Bashō

Bashō (born 1644, Ueno, Iga province, Japan—died Nov. 28, 1694, Ōsaka) was the supreme Japanese haiku poet, who greatly enriched the 17-syllable haiku form and made it an accepted medium of artistic expression.

Interested in haiku from an early age, Bashō at first put his literary interests aside and entered the service of a local feudal lord. After his lord’s death in 1666, however, Bashō abandoned his samurai (warrior) status to devote himself to poetry. Moving to the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), he gradually acquired a reputation as a poet and critic. In 1679 he wrote his first verse in the “new style” for which he came to be known:

On a withered branch

A crow has alighted:

Nightfall in autumn.

The simple descriptive mood evoked by this statement and the comparison and contrast of two independent phenomena became the hallmark of Bashō’s style. He attempted to go beyond the stale dependence on form and ephemeral allusions to current gossip that had been characteristic of haiku, which in his day had amounted to little but a popular literary pastime. Instead he insisted that the haiku must be at once unhackneyed and eternal. Following the Zen philosophy he studied, Bashō attempted to compress the meaning of the world into the simple pattern of his poetry, disclosing hidden hopes in small things and showing the interdependence of all objects.

In 1684 Bashō made the first of many journeys that figure so importantly in his work. His accounts of his travels are prized not only for the haiku that record various sights along the way but also for the equally beautiful prose passages that furnish the backgrounds. Oku no hosomichi (1694; The Narrow Road to the Deep North), describing his visit to northern Japan, is one of the loveliest works of Japanese literature.

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On his travels Bashō also met local poets and competed with them in composing the linked verse (renga), an art in which he so excelled that some critics believe his renga were his finest work. When Bashō began writing renga the link between successive verses had generally depended on a pun or play on words, but he insisted that poets must go beyond mere verbal dexterity and link their verses by “perfume,” “echo,” “harmony,” and other delicately conceived criteria.

One term frequently used to describe Bashō’s poetry is sabi, which means the love of the old, the faded, and the unobtrusive, a quality found in the verse

Scent of chrysanthemums . . .

And in Nara

All the ancient Buddhas.

Here the musty smell of the chrysanthemums blends with the visual image of the dusty, flaking statues in the old capital. Living a life that was in true accord with the gentle spirit of his poetry, Bashō maintained an austere, simple hermitage that contrasted with the general flamboyance of his times. On occasion he withdrew from society altogether, retiring to Fukagawa, site of his Bashō-an (“Cottage of the Plantain Tree”), a simple hut from which the poet derived his pen name. Later men, honouring both the man and his poetry, revered him as the saint of the haiku.

The Narrow Road to Oku (1996), Donald Keene’s translation of Oku no hosomichi, provides the original text and a modern-language version by Kawabata Yasunari. The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School (1981), a translation by Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri, presents a celebrated linked-verse sequence in which Bashō took part, along with a commentary.