7

九日九月

Basho’s and Issa’s inner relation to the idea of travel was essentially quite different. For Basho it was a discipline of renunciation—an exercise in solitutde—and the loneliness of the road expressed the fundamental loneliness of all human life. For Issa, on the contrary, the road was a link that bound him more closely to other human beings. The solitutde he experienced as a traveler only servied to remind him more strongly the happy home he had left behind. And it is characteristic of him that while on the road he should constantly be seeking a friend with whom to pass the night:

On January 13, I went to see the poet Charai, in the village of Naniwa in Kazahaya, which is seven miles beyond the village of Tsuchikuchi, but I was told he had died fifteen years before. The man who had succeeded Charai as the priest of Seimeiji temple did not allow me to spend even so much as a single night. I had come so many miles to see my old friend and now I did not know what to do As I wandered hopelessly on, I wrote:

Softly, softly

I stepped on the ground

But alas—everywhere

Water sprang up.

However, after a hundred steps of so, I came upon the house of the poet Goi, and there I was given a comfortable lodging. I wrote:

Under the soft moon

I sought

A good gate—

And I found one.

In brief, we may say that Basho became a traveler in order to leave the self behind and shake off the bonds of human attachment, whereas when Issa took to the road it merely strengthened and confirmed those that bound him in human love to the rest of mankind.

The Year of My Life: A Translation of Issa’s Oraga Haru. Nobuyuki Yuasi. “Introduction.” Second Edition University of California Press, Berkely: 1972. 7-8.