazines to be swamped with 'place name haiku' for the next six months, until another fad takes over. But you might just ponder whether 'river' is always the best word to use.

On the other hand, remember - there will be occasions when the generic term, e.g. river, is more effective than the place name, e.g. Rhine. As with so many other things, it is ultimately a matter for 'poetic discretion'.


Editor's note:
This article has recently appeared in Fropgpond, although there has been one minor change, and appears here with the kind permission of the author.

David Cobb made a teaching research trip to Japan in 1977 and, with the encouragement of a local high school teacher, began to learn how to write haiku. In 1989 he helped establish the British Haiku Society, serving as secretary (1990-97) and president (1997-2002). He started the BHS newsletter and its magazine, Blithe Spirit.

His haiku and haibun have received numerous international awards, as have his collections of his work. His most recent awards are the Oi-Ocha Prize (for a single haiku) in 2010 and a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award in 2007.

Spitting Pips, a collection of David's haibun, was published in 2009. For more information see his website.


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Barnhill Basho Journals

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THE JOURNALS OF MATSUO BASHŌ
David Landis Barnhill
A Hermeneutical Approach to the Journals of a Wayfaring Poet

QUOTE
source: www.uwosh.edu


The long tradition in Japan of diary literature reached perhaps its greatest peak with the journals of Matsuo Bashō. His five travel journals and one diary present a compelling portrait of one person's spiritual life and in the process display sophisticated religious thought. His haibun, short pieces of poetic prose, are also rich sources of religious meaning.

Because of the autobiographical character of Bashō's prose, we will focus here on the world view and way of life presented in the journals. With such a goal in mind, the methodology of phenomenological hermeneutics is particular appropriate. This method sees the text principally as a projection of a particular mode of being in the world. Interpretation is the explication of that mode of being. Phenomenological hermeneutics focuses on experience, seeing it not as a subjective being experiencing an objective reality but rather a mutual implication of subject and object. That is, subject and object are not separate entities but part of a single field of experience, like poles of a continuum. What the author (for example Bashō) experienced was his particular being-in-the-world, not some objective reality. The text arises out of that experience and is itself a presentation of a mode of experience. But the text's projection of a being-in-the-world is "fictive" (no matter how autobiographical it seems), not exactly equivalent to that of the historical author's. Thus a reader engages the text's world of experience, not that of the person who actually wrote the text. Thus when we talk of "Bashō" in this section, we will be referring to the persona in the prose works, not the historical author.

The text was the creation of a different time and place and is therefore distant and different from the reader. But reading allows us to appropriate the text, to actualize it into our own world of experience. That appropriation can never be transparent, for the text remains distant and it is experienced within our particular mode of being. In a sense the reader "puts into play" the world of the text, and as such the reader is himself played by the text.1
Thus there are several relationships at work. The author and his world, the author and the text, the self-world relationship embodied in the text, and the reader's experience of that textual world. Interpretation per se concerns this last relationship. But we should note that phenomenological hermeneutics emphasizes the importance of another relationship, the reader's own being-in-the-world which is affected by his or her reading of the text. The ultimate goal of reading is self-understanding that arises from the reader's experience of and response to the text.

Given this hermeneutical method, we can approach the religious meaning of the being-in-the-world of Bashō's literary prose in a wide variety of ways. Here we will briefly make use of four: an examination of the religious traditions he participated; an analysis of specific themes in his writings; the application of cross-cultural theories of religion; a discussion of his relation to existing religions.

Bashō and His Traditions
Bashō experiences himself as part of a tradition of religiously motivated travel. The opening passage of his first journal, The Record of a Weather-exposed Skeleton [Nozarashi kikô], Bashō announces his spiritual intention. “I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions. I leaned on the staff of an ancient who, it is said, entered into nothingness under the midnight moon.”

In particular Bashō sees himself as part of the tradition of ascetic practices (gyô). In The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), for instance, he climbs up to Urami ("back view") waterfall, which you can walk behind and look out from the back of the falls. Bashō offers this verse:
1 The analysis of the reading aspect of phenomenological interpretation closely parallels that of reader-response theorists. See the section on Bashō's hokku for a discussion and application of that approach.
2
shibaraku wa For a while
taki ni komoru ya confined to a waterfall:
ge no hajime onset of summer

Ge no hajime literally means "the beginning of summer," but it refers to a practice in which monks would go into seclusion in the mountains for ninety days of ascetic practices. Bashō is explicitly associating himself with the tradition of mountain asceticism, but he remains confined only "for a while." His own practice is not seclusion but wayfaring, the yugyô hijiri tradition we have discussed in earlier sections.
It is important to consider the function of his hijiri-like wandering. In part, traveling the countryside was a form of ascetic practice that sharpened both his poetic creativity and his religious vision. But it also served a specific religious purpose of "re-membering" those of the past, not simply recalling people and events of the past but establishing a spiritual bond (kechien) with special people. Early in The Narrow Road to the Deep North he stops at a shugendô temple and worships at a statue of En-no-gyōja, the founder of the sect. Focusing on the elevated footwear made especially for rain, Bashō writes:

natsu yama ni In summer mountains
ashida o ogamu praying to the clogs:
kadode kana departure

Bashō's journals are filled with moments of such communion with monks and poets, in particular Saigyō. 1690 was recognized as Saigyō's gohaku saiki, the ritual on the five hundredth anniversary his death. Bashō's journey was in part a rite of remembrance of Saigyō and participation in the earlier poet's religious life.
In addition to the hijiri tradition, Bashō also experiences himself in line with the religio-aesthetic tradition of Japan. This tradition includes not only Saigyō but also the painter Sesshu, the tea master Rikyu, and the renga poet Sōgi. In Bashō's words, this tradition is one of following creation and being a companion to the turning of the four seasons. We will discuss this tradition and Bashō's poetics in the next section.

Bashō, then, sees himself as part of two major traditions, the yugyô hijiri heritage of religiously motivated, ascetic wayfaring and the religio-aesthetic tradition of a vision that parallels nature's creative power. But Bashō was not simply another example of these traditions. His vision and way of life were unique developments of them. To see this we need to turn to certain themes in his writings that indicate patterns in his mode of being in the world.

Two Themes in Bashō's Journals
1. MUJŌ
We have seen how mujô (impermanence) is one of the most important themes in Japanese literature. Perhaps no Japanese literary writer developed a more sophisticated notion of time than Bashō. Here we can but briefly touch on his vision of impermanence.
Bashō experienced the world as being characterized by what we have called "soft" transformations of the world, change that involves no radical or unexpected disruption. Unlike the Heian courtiers, however, his experience of nature's changes is at times marked by immense scale and a sense of awe: "mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings. Time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable." (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) It is noteworthy that while these changes are slow and predictable, they are not reassuringly cyclical and the change created is of a scale far more monumental than depicted in Heian literature. In this he is more akin to Chōmei.

3
Bashō's world is also characterized by another type of mujô: the shôja-hissui ("those who rise must fall") that is seen especially in The Tales of the Heike. In a passage in his Saga Diary, Bashō comes upon the grave of Lady Kogo, a former court lady who had been acclaimed the most beautiful lady and finest koto player in the palace but who was banished from the palace at the age of 23.
She lived her daily life in brocades and silks; in the end she turned into dust amid
the underbrush....

ukifushi ya Wretched
take no ko to naru the fate of a person:
hito no hate bamboo shoots

While Bashō's sense of shoja hissui recalls The Tales of the Heike, it is far less genteel. He sees not only the bittersweet beauty of nobility overwhelmed, but also the crudeness and thoroughness of death: glory has not only died, it has decayed and putrefied.

The hard edge of Bashō's mujô-kan is found also in his sensitivity to the imminence and unpredictability of death. In A Visit to Sarashina Village he becomes frightened as he rides on a horse along a narrow cliff-edge path. He dismounts, and a servant promptly seizes the opportunity for a free ride.
Many times I thought he surely would fall; I was terrified as I looked up from behind. Gazing upon the sentient beings of this transitory world, the Lord Buddha must feel the same. When we reflect upon the unremitting swiftness of change, we can see why it is said: "The whirlpool of Awa is free of wind and waves."
The final quotation references to a popular Buddhist poem: "Compared to our journey through his world, the whirlpool of Awa is free of wind and waves."2 Life is turbulent and we are all like the servant, riding precariously on the edge of death.
Bashō consciously patterned his life after the yugyô hijiri ideal of sutemi mujô (abandoning oneself to impermanence), as seen in the first poem in his first journal.

nozarashi o Bleached bones
kokoro ni kaze no on my mind, the wind pierces
shimu mi kana my body to the heart

The bones he imagines are both those who have died on the road before him and also his own.
For Bashō, however, mujô does not simply involve the inevitable or imminent passing away of things. It also involves continuity and regeneration. By visiting utamakura he is able to witness the traces (ato) of the past and to "see into the hearts of the ancients," as he says in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The past survives through centuries and is brought back to consciousness by his own travels and journals.

Bashō not only experiences continuity through impermanence but also the continuity of impermanence: the ceaseless flow of living, dying, and living. The Narrow Road to the Deep North opens with this type of mujô.
Months and days are the wayfarers of a hundred generations, the years too, going and coming, are wanderers. For those who drift life away on a boat, for those who meet age leading a horse by the mouth, each day is a journey, the journey itself home. Among ancients, too, many died on the
2 Translation by Donald Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981), 117.


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journey. And so I too--for how many years--drawn by a cloud wisp wind, have been unable to stop thoughts of rambling.
Here death is always followed by life, as life is followed by death. This is neither the cyclical change in which spring goes and then returns nor the karmic cycle of rebirth. The images of days, months, and years suggests that what passes will not return: a year once gone is gone forever. The ancients, too, have come and gone, dying on their life's journey, to be followed by other poets and religious practitioners. Now Bashō journeys, and the implication is that he too will die--and that others will follow him. The balance between the acute sense of death with strong sense of historical continuity gives this passage a pronounced tone of solemn celebration.

For Bashō, mujô is the central aspect of his religious worldview. Worldview has been defined as what a "religion affirms about the ultimate nature of reality" and it functions as a frame of perception, a symbolic screen through which experience is interpreted.3 For Bashō, mujô shaped his vision of how life ultimately is and it lead to his view of how it ought to be, which he embodied in his wayfaring lifestyle.

2. THE JOURNEY ITSELF HOME
The opening passage of The Narrow Road to the Deep North quoted above makes explicit Bashō's ideal of the wayfaring life. As presented in his journals, his travels are not temporary departures from his normal lifestyle, they are his basic mode of living and his primary religious practice.

It is a religious practice for a variety of reasons. He visits numerous sacred sites and expresses deep spiritual sentiment. We also have mentioned that he is part of the yugyô hijiri tradition and that he seeks a religious state of mind. But more importantly it is a religious practice because for him it embodies the fundamental nature of existence.

The anthropologist of religion Clifford Geertz has suggested that a primary function religion is to fuse one's worldview with one's values and way of life. The religious perspective is "the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable inner connection."4

Despite the variety of occupations and lifestyles, Bashō sees all people as wayfarers. Whether or not the boatman and horseman realize it, their life is a journey that ends only in death. But it is not enough for Bashō just to recognize this fact, he feels compelled to embody it directly and concretely in the way he lives. By living as a wayfarer, he "real-izes" the inherent structure of reality. In doing so he "moves with the deepest grain of reality."5

Bashō's view that all people are wayfarers suggests another religious aspect of his mode of life. The anthropologist of religion Victor Turner has analyzed an important aspect of human society. We normally think of societies creating a social structure that people are part of. Turner showed us that there is also an “anti-structure,” a position outside of the conventional structure. This is often seen in moments of transition, for instance from childhood to adulthood. In many tribal societies, there are rites of passage, in which the young person leaves the village and his childhood identity, and after a “liminal” period spent away, the person returns to the village and is welcomed as an adult. During that liminal period, the person in effect has no social identity. Rites of passage may involve hardships and privations.
There are similarities between this and military boot camps, when the people are no longer civilians but not yet accepted as soldiers. Another kind of liminal ritual is more social, a day or days in the calendar year in which the normal social roles and rules do not apply. Mardi gras is such a ritual.
3 See Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 125, and Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 98.
4 Islam Observed, p. 97.
5 Islam Observed, p. 102.
5

Pilgrimages can function as a liminal ritual. People leave their society and join people of other societies temporarily as part of the pilgrimage. After journeying to the pilgrimage site, gaining religious benefits, they return to their home society. During the pilgrimage they have a different identity. Turner found that in pilgrimages, social divisions tend to disappear and people experience “communitas,” a feeling of social solidarity with others, even with those who normally inhabit different social classes.

In all of these cases, people step outside normal social structures. They are “betwixt and between” social roles. Bashō’s journals in various ways demonstrate such anti-structure. One key difference, however, between Turner’s notion of pilgrimage and Bashō’s wayfaring is that Bashō presents his wanderings as his basic mode of life, rather than a temporary ritual. The ideal presented in his journals is of a person who is always on the road; it is not a temporary condition but rather his fundamental way of experiencing the world.
We see communitas at various points in his journals. While other people divide people into religious sects, occupations, and classes, he sees a communitas among all people as wayfarers. In The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton he presents a scene in which structure "holds people apart, defines their differences, and constrains their actions."6

I wear no sword on my hips but dangle an alms wallet from my neck and hold a rosary of eighteen beads in my hand. I resemble a priest, but the dust of the world is on me; I resemble a lay person, but my head is shaven. Although I am no priest, here those with shaven heads are considered Buddhist friars, and I was not allowed to go before the shrine.

Bashō's religious stance is not that of a monk but of a tonseisha and ultimately a wayfarer. This gives him a "betwixt and between" status, or statusless status, that characterizes anti-structure. He gives a humorous picture of his liminality in the opening passage of A Visit to Kashima Shrine: "I am neither a monk nor a man of the world; I could be called a bat--in between a bird and a mouse."

Bashō and Religious Traditions
Of course the fact that Bashō chose not to become an official member of a religious tradition does not mean that those traditions are irrelevant. While he is not, for instance, a Buddhist in the conventional sense of the term, his world view and way of life exhibit certain Buddhistic qualities, only one of which can we mention here.
As we have seen, an important aspect of Buddhist thought is nonduality. Nonduality applied even to the distinction between the deluded state and enlightenment, as seen in Buddhist phrases such as "enlightenment is found in the world of passions" (bonnô sunawachi bodai naru) and "the deluded mind is itself Buddha" (môjin soku butsu). The Zen master Dōgen is famous for insisting on the nonduality of means and end. For him, zazen is not a technique one engaged in for the purpose of achieving enlightenment, it was the enactment of enlightenment.

Bashō also experiences, in a unique way, the nonduality between imperfection and perfection and means and end. His travels are not like pilgrimages, which are temporary journeys directed toward a specific end. His wayfaring is endless: the journey itself is home. Early in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he falls ill and his sufferings continue through the night and into the morning. But he recalls that the "goal" of his wandering is to resign oneself to death continue on the journey, to cross the next barrier.
My distant journey remained, I was anxious about my illness, and yet this was a pilgrimage to far places, a resignation to self-abandonment and impermanence (sutemi mujô). Death might come by the roadside but that is heaven's will. With those thoughts my spirits recovered a bit, I began to step broadly on my way, and jauntily I crossed the Ōkido barrier at Date.
6 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 274.
6
The nonduality of means and end extends to his attitude toward himself. Because his practice is never concluded, he sees himself as forever incomplete, like the asunarô tree, which appears to be the valuable cypress but is not.
"Tomorrow I will be a cypress!" an old tree in a valley once said. Yesterday has passed as a dream; tomorrow has not yet come. Instead of just enjoying a cask of wine in my life, I keep saying "tomorrow, tomorrow," securing the reproof of the sages.

sabishisa ya Loneliness:
hana no atari among the blossoms
asunarō an asunarô

The name asunarô literally means "tomorrow I will become..." with the context implying "...a cypress." But the tree will never become a cypress, and Bashō will never complete his journey either. While in several passages Bashō exhibits self-denigration about his incompletion, ultimately this is not condemnation but realization: reality fundamentally is an endless journey with no climax or completion. But there is, perhaps, something of a Pure Land Buddhist tone in his self-recrimination and sense of imperfection, and the possible affinities between Pure Land and Bashō are worth careful attention.

While Bashō's mode of being is Buddhistic in some ways, they depart from traditional Buddhism in other ways. Buddhism began to lose its hold as the predominant religious tradition in the seventeenth century, and Bashō's departure from (and in some cases criticism of) Buddhism may be an example of this. The notion of karma, so important to medieval Buddhism, is absent in his works. In fact, early in The Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton Bashō encounters a situation that seems to be presented in a way that the reader expects a reference to karma: an abandoned baby by the roadside. After tossing the child some food and composing a mournful poem, he continues his speculation on the cause of the situation. “Why did this happen? Were you hated by your father or neglected by your mother? Your father did not hate you, your mother did not neglect you. This simply is from heaven, and you can only grieve over your fate.” Traditional Buddhism would call for an explanation based on past lives that would affirm the cosmic justice of deserved suffering. For Bashō there is no cosmic justice in the normal sense, only the ever-present imminence of death shared by all wayfarers.

This passage is patterned very closely on the writings of the Taoist Chuang-Tzu, and Bashō's notion of fate is far closer to classical Taoism than it is to traditional Buddhism. In fact, Chuang Tzu is alluded to in his writings more often than any other religious thinker. Bashō's self-portrait has several Taoist aspects. The Chuang Tzu contains numerous images of wayfaring and flying as the ideal, especially in the first chapter, "Free and Easy Wandering." The Record of a Travel-Worn Satchel begins with a description of Bashō as a fûrabô, and the image in the first sentence is taken directly from The Chuang Tzu.

Among these hundred bones and nine holes there is something. For now let's call it "gauze in the wind" (fûrabô). Surely we can say it's thin, torn easily by a breeze. It grew fond of mad poetry long ago; eventually, this became its life work.
This life's work, he relates elsewhere, is quite "useless," a major theme in Chuang Tzu's writings.

Bashō, then, experiences life as an inheritor and participant in the meditational Buddhist, classical Taoist, and shamanistic yugyô hijiri traditions. Indeed he most likely saw them as three complementary streams, all of them parts of one religious complex of ideas, attitudes, and practices. This particular mode of being-in-the-world presents to the reader a sophisticated world view and way of life that becomes for us an ato, a trace of his life that we can appropriate in our particular way as we travel our own endless journey.


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Basho - Stephen Kohl

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BASHO'S LIFE

by Stephen Kohl

QUOTE
source: www.meister-z.com

An Introduction)
One day in the spring of 1681 a banana tree was being planted alongside a modest hut in a rustic area of Edo, a city now known as Tokyo. It was a gift from a local resident to his teacher of poetry, who had moved into the hut several months earlier. The teacher, a man of thirty-six years of age, was delighted with the gift. He loved the banana plant because it was somewhat like him in the way it stood there. Its large leaves were soft and sensitive and were easily torn when gusty winds blew from the sea. Its flowers were small and unobtrusive; they looked lonesome, as if they knew they could bear no fruit in the cool climate of Japan. Its stalks were long and fresh-looking, yet they were of no practical use.

The teacher lived all alone in the hut. On nights when he had no visitor, he would sit quietly and listen to the wind blowing through the banana leaves. The lonely atmosphere would deepen on rainy nights. Rain water leaking through the roof dripped intermittently into a basin. To the ears of the poet sitting in the dimly lighted room, the sound made a strange harmony with the rustling of the banana leaves outside.

Basho nowaki shite A banana plant in the autumn gale -
Tarai ni ame o I listen to the dripping of rain
Kiku yo kana Into a basin at night.


The haiku seems to suggest the poet's awareness of his spiritual affinity with the banana plant.

Some people who visited this teacher of poetry may have noticed the affinity. Others may have seen the banana plant as nothing more than a convenient landmark. At any rate, they came to call the residence the Basho ("banana plant) Hut, and the name was soon applied to its resident, too: the teacher came to be known as the Master of the Basho Hut, or Master Basho. It goes without saying that he was happy to accept the nickname. He used it for the rest of his life.


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I. First Metamorphosis: From Wanderer to Poet
Little material is available to recreate Basho's life prior to his settlement in the Basho Hut. It is believed that he was born in 1644 at or near Ueno in Iga Province, about thirty miles southeast of Kyoto and two hundred miles west of Edo. He was called Kinsaku and several other names as a child; he had an elder brother and four sisters. His father, matsuo Yozaemon, was probably a low-ranking samurai who farmed in peacetime. Little is known about his mother except that her parents were not natives of Ueno. The social status of the family, while respectable, was not of the kind that promised a bright future for young Basho if he were to follow an ordinary course of life.

Yet Basho's career began in an ordinary enough way. It is presumed that as a youngster he entered the service of a youthful master, Todo Yoshitada, a relative of the feudal lord ruling the province. Young Basho first served as a page or in some such capacity. His master, two years his senior, was apparently fond of Basho, and the two seem to have become fairly good companions as they grew older. Their strongest bond was the haikai, one of the favorite pastimes of sophisticated men of the day. Apparently Yoshitada had a liking for verse writing and even acquired a haikai name, Sengin. Whether or not the initial stimulation came from his master, Basho also developed a taste for writing haikai, using the pseudonym Sobo. The earliest poem by Basho preserved today was written in 1662. In 1664, two haiku by Basho and one by Yoshitada appeared in a verse anthology published in Kyoto. The following year Basho, Yoshitada, and three others joined together and composed a renku of one hundred verses. Basho contributed eighteen verses, his first remaining verses of this type.

Basho's life seems to have been peaceful thus far, and he might for the rest of his life have been a satisfied, low-ranking samurai who spent his spare time at verse writing. He had already come of age and had assumed a samurai's name, Matsuo Munefusa. But in the summer of 1666 a series of incidents completely changed the course of his life. Yoshitada suddenly died a premature death. His younger brother succeeded him as the head of the clan and also as the husband of his widow. It is believed that (as a result of these events,) Basho left his native home and embarked on a wandering life shortly afterward.

Various surmises have been made as to the reasons for Basho's decision to leave home, a decision that meant forsaking his samurai status. One reason which can be easily imagined is Basho's deep grief at the death of his master, to whom he had been especially close. One early biography even has it that he thought of killing himself to accompany his master in the world beyond, but this was forbidden by the current law against self-immolation. Another and more convincing reason is that Basho became extremely pessimistic about his future under the new master, whom he had never served before. As Yoshitada had Basho, the new master must have had around him favored companions with whom he had been brought up. They may have tried to prevent Basho from joining their circle, or even if they did not, Basho could have sensed some vague animosity in their attitudes toward him. Whatever the truth may have been, there seems to be no doubt that Basho's future as a samurai became exceedingly clouded upon the sudden death of his master.

Other surmises about Basho's decision to leave home have to do with his love affairs. Several early biographies claim that he had an affair with his elder brother's wife, with one of Yoshitada's waiting ladies, or with Yoshitada's wife herself. These are most likely the fabrications of biographers who felt the need for some sensational incident in the famous poet's youth. But there is one theory that may contain some truth. It maintains that Basho had a secret mistress, who later became a nun called Jutei. She may even have had a child, or several children, by Basho. At any rate, these accounts seem to point toward one fact: Basho, still in his early twenties, experienced his share of the joys and griefs that most young men go through at one time or another.



Lost Into Time and his Life Voyage
Basho's life for the next few years is very obscure. It has traditionally been held that he went to Kyoto, then the capital of Japan, where he studied philosophy, poetry and calligraphy under well-known experts. It is not likely, however, that he was in Kyoto all during this time; he must often have returned to his home town for lengthy visits. It might even be that he still lived in Ueno or in that vicinity and made occasional trips to Kyoto. In all likelihood he was not yet determined to become a poet at this time. Later in his own writing he was to recall, "At one time I coveted an official post with a tenure of land." He was still young and ambitious, confident of his potential. He must have wished, above all, to get a good education that would secure him some kind of respectable position later on. Perhaps he wanted to see the wide world outside his native town and to mix with a wide variety of people. With the curiosity of youth he may have tried to do all sorts of things fashionable among the young libertines of the day. Afterward, he even wrote, "There was a time when I was fascinated with the ways of homosexual love."

One indisputable fact is that Basho had not lost his interest in verse writing. A haikai anthology published in 1667 contained as many as thirty-one of his verses, and his work was included in three other anthologies compiled between 1669 and 1671. His name was gradually becoming known to a limited number of poets in the capital (of Kyoto). That must have earned him considerable respect from the poets in his home town too. Thus when Basho made his first attempt to compile a book of haikai, about thirty poets were willing to contribute verses to it. The book, called The Seashell Game (Kai Oi), was dedicated to a shrine in Ueno early in 1672.

The Seashell Game represents a haiku contest in thirty rounds. Pairs of haiku, each one composed by a different poet, are matched and judged by Basho. Although he himself contributed two haiku to the contest, the main value of the book lies in his critical comments and the way he refereed the matches. On the whole, the book reveals him to be a man of brilliant wit and colorful imagination, who had a good knowledge of popular songs, fashionable expressions, and the new ways of the world in general. It appears he compiled the book in a lighthearted mood, but his poetic talent was evident.

Then, probably in the spring of 1672, Basho set out on a journey to Edo, apparently with no intention of returning in the immediate future. On parting, he sent a haiku to one of his friends in Ueno:

Kumo to hedatsu Clouds will separate
Tomo ka ya kari no The two friends, after migrating
Ikiwakare Wild goose's departure.


His motive for going to Edo cannot be ascertained. Now that he had some education, he perhaps wanted to find a promising post in Edo, then a fast-expanding city which offered a number of career opportunities. Or perhaps, encouraged by the good reception that The Seashell Game enjoyed locally, he had already made up his mind to become a professional poet and wanted his name known in Edo, too. Most likely Basho had multiple motives, being yet a young man with plenty of ambition. Whether he wanted to be a government official or a haikai master, Edo seemed to be an easier place than Kyoto to realize his dreams. He was anxious to try out his potential in a different, freer environment.



Further Into his Life Voyage
Basho's life for the next eight years is somewhat obscure again. It is said that in his early days in Edo he stayed at the home of one or another of his patrons. That is perhaps true, but it is doubtful that he could remain a dependent for long. Various theories, none of them with convincing evidence, argue that he became a physician's assistant, a town clerk, or a poet's scribe. The theory generally considered to be the closest to the truth is that for some time he was employed by the local waterworks department. Whatever the truth, his early years in Edo were not easy. He was probably recalling those days when he later wrote: "At one time I was weary of verse writing and wanted to give it up, and at another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless."

Though he may have been in a dilemma Basho continued to write verses in the new city. In the summer of 1675 he was one of several writers who joined a distinguished poet of the time in composing a renku of one hundred verses; Basho, now using the pseudonym Tosei, contributed eight. The following spring he and another poet wrote two renku, each consisting of one hundred verses.. After a brief visit to his native town later in the year, he began devoting more and more time to verse writing. He must have made up his mind to become a professional poet around this time, if he had not done so earlier. His work began appearing in various anthologies more and more frequently, indicating his increasing renown. When the New Year came he apparently distributed a small book of verses among his acquaintances, a practice permitted only to a recognized haikai master. In the winter of that year he judged in two haiku contests, and when they were published as Haiku Contests in Eighteen Rounds (Juhachiban Hokku Awase), he wrote a commentary on each match. In the summer of 1680 The Best Poems of Tosei's Twenty Disciples (Tosei Montei Dokugin Nijikkasen) appeared, which suggests that Basho already had a sizeable group of talented students. Later in the same year two of his leading disciples matched their own verses in two contests, "The rustic haiku Contest" ("Inaka no Kuawase") and "The Evergreen haiku Contest" ("Tokiwaya no Kuawase"), and Basho served as the judge. That winter his students built a small house in a quiet, rustic part of Edo and presented it to their teacher. Several months later a banana tree was planted in the yard, giving the hut its famous name. Basho, firmly established as a poet, now had his own home for the first time in his life.


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II. Second Metamorphosis: From Poet to Wanderer
Basho was thankful to have a permanent home, but he was not to be cozily settled there. With all his increasing poetic fame and material comfort, he seemed to become more dissatisfied with himself. In his early days of struggle he had had a concrete aim in life, a purpose to strive for. That aim, now virtually attained, did not seem to be worthy of all his effort. He had many friends, disciples, and patrons, and yet he was lonelier than ever.

One of the first verses he wrote after moving into the Basho Hut was:

Shiba no to ni Against the brushwood gate
Cha o konoha kaku Dead tea leaves swirl
Arashi kana In the stormy wind.


Many other poems written at this time, including the haiku about the banana tree, also have pensive overtones. In a headnote to one of them he even wrote: "I feel lonely as I gaze at the moon, I feel lonely as I think about myself, and I feel lonely as I ponder upon this wretched life of mine. I want to cry out that I am lonely, but no one asks me how I feel."

It was probably out of such spiritual ambivalence that Basho began practicing Zen meditation under Priest Butcho (1642-1715), who happened to be staying near his home. He must have been zealous and resolute in this attempt, for he was later to recall: "...and yet at another time I was anxious to confine myself within the walls of a monastery." Loneliness, melancholy, disillusion, ennui -- whatever his problem may have been, his suffering was real.

A couple of events that occurred in the following two years further increased his suffering. In the winter of 1682 the Basho Hut was destroyed in a fire that swept through the whole neighborhood. He was homeless again, and probably the idea that man is eternally homeless began haunting his mind more and more frequently. A few months later he received news from his family home that his mother had died. Since his father had died already in 1656, he was now not only without a home but without a parent to return to (as well).

As far as poetic fame was concerned, Basho and his disciples were thriving. In the summer of 1683 they published Shriveled Chestnuts (Minashiguri), an anthology of haikai verses which in its stern rejection of crudity and vulgarity in theme and in its highly articulate, Chinese-flavored diction, set them distinctly apart from other poets. In that winter, when the homeless Basho returned from a stay in Kai Province, his friends and disciples again gathered together and presented him with a new Basho Hut. He was pleased, but it was not enough to do away with his melancholy. His poem on entering the new hut was:

Arare kiku ya The sound of hail -
Kono mi wa moto no I am the same as before
Furugashiwa Like that aging oak.


Neither poetic success nor the security of a home seemed to offer him much consolation. He was already a wanderer in spirit, and he had to follow that impulse in actual life.

Thus, in the fall of 1684, Basho set out on his first significant journey. He had made journeys before, but not for the sake of spiritual and poetic discipline. Through the journey he wanted, among other things, to face death and thereby to help temper his mind and his poetry. He called it "the journey of a weather-beaten skeleton," meaning that he was prepared to perish alone and leave his corpse to the mercies of the wilderness, if that was his destiny. If this seems to us a bit extreme, we should remember that Basho was of a delicate constitution and suffered from several chronic diseases, and that his travel in seventeenth-century Japan was immensely more hazardous than it is today.



The Journey Into Wisdom
It was a long journey, taking him to a dozen provinces that lay between Edo and Kyoto. From Edo he went westward along a main road that more or less followed the Pacific coastline. He passed by the foot of Mount Fuji, crossed several large rivers and visited the Grand Shinto Shrines in Ise. He then arrived at his native town, Ueno, and was reunited with his relatives and friends. His elder brother opened a memento bag and showed him a small tuft of gray hair from the head of his late mother.

Te ni toraba Should I hold it in my hand
Kien namida zo atsuki It would melt in my burning tears -
Aki no shimo Autumnal frost.



This is one of the rare cases in which a poem bares his emotion, no doubt because the grief he felt was uncontrollably intense.

After only a few days' sojourn in Ueno, Basho traveled farther on, now visiting a temple among the mountains, now composing verses with local poets. It was at this time that The Winter Sun (Fuyu no Hi) was produced, a collection of five renku which with their less pedantic vocabulary and more lyrical tone marked the beginning of Basho's mature poetic style. He then celebrated the New Year at his native town for the first time in years. He spent some more time visiting Nara and Kyoto, and when he finally returned to Edo it was already the summer of 1685.

The journey was a rewarding one. Basho met numerous friends, old and new, on the way. He produced a number of haiku and renku on his experiences during the journey, including those collected in The Winter Sun. He wrote his first travel journal, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (Nozarashi Kiko), too. Through all these experiences, Basho was gradually changing. In the latter part of the journal there appears, for instance, the following haiku which he wrote at the year's end:

Toshi kurenu Another year is gone -
Kasa kite waraji A travel hat on my head,
Hakinagara Straw sandals on my feet.


The poem seems to show Basho at ease in travel. The uneasiness that made him assume a strained attitude toward the journey disappeared as his trip progressed. He could not look at his wandering self more objectively, without heroism or sentimentalism.

He spent the next two years enjoying a quiet life at the Basho Hut. It was a modest but leisurely existence, and he could afford to call himself "an idle old man." He contemplated the beauty of nature as it changed with the seasons and wrote verses whenever he was inspired to do so. Friends and disciples who visited him shared his taste, and they often gathered to enjoy the beauty of the moon, the snow, or the blossoms. The following composition, a short prose piece written in the winter of 1686, seems typical of his life at this time:

A man named Sora has his temporary residence near my hut, so I often drop in at his place, and he at mine. When I cook something to eat, he helps to feed the fire, and when I make tea at night, he comes over for company. A quiet, leisurely person, he has become a most congenial friend of mine. One evening after a snowfall, he dropped in for a visit, whereupon I composed a haiku:

Kimi hi o take Will you start a fire?
Yoki mono misen I'll show you something nice -
Yukimaroge A huge snowball.





The fire in the poem means "to boil water for tea." Sora would prepare tea in the kitchen, while Basho, returning to the pleasures of a little boy, would make a big snowball in the yard. When the tea was ready, they would sit down and sip it together, humorously enjoying the view of the snowball outside. The poem, an unusually cheerful one for Basho, seems to suggest his relaxed, carefree frame of mind of those years.

The same sort of casual poetic mood led Basho to undertake a short trip to Kashima, a town about fifty miles east of Edo and well known for its Shinto shrine, to see the harvest moon. Sora and a certain Zen monk accompanied him on the trip in the autumn of 1687. Unfortunately it rained on the night of the full moon, and they only had a few glimpses of the moon toward dawn. Basho, however, took advantage of the chance to visit his former Zen master, Priest Butcho, who had retired to Kashima. The trip resulted in another of Basho's travel journals, A Visit to the Kashima Shrine (Kashima Kiko).

Then, just two months later, Basho set out on another long westward journey. He was far more at ease as he took leave than he had been at the outset of his first such journey three years earlier. He was a famous poet now, with a large circle of friends and disciples. They gave him many farewell presents, invited him to picnics and dinners, and arranged several verse-writing parties in his honor. Those who could not attend sent their poems. These verses, totaling nearly three hundred and fifty, were later collected and published under the title Farewell Verses (Kusenbetsu). there were so many festivities that to Basho "the occasion looked like some dignitary's departure -- very imposing indeed."

He followed roughly the same route as on his journey of 1684, again visiting friends and writing verses here and there on the way. He reached Ueno at the year's end and was heartily welcomed as a leading poet in Edo. Even the young head of his former master's family, whose service he had left in his youth, invited him for a visit. In the garden a cherry tree which Yoshitada had loved was in full bloom:

Samazama no Myriads of things past
Koto omoidasu Are brought to my mind -
Sakura kana These cherry blossoms!



In the middle of the spring Basho left Ueno, accompanied by one of his students, going first to Mount Yoshino to see the famous cherry blossoms. He traveled to Wakanoura to enjoy the spring scenes of the Pacific coast, and then came to Nara at the time of fresh green leaves. On he went to Osaka, and then to Suma and Akashi on the coast of Seto Inland Sea, two famous places which often appeared in old Japanese classics.

From Akashi, Basho turned back to the east, and by way of Kyoto arrived at Nagoya in midsummer. After resting there for awhile, he headed for the mountains of central Honshu, an area now popularly known as the Japanese Alps. An old friend of his and a servant, loaned to him by someone who worried about the steep roads ahead, accompanied Basho. His immediate purpose was to see the harvest moon in the rustic Sarashina district. As expected, the trip was a rugged one, but he did see the full moon at that place celebrated in Japanese literature. He then traveled eastward among the mountains and returned to Edo in late autumn after nearly a year of traveling.

This was probably the happiest of all Basho's journeys. He had been familiar with the route much of the way, and where he had not, a friend and a servant had been there to help him. His fame as a poet was fairly widespread, and people he met on the way always treated him with courtesy. It was a productive journey, too. In addition to a number of haiku and renku, he wrote two journals: The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel (Oi no Kobumi), which covers his travel from Edo to Akashi, and A Visit to Sarashina Village (Sarashina Kiko), which focuses on his moon-viewing trip to Sarashina. The former has an especially significant place in the Basho canon, including among other things a passage that declares the haikai to be among the major forms of Japanese art. He was now clearly aware of the significance of haikai writing; he was confident that the haikai, as a serious form of art, could point toward an invaluable way of life.

It was no wonder, then, that Basho began preparing for the next journey almost immediately. As he described it, it was almost as if the God of Travel were beckoning him. Obsessed with the charms of the traveler's life, he now wanted to go beyond his previous journeys; he wanted to be a truer wanderer than ever before. In a letter written around this time, he says he admired the life of a monk who wanders about with only a begging bowl in his hand. Basho now wanted to travel, not as a renowned poet, but as a self-disciplining monk. Thus in the pilgrimage to come he decided to visit the northern part of Honshu, a mostly rustic and in places even wild region where he had never been and had hardly an acquaintance. He was to cover about fifteen hundred miles on the way. Of course it was going to be the longest journey of his life.

Accompanied by Sora, Basho left Edo in the late spring of 1689. Probably because of his more stern and ascetic attitude toward the journey, farewell festivities were fewer and quieter this time. He proceeded northward along the main road stopping at places of interest such as the Tosho Shrine at Nikko, the hot mineral springs at nasu, and an historic castle site at Iizuka. When he came close to the Pacific coast near Sendai he admired the scenic beauty of Matsushima. From Hiraizumi, a town well known as the site of a medieval battle, Basho turned west and reached the coast of the Sea of Japan at Sakata. After a short trip to Kisagata in the north, he turned southwest and followed the main road along the coast. It was from this coast that he saw the island of Sado in the distance and wrote one of his most celebrated poems:

Araumiya The rough sea -
Sado ni yokotau Extending toward Sado Isle,
Amanogawa The Milky Way.



Because of the rains, the heat, and the rugged road, this part of the journey was very hard for Basho and Sora, and they were both exhausted when the finally arrived at kanazawa. They rested at the famous hot spring at Yamanaka for a few days, but Sora, apparently because of prolonged ill- health, decided to give up the journey and left his master there. Basho continued alone until he reached Fukui. There he met an old acquaintance who accompanied him as far as Tsuruga, where another old friend had come to meet Basho, and the two traveled south until they arrived at Ogaki, a town Basho knew well. A number of Basho's friends and disciples were there, and the long journey through unfamiliar areas was finally over. One hundred and fifty-six days had passed since he left Edo.

The voyage (trek) marked a climax in Basho's literary career. He wrote some of his finest haiku during the journey. The resulting journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), is one of the highest attainments in the history of poetic diaries in Japan. His literary achievement was no doubt a result of his deepening maturity as a man. He had come to perceive a mode of life by which to resolve some deep dilemmas and to gain peace of mind. It was based on the idea of sabi, the concept that one attains perfect spiritual serenity by immersing oneself in the egoless, impersonal life of nature. The complete absorption of one's petty ego into the vast, powerful, magnificent universe - this was the underlying theme of many poems by Basho at this time, including the haiku on the Milky Way we have just seen. This momentary identification of man with inanimate nature was, in his view, essential to poetic creation. Though he never wrote a treatise on the subject, there is no doubt that Basho conceived some unique ideas about poetry in his later years. Apparently it was during this journey that he began thinking about poetry in more serious, philosophical terms. The two earliest books known to record Basho's thoughts on poetry, Records of the Seven Days (Kikigaki Nanukagusa) and Conversations at Yamanaka (Yamanaka Mondo), resulted from it.

Basho spent the next two years visiting his old friends and disciples in Ueno, Kyoto, and towns on the southern coast of Lake Biwa. With one or another of them he often paid a brief visit to other places such as Ise and Nara. Of numerous houses he stayed at during this period Basho seems to have especially enjoyed two: the Unreal Hut and the House of Fallen Persimmons, as they were called. The Unreal Hut, located in the woods off the southernmost tip of lake Biwa, was a quiet, hidden place where Basho rested from early summer to mid-autumn in 1690. He thoroughly enjoyed the idle, secluded life there, and described it in a short but superb piece of prose.

Here is one of the passages:

In the daytime an old watchman from the local shrine or some villager from the foot of the hill comes along and chats with me about things I rarely hear of, such as a wild boar's looting the rice paddies or a hare's haunting the bean farms. When the sun sets under the edge of the hill and night falls, I quietly sit and wait for the moon. With the moonrise I begin roaming about, casting my shadow on the ground.

When the night deepens, I return to the hut and meditate on right and wrong, gazing at the dim margin of a shadow in the lamplight.



Basho had another chance to live a similarly secluded life later at the House of the Fallen Persimmons in Saga, a northwestern suburb of Kyoto. The house, owned by one of his disciples, Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704), was so called because persimmon trees grew around it. There were also a number of bamboo groves, which provided the setting for a well-known poem by Basho:

Hototogisu The cuckoo -
Otakeyabu o Through the dense bamboo grove,
Moru tsukiyo Moonlight seeping.



Basho stayed at this house for seventeen days in the summer of 1691. The sojurn resulted in The Saga Diary (Saga Nikki), the last of his longer prose works.

All during this period at the two hideaways and elsewhere in the Kyoto-Lake Biwa area, Basho was visited by many people who shared his interest in poetry. Especially close to him were two of his leading disciples, Kyorai and Nozawa Boncho (16??-1714), partly because they were compiling a haikai anthology under Basho's guidance. The anthology, entitled The Monkey's Raincoat (Sarumino) and published in the early summer of 1691 represented a peak in haikai of the Basho style. Basho's idea of sabi and other principles of verse writing that evolved during his journey to the far north were clearly there. Through actual example the new anthology showed that the haikai could be a serious art form capable of embodying mature comments on man and his environment.



On the Road Back -- Now Made Wise
Basho returned to Edo in the winter of 1691. His friends and disciples there, who had not seen him for more than two years, welcomed him warmly. For the third time they combined their efforts to build a hut for their master, who had given up the old one just before his last journey. In this third Basho Hut, however, he could not enjoy the peaceful life he desired. For one thing, he now had a few people to look after. An invalid nephew had come to live with Basho, who took care of him until his death in the spring of 1693. A woman by the name of Jutei, with whom Basho apparently had had some special relationship in his youth, also seems to have come under his care at this time. She too was in poor health, and had several young children besides. Even apart from these involvements, Basho was becoming extremely busy, no doubt due to his great fame as a poet. Many people dropped in to visit him, or invited him for visits. For instance, in a letter presumed to have been written on the eighth of the month of December, 1693, he told one prospective visitor that he would not be home on the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, suggesting that the visitor come either on the thirteenth or the eighteenth. In another letter written about the same time, he bluntly said: "Disturbed by others, I have no peace of mind." That New Year he composed this haiku:

Toshidoshi ya Year after year
Saru ni kisetaru On the monkey's face
Saru no men A monkey's mask.



The poem has a touch of bitterness, unusual for Basho. He was dissatisfied with the progress that he and (possibly) some of his students were making.



As these responsibilities pressed on him, Basho gradually became somewhat nihilistic. He had become a poet in order to transcend worldly involvements, but now he found himself deeply involved in worldly affairs precisely because of his poetic fame. The solution was either to renounce being a poet or to stop seeing people altogether. Basho first tried the former, but to no avail. "I have tried to give up poetry and remain silent," he said, "but every time I did so, a poetic sentiment would solicit my heart and something would flicker in my mind. Such is the magic spell of poetry." He had become too much of a poet. Thus he had to resort to the second alternative: to stop seeing people altogether. This he did in the autumn of 1693, declaring:

Whenever people come, there is useless talk. Whenever I go, and visit, I have the unpleasant feeling of interfering with other men's business. Now I can do nothing better than follow the examples of Sun Ching and Tu Wu-lang, who confined themselves within locked doors. Friendlessness will become my friend, and poverty my wealth. A stubborn man at fifty years of age, I thus write to discipline myself.




Asagao ya The morning-glory -
Hiru wa jo orosu In the daytime, a bolt is fastened
Mon no kaki On the front-yard gate.







Obviously, Basho wished to admire the beauty of the morning-glory without having to keep a bolt on his gate. How to manage to do this must have been the subject of many hours of meditation within the locked house. He solved the problem, at least to his own satisfaction, and reopened the gate about a month after closing it.

Basho's solution was based on the principle of "lightness," a dialectic transcendence of sabi. Sabi urges man to detach himself from worldly involvements; "lightness" makes it possible for him, after attaining that detachment, to return to the mundane world. Man lives amid the mire (mud and cumbersome purlessness) as a spiritual bystander. He does not escape the grievances of living; standing apart, he just smiles them away. Basho began writing under this principle and advised his students to emulate him. The effort later came to fruition in several haikai anthologies, such as A Sack of Charcoal (Sumidawara), The Detached Room (Betsuzashiki) and The Monkey's Cloak, Continued (Zoku Sarumino). Characteristic verses in these collections reject sentimentalism and take a calm, carefree attitude to the things of daily life. They often exude lighthearted humor.



Still Creative -- On the Last Stretch
Having thus restored his mental equilibrium, Basho began thinking about another journey. He may have been anxious to carry his new poetic principle, "lightness," to poets outside of Edo, too. Thus in the summer of 1694 he traveled westward on the familiar road along the Pacific coast, taking with him one of Jutei's children, Jirobei. He rested at Ueno for a while, and then visited his students in Kyoto and in town near the southern coast of Lake Biwa. Jutei, who had been struggling against ill health at the Basho Hut, died at this time, and Jirobei temporarily returned to Edo. Much saddened, Basho went back to Ueno in early autumn for about a month's rest. He then left for Osaka with a few friends and relatives including his elder brother's son Mataemon as well as Jirobei. But Basho's health was rapidly failing, even though he continued to write some excellent verses. One of his haiku in Osaka was:


Kono aki wa This autumn
Nan de toshiyoru Why am I aging so?
Kumo ni tori Flying towards the clouds, a bird.



The poem indicates Basho's awareness of approaching death. Shortly afterward he took to his bed with a stomach ailment, from which he was not to recover. Numerous disciples hurried to Osaka and gathered at his bedside. He seems to have remained calm in his last days. He scribbled a deathbed note to his elder brother, which in part read: "I am sorry to have to leave you now. I hope you will live a happy life under Mataemon's care and reach a ripe old age. There is nothing more I have to say." The only thing that disturbed his mind was poetry. According to a disciple's record, Basho fully knew that it was time for prayers, not for verse writing, and yet he thought of the latter day and night. Poetry was now an obsession -- "a sinful attachment," as he himself called it. His last poem (on this planet) was:


Tabi ni yande On a journey, ailing --
Yume wa kareno o My dreams roam about
Kakemeguru Over a withered moor.



End of this Basho Biography.
The meister_z Version.

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Originally prepared and put on the Web by Stephen Kohl (Univ. of Oregon.
Edited, HTML-Coded, Designed, English Corrected, Adapted and Commented by jzr -- meister_z Enterprises -- [April 9, 2K].

Kohl's Info: Instructor Stephen Kohl
303 Friendly Hall
kohl@oregon.uoregon.edu
346-4006





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Haiku and Noh Mayuzumi

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Haiku and Noh:
Journeys to the Spirit World

Mayuzumi, Madoka

QUOTE
source: www.tokyofoundation.org April 2012


MADOKA MAYUZUMI:
Since spring 2010, I’ve been living in Paris, traveling around France and neighboring countries to promote cultural exchange and to introduce the world of haiku to people in Europe. In explaining the distinctive conventions used in haiku,[1] I’ve gained a renewed appreciation for the important role played by “form” [kata] and “omission”—the thoughts and feelings that are left unexpressed—in this very succinct poetic form.

This process of compaction is not unique to haiku; in fact, one can see it in many other aspects of Japan’s traditional culture. I think that the classic stage art of noh, in particular, has many parallels with haiku. Today, we’re fortunate to have two guest speakers who can eloquently describe this rather vague concept.

Mr. Yasuda belongs to a school of waki actors, who perform in supporting roles. When most people think of noh, they assume that actors all wear masks. But masks are worn only by shite actors, who play the lead characters. Waki are also very important, however, as Mr. Yasuda will now explain.

Between Two Worlds
NOBORU YASUDA:
Ms. Mayuzumi has just mentioned the two types of actors in noh: shite and waki. One meaning of the term waki is “supporting role,” as was just explained, and people generally assume that’s the only definition. But there’s another, older meaning of the word: It is the seam along the side of the kimono that separates the front of the garment from the back. I’ll come back to this point a little later.

In a typical noh play,[2] a waki actor comes on stage first, often in the role of an itinerant monk and frequently accompanied by other monks. Coming upon an unusual tree, flower, or rock, he recites a poem, which triggers a sudden and strange natural phenomenon, such as a downpour or a darkening of the sky.

The shite then appears, quite often a young woman or old man. As the characters speak, their conversation turns to the past—a story from a literary classic or a local legend. The waki begins to suspect that he is not speaking to an ordinary human being. He asks why the shite is so familiar with this particular episode and calls on the shite to identify him- or herself.

The shite hints that he or she is actually the protagonist of the tale and disappears. As evening falls, the waki spends the night there—or if he is a Buddhist priest recites sutras—and waits to be revisited by the shite, typically in the waki’s dream. The shite reappears, recounts his or her tale, and often performs a dance before disappearing again with the approach of dawn.

I’m sure that all of you have visited places of historical significance—a medieval castle, for example. Each locality has its own “story” that is part of the district’s collective memory. But rarely will you meet a “ghost” who appears to recount the past. That’s because ghosts inhabit a world different from ours.

The waki is someone who stands at the edge of the two worlds, similar to the seams along the sides of a kimono. The front of the kimono can be likened to the world of living humans and the back to the abode of spirits. The two worlds usually don’t mingle, but since the waki has his feet in both, it’s not unusual for him to meet visitors from the beyond. His role is to make the invisible world accessible for the audience.

MAYUZUMI:
I recall Mr. Yasuda making a very interesting comment that the key quality enabling waki characters to mingle with spirits is the passive nature of their psychic orientation. They don’t go out to win nature over; in fact, nature reaches out to woo them.

This is quite similar to the experience of writing a haiku, as nature is an integral component of the poetic form. It’s through trees, flowers, and stones that the poet communes with entities that are not visible. A haiku is a kind of greeting, a short note asking if all is well.

And just like the waki, haiku poets don’t go hankering after their subjects; we wait for them to approach us—a state of mind that might be called “waiting proactively.” Verses of five, seven, and five syllables per line are offered as a greeting, and we wait for a “reply” from the subject to complete our poems.

YASUDA:
Encounters with trees, flowers, and stones aren’t possible through prose. To communicate with the world of spirits, you have to use verse, which in Japanese has traditionally meant metered lines of five and seven syllables.

Prose is the language of us humans, inhabiting a world that may, quite literally, be described as prosaic. Poetry is what is spoken in the world of spirits. It’s through language we don’t normally use—through verse—that we’re able to commune with those spirits.

MAYUZUMI:
To compose their verses, Matsuo Basho[3] and other poets often traveled to famous or ancient sites that are collectively referred to as uta-makura or hai-makura, about which many verses have been written in the past. Often, poets allude not just to the spectacle before their eyes but also to the many earlier poems that have been written about it.

It’s as if you’re picking up a letter that someone has left there and adding one’s own comments, perhaps to be read later by someone else. Through a blooming flower or the moon, trees, and other natural phenomena, you’re paying your respects to the spirits there and the poets who wrote about them long ago.

Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is a good example. In embarking on a journey to the interior of Japan, Basho was retracing the steps taken in the late Heian period by poet-monks Saigyo and Noin[4] and paying his respects to the spirits they no doubt also encountered.
For Basho, the medium of communication with such spirits was the haiku.

YASUDA:
Basho also has strong ties to noh. Before I talk about that, though, I’d like to say that the waki does not act alone in beckoning the spirits. An equally important role is played by the musicians—collectively called hayashi[5]—and particularly by the flute. I wonder if Mr. Tsukitaku can speak about that.

Crossing Over
SATOSHI TSUKITAKU:
I was fascinated by Mr. Yasuda’s description of the passive nature of the waki’s interaction with the spirit world. Hayashi’s involvement, by contrast, may be described as actively creating a communication channel with this realm.

The waki is on the border between two worlds, and he’s not necessarily keen on moving to the other side. So the role of hayashi is to provide the needed push.

Hayashi music is usually performed at the beginning of a noh play, or when a character enters the stage. As Mr. Yasuda explained, we don’t normally meet ghosts in our daily lives. The flute, in particular, is the vehicle that can temporarily transport us to their world. Let me give you a short example. If you’ve ever seen a noh play, I’m sure you’ll remember hearing this very powerful note. [Performs a high-pitched note]

That piercing shrill is called hishigi, which comes from the verb hishigu meaning “to crush” or “to tear.” The role of hayashi is not to entertain, and so it’s probably quite different from the music you normally enjoy listening. It seeks to break down the barrier separating the world of humans with that of ghosts, spirits of trees and flowers, and divinities and to make them appear before us.

MAYUZUMI:
Perhaps it’s better not to regard hayashi as music at all. It’s more momentary and fleeting.

TSUKITAKU:
It’s not always fleeting, though. Rather, hayashi creates a perceptible change in the flow of time.

MAYUZUMI:
I see. It creates a break with our everyday reality.

TSUKITAKU:
That’s right. Performing arts in Japan is said to have begun with the practice of calling on divinities to take possession of spiritual mediums. This can still be seen in Shinto rituals in Japan and in shamanistic rites around the world. Divinities don’t appear without a reason, and the beckoning of spiritual entities usually entails jarring, nonmusical sounds that entreat them to possess the mediums.


Noh and Basho
YASUDA:
I’d like to come back to Basho’s ties with noh. Let me show you an illustration. It depicts a traveling monk standing in a winter field. The man is Basho; it was drawn by one of his disciples, and the words—a poem composed by Basho—were written by the poet himself. You can see the poet’s signature and seal. The haiku reads:
Tabibito to / waga na yobaren / hatsu shigure
(Let my name / be traveler / first rains).

He was about to embark on a long journey, and he surmises that people will remember him as a traveler.





MAYUZUMI:
This comes from the opening section of a travel diary, known as Oi no kobumi [The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel].

YASUDA:
What’s interesting about this drawing is that to the right of his verse are four lines of text, accompanied by a variety of symbols, which denote melody and rhythm—in other words, how the words should be sung as part of a te melody and rhythm—in other words, how the words should be sung as part of a noh play.[6] This text, again, includes the word “traveler” and is an excerpt from a noh play called Umegae.

In this play, the character portrayed by the waki encounters a sudden downpour on his travels and, finding a house, asks for a night’s lodgings. The traveler then discovers that the mistress of the house is not an ordinary human being but a figure from the past. Basho’s reference to this play suggests that when he set out on his journeys, he, too, was hoping to meet figures who were no longer alive.

There’s one more thing that the drawing implies. Composing a haiku—or any other kind of verse, in fact—is called utau in Japanese, which also means to sing or chant. In that sense, Basho’s haiku were probably meant to be sung, not just read or recited. It might be interesting to see how it might have been performed. Let me give you a demonstration of how the excerpt from Umegae and Basho’s haiku can be sung to a flute accompaniment. [Performance of noh singing]

MAYUZUMI:
When Basho wrote Oi no kobumi, I’m sure his verses were sung in this way. In his Narrow Road, he writes that in Nasuno (now in Tochigi Prefecture), the sky suddenly turned dark, followed by a downpour, and he had to ask a local farmer to put him up for the night. He subsequently describes his visits to Sesshoseki and Yugyoyanagi[7] before composing his famous verse:
Ta ichimai / uete tachisaru / yanagi kana
(A paddy of rice / now planted, so moving on / the willow tree).[8]

This poem has been interpreted in various ways, but there is no questioning the fact that it was written in reference to Saigyo’s own poem about the same willow, on which the noh play Yugyoyanagi is based. Basho is so thrilled to come upon the tree that Saigyo himself had written about that he no longer can tell whether what he’s experiencing is real or just a dream. In a sense, Basho has become a waki and is awaiting the appearance of Saigyo’s spirit, so the Narrow Road can be regarded as having been written in the style of a noh play.



Freedom through Form
MAYUZUMI: I’d like to move on to the concept of kata, or conventionalized form. Just the other day, a French haiku poet asked me whether I didn’t find the formal conventions of haiku too restricting, as poetry is supposed to encourage free expression. My response was that it was precisely form that frees you. I’m sure that form plays an important role in noh as well. Can you elucidate on this point?

YASUDA: In one sense, kata is a restriction. But I think that in many traditional Japanese arts, form is seen as less of a hindrance than an aid to freedom.

There are many different kata in noh, but I’d like to speak about just two today. The first is the fixed nature of the stage. The main performing area is a square measuring less than six meters a side.[9] In the finale of the play Hagoromo, for instance, the angelic lead character returns to her home in the heavens with her hagoromo (feather mantle). If the stage weren’t fixed, her flight into the sky would probably be expressed by pulling her off the floor with a rope. This, in fact, is what is done in the kabuki adaptation of the play. Because of the noh stage’s physical limitations, though, her upward spiral is expressed by the shite circling the stage several times. This requires the audience to imagine her ascent.

The restrictions compel people to use their imagination; many arts in Japan, in fact, rely on the audience’s imagination to bring a work to life. I’m sure the same is true for haiku.

MAYUZUMI: Absolutely. And form plays a big part in drawing out people’s imagination. Because haiku are so short, it’s impossible to express everything through words. Terms aren’t “added” together in a haiku; they’re “multiplied” to create a much bigger effect.

At the same time, the brevity creates “margins” or “blank spaces,” giving readers room to imagine the sentiments behind each phrase. Basho describes this as iiosete nanika aru (say little, imply much). If you express everything, nothing will be left to say. It is by being selective that a process of distillation and purification takes place, transforming the haiku into a experience that can lift the spirits of both the poet and reader. This, I think, is the power of kata.

YASUDA: Limitations posed by the human body, too, can be turned into an advantage. This is the second of the two kata I want to mention. In the world of noh, I’m still considered a junior performer, although I’m already 55. My teacher is 80, and when he talked about retiring due to an illness, he was admonished for thinking about such things while he was still so young!

It is when you can no longer freely use your body to express something that you begin to exude an aura that comes from having devoted yourself to years of discipline and training. That’s the reason that performances by actors who are really advanced in age can be very moving. Perhaps the instrument that best embodies this concept is the flute.

TSUKITAKU: Yes, I’d agree. The modern Western concert flute, as you know, is made of metal and has many keys. This was developed in the nineteenth century to overcome the restrictions of earlier models to enable the instrument to play a fuller range of notes. With the new innovations, flutists were free to play any note they wished.

The noh flute, by contrast, is an instrument with many physical limitations that in themselves can be thought of as constituting a type of kata. It appears to be a single piece of wood, but actually there’s a narrow piece of bamboo embedded into a wider one, and the bore is rather irregular. This prevents the instrument from producing regular intervals in pitch but gives it a highly distinctive tone. Ms. Mayuzumi was right when she surmised that hayashi isn’t really music. The noh flute is made in a way that it can’t produce the kind of melodies that people can readily sing. This is an intentional limitation.

YASUDA: I understand that playing the noh flute is quite difficult.

TSUKITAKU: If you can play the Western flute, you’ll probably get a sound out of the noh flute without much effort. But the chances are, it won’t be the sound required in a noh performance. Let me show you what a noh flute needs to sound like. [Performance]

Someone learning to play the noh flute would begin not by actually playing on the instrument but singing the names of those notes, such as o-hya-ra. This is designed to familiarize the student with the use of the body before he or she learns the use of the instrument. This song, called shoga, can also be described as a type of kata.

I play the noh flute exactly as I was told to by my teacher. That’s all I’m capable of doing, but this “limitation,” in fact, gives me the freedom to perform any type of noh play, in any language.

MAYUZUMI: I think that the importance of kata is much clearer now. Rather than hindering free expression, kata gives us the tools to enable us to express ourselves freely.

Many people, when they begin writing haiku, feel that there are too many restrictions. The haiku is so short, the lines must follow the five-seven-five metric pattern, and a seasonal kigo must be included. But if you keep working at it, after ten or twenty years, you suddenly realize how liberating such rules can be.

YASUDA: A span of ten to twenty years may seem long, but that’s not necessarily the case in Japanese traditional arts.


Kokoro versus Omoi
MAYUZUMI: Rather than being an unnatural imposition, form can be one of the most natural of human desires.

YASUDA: For me, kata is the channel I use to go beyond surface appearances to arrive at the core, inner aspects of human nature.

Usually, a noh actor doesn’t think about the feelings of the characters he portrays. Rather, we faithfully perform the kata as we’ve been taught by our teachers.

This is related to the difference in meaning of two Japanese words: kokoro and omoi. The former refers to feeling or emotion, and is also the word for “heart.” This is very fickle, changing from one moment to the next. The person we were in love with last year, for example, might no longer be the one we’re fond of now.

MAYUZUMI: That’s very straightforward. I think we’re now very clear on what kokoro means.

YASUDA: The word for something deeper and unchanging, on the other hand, is omoi. The object of our amorous desires might change, but there’s an urge in us that compels us to always be in love with someone! Omoi lies behind our fleeting emotions. In noh we don’t deal with kokoro; we’re concerned with omoi. If kokoro had been our chief interest, I don’t think noh would have survived for 650 years. An art form dedicated to something that is always changing would surely have become outdated by now.

The actors expressing this omoi on stage, though, are living humans, so we’re full of capricious kokoro. In a role requiring the expression of love, for instance, it’s easy to fall into the trap of drawing on our shallow experiences.

There are moments in our lives, though, when we tap into something bigger, particularly after a traumatic or shocking event, such as when you lose all your possessions, your social status, or your lover.

Around 650 years ago, when the noh theater was founded, the playwrights and actors no doubt created the kata to express such omoi, enabling it to be preserved and handed down from generation to generation—as if in a deep freeze. It’s the job of living noh actors to “thaw” or “extract” the omoi and bring it back to life with each performance. Once it manifests itself on stage, the omoi might then resonate with members of the audience, who, together with the actors onstage, awaken to something that ordinarily goes unnoticed.

So kata is not just outward form. It has its roots in emotions so deep that we don’t even realize they’re there.

MAYUZUMI: Since I teach haiku writing, I frequently come across instances of people attempting to compose their very first verse. The motive for such an attempt is not infrequently a death of a family member or a broken heart. It’s at such moments—when something one has taken for granted is suddenly lost—that people are suddenly confronted with their deepest and most personal emotions. And to come to grips with such omoi, there seems to be an innate longing for form, for kata that they know won’t betray them.

One might say that the changing and enduring aspects of our affective lives, as represented by kokoro and omoi, have a parallel existence. Omoi lies deeper, while kokoro is on the surface. Haiku, too, is a tool for connecting with our deepest nature, rather than a depiction of our fleeting whims.

Omoi often can’t be put into words, so we use metaphors like scenes of nature. The real message is to be found not in the words but in the omissions, the blank margins in between. Nature is the medium we used to arrive at our omoi.

YASUDA: Omoi isn’t a personal matter, so it doesn’t take a subject—there’s no first person. If I say, “I’m in love with Ms. Mayuzumi,” for instance, the “I” is there. Someone else might say they dislike Ms. Mayuzumi. That would be a rude thing to say [laughs], but the “self” would still be there.

In noh, however, our love for our spouses, children, lovers, or even food is all transformed into omoi. While we’re portraying a specific character, at the same time we’re also expressing everyone’s omoi, including those of people in the audience. And so the “I” naturally disappears.

MAYUZUMI: And of course, haiku have no first person either.

TSUKITAKU: The discussion about omoi is very interesting. My personal take on this is that it represents the moment when we transcend the self and reach a new level of consciousness. Physically speaking, it’s the moment when our energy becomes focused here, in the lower abdominal area.

MAYUZUMI: Hmm, then maybe kokoro is something we feel in our chest. Omoi is a little lower, an area called tanden in Japanese, below the navel. That’s the place where we focus our breaths when doing yoga or zazen. Is that also the case when you’re playing the flute?

TSUKITAKU: Yes, exactly. This area becomes very active. And we practice moving the energy around when singing shoga, the names of the notes, as I mentioned earlier.

MAYUZUMI: In haiku, too, we’re often taught not to compose poems with our heads. The inspiration has to come from deeper down, I suppose, from around our tanden area.

Sound of Silence
MAYUZUMI: There’s an indescribable richness to the empty intervals, called ma, between the notes performed by a flute or the words spoken or sung by an actor. I was speaking recently with an ikebana [flower arrangement] artist who explained that her art, too, places great importance on ma—in her case, the empty spaces between the flowers. In fact, she claimed that she doesn’t look at the flowers at all; she’s not arranging the flowers so much as using them to design the spaces in between. The aesthetic underpinnings of the spatial and temporal “margins” in ikebana and noh, respectively, seem to have much in common.

YASUDA: Let me take this notion of ma one step further. In noh, there are intervals that everyone perceives. You can hear the pauses between the notes. But there is another type of ma that isn’t so obvious. I wonder if Mr. Tsukitaku would first explain the more easily perceived type of ma.

TSUKITAKU: I talked earlier about the flute’s role in calling spirits onto the stage. The noh stage is fitted with a long corridor called the hashigakari;[10] this is a passageway linking the world of living humans—that is, the main performing area—with the spirit realm, on the other side of the curtain.

In a special rendition of the play Kiyotsune, the lead character enters the stage along the hashigakari to the accompaniment only of the flute, pausing every time the flute stops. There is a rather long silence—ma that everyone in the audience perceives—broken when the actor starts moving again and the flute resumes its refrain. This is repeated several times before the actor reaches the stage. No sound is produced during the pauses, but in many ways, the silences speak louder than the notes. They’re very rich and condensed moments.

YASUDA: You’re not actually looking at the actor as you play, are you?

TSUKITAKU: No, I’m not. The length of the ma is measured by the number of breaths. This enables the actor and the flutist to break the silence at more or less the same time, without having to look at each other. The shite and flutist are positioned far apart from one another, but we know what the other is doing because we share our ma. [Performance]

MAYUZUMI: How should such long pauses be interpreted? Or rather, how can they be fully appreciated by the audience?

TSUKITAKU: The ideal situation would be for members of the audience to breathe along with us.

MAYUZUMI: The audience, in effect, also becomes the shite.

YASUDA: Synchronizing our breaths means that everyone in the theater is inhaling and exhaling as one. When our breathing slows down, we tend to get drowsy, and you often find people in the audience nodding off . . .

TSUKITAKU: But that’s not the same as going into a deep slumber. People become half-asleep.

MAYUZUMI: I suppose that in this state, the audience can also enter into that realm where the boundary between the physical and nonphysical worlds becomes blurred.

Simplicity as the Ultimate Goal
MAYUZUMI: We talked earlier about there being no “self” in an omoi and that this is also a feature of haiku. Writing a haiku is like depicting a scene without injecting our subjective feelings.

YASUDA: An interesting example of how the self is discarded in noh is the flutist’s relationship with his instrument. The flute used by Mr. Tsukitaku is about 300 years old, but he claims it’s relatively new.

TSUKITAKU: Other flutists use much older instruments, so the one I’m using now wouldn’t be regarded as being very old.

YASUDA: It’s been passed down from generation to generation. But just because it’s been used so long doesn’t mean that it’s easy to play.

TSUKITAKU: This flute used to belong to my teacher, and the first time I played on it, I couldn’t get it to sound right. Only gradually, over more than 10 years, have I been able to get it to play the way I want. But people have told me that I now sound more like my teacher. So perhaps the flute hasn’t adjusted to me; I’ve adjusted to the flute.

For three centuries, then, there’s been a generation after generation of flutists who’ve worked to keep the sound alive. For me, this was a very liberating thought. I no longer felt separate from the flute. I melted into it. In effect, the “I” disappeared.

YASUDA: When Mr. Tsukitaku first received this flute, it still carried the breath of his teacher, who had used it for years. But after a while, it adapted to Mr. Tsukitaku’s breath, and at the same time, he conformed to the “breath” of the flute as well. This is a process that’s been ongoing for three centuries, and the chances are it will continue for another 300 years. The flute adjusts to each new musician, and vice versa, so the sound continues to evolve. Performing on such a flute precludes any notion of self.

TSUKITAKU: Said another way, it’s gone through so many “selves” that it’s impossible to make it your own. [laughs]

MAYUZUMI:
Mr. Yasuda also has an interesting interpretation of Basho’s famous haiku:
Furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
(A still, quiet pond / a frog leaps in / the sound of the water).

It’s a very novel interpretation that surprised me. He claims that Basho is not watching a frog jumping into a pond from its banks; rather, he is the pond. There is no “I” that is witnessing this event.

YASUDA:
The poem has three basic components, namely, the pond, the frog jumping into it, and the sound of water. I think that anybody who writes haiku or poems of any kind would immediately identify the sound of water as being the crux of Basho’s experience.

He might have composed this verse as he was walking, having heard something fall into a roadside pond. But after hearing a plop, the frog was nowhere to be seen. So as far as he was concerned, it could have been a rock or a carp, rather than a frog. The only way he could be certain that it was a frog is if he was the pond itself.

Zeami, who along with his father Kan’ami in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century elevated noh into a highly refined dramatic art form, said something very similar. There is a much larger universe beyond the visible world. Even something as simple as extending my right hand is a very complex process involving the coordination of muscles and neurons. Since I’m Japanese, the raising of my right hand might have particular cultural implications. A very simple physical act isn’t so simple when you consider all the factors that are associated with it.

Before the hand actually moves, moreover, there is a trigger that sets the process in motion. Zeami notes that three factors are involved behind each movement: the broad invisible world, the trigger, and the actual motion. The audience sees only the last of the three, but the actor needs to be aware of the other two as well. They must be attuned to the invisible world and recognize the subtle changes that launch the movement. From this viewpoint, Basho’s haiku is not just about the sound of water but the events preceding it, namely, the motion of the frog, and the setting of the pond.

The unperceived elements can also be thought of as ma. Such an “interval” is neither spatial nor temporal but comprises the vast “emptiness” from which everything is born.

MAYUZUMI: Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi was an admirer of Auguste Rodin and initially created very realistic works. But over time his sculptures grew simpler. He said that as one approaches the “truth” or “essence” of objects, one ultimately arrives at simplicity.

Haiku, as a poetic form, is simplicity itself. It’s been pared to its essence, and the kata, the structure, couldn’t be simpler. And by using this form over the years, it’s possible to reach the core. The approach is perhaps the reverse of Brâncuşi, since you’re already starting with simplicity, but the final result is the same.

In Japan, the kata comes first. The kata is the result of a long evolutionary process, of course, but once created, they can lead you, through years of practice, to the essence. I think this is a characteristic seen in many Japanese arts.

YASUDA: That’s certainly true with noh. You have to work with kata for years with faith in your teacher and unwavering devotion to the art. Mastery is a long and arduous process that doesn’t come until you perhaps reach the age of 80, 90, or even 100.

MAYUZUMI: Thank you for your fascinating comments. I’m afraid our time is up today. Thank you very much for attending this forum.



Translated from “‘Haiku to no,’ sono utsukushiki sekai,” Haikukai, September 2011 (No. 182), pp. 205–213 (article based on the February 14 symposium at the Association Culturelle Franco-Japonaise de Tenri: appended here with comments at the February 12 symposium at the Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris).




[1] Haiku follow a 5-7-5 metric pattern and must contain a kigo, a word or phrase denoting a particular season. A list of kigo is contained in compilations called saijiki, which also includes many samples by poets of the past.

[2] Most noh plays are categorized as mugenno, in which the leading character is not a living human being but an otherworldly figure who recounts a tale from the past. It is the mugenno form that gives noh its distinctive quality. Plays featuring living humans are called genzaimono.

[3] Basho (1644–1694) created a new poetic form called haiku by taking the first three lines of a much longer collaborative poetry genre called haikai no renga and turning it into a stand-alone work.

[4] Saigyo (1118–1190) and Noin (998–?) are poet-monks who were constantly on the road. Their lifestyle had great appeal for Basho, and he frequently refers to the two in his Narrow Road.

[5] Hayashi music is performed by three percussion instruments (otsuzumi, kotsuzumi, and taiko) and a flute, the flute being the only instrument that can perform a melody.

[6] Major constituent elements of a noh play include dance, hayashi, and utai, the last making up the text, both those that are spoken and sung.

[7] Both Sesshoseki and Yugyoyanagi are also names of noh plays.

[8] Different interpretations have been posited for who actually “emerged” from the shade: local farm girls, the poet himself, or the spirit of the willow tree.

[9] Pillars stand at the four corners, which support a roof—a remnant of the days when noh was performed outdoors.

[10] The bridge-like corridor has railings on both sides and extends from the left rear side of the main stage at an angle to the kagami-no-ma, from when actors enter and exit, separated by a curtain. The hashigakari is not just a passageway but also an important part of the performing area.

http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/articles/2012/haiku-and-noh/?searchterm=basho haiku

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