Fragrance of rice
as we pass by—to the right,
Ariso Sea
We crossed Mount Unohana and Kurikara Valley at noon on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon and entered Kanazawa, where we took rooms at an inn with a merchant from Osaka, a Mr. Kasho, who was in town to attend memorial services for the haiku poet Issho, locally renowned for his verse and devotion to craft. The poet's elder brother served as host, the poet having died last winter. . . .
After supper, I set out for Fukui, five miles down the road, the way made difficult by falling dark. An old recluse named Tosai lived somewhere around here. More than ten years had passed since he came to visit me in Edo. Was he still alive? I was told he still lived near town, a small, weathered house just off the road, lost in tangles of gourdvines growing under cypress. I found the gate and knocked. A lonely-looking woman answered. "Where do you come from, honorable priest? The master has gone to visit friends." Probably his wife, she looked like she'd stepped right out of Genji.[145]
I found Tosai and stayed two days before deciding to leave to see the full moon at Tsuruga Harbor. Tosai, enthused, tied up his robes in his sash, and we set off with him serving as guide.
Mount Shirane faded behind us and Mount Hina began to appear. We crossed 35 Asamuzu Bridge and saw the legendary "reeds of Tamae" in bloom. We crossed Uguisu Barrier at Yuno-o Pass and passed by the ruins of Hiuchi Castle. On Returning Hill we heard the first wild geese of autumn. We arrived at Tsuruga Harbor on the evening of the fou[r]teenth day of the eighth moon. The harbor moonlight was marvelously bright.
I asked at the inn, "Will we have this view tomorrow night?" The innkeeper said, "Can't guarantee weather in Koshiji. It may be clear, but then again it may turn overcast. It may rain." We drank sake with the innkeeper, then paid a late visit to the Kei Myojin Shrine honoring the second-century Emperor Chuai. A great spirituality—moonlight in pines, white sands like a touch of frost. In ancient times Yugyo, the second high priest, himself cleared away the grounds, carried stones, and built drains. To this day, people carry sands to the shrine. "Yugyo-no-sunamochi," the innkeeper explained, "Yugyo's sand-bringing."
Transparent moonlight, just as it shone when Yugyo carried sand to the shrine
On the fifteenth, just as the innkeeper predicted, it rained:
A harvest moon, but
true North Country weather—
nothing to view
The sky cleared the morning of the sixteenth. I sailed to lro Beach a dozen miles 40 away and gathered several colorful shells with a Mr. Tenya, who provided a box lunch
and sake and even invited his servants. Tail winds got us there in a hurry. A few fishermen's shacks dotted the beach, and the tiny Hokke temple was disheveled. We drank tea and hot sake, lost in a sweeping sense of isolation as dusk came on.
Loneliness greater than Genji's Suma Beach: the shores of autumn
Wave after wave mixes tiny seashells with bush clover flowers
Tosai wrote a record of our afternoon and left it at the temple.
A disciple, Rotsu had come to Tsuruga to travel with me to Mino Province. We rode horses into the castle town of O gaki. Sora returned from Ise, joined by Etsujin, also riding a horse. We gathered at the home of Joko, a retired samurai. Lord Zensen, the Keikou men, and other friends arrived by day and night, all to welcome me as though I'd come back from the dead. A wealth of affection!
Still exhausted and weakened from my long journey, on the sixth day of the dark- 45 est month, I felt moved to visit Ise Shrine, where a twenty-one-year Rededication Ceremony was about to get underway. At the beach, in the boat, I wrote:
Clam ripped from its shell, I move on to Futami Bay: passing autumn.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How do the haiku verses complement or set off the prose narrative? Do you think that Basho is successful at distilling into poetry the experiences he describes in prose?
How does Basho invoke earlier poets? Why is it significant to him that some of the sites he visits on his journey were described in earlier classic poems?
Basho himself believed that linked verses—when one haiku verse follows another— were his most important contribution to the haiku form. How do linking verses compare to a single verse in representing the author's experience?
Why might Basho and Sora have travelled dressed as Buddhist priests? Does knowing this affect your understanding of the prose narrative?
In what way does the text use the physical journey of Basho and Sora as a metaphor for a spiritual journey? What role do the haiku verses play in this spiritual journey?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Basho's poetry is deeply infused with the Buddhist idea that everything in nature is connected to everything else. How does this understanding compare with Barry Commoner's ecological understanding of nature (p. 344)?
Does the narrative style of The Narrow Road to the Interior correspond to the ideal writing style that Lady Murasaki describes in "The Art of the Novel" (p. 248)? Do these two texts expound similar aesthetic ideals?
What elements of Basho's journey might Edmund Burke consider "sublime"? What things seem to fill Basho with awe?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Perhaps the most famous quotation from The Narrow Road of the Interior appears at the beginning: "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." Write a brief essay interpreting this line.
Choose one passage from The Narrow Road to the Interior that ends with a haiku and analyze its rhetorical function within the prose narrative. Examine what the haiku verse adds to the prose and how it changes the way that you understand Basho's experience.
Write a narrative in the style of The Narrow Road to the Interior—using prose and haiku—in which you describe a trip that you have taken recently.
joseph wright of derby
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
[1768]
PERHAPS MORE THAN any other painter of his day, Joseph Wright (1734-1797) made science the subject of art. Born in the English town of Derby, Wright studied in London with the well-known painter Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) before returning to his native town and adopting its name as part of his official signature. His paintings often centered around scientific and industrial contraptions that were unfamiliar to his audience, such as the "orrey," or model solar system, which is the subject of his 1766 painting A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrey. In his paintings, he often attempted to capture the transition from an unscientific worldview to a scientific one.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is one of Joseph Wright of Derby's most famous paintings and one of the most recognizable artistic images of the Scientific Revolution. In the painting, a scientist is using an air pump to create a vacuum in a small glass container holding a bird, which, deprived of oxygen, is going into convulsions. The crowd gathered for the experiment displays a range of reactions, from horror to intense interest to complete indifference.
The experiment does not seem to serve any valid scientific purpose. Though even before this time air pumps had been used by the English physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and others in important research, this experiment takes place not in a laboratory or another controlled environment that would allow it to yield useful data but in a private home, apparently for entertainment. The spectators are not students or colleagues of the scientist, and the exotic bird in the container—a cockatoo—is not well suited for this kind of experiment: it is far too rare and expensive to use as a research subject. The entire display seems designed as a scientific-themed sideshow with no real value for the production or dissemination of knowledge. Both the experiment and the reactions of the crowd work allegorically to capture a number of contradictory attitudes about science during the eighteenth century.