On the Poet's Trail - Interactive Travelogue - National Geographic Magazine

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On the Poet's Trail

Journey along Basho's Trail with writer Howard Norman as he shares his daily observations in this travelogue.

0 600 img/bashos-trail-map.jpg 734 600 0 13369344 img/01-moonrise.jpg Wandering Scholarship September 25

If only the moon’s journey could be the heart’s journey.
- Saigyo, 12th-century Buddhist monk

A drifting archipelago of dark clouds covers the full moon, a gift because it allows the sudden desire for the moon to return. An owl can be heard—a harsh gro ho ko, gro ho ko—somewhere among the red pine, cedar, and ginkgo of the Imperial Palace grounds. I have lived in Kyoto for less than eight hours.

At 3:15 a.m. I walk a rented bicycle, with an umbrella affixed for protection from rain or sun, to my “scholars hotel.” Lined up on the windowsill in my room are the 114 notebooks kept along the famous record of his travels in 1689. Over the past 51 days I have visited most of the sites that he and his disciple Kawai Sora visited. Their journey took them to places of military, spiritual, and literary significance. Mine was a literary peregrination, a wandering scholarship, that took me from Tokyo north through the backwater towns and highlands, the Three Mountains of Dewa, along the Japan Sea, and finally to Rakushisha, Basho’s “Cottage of Fallen Persimmons” in Kyoto. “Each day is a journey and the journey itself home,” Basho wrote. (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Basho. Basho. Basho. I was passionately drawn to the 17th-century Japan of his arduous travels, but 318 years have passed. So along my personal Oku no hosomichi, my philosophy had been to expect every day to contain paradox and simply to take note of it. And every day did. One humid, cicada-agitated morning at Risshakuji, a mountain temple in Yamagata Prefecture, I sat under a gnarled, 800-year-old ginkgo tree next to a teahouse and watched several young women in high heels begin to climb the temple’s 1,015 steps. A high school fellow’s cell phone played the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. Old side by side with new.

As the moon frames my window in the scholar’s hotel, I think back as well to the Japan Sea and the town of Sakata. A squid boat festooned with tightly sealed glass lamps trailing in the sea to attract the fish has written on its hull: “Our glass lanterns invite squid into the next life.”

We remember the particulars and impressions of life with different emotions from those with which we originally experienced them. My own literary journal to Japan’s north, with its deliberate choice of facts, has been written to the accompaniment of the shrill cry of the cicadas that can be heard throughout Honshu—me-ya me-ya me-ya—and the duet between trickling water and silence punctuated by a shishiodoshi, “deer-scaring bamboo”—an apparatus that at varied intervals, sends water into a split of bamboo, causing it to seesaw forward and release the water onto a strategically placed rock with a sharp hollow thwonk.

At 5:30 a.m. I lay awake in the scholars hotel unable to sleep, so I go back to the palace grounds and sit on the same bench, admiring in the dawn light the care taken to provide bamboo staffs and cedar “crutches” to support the lowest stretching branches of red pine trees. I remember that Emperor Go-Toba is said to have compared the odd-angled architecture of red pine trunks and branches, their sinuous choreographic postures, to that of Chinese written characters. “The whole country,” he declared, “is perpetually being written in pines.”

I did not notice exactly when the cicadas, now in chorus every which way, started up. The sky is cloudless and a haiku line written by 19th-century poet Hosai Ozaki floats by—“Daytime moon traveling pale but in good health.”]]> 97 10 0.5 1-Kyoto 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 83.5 266 -20 4 0 13369344 img/02-fishtears.jpg A Haiku by Ryonosuke Akutagawa September 2

I have arrived in Tokyo to begin my travels north, and the news is full of Typhoon No. 9, now approaching Honshu. After a bath at a neighborhood public bathhouse, I’m back in my hotel room at 6:45 a.m. I read indispensable commentaries on Basho’s travel writings and haiku by contemporary scholar Makoto Ueda. It is a hot and humid morning, what my translator Michiko Zentoh refers to as “Asian heat.” Miso soup, rice, dried fish, and tea for breakfast. Afterward, Ms. Zentoh and I take the subway, then walk to the secluded Jigenji Temple—a pilgrimage to the shrine of the melancholy genius of early 20th-century writer Akutagawa Ryonosuke. His book In A Grove inspired the film Rashomon. He also wrote Karenosho—O’er a Withered Moor—a fictional account of the final hours at Basho’s deathbed.

At the temple cemetery we ask the caretaker-priest for directions to his shrine and find three family gravestones in the shade of ginkgo trees. The cicadas’ me-ya me-ya hums beneath the trees. Michiko places flowers at Akutagawa’s individual stone, bows, says a prayer, turns. “Here,” she says, handing me some fallen ginkgo leaves, “to take with you in the north.” She also gives me a travel charm of miniature straw sandals (waraji) and bells on a length of braided kemp. With brooms from a rack we sweep the shrine, and with water from a bucket wash everything, even the bottle of absinthe someone has left. We dust the dozen or so framed photographs, left by admirers of their families. There are missives written on smooth stones. “Here’s a literary inquiry,” Ms. Zentoh says, pointing to one. “A question to Ryunosuke about one of his stories! How long do you think the answer will take?”

Early afternoon and we are received by Mr. Ichihara of the Oku no Hosomichi network in his library and office near the Sumidagawa River that launched Basho, Sora, and a few friends in a boat from Edo toward Senju on May 16, 1689—or according to the old lunar calendar of the time, the 27th day of the third month. Dressed in a brown obi, Mr. Ichihara bows, “I am sorry you are visiting when Typhoon No. 9 is soon. Also, I am sorry you are here when our prime minister is not feeling well.” Mr. Ichihara has an open, unassuming manner, a contagious intensity of spirit. We are about the same age, mid-50s. We talk for an hour, especially about Basho’s letters to sponsors, students, friends. “As late as 2003,” Mr. Ishihara says, “unknown Basho letters were discovered—among some forgotten family papers. Scholarship has to be patient. Things keep turning up.” Maps and texts are presented. Mr. Ichihara gives me the gift of a paper fan his mother fashioned, with a Basho haiku in her own calligraphy. We walk to a nearby statue of Basho. Mr. Ichihara, whose effectiveness in educating his neighborhood about their literary heritage is respected, recites Basho’s “farewell to friends” haiku, most likely composed between 1692 and 1694, after he traveled the Oku no Hosomichi:

Departing spring (ya)
birds cry fishes’
eyes tears.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

“And look!” Mr. Ichihara pats the belly of Basho’s statue, “He was a little chubby when he set out. You’ll see, in the statues of him at the end of the Oku no Hosomichi he looks haggard and yet full of knowledge and joy—and sadness, which all makes sense. Mr. Ichihara tells Ms. Zentoh that he is sufficiently convinced I’m “obsessed” enough with Basho to make me a “comfortable” person to have visited his offices.

Dinner of sea bream, rice, brittle fried lotus leaves. Early in the evening I hire a boat, which slowly navigates the Sumidagawa River almost to Tokyo Bay—Basho’s route. We pass under the bridges Kuramae-bashi, Ryogoku-bashi, Shino-hashi, Kiyosu-bashi, Eitai-bashi, Tsukuda-ohashi, and Kachidoki-bashi, turning around at the fish market. It is dark now. How could Basho have imagined the ten million lights of Tokyo—or being hard pressed to see the stars because of them? On the return I notice a love hotel called “Cunning Activity.”]]> 10 10 0.5 2-Tokyo (Edo) 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 10 0 false 331.5 389 -77 -19 0 13369344 img/03-uramifalls.jpg Climb to the Sparrow-Braiding Falls September 5

Basho once remarked that, despite centuries of trying to describe the moon, poets have not succeeded in diminishing its beauty. Last night, a pleasing view of the gibbous moon, between skyscrapers. At breakfast in the hotel dining room this morning, I look up to see Kunio Kadowaki, 65, who will now accompany me on the journey into the far north as driver, translator, photographer, jack-of-all-trades. He has done this kind of work for National Geographic and other concerns for 35 years. “Knows the country inside out,” photographer Mike Yamashita, who shot the Basho story for the National Geographic magazine, told me. I mention that in just the few days I’ve been in Japan, I’ve become dedicated to sesame coffee. He says, “I’ve seen this before,” and immediately I understand that his sense of irony will allow us to travel in close quarters equitably.

At 8:15 a.m. we leave Tokyo in a van, out to the Shuto Expressway, arriving in lashing rain at Tochigi at 10:30 a.m. Under umbrellas, we meander through the Omiwa Shinto Shrine, rain so steady hard it appears to rivet braille on the lotus pond. (Cicadas are heard through downpour.) Soba noodle lunch, soaked to the bone, and laughing about it. Rains sent inland from the typhoon means for the next few days we will have temples and stairs and trails to ourselves. There are always many perspectives.

We next visit the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko. I read in Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi: “Originally this mountain known as Futarayama, but when Kukai Daishi dedicated the shrine here, he renamed it Nikko. Perhaps with presentiment those thousand years ago of the splendor now gracing our skies and the blessings extended to the eight directions to the four classes of citizens living in peace.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

About four miles west of Nikko, Basho climbed to Urami Falls, which Kadowaki and I do as well. Underfoot the rain feels sponged into the mossy steps. At the top a narrow river splits in two and plunges. It’s sometimes called “sparrow-braiding falls,” because sparrows can be observed careening in and out of the spray, which resembled to someone at some time the “braiding” of a woman’s hair. We see sparrows doing this. Maybe chasing insects, maybe “riding the falls for ancient fun,” as 18th-century poet Sakurai Rito described it. No one is quite sure. Almost on all fours, in hiking boots and rain slicker, I navigate my way up an “off-limits” and barely discernible cobble path to the actual cave behind the falls where Basho secluded himself for a while. Looking out through the waterfalls and spray, I discover that the sparrows actually fly in and out of the cave. I wonder how long it has been since sparrows have seen a person in here. Can it have been centuries? According to Sora’s journal, Basho visited the falls on May 20. Basho’s haiku remembers the moment this way:

For a while
to a waterfall confined
summer opening.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Back in the van, the radio reports many rivers in the capital and vicinity have swelled to near flooding. At a ryokan called Turtle Inn, our rain-soaked clothes are hung in a woodshed with a stove burning bamboo charcoal. In dry clothes we enjoy a fish called jack mackerel, eel sushi, octopus, rice, and miso soup for dinner in a nearby restaurant, followed by tea in the sitting area off the ryokan’s lobby. Kadowaki retires for the evening “to check emails.” A group of Australian birders, with state-of-the art photographic gear and “life lists,” hollers one after the other into the green telephone in the hallway, “What? What? I can’t understand you!” Their Japanese guide, Mr. Yokohama, sipping tea in the small restaurant off the lobby, pores over maps and field guides. Windblown rainy darkness outside.

Up for breakfast at 6 a.m. I find Mr. Yokohama having tea again. “I understand you’re going to Gassan Mountain National Park,” he says, turning to a page in Field Guide to the Birds of Japan, a Japan Wild Bird Society publication. “You might see this,” he continues, indicating the portrait of a ruddy kingfisher described as having “striking rufous plumage and red bill.” “I myself have never seen one, but my wife has. Two years ago she was out walking in Gassan Park. Just on a trail the kingfisher presented itself. She hopes soon I will see one, so I can stop talking about the one she saw, with the same enthusiasm as if I saw it. That bird has a powerful spirit, I think. You get that from the mountain.” We have tea together, paging through the field guide for a good half hour before anyone else appears. Lovely fellow, Mr. Yokohama. Even so, I recognize yet again the impulse to experience a ryokan like this or, say, a trek through Mount Gassan National Park, entirely alone. No doubt this is why I carry a photograph of a painting by Tanyu Kano depicting a traveler on a rocky path, dressed in mountain garb, his face scrunched up, highly annoyed, a permanent scowl. The title: “Man Realizing Another Person Shares the Mountain—But Who Has Made Him a Promise Otherwise?” This condition is what Zen priest-poet Philip Whalen called, “indulgent disappointment.” It’s a very funny painting.]]> 10 10 0.5 3-Nikko 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 377.5 314 -49 0 0 13369344 img/04-cedars.jpg Time of Day When One Mountain Hands Its Neighbor a Tray of Mist September 4-6

Sometime between May 22 and June 2 near Kurobane village, Basho composed a haiku in which birds provide a counterpoint to silence, that is, in which opposites harmonize:

Even woodpeckers
can’t break into this hut
summer grove.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Basho arrived at Kurobane on a borrowed horse and enjoyed the hospitality of Joboji, the deputy governor of the castle there. His lodgings, provided by former students, made a welcome respite after days of grueling travel. Kurobane, as it turned out, was where Basho stayed for the longest duration along the entire Oku no Hosomichi.

Basho visited the nearby Unganji Temple. It was this temple, past the Ten Famous Views, where Basho saw a small hut that inspired the poem “Even woodpeckers…” The weather has cleared when I visit, and looking out from Unganji Temple, I witness “the time of day when one mountain hands the next a tray of mist” (Hatori Doho; 1657-1730). Bonchi, mist; bonchi-mist, “hanging as if held by trays in the space between mountains.” This sight so obviously corresponds to the many scenes in scrolls, paintings, and drawings of mist-shrouded landscapes.

I am hard-pressed to describe what it feels like to see the Unganji Temple, where Basho’s Zen teacher, Priest Buccho, lived in isolation in a small hermitage behind the temple. I can only say that it is the place where I most intensely feel old Japan deepen its invitation. Enjoying a reprieve of rainless air, I choose to walk hours up the road, past a long, steep gradient to Karamatsu-Toge, or Larch Pass. As I descend the pass, I see the view open to the valley cradling the city of Susaki. Unganji Temple is located on the eminence at the east end of the city. The site, to my mind, still resembles the way it would have appeared to Basho: “Dense, a long way through the valley, pine and cedar thick massed, moss oozing, Uzuki sky chilly. Where the ten views ended, crossed a bridge and entered by temple gate.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I was delighted to glimpse a Japanese green woodpecker whistle-calling pee-ayeee-u pee-ayeee-u as it flew over some blossoming crepe myrtles and landed high on a cedar trunk. Alone on the arched bridge lacquered in vermillion I dozed off, (dreamed of the very same arched bridge), woke, ate my lunch of sea-eel sushi and bottled green tea, then climbed the steps up to Sammon—the main gate is said to have survived since Basho’s time. It occurred to me I’d had the privileged experience of dreaming a red bridge then waking up literally on a red bridge between unconscious and conscious life—this shall never happen again. On the west side of the temple’s Zazen hall is a mossy stone monument etched with Basho’s “woodpecker” haiku. Unganji Temple is a Zen training place; a sign here says, “You are free to look around but we can’t give you any guidance.”

The return walk took until dusk.

Praying mantises on the tile roof by the carp pond and garden at this night’s ryokan. I lay on the tatami reading a tawdry Edo period story: “In Kyoto, Izumi was unaware that she was shadowed by an assassin hired by her husband. For her very heart felt moon-lit, as she and Shuichi approached each other from opposite directions, meeting at the middle of the bridge in the geisha quarter. The moment they bowed to one another, held the railing and looked into the water, their hands close together but not entwined, she imagined that within the hour their love-behaviors would be a play of shadows on the screen in their oft-used private hideaway. And what was depicted on this ancient screen? It was a family of husband, wife, three children, four grandparents, having a picnic in the cool breeze along the river.” At best poorly translated, at worst accurately translated. Still, here was the author’s attempt to allow opposites—peril and bliss, furtive lovers and traditional family—to harmonize.

Tomorrow, a visit to the “Killing Stone” or “Poisonous Stone” or “Noxious Fume Stone” or “Life-taking Stone” or “Breath-choking Stone,” or “Slaughter Stone” or “ Breath-Stealing Stone” or “Choking Revenge Stone” or “Dead-Faint Stone” or “Suddenly One Dies Stone” or “Eerie Killer Stone” or “Perish Stone” or “Stone You Cannot Visit Twice” or “Death Stone,” depending on the translation.]]> 10 10 0.5 4-Kurobane 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 420.5 315 -5 3 0 13369344 img/05-fisherman.jpg Seven Views of Fishermen at the Kankoyana Fish-Trap September 8

Typhoon No. 9 has entered the capital. In Kurobane we had a night of rain and lightning. I had my window open so as to hear the roof tiles, overlapped like the scales of carp, runnel rain into the eaves trough, which in turn delivered it to a ten-foot-high “rain chain,” which “relayed water musically downward,” as writer Cid Corman described it (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.). Each stage of descent had its own sound. Finally, the sky cleared. Po-po-po-po of an oriental cuckoo, also called a Himalayan cuckoo. It flies off at the knock on my door, “Sumi-masen. Sumi-masen. Ohayo gozai-mass!—Excuse me. Excuse me. Good morning!” My wake-up call, though I’d been up hours reading Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko and Time and Materials, a collection of poems by Robert Hass. And like any tourist, I wrote postcards.

At 10 a.m. we arrive at Sesshoseki, the Killing Stone. On about June 3, 1689, a deputy of the castle sent Basho here. The groom leading the horse asked if Basho would write a poem. “Beautiful he wanted one” Basho thought, and in turn requested of the groom,

Across the fields
head the horse
hototogisu.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

The Killing Stone is seven feet square and four feet high and is located in Nasu Hot Springs, a protected area accessible by a boardwalk. The stone itself is fenced in. This morning 12 other visitors, and photographs are being taken. A few people scrunch up their faces and pinch tight their nostrils, and one pretends to faint. In Oku no Hosomichi Basho reports so many dead bees and moths around the stone that the color of the sand could not be determined.

From the path above the Killing Stone, I look down at a congregation of dozens of stone figurines, most in red knit caps and aprons, holding their hands up in prayer. Each is a jizo bosatsu and a protector of children. Sometimes they judge who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Until the Buddha returns, in some five billion years, they’ll serve as caretaker-buddhas. (I counted 23 near a playground.)

Walking back roads away from the Killing Stone, I stop along a stretch of river to watch five fishermen at wide intervals, each using the longest fishing poles I’ve ever seen. On a gravel road leading down to the river is an open-air restaurant specializing in the sweet fish called ayu. In hiking boots I walk onto a shoal to watch one fisherman. He gestures to me to wade closer yet. When he reels in about 30 yards of line, I see he’s caught an ayu—but no, he explains (in broken English), the ayu on his hook is bait. Ayu are territorial, and if there’s an outsider ayu, local ayu attack it immediately. So these fishermen carry buckets of live ayu from other rivers to fish this river.

Later, at a restaurant, I observe ayu being prepared in the open-air galley. After the meal I walk down to inspect a fish trap. It consists of a wide wood and bamboo platform slanted into the river, just across a wooden bridge. Anchored in the river itself is fencing, which detours part of the river already made more shallow by hundreds of stones placed there. So directed, some ayu are caught in the trap, often among vines and leaves and twigs—I also saw a tennis shoe—all the tumbled detritus delivered by the current.

I sat there all afternoon, happy as I’ve been. Dinner at the same table—ayu, rice, spicy mushroom soup, “mountain vegetables,” pear custard for desert. Tea.

Ayu fisherman with brooding sky as a background, shouting—what?—back and forth to each other. Ayu fishermen sitting near the fish trap eating ayu on bamboo skewers. One ayu fisherman turning to cast in the opposite direction of a heron that has just landed. An ayu fisherman wading a hundred or so yards to talk to another—his brother-in-law. Ayu fishermen casting their lines in succession right to left, as if the wind moving in that direction delivered permission. A lone ayu fisherman and a heron joined by a white egret as dusk deepens. When the stilt-legged birds fly off, the last ayu fisherman turns on a flashlight and shines it out onto the river.]]> 10 10 0.5 5-Nasu 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 411.5 314 -41 -19 0 13369344 img/06-forbidding.jpg A Landscape-Scarer From Basho’s Time September 9

In a thatched-roof house near the Kawaji Spa I have an appointment with Mrs. Mitsuhashi Mori, 76, a folklorist and local historian. Tea is served. Mrs. Mori, who had six years of married life in London, says, “I enjoy practicing my English.” She sets out on a table eight facsimiles of drawings of a rather dour looking, corpulent fellow, with a thin, down-turned moustache, dressed in tattered clothes. As a backdrop in each, there is a beautifully rendered, forbidding mountain landscape. “Now these,” she says, “are pictures of my ancestor, who—I have the English translation written down,” she casts about through some papers—“who was a ‘landscape-scarer.’ I don’t know his name. He had a certain kind of imagination, the imagination of a criminal. He lived in Basho’s time. He lived in a place Basho may well have traveled through, very difficult country in that time, very few people dared to travel there, but some had to. Families had to travel through there sometimes. This ancestor of mine—he and his brother had a scheme. He would ride on a horse directly up to innocent travelers and scare them with information about the mountains and mountain routes. ‘There are bad people, murderers, thieves, dangerous cliffs and rivers that drown,’ he would tell them. But then he’d offer his brother as the only one who could get them safely through. He was quite successful. In the end, his own brother killed him up there in the mountains. And so, he was telling the truth after all—there were murderers about! This was in Basho’s time.”

That evening in the ryokan, I listen to the weather report and forecast on the radio, partly for the region we are heading into: Strong winds and lashing rainfall along Typhoon No. 9’s anticipated route; even well inland driving hazardous; avalanches due to “rain erosion” reported in a number of locales; waters running high in rivers; trees being felled by strong winds; power blackouts; house and building fires due to “electrical short-outs.” This is mostly in and around Tokyo. Slightly drunk on sake at dinner, discussing travel in Basho’s time with knowledgeable Kadowaki, I hoarsely sing, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (Bob Dylan). “I see you’ve forgotten the rest of the song,” Kadowaki says. “That’s good.” So far, it’s been pretty much a rain-drenched journey, but Kadowaki is predicting “sunny clear in a day or two.” (Hours earlier the van skidded on a bridge but held the road.) Solaced by rice wine now.

I’m keeping a separate notebook of inventive locutions in English translation. September 6, from the Daily Yomiuri—“Typhoon No. 10 already has begun its Asian visits.”]]> 10 10 0.5 6-Kawaji 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 385.5 323 -19 3 0 13369344 img/07-ricepaddy.jpg Birds Seen From Saigyo’s Willow Tree September 10

Near Ashino village. Is the willow I’m standing next to the exact same tree about which the Buddhist monk Saigyo (Basho’s mentor in life and art) composed a waka (classical Japanese verse, it consists of a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic rhythm. It was the principal verse form in the Heian and early medieval periods, and today is called tanka.) People who know about such things say that this tree is indeed the same willow Saigyo described.

Basho reportedly told a student that along the Oku no Hosomichi, Priest Saigyo was “always with me—I had many conversations with him, conversations between ghost and ghost-to-be.” My ghost, then? Matsuo Basho, and indeed I’ve had a number of “conversations” with him, which may sound strange. However, I’m quite comfortable defining myself, given the once-in-a-lifetime sanction of this journey, as a ghost-to-be. By the willow, I experience the sense of suspended time that Saigyo’s waka evokes, in the same way that Basho’s own haiku does.

A patch of rice
planting done leaving
the willow there.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

The whole day goes by “like a heron flying across a wide valley behind you, and you are oblivious to it” (Keiko Matsuo 1911-1982). The air is almost mist. This is a site lovingly kept. On one side of the path to the willow, the bright red of “equinox flowers,” on the other a low wooden fence. As in Basho’s time, there are rice fields all around. Basho reports that the governor of this district, Suketoshi Ashino (1637-92) had long wished to show him this willow, “and today at last in that very willow's shade.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I can’t quite leave the willow. Out by the main road I see a three-car train rush by, causing a wind that moves over bordering susuki, “pampas grass,” and flushing out a copper pheasant, which flies a brief arc and then disappears into a paddy. In the hours at Saigyo’s willow I see crows, sparrows, an egret, a heron along a nearby stream, a few circling common buzzards, and Japanese wagtails; at dusk nightjars appear.

Night at Saigyo’s willow—no moon. Sitting on the stone bench, the tips of the lowest bowed branches touch my hat. Another train rolls past, this one has five cars. Squares of light like a splice of film. I imagine into the darkness, pampas grass waving. Where do the pheasants sleep?]]> 10 10 0.5 7-Ashinao 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 417.5 308 -5 -19 0 13369344 img/09-seabreeze.jpg Red Marks on a Manuscript September 12

Basho entrusted the final writing of Oku no Hosomichi to the renowned calligrapher Soryu, and it’s that version we have today. As every curator in Basho museums small and large across Japan told me in almost exactly the same words, “Remember, Oku no Hosomichi was written in ‘old Japanese,’ so in that sense, the one we have in books has been translated into modern Japanese.”

In the Basho Museum in Tokyo I saw a manuscript page on which Basho himself had made red marks to correct a passage. Now, over three centuries later, I am watching Ms. Mari Takahashi, calligraphy instructor at St. Ursula School in Sendai, making red marks on a piece of paper filled with calligraphy composed by a young woman in her class. St. Ursula used to be an all-girls school but is now coed. I am allowed to observe the class for several hours; it includes not only high school students but a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, along with a middle-age woman and three more elderly women, each at various stages of accomplishment, each working on different calligraphy exercises. One of the students, 17-year-old Kasumi Honma, has just won a Japan-wide competition. She shows me her version of the entire Oku no Hosomichi, written in a book of large pages, in which she has copied Basho’s original style of calligraphy. “He wasn’t known as a very good calligrapher,” Ms. Takahashi says, with a light laugh. “But Kasumi Honma wanted to copy his original writing. It was a privilege.” The students are serious and having fun.

Later I watch Ms. Takahashi demonstrate for another student the proper use of a large brush on a five-foot-high piece of calligraphy paper. She lifts her right leg in a manner reminiscent of a sumo wrestler’s ritual of elegant restrain just prior to engaging his opponent—“use only the amount of power absolutely necessary”—then, lowering her right foot to the floor, she presses and twists the large brush to paper, lifts the brush, leaving a thick and exquisite character in black ink. She steps back, appraises her work, then does it again as the student scrutinizes her every move. This is repeated for a good hour. Later, I am presented a copy of a Basho haiku written near the Mogami River and copied by Ms. Takahashi in my presence.

Early rice fragrance
pushing thru to right
the ‘Rough Sea’.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I hardly know how to thank her. Her students tell me how rare it is for her to do this.

By the old Japanese calendar, Basho was in Sendai on May 7. Here we visit the two shrines he did, Yakushido and Tenjin. Yakushido Shrine was built by the feudal lord of Sendai, Masamune (1565–1636). Tenjin was built in 974 and dedicated to the priest-scholar Michizami Sugawara (845–903). He was treated with disdain and exiled throughout his life and finally deified as Tenjin. All across Japan temples bear that name. But in my edgy disinclination toward cities just now, I’m happy to travel out from bustling Sendai.

I visit a small Inari shrine with five fox statues near the entrance—this is far off the Oku no Hosomichi, but I am fortunate to be received by Mrs. Nishikawa, an expert in fox and badger stories, both animals having a great status as tricksters and cunning messengers. Under drab overcast skies we tour the fox statues, some grimacing, some with wry half smiles, some with no discernable expressions, one holding a twig between its teeth. We repair to a small teahouse where Mrs. Nishikawa is known. “Here is the translation I mentioned in my letter,” she says as tea is served. She hands me a packet. On its cover is printed: “Why One Fox Travels By Moonlight, Whereas Another Fox Doesn’t.” “By the way,” she says, “did you know, foxes really love fried tofu and tempura and dried fish?”

Mrs. Nishikawa opens a book to a work, “Foxes Setting a Trap for Human Beings.” “This, in my opinion,” she says, “deserves much attention.” The reproduction is found in volume two of Extraordinary Persons: Works by Eccentric, Nonconformist Japanese Artists of the Early Modern Era (1580-1868) in the Collection of Kimiko and John Powers. John Rosenfield, who wrote the text, states, “This painting by Shiba Kokan is an essay in toba-e, the depiction for humorous and moralistic purposes of animals carrying out human actions… In this work two kimono-clad foxes hiding in pampas grass have baited a trap with a sake cup, a large gold coin (koban), and a strip of folded paper (tamazusa) that contains a specially composed letter.”

Kokan was also an astronomer, memoirist, philosopher. “In 1813, he moved into the Zen monastery of Engaku-ji in Kamakura,” Rosenfield writes, “where he issued his famous obituary saying that he had attained Enlightenment and died—five years before his actual demise.”

At my ryokan that night I study the packet, especially noting, on early drafts of Mrs. Nishikawa’s translation of “Why One Fox Travels By Moonlight, Whereas Another Fox Doesn’t,” the red pencil marks and comments she used to edit and admonish herself.]]> 10 10 0.5 9-Sendai 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 534.5 258 -48 -17 0 13369344 img/10-pineislands.jpg Dragon Boats at Matsushima September 14

Many people arrive at Matsushima on ferries with dragon-head bows. The ferries navigate past Niwo Island, which is wind carved in a shape that resembles a submarine, past wind-sculpted Zaimoku Island, Kane Island with its four water tunnels, Komone Island, Zaijo Island, Futago Island. Moments off our own dragon boat, looking around at the promenades, shops, hotels, restaurants of Matsushima, Kadowaki declares, “Too much concrete. Eyesores.” To counteract present-day reality (and daydream the past), I sit down on a bench and read how Basho described Matsushima: “Now, though it's been only too often observed, Matsushima presents a magnificent vista, the finest of our “mulberry land” and comparable to that of Lake Dotei or Seiko. The sea enters at the southeast, three li wide at that point, like Sekko at flood tide. All sorts of islands gather here, steep ones pointing to sky, others creeping upon waves. Or some are piled double on each other, or even triple, and some divided at one end and overlapping at the other. Some bear others on their backs, some seem to embrace them, as if caressing their offspring. Green of the pines deep, needles and branches mauled by the salt winds—though contorted by nature—look artificially trained. The feeling: one of intense beauty, of a lovely creature engrossed in her glass. Perhaps in the Age of the Gods Oyamazumi shaped this place. Who with brush or speech can hope to describe the work of heaven and earth's divinity?” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Basho conjures his visit to Matsushima in the first entry of Oku no Hosomichi—“the moon at Matsushima rose to mind” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)—which in that context seems literally to invigorate and light the pages of memory. (He finished his book five years after completing the physical journey.) Basho was mesmerized—add joyful exhaustion—by the landscape here: “I, wordless, tried sleeping, but couldn’t.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) However, in Oku no Hosomichi he does offer one of Sora’s haiku:

Matsushima (ya)
come as a crane
hototogisu.”
- Sora
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I walk up a winding path to the site of a 17th-century moon-viewing villa. There are behemoth freighters in port, and the gulls seem to eddy in the sky without purpose, though this can hardly be true. Dusk and the dragon boats, continuing on schedule, seem more to be “born of fog” than moving through it. I can hear crows but can’t see any. Cicadas one can seldom see anyway, but they are scraping the air.

On the main street I visit the corner room on the third floor—the exact site, though of course not the same building, that was definitely a moon-viewing room in the Edo period. It’s full of cartons of tourist maps, brochures, fishing equipment, all sorts of items sold in the street-level shop. However, there were three chairs by the window, sake bottles on a small table, which made me suspect moon viewing. This night my room in the ryokan is called unkai–sea of clouds. There is a scroll of a carp in a river. A note found under my door: “Hope you finally figured out the t.v. The sumo matches were good. Kadowaki.” I am following the tragic death of a 17-year-old sumo apprentice as it unfolds. “It is saddening the nation,” the Daily Yomiuri.]]> 10 10 0.5 10-Matsushima 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 543.5 262 -5 3 0 13369344 img/08-mossypath.jpg Crossing the Shurakawa Barrier September 11

Likely more than once Basho and Sora dressed in priest’s clothing to pass through closely watched barriers. Over the centuries the belief that Basho was in some capacity or other employed as a “spy” (why else would he be allowed to travel “freely” through scrutinizing checkpoints?) gained credibility. I was surprised at how often this conviction was expressed. At best, it registered with me as “the dregs of scholarship,” to use a phrase from novelist Osamu Dazai. When a scholar-priest in Yonezawa assured me that “it was widely known” Basho was a spy, I expressed great skepticism. “Then again,” I said, “I can’t read documents and accounts and memoirs in Japanese,” adding with somewhat desperate congeniality, that the novelists Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham were involved in espionage. This proved an awkward impasse. Chagrined by what he obviously perceived as my naïveté and ignorance about the perhaps more encoded aspects of Basho’s life, this seasoned Basho scholar kindly said, “Yes, certain creative minds are drawn to intrigue of a dangerous sort. Yet it’s also true, some people are incapable of allowing a writer’s books alone to represent a writer’s complicated nature.” After tea he stood in the doorway of his rooms bowing until I was out of view.

Reading of Edo-period border guards and merchant travelers, anecdotal accounts and academic treatises, it was clear that to cross a border was often a nerve-racking incident of travel—there were countless barriers preserved even after Japan was united in 1603. Borders could mean shakedowns, delays, bribes, threats, sometimes violence, arrests—people on the lam for various crimes and those who had fallen into political disfavor, those escaping debt, all sorts of urgencies, all sorts of fates unfolding. Standing at the Shirakawa barrier gate, Kadowaki and I talk a while about post 9/11 anxieties at airports, homeland security, and so forth. Also, he enjoys “preaching” (as he calls it) about the reproduction of an Edo period painting—a weathered historical marker—we look at, which depicts samurai warriors and common folk alike trying to get through the Shirakwa Barrier. “Look at those people huddled there,” Kadowaki says. “They look frightened, but even though they’re dressed in peasant’s clothes, who knows who they really were? Look at those waiting benches—upper-class samurai sitting there, lower class sitting over there.”

From Edo it had taken Basho and Sora about three and a half weeks to reach the barrier. Sora’s diary doesn’t mention difficulties in getting through. In fact, they had another 20 miles or so to go that day, on to Sukagawa. Here they stayed at the house of Basho’s friend, poet Tokyu Sagara (1638-1715). At some point in his five-day stay in Sukagawa, Basho participated in creating a kasen, a 36-stanza “collaborative” sequence of linked verse. His contribution was:

Furyu’s
beginning Oku’s
rice-planting song.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

As if crossing from furyu, cultural refinement, into the unfamiliar northern reaches, poets felt compelled to record their passing through the Shirakawa Barrier.

Tonight, still affected by the priest-scholar’s insistence on espionage, I ask Kadowaki if he thinks Basho was a spy. “One study you read to me says Basho ‘dramatized his thoughts through travel.’” Kadowaki replies, “Well, some people like to dramatize Basho’s life in different ways. But who knows everything about a person—Basho or anyone? Everyone has shadows. Sometimes the shadows aren’t so closely attached to the person.” This response delighted me so much I made a big deal of paying for dinner.]]> 10 10 0.5 8-Shurakawa 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 428.5 313 4 -9 0 13369344 img/11-mountainpass.jpg Scholars Debate 'Horse Pissing' at Hojinnoie September 15

Beginning at the Natagari Pass, I make a walk of six miles, take a footbath at Narugo Onsen (hot springs), then make a visit to Shitomae-no-seki, an old checkpoint. All following in Basho’s footsteps. Waylaid by a storm, Basho stayed in Hojinnoie. In Hojin-no-ie myself, I wander into scholarship that qualifies as a separate incident of travel. This happened at a stable that replicates the one where Basho and Sora stayed.

Basho wrote, “This route few travellers ever take, so guards eyed us suspiciously and barely let us through. Climbed high mountain there, sun already down, and happening on a border guard hut sought shelter there. For three days winds and rain fierce, forced to hang on in that dull retreat.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) This was actually the house of a high official, and the family had a number of horse stables. (Dewa Province in Basho’s time covered today’s prefectures of Akita and Yamagata.) Anyway, Basho and Sora slept under somewhat wretched conditions.

Fleas and lice biting
Awake all night
A horse pissing close to my ear.

My first night in Hojinnoie, I have dinner with three scholars who are staying at my ryokan as they make their annual visit to a number of sites along the Oku no Hosomichi. They each speak excellent English. Two teach “Western students” in Sendai. They are all old friends. After tea I set out 27 English-language versions of Oku no Hosomichi on the table. “Twenty seven!” one scholar says. “This is quite impressive. Your translators are trying so hard!” There is a heated, in the main good-natured debate, incrementally fueled by sake, about Basho’s haiku. “No, no, we have differing opinions—the horse-pissing sound didn’t wake him. He was already awake, scratching at the fleas, and that’s when he heard the sound.” “No, the order isn’t important. Basho suffered insomnia anyway. It was the reduced circumstances, the primitive circumstances of sleeping in the stable that’s most important here.” “I think eventually Basho is laughing here—fleas, lice, horse pissing, all gave him the haiku.” One fellow slowly recites the haiku in Japanese: “Nomi shirami / uma no shitosuru / makura moto,” then, writing it down for me, says, “The name of the barrier nearby, Shitomae, in your English means ‘before the urine.’ Basho must have thought about that, eh?” On and on—two bottles of sake, a third bottle, up all night.

First thing in the morning, we all go back to the stable and one by one lie down in front of the wooden-horse replica and have a photograph taken. They pile into their car. Then the window rolls down, and I’m handed an old-style mimeographed pamphlet; I bow, say “Arigato” (you can never say thank you often enough). The note paper clipped to the pamphlet reads: “Other poets wrote haiku in Basho’s years. Many people forget this is true. These were translated by a student at Kyoto University.”

Back at the stable, the “curator” asks if I’d like to meet the woman who lives in her ancestral house out back, a descendent of the family that allowed Basho to stay here. Kadowaki tells the woman I am traveling the Oku no Hosomichi, then walks off in conversation with the curator. Roughly 50, the woman beckons me into the small house. “Photograph,” she says. I fully expect to view a portrait of one of her ancestors. Instead, she takes from the wall a faded sepia photograph of a horse in what looks like the same stable 20 or so yards away. Tapping the glass she says, “Related to horse in Basho,” then points to my well-thumbed copy of Narrow Road to a Far Province.]]> 10 10 0.5 11-Hojinnoie 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 515.5 222 -5 2 0 13369344 img/13-falls.jpg Elixir for Laughing Mountain Legs September 17

Downward climb. It’s much harder on the descent. Precipitous rock staircases, rickety metal ladders alongside sheer drops, narrow path of flat shale shards, difficult footing. I fall far back from Mr. Sato, who is whistling. After an hour at a tortoise pace, I stop. Mr. Sato is behind me. Up ahead perhaps 50 feet is a mountain bear; it’s a male, stocky, wide chested, delicately mouthing blueberries from a low bush. It takes notice of me with a guttural sound. Then it’s back to the blueberries. “Mr. Sato, what do I do?” Mr. Sato says straight-faced, “Remind mountain bear—Japan is a Buddhist country!” I ask if this is some long-practiced mountain guide’s joke; Sato claps his hands loudly a dozen or so times, and the bear ambles off about 20 yards, then sits on its haunches. As we admire the bear for a short time, Mr. Sato tells me of a newspaper article about mountain guides. Apparently the article said the bells he wore were meant to fend off bears; this offended Mr. Sato, because the sentiment and spiritual logic were both, to his mind, wrongheaded. “The bells,” he explains, “are to help bears not have to get close to people, to spare them the trouble. It’s very good fortune to see a bear.”

Somewhere along the descent the landscape segues from barren alpine to thick green foliage, bamboo thickets, ferns, camellias, all growing in the humidity and hard sunlight. Mr. Sato climbs down a 300-foot metal ladder facing forward. I face the rock. I don’t mind heights. I simply don’t want to calibrate how far I’d fall. I clamber along, two more hours or so. Creak of another rusty ladder, 150 feet give or take, and this is the last one. With only a mile or so left, there is a waterfall and wide pool. I am sweat soaked, exhausted, mindless. Mr. Sato warns, “The water is traveled down out of the ice” (we saw patches of ice at the highest elevations). I strip off my clothes anyway, walk to the edge of the pool and dive in. It is the coldest water imaginable. I’m in the pool scarcely three or four minutes, and it’s numbing and exhilarating. I have a towel in my backpack. Mr. Sato says. “Not much farther now.”

On visiting the inner shrine on nearby Mount Yudono, Basho wrote, “By and large against code to disclose what goes on here. And with that the brush stops, won’t write.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) I too visit the sacred destination; the goshintai, divine body, the god in his form; jodo no sekai, “western paradise.” I linger as long as I’m allowed in the shrine but of course won’t describe it. Nearby I soak my feet in the hot springs. Why does the anvil weight and ache gather in the knees? When I get back to the ryokan, Mr. Yanamoto says, “The prime minister has retired.” Dinner of “mountain vegetables” and fish soup. I can’t sit cross-legged; Kadowaki notices but doesn’t comment. It’s the most beautifully presented meal I’ve ever had. Sake, half asleep at the table. Since blueberries are part of the dessert, how could I forget to tell Kadowaki about the mountain bear?

In the morning I need pain ointments to rub into my legs. Advil, two canes to walk down the main street of Haguro. I feel younger, somehow: also, I feel aged by 50 years. Part of a sentence on the side of a box of tea reads, “elixir for laughing mountain legs.” At a small tea shop I spend 50,000 yen on this medicinal tea and drink it all.

“You might find this cruel,” Kadowaki says, “but there’s a Japanese idea—if you can’t climb steps you’re no longer human.” I ask if climbing steps generically refers to the physical ability to get up to a shrine in order to pay respects to the Buddha, the opportunity to worship and so forth. “That is partly it,” he says. Kadowaki sometimes gets a world-weary expression that I interpret as, “There’s just too much context to explain. Too much information to impart in so short a time.” He has to use a lot of discretion, to pick and choose what to “preach me.” Not an easy task. His name for me is “Illiterate boat.” That is, I can’t speak or understand the Japanese language; I am afloat on the “rough sea” of an entirely unfamiliar history.

Kadowaki means, roughly, “gatekeeper.” “I come from a long line of gatekeepers,” he says (his father owned a small hardware store in Kyoto). “I think that’s why I take so many photographs of gates.” Upon viewing the entranceway to a shrine, restaurant, house, Kadowaki might declare, “Beautiful gate—very thought out.” Or he might announce, “Not very well thought out, this gate.” From the get-go, I’ve been educated by these appraisals and follow-up explanations.]]> 10 10 0.5 13-Mount Yudono 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 509.5 216 4 -17 0 13369344 img/12-mists.jpg Weighted Down by Too Many Travel Charms He Nearly Falls Off the Mountain September 17

Mrs. Yoko Yanamoto—proprietor along with her husband, Yoshio Yamamoto, of the elegant Hagurokan Ryokan—has prepared and set my lunch of rice cakes on the counter, like a neatly packed going-away gift.

During Basho’s lifetime Dewa Sanzan, Three Mountains of Dewa (mounts Gassan, Haguro, and Yudono), comprised the most sacred region in the north. Basho and Sora stayed in the town of Haguro for about a week. Basho wrote: “On the eighth day of the Sixth Moon [July 24] we climbed Gassan, or ‘Moon Mountain.’ Wearing chain necklaces of mulberry paper to keep us free from impurity and bleached cotton hoods, we were led by a so-called Strong Man, a mountain guide, as we climbed for nineteen miles through cloud and mist and over ice and snow until it seemed as if we too shared the very path of the sun and moon!” In part they took the rough-hewn, often harrowing path “bee-faced Prince Hachiko” had somehow managed to trample out about 900 years earlier. “Three leagues of grass, three leagues of forest, three leagues of rock,” Hachiko had chronicled. It leads some 20 miles and up 6,000 feet to the summit of Gassan.

My own goriki—guide—is Mr. Shunichi Sato, age 50, who is also a rice farmer, works a snowplow in the winter months, and holds a number of other jobs as well. When he shows up at 7 a.m. at the ryokan, he sits cross-legged near my table and speaks Japanese with Kadowaki. He looks tremendously fit. He apologizes for his “poor English,” which in fact is hardly that. He tells us he has guided for more than 25 years, tells us of his family, tells us of his house. I show him a photograph of my farmhouse in Vermont, which is situated on 60 acres of land. It’s a winter photograph, and snow becomes the next topic—a good give-and-take conversation. Whenever we get stuck, he says, “No matter.”

There are pilgrims of many different ages at the base of Mount Gassan. I suppose I mean that two ways. First, they range from children to quite elderly; second, their dress represents the far past and modern day. The oldest wear white cotton obi-like robes, some with bells “for bears” sewn along the hem. Younger pilgrims are in jeans, sweatshirts, tennis shoes, and baseball caps. “Some will climb to the shrine at the top but others will turn back—it’s just good to climb, no matter,” Mr. Sato says. A remarkable array of sunglasses. Some very hip, “Elton John,” according to Mr. Sato. Some of the wraparound glasses look like they’re from 1950s science-fiction movies of scientists in lab coats partaking of gamma-ray experiments.

In my first hundred steps I’m passed by three women, each at least ten or fifteen years older than me. One pokes me nearly off the trail with her walking stick, laughing. Her companions apologize, also laughing. Mr. Sato is a short ways ahead and has already stopped a few times to snap pictures of wildflowers. (The Japanese here walk steadily and fast.) Suddenly I hear, “Howard Norman! Howard Norman!” I turn to see a man chasing me waving a piece of paper. When he reaches me, he says, “Wife had heart attack!” I had spoken with my wife only hours before by telephone and was fairly certain this was a mistake. It turns out, someone at the ryokan not only had forwarded a message but had underlined the alarming two words “heart attack” in the severely ironic sentence (having to do with a small financial matter, no problem at all, really). “Please clarify before I have a heart attack.” Under the scrutiny of many pilgrims and my goriki—Mr. Sato was showing much concern—I read the missive, smiled, said, “It’s OK,” crumpled the paper into my backpack, and set out. Several elderly folks hiking near me had very puzzled, troubled expressions, muttering among themselves. I wondered what they must have comprehended and what their judgment of me was—“How could he just go up the mountain with such news?”. Trying to salvage some dignity on my behalf, a quite elderly man approaches and says, “I’ll tell you what words to pray—for wife—at the top of Gassan.”

Sato recites, “Weighted down by too many travel-charms / he nearly falls / off the mountain,” but can’t recall the author. Altogether, I have 11 travel charms fastened to my backpack, belt, rain slicker and paper-clipped onto my short ponytail, braided for this climb. A rare clear day is forecast on Mount Gassan, though it is never without cold, clouding mists at the higher elevations.

The path is alternately easy going and hard, with brief stretches of planks, but mostly larger stepping-stones, smaller stones like those in a dry riverbed, and smooth earth. I have my walking stick. One by one, we come to the pilgrim “stations”—Kowashimizu, Hirashimizu Takashimizu, and on and on—the views breathtaking up the barren slopes, looking out on Japan. People keep asking Mr. Sato, with great deference and respect, to please point out their home villages. He complies without fail and in good cheer. His standard introduction of me is “American—but interested in Basho.”

On the mountain four hours. I sit to rest at Takashimizu, the seventh station. Sato notices my knees quaking, as I rub in arnica. “We say the knees are laughing,” he says. Floating islands of mist almost close enough to touch; sunglasses beaded up; common buzzard hovering over a stony field. I watch it for a good 20 minutes, as it dives and scrambles along the ground, nabs a lizard. Mr. Sato—how is this possible?—receives a cell phone call not 30 yards from this mountain lizard’s fate.

Gassan Shrine is a kind of fortress-in-miniature surrounded by impressive walls harboring the shrine against winter snows and winds. There are about ten pilgrims here. It’s maybe 20 degrees colder than at stage one. We are shown through the torii gate and fall silent. This is the sacred place, you don’t have to be told, it’s perfectly clear. The resident high priest appears—his green robes have some sort of thistles clinging to them here and there, especially in back; he is somber, wearing a black hat, chants, waves a folded white paper over us. He gives each of us a small folded paper priest’s robe, a prayer written inside. He steps up to me, “Welcome.” Shows me—because I’m the only one who doesn’t already know—how to rub the paper over my body, for purification. He points to the stone font, where dozens of these are floating or sunk. I set mine among them.

Inside the shrine we sit on benches and have lunch. Two priests serve thimbles of sake. Directly in front of me, one priest says (translated) of me, “I’m not playing favorites, but he probably needs a second drink!” This causes much good cheer and laughter. I scarcely mind, no matter how it’s meant. Why care how it’s meant? It causes laughter and good cheer in this ancient charitable place. My knees are laughing like crazy; the second thimbleful helps. We stand outside the shrine, looking down at the phenomenal winding path as far as the eye can see. “Another six hours down to Yudono,” Mr. Sato informs me. “Most people don’t go the way we’ll go. Two people fell off down there—couple years back. One died, the other didn’t die. But you wanted to go the way Basho went. Have no doubt, Norman-san. It’s good. It’s the way Basho took. Every time—knowing this—makes me grateful.”

I leave seven travel charms near the torii gate. Don’t even know why I chose some over others, but somehow feel lighter. The haiku Basho wrote here:

Cloud's peaks
how many collapsing
moon's mountain.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)]]> 10 10 0.5 12-Haguro 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 505.5 223 -67 -6 0 13369344 img/14-bamboo.jpg Summer and Early Autumn Visitor Sometimes Seen Near Mountain Streams September 18

I spend the morning in Gassan National Park, the excellent visitors' center, then the deciduous forest and mountain paths. At Hidden Pond I see a ruddy kingfisher. I immediately think of Mr. Yokohama at the Turtle Inn some days earlier, reviewing his field guides. This bird’s reddish-orange hue, even with a dusty tinge, is startling (a brief glimpse of the glossy blue feathers on the rump). The sight brings to mind “As kingfishers catch fire—”(Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem). At a teahouse just outside the national park, dozens of dragonflies alight on crepe myrtle leaves. Enough has occurred already in this day to remember for years.

Medicinal catalpa tea. Slept all afternoon, dreamed I visited my own gravestone, on which was etched: “Summer and early autumn visitor sometimes seen near mountain streams,” a passage from the description of the ruddy kingfisher in Birds of Japan. I think I had this dream because I’d recently visited the gravesite of Helen Tanizaki, a linguist I met in the Arctic in the late 1970s. When she was dying of cancer, she decided she would be reincarnated as a seabird and studied field guides to narrow down her choices.]]> 10 10 0.5 14-Gassen National Park 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 501.5 216 -71 -28 0 13369344 img/15-scorchingsun.jpg Otis Redding by the Sea Wall at Kisikata September 20

Sakata Harbor. Industrial Japan. Insomnia, night at a business hotel rather desultory, sound track to pornographic movie through the walls. I call the front desk but can’t make my complaint comprehensible. Breakfast is cubes of scrambled eggs, dumplings in soup, thin slices of persimmon, coffee, orange juice, hard pieces of peppered salmon, soba noodles.

I’m struck by what Cid Corman writes in his introduction to his translation of Oku no Hosomichi: “When tears come to Basho, it may seem that he is merely being soppy … A man’s sentiments, however, are not disputable. But if we feel what it is to live and to be dying, each one alone, know what cherishing is and see what Basho sees into tears, we may realize that there is a sympathy that enlarges the spirit without destroying it, that obtains for a man a more complete sense of relation to his world.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

On June 16 (by the old calendar) Basho was heading toward Kisakata: “From Sakata harbor northeast, crossing mountains, following shore, walking sand, some ten li, sun falling, sea wind swirling grit, gusty rain hid Mt. Chokai.” And: “Next morning, sky utterly clear, sun miraculous, dazzling, boated about Kisakata.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) Between Sakata and Kisakata it’s about 25 miles. We take a roundabout route—some driving, some walking. Kadowaki’s “diary” reads: “Sept. 16. to Sakata, pine clad island, Kanimandera Temple, and Museum to see the old Kisakata Screen, then to Misaki Park, old Basho trail, then visit Mt. Chokai (2,236 meters), sea of cloud, travel along the Mogami River to see Sokoji Temple.” In Sakata Basho wrote:

Hot sun
into sea driven
Mogamigawa.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Maybe it’s just a half-baked longing for an emotional synchronicity to traverse centuries, essentially hubris to suggest I “know” what Basho ever felt. Or maybe all this rain’s an intensifying element to my own wistfulness. But suddenly, here in Kisakata, traveling the grid of “backwater roads,” I seem to be experiencing a concordance of joy and sadness. Plus I’m feeling the effects, still, from climbing Mount Gassan and Mount Haguro—legs ache; some stomach ailment; fingers swollen from, I suspect, too much salt in my recent diet, but can’t be certain; and a touch of emotional letdown after such heights.) Well, depending on the level of engagement, you can either experience monsoonlike rain as “interesting” or something else. Also, homesickness arrives and departs. Along the sea wall, one to each lamppost, are fishing hawks. And enormous black sea-break boulders like a herd of walrus about a hundred yards out.

Basho wrote here: “During this stretch of nine days, putting up with heat and rain, spirit sore afflicted, taken ill, no way to keep up writing.” Yet he also wrote of this place:

Shiogoshi (ya)
crane leg splashed
sea cool.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Pant legs rolled up, I stroll along the beach. Abstract moodiness is unsettling. Cormorants on posts extend their wings to dry in the late sun and breeze. Walking past a small Shinto shrine, I hear a prayer spoken, hands clapping, a prayer. Across the road a car has stopped, a young woman gets out and hurries, carrying a delivery or gift into a seaside shop; I notice a stack of American and British CDs on her front seat—and the CD player, at modest volume, has Otis Redding singing, “It’s raining” (from I’m sick Y’all, my favorite song since the late 1960s.) At a gift shop I buy 20 copies of a postcard depicting a 17th-century family portrait of a husband, wife, child, all sitting together—serenity—drawn by Kusumi Morikage and titled “In the Cool of the Evening.” I purchase stamps just as the local post office is closing. Visitors such as myself are given a pen, a piece of hard candy, and a postcard of the post office itself.]]> 10 10 0.5 15-Kisakata 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 522.5 159 4 -9 0 13369344 img/16-clover.jpg At Parent Ignored, Child Ignored September 21

In early morning, from the coastal village of Hoigawa we passed through Uramoto fishing port, later crossed Umikawa River then the Himekawa River, both where they run into the sea. Along the way I visit Mr. and Mrs. Sato, salt makers, at their small salt factory, where they make pyramid-shaped salt. Mr. Sato explained that he and his sister brought salt to Haguro when they were children and sold it there; their father was a salt maker, too. Mrs. Sato’s grandfather was a salt maker as well. “He always introduced my grandmother as ‘the salt maker’s wife.’ My husband doesn’t do that.”

Basho called this region “the most perilous place in the north.” Today there’s a road, of course, high up along the steep cliffs with concrete supports and wire netting to hold against landslides. But the names of the passes retain their old warnings, such as koma gaeshi—send back your horses. What happened here? Basically, about 800 years ago the mistress of a powerful official tried to flee with her small child along the cliffs. Crashing waves flung them into the sea. Someone observed this and reported that at one fateful moment the currents tore the woman from her child, and suddenly they were spun in opposite directions, then drowned. The sea “ignored” their plight. And it might have looked as if the mother and child “ignored” each other. Parent Ignored, Child Ignored is the saddest place I’ve ever been.

Basho and Sora got through a checkpoint, then found a room at an inn in Ichiburi. Exhausted, trying to sleep, they heard through the paper walls “sounds of voices in front room one room away, sounding like two young women. Old man's voice mingled with theirs as stories told are heard and it seemed they were play-girls from Niigata in Echigo Province.” One prostitute says, “On the strand where white waves crash we wander, children of the sea, thus fallen, to every chance relation, every day karma, shame...” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) Comparing the women to hagi—bush clover—(friendly but keep a distance) and himself to a kind of spectral priest, Basho recited to Sora:

In the one house
play-girls also slept
hagi and moonlight.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

The next morning the prostitutes tearfully approach, ask to travel with, but at a discreet distance behind, Basho and Sora. The women plead that this might help them turn to the way of the Buddha and feel safer on the roads. Basho makes excuses: “‘Surely the gods will protect you and see you safely through,’ words left them on leaving, but felt sorry for them for some time after.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Can’t sleep for replaying the tragic incident at Parent Ignored, Child Ignored in my thoughts; write a 12-page letter to my daughter in California; sesame coffee; finish “Time and Materials.” Crows at 5 a.m. The morning papers report that the “stable master” responsible for the death of the apprentice sumo wrestler (the stable master clouted him with a beer bottle and ordered other students to beat him, simply because the young man wanted to leave the profession) has “apologized to the parents” and “brought disgrace on his own family and on Japan’s ancient national pastime.”]]> 10 10 0.5 16-Niigata 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 410.5 214 -58 -21 0 13369344 img/17-autumnwind.jpg A Hoopoe at Lake Kahokagata; Poet Wailing at Genenji Temple September 23

In the old castle town of Kanazawa, I rent a bicycle and, studying maps, manage to find a number of samurai mansions along alley mazes. Lunch of fish on skewers from one of the numerous fish markets. Wrote letters all afternoon and in the evening attended a concert by musicians playing traditional string instruments, plus Kabuki scenes and fan-dance choreographies in an exquisite concert hall (dragon murals, narrative screens) next to the train station. College students studied for exams in Starbucks, which offered sesame coffee. Late at night reading Japanese Sayings and Proverbial Scenes—“Generous, the monk sweeps harder, straws break off, thus providing more work for the broom.”

Early the next morning I cycle along busy streets to Lake Kahokugata, where there’s a small bird sanctuary. When I arrive I see a middle-aged woman, dressed on this clammy hot morning in clothes that seem more fit for winter, an umbrella fixed to her easel. She’s sketching small treeless islands like floating pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, so varied are their shapes. Nearby are marsh grasses and willows. She’s done some drawings already today and allows me to look at them. No people, no birds, just trees, grasses, islands, clear sky. “Before—after—like Ozu movies. Do you know Ozu?” I ask her. (Yet again I’m utterly reliant on someone’s ability to speak some English.)

After a few hours of wandering about I realize the absence of people in her paintings corresponded in her mind to how the film director Ozu often held the camera for consecutive minutes on a room before people entered it and again when they left. A sense of anticipation inevitably succeeded by a sense of absence; interludes during which, as novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote, “The past returns to its rooms.” Or in the case of this woman’s paintings, the past returns to its landscapes.

There are ducks in flotillas, ducks alone, and then, in an orchard, an “uncommon transient on Honshu,” a hoopoo! The startling strangeness of this bird! The field guide calls it “unmistakable.” To say the least! “Pinkish-brown plumage with boldly barred black-and-white wings and tail. Black-tipped erectile crest looks like a large fan but is often held flat. The long black decurved bill has a flesh-colored base.”

In Kanazawa, Basho received lodging from a merchant from Osaka named Kasho. Settling in, he was crestfallen to hear of the sudden death in the past winter of a devoted young haiku poet, Issho, whom he had never met. Issho’s brother organized a memorial service.

I ride out to the large city park, which has three temples: Genenji, Chokyuji, and Seigakuji. It was at Genenji Temple that the haiku gathering for Issho took place. Basho’s contribution:

Tomb move too
my cry’s
autumn wind.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I bicycle from Genenji Temple to Chokyuji Temple, originally a thatched hut hermitage:

Fall coolness
hand by hand preparing
eggplants cucumbers.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

I bicycle from Chokyuji Temple to Seigakuji Temple:

Red red
sun unrelentingly
autumn’s wind.
(Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.)

Warm, rainy evening. Holding an umbrella, I bicycle to an eel restaurant. My shoes will dry in the entranceway next to other shoes. In shameful Japanese I execute an attempt to order specifically. Nonetheless, eel appears, and rice, and is delicious. The fellow at the next table eats the choice I tried to order. We both start laughing, never exchange a word. Plum wine “on the house.”]]> 10 10 0.5 17-Kanazawa 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 214.5 204 -6 -22 0 13369344 img/18-thousandli.jpg A Thousand Li From Anywhere September 23

We enter Fukui Prefecture, the town of Shioya, early morning. See white egrets at Kitagata Lake and north lagoon, on to the Kashima Forest, then Shioya Beach, where there is a sign warning swimmers against jellyfish. In the distance the air is filled with smoke from rice paddies. “The closer it is to the rice harvest, the more scarecrows appear in the fields,” Kadowaki says. An expertly painted sign above an eel restaurant depicts the Buddha handing a big eel directly to the owner of the restaurant. Now that’s a business connection!

I visit the Tenryu Temple, as Basho had, near the town of Matsuoka. Here poet Hokushi, who’d accompanied Basho from Kanazawa, left his company. Basho composes a poem for Hokushi:

The fan is torn in half
but what was written on it remains
memories of departure.

Tour busses are parked near the Eiheiji Temple. Jokingly—sort of—Kadowaki suggests that in my journal I use the word “magnificent” only once; the Eiheiji Temple is magnificent. A vast complex of buildings, ponds, Zen training temples, and so on. I sit near the entrance and read the 11-page “history” to the cicadas’ mee-ya mee-ya mee-ya mee-ya, also the darting whirr of hummingbirds. Individual cedars looming, great cedar lanes up the winding slopes, crows on red pines.

An elderly man and his granddaughter, roughly age 15, sit next to me. “I have English,” she says. “This isn’t my family’s temple, but I’m visiting my grandfather. He’s brought me here to pray with him—for monks getting punished and killed in Myanmar.” She says something to her grandfather, who unfolds the front page of a Japanese newspaper and points out a photograph of Burmese monks being clubbed by soldiers; other citizens, dressed in sarongs and Western clothes alike, are fleeing the street. Ten yards from the bench, an enormous Buddha floats on a lotus island in a pond. Onshore, facing the Buddha as if in timeless communion, an equally enormous stone toad.

Basho walked up a little over three miles up to pray here. He notes that its location, “a thousand li from Hoki” (the imperial seat in Kyoto) was the result of “careful consideration.” (Corman, Cid & Kamaike Susumu. Back Roads to Far Towns. White Pine Press, 2004.) It feels like a thousand li from anywhere. This is Dogen-zenji’s temple. In the mid-13th century he brought Soto (Ts’ao-T’ung) Zen into Japan. I stay here some six hours. Monks chanting sutras can be heard but not seen. The nooks and crannies, “shadows of shadows” gardens, spotless wooden floors, corridors and stairs, “PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO MEET THE EYES OF MONKS OR SPEAK TO THEM PLEASE” signs, dragon depicted on ceilings, an incense clock.

From here Basho and Sora had to cross the treacherous Kinome Pass. I walk the pass, following well-marked Oku no Hosomichi signs (depicting Basho and Sora in wide hats and holding staffs), past an off-season ski resort. It is dark when I arrive at my ryokan, “a place to rest from Kinome Pass.” Too late for dinner but not for a bath. The owner’s teenage nephew sifts through his collection of Godzilla movies; “There’s more than people in the U.S. even know about,” he says. Each cassette boasts an outlandish depiction of Godzilla rising from the sea, clubbing a fighter jet from the sky, ransacking Tokyo, exhaling a funnel of electric fire, and so on.

On CNN officials from the Sumo Association have personally apologized to the parents of the young apprentice sumo. The prime minister is “resting” somewhere in Japan. Myanmar military squads have raided monasteries. Human Rights organizations are filing protests; the official emissary from the UN can only manage the words “alleged violence against monks,” despite all eyewitness accounts, photographs, footage. Coward.

On the fan purchased in the ryokan gift shop, there’s Basho’s haiku again:

The fan is torn in half
but what was written on it remains
memories of departure.]]> 10 10 0.5 18-Maruoka 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 170.5 211 -73 -16 0 13369344 img/19-bashotree.jpg Cry of the Cuckoo at Kiso Yoshinaka Temple September 24

Today along the Nagara River I watch how three fisherman in wooden boats have tightened cord “necklaces” around six cormorants’ necks— they trained the birds to dive and catch fish, which the fishermen retrieve by reaching into the cormorants’ throats. Demonstration of age-old fishing technique both for tourists and to feed their families. I watch this for an hour or so, until finally the cormorants are fed the fish they themselves caught!

We are anxious to get to Genjyu-an, near Lake Biwa, to the Kiso Yoshinaka Temple where Basho is buried. Founded in 1553, this “humble hermitage” is dedicated to Kiso Yoshinaka (1154-1184), a famed general of the Minamoto Clan killed near here. Basho, at his own request, was buried next to the grave of Yoshinaka, whom he admired. The caretaker steps from the modest gift shop to show us the grave itself. Incense is burning. In the small pond there are two turtles. I dip in a bucket the long-handled wooden ladle and wash the gravestone. The basho tree (a kind of banana tree) is in bloom. Cicadas. As if summoning the dusk, the cry of a cuckoo. The train station is close by, car traffic, students on bicycles, crowded streets. Still, inside the Kiso Yoshinaka Temple, the cry of the cuckoo is clearly heard. The last haiku Basho recited:

Sick on a journey
my dreams roam
the withered moor.

I see the caretaker closing up shop. She notices me lingering at the gravestone. “It’s good to say a prayer. It’s up to you which one.” She bowed to me, bowed to the gravestone, lit more incense. “I’ll wait to lock the gate.”]]> 10 10 0.5 19-Genjyu-an 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 8 0 1 0 false 91.5 265 -5 -19 0 13369344 img/20-travelingshoes.jpg Visit to the Cottage of Fallen Persimmons October 18

Sometimes a place has such stillness that it stops time inside a person. This is true of Rakushisha, “Cottage of Fallen Persimmons.” In the last few years of his life Basho greatly enjoyed staying here. The cottage is located in Saga, a northwestern suburb of Kyoto. The house was owned by one of Basho’s disciples, the Genroku poet Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704). He was the most important poet to continue Basho’s authentic style of writing after the master died. In the garden there’s a poem stone made by Inuoue Juko, a relative of Kyorai:

From this angle
persimmon treetops seem close
to Stormy Mountain

As the story goes, Kyorai had about 40 persimmon trees in the garden. One autumn, when the fruit was ripe, he’d arranged to sell the persimmons. But the night before they were to be picked, a storm knocked every last one off the trees. Kyorai was enlightened by this experience and named his dwelling Rakushisha.

In the summer of 1691, on his second visit to Rakushisha, Basho wrote the last of his longer prose works, Saga Nikki—Saga Diary—which, when not directly elegiac, is replete with elegiac anticipation. The deteriorating condition of the cottage itself seems to correspond to Basho’s. The poet draws an inimitable (and wistfully comical) portrait of the writing life, chronicles the comings and goings of visitors, the prodigious epistolary life of poets, and, of course, departure. I step outside, a strong breeze. From the trees in front of Cottage of Fallen Persimmons, persimmons are falling.

Each Basho “site” is successively more difficult to leave. Later I walk from the Imperial Palace grounds to the Kinkakuji Temple (1482) and view the paintings in the main hall by Ike no Taiga (1723-1776), Tomioka Tessai (1836-1924), and Okuda Gensou (1912-2003), then sit near Tougudo, the Buddhist Hall, (a National Treasure), with its thatched roof and Japanese cypress, and read Saga Diary, not wanting to leave here either, for the cicadas, light rain, weariness after so much travel. Two Zen monks begin to sweep and tidy up a shop selling charms, therefore by an age-old strategy of indirection implore me, without words, to go home. As I walk past, I point to a red pine and ask how old it is. One monk says, “Years?” “Yes,” I say. “How many years?” The monks confer. “There are many opinions about that,” he says. This is enough of an answer and, besides, the only one I will receive.]]> 10 10 0.5 20-Saga 0 13369344 10 Verdana 0 20 0 1 0 false 75.5 265 -46 -19