The Heart of Haiku (3 page)

In 1680, two events, one inward, the other outer, can be taken as markers for the fruition of Bashō’s efforts. The inner boundary-marker can be found in a haiku often referred to as Bashō’s first mature work:

On a leafless branch,

a crow’s settling:

autumn nightfall

kareedani  karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure

When autumn’s diminishments and an ordinary crow are felt to be beauty as much as loss, loss is unpinned. In Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as
sabi
—a quality at the heart of much of Bashō’s mature writing. The noun
sabishi
is generally translated as “loneliness,” or sometimes “solitude,” but the word originates in associations very close to those found in this haiku: it holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of essence. “The works of other schools of  poetry are like colored paintings; my disciples paint with black ink,” Basho later said. To feel
sabi
is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did “infinity in the palm of your hand”—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.  In making the expression of
sabi
one of haiku’s goals, Bashō turned his own and his students’ writing toward a new spirit. The gravitational pull of that renewed seriousness shifted haiku-writing from the construction of entertainment to the making of art.

Haiku’s imagery is not confined to the lyrical, as we’ve already seen. “Eat vegetable soup, not duck stew,” Bashō famously told his students, calling plainness and oddity the bones of haiku. Another poem from this time begins with a headnote:

“The rich enjoy the finest meats and ambitious young men save money by eating root vegetables. I myself am simply poor.”

snowy morning—      

alone,

still able to chew dried salmon

yuki no ashita hitori karazake wo kami etari  

In 17th-century Japan,
karazake
was commoner’s food. For Bashō, to speak of eating dried salmon on a cold morning was neither complaint nor self-pity—it was an evocation of
wabi
. An idea often linked to
sabi,
and equally important to Bashō’s work,
wabi
conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects. A hemp farmer’s jacket, a plain fired-clay cup, the steam rising from a boiling teapot— these are
wabi’s
essence. A gold-and-cloisonné bowl or ornate silk clothes are its opposite. In the spirit of
wabi
, then, this poem mulls the deep satisfaction of a life stripped almost bare.

Of the two transition-markers that signal Bashō’s maturation as person and poet, the inward change was his embodiment of a Zen spirit
, wabi-sabi
, and plainness. The outer change was the alteration of circumstance that led to the name by which he’s now known. In feudal-era Japan, “town teachers,” as they were called, lived by the support of students and wealthy patrons. Such gifts might be monetary, but as often took the form of rice, books, sandals, and clothes. For nine years in Edo, Bashō had lived in rented housing, on a combination of salary from his water-company work, fees for correcting poems, and teaching donations. In the winter of 1680, shortly after Bashō wrote his haiku on the autumn crow, one of his followers built him a simple thatch-roofed hut on the bank of the Sumida River in Fukugawa, a quiet outskirt of the city. That spring, another student planted a kind of Japanese plantain or banana tree in its front garden—a plant known in Japanese as a
bashō
. The house came to be called the Bashō Hut, and its inhabitant soon took the name as well.

Many years later, when living in a different hut near the site of his first one, Bashō wrote two different versions of a haibun on the occasion of transplanting some shoots from his old
bashō
tree to a new location in his garden. Here is an excerpt, ending with its haiku:

What year did I come to nest in this area, planting a single
bashō
tree? The climate here must be good for it—many new trunks have grown up around the first one, their leaves so thick that they crowd my garden and shade my house-eaves. People named my hut after this plant. Every year, old friends and students who’ve grown to like my tree take cuttings or divide the roots and carry them off to replant far and wide.

 One year my heart set itself on a trip to the northern interior, and I abandoned this Bashō Hut. […] My sadness at leaving the tree was surprisingly strong. After five springs and autumns away, I’ve now returned, and my sleeves are wet with tears. The scent of blossoming oranges is near; my friends’ warmth has not changed. There’s no way I’ll leave it behind again.

My new thatch-roofed cottage, near the site of the earlier one, fits me well, with its three small rooms. […] I’ve transplanted five
bashō
saplings so that the moon, seen through their branches, will be even more beautiful and moving. The
bashō’s
leaves are over seven feet long. When they rip almost to their center ribs in the wind, it’s as painful as seeing a phoenix whose tail has been broken, as pitiful as the sight of a torn green fan.

Sometimes the
bashō
tree blossoms, but its flowers are small. Its thick stalk remains untouched by any axe. Like the famous ancient tree of the mountains, the
bashō’s
useless nature is itself the reason to admire it. A monk caressed that mountain tree with his brush to learn its ways; a scholar watched its leaves unfold to inspire his studies. But I’m not like either of them. I just rest in the shade of the leaves I love because they are so easily torn.

bash
ō
leaves

will cover its post-beams—

hut of the moon          

bash
ō
ba o hashira ni kaken  io no tsuki     

By the time he wrote this, the poet had long been called by the
bashō
tree’s name, and each of the major themes of his life appears in this dense meditation on the plant whose identity merged with the poet’s own—his restless wanderings and sensual awareness; his transplanter’s impulse toward revision and renewal; his empathic identification with the tree’s fragile leaves; the importance of friendship; the desire for unusual beauty; and the continuing examination of both inner and outer worlds undertaken by seeing through words, both those of earlier writers and his own.

The aesthetics of spareness and poverty should not disguise the genuine hardship of Bashō’s life. His grass hut, however scenic, had neither a well nor plumbing. In one haibun written late in 1681, Bashō quotes a few lines by the Chinese poet Tu Fu, then says, “I can see the
wabi
here, but I don’t take any joy in it. I’m superior to Tu Fu in only one thing: the frequency with which I fall sick. Hidden away behind the
bashō
leaves of this rickety hut, I call myself, ‘Useless Old Bum.’”  One of several accompanying haiku reads:

Bitter ice-shards         

moisten

the mud-rat’s throat.

kōrinigaku enso ga nodo wo uruoseri  

The haiku carries a headnote: “I buy water at this grass-roofed hut,” and it alludes to a statement from the Chinese Taoist writings of Chuang-Tzu: A sewer rat drinks only enough from the river to quench its thirst. Bashō’s container of purchased water, which regularly froze during winter nights, may have reminded him of that image. Still, this haiku seems as much a portrait of genuine bitterness as any depiction of Taoist austerity.

Another haibun from this time, titled “Sleeping Alone in a Grass Hut,” includes this poem:

the
bashō
thrashing in wind,

rain drips into an iron tub—

a listening night

bashōnowaki shite tarai ni ame wo kiku yo kana

The haiku is a study in sounds, textures, and scale, and in exposure, both exterior and interior. The banana tree’s leaves are torn by the typhoon winds—the storm was the fiercest in many years—whose huge sound passes over the poem. The plink of rain against a wash-tub (possibly outside, but more likely catching water from a roof leak) is near, precise, and intimate; yet its purchase on the attention is as large as the storm’s.
Bashō
tree leaves tearing in wind were a long-standing image in classical Chinese and Japanese poems; dripping roofs and ordinary metal basins, less so. The balance of the minute and the vast, of the personal and forces that care nothing about the personal, of idealized and “poetic” experience and the actual living through of a major storm, is registered in each drop of water striking iron.

In January 1683, a year after Bashō moved into his Fukugawa hut, a fire swept through much of Edo. Bashō survived only by jumping into the river, using a soaked reed mat to shield his head from the heat and smoke. He was forced to move into a patron’s house, far from the city. Then, that summer, his mother died. In the fall, his students found him new lodgings in a run-down house not far from his burned one, and supplied him with household items, a few clothes, and a large hollow gourd to hold rice, which they regularly filled. When the New Year (early spring, in the traditional Japanese calendar) arrived, Bashō marked it with this haiku:

I’m wealthy—

going into the new year

with 20 lbs of old rice

waretomeri shinnen furuki kome gosh
ō
 

Bashō later replaced the self-description of the haiku’s opening line with something plainer. Bashō revised his haiku, haibun, and journals throughout his life. Not infrequently the direction was toward a diminishment of self, but there are also poems in which he experimented with various alternative verbs or subject lines to feel their effects. Should a poem be about “loneliness” or “stillness”? Should a sound “soak,” “pierce” or “stain”? These alterations show that even his most seemingly unstudied and artless works were often produced by a method quite unlike what is sometimes described as a “Zen” “first thought, best thought.” The revised poem:

spring begins—

going into the new year

with 20 lbs of old rice

harutatsu ya shinnen furuki kome gosh
ō
      

A few years later, another haiku seems to recall that rice-storing kitchen gourd, though here it appears to be empty:

My one-possession

world,

a lightweight gourd

monohitotsu waga yo wa karoki hisago kana   

The words do not reveal the poet’s attitude about the situation. I myself lean towards the interpretation of a liberating portability of existence: this poem was written during the time of Bashō’s travels, by a man used, by then, to many losses.

Not long after the fire, Bashō published the first collection holding the work of his followers.  Its title,
Shrivelled Chestnuts
, points towards Bashō’s aesthetic of valuing the valueless; he said of the book’s “shrivelled chestnuts,” “they may be small, but their taste is sweet.” Yet along with his increasing success as a poetry master, Bashō grew, it seems, increasingly unsettled. When he received an invitation to visit some former students, he began preparing for a lengthy trip. He shaved his head, put on the robes of a mendicant monk, and in the fall of 1684 set out with a friend on a seven-month-long journey by foot, horseback, and ferry. The trip would include a visit to his mother’s grave before going on to places made famous by earlier Japanese writers. It was the first of five such trips, each recorded in a published journal mixing poems written during his travels with prose descriptions of places, people, and events.

Bashō called his account of this early trip
The Journal of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton
, and its first sentences and opening haiku set the tone:

I set out on a trip of a thousand miles without any supplies, my walking-stick the staff of an ancient said to have vanished one night under a midnight moon. […]          As I left my run-down hut, the wind’s sound over the river was odd and 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.