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Members of WHC were invited, this year, to participate in the Oku-no-hosomichi kukai as part of the celebrations of the WHF2002/Basho Journey/Kamakura-Kyoto Options, held in Japan during the month of September. Nancy Stewart Smith's winning entry succinctly mirrors the spirit of Bashô as he passed through the northern rice fields...

rice planting girls
skirts tucked above their knees
move on mirrored fields

Nancy Stewart Smith

The art-image behind Nancy's haiku, above is of a famous, enshrined site, couched in rice paddies near the village of Ashino where the monk, Saigyô immortalized a certain willow in poetry. Bashô had stopped here especially to see the tree, soujourning awhile (more than a few moments) on his Oku-no-hosomichi. Alluding to Saigyô, he recorded in his diary:

When the girls had planted
A square of paddy-field
I stepped out of
The shade of a willow tree.

Since Bashô's time, the willow, now shading a mossy monument and stone lantern, is one of several replantings. Participants in WHC's Oku-no-hosomichi visited this station on the way to WHF2002, following Bashô's route from the bustling city of Tokyo to the mountainous Akita prefecture in the north. Surely some members must have often felt as did Bashô when he wrote:

...I had not been able to make as many poems as I wanted, partly because I had been absorbed in the wonders of the surrounding countryside and the recollections of ancient poets.

The wayfarer continues,

It was deplorable, however, to have passed the gate of Shirakawa without a single poem worth recording, so I wrote

The first poetic venture
I came across
The rice-planting songs
Of the far north.

It was important for haiku poets on such a pilgrimage to visit famous places, and to compose poems for each. Bashô's term, translated in the above haiku as "poetic venture", is furyu, meaning the refined taste and the lifestyle of a poet; and his poetic taste for rusticity was to be found in the poetry of the simple folksongs of the common people. As he traveled further, Bashô arrived in Shinobu to look upon the stone used to dye a cloth called shinobu-zuri. After telling the legend of the stone, he writes a verse full of reference and associations to the past through his experience in the present:

The busy hands
Of rice-planting girls,
Reminiscent somehow
Of the old dying technique.

While Bashô visited the rice fields during the planting season of 1689, the WHC poets of 2002 enjoyed the sites right at harvest-time, when fields were vivid with golden heads of rice bowed so heavy with fruit, many crops lay prostrate on the ground. While seasons come and go in their round cycle of time, their inherent timelessness is felt in these poems from past to present.

~ D.W. Bender

Quotes and Bashô's haiku translations are by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Bashô, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other sketches, Penguin Book, London, 1966.

(Digital art by D. W. Bender - image from visit to the site of Saigyo's willow near Ashino, Japan)