Nozarashi kikô in Buson's handwriting

I'm working on Buson jihitsu Nozarashi kikô emaki no kôsatsu - Sono honbun keitô joretsu o chûshin ni (Nozarashi kikô in Buson's handwriting - Centering on the compilation history of the main text) by Yayoshi Ken'ichi, in Kinsei bungei kô, No. 2, pp. 1-12, 1960.

It's very similar to what's in his book, but I just wanted to mention it because I love the article for being handwritten. I've posted an excerpt, left. How amazing, though. Considering these days typing on a keyboard itself seems a chore. I love the person's handwriting -- it's gorgeous. (Could it be done by Yayoshi himself? I only got a copy of the article itself by interlibrary loan. The next time I have a chance to go to Harvard-Yenching I'll check it out.)

He talks about the difficulty of identifying the owner of the piece, how he tried to track it down in the Itsuo Bijutsukan collection, where Sanseidô's Bashô kôza article by Professor Sugiura had claimed it was, and even asked Okada Rihei himself about it, but it turned out that this information was wrong. He also found another reference for it that was wrong, this time in a volume on Buson published by Heibonsha. So he ended up working from a reproduction published by Tôkyô Bijutsu sha. (A quick glance at recent photographs of the piece in books simply say it's owned by a "private collection." Mysterious!)

Haiku on Wall Street

This is from American poet Sharon Rousseau:

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As morning rain falls / protesters march toward Wall Street / tweeting photographs.

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American haiku is usually quite different from the kind I work on, but I found this one gave me something to think about today.

First Lines of Nozarashi kikô

From this, you can see why scholars call this opening section "sad." I think I have to take it a bit farther to see the "poetic madness" aspect.

千里に旅立て、路粮を包まず「三更月下無何に入」
と云けむ昔の人の杖にすがりて、
貞亨甲子秋八月、江上の破屋を出づる程、
風の声そぞろ寒気也。

野ざらしを心に風のしむ身かな　

秋十年却て江戸を指故郷

Without packing provisions for my thousand-league journey, I drew support from the words of the ancient sage who said, "Beneath the light of the moon at midnight, entering into a condition of neither having nor lacking anything..." and in the Eighth Month, in the autumn of the first year of the Jôkyô period, when I left my riverside home, the sound of the restless wind had a chilly feeling.

bleached bones in a field
and the piercing wind
in my heart

already I have passed
ten autumns in Edo
it's become my hometown

The first line alludes to a passage in Zhuangzi which notes that travelers can only start their packing three months in advance. The "ancient sage" is a Chinese Zen cleric called Yanxi Guangwen 偃溪廣聞 (1189～1263).

Ogata's Bashô Handbook and Barnhill's Version

1. I'm looking at a useful book I got on my most recent trip to Japan, Ogata's Bashô Handbook 芭蕉ハンドブック (Sanseidô, 2002, 2008). Here's its list of Bashô's journals, travel and otherwise:

Nozarashi kikô 野ざらし紀行 Bleached bones in a field travel journal
Kashima no ki かしまの記 Kashima record
Oi no kobumi　笈の小文 Rucksack journal
Sarashina nikki　更級日記 Sarashina journal
Oku no hosomichi　奥の細道 Narrow road to the interior
Saga nikki 嵯峨日記 Saga journal

There are also 6 other haibun 俳文 (haikai prose works), including Genjû-an no ki 幻住庵の記 (Record of the "Unreal Dwelling" Studio).

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2. The travel journals are all translated in a recent book by David Landis Barnhill, Bashô's Journey (SUNY Press, 2005). This is an excellent collection and the translations are of very high quality. It's directed more at people who are coming at the topic as "haiku," and Barnhill includes an introduction that situates the travel journals in the context that would be familiar to readers of American poetry. So it doesn't address a lot of the issues that a Japanese classical literature geek finds interesting.

But that's okay. Maybe I'll "write what I want to read" myself, as Alice Walker attributes to Toni Morrison.

Textual Variants of "Nozarashi kikô"

All of this Nozarashi kikô writing is related to the paper I'm working on for the upcoming Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. The paper is about Buson's version of the text, and in order to understand what Buson does with it I first have to have a good sense of what it is. One of the things that comes up when thinking about Buson's version is the variant of Nozarashi kikô that he uses, so let's think about the history of the text's compilation and publication.

Buson's version is based on a particular textual variant that is called 初懐紙本, hatsukaishibon, perhaps? or 初懐本, shokaihon? This looks like a version that emerged later in the chain of versions, and seems to be rather unlike the others in many important respects, such as where it ends and the sequence of some of the episodes.

Here is a list of the different versions. Scholars arrived at this typology by detailed analysis of tiny differences in the grammar and content. (Japanese literature scholars are masters at this kind of painstaking, precise work.) The typology below comes from Yayoshi Ken'ichi 弥吉菅一, Bashô Nozarashi kikô no kenkyû 芭蕉『野ざらし紀行』の研究 (1986).

Type 1. 菊本本 [天理本] (Jôkyô 2, 1685?)
Type 2. 泊船本 (Genroku 11, 1698)
Type 3. 孤屋本 (Jôkyô 3, 1686)
Type 4. 三康本 (Jôkyô 3-4, 1686-7)
Type 5. 初懐本 (Hôreki 11, 1761)

Buson's version is related to Type 5. It was copied by hand. Interestingly, a lot of these were actually woodblock printed.

(Chômu's version, which I hope to discuss in a later post, is related to the Hakusen ms., Type 2. It dates from An'ei 5, 1776))

Anyway, I'm making myself crazy with all of this, and I am going to stop trying to figure it out. The chart on page 512 on Yayoshi's book lists over 30 distinct versions of Nozarashi kikô published or compiled between 1685 and 1863, which is pretty amazing. (Some of these are conjectural, based on analysis of existing versions.) Of course the actual text is pretty short, and in most cases it was included as part of collections of Bashô's works.

However, I notice a couple of points:

• there's a slightly perceptible concentration of publication/compilation dates between 1761 - 1780 (7) which makes sense, considering these were the years of the Bashô Revival and
• between 1802 and 1853, there were 5 new versions; 4 were printed and 1 was hand-copied.
• some either are or seem to be reprints of earlier copies.

Nozarashi kikô map

If you click on the image, it will get a bit bigger. But don't bother -- it's not very pretty. If I have time and the inclination I'll redo it, but for now, it's just something to help me understand the geography better.

I tried to work out for myself the route that Bashô took by making a map. Now, I'm not the world's greatest cartographer, so this is primitive. However, it was very useful to try to map the route because it was easy to see how 1) Nozarashi kikô is fictionalized, because the sequence of places doesn't make sense as a single round-trip journey and 2) some versions of the text list the places in a slightly different order. I'm not even sure if the routes reflect actual roads in all cases. Books that include maps (like the one on which this is based, Uwagawa Shôsuke's Nozarashi kiko no kaishaku to hyôron) give the routes of the actual journeys Bashô took which became the basis for the text, from what I can see.

So, is it safe to conclude that Nozarashi kikô is not really the record of a journey, but more like a collection of verses and prose contexts related to them, put together because the places were nearby each other? That in addition to collating a thank-you volume for the benefit of his patrons, Bashô found the "travel journal" format useful for creating a collection of verses that reflected his experiments with fûga (poetic elegance)?

So much has been written about Bashô and I've read so little of it. Nozarashi kikô gets considerably less attention than Oku no hosomichi (Narrow road to the interior), so perhaps it's a good place to start.

Bashô's "Nozarashi kikô" route

This is a list of the main sites Bashô lists as having visited on the Bleached bones in a field journey. This reflects sections in annotated editions of the text more that anything strictly linked to a date or a verse; remember that the text itself is fictionalized so it's not possible to really be precise as one might with an actual itinerary.

Section (Japanese)	Section (English)
旅立ち	Departure, Edo
箱根	Hakone
富士川	Fujigawa River
大井川	Ôigawa River
小夜の中山	Sayo-no-nakayama
伊勢神宮	Ise Jingû
西行谷	Saigyô Valley
上野	Ueno (9th month)
竹内	Take-no-uchi
二上山 (当麻寺）	Futagami Taima Temple
吉野山	Yoshino
不破の関	Fuwa-no-seki
大垣	Ôgaki
桑名	Kuwana
熱田	Atsuta
名古屋	Nagoya
熱田	Atsuta (after returning from Nagoya)
伊賀上野	Ueno (returned home for the New Year
奈良	Nara
京都 （鳴滝、伏見）	Kyôto (Narutaki, Fushimi)
大津	Ôtsu
辛崎	Karasaki
水口	Minakuchi
熱田	Atsuta (3rd-4th month)
甲斐	Kai