Snowball Fever

Here at high altitude in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, just over and up the snowcapped mountains from Kyoto - the old and sometimes snowy capital - even as three or more ice breakers are one by one being frozen into the Antarctic pack ice, the precipitation is falling steadily here on the mountainside today, as it has been since morning, the beautiful quieting whiteness delicately laying its soft, thick, ermine blanket over the countryside, festooning the trees and outlining the shapes of all the paddies in its... NOT! 

On January 8 it is NOT snowing, it is raining; it hasn't snowed yet this year, apart from a solo flake I think I saw one evening, which might have been a confused butterfly. But who ever said weather is fair? What’s worse, the pour is coming down as hard as if this were rainy season, which should have ended months ago; it’s even flooding in places, and if this were crisp dry snow it would be deep and way nicer, but noooo, it perverses to be wet, cold, rain and what can we say, we serial weather victims, what can we do about it and don’t give me that carbon footprint spiel if you don’t mind, it makes me want to throw a heavy snowball really hard, which those boat crews are probably doing a lot of in the Antarctic right now.   

Heart's Horizons

We selected some healthy looking, good-sized vines about a half-inch thick at the base where they rose from among the thick mountain bamboo to latch onto the trunks and lower branches of cedars and oaks, then lace their way into the upper reaches. I clipped the chosen vines near the ground (3 vines and a backup).

 Then we put on our strong gloves, grabbed hold of the end of each vine and pulled hard - 4, 6, even all 8 hands at a time - then pulled again, then again with a "Heave-ho," and again, leaning backward in the middle of the road, pulling hard, bending the low branches! Shaking the whole tree! Then bending high branches! Then pulling more slowly as the high vine began to come away, even bending the whole tree sometimes!

Working together, pulling another long vine down out of a big cedar or oak tree -- pulling harder and harder as slowly the whole vine surrendered, at last coming away until it was laying in the road and Trio had done that great thing, with the high tree, all the way up the tree and now they had to handle that 15-meter vine from high in those branches-- Kids LOVE to do really BIG things!

 Kaya, Mitsuki and Miasa were going to make Christmas wreaths.

A couple of weeks before, while we were doing some winter prep work out in the garden and surrounds, Mitsuki had said, mid-task, out of the blue - as the Trio seems to do these days - that she wanted to make a wreath. I asked her where that idea had come from. She answered "Christmas!" which answered my question well enough; one can't really expect grown-up-minded explanations from little girls, who live so much in their hearts.

 Since the Trio and I were finished enough with our prep labors I went and got the clippers, a saw, a big basket and 8 strong gloves, then we went down the inner road, where I know there are a lot of longstanding, well-developed vines of fujii (wild wisteria) and akebi (akebia trifoliata) among the trees and bamboo.

 Once the vines were down, the Trio trimmed them, coiled them, tied them with the tendrils and put them in the basket, along with shiny clusters of holly leaves that also grow by the road. They got some good evergreen branches too, plus some perfect pine cones from my pine cone stash in the shed.

Back home, they got the tree ornaments and some ribbon from the closets, then sat out on the deck with the scissors and all those bright things scattered around them. I showed them how to choose a length for the wreath size they wanted, how to coil the strong vine into a wreath size, how to fix it here and there along its length using the thinner tendrils, and that this was the way you could make baskets too - fujii vine is great for baskets - then I went upstairs for a while to do some editing and forgot about the time--

 When it was growing dark I came downstairs into a silent house, saw the Trio still outside working even in the the darkling cold, engrossed in the task of crafting their very first wreaths, absorbed in the art of it. I just stood there watching the design ideas flow, turned on the lights when it began to get too dark. The Trio went on working until they were content with their basic wreaths and went inside to fine-tune the decorations.

 Natural ways, natural tasks involving natural interests like the endlessness of seeds, branches and flowers, insects and animals - instead of only brief gadgetry - simply confirm that there is no substitute for the natural reaches of life, the wellspring of thoughts and imaginings that lead always onward, with no end but the heart’s horizons.

In that spirit, Happy Holidays to All.

Ancient Is the New Now

Big-shouldered typhoon, flooder, landslider and tornado generator Man-Yi stormed the night through the country, leaving big wet long wide footprints all over filled with trees, cars, roofs, rivers, sheet metal and mountainsides.

At about 4 am on Monday I'd been sleeping to the roar of the heavy rain (up to 8 cm (> 3 inches) an hour!) that had been falling for, oh, the past couple months, seemed like - it was becoming the normal ambient sound - so I didn't really notice unless it stopped, then suddenly in utter dark the first big shoulder hit the side of the house. I lay there wondering if the walls and roof could withstand much more of that, then the wind blew harder and I pictured the outside, what might be flying around out there, sounded like a slow-motion train derailment, metal somewhere in the din doing loud wind-torquing back and forth-- later learned it was the demolished neighbor cabin roof.

In the spitty gusty morning our trees are raggy leaved, what's left of them; large-branch loss from cherry and chestnut, couple of trees fell on a cabin below us, half-rubbling it, a bigger tree fell on the roadside, looked like it had been mauled by a giant tiger. The slavering, growling beast removed roofs, tossed some buildings stopped the trains too, of course. During the daystorm, against the blur out the window I watched our old chestnut tree shimmying and shaking itself apart, out front the high old cedar tree, trunk a meter around, was rockin in the wind like at a Stones concert as the weeping cherry did a whole different rubbery dance, the house rocking and shuddering at the serial impacts of giant windshoulders as the rooftiles rang like fine marimbas up there.

On TV, while we had it, the rampaging Yodo River in central Kyoto was higher than I've ever seen it, lashing at the splendid old bridge in Arashiyama, and I realized that that the famed and lovely stone walk along the river's banks beside Ponto-cho, like the supporting poles of the striking riverside restaurant platforms, aren't there just to be pretty-- they are of ancient necessity, as long ago folks here learned from experience over millennia, and again this week.

Seems the earth is increasingly revisiting its old ways, as though asserting its authority, shrugging off carbon footprints, ramping up earthquakes and beefing up the tsunami department, reviving ancient weather patterns, droughts, floods, wildfires, volcanoes coming back around again for longer, fiercer times, tweaking the DNA spectrum to give us all new challenges, as we begin to relearn (or not) the truth of long-ago solutions, as ancient becomes the new now, testing once more whether and what we can overcome, that we may move on...

You Talkinna Me??

This morning I was out doing the usual early Saturday round of little chores that build up during the week. I'd earlier scattered the kitchen refuse atop the compost pile - now nearbelow the cherry tree - and was bucketing the last of the wood stove ash from the ash heap to scatter along the feet of the biwa (loquat) and natsume (jujube) trees, the blueberry bushes and the mountain azaleas that line the inner road, then to sprinkle the last of it all atop this morning's compost. 

The bucket was heavy with damp ash; I was just passing head down beneath the cherry tree when a blast of raucous sound from above made me look up. There in the branchy shadows blustered Mr. Crow, who owns this turf. Japanese crows can be uncomfortably loud even from a hundred meters away, but Mr. Crow was right there, yawping in my face. He wasn't flying away, as he normally would have done from this sudden proximity; he was staying put, hopping mad on a low branch: I had entered his dark presence just as he was planning his daily breakfast selection from the compost buffet, freshly laid out for him below. There was beaksome orange peel, onion skins,  tomato trimmings, cabbage core, tea leaves, broccoli stems, eggshells, you name it, all interlayered for Crow delight, what a feast it would be-- then I blundered into the picture and he became the essence of umbrage.  

I just stood there staring at him; he just hopped there, flaring and glaring. Then he raised his head and let out another blast, whoa loud under that canopy of leaves. Crow had never confronted me directly in this way, or this close up; only a couple of meters separated us. This was a bit too near even for my taste. I stared at him some more. He tilted his head and fixed me with his blackest eye: was I gonna get the hell out of his face or what.

For me, the next move was clear. I'd been waiting a long time-- about 35 years, actually. "You talkinna me??" I said, in my best Nooyawkese. He looked dumbfounded. "You talkinna me??" louder this time, more ominous, more threatening, half a step forward, just like De Niro, except this was for real. The big crow beak hung open in dark disbelief, like he could not believe his ears; like he'd seen that movie too! And I was using that very trope, out here in the -- semiwild, which was Crow's alone! What was Crow culture, then, if this was also an element of the human... whatever?

I seemed to sense a deep rift in the crow cosmos; a psychic shock wave passed through me. Crow looked here and there to his heavens for affirmation, as though he'd just read all of Nietzsche or its corvine equivalent. He gave a little croak upward. Forget about the select breakfast buffet. Human and Crow had just had a cultural exchange. We had crossed a line; there had been a merging of artistic elements. If this got out, things would ever be the same. 

The question now was, would Crow tell the others, or would he keep this bright secret for his own? Mumbling to himself, he flew off into the upmountain forest, likely to a distant higher branch of contemplation where he could be most alone-- as though he had to think about it. I'm sure he'll keep it all to himself, like that whole thick slice of bread he got not long ago. He'll never share this historic experience with another crow; crows don't do such things. 

But humans do.     

NOBUNAGA'S CASTLE

Went on Sunday to a mountain across the Lake to check out Oda Nobunaga's Azuchi castle digs, he wasn't there, hasn't been for several centuries now, nothing left on that mountaintop but huge stone foundations that cast the eye into high fortifications and the mind into standing guard outdoors in high twisting corridors of stone on savage winter nights alert in the dark of long before electricity, listening through the howl of the wind for sounds of conspirators edging up through tilted blackness, and only three years after all that magnificence was built, Oda made his biggest mistake, got cornered at a lowdown temple near Kyoto's Gion district (still a pleasure center today), and slit his own belly rather than be captured by an upstart, and the very next day the plotters burned those brand-new golden towers, those treasure walls down to the bare rough stones I saw on Sunday, overlooking vast holdings that belong to no one after all, is what the ruin says, and only ten days later Hideyoshi carried out an amazing forced march and sent the surprised plotters themselves to where Oda and his fabulous dream-filled castle had gone, and there 400 years later was I, standing on a post stone 30 meters below where Oda's candle-lit tower room had risen into the night with its painted walls, broad doors open to the vastness beneath the stars, no one there today but some elderly visitors stumbling to the top of what's left of the foundation to exclaim on the view from here, in fact one can see much much farther in so many ways from such places as this, royal chambers in the air where once were trysts and plottings now repossessed by the crowns of trees, the fights of crows and how fickle is power, as one's boot fits the wear in the time-tilted grand steps of stone a nation once climbed, in obeisance now as far from here as Nobunaga is...

ON LITTLE PINE BEACH

On Wednesday afternoon I took the beach-hungry beasties to our favorite secret beach, called by us Little Pine Beach, where on that ultrafine calm blue feather-clouded day the four of us got out of the car at the end of the long narrow road to the sand and water about a hundred meters or so away. When I turned around after getting my bag from the trunk, there in the far distance, arms raised in glee, were three tiny silhouettes already screamsplashing into the calm water...

I headed at a slow pace along the hundred meters or so to the beach, and when I was almost there remembered the beach mat in the trunk so turned and walked the hundred meters or so back to the car, got the mat and walked the hundred meters or so back to the beach where I realized that since school was in session, the season does not begin for about another month and there WAS NOBODY ELSE THERE WE HAD THE ENTIRE BEACH TO OURSELVES!

As I spread the mat amidst the joy I couldn't help but notice that beneath the many little pines were strewn about seven million pine cones, perfectly seasoned for starting fires in a woodstove, and there's only one household I know of around here that has any such need for pine cones. Everybody else uses nuclear power. Even better, these were free pine cones, with no meltdown.

But no way would (or could) I ask the girls out of the water when the swimming was perfect, even to gather also perfect pine cones just lying there waiting to be claimed by this lucky winner of the Pine Cone Lottery. No questions from the press, please. So I alone jumped right on the pine cones, but I only had my small back pack and a little plastic bag of the kind they make that holds maybe two pine cones, go figure. And it would rain before I could get back here on the weekend... What's that old saying about Lord, thy pine cone-covered beach is so vast etc.--

So I walked the hundred meters or so back to the car and was lucky to find some large plastic bags that we sometimes have in the car for wild vegs, fruits and herbs, walked the hundred or so meters back to the beach and commenced harvesting pine cones by ones twos and threes in the mango gold of the late afternoon as the girls splashed in the shallows and a powerboat roared aimlessly back and forth offshore, playing music of the kind that requires volume to offset some central emptiness, the roarers seeking in the midst of nature's beauty to somehow drown out her insistent presence in a dull version of fun that seeks distraction from what it will not see and does not want to understand. Unlike the girls, who in their bigger world were fashioning beach toys and houses from bamboo and sandpiles, having deep fun with water and earth-- no boat, no motor, no fuel, no blasting along the surface, no costly layers of separation from what is, bottom line, the ancient part of ourselves.

And so as the girls played in all that majesty I bent to my task about 500 times, wandering not bent/bent/not bent/bent along the shore beneath the pines, gathering only the finest cones - one becomes a pine cone gourmet of sorts after a few years - strewn there by the hurricane of a few days ago and normally soon raked away and burned by the beachkeepers, but the season hasn't begun so I was doing them something of a favor, and I must say I haven't seen such a fine crop of pine cones in all my years here, they were that golden amber of the fresh unweathered kind-- I got 8 big bulging bags full.

Later, after a cooling loll on the shady sand, as it approached time to leave - me wearing my white hemp pants, orange NYC t-shirt under white shirt w/long sleeves rolled and straw cowboy hat with the silver concho on the front - I gathered up three big bulging bags of pinecones in each hand and headed back the hundred meters or so to the car through the narrow alley. On the way, I passed three young Japanese males heading for the beach, who, upon beholding way out here in the middle of nowhere - japanopublicly speaking - a tall, long-white-haired elder gaijin striding along in white pants, white shirt, orange NYC tee and conchoed straw cowboy hat, carrying... three big bags full of pine cones in each hand... it changed their worldview somewhat.

When I walked back the hundred yards or so to the beach to get the other bags of pine cones and carry them the hundred yards or so back to the car before coming back the hundred yards or so to the beach to gather up the girls and their stuff and walk the hundred yards or so back to the car to head home, I saw the young men still standing there on the sunset beach like the enigma in a De Chirico painting with some loud rap music drifting over the water, puzzled to have come to a long beautiful beach empty but for three little girls, and additionally puzzled at major pine cone haulage by a strange foreigner from NYC... It was an odd day, I could sense them concluding at their unsought insight into the inspirational sources of the surrealists. It got even more surreal when I took the three little girls away with me.

Life can get interesting on Little Pine Beach.

TENNESSEE TRUFFLES?!

Hmmmm... wonder if I could grow truffles here in Shiga...

via

ISHIYAMA-DERA

Some photos from our recent visit to Ishiyama-dera, one of our favorite local places, posted on before...

THE　NANOPANGS OF　MONKEYLESSNESS

Long-time readers of this aging blog have perhaps begun to wonder where the hell all the monkeys have gone that this guy used to be ranting about all the time in re his vain attempts at growing onions and pumpkins and his annual shiitake harvest competition versus the quick-fingered simians etc., but whether said readers are wondering or not, I’m responding.

The fact of the matter is that I haven’t seen even one red-faced marauder around here for several months now, let alone a tribe; no ready stomping of a few dozen unshod feet in full ownership across my roof, no screechingly dull conversations from the trees before settling in around the house of a summer night, no hordes of the creatures huddling past on the winter road like refugees in fur coats. I admit to feeling some nanoanguish at their absence, though my full grasp of a delightful reality soon returns. As to the why of it, asking why there are no monkeys is like asking why I'm not sitting on a tack. One does not ponder the absence of a pain in the ass.

I have recently heard, however (I wasn’t asking), through the human grapevine, of a program being carried out by Shiga Prefecture, likely in response to loudening complaints from local pumpkin and onion raisers, to say nothing of the owners of those large tracts of shiitake logs just lying there unattended in the forest hereabouts in such fungal lasciviousness as to tempt even me, though I am not a full-time simian and I have a conscience, which works now and then, often at the wrong time.

Shiga Prefecture, as I was saying before thoughts of simian brigandage interrupted like a raid on my garden, has been carrying out some sort of Macaque control program - if it was sterilization I’d still see some monkeys around, though there wouldn’t be as much flirting in the trees (open-air simian love hotels). Or maybe the authorities read my blog and have developed a desimianization program involving work visas and commuter passes to remote fruit-picking jobs, although the monkeys around here have always raucously mocked the idea of national citizenship, let alone permanent residency. Commuting and full-time jobs forget it. Monkeys know nothing of permission.

I don’t know what Shiga Prefecture is doing with the monkeys exactly, but whatever they’re doing, it’s been effective. I’m already having thoughts about onion sets and pumpkin seeds, even grapes - and plums from my tree! - amid the broad spectrum of pleasant meditations that characterize monkeylessness.

KATSUBE HINOMATSURI

OPERATING THE LOBSTER

To be perfectly honest, I've never even thought of operating a giant lobster-- who can perceive all the possibilities that life lays out before us? But when I saw that giant lobster sitting there, my inner child leaped at the prospect. Regrettably though, my outer adult was too big to fit into the crustacean. But then I've never thought about not fitting into a lobster either, so the disappointment was small one.

I'm speaking of the new Nephropida across the water, in that special section of the fantastic Lake Biwa Museum called the "Discovery Room," where kids can go unattendedly wacko while their parents collapse nearby.

Yes, in the Discovery Room there is now a giant lobster you can physically go inside of and, while looking out through the lobster's mouth, manipulate the levers in there to operate the giant claws and snap up a praying mantis bigger than my forearm, or a 20-pound pollywog - both at once, if you can swing it - those dainties are dangling temptingly right out there in front of your big bulbous eyes, just within reach of those long heavily jointed chitinous arms extending out from your spiny red carapace, deep in the imaginary sea where so much of the world's fun resides.

When we brought the grandgirls to the Museum on Sunday, Kaya headed straight for the lobster and got in line behind all the boys until at last she got to direct the beast, caught a loach or two and snagged a pollywog, but soon burned out on the deeper potential of the thing - sure it's cool, said her look, but lobster interest fades - she wandered off; then each of the twins had a go at the lobster, with about the same result. Of course they're totally children at this point in their lives, with quite a while to go before they begin to acquire their own outer adults and the restrictions/perspective that affords; still, their actions were a surprise to both of me.

Yes, the girls quickly gave up wielding those giant spiked arms with the gnarly grabbing claws at the ends!! They wandered off, stuck their heads up inside the fish tank and stuff like that, made some yarn pictures on the yarn boards, but their hearts weren't in those activities any more than they had been in the lobster.

As far as I could tell, their hearts kept pretty much out of it until they found, over in a far corner, the traditional Japanese kitchen of a hundred years or so ago, where they could do trad stuff like "slice" "daikon" and other "vegetables" etc. with a "hocho" (traditional Japanese kitchen knife) and put them in a big iron pot over a "fire" in an old-fashioned irori (fireplace) to make a nabe (stew type meal) for "dinner," and you couldn't tear the girls away from there, they made dinner over and over, fascinated at slicing not-even-real radishes with a not-even-real hocho, one twin at the edge of the girl-crowded space complaining initially to Kasumi that there was no room in the kitchen: “Mama, there's no room for me to make a nabe!”

While gazing upon that comfortingly homish scene, my outer adult couldn't help but be aware of his inner child's powerful desire to sneak away from this girl stuff and work that lobster big time.

Museums are there to teach us of the amazing aspects there are to the world and to ourselves. The lesson here appears to be that somewhere back in the history of girls there is warmth, there is comfort, there is nurturing; whereas somewhere back in the history of boys there is a giant lobster.

Which gets harder to operate as we get older.

TO AND FROM TAROBO

Tarobo Shrine, from a distance

A distance, from Tarobo Shrine
(Taken from well beyond the small building
to the left in the upper photo)

EVERY REAL MOMENT

On Sunday took the goodies swimming again, this time across the lake at a secret beach right beyond the famously photographed nanohana garden (in this season full of sunflowers) on the lakeside roadway whence, I suspect, Hiroshige got some of his mountain views for Omi-Hakkei, a view that Basho in his local wanderings no doubt also stopped to admire.

Comfortably heedless of all this history, and of the splendid view, the trio spent their time in the water, with only rare breaks for food or drink, the slanting beams of the westering sun lighting the lake surface to a sparkling blue lain out before the green mountains, the vast paddy slope beside which we live clearly visible as a patch of imperial jade on the tree-dark green of the distant slopes, whose shape Hiroshige captured in his own way; it was less than 200 years ago, that distant human world, a split second to a mountain.

And there in the sun of much the same afternoon were the offspring of that world, three little sisters in their bright bathing suits in the light of the same setting sun, holding hands to make a ring in the gleaming water and singing songs to fill a New Yorker’s hungry heart. With even the slightest real look (real looks is all they have, at that age), they make me realize with a bit of mental lightning what I have known since birth but that often slips my attention: every real moment is beyond price.

SATOYAMA

Years ago on Japanese tv I saw a documentary by David Attenborough, called Satoyama, which centered on traditional village life in the reed country on the shores of Lake Biwa. We have spent much time visiting these and many similar places around the Lake, but I had no idea the entire documentary was available for viewing (in 6 parts) on YouTube.

I live in those mountains beyond the soaring hawk at the beginning.

At the beginning of the second part they make funazushi...

With thanks to Todd Lambert for the reminder...

Shishi (dog-lion)
guarding the gate

at Hachimangu Shrine
in Omihachiman

YAYOI PICNIC REMNANT

I had a piece of melon just the other day - the summer melons are starting to come in from the farms in Kyushu and further south - nothing like a sweet, cool slice of melon on a picnic.

The same was apparently true a couple thousand years ago here in Shiga Prefecture, just across Lake Biwa in fact, in the small neat and classy town of Moriyama - oddly with no website of its own - which as of yesterday holds the world's oldest melon record.

Moriyama stands on the site where some Yayoi villagers lived and just tossed away the melon rinds on their picnics - who cared in those days, knowing that all would be taken care of by nature - never suspecting the problem that garbage would one day become, or that this particular melon rind, so casually tossed away as Yayoi garbage, would in that very same one day be an archaeological treasure; that a couple of millennia hence a professional in the unknown and as yet unnecessary career field of archaeology would with her trowel painstakingly excavate the melon rind intact and the discovery would be worldwide news, the melon pictured on the inconceivable internet...

Like melons, picnics can turn out to be pretty historic.

ROSEMARY DOG

When we lived on the island of Ibiza in Spain, in an old finca out on a point of land overlooking Tagomago Island in the Mediterranean, wild rosemary grew everywhere around us - not quite a weed - among the almond, olive and carob trees, and the sheep didn't eat it, which was great. We used it for cooking of course, skewers too; I even made toothpicks, chopsticks and I Ching sticks out of it.

It never grew very large there, though, given the hard soil, heat and general dryness, but it was a constant companion of that place-- an old face, year round. So when we moved here to the mountain, one of the first things I put in the garden was a rosemary plant. It was a mere sprout at the time, but there's lots more water here, and with all that moisture and care the rosemary is now very large, more than twice the height it grew in Spain, and gangly as a result, its long older branches eventually reaching more along the ground than rising toward the sky, the way the new branches do before they too grow lengthy and stretch out along the earth.

About this time of year, when the rosemary is putting out all the new shoots on its branches, and the branches themselves are bouncy with moisture from the generous Spring rains, the entire plant takes on a floppy life of its own in the mountain wind; but whenever I take the hose and use the strong jet to wash away the tangles of spider webs and windblown leaves that about now begin to clog the scented branches, the rosemary reminds me of a big green sheepdog gallumping playfully in and out of the waterstream with its long wet green fur, away and toward what feels so good but is also fun to avoid. The new branchings are not yet woody, and the light silvery tint to their underleaves makes them seem all the more like big furry green sunbleached paws romping in fun with the hose on a warm day.

And when we're done with the hose bath, there's nothing cleaner, greener and loving drying itself in the breezy sun, than the rosemary dog.

RICE PADDY

Ready for planting.

SPIRITUAL RECHARGE

Bearers of one of the many sacred taiko (lit: big drum)
shouldered and drummed around the neighborhoods
of Omihachiman City during the Hachiman Matsuri (festival)
finally make it through Hachimangu Shrine gate at the end,
after many tries.

BASHO'S FINAL HAIKU Part II

It was no mystery that Basho, at the end of a life spent wandering in pursuit of plain and humble beauty, chose as his resting place this small, quiet temple that perfectly manifests the principle of sabi, its thatched roof the earth-brown color of Basho's robes. It is also no mystery given the view of the Lake this place afforded during Basho's time; he visited here often for poetry gatherings and no doubt steeped himself in its history.

The mystery for me was why Basho, after an entire life spent in pursuit of the ephemera of words, as a lover of beauty, as a recluse who lived much of his life in simple austere refinement, as one who named himself after a useless banana plant (growing in a clime too cold for it to bear fruit) and having visited the many beautiful places in Japan on his far wanderings, should in his will reveal the wish to have his grave placed beside that of Kiso Yoshinaka, a renowned, ambitious, vengeful warrior who had been slain by his Minamoto cousins on the spot where this temple, Gichuin (Gichu is another pronunciation of Kiso's name) was built to commemorate him, warrior star of the Heike Monogatari, centuries before Basho was born.

Basho himself was born to a lowly samurai family of Ueno and was reputedly a ninja (Iga-ueno was (and still is) the ninja ‘capital’ of Japan), but not much credence is placed in this theory, which might link Basho-as-samurai to Kiso-as-samurai. I think it's more likely, given Basho's skills, that in choosing this place he did the same thing he did in his poetry: he combined very disparate elements to great dissonantive effect. Much more evocative than a monotone grave in a forest somewhere.

So there they lie, side by side: the tragic, vainglorious, multiply betrayed warrior and the simple, reclusive wandering poet, in precincts dotted with many haiku-carved stones - placed there by Basho's students and admirers over the centuries - and the grave stone of Kiso's Kyoto mistress over there in the corner (she killed herself upon hearing Kiso had been slain; Kiso's wife was forced to marry into the victorious side of the Minamoto clan, later became a mendicant nun and returned to Nagano in her final days...

By choosing to reside in these simple grounds, Basho has created his final, unspoken and unending poem, evoked in the spirit of all who come to visit here and let the long silence tell the stories that lie quietly in this place...

***

Here's an English translation of Basho's "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" (Oku no Hosomichi).