Oku no Hosomichi
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Oku no Hosomichi (Japanese: 奥の細道, meaning Narrow Road to Oku [the Deep North]) is a major work by Matsuo Bashō.
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. Travel in those days was, of course, very dangerous to one's health, but Bashō was committed to a kind of poetic ideal of wandering. He travelled for about 156 days all together, covering thousands of miles mostly on foot. Of all of Bashō's works, Oku no Hosomichi is 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, Sakata, Kisakata, and Etchu Province. He and Sora parted at Yamanaka, but at Ogaki he met up with few other of his disciples for a brief time before departing again to the shrine at Ise 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 is clear that some events were fabricated or reordered to make a better story, but the essential poetic truth remains.
External links
- Original Japanese text of Oku no Hosomichi (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/basho/MatOkun.html)
- Wikitravel: Narrow Road to the Deep North (http://wikitravel.org/en/article/Narrow_Road_to_the_Deep_North)