I Am Poor: Bashō’s Pursuit of Poetic Purity

Friday, 8 December 2023

It still seems like autumn outside, but by the traditional Japanese reckoning we are into winter now. This in mind, a verse Bashō wrote about 343 years ago comes to mind.

雪の朝独リ干鮭を噛み得タリ
yuki no ashita hitori karazake o kami e tari[1]

this snowy morn
by myself
chewing dried salmon
—Bashō
[2]

Snowy Farmyard in Yaizu by Tsuchiya Koitsu
Snowy Farmyard in Yaizu by Tsuchiya Koitsu

Dried salmon was an ordinary food, far from the luxury of the rich. Bashō is setting himself as a man of the common people, a place he was most comfortable. However, at the same time, he is also setting himself apart from the common people. Let’s look at how.

In a headnote to this haiku he tells us:

富家喰肌肉丈夫喫菜根. 予乏し
Fuka wa kiniku o kurai, jofu wa saikon o kissu. Yo wa toboshi.
Wealthy people eat fine meat, and ambitious young men eat roots. I am just poor. (or “I lack both”)

The reference to “roots” is a nod to a classic Chinese philosophical text called Saikontan (菜根譚, Caigentan in Chinese) which was very popular in Japan during the Edo era. Written by Kōjisei (Hong Yingming in Chinese), it is a book of aphorisms from Confucianism, Taoism, and Chan (Zen) Buddhism. It is still fairly popular to this day—I’ve seen it compared in popularity in Japan to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in the West.

One line from the book tells us that “A man who can get by on roots can achieve anything” (人常咬得菜根, 則百事可做). One can easily guess how people who aspired to great things might take this line literally and adopt the practice of chewing vegetable roots as a way to get there.

Bashō is having a bit of fun poking at both sides. He is denying both riches and ambition. He has no desire for either and prefers to be a poor poet; just as a monk sets all ambition and desire aside in their pursuit of the Buddha, Bashō does the same in is pursuit of poetic purity.

Snow is a kigo (season word) for late winter, roughly 1/6 – 2/3 on our current calendar, but the main kigo here is dried salmon which is a kigo for all winter. Back in the day, salmon would have their guts removed and then be hung to dry under the eaves of buildings and would be eaten all winter.


Licensed under Creative Commons by Yosi Oka

Published by David

Watching the world drift by, learning as I go, lost in Japan





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