Related somewhat to the current theme, I would like to offer the following haiku from Matsuo Basho’s Oku_no_Hosomichi :

From Station (Chapter) 23, “Hiraizumi”

The transliterated original:

  natsukusa ya
  tsuwamonodomo go
  yume no ato

A biography of Basho has appeared previously (#802, “Haiku”); I’d instead like today to talk about Oku_no_Hosomichi and the context for this poem in particular.

Decades of brutal civil war had ended almost a century earlier at the decisive battle of Sekigahara; and the shogunate that Tokugawa Ieyasu established at Edo (now Tokyo) was firmly entrenched by the time Basho began writing the Oku_no_Hosomichi. Edo was fast becoming a great city by the end of the seventeenth century, but the lands surrounding were still relatively wild. It was the sights of the region of Tohoku in Northeastern Japan that Basho set out to explore in 1689. The three months he spent wandering through the mountains and valleys of Tohoku became the basis for Oku_no_Hosomichi, “Narrow Road to the Deep North”. This collection of Basho’s essays and haiku has become regarded as one of the great literary works of the Japanese language. One of the places Basho visited was Hiraizumi.

Hiraizumi was the setting in which, centuries earlier, one of the great heroic tragedies of Japanese history had its bitter end. Centuries before the battle at Sekigahara, a prior, equally brutal civil war was fought between the forces led by the Taira and the Minamoto clans. The stories of this time were collected in the epic Heike_Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), and include many of Japan’s most famous samurai legends. And among the great warriors on both sides, Minamoto Yoshitsune was regarded as one of the most brilliant and brave.

At the height of the battle of Ichi-no-Tani Yoshitsune and his cavalry charged like a storm straight down a previously-thought impassable cliff and broke the enemy; at the battle of Yashima, Yoshitsune led his men in a daring headlong assault across a sea-channel at low tide to drive his enemy literally into the ocean; and at the final sea battle at Dan no Ura, Yoshitsune crushed the Taira utterly, the last lords of the Taira throwing themselves into the sea to avoid capture. Yoshitsune’s bravery and skill won the civil war for the Minamoto. Yoshitsune’s reward was betrayal.

Yoshitsune’s lord, Yoritomo, had become increasingly paranoid that Yoshitsune’s prowess constituted a threat to Yoritomo’s own rule. Yoshitsune protested his loyalty to the Minamoto family and to Yoritomo himself in the famous “Koshigoe Letter”. But treason and slander won the day, and the brave Yoshitsune was forced to flee for his life. Pursued and hounded, Yoshitsune was finally cornered. Even Yoshitsune’s death was legendary: Yoshitsune calmly committed seppuku (samurai ritual suicide) in an interior room while his oldest friend, the giant warrior-monk Benkei (Japan’s “Little John”) single-handedly held the door against vastly outnumbering enemy troops. The place where Benkei and Yoshitsune made their final stand was Hiraizumi, and it was in this context that Basho composed a number of haiku, including the one above.

Basho is believed to have chosen the Japanese word ‘natsukusa’, in reference to the muggy, slimy, rank muck that summer’s oppressive humidity and heat turn the grasses of spring into, an appropriate vision, perhaps, of the chaos and treachery of war. By the time Basho visited Hiraizumi centuries later, those dank overgrown weeds were all that remained of the fortress in which Yoshitsune made his final stand. As Basho himself comments in the Oku_no_Hosomichi:

“The select band of loyal retainers who entrenched themselves here in this High Fort and fought so desperately - their glorious deeds lasted but a moment, and now this spot is overgrown with grass…We sat down upon our straw hats and wept, oblivious of the passing time.”

The sentiments Basho expresses in the Haiku have deep meaning, even (especially!) today. But for me, there is a deeper truth contained in the haiku and the greater story it is a part of. Yoshitsune’s betrayal was only made possible by the cowardice, greed, or perfidy of many petty lords and scheming officals who turned on Yoshitsune in order to benefit or protect their own positions. They are all forgotten. But even as the poets and storytellers –like Basho– mourned Yoshitsune’s death, in doing so they kept his memory alive, such that today almost all Japanese know Benkei and Yoshitsune as Europeans know Leonidas at Thermopylae; and in that sense, Benkei and Yoshitsune have become immortal. The dreams of the brave live on.

— Jeff