Basho's Journey

Basho

1. Where and when does Basho start his travels?

Basho’s journey starts from a 17th Century Japanese city called Edo (present-day Tokyo). He had a cottage in a quiet, rural part of the city. He left Edo in the Spring season, “ It was the Twenty-seventh Day, almost the end of the Third Month.” (p. 2112)

2. Why does Basho start his travels?

Like many of us do, Basho was beginning to question the purpose of his existence. In comparison to what Dante was going through during the time he wrote the Inferno, Basho is having somewhat of a mid-life crisis.

“ I myself fell prey to wanderlust some years ago, desiring nothing better than to be a vagrant cloud scudding before the wind... But the year ended before I knew it... Bewitched by the god of restlessness, I lost my peace of mind; summoned by the spirits of the road, I felt unable to settle down to anything.”

Also, consider the political context surrounding Basho. He lives in an Imperialist society where material benefits are held on high and there is a huge gap between the social elite and the poor. At this point, Basho feels the world is out of balance. He sought an austere existence, lived in solitude and consecrated his life to poetry. The purpose of his travels was a “poetic devotion to nature.” Also, for Basho, this pilgrimage through nature was a search for inspiration from places made famous by literature and history. This is an interesting parallel to Montaigne... but Basho actually visited the places he read about in books. At the beginning, he makes his point clearly “travel is life.”

3. What is the role of the haiku poems in the text?

Basho takes these small little poems and places them throughout the text to tell the story of his travels. Each haiku tells the reader where Basho is, what he is doing and what is going on around him. Each poem expresses emotional/visual content of carefully chosen events.

Also, the structure of the haiku is entirely simplistic - this reflects Basho’s and Sora’s humble way of life. In only 17 sylla...

... middle of paper ...

...;The rain at Kehi Shrine shook him up a little bit. He is at the end of his long, hard journey empty handed. He lacks the fulfillment of achievement. It seems that he pushed onward because he knew there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Somehow, things didn’t exactly pan out the way he planned and here his at the end of the road, contemplating on the emptiness of the world...

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, something like Sunday evening blues...people go through this kind of feeling... you know just laying around all day, doing NOTHING... and then 6PM rolls around and you feel like a loser because you wasted the whole entire day... something like that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Basho is experiencing this inner hunger, a deep need for personal fulfillment... He describes the scene around him, but somehow it doesn’t have that “spark” to it... he is faced with the challenge of accepting his life as a regular human being... like Elizabeth said, he is not the moon...