Bashō’s narrow road, re-imagined in ink and light
By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 24, 2025
In the spring of 1689, Matsuo Bashō set out from Edo with his inkstone and his disciple, walking north through Japan’s interior. This essay imagines the painter Ogata Kōrin at his side, brush catching what haiku left unsaid: the lantern’s glow, a fox’s mischief, the silence after sound.
The morning I left Edo, the sky was thick with petals. Cherry blossoms fell in sudden gusts, scattering across canals and clinging to the backs of merchants. Someone in the crowd said my name. “Bashō—the man of stillness.” The words felt like a shroud. Stillness was not peace. Stillness was suffocation.
I carried only a robe, a small pack, and my inkstone. I gave no notice, offered no farewell. A poet should know the difference between an entrance and an exit, and Edo was drowning in entrances—recitations in smoky salons, verses pinned to pillars, applause echoing in courtyards. To slip away silently was my only true poem.
Sora, my disciple, waited by the gate, his journal tied at his side. Beside him stood Ogata Kōrin, carrying brushes wrapped in cloth, a small box of pigments, and sheets of fine paper. He was famed for painting bold pines and cranes against gold, but he wanted to walk with us, to see if paint could keep pace with words.
“You walk for silence,” he said as we stepped into the road.
“And you?” I asked.
“I will paint the sound.”
A crow on a bare branch—
autumn evening.
Walking unstitched illusions. You cannot hurry rain. You cannot plead with a mountain. Each step was a reminder of smallness.
Oku—the interior—was more than geography. It was the hidden chamber within things. To walk north into deep country was to step into the interior of myself.
The road gave humility: a thin robe against spring wind, an empty belly by sundown, blistered feet in straw sandals. Hunger was not a lack but a space for the world to fill. Only when stripped of comfort could I hear the world breathe.
By the second month, rains thickened. Each evening Sora dried our sandals by the inn’s hearth, though by morning they were heavy again.
At a mountain temple, a monk struck the great bell. The sound swelled, then emptied into air.
“Not the ringing,” he whispered, “the silence after—that is the true temple.”
Kōrin ground his ink and left behind a circle fading into white paper. I looked at it and felt the hush expand. His first gift of the journey.
Pine shadow—
the road bends
to meet it.
Summer pressed down like a hand. Cicadas shrieked in the trees, their chorus burning itself away. At a roadside inn, a farmer’s wife handed me a bowl of barley and salt.
“Why walk in this heat?” she asked.
“To see what words cannot hold,” I said. She laughed, shaking her head.
That night, I listened to the cicadas outside the window. Kōrin painted their wings in silver strokes. Sora struggled to describe them, blotting his brush, sighing. Not every moment can be pinned to the page.
One afternoon, a girl chased dragonflies, sleeves spread like wings. She caught none, but her laughter rang sharper than capture. Kōrin caught her mid-flight in vermilion. He pressed the paper into Sora’s hands. “If you cannot hold it with words,” he said, “let color remind you.”
We reached Matsushima, where pine-covered islets scattered like jewels across the bay. Some places do not need words. Kōrin’s blues and greens glowed even at dusk.
That night, fireflies pressed against the paper walls of our hut, their glow brighter than the lamp. I set down my brush. Some nights call for silence more than lines.
Later, in a fishing village, I collapsed with fever. A fisherman’s wife placed cloths on my brow and whispered prayers to the sea.
When I woke, Kōrin held out a small painting of a lantern’s glow against dark waves. The flame was steadier than I had felt in days.
Lantern flickers—
the sea’s hush louder
than my pulse.
By August, the barley fields had turned gold. The harvest moon rose red above the stubble. Villagers poured sake and sang. A boy ran over with a cup. “Drink, master!”
“The moon is already enough,” I said.
Snow still lingered in the high passes. The mountain does not flatter. It does not care if a man is poet or beggar. It accepts only attention.
Winter gust—
even the inkstone
holds the wind.
Crossing a frozen river, I slipped. A peasant caught my arm. “Careful, master. The ice breaks without warning.”
“So does the self,” I said.
Even in silence, the self lingered like a shadow. I imagined my words drifting northward, reaching readers yet unborn. But the further I walked, the thinner that dream became. What immortality is there in syllables, when rivers change their course and mountains crumble?
In Edo, applause had filled the air like thunder. On the road, there was only silence. Silence wounds, but it also heals.
The answer came not in thunder but in a sparrow’s wing. Write not to endure, but to attend. Not for tomorrow, but for now.
Near a riverbank, a boy approached with a scroll of verses. “Master, how do I make my poems last?”
“Write what you see,” I said. “Then write what you feel when you see it. Then tear it up and walk.”
The boy bowed. Kōrin added, softly: “Or paint the emptiness left behind.”
River mist—
the boy’s scroll
left unopened.
In the mountains I met a man from the north whose dialect I could not follow. He pointed to the sky, then to the river, then to his chest. We shared tea in silence. I realized then that language is not the vessel, but the gesture. Poetry lives in the space between.
One morning, I watched a fox dart through a field, a rice ball clutched in its mouth. The farmer cursed, but I laughed. Even hunger has mischief. Kōrin’s brush caught the moment in quick ink.
Fox in the field—
the rice ball warmer
than the sun.
Toward the end of our walk, Sora counted the ri that remained. “Two thousand and more behind us,” he said. His journal pages were full of weather, distances, small observations.
“I counted shadows,” I told him. “I counted pauses.”
Kōrin smiled. “I painted both.”
At last, beneath a cedar, I placed the inkstone on my lap and listened. Snow weighed heavy on the branches. The air was sharp with winter. The wind moved through ridges and needles and into the hollow of the stone. For a moment it seemed the ink itself stirred.
I wrote one last haiku, not as conclusion but as surrender. The road has no end. Only pauses where breath gathers.
Wind in the cedar—
the inkstone deepens
into silence.
When these fragments later formed Oku no Hosomichi, I wondered what I had left behind. Not a record of steps, but a trace of listening. The form belonged not to me but to the rhythm of walking.
Kōrin returned to Edo with his scrolls. I with my scattered lines. Yet three small works stayed with me: the fading bell, the glowing lantern, the fox with his rice ball. They were his haiku in color, brief offerings to impermanence.
If others take their own narrow roads, let them not follow our footsteps but their own shadows. The road is never the same twice. Neither traveler nor mountain remains unchanged.
Perhaps one day, a traveler will walk with a pen of light, or a scroll made of glass. They will pause beneath a cedar, not knowing my name, not knowing Kōrin’s brush, but feeling the same hush. The road will whisper to them, as it did to us. And they will listen—not to the words, nor the colors, but to the breath between.
Digital ink—
the silence still.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI
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