The Heart of Haiku Read Online Free PDF Page A

cold.

    roadside-skeleton-thoughts:
    wind penetrates
    through to the heart
    nozarashi o kokoro ni kaze no shimu mi kana   

    One Zen saying proposes, “Live as if you were already dead.” Bashō’s journal’s title seems to carry that spirit. But the effect of the haiku itself is quite different. Chilled from the first moment of his departure, the poet felt cold winds going through him as if through a skeleton’s exposed ribs. Travel was perilous, Bashō’s health not strong, and the image of himself as that skeleton, its bones left out to weather by the road, would haunt him throughout the journey.
    Another reminder of death’s omnipresence appeared soon after, when Bashō saw a small child, perhaps two years old, abandoned by the road. The early 1680s were years of famine, flood, fire, social turmoil, and desperate poverty, and the sight was not uncommon. Still, for a modern reader, this incident is the most difficult to accept of any in Bashō’s life: he tossed some food to the child and rode on, thinking about fate, finally deciding that, however sorrowful, the child’s abandonment was “heaven’s will.” The haiku he wrote afterward, though, is an undisguised rebuke—to society, to poetry, and to the writer himself:

    The cries of monkeys
    are hard for a person to bear—
    what of this child, given to autumn winds?
    saruwo kiku hito sutego ni aki no kaze ikani          

    Shortly afterward in the journal, the theme of impermanence appears yet again, though in a different mood:

    the roadside blooming
    mallow:       
    eaten by my horse.

    michinobe no mukuge wa uma ni kuwarekeri 

    These three haiku, placed near one another at the start of Bashō’s journey, have the effect of reminding the reader, and perhaps the poet himself, that all things vanish, sometimes tragically, sometimes ridiculously. When he reached Ueno, his brother showed him a lock of their late mother’s white hair. The haiku he wrote in response:

    if I took it into my hand,
    would hot tears make it vanish?
    autumn frost
    teni toraba kien namida zo atsuki oki no shimo

                                          
    Leaving Edo required crossing a high mountain pass. Famous for its view of Fuji, it was the vantage point of many earlier poems. Here is Bashō’s contribution:

    Mist, rain,
    not seeing Fuji—
    an interesting day!
    kirishigure Fuji wo minu hi zo omoshiroki     

    The haiku’s response reflects the spirit of Bashō’s early teachers, who suggested that haiku’s essence was to find, in the face of the long-familiar, something not yet said. The poem might almost be translated, “Mist, rain, not seeing Fuji—what luck!”

    *

    During the ten years of journeys that filled his forties, Bashō stopped to record his responses to temples and shrines, the sites of historical battles, ruined huts where earlier Buddhist poets had lived. He met and separated from friends, shared his sleeping quarters with fleas, prostitutes, and pissing horses, and his robes with lice. He participated in linked-verse gatherings, returned home and repeatedly set out again, published haiku, renga, and the five major journals describing his travels. Various haibun describe briefer trips to places famous for moon-viewing and retreats undertaken in two borrowed houses, “The Unreal Hut,” on Lake Biwa and “The Villa of Fallen Persimmons,” near Kyoto. The best known of all Bashō’s journeys is the 1500 mile expedition recorded in the journal Narrow Road to the Far North . The title is sometimes rendered as “Narrow Roads to the Deep Interior”—the word oku carries both geographical and metaphorical meanings (as it does in English, when we refer, for instance, to the “interior” of both Alaska and the self).
                Bashō’s traveling was an exercise in response and immersion. Each day in a new place brought changed circumstance and the possibility of a new subject,