A Narrow Path, a Wide Breath. Northward—into the country, and into oneself

Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no hosomichi as a story about exhaustion with roles—and about what the road does to a person: from Edo to northern Japan, with haibun and hokku in the background. An essay on wonder, the discipline of walking, and impermanence (mujō).

The road…

Sometimes a person doesn’t need another piece of advice, another detailed plan, another fixed goal. They simply need to step out of the frame for a moment. Not a grand revolution—just a few steps that shift perspective: from playing a role to ordinary breathing, from building the future to attentiveness, from “I must” to “I go.” It is precisely at such a point that one meets Matsuo Bashō—the seventeenth-century poet-wanderer—and his „Oku no hosomichi”, that is, “The Narrow Road into the Interior / into oneself.” This is not a novel, not a guidebook, and not yet another anthology of short poems. It is haibun: a road journal written in prose interwoven with hokku (today we say: haiku)—like small, sharp lights—single sentences that can strike a person more deeply than a long lecture.

With Bashō, escape is not an escape from people—it is an escape from the version of oneself that people (often quite unconsciously) have pinned onto us. It is easy to mistake the world’s kindness for an obligation to be strong: when many people want something from us—even if they mean well—we begin to play a role: grateful, brave, reasonable, “together.” And burnout very often consists in this: the role eats the person from the inside. That is why, in „Oku no hosomichi”, a question returns so often that it sounds surprisingly modern: does wonder heal, or does it only intoxicate for a moment? Because intoxication can be relief too—only brief and suspect, if one returns from it even more thirsty.

On this journey we will look into places Japan remembers like quotations from classical poetry—uta-makura: Shirakawa, Matsushima, Kisakata, the austere stretches of the northern road, nights “under one roof,” where hierarchies weaken because everyone is only there for a moment, passing through. But this will not be merely a journey across a map. The most fascinating thing about „Oku no hosomichi” is that one can set out along this narrow road without being in Japan at all: walking, not planning; openness without judging; taking in the world without trying to control it. In the end each of us can ask: what is my Edo, and what is my Shirakawa? When was the last time I did something not in order to make it on time—but simply in order to be?

Bashō and his journey

Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉, 1644–1694) is often presented today as a solitary master of the short form, but in his own time he was above all a man of a milieu: a teacher, an organizer of poetry gatherings, and someone who could give ordinary moments the weight of meaning. He lived in the Tokugawa era, when Edo was growing in power and self-confidence, and urban culture pulsed with a rhythm of activity, ambition, undertakings, and social obligations. In that world poetry was not an addition to life—it was its social fabric: it created circles of pupils, master–disciple relationships, shared writing sessions, and sometimes simply gave a person language so as not to get lost in the daily bustle.

Here it is worth putting one linguistic matter in order right away, because it will return throughout the text. Today we most often say “Bashō’s haiku”—and in a readerly sense that is understandable. Historically, however, Bashō wrote hokku (発句), that is, the opening stanzas of linked-verse poetry (haikai no renga / renku), which over time began to function independently as well. The term “haiku” did not become widespread until the end of the nineteenth century, when Masaoka Shiki gave independent hokku a new name and granted them the status of a distinct genre. Therefore “Bashō’s haiku” is a convenient shorthand—but somewhat anachronistic. The fairest thing would be to say: “hokku (today customarily called haiku).”

Let us move, however, to the main subject of today’s essay: „Oku no hosomichi”.

The title „Oku no hosomichi” is written as:

奥の細道
(Oku no hosomichi)

Literally: “A narrow path (細道) into depth / interiority / distant reaches (奥) / but also: into the interior of the country.”

That word oku (奥) is the key. It means “inside,” “depth,” “that which lies farther from the world’s façade,” and at the same time “the distant interior of the country”—lands far from the center, harsher, less civilized, untamed. And “the narrow path” is not merely decorative: it suggests a road uncertain, fragile, sometimes barely visible, a little wild—one that demands vigilance, because you cannot walk it automatically. And precisely for that reason the title naturally opens into a psychological sense: it is not only a description of a route, but also a description of an inner motion—an entry into a less comfortable truth about oneself and the world.

Bashō begins „Oku no hosomichi” with a prose sentence that is like a quiet key to the whole expedition. It is not a poem, but the opening of the haibun—prose in which hokku will appear only later:

月日は百代の過客にして、行きかふ年もまた旅人なり。

(Tsuki hi wa hakudai no kakaku ni shite, yukikau toshi mo mata tabibito nari.)

“Months and days are travelers of a hundred generations, and the years that come and go are travelers too.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „奥の細道” („Oku no hosomichi”), prologue (序).

The text in the form known today was shaped after the journey of 1689 (the northern expedition with Kawai Sora), and the work was published posthumously.

What does this sentence say? That travel is not an exceptional event that begins “when we finally leave home.” Travel is a state of time, and time is a state of the human being. If one looks at it that way, the decision to set out ceases to be logistics. It becomes a psychological decision: consent to impermanence, to abandoning the role one has already grown into, and to entering a movement that promises no immediate reward. „Oku no hosomichi” thus begins before the famous landscapes appear, before place-names are spoken—it begins in one simple reversal of thought: it is not that we “go on a journey,” but that our whole life has been on the road from the start, and we only sometimes pretend it stands still.

Before we set out together with the Master, let us first explain what his work is. „Oku no hosomichi” is not a novel, nor a “diary” in today’s reportorial sense. As a genre it is haibun (俳文)—prose written in the spirit of haikai, rhythmic and concise, interwoven with hokku (発句), short poems that today are customarily called haiku.

Haibun joins the concreteness of the road (place names, meetings, fatigue, weather) with literary composition: the narrator does not record everything that happened; he selects scenes and images so as to create a coherent “path of meaning”—a journey through landscape, cultural memory, and one’s own state of mind. That is why „Oku no hosomichi” is at once a record of a trek and a work of art: the real route forms the backbone, but the language, the ellipses, and the overall arrangement are already conscious writerly work.

Sora: the journey begins in identity

In the story of „Oku no hosomichi” it is easy to stop at the map: here Edo, here Senju, here the north. Meanwhile the first, most important “border crossing” happens without geography—in the head and in the body. Bashō describes the morning of departure as though the world has not yet managed to wake: a misty dawn, pale outlines of Fuji, the flowers of Ueno and Yanaki, people gathering “since evening” to see him off by boat. And suddenly, in that delicate light, a sentence falls that sounds very ordinary and yet is like locking a door with a key: when they step ashore at Senju, “the thought of three thousand ri” chokes his chest, and the tears of farewells fall “toward the world of illusion.”

This beginning matters because it breaks the romantic cliché of the “great expedition.” The expedition begins with overload—with a person feeling too much at once. And it is not only fear of the road. It is something more human: an excess of meanings, expectations, bonds, kindness. Bashō is seen off as one sees off someone who may not return. In many accounts from the period the same image appears: visits from old friends and pupils, farewell texts, small gifts, paper bundles of money “for sandals,” a hat, socks, warm clothing, sake and snacks brought to the modest hut for a toast—until, finally, a sincere confession that he is “filled to overflowing” by all of it.

That word—overflowing—is an excellent point of departure. Because within the world’s kindness there is sometimes something ambiguous: if so many people came, if so many gave gifts, if so many admire him, then perhaps it “becomes” one’s duty to be strong, calm, grateful, appropriate. And yet a person—even a master, even one with rank, even one walking in the name of “the way”—still can simply be tired of the role assigned to him. Then travel is not an escape from people—it is an escape from the obligation to be someone for everyone at once.

In „Oku no hosomichi” itself Bashō closes this scene with a single hokku, written like the first brushstroke of a new life—“the beginning of the ya-tate,” the beginning of the road, the beginning of the story:

ゆく春や鳥啼魚の目は涙
(Yuku haru ya tori naki uo no me wa namida)

“Departing spring—
birds weep,
and fishes’ eyes brim with tears.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „奥の細道” („Oku no hosomichi”),
Senju, the day of departure from Edo
(27th day of the 3rd month of the lunar calendar, 1689).

It feels very lifelike and true: in the moment of parting everything seems softer, more susceptible to tears—even that which is normally expressionless and mute. Bashō does not say “I feel heavy”; instead he does something very Japanese: he slips the burden into the landscape, into spring, into birds, into fish—as if it were easier to confess one’s own fragility when one pours it out into the world.

Alongside the emotional farewells and tears, something else is happening: Bashō and Sora enter travel as one enters a role, not as one goes on holiday. Sora, who walks with Bashō as companion and helper, performs at the very beginning gestures with clear meaning: at dawn he shaves his head, puts on a dark garment resembling that of a pilgrim or monk (墨染, sumizome), and takes on a new name—in place of the secular “Sōgorō” he uses the Buddhist name Sōgo—宗悟 (Sora was his poetic sobriquet). Bashō notes this without embellishment, as a fact, but the meaning is plain: before they have gone far at all, Sora says with his body and appearance: “from today I am someone else; I cross the border of my former life.” In the realities of the Edo era such gestures were an intelligible social and religious signal: travel was a practice and a transformation, not only moving from place to place.

That gesture carried social and religious weight in the world of Edo. Travel was not a “vacation” that begins with putting work aside and buying a ticket. It was a life-practice: entering impermanence, uncertainty, the body exposed to cold and rain, and at the same time entering the role of a pilgrim—someone who does not go after “attractions,” but after transformation.

Sora summarizes his passage in one hokku that is at once a factual record and a metaphor:

そり捨て黒髮山に衣更
(Sorisutete Kurokami-yama ni koromogae)

“Having shaved my head—
on Mount Kurokami:
a changing of robes.”

— Kawai Sora (河合曾良), „奥の細道”, entry near Nikko / Kurokami-yama, 1689.

The word 衣更 (koromogae) literally means “changing clothing”—the seasonal custom of switching to summer garments—but here it works doubly: it is also a “changing of robes” in the sense of identity. From then on he is no longer an ordinary resident of Edo, no longer a household helper from Bashō’s neighborhood; he becomes someone who walks the road as though making a vow.

And here one sees an important difference between a “trip” and a “way.” A trip can be abandoned when it becomes uncomfortable; a way begins when there is no longer any turning back. Bashō shows this almost immediately—not in Senju, but in the next step: in the scene by the waterfall, where he “encloses himself” for a moment in the roar of water, as though he wanted, right at the start, to enter the rhythm of practice, not the rhythm of sightseeing:

しばらくは瀧に籠るや夏の初
(Shibaraku wa taki ni komoru ya ge no hajime)

“For a little while—
to take shelter within a waterfall.
The beginning of summer.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „奥の細道”,
around Nikko (Urami-no-taki), 1689.

This hokku is simple, almost austere, and promises no catharsis. It says only: for a moment, enter something larger than one’s own thoughts. And perhaps that is why it feels so contemporary. Burnout does not always announce itself with drama. More often it begins as a quiet desire—if only for a moment—to stop being “the one one has to be,” and become simply someone who is walking. In that sense Bashō’s first steps north are not a triumphant start. They are an honest, somewhat heavy—and therefore credible—beginning: farewells, gifts, kindness—and the decision to go out anyway, even though the heart is not light at all.

The journey gathers pace

The first dozen or so days of „Oku no hosomichi” contain something familiar to anyone who has ever tried to “begin again”: before one sees anything great, one has to somehow carry the small things—other people’s kindness, one’s own hesitation, the weight of the role left behind. Bashō does not pretend to be a hero here. As we have noted, in one place he admits outright that farewells, gifts, and toasts have left him “overflowing”—too many good intentions at once can weigh a person down rather than strengthen them.

From this we have already drawn the first lesson of the journey: it is easy to mistake the “world’s kindness” for an obligation to be strong. When many people want something from us—even if they mean well—we begin to play a role: grateful, brave, reasonable, “together.” And burnout very often consists precisely in this: the role eats the person from the inside. That is why, in „Oku no hosomichi”, escape is not an escape from people; it is an escape from that version of oneself that people (sometimes unconsciously) have pinned onto us.

In this period Bashō writes a verse that sounds like the caption beneath the first step of someone tired of the world—sober, slightly bitter, without melodrama:

旅人と我が名よばれん初しぐれ
(tabibito to waga na yobaren hatsu-shigure)

“I would like to be called a traveler—
in the first winter’s
passing shower.”

Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, 1689,
the beginning of the road from Edo (hokku opening the thread of wandering).

We see here the conscious choice of the simplest identity the road offers: a traveler. Not a master, not a teacher, not someone from whom form is expected. A traveler may be uncertain, may be wrong, may not have a plan for everything. Bashō adds in prose that the sky in the “godless month” is uncertain, and he himself—like a leaf in the wind—does not know where he is really headed. And again: this sounds like a description of someone who regains his humanity only when he stops pretending he has everything under control.

Further on, the trek gathers pace, but its meaning more and more clearly concentrates around one point: a threshold. Such a threshold in Japan’s literary geography is Shirakawa no seki (白河の関)—one of the “barriers,” sign-places that for centuries worked as a border between the “known world” and “the north,” that is, oku. It is also an uta-makura: a place that in culture is more than a point on a map—it is a bundle of associations, quotations, and old emotions.

In courtly tradition and classical tanka, Shirakawa was often a place of nostalgia: the poet stands at the border and thinks of the capital, of what he leaves behind. Bashō makes a subtle turn: he does not so much look back as learn to look differently—he seeks the beginning of fūryū (風流, “poetic elegance / sensitivity,” more on this here: Fūryū. Listening to How the World Blows.) not in salon melancholy, but in what is ordinary, working, close to the earth. Hence one of the most significant lines of the entire expedition—as though Bashō were saying: true poetry begins where a person hears life again:

風流の初めや奥の田植唄
(fūryū no hajime ya / oku no taue-uta)

“The beginning of fūryū:
a rice-planting song
in the deep interior.”

Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, 1689,
near Shirakawa / the northern route (hokku opening the thread on the “beginning of poetry”).

This is also a sentence about “being tired of the world” that needs no big words. When a person is burned out, they often stop responding to “canonical beauty”: postcard views, proper admirations, places one is supposed to praise. And then suddenly something returns—not through grand art, but through the rhythm of everyday life: through working hands, through song, through a simple image of “here and now.” With Bashō this is not anti-culture; it is a reset of sensitivity.

In the same key appears the image of hands at rice planting—and at once it collides with literary memory (another uta-makura, the legend of shinobu-zuri, dyeing patterns tangled like feelings). Bashō makes his characteristic move: an everyday act triggers an old story, but without theatricality—more like a flash:

早苗とる手もとや昔しのぶ摺
(sanae toru / temoto ya mukashi / shinobu-zuri)

“Hands pulling seedlings—
as though they touched the old
shinobu-zuri.”

- Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, 1689,
around Shinobu (hokku linked with the legend of dyeing cloth).

And only after these thresholds—after the overload of farewells, after the choice of the new identity “traveler,” after crossing into oku—can one understand why Matsushima is not merely a “point attraction.” It is a promise Bashō carried in his head even before leaving Edo (in letters he plans, among other things, a “blurred moon over Matsushima”).

Psychologically this matters: a person tired of the world often has a private Matsushima—an ideal image meant to heal them by the mere fact of existing.

But the maturity of this journey lies in the fact that Bashō does not sell the reader an easy fairy tale: “you will see beauty and you will recover.” Beauty for him is more of a test. Wonder can heal, but it can also act like a brief anesthetic: for a moment it lifts you, and then it leaves you with yourself again, to live on. That is why, before we go deeper into Matsushima, it is worth keeping this axis in mind already now: is wonder a practice, or only a break? If it is a practice, it does not consist in “wow,” but in quietly regaining the taste of the world—exactly as in the scene of the rice song: not spectacularly, but truly.

Matsushima

Matsushima was in this journey something more than a point on the route. Before Bashō saw it, he was already carrying it within him—like a promise that would come from afar and “repair” a person by the sight alone. That is how famous places work: they walk before us like a dream, and when we finally stand on the shore, reality must contend with what has been building for years in imagination.

In old Japan there was even a simple, beautiful word for this: uta-makura (歌枕). Literally, a “poetic pillow”—a place on which poetry “rests its head.” It is not an ordinary geographic name, but a place to which history and culture return over centuries: hearing “Shirakawa,” “Nikko,” “Matsushima,” one did not see only a map, but an entire bundle of associations, quotations, old journeys, legends, moods, and sometimes even ready-made little scenes. Uta-makura thus works like a psychological shortcut: it reduces the world’s chaos to a few sanctified images. And here lies the risk—because a shortcut may be convenient, but it can also take away freshness. One can arrive at a place and see not it, but one’s own idea of it.

For centuries Matsushima was precisely such a “shortcut of beauty”: a bay full of islets, pines, rocks, water, light. A place so beautiful it is almost suspicious—as though nature wanted to prove here that it can be “perfect.” Bashō enters this scenery fully aware of tradition and with the human need for wonder, but at the same time there is something very sober in him: he knows that wonder does not always heal. Sometimes it acts like a cup of sake: for a moment it seems to brighten, and then a person returns to themselves with an even greater emptiness.

And that is why Matsushima becomes a test. Not of beauty, but of what beauty does to a person. In „Oku no hosomichi” Bashō records in Matsushima a hokku that does not shout “ah!”—it cuts the view into small parts, as though he wanted to regain it anew, already without ready-made (other people’s) admiration:

島々や千々に砕けて夏の海
(Shima-jima ya chiji ni kudakete natsu no umi)

“Islands, islands—
shattered into a thousand fragments:
the sea of summer.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi” (奥の細道),
Matsushima, summer 1689.

This is very much Bashō’s style: not “pretty,” but “true.” He does not describe a postcard, but the world’s movement. The bay is not décor; it is something living, cracking, scattering, as if reality cannot bear too smooth a form. And yet in this “shattering into a thousand” there is something soothing: life does not have to be one grand narrative. It can be scattered moments, each with its own meaning, even if they do not arrange themselves into a simple plan.

In tradition another verse circulates, often given as “the Matsushima haiku,” famous like a proverb. It is worth knowing—but honestly: its authorship is disputed, and some scholars believe it is more a later anecdote than a secure Bashō record. Even so, it shows well the mechanism of being “overloaded with beauty”:

松島やああ松島や松島や
(Matsushima ya aa Matsushima ya Matsushima ya)

“Matsushima…
ah, Matsushima…
Matsushima…”

— tradition attributes it to Bashō;
often cited as “words without words” in the face of too much beauty.

If one takes this verse as legend, it works as a very human note: sometimes wonder does not produce an eloquent commentary; it simply takes speech away. And here the question appears, which is the heart of this scene: does wonder heal, or does it only intoxicate? Because intoxication too can be relief—but brief and suspect, if one returns from it even more thirsty.

Bashō does not flee into a simple answer. Instead he sets Matsushima against what came before it: the road through Michinoku, a road harsh, uneven, in essence uncomfortable. This matters because Michinoku in this journey is not only “the north.” It is a method. Five months of marching, largely on foot, with illness, without luxury, with lodgings depending on whether someone lets you in or not—all of this knocks a person out of the automatic mode in which they usually live. The city teaches how to protect oneself: to plan, to control, to predict. The road teaches the opposite: how to let go of control without falling apart.

In the Edo period that hardship had an additional meaning, because it fit the ethos of the pilgrim and the poet-wanderer. Bashō’s great predecessors—such as Saigyō—were remembered not only for poems, but for the fact that their life was a road: a choice of solitude, discomfort, risk, and sometimes also death in motion, “far from home.” In such a light “travel” ceases to be an addition to life. It becomes life purified: the fewer comforts, the fewer excuses; the fewer stimuli, the more truth about what remains in a person when decorations are removed.

And here “moments of practice” begin: moments in which spirituality is not a mood, but an act. Bashō’s road has its discipline, often very concrete and bodily: prayers, visits to temples, a daily rhythm subordinated to weather, seasons, and possibility. Elements of mountain ascetic practice appear as well—shugendō—which taught that one does not “think” one’s transformation; one passes through it: step, breath, cold, effort. Even such details as ashida—high clogs that lift the foot above mud—become, in this perspective, something more than footwear. They are a sign: you walk even though it is uncomfortable; you place your foot so as to survive the next stretch.

Contemporary psychology might say: the rhythm of walking, repetition, reduced stimuli, contact with what is real and repetitive (step–breath–road) can regulate a person more deeply than life in abstraction. It is a return to conditions in which the nervous system finally stops being constantly “on watch.”

And then Matsushima becomes something far more interesting: not a reward for hardship, but a test of whether hardship has shifted something inside a person. Because if the road has done its work, wonder need not be intoxication. It can be calm, clean seeing—without the compulsion to “get something out of it,” without the pressure to feel better at once.

Bashō does not promise salvation through beauty on this journey. He promises only that if one walks long enough, simply enough, attentively enough, then with time one’s capacity returns—to feel the world without strain. And that is already a lot—especially for someone who had previously been “overflowing” with other people’s expectations and his own role.

“Matsushima laughs, Kisakata suffers”

After Matsushima one might expect that from then on it will be only “beautiful.” That wonder, once triggered, will carry itself like light on a clear day. And yet the north has a different pedagogy: it offers a promise first, then introduces shadow—and it does so without malice, rather with that calm firmness of nature, which has no obligation to improve our mood.

When Bashō reaches Kisakata he sees something that resembles Matsushima: water, islets, pines, distant horizons. And yet his language changes at once. He writes one of the most penetrating juxtapositions in the entire trek: Matsushima has a “cheerful, laughing beauty,” while Kisakata carries “bitterness, grief, loneliness, and the sadness of a tormented soul.” This sentence matters not only as landscape description. It sounds like a psychological recognition: sometimes the same “beauty” does not heal, but reveals how cracked something inside a person is.

In Kisakata it rains. Wind from the sea carries sand, hides Mount Chōkai; the view is more inferred than seen. And in that rain Bashō composes a hokku that is, on one hand, an image, and on the other—almost a definition of quiet desiccation, that particular kind of fatigue:

象潟や雨に西施がねぶの花
(Kisakata ya ame ni Seishi ga nebu no hana)

“Kisakata—in the rain
even Xi Shi, like a nemu flower,
drowsy and dimmed.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, Kisakata (summer 1689).
A hokku from his stay by the lagoon, when rain and wind veiled the landscape.

There is something here that we would call a very contemporary experience: burnout need not look like despair. Sometimes it looks like quiet bitterness and dimming, as though the world’s inner “color” has faded. The nemu flower (often associated with “falling asleep,” with closing) shows a state in which beauty does not disappear, but loses its radiance, becomes depleted.

And then, when the weather finally clears, Kisakata reveals a second face: cool, transparent, cleansing. Bashō looks at the coastal shallows, at Shiogoshi (a narrow pass flooded by the tide), and at the cranes—and suddenly the same landscape that a moment ago was bitterness becomes breath:

汐越や鶴はぎぬれて海凉し
(Shiokoshi ya tsuru hagi nurete umi suzushi)

“Shiogoshi—
cranes with wet legs;
the sea is cool.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, near Shiogoshi by Kisakata (summer 1689).

A hokku after the rain, when air and water carried relief.

This is a very sober consolation: not “it is wonderful,” but “it is fresh.” Not a sudden transformation of life, but a physical sign of relief—wet legs of birds, the sea’s coolness. Sometimes that is exactly how a person returns to themselves: through a small bodily fact, through temperature, through air, through the moment they stop suffocating.

Kisakata also has another dimension, very Edo in spirit: the rhythm of festivals, local gatherings, food, small absurdities. Bashō weaves into this space a lightness too—and he does it in a surprisingly ordinary way. During a festival he can jot down a question that sounds like a smile after a heavy day:

象潟や料理何くふ神祭
(Kisakata ya ryōri nani kuu kami-matsuri)

“Kisakata—
what do they eat here
at the gods’ festival?”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”,

Kisakata, during a local festival

And this matters as well: a person tired of the world does not recover life only through grand landscapes. Sometimes it returns through a small curiosity—through the simple fact that one wants to know again what people eat, how they celebrate, how evening smells. These are the first signs that the inside is no longer dead—that the earlier depletion has not devoured the whole person.

Sakata and the “northern road”

After Kisakata comes Sakata—a port town, a place to pause, to catch one’s breath, and at the same time a point where the future begins to weigh. Bashō and Sora “stay for a few days,” as though body and mind were trying at last to catch a rhythm. Above them hang the clouds of the “Northern Road”—Hokuriku. And then a sentence appears that is so simple it is piercing: upon hearing of the enormous distance, their hearts “weaken.” There is no heroism here, only a human reaction to scale: “that much still”?

This is the moment when many of us would stop. Turn back. Invent a rational reason not to go on. And here one sees the difference between motivation and resolve. Motivation is a feeling—it comes, it disappears, it returns. Resolve is a choice that persists even when feelings do not help.

Bashō simply goes on. And as often with him, the most important sentence about this “we go anyway” does not take the form of a manifesto, but of an image. He rides a boat on Mogami-gawa, a river of currents and difficult passages, which at last flows into the sea near Sakata. Rain, heat, fatigue—everything mixes. And he writes another hokku:

暑き日を海に入れたり最上川
(Atsuki hi o umi ni iretari Mogami-gawa)

“A hot day—
poured into the sea
by Mogami-gawa.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”,
Mogami-gawa on the way toward Sakata (summer 1689).

This is a brilliantly simple image of resolve. The river does not ask whether it has strength. It does not look for motivation. It simply carries its “hot day” to the end. And in that simplicity there is comfort: sometimes you do not need great energy to go on. It is enough to carry what you have—step by step—until, at some point, it “falls into the sea,” that is, stops choking you.

And before they enter the most difficult stretches, Bashō allows himself one more small gesture, important in Edo: evening coolness viewed from a good place, deliberately, like a ritual of attentiveness. Not luxury—simple practice: to be able to sit and truly feel the air.

あつみ山やふくうらかけて夕すゞみ
(Atsumi-yama ya Fuku-ura kakete yūsuzumi)

“Mount Atsumi
and Fuku-ura Bay—
evening coolness.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”,
near the road toward Sakata (summer 1689).

Here the journey becomes—as though more mature? It is no longer about whether it will be beautiful. It is about whether one can go on when beauty does not help, and wonder is not medicine. Kisakata showed the language of bitterness—quiet dimming. Sakata shows something even harder: the moment when you have no strength, and yet you go. Not because you are “tough.” Only because you chose the way.

Encounters along the road

At a certain point in this trek something happens that could look like a marginal episode, and in reality is one of the most “therapeutic” scenes in all of „Oku no hosomichi”. Bashō and Sora stop for the night in a place where, under one roof, people from entirely different worlds meet: wandering monks and women who work on the road—courtesans, who also are “in travel,” though their travel carries a different weight and risk. And then Bashō does what is typical of him: he does not moralize, he does not describe sensation, he does not build drama. Instead he shows one simple experience of shared fate: everyone is here only for a moment, everyone under the same moon.

一つ家に遊女も寝たり萩と月
(Hitotsuya ni yūjo mo netari hagi to tsuki)

“In one house
even courtesans sleep—
and beside them: hagi shrubs and the moon.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”,

a stage of the northern road, 1689.

This hokku places “yūjo” (courtesans) beside hagi and the moon, as if to say: the world is not divided as neatly as our ego likes to see it. It is more fluid, beyond our judgments; it contains more. On the road hierarchies weaken. If we all sleep in the same room, then perhaps differences that in the city seemed fundamental are, in truth, roles—costumes worn under certain conditions.

And this is important precisely in the context of burnout. When a person is tired of the world, contempt or weariness with people comes easily: everyone seems like a “problem,” “noise,” “disappointment.” Bashō’s road works in the opposite direction. It dissolves differences and restores a simple, quiet community of fate: we are here only for a moment, each carries their burden, each is a little more defenseless than they look in daylight. This scene does not “fix the world.” It only, for a moment, sets it at the right scale.

Mujō as antidote, not a problem to solve

The deepest layer of this journey is not geographic, but existential: the slow domestication of the truth that everything is in motion. In the Japanese language of sensitivity one speaks of mujō (無常—more on this here:: Japanese children know "Hōjōki" by heart – but what can we learn from a monk of the 13th century?)—impermanence, transience, lack of permanence. It is easy to turn this into a “sad thought,” but with Bashō it works differently: impermanence is not tragedy, nor a flaw in reality. It is its fabric. And when a person stops fighting the fabric of the world, suffering becomes more “bearable”—it does not vanish, but it ceases to be something that must be treated as a personal failure.

Most powerfully one sees this in a place where history and violence have long since settled, and only what always remains is left: grass, wind, silence. Bashō stands on a field of former samurai glory and writes a sentence like the seal of the whole trek:

夏草や兵どもが夢の跡
(Natsukusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato)

“Summer grasses—
the trace of
warriors’ dreams.”

— Matsuo Bashō, „Oku no hosomichi”, Hiraizumi, 1689.

This hokku is the idea of mujō in miniature: even the greatest “plans,” even the greatest “I,” even the greatest “role”—all of it will one day become earth on which grass grows. And in this there is paradoxical relief: if transience is the law of the world, I do not have to keep life rigidly in the form I once promised myself. Burnout often arises precisely from that fight: that nothing must crack, that everything must be “as it was supposed to be,” that the image must match. Bashō shows a quieter way: instead of tightening the world, loosen your grip.

After making this trek with Bashō through attentive reading of „Oku no hosomichi”, one can honestly ask oneself about one’s “own oku.” The “narrow road into the interior” need not lead to northern Japan. It is enough: fewer stimuli, more walking; fewer opinions, more openness to the world; fewer roles, more simple contact with what is. This is not about escaping from people, nor about romantic solitude. It is about a moment in which one stops being a “function” and becomes oneself again—someone who walks, breathes, sees.

In the end there remains a practical question, simple and uncomfortable at once: what in our life is Edo, and what is Shirakawa? Where does automatism end, and where does the road begin—even if it is a very short road, very everyday, barely visible. Sometimes one conscious step beyond one’s own boundary is enough to recover something Bashō recovered over entire months: the capacity to live without the compulsion that everything must be permanent and under our control.

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