‘Deep North’…and far out?

This was only the second ‘Japanese’ book that I ever read after The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, and of course there was a connection: I won’t say that Bashō (1644-94) is my favourite Japanese haiku-writer, but he’s surely the greatest. I wanted to know more about him and, particularly, his art. Where the latter is concerned, I immediately learned something fundamental about the haiku: note after note by Nobuyuki Yuasa at the back of his Penguin Classics translation revealed to me that Bashō’s haiku (originally ‘hokka’) are very often of ‘irregular form’, i.e. not 5-7-5 syllables!

That was in 1976. I have read this slim book many times since, including three times in the past six weeks, and I know I will always come back to it. It actually contains five travelogues. The first four are between six and twenty pages long, ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ itself is forty-seven pages, each has a character and beauty of its own, but ‘Narrow Road’ is the masterpiece. I always read it with a rush of fresh perceptions, probably because its very keynote is variety: variety of places, landscapes, weathers, people, events (present and long past), phenomena, facts, moods, plants…

All this passes before you at what always seems exactly the right pace; never too quick or too slow. It’s utterly mysterious how he has managed it so that you always feel you are on the move with him, there is always an excitement about what is going to happen next, experience after experience is contemplated yet you always know that the journey must keep going, that it has a purpose and a unity greater than its multitude of parts. It is a journey to shrines and sites of deep Japanese historical significance, but also to phenomena of the natural world (a thousand-year-old pine, ancient cherry trees, a famous willow, rocks), and they are described with great wit (sometimes he does not find the famous pond reflections, irises or rock pattern that he has come to see). The effect is overwhelmingly aesthetic: you feel you have been initiated into the artistic way of seeing of an incredibly sophisticated civilisation.

All our journeys are personal journeys (e.g. George Calderon’s Tahiti), but not every journey is a spiritual one. ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is. Bashō is so modest that on a first reading it is easy to overlook that the journey is grounded on danger, in existential terms it is a ‘boundary situation’. When Bashō sets out in 1689, he sells his house as he does not expect to come back from penetrating what was regarded as unexplored territory. When he reaches the ‘barrier-gate’ to the North, the gate-keepers are ‘extremely suspicious, for very few travellers dared to pass this difficult road under normal circumstances’ (p. 120). He teeters over abysses, he literally has to crawl on all fours up a mountain, he forces his way through bamboo thickets, he negotiates a swollen river in a cockleshell boat, he is laid low by illness. The backbone of this travelogue, then, is existential risk and angst. It forces Bashō to question the value and meaning of his life, of all human life, of the universe’s life. (He often weeps.) He says that when he got home after nearly three years, ‘everybody was overjoyed to see me as if I had returned unexpectedly from the dead’ (p. 142). In a sense, he had. His self had been far out.

However, no encounter with a different culture can be without difficulty, and there was something that profoundly worried me about this book when I first read it. On the second page of the first travelogue, ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, Bashō comes upon ‘a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the river bank, obviously abandoned by his parents’. The child was ‘so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had’, but then Bashō philosophises about the causes of the child’s ‘great misery’, concluding:

Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive [than his parents] — by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind. (p. 52)

Outrageous humbug, I thought, surely he could have rescued the child? In fact the abandonment of children by their parents, of old parents by their children, and of other humans by Bashō himself, is a theme that runs throughout ‘The Narrow Road’. This would be understandable enough as mere truthful reporting, but it always seems to be accepted as a fact of life, never deplored or acted upon. I began to think there was a moral vacuum at the heart of the book, even at the heart of Japanese life at that historical time, and that the source of it was the ‘fatalism’ and ‘resignation’ of Bashō’s Zen Buddhism. The latter profoundly imbues his haiku, and there are those who consequently believe you cannot write haiku unless you believe in Zen. I don’t accept that, and I’m very unsettled by the feeling ‘The Narrow Road’ leaves me with sometimes, that its world is amorally ‘aesthetic’ and ‘philosophical’, and that Bashō is an entirely self-centred artist.

On more recent readings, I have come to interpret the above scene, and Bashō’s moralising rejection of the tearful concubines in ‘Narrow Road’ (p. 132) as Zen symbols, not necessarily reportage at all, since parts of the narration, I gather, are as fictive as some aspects of George’s Tahiti. I must admit, as symbols they are sublime. On the other hand, I also find myself wondering whether Bashō’s passing by on the other side (although he is always full of pity) is not an early example of the Japanese phrase taigan no kaji, which Roger Pulvers explains in his autobiography means a fire that burns on someone else’s riverbank, so although you can see it, ‘you can be indifferent to its cause or effect’.

Yet an equally strong impression from ‘The Narrow Road’ is that of sociability, of human contact, collaboration, interaction, people being aware they can contribute something to other people; dialogue, in fact. A simple example would be the ‘disciples’ and strangers who at every point volunteer to accompany, guide and help Bashō on his journey. He is rarely alone. My impression at the moment is that Japanese life is as sociable and collaborative as that today. I shall have to wait and see. But one can hardly accuse Bashō of being an ‘entirely self-centred artist’ when so many of the haiku in this book are contributed by his companions and he is so complimentary about them!

I cannot begin to do justice to ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ in a blog post that is already over-long. Bashō’s journey is a world classic that everyone should read.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.