Month: June 2024

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.

Ah, Matsushima

Furabo

cuckoo bird

A new pen name?

Furabo 風羅坊, a wanderer (a monk) with no home.

[Note. 風羅, literally, the wind that shifts; 坊, monk. Basho idolized Saigyo, a 12th century monk who wandered.]

The thought first appeared to Matsuo Basho in Oi no Kibumi (1688). That he, Matsuo Basho, like Saigyo, had become a wanderer with no fixed home. Furabo appears in the introduction, in the first line.

百骸九竅の中に物有、かりに名付て風羅坊といふ。
“Somewhere within my body of 100 bones and 9 orifices is something I call Furabo (風羅坊).”

The thought became an idea that reappeared not too far into Basho’s Journey into the Northern Interior (Oku no Hosomichi, 1689). Basho and his companion Sora spent a couple of days in Nasu, at the home of Takaku Kakuzaemon, the village headman. The village had hot springs which must have come as a relief to the two travelers. Nearby were several volcanic mountains, and a place called seessho-kiki, the killing rocks, so named because the sulfuric fumes were poisonous. Perhaps, Basho heard the familiar sound of the cuckoo bird, “kakkou kakkou” and compared that to the name of his host, Takuku. Taking this call as a warning to “rest.”

Basho wrote, 落ち来るや高久の宿の郭公.

      ochikuru ya | falling down from high
takaku no shuku no | at Takaku’s inn
         hototogisu | a cuckoo bird

Matsuo Basho, Oku no Hosomichi, Nasu, Summer 1689

and signed his name as Furabo.

If Basho was thinking of changing his pen-name to Furabo, it was too late.

cuckoo bird

Cree-ack

“Cree-ack” said the wind.

I have two rescue dogs (a bonded pair I call Lucy and Desi) who love to go out the kitchen door and come back in all day. Occasionally, I leave it ajar so they can go out and in on their own. If it is not wide enough, they will sit and stare, for they haven’t learned how to push. Then, to their amazement, there is a “creeack” as the wind opens it wide.

An open door policy is an invitation to flies, as my wife says.

“Cree-ack”
was the sound of the wind
as it opened the kitchen door

“Whizz” go the flies
who furiously flee
the swat of the swatter
— Bashō no yōna, Spring 2024

Nature’s Sound

“Cree-ack” is a high pitched sound like chalk on a chalkboard. It startles.

Matsuo Basho was captivated by the sounds of Nature. There is the familiar sound of the wind in the trees, the joyful sound of the birds in spring, and the cuckoo that always reminded him of Kyoto (a Proustian moment). Then too there was the famous sound of the water as the frog jumped in the pond — “kerplunk.”