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Paper short abstract

This paper surveys poetic activities during Bashō’s and Sora’s 1689 journey, drawing on Sora’s little-known travel records. By comparing these with Oku no Hosomichi, it reveals what was included or omitted and how linked-verse gatherings shaped the final literary work.

Paper long abstract

In 1689, Matsuo Bashō and his travel companion Kasai (Iwanami) Sora undertook a journey through the northeastern regions of Japan’s main island. The literary outcome of this journey, Oku no Hosomichi, composed several years later, is now regarded as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet, comparatively little is known about the other poetic and literary activities that occurred during this journey in collaboration with numerous local poets. These outputs – linked verse sequences, individual hokku (haiku), and short prose – survive in Sora’s travel records, anthologies, and private manuscripts. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of all such documented activities and events.

Two aspects will receive particular attention. First, after a short examination of the current research situation, I introduce Sora’s travel records, which remain largely unfamiliar in Western scholarship. While Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi is not a diary but a highly crafted work of fictionalized travel literature, Sora’s diary, which is embedded within his records, cannot be read as literature in the same sense. Nevertheless, these records preserve texts of considerable literary value, including linked verse sequences and independent hokku, which illuminate the compositional process behind Oku no Hosomichi. They raise critical questions about selection and omission: what was incorporated into the canonical text and what was deliberately left aside?

Second, I examine how these poetic activities are reflected within Oku no Hosomichi. The work occasionally presents clusters of three or four hokku, typically attributed to the narrator, with occasional contributions by “Kawai Sora” and, in one instance, another poet. However, the actual linked-verse gatherings only obliquely represented. A modern reading of the text on YouTube compresses a five-month journey into less than an hour, underscoring how much material was excluded. This discrepancy is especially striking in the long passage through Echigo, where Sora’s records attest to multiple poetic gatherings. By juxtaposing these records with Bashō’s text, this paper seeks to reconstruct the broader literary landscape of the 1689 journey and reassess its significance within the collaborative poetics of the Bashō school.