the narrow road to the deep north
this is my zuihitsu responding to matsuo bashō’s the narrow road to the deep north (oku no hosomichi, 奥の細道). it was written as an assignment for my early-modern japanese literature course at brigham young university.
As an engineer, I tend to see things in terms of processes, parameters, and systems. To me, a frog jumping in a pond1 is an input to a system with an output of waves with a certain period, amplitude, etc. Yet for some reason I found myself fascinated by Oku no Hosomichi. The engineer in me has looked at all the other texts I’ve read so far for this course and has coldly analyzed their subjects, their cultural and societal environments, etc. Oku no Hosomichi actually evoked some emotions in me (something terribly dangerous for an engineer I should point out). Perhaps it’s because I have also stood looking out over the fields at Hiraizumi and thought about its ancient past or because I have also hiked along the paths of Nikkou Mountain. But I have also wandered through the Gion district of Kyoto, and I certainly did not feel the same way when I read Life of a Sensuous Man. I want to talk about the reasons I think Oku no Hosomichi meant something to me.
We talked about Bashō’s “hyōhaku no omoi” in class and I think I have felt a similar “wanderlust”. I am not trained in ancient Japanese literature, so my comparison can only go so far, but I think I have felt and do feel some of the same things he felt. Bashō felt a pull to the North. It wasn’t just a journey in search of the ancients. It was a journey in search of the same things the ancients sought. The big question is what was it that the ancients sought in the North. I think there is something romantic about the North. I was raised in Wisconsin, so to me, south was Chicago and civilization and north was Canada and the wild. As a child I loved staring at maps for hours (it helped me win my school’s geography bee multiple times), especially maps of northern countries. I always wondered what the frigid coasts of Siberia and Greenland must be like. Even now I catch myself using Google Earth to zoom in on small islands in the Bering straight just to see what’s there. I’ve seriously considered on multiple occasions taking off to work on a salmon boat in Alaska. The North’s distance from civilization and remoteness, its ruggedness and raw natures all give it this romantic appeal. I can’t see why it would not have had the same romance to the ancient Japanese people. Each step towards the North was one away from Kyoto and civilization and one step nearer the frontier, the Ainu, the unconquered.
But attributing my feelings to the “romance” of the North is certainly too shallow of an understanding. Oku no Hosomichi is not a story of grand discovery of new places. Bashō wrote about the people he met along the way, his feelings when seeing both famous and non-famous places, and just small events and observations. If he had been merely seeking the ancients, he would have stuck to the same famous historical locations and paths, and he would have given them the same meaning as the ancients had. Yet he sought out new places and new meanings. I’ve felt that desire during my travels. Over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, my friends and I went to Zion National Park on a road trip. The scenery was beautiful and we took plenty of pictures. But the most interesting part of the trip for me was pulling off the interstate at Parowan to grab breakfast at the Parowan Cafe. The town fascinated me. After breakfast I insisted we wander around a bit to look at the old churches and buildings along the main road. I wondered what type of people lived there and what the people who first lived there were like. To most people driving to St. George or Las Vegas, Parowan is a blip on the radar, but to me it was a place full of mystery and interest. I think Bashō felt the same way about some of the places he went. He saw the places the ancients saw, but he also saw the places they passed by, and he assigned a meaning to both.
I suppose it’s impossible to talk about Oku no Hosomichi without touching upon the haikai verses spread throughout. The engineer in me says poetry is typically something that I fail to grasp. My most accomplished poetry was a set of “haiku” about the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Obviously I didn’t quite understand the point of haiku at the time. But after experiencing and studying Japanese culture for the past seven years, I think the meanings of these poems are beginning to become more clear to me. Bashō could take the scenes he saw and imbue them with new meaning and depth in only 17 syllables. This is what made him great, and honestly I feel a little jealous of his skill. All I could come up while staring at the Hikaridō was “that’s pretty cool looking” and then I snapped a few pictures. I wish I could found some hidden depth in the scene in front of me.
After I finished reading Oku no Hosomichi, I posted the following:
new life goal: backpack the same trail that bashou took in oku no hosomichi.
What I liked so much about this reading was that it helped me realize that it was exactly what I wanted to do. My romance with the “North”, my interest in places off of the beaten path, and my desire to find deeper meanings in my experiences seemed to me to be some of the same things that Bashō was feeling. I suppose I could say, as cheesy as this sounds, that this story of a journey brought out the desire inside of this cold, analytical engineer to be a “poet”. Someday I really do hope to backpack the same path as Bashō. I probably will forgo the haikai poems (I only need to dig up some of those haiku about Big Nurse to show why), but I hope to be able to find the same things that Bashō did.
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bashō’s most famous haiku:
furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto(an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water) ↩︎