Notes from a Withered Field

Joso, call Kyorai. Last night, unable to close my eyes, I fell into thought and had Donshu write this down. Each of you, compose on it:

Fallen sick on a journey, my dreams roam over a withered field.

—From the Florist's Diary—

It was the afternoon of the twelfth day of the tenth month of Genroku 7. The sky, which for a while had blazed red with dawn, seemed as though it might, like yesterday, break again into a passing winter shower, and drew the waking eyes of the merchants of Osaka beyond the distant rows of tiled roofs. Yet there was no rain heavy enough even to mist the tips of the willows that had shed their fortunate leaves, and before long it became a cloudy yet faintly bright, quiet winter noon. Even the water of the river that seemed to flow without flowing between the closely packed townhouses had today lost its sheen in a dull haze, and even the scraps of green onion floating on it seemed, perhaps only in imagination, no longer coldly green. Still less did the people passing along the bank—the ones in round hoods, the ones in leather tabi—look as though they remembered they lived in a world of cutting winter winds; all of them walked on in a kind of absent hush. The colors of the shop curtains, the traffic of carts, the distant sound of shamisen from a puppet theater—everything stood guard over that faintly bright, quiet winter noon so still that even the dust lying on the bridge's giboshi finials did not stir....

At this time, in the back parlor of Hanaya Nizaemon's house in Minami-Kyutaro-cho before Mido Temple, Tosei of Basho-an, Matsuo Basho, revered in those days as the great master of haikai, was being tended by disciples gathered from every direction, and, making the fifty-first year of his life his final one, was quietly about to breathe his last, "as warmth dies out from buried embers." The hour was probably near the middle of the Monkey hour. In the large room, opened wide by removing the sliding partitions, a single thread of incense smoke rose beside his pillow. The fresh paper of the new shoji, which shut out the winter of the whole world just beyond the garden, was dim with shadow only here, and the place felt piercingly cold. With that shoji at his head, Basho lay in utter stillness. Closest to him, the physician Bokusetsu had his hand beneath the bedding, feeling the faint, intermittent pulse while knitting his gloomy brows. Crouched behind him, softly chanting the nembutsu without cease since some time ago, was surely the old servant Jirobei, who had accompanied his master from Iga. Beside Bokusetsu sat the large-framed, fleshy Kikaku, obvious to anyone at a glance, and with him Kyorai, dignified in bearing, his checked tsumugi robe swelling broadly at the breast and the shoulders of his kempo-patterned kimono standing straight, both intently watching their master's condition. Behind Kikaku sat the priestlike Joso, a rosary of bodhi-seed beads looped over his wrist, composed and proper; and Otsushu beside him, continually sniffling, was no doubt no longer able to restrain the grief rising inside him. Staring at that scene, straightening the sleeve of his old priest's robe and jutting out his unsociable chin, the short monkish figure was Izen-bo, seated shoulder to shoulder with Shiko, dark-skinned and stubborn-looking, across from Bokusetsu. The rest were only disciples, several of them, all hushed as though hardly daring to breathe, surrounding their master's bed to right and left, mourning the parting that death would make endless. Yet among them one alone was crouched in a corner of the room, prostrate flat against the tatami, letting out the sound of sobbing grief; that seemed to be Shoshu. Even that, however, was subdued by the chilly silence in the room, and did not rise loudly enough to disturb the faint scent of incense at the bedside.

A little earlier, in a voice roughened by phlegm and wheezing, Basho had given uncertain last words; after that he seemed to have fallen into a state of half-conscious stupor, his eyes left half open. His faintly pockmarked face had wasted until only the cheekbones stood out nakedly, and the lips enclosed in wrinkles had long since lost all color. Most painful of all was the look in his eyes: with a dim light floating in them, they seemed to gaze vainly into some far place, as if toward an endless cold sky beyond the rooftops. "Fallen sick on a journey, my dreams roam over a withered field." It may be that at this very moment, within that aimless stare, there drifted dreamlike the dusk of a vast, desolate field, just as he himself had written in his death poem three or four days before, with not so much as a trace of moonlight.

"Water."

At last Bokusetsu said this and quietly glanced back at Jirobei behind him. A bowl of water and a feather pick had already been prepared by the old servant. Nervously he set the two beside his master's pillow, then, as though remembering himself, hurried his lips again and began chanting the nembutsu with total devotion. In Jirobei's simple heart, raised in the countryside, there had probably taken root the firm conviction that whoever it might be, Basho or anyone else, if one were to be reborn in the other world, then one ought equally to rely on Amida's compassion.

For his part, in the instant of saying "Water," Bokusetsu again encountered his usual doubt whether he had truly done everything possible as a physician. But at once he seemed to steel himself and turned toward Kikaku beside him, giving a small signal in silence. In the hearts of all gathered around Basho's bed there flashed at that moment the taut sensation of now, at last. But together with that tension, there also passed through them a kind of relaxation—something like relief that what had to come had finally come. It is equally beyond dispute that this feeling did pass. Yet perhaps because this relief-like feeling was so subtle that no one present would willingly admit its existence, even Kikaku, the most realistic among them, when his eyes met Bokusetsu's by chance and he read the same feeling there, could not help but start. Hurriedly averting his gaze, he casually picked up the feather pick.

"Then, after you," he said politely to Kyorai beside him.

And dipping the feather tip into the water in the teacup, he edged forward on his thick knees and softly peered into his master's face at the brink of death. To tell the truth, before things had gone this far he had not been without a vague anticipation that taking leave of his master in this life would surely be a sorrowful thing. But when he now actually performed the rite of moistening the lips of the dying, his real feelings utterly betrayed that theatrical expectation and spread before him with chilling clarity. More than that, what surprised Kikaku most was that the ghastly figure of his master at death's door, wasted literally to skin and bone, roused in him such fierce disgust that he could hardly help turning away. No, to call it merely fierce would still not be expression enough. It was the most unbearable kind of revulsion, acting even physiologically, like some invisible poison. Had he at this moment, through a chance occasion, vented upon his master's sick body his aversion to all ugliness? Or for him, a hedonist devoted to the pleasures of life, was the fact of death symbolized there the most accursed of nature's threats? At any rate, feeling an indescribable repugnance before Basho's dying face, Kikaku, with scarcely any grief at all, brushed a streak of water across those thin, purplish lips and at once withdrew, his face tightening. To be sure, as he drew back a feeling like self-reproach did graze his mind for an instant, but the disgust he had felt moments before seems to have been too intense to heed such moral scruple.

The next to take up the feather pick after Kikaku was Kyorai, who had already seemed to lose his composure from the moment Bokusetsu gave the signal. Known in daily life for humility and reverence, he made a light bow to those present and slipped nearer to Basho's pillow. But when he looked upon the face of the old master of haikai lying there, sick and senseless, he could not help tasting a strange mingling of satisfaction and regret. In truth, that satisfaction and regret, inseparable as sunlight and shadow, had for the last four or five days continually disturbed his timid spirit. The reason was this: the moment he heard that his master was gravely ill, he had boarded a boat from Fushimi and, caring nothing for the lateness of the night, had come knocking at this florist's gate, and from then on had not neglected his master's care for a single day. Besides that, he had prevailed upon Shido to help arrange attendants; he had sent someone to Sumiyoshi Daimyojin to pray for recovery; he had consulted Hanaya Nizaemon and had him purchase furnishings and necessities. In almost everything, he alone had been the wheel on which all business turned. It is true that Kyorai had undertaken these things of his own accord, with no wish whatever to make anyone indebted to him. Yet his awareness that he had devoted his whole self to nursing his master inevitably sowed in the depths of his heart the seed of a great satisfaction. So long as that remained merely an unacknowledged satisfaction, spreading a warm feeling behind all his activity, he seems to have felt no constraint in any posture of life. Otherwise, under the light of the vigil lamp at night, he would not have discoursed at length with Shiko, citing the duty of filial piety and saying that serving his master was for him the same as serving a parent. But at that moment, flushed with his own zeal, when he caught the faint flash of a mocking smile across the ill-natured face of Shiko, he suddenly became aware that the harmony of his heart had been thrown out of tune. Then he discovered that the cause of the discord lay in the satisfaction he had only then noticed in himself, and in his own criticism of that satisfaction. While nursing a master critically ill, a master who might die tomorrow, was he worrying over the man's condition? No—he was idly looking upon his own labors with satisfied eyes. For a truthful man like Kyorai, this was surely a source of shame. From that time on, whatever he did, he naturally felt himself restrained to a certain degree by the conflict between this satisfaction and this remorse. Whenever, especially, he happened to see the hint of a smile in Shiko's eyes, the awareness of his own self-satisfaction became all the more distinct, and the result was that he felt the baseness of his nature more bitterly than ever. After days of this, now that he had come to the pillow to offer the water of farewell, it was no wonder, pitiable as it was, that a morally scrupulous man, and one whose nerves were unexpectedly delicate, should completely lose his composure before such contradiction in his heart. And so, when Kyorai took up the feather pick, his whole body grew oddly rigid, and even the white tip wet with water trembled repeatedly as it brushed Basho's lips; he was seized by an abnormal agitation. Fortunately, tears were welling at the same time upon his lashes, so the disciples who watched him—perhaps even the acid-tongued Shiko—must have taken all this agitation simply as the result of grief.

At length Kyorai, his shoulders still stiff beneath the kempo-patterned cloth, timidly returned to his place, and the feather pick was passed to Joso behind him. The sight of this usually solid, dependable man, modestly lowering his eyes, faintly reciting something under his breath as he quietly moistened his master's lips, must have appeared solemn to everyone who saw it. But into that solemn moment there suddenly broke from one corner of the room an uncanny sound of laughter. Or at least that is what it seemed for the instant. It was like a guffaw welling up from the bottom of the belly, dammed at the throat and lips, yet still unable to contain its own grotesque hilarity, bursting in broken jets from the nostrils. Needless to say, no one in such a place had actually been moved to laughter. The sound was in fact the sobbing grief that Shoshu, who had been weeping from before, had restrained and restrained until at last it burst from his chest. That wailing, of course, was tragic in the extreme. Perhaps not a few among the disciples present recalled their master's famous verse: "Even the grave mound stirs; my crying voice is the autumn wind." Yet Otsushu, himself on the verge of choking with tears, could not help feeling some discomfort at a certain exaggeration in this terrible lament—or, if that puts it too strongly, at the lack of willpower to restrain it. Still, the nature of that discomfort was probably intellectual through and through. Though his head told him no, his heart was instantly moved by the sound of Shoshu's grief, and before he knew it his eyes were full of tears. Yet even as he found Shoshu's sobbing distasteful, and even judged his own tears not entirely noble, nothing of that had changed from a moment before. And still the tears overflowed more and more. At last Otsushu, with both hands planted on his knees, involuntarily let out a choking sob himself. But at that moment he was not the only one who gave a sign of weeping. From among the disciples gathered at the foot of Basho's bed there began almost at once, overlapping one another, the subdued sound of people sniffling, vibrating through the clear and solemn air of the room.

Amid those deeply sorrowful sounds, Joso, the bodhi-seed rosary still looped about his wrist, quietly returned to his place as before, and after him Shiko, facing Kikaku and Kyorai, moved up toward the pillow. Yet Toka-bo, known for his sarcasm, did not seem to possess the delicate nerves that might be swept into the emotions around him and make him shed tears for nothing. As always, he wore on his dark face that same air of mocking other people, and as always he held himself at a curious slant, casually brushing water onto his master's lips. Even so, it is beyond dispute that he too felt something on this occasion. "Exposed in the open field, I feel the wind pierce my heart." Four or five days ago their master had repeatedly thanked them, saying, "I had thought I would die on grass for a bed and earth for a pillow; so to be able to fulfill my long-cherished wish of dying on such beautiful bedding as this is the happiest thing of all." But in truth, there was no great difference between the middle of a withered field and this back room of the florist's house. Even he himself, now moistening those lips, had until three or four days ago been concerned that the master had no death poem. Yesterday he had been planning to compile the master's hokku into a collection after his death. And until only a moment ago today, he had watched his master drawing ever nearer to death with an observing eye, as though somewhere in the process itself he took an interest. To push the irony one step further, it could not be denied that behind the way he watched there may even have been anticipated a passage in the record of this death that he himself would one day write. If that was so, then while attending at his master's death, what ruled his mind were such things as reputation before other schools, the interests of the disciples, or his own private calculations and curiosities—all of them matters with no direct relation to the dying master before him. In that case, just as his master had often imagined in his verses, he was indeed dying exposed in the limitless withered field of human life. All of them, the disciples, were not grieving for the master's end, but grieving for themselves now deprived of him. They did not lament the elder who lay dying in the barren field; they lamented themselves, left behind in the dusk without him. Yet even if one were to condemn that morally, what could one do about human beings like themselves, made by nature to be unfeeling? Sinking into this misanthropic reflection, and at the same time secretly pleased with his capacity to sink into it, Shiko finished moistening his master's lips, returned the feather pick to the teacup, cast a sidelong glance around at the disciples choking back tears as if in mockery, and then slowly went back to his seat. Good-natured Kyorai, from the first unsettled by Shiko's cold attitude, felt his former uneasiness newly awakened again; only Kikaku wore a peculiarly tickled expression, apparently finding tiresome this ingrained habit of Toka-bo's to insist on carrying everything through with a look of disdain.

By the time Izen-bo, following Shiko, drew the hem of his black robe heavily over the tatami and crawled forward, Basho's death agony must already have been only moments away. His face had lost even more color than before, and at times the breath seemed to cease altogether between his wet lips. Then, as though remembering, his throat would suddenly jerk in a large movement, and weak air would begin to pass again. Deep in that throat phlegm rattled faintly once or twice. Even his breathing seemed gradually to grow stiller. At that moment Izen-bo, just about to touch the white tip of the feather pick to those lips, suddenly began to be seized by a fear wholly unrelated to the grief of parting. It was the almost groundless fear that the next person to die after the master might be himself. Yet precisely because it was groundless, once this fear began to assail him, he had no way to resist it. By nature he was one of those people who react to death with morbid palpitations, and from long ago, whenever he thought of his own death, even while wandering about on elegant pilgrimages, he had felt a ghastly terror that made sweat pour over his whole body. Accordingly, whenever he heard that someone other than himself had died, he would feel a kind of relief that at least it was not he who was dying. At the same time, he would also feel the opposite uneasiness: but what if it were I? Basho's case was no exception. So long as the end had not yet pressed so near—when winter sunlight shone on the shoji, and the narcissus sent by Sonome spread their pure fragrance, and everyone gathered by the master's pillow composing verses to ease the tedium of illness—his mind had wandered back and forth between those two opposite feelings, bright and dark. But as the end gradually drew closer—from that unforgettable day of the first winter shower, when even the pears he had liked so much could not be eaten by the master, and Bokusetsu tilted his head anxiously at the sight—his relief had little by little been swallowed up by unease, until at last even that unease spread coldly over his heart the sinister shadow of a still darker terror: perhaps the one to die next would be himself. So while he sat at the pillow carefully moistening the master's lips, he seems to have been so haunted by this fear that he could hardly bring himself to look straight at Basho's dying face. Or perhaps he did look at it once; but just then the faint sound of phlegm clogging in Basho's throat was heard, and whatever courage he had gathered must have broken off halfway. "The next person to die after the master may, perhaps, be me." With that voice of foreboding always sounding in the bottom of his ears, Izen-bo shrank his little body and, even after returning to his place, made his unfriendly face more unfriendly than ever, using only upward glances and trying as much as possible not to look at anyone's face.

Then Otsushu, Shoshu, Shido, and Kibushi, the disciples gathered around the sickbed, moistened their master's lips one after another. But in the meantime Basho's breathing grew fainter with every breath, and even the number of breaths gradually decreased. By now his throat no longer moved. That small face, somehow waxen, with faint pockmarks showing on it; the color of those dimmed eyes, fixed on some far-off space; and the silver-white beard growing along his chin, all seemed frozen by the coldness of human feeling, as though he were quietly dreaming of the Land of Tranquil Light to which he was soon to depart. Then, at this moment, Joso, seated behind Kyorai with his head bowed in silence, that seasoned old man of Zen, began to feel, as Basho's breathing grew ever fainter, an endless sorrow, and at the same time an endless calm, slowly flowing into his heart. The sorrow, of course, needs no explanation. But that calm was a strangely lucid feeling, like the cold light of dawn gradually spreading through the darkness. And as moment followed moment, it drowned and swept away every stray thought, until in the end even the tears themselves were transformed into a pure sorrow, one without the slightest pain to pierce the heart. Was he perhaps rejoicing that his master's soul had transcended the illusory dream of life and death and returned to the jeweled land of eternal nirvana? No, even he himself could not affirm such a reason. Then what was it? Ah, who would idly hesitate and dare the folly of deceiving himself? This calm feeling in Joso was the joy of release: his free spirit, long vainly bowed beneath the shackles of Basho's personal force, was at last trying to stretch its arms and legs with its own native strength. In the midst of this rapturous, sorrowful joy, fingering his rosary of bodhi-tree beads, while the disciples around him also wept in hushed sobs, he, as if a cloud had been swept from the depths of his eyes, let a faint smile rise to his lips and reverently bowed in worship before the dying Basho.

And so it was that Matsuo Tosei of the Basho Hermitage, the great master of haikai without equal in all ages, surrounded to the very end by disciples "whose grief knew no bounds," suddenly passed into death.

(September 1918)