Matsishima

Ah, Matsushima

Let us settle the debate once and for all. Basho is said to have composed a famous haiku that goes:

松島や . ああ松島や . 松島や
Matsushima ya . Ā Matsushima ya . Matsushima ya
Ah, Matsushima, Oh, Matsushima, Matsushima, ah!

In an article written after the severe earthquake in 2016, Takayangi Katsuhiro writes, “… the popular comic poet Tawara-bo composed a similar poem (Matsushima ya sate Matsushimaya Matsushima ya), and this has been conveyed erroneously as a work by Basho.”

There is no mention of Matsushima in Oku-no-Hosomichi. This is unusual in as much as Basho comments in the Prologue that he had been “dreaming of the full moon rising over the islands of Matsushima.”

“Why, then, did he not mention it in any of his haiku poems?” Katsuhiro asks. The answer is perhaps that of the Tao de Ching. Beauty is the word, but the word does not convey the feeling of each individual who takes in the beauty. Beauty is ineffable. Thus, one who speaks does not know, one who knows the beauty of Matsushima doesn’t speak.

It was by modern count, the 21st station on the journey. It followed Shiogama, on the coast just past Sendai. Today, boasting all manner of seafood. Basho’s description of Matsushima takes on the air of a travelogue, which the book Oku no Hosomichi was intended, in part, to be.

“Islands upon island, islands are joined to islands, looking exactly like parents walking hand in hand with them. Pine trees are of the brightest green, their exquisite branches, bent by the constantly blowing wind. Indeed, the beauty of the scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed feminine face, for who else could have created such beauty but Nature herself? My pen could hardly rise to the task of describing this divine creation.”

With no words of farewell, no regret, Basho says, “I left for Hiraizumi (back into the interior) on the twelfth (of June).” And, as sometimes happens, he lost his way.

A question for Zhungzi — are dreams better than reality?

Is the dream better
than reality, or
do we care about the truth?

All of this reminding me of the Demosthenes’ saying, “One believes not in the truth, but in what one wants to believe.”

Source: Takayanagi Katsuhiro, “A Journey Along the Destroyed Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North),” 2016.