Everything about Oku No Hosomichi totally explained
meaning "Narrow road to/of the interior", translated alternately as
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and
The Narrow Road to the Interior) is a major work by the
Japanese poet,
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694).
The text is written in the form of a
travel diary, and it was penned as he made an epic and dangerous journey on foot through feudal Japan. While the poetic work became seminal of its own account, the poet's travels in the text have since inspired many people to follow in his footsteps and trace his journey for themselves. In one of its most memorable passages, Bashō suggests that "every day is a journey, and the journey itself home."
Of
Oku no Hosomichi,
Miyazawa Kenji once suggested, "It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it".
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Plot
Oku no Hosomichi was written based on a journey taken by Bashō in the late spring of
1689. He and his traveling companion Sora departed from
Edo (modern-day
Tokyo) for the northerly interior region known as Oku, propelled mostly by a desire to see the places about which the old poets wrote. Specifically, he was emulating
Saigyō, whom Bashō praised as the greatest
waka poet; Bashō made a point of visiting all the sites mentioned in Saigyo's verse. Travel in those days was very dangerous, but Bashō was committed to a kind of poetic ideal of wandering. He traveled for about 156 days altogether, covering thousands of miles mostly on foot. Of all of Bashō's works, this is the best known.
The text is a mixture of
prose and
verse, with many references to
Confucius,
Saigyō, ancient Chinese poetry, and even
the Tale of the Heike. It manages to strike a delicate balance between all the elements to produce a powerful account. It is primarily a
travel account, and Bashō vividly relates the unique
poetic essence of each stop in his travels. Stops on his journey include the
Tokugawa shrine at
Nikkō, the
Shirakawa barrier, the islands of
Matsushima,
Hiraizumi,
Sakata,
Kisakata, and
Etchū. He and Sora parted at Yamanaka, but at
Ōgaki he briefly met up with a few of his other disciples before departing again to the
Ise Shrine and closing the account.
After his journey, he spent five years working and reworking the poems and prose of
Oku no Hosomichi before publishing it. Based on differences between draft versions of the account, Sora's diary, and the final version, it's clear that Bashō took a number of artistic liberties in the writing. An example of this is that in the
Senjūshu ("Selection of Tales") attributed to Saigyo, the narrator is passing through Eguchi when he's driven by a storm to seek shelter in the nearby cottage of a prostitute; this leads to an exchange of poems, after which he spends the night there. Basho similarly includes in
Oku no Hosomichi a tale of him having an exchange with prostitutes staying in the same inn, but Sora mentions nothing.
English translations
- Britton, Dorothy, trans. Haiku Journey: Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province. Kodansha, 1974.
- Corman, Cid, and Kamaike Susume, trans. Back Roads to Far Towns. Grossman, 1968.
- Hamill, Sam, trans. The Narrow Road to the Interior.
- Keene, Donald, trans. The Narrow Road to Oku.
- McCullough, Helen Craig, trans. The Narrow Road to the Interior.
- Miner, Earl, trans. In Japanese Poetic Diaries. University of California Press, 1976.
- Yuasa, Nobuyuki, trans. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Oku No Hosomichi'.
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