This study will examine the experiences and discoveries of Matsuo Basho on his travels in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches to determine how those experiences enriched his poetry. Basho was, at the time he first set out on his several travels, in the midst of an intensely spiritual time of self-examination. He was not merely traveling for pleasure or distraction from life's worries. To the contrary, he was seeking the ultimate truths of life.
Accordingly, the discoveries Basho made on his travels were serious and profound lessons about himself and nature. Basho is not writing a travelogue, but rather a portrait of his spiritual reality as it exists at the moment of writing each particular poem.
What Basho discovers again and again on his travels is that the natural world and the spiritual reality of the human observer form a relationship and a unity which can be expressed in poetry. As Yuasa writes in his Introduction to the book, "Each locality
. . . is portrayed with a distinctive character all its own. . . Basho was in possession of a magical power to enter into 'the spirit of place'" (37).
It could also be fairly said that Basho has a magical power to enter into his own spiritual reality at any moment, to discover the relationship between his spirit and the spirit of the place, and to then express the result in a clear, simple, but powerfully mysterious poem.
In a sense it is misleading to try to name what Basho discovers which enriches his poetry, for in a very real sense the moment of discovery occurs as he creates the poem. It is not as if he makes a clear discovery about himself, or nature, or the relationship between the two, and then separately determines how to put that discovery into poetic language.
The discovery in which Basho is involved from poem to poem is a continuous process, including self-reflection, observations of nature, of the relationship between humanity a...