Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North)

Oku no Hosomichi is a travel journal by Matsuo Bashō, the most famous poet of the Edo period (1603–1868) and a master of haikai, the popular linked verse from which the modern haiku developed. It describes the journey Bashō made with his disciple Kawai Sora in 1689 from Edo through the Tōhoku and Hokuriku regions of northern and western Honshū.

The title is usually translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Narrow Road to Oku. “Oku” means “the interior” or “the deep inside”, and here refers to the remote northern provinces, often called Michinoku, “the end of the road”. “Hosomichi” means “narrow road” or “path”. It was also the name of an actual lane near Sendai mentioned in the book, and it suggests a difficult inner path of art and spirit.

The book is short, only a few dozen pages in a modern edition. It is written in haibun, a style that combines brief, dense passages of prose with hokku (the verse form now called haiku). It is not a straightforward diary: Bashō shaped, compressed and in places invented events to create a carefully structured work of literature.

Bashō left his hut in Fukagawa, Edo, on the 27th day of the third month of Genroku 2 (16 May 1689). Before leaving he sold his house, and the first poem of the book imagines the new owners’ family setting out dolls for the Girls’ Festival: “Even my grass hut / will change with the new tenant— / a house of dolls.”

The travellers went north to Nikkō, with its shrine to the first Tokugawa shogun, and crossed the Shirakawa Barrier, the ancient gateway to the north celebrated by many classical poets. They visited the islands of Matsushima, which Bashō praised as the most beautiful place in Japan, and Hiraizumi, where the Northern Fujiwara clan had flourished and where the hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune died in 1189, exactly 500 years before.

Then they turned west across the mountains. At the temple of Risshakuji (Yamadera) Bashō wrote his poem on the cicadas; on the Mogami River he wrote of the swift waters swollen by the early summer rains; he climbed the three sacred mountains of Dewa (Dewa Sanzan) and visited the lagoon of Kisakata. Along the Sea of Japan coast he looked across to the island of Sado and wrote of the Milky Way stretching over the rough sea.

At Yamanaka hot spring Sora, who had fallen ill, left to go ahead, and Bashō continued with other companions to Fukui and Tsuruga. The journey in the book ends at Ōgaki, where friends and disciples gathered to greet him. The last poem shows Bashō setting off again in the ninth month for the Ise Shrine: parting from friends is compared to a clam being separated from its shell, “departing autumn”.

The opening. The book begins with one of the best-known sentences in Japanese literature: “The months and days are travellers of a hundred ages, and the years that come and go are also travellers.” Bashō goes on to say that boatmen and horse-drivers spend their lives on the road, that many ancient poets died while travelling, and that he himself has long been seized by the desire to wander. The opening echoes a famous preface by the Chinese poet Li Bai, which calls time “a traveller of a hundred generations”.

Hiraizumi. Standing on the ruins where Yoshitsune’s followers died, Bashō recalls a line from Du Fu’s poem “Spring View”, “The nation is destroyed, yet mountains and rivers remain”, and writes: “Summer grasses— / all that remains / of warriors’ dreams.” The poem joins the living present, the green grass, to the vanished past.

Yamadera. At the mountain temple, among rocks and pines, Bashō wrote: “Stillness— / seeping into the rocks, / the cicadas’ cry.” The poem turns a loud sound into an experience of deep silence.

The Mogami and the sea. Two other poems are learned by Japanese schoolchildren: “Gathering the rains / of early summer, how swift— / the Mogami River,” and “Rough sea— / stretching out over Sado Isle, / the River of Heaven.” The second joins a vast, stormy landscape with the island of Sado, a place of exile, and the Milky Way above.

How to read these poems. Many of Bashō’s hokku contain a “cutting word” (kireji) such as ya, which works a little like a dash or an exclamation: it splits the poem into two images and lets the reader feel the connection between them, as in “summer grasses” and “warriors’ dreams”. Each poem also contains a season word (kigo), such as summer grass, cicadas, early summer rain or the Milky Way of autumn, so the poems trace the passage of the seasons from spring to autumn across the journey. English translations cannot keep the exact 5-7-5 sound pattern, so translators choose between keeping the rhythm and keeping the images.

Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644 in Iga Province (now part of Mie Prefecture), into a family of low-ranking samurai or well-to-do farmers. As a young man he served in the household of a local samurai, Tōdō Yoshitada, with whom he shared an interest in haikai poetry. After his master’s early death he eventually moved to Edo, where he made his name as a haikai master.

In 1680 he moved to a simple hut in Fukagawa on the edge of the city; a disciple planted a banana tree (bashō) there, and he took his pen-name from it. He studied Zen and Chinese poetry, especially Du Fu and the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, and developed a new style that aimed to make haikai, which had often been witty wordplay, into a serious art. His frog poem of 1686, “An old pond— / a frog jumps in, / the sound of water,” became the emblem of this new style.

From 1684 Bashō made a series of journeys that produced travel writings, including Nozarashi kikō (Record of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton) and Oi no kobumi (Knapsack Notebook). Oku no Hosomichi, the account of his longest and most ambitious journey, is the culmination of this series. Bashō died in Osaka in 1694 (the 12th day of the 10th month of Genroku 7) while on another journey.

Bashō lived during the Genroku era (1688–1704), a time of peace, economic growth and flourishing urban culture under the Tokugawa shogunate. The great cities of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka had a growing class of merchants and townspeople who read printed books, went to the kabuki and puppet theatres, and practised poetry as a hobby. Haikai masters like Bashō earned a living by teaching students and judging poetry contests.

Travel had become easier and safer thanks to the network of highways, post stations and inns built by the shogunate, although travellers still needed permits and passed through checkpoints. Pilgrimage to shrines and temples was popular. The northern regions Bashō visited were nevertheless still considered remote by city people.

Travel had a special meaning in Japanese poetry. Since the time of the imperial anthologies, poets had written about utamakura, “poem pillows”, places famous from earlier poems, such as the Shirakawa Barrier or Matsushima. Visiting these places was a way of entering into conversation with the poets of the past. Bashō especially admired the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyō and the Chinese poets Li Bai and Du Fu, all of whom were associated with wandering; his 1689 journey fell in the 500th memorial year of Saigyō’s death, counted in the traditional Japanese way.

Life as a journey. The opening turns travel into a metaphor for existence itself: time is a traveller, and so are we. Bashō’s journey is both a physical trip and a spiritual discipline, a letting go of home and possessions in pursuit of art.

Impermanence and memory. Again and again Bashō visits places associated with the past and finds them changed or vanished: the ruins of Hiraizumi, a pine that has been replaced, an ancient stone inscription at Taga Castle (the Tsubo no ishibumi) which moves him to tears because it has survived a thousand years. The tension between what changes and what endures runs through the book. In the period after the journey Bashō and his disciples discussed the idea of fueki ryūkō, “the unchanging and the ever-changing”, as the two aspects of poetry.

Prose and poem. In haibun the prose sets the scene and builds up tension, and the hokku crystallises the moment. The prose itself is highly compressed and poetic, full of parallel phrases in the Chinese manner, allusions and shifts of tone, from lofty descriptions of landscape to comic episodes about fleas and horses urinating near the pillow. Some poems in the book are by Sora and other companions, so the work also reflects the collaborative culture of haikai.

Structure. Scholars have noted that the book is carefully balanced: for example, the glorious description of Matsushima (the laughing beauty) is answered by melancholy Kisakata (the sorrowful beauty), which Bashō compares to the Chinese beauty Xi Shi. The sequence of places, seasons and moods forms a composition, much like a sequence of linked verses.

Bashō did not write the book during the journey. He worked on it for several years afterwards, probably mostly in 1692–1694, polishing the prose and revising poems. Around 1694 a calligrapher named Soryū made a clean fair copy, which Bashō kept; this copy, later called the Nishimura manuscript after a family that owned it, has a title slip reading “おくのほそ道”, the spelling many scholars prefer.

Several manuscripts survive. One copied by a disciple and associated with Sora (the Sora manuscript) contains corrections, possibly in Bashō’s hand; another, the Kakimori manuscript, was made public in 1960. In 1996 a manuscript believed to be in Bashō’s own handwriting, the Nakao manuscript (also called the Yaba manuscript), was announced. It contains many corrections pasted over on slips of paper, allowing scholars to watch the author revising his text.

The book was first printed in 1702 in Kyoto by the bookseller Izutsuya, based on the Soryū fair copy, eight years after Bashō’s death. Printed editions and commentaries multiplied during the Edo period, when Bashō was increasingly revered almost as a saint of poetry.

Oku no Hosomichi is taught in Japanese schools and is regarded as a classic of world travel literature. Its opening lines and major poems are known by heart by millions of people. Places along the route, such as Yamadera, Hiraizumi and Kisakata, display monuments inscribed with Bashō’s poems, and many people follow the route on foot, by train or by car. Some of the landscapes have changed: the Kisakata lagoon was lifted out of the sea by an earthquake in 1804 and is now rice fields dotted with former islands.

The book also shaped how later poets travelled and wrote. Edo-period poets retraced Bashō’s steps, and in the twentieth century writers, painters and photographers responded to it. Its emphasis on the fleeting moment, simple things and the harmony of prose and image influenced not only Japanese literature but also the international haiku movement.

It has been translated into many languages. English translations include versions by Nobuyuki Yuasa (1966), Donald Keene (The Narrow Road to Oku, 1996) and others; there are also Korean, Chinese and European translations. Translators face the challenge of rendering the dense allusions and the 5-7-5 rhythm of the hokku, and each translation offers a different interpretation.

Sora kept a travel diary with dates, weather, lodgings and people met. This record, which became known to scholars in the twentieth century, allows the book to be compared with what actually happened. The comparison shows that Bashō changed dates, reordered events, omitted many visits and people, and invented or embellished some episodes.

The best-known example is the scene at Ichiburi on the Sea of Japan coast, where Bashō writes that two courtesans (yūjo) on a pilgrimage were sleeping in the next room of the inn and asked in the morning to accompany him; he refused and wrote, “Under one roof / courtesans too were sleeping— / bush clover and the moon.” Sora’s diary does not mention them, and most scholars regard the episode as fictional, perhaps inspired by classical literature. Similarly, the weather and dates at some sites were adjusted for literary effect.

These findings have changed how the work is read. Earlier readers often treated it as a record of the poet’s actual experiences and spiritual life; scholars now emphasise that it is a composed literary work in which the traveller “Bashō” is partly a persona. The differences between the diary and the book reveal Bashō’s artistic choices, such as his wish to align his journey with classical models and with Saigyō.

The Sora diary also adds human detail that the book leaves out: the many local poets and patrons who hosted Bashō, the linked-verse sessions held at almost every stop, and the practical arrangements of lodging and letters of introduction. These show that the journey was in part a working tour by a haikai master meeting provincial students, not only a lonely pilgrimage, which is how the book presents it.

Textual criticism. The discovery of the Nakao manuscript in 1996 led to debate over whether it is truly in Bashō’s hand and how the different manuscripts relate to one another. Many scholars accept it as an autograph draft, though doubts have been raised, and the pasted-over corrections have become key evidence for reconstructing the stages of revision. Scholars also discuss when the work was completed and how far Soryū’s fair copy reflects Bashō’s final wishes.

Cultural memory. In Traces of Dreams (1998), Haruo Shirane argues that Bashō’s poetry must be understood as a dialogue with cultural memory: by visiting utamakura and alluding to classical texts, Bashō both honoured and renewed the poetic past, joining the elegant (ga) tradition of court poetry with the popular (zoku) language of haikai. This approach moved scholarship away from seeing Bashō as a solitary mystic.

Readings of particular poems. Even famous poems are debated. A well-known twentieth-century dispute concerned which species of cicada Bashō heard at Yamadera: the poet Saitō Mokichi argued for one species, the scholar Komiya Toyotaka for another, and field observation of the season was used to settle the matter. Such debates show how the poems are read against real places and natural history.

Myth and reception. Bashō was idealised in later centuries, and some attributions are false: the popular verse “Matsushima ya / aa Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya” is not by Bashō, who did not include a Matsushima poem of his own in the book. Studying how the work was edited, commented on and turned into a pilgrimage route is itself an important part of modern research.