Humor in Bashô's Hokku: III

In the first article in this series, I wrote of Bashô’s childlike humor, in the second of a more "sophisticated" humor in which Bashô played with the tradition of Japanese poetry. Perhaps there is some significance to the fact that my examples in that second part came mainly from the mid 1680s, about the time when he most firmly established his own style, writing the famous "old pond" hokku, among others.

In this piece I would like to finish out the round with what I call "cosmic humor"—that is, humor that transcends time and place, person and culture. Of course, it may be difficult to write about anything without some cosmic humor in attendance, even if the author hurries on with brush, pencil, or keyboard oblivious to the oblivion that forms our basic context. But as Bashô matured, it seems to me, he grew more and more deeply aware of the essential silliness of existence, which he in those later years called "lightness" (karumi). Perhaps he foresaw on some poetical level uncertainty, quarks, indeterminacy, and the other deeper insights of modern physics, even 300-plus years ago.

In 1684, Bashô includes the following verse in his "Weather-Exposed Travel Diary" (Nozarashi kikô, 1684):

michinobe no
mukuge wa uma ni
kuwarekeri

the road-side
rose of sharon eaten up
by the horse

Expect to see the flowers there a moment ago? Your feast for the eyes has found another purpose.

Bashô’s mature attitude toward haikai seems to be telling us to "lighten up", as when he gives the following preface and opening verse to a haikai no renga composed near the end of his journey recorded in that same diary¹:

Straw hat was falling apart from the rains of the long journey; paper jacket wrinkled from storms endured here and there. A miserably exhausted, hopeless person, even I thought myself pathetic. Then, remembering that long ago a genius of mad songs plodded through this country, I offered:
kyôku kogarashi no mi wa Chikusai ni nitaru kana	Mad Verse: in withering winds how my body resembles that Chikusai

Makoto Ueda explains the background: "Chikusai is the name of a fictional quack doctor featured in a contemporary [humorous] story, Chikusai monogatari (The tale of Chikusai). He has lost all his patients due to his indulgence in comic poetry; impoverished, but still scribbling kyôka [mad waka], he manages to reach Nagoya on his way to Edo."² Ueda also translates some of the voluminous commentary on this verse, which was used as the opening stanza of the first haikai no renga in one of the major anthologies of the Bashô school, Winter Days (Fuyu no hi, which may also be translated Winter Sun).

Shûson Katô, one of the twentieth century’s greatest haiku poets and scholars of Bashô, notes that "From the fact that Bashô compared himself to Chikusai, we can surmise that he was relaxed enough to look at himself objectively. We can see a faint smile forming on his face as he made the comparison."³ A humbled antihero of contemporary popular fiction becomes the mirror in which Bashô humorously depicts himself.

Nôichi Imoto, about whom more later, says "To the local poets whom he met for the first time, Bashô introduced himself as a person no better than Chikusai. [Thus] he asserted the principle of fûkyô."⁴ According to Ueda, this fûkyô is "‘Madness’ characteristic of the mind of a poet or artist. [One] dedicated to poetry or art is considered ‘mad’ in the sense that he is undisturbed by the worldly concerns of an ordinary—‘sane’—person."⁵

One of Imoto’s younger colleagues, Nobuo Hori, calls this verse a "humble greeting to the poets in Nagoya", but "At the same time, it was his way of inviting them to enter and enjoy the world of fûkyô with him. . . . Chikusai has the transparent purity that only a fictional character can have, and that quality makes sure that the spirit of fûkyô in this poem is pure."⁶ Here I cannot help thinking of Cervantes's Don Quixote, the ultimately pure fictional character. But Bashô’s purity is greater, for he is not deluded about who and what he is.

So we can appreciate the inner wry smile as Bashô sees himself in the guise of a fictional antihero and asserts his own madness in poesy, as well as the warmth as he invites the rest of the poets gathered to meet him for the first time to join him in this uncommon madness we call art. Here Bashô reaches beyond the humorous plays on the classics of the Teimon poets with whom he was originally allied. Here he moves into the world of hokku richly layered with personal, literary, and social meanings that transcend any single interpretation.

This shift in Bashô’s poetics coincides with the journey that forms the basis of the first of his major travel diaries. Though he was no stranger to travel, this journey also begins his life as a renowned traveling poet, reaching out to and gathering new students all over Japan as he visits first one region, then another. By the time he reaches Nagoya, he has also transcended the bleak meditation on death that haunts the beginning of "Weather-Exposed Travel Diary". He snaps out of his personal monodrama, sees it for the comic self-indulgence it is, and addresses the world with a grin. But this is not the superficial grin of the school-boy comedian. Rather, this grin pervades the works of the mature poet, mixing with many other emotions to create the great multivalent hokku of his final decade.

We do not have a great deal of information on Bashô’s ideal of "lightness"⁷, but there is one poem which he said exemplified lightness, his own verse of 1690:

ki no moto ni
shiru mo namasu mo
sakura kana

under the trees
soup and fish salad too—
cherry blossoms

Rather than trying to express the beauty of the cherry blossoms, Bashô sets the scene of the picnic, where people are happily slurping soup and chewing chunks of pickled fish and vegetables. "This is how it is" the poet says, and loves it, not just the beautiful blossoms, but the people satisfying their bodily hunger in the midst of that beauty.

On lightness, we might also look at this seemingly "heavy" poem of later the same year:

yagate shinu
keshiki wa miezu
semi no koe

soon to die
they show no sign of it:
the cries of cicadas

Cicadas soon will die, yet they cry as if there were no tomorrow. And we, poem-singers or not, must also look forward too soon to a similar fate. Surely, there’s some humor here, in that uncomfortable pairing of destinies. Yet there is no sorrowing here, and the tone of this hokku has prompted one of Japan’s greatest students of Bashô—a fine poet himself—to speak of this poem in these words:

Undeniably this is a philosophical poem on the mutability of life, but I think it also contains the poet’s irritation at the noisy screech of the cicadas, tempting him to cry out to them, "You’re going to die soon!"⁸

So says Nôichi Imoto, who was one of the editors of the Complete Works of Bashô (Bashô Zenshû) and the editor of the Collected Treatises on Haikai (Haironshû), both published in the 1960s, and who continues to contribute scholarly works and his own poems to the haiku world today. Perhaps he is right; Bashô may well have composed this verse in the mood of someone who would like some peace and quiet. In one collection the poem appears with a brief preface, "Transience is swift" (mujô jinsoku), which Makoto Ueda aptly translates as "Death strikes quickly."⁹ While this has a sententious ring to it, it also sounds like one who grins at the vengeance of time. Perhaps Bashô liked the poem for the way it expressed his transient feelings at that moment, as well as its deeper meanings.

This is part of the point of the high art of haikai, as Bashô came to practice it. And thus he practiced it right up to the end. Think of the verse commonly considered his death verse (jisei):

tabi ni yande
yume wa kareno o
kakemeguru

ill on a journey
my dreams run around
withered fields

This poem, with its verb usually translated as something like "go wandering", was the last wholly new poem that Bashô wrote, soon after midnight about three and a half days before he died. It may be that he indeed expected this poem to be his last, though he lingered on a few days.

Much has been said about the solemnity in this poem. The following comment, by Meisetsu Naitô, one of Shiki’s earliest and staunchest supporters, is typical:

The poem well describes the lonely, helpless feeling of a man who has fallen ill during a journey.¹⁰

Nôichi Imoto, that usually most level-headed of Bashô’s "interpreters", even seems at first to chide Bashô a bit in his assessment of this poem:

This is not a poem that expresses an enlightened mind. There is a dash of bitter sorrow as well as the sound of one gasping for breath. This is an unadorned, honest, truthful poem.¹¹

But when I consider the etymology of Bashô’s compound verb, I have to come to a different conclusion. For the two verbs of which this is made are kakeru, "to run" (also a homonym for "to break" and "to write" and "to cover" and "to bet" and "to begin"), and meguru, "to circle" or "to travel around". In addition to this etymology, it will be useful to know two more things about this nonce word, kakemeguru. First, it is not a common word in the Japanese language in any period. (Nor is either component a particularly common verbal prefix or suffix.) Second, while each of the homonyms indicated above for kakeru calls for the use of a different kanji (Sino-Japanese character), Bashô elects to write the first part of this compound verb in kana, a purely phonetic system that allows the full range of homonyms to come into play. (A half-dozen variations of this verse appear in print soon after Bashô’s death; all employ kana for the kake- part of this verb.)

So, I have to ask myself, was not Bashô a crafty delirious, fevered, sick, old poet when he packed all these meanings into the last word of his poem:

[my dreams] run around

[my dreams] cover [things] all around

[my dream] breaks [and scatters] around

[my illusion was to] bet on [traveling] all around

[my dream-like life has been devoted to] writing all around

[my dreams] were all [=nothing but] beginnings, everywhere

And then, of course, this "everywhere" that his dreams, in life and in death, are "running around" is this withered world of illusion. What could possibly be a bigger joke than this?

For many years, I was dissatisfied with this so-called "death-verse" of Bashô. But now taking a closer look at his marvelous word-crafting, I can accept it as his intended last poetic statement. How else to look at a life in this crazy world of shifting life and death blowing in the wind? As if to underline this view, Bashô in fact did write another poem the day after he wrote tabi ni yande; some scholars and poets believe that this truly last poem more accurately reflects the composed mind of the "saint of haiku" as he moved even closer to his end:

kiyotaki ya
nami ni chirikomu
aomatsuba

Clear Cascade . . .
scattering together into the waves
young pine needles

Why was this later poem not universally accepted as Bashô’s death verse? Because he is said to have called it a revision of a poem he had written earlier that summer, a poem that already existed in two versions, one of which goes thus:

kiyotaki ya
nami ni chiri naki
natsu no tsuki

Clear Cascade . . .
in the waves no speck
the summer moon

(The other version begins oigawa ya [The River Oi . . .]; scholars are divided over which version came first. The poem was apparently written where the smaller Kiyotaki meets the Oi.)

From the standpoint of craft, it is interesting to note that chiri, the noun I have translated as "speck" (and which means "dust" or "speck of dust"), though written in kanji, seems to have suggested to Bashô the homonymic verbal chiri-, which is written with a completely different kanji. (Bashô used the appropriate kanji in each version.)

I think we can all agree that Bashô’s final version of the poem is much superior to either of the earlier versions. The earlier versions present a three-part picture, three separate images, which do not quite come together. The later version operates in a purely psychological progression, first noting the location (with a vibrantly descriptive place name) and then following some action that resolves only as one focuses on those things in the water—what are they?—oh, young pine needles. The light blue-green needles of new growth from the tips of pine branches, so tender that some of them fall off in a light breeze, scattering down into the water. And the final "version" actually reverses the sense of the earlier ones, now seeing the clear water as including these small pine needles, no longer "without a speck".

Yes, however marvelous Bashô’s "dreams running around" verse may be, with its multiple meanings all bound in a singularly apt neologism, I think I will have to agree with Masahisa (Shinkû) Fukuda, master of the Milky Way Renku Club on Sado Island and professor of literature at Seikei University, that the last version of the Clear Cascade verse is in fact a new poem, and Bashô’s true final poetic statement.¹² How amusing this life, in which we flourish for just a little while, then let go, falling together with our fellows into that pure water that is life and death itself. And so, the river feeds the tree that puts forth the needles that flourish and then fall off into the river, in an endlessly renewing cycle. We are but specks in the river of life. How wonderful, how joyously laughable, to be a part of that.

Unless otherwise credited, the hokku and prefaces in this essay are based on the versions found in Ogino Kiyoshi and Ohtani Tokuzô, eds. Bashô Zenshû, vol 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shôten, 1962-63).

1 Preface and hokku found in Ohtani Tokuzô and Nakamura Shunjyô, eds. Bashô Kushû (Tokyo: Iwanami Shôten, 1962), p. 296.

2 Translated by Makoto Ueda, in Bashô and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 120.

3 Ibid., p. 121.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 427.

6 Ibid., p. 121.

7 In Dohô’s Sanzôshi, in Imoto Nôichi, ed. Haironshû in Renga ronshû haironshû (Tokyo: Iwanami Shôten, 1961), pp. 410-411.

8 Bashô and His Interpreters, p. 296.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 413.

11 Ibid., p. 414.

12 Professor Fukuda’s theory is set forth in his book Bashô no kokoro (Bashô’s Heart, Tokyo: Ashi Shobô, 1977).