What makes Japanese Travel Writing Unique?
Travels with a Writing Brush
Meredith McKinney | Reflections
#lovelyreads
Epigraph comes first you see! 😊
This book was given to me by one of our loveliest students, in April 2023!
And it has taken me a full two years to read this book! 😊 And at last here it is!
Here we go!
Well, first and foremost - to begin this lovely blogpost, I’ve got a series of seven rhetorical questions!
Where on earth do you find travel writing inspiring and impacting an entire nation’s imagination?
Where on earth do you find a literature of travel, documented as ‘Poetic Renderings’ or ‘Poetic Highlights’?
Where on earth do you find an inherent connection between travel and poetry embedded dep within a nation’s literary tradition?
Where on earth do you find places mentioned in poetry becoming significant literary landmarks for future travellers?
Where on earth do you find a unique literary tradition where the journey was not just a physical movement but also a source of profound poetic and emotional experience?
Where on earth do you find a nation’s literature and culture expounded through the specific lens of travel writing?
Where on earth do the evocative travel poems capture the aura and the essence of a place or experience?
The clue lies in the famous sobriquet –
The Land of the Rising Sun! 😊
Woven so intricately in this lovely book titled, Travels with a Writing Brush by Meredith McKinney on the Japanese tryst with the twin sisters of poetry and travel!
Meredith Mckinney, by the way, is a translator of Japanese literature, both contemporary and classical. She lived in Japan for twenty years and is currently Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Secondly, in a way, this post is also a continuation of our past post on Japanese Culture, by Pico Iyer, one of the greatest travel writers of all time!
Pico Iyer calls Japan - the home of ‘collected inwardness’!
As Proust once observed, “a change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world, and ourselves.” The phrase ‘collected inwardness’ here could connote a person who is calm, self-controlled, and introspective! Travel teaches you this ‘collected inwardness’ says Iyer. You may want to read that past post HERE on our blog.
Meredith in this amazing book here, extends the metaphor a bit further and says that, this ‘collected inwardness’ is a unique feature not only of travel, but also of ‘literature of travel’.
As Meredith notes, in her book (by contrasting the Japanese impulse with the Western impulse to documenting their travels) -
Travel gave fresh impetus to the writer the ‘illusory option’ of flight from their wearied present.
As such, the traveller doubled up as a writer and an adventurer seeking the exotic or the wild, as an exemplar of the exotic, a connoisseur of fascinating landscapes, and an observer of strange habits, rituals and customs.
To the Western travel writer then, a successful travelogue carries with it, a great sense of curiosity and a sharp sense of humour – which were both part of the travel writer’s narrative strategies.
However, their eastern counterpart in Japan begs to disagree, differ and defer on this notion of travel!
To the Japanese travel writer, and reader, for many centuries it was above all the poems that were the point.
Travel writings were either ‘poetic renderings’ or ‘poetic highlights’.
This has important consequences for the literature of travel that may make it at first somewhat disorienting for the Western reader. Where we might expect a more or less continuous narrative of the journey, what we often find is a series of short, disconnected scenes or episodes, sometimes quite briefly sketched, that culminate in a poem, bridged perhaps by a vague linking expression such as ‘On I went, and then …’ that vertiginously elides what can be a substantial amount of intervening time and space.
The effect is a little like a series of glowing points on an otherwise dark map, a kind of montage of intense poetic experiences rather than a realistic description of the journey.
So what makes this book unique?
This book by McKinney titled, Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese Travel Writing from the Manyoshu to Basho is an anthology that stretches across a thousand years of Japanese travel writing. It contains an assortment of songs, diaries, tales, and poetry, offering a unique glimpse into how travel inspired the Japanese imagination throughout history.
McKinney’s profound observations on the Japanese and their travel sensibilities are phenomenal in their import through each of the pages of the book are quite endearing and alluring to the travel buff!
She foregrounds the waka sensibility that governs the prose of most literary travel writing until the Edo period! Where the poetic effect is reinforced by the prose itself!
She adds,
In classical Japanese literature, one definition of good poetry is poetry that touches the heart. Celebration and delight, emotions that we may look for in poetry, play a relatively minor role, as does the purely imagistic description that we in the West associate with haiku.
Longing and absence, rather than fulfilment and pleasure, are at the heart of Japan’s classical love poetry (one of the great poetic categories), and it was only natural that these became the dominant themes also in travel literature, in which the landscape itself evokes the aware of the lonely traveller savouring his longing for home and absent loved ones.
The anonymous author of A Gift for the Capital, a quintessential medieval travel chronicle, sums up the experience of the literary traveller in the following description –
And yes, do pay attention to the poetic cadence to the prose, as you read… 😊
There were times when I slept alone, blanketed in the wind off the high peaks; times when I woke to waves pounding the rocky shore, sleeves soaked from the wandering traveller’s sorrowing sleep. Times also when I chanced to hear in the grass by my pillow the small cry of insects weakening in the cold, and knew that autumn was at its end; or looking up from yet another bed in some fisherman’s rough hut, knew from the sky that the moon was rising now above a flood tide.
Wandering thus, drawn on along the road, I crossed the Shirakawa Barrier and, past the twentieth day, came to the banks of a broad river. This was none other than the Abukuma River.
I had heard tell of this remote place back in the Capital, and now standing beside it I felt the full force of how immensely far my journey had brought me. The ferryman drew up his boat, I and the other travellers hurried aboard, and as I gazed out over the wide water I saw that from the layered mountain range beyond smoke was rising.
I asked the boatmen about it, and they told me that it had begun in the same year the Kamakura government had fallen, and continued ever since. Strange indeed.
Disembarking and going on my way, I saw by the wayside a grave mound. It was evidently the doing of passersby, with a number of poems attached to nearby trees.
Someone explained to me that it was the grave of the long ago Chinese Prince Dong Ping, who had died here yearning for his distant home, and it was no doubt his longing that made the plants that grew upon his grave mound all lean westward toward China.
Moved by this tale, I was reminded of the similar story of the green grasses that grew on Wang Zhaojun’s grave. It seemed to me that any traveller who met his end beneath a foreign sky would surely long for the night smoke of his funeral pyre / to drift toward home, and I sighed at the folly of our worldly attachments. It moved me, too, to wonder if the dense line of pines that grew about the grave mound were what they call unai-matsu, the pines planted to mark a grave, and the thought put me in mind of certain old tales.
Home – what is it
that still our hearts
even when we have died
and turned to dream
remember it with love?
The greatest pleasure a literary traveller could experience was the pleasure of arriving in person at a place hallowed in poetry, notes McKinney.
Many other places visited by the travellers in these pages originally gained their poetic fame in similar ways; it was not the characteristics of the place itself so much as the presence of its name in literature (or sometimes in history) that lent it special power. The term for such place names, and by extension for the places that bore those names, was utamakura (poem-pillow), and their central role in travel literature was one of its defining features, she notes!
This is not to suggest, of course, that the travellers in these pages were not men and women with their own stories, writing in varying ways from their own lived experience.
Rather, the waka sensibility and its great literary tradition gave expressive form and depth to the articulation of individual experience, and often also to that experience itself, says McKinney.
In such ways, both the land itself and the experience of those who travelled through it were overlaid with a complex palimpsest of the literary that integrated the two in much the same way that landscape and feeling might merge in poetry.
There’s one such poem by Sami Mansei from the early eighth century.
Mansei took the tonsure in 721, and is known by his Buddhist name. He was part of Ōtomo no Tabito’s poetic circle. This poem is one of the most frequently quoted poems in classical poetry and plays a key role in later travel poetry, although it was better known in a later variant form. It is a rare example of a Manyōshū poem that expresses a specifically Buddhist sensibility.
To what shall I compare
this world?
It is like a boat at daybreak
rowing away and gone
leaving no trace
Sample this, on the Bay of Shiogama –
Dawn’s paling moon
and with it fishing boats
rowing out across the bay
of Shiogama
recede toward nothing
whereupon his companion says -
What point in looking
at the salt-soaked shells you bring
from Shiogama Bay
since I was not there with you
to see it?
And the reply –
What point indeed
in the salty shells
given this bitterness
though it was all for you
I gathered them at Shiogama?
Well, one added feature of this book is the philological fidelity that McKinney tries to adhere to, throughout the book.
Something akin to Achebe’s glossing in his novels, Meredith McKinney does an extensive glossing of seemingly native, obscure or untranslatable terms, like the waka, the renga, the tanka, the hokku and the like!
Sample this –
Journal of the Kyushu Road adheres strictly to the norms of the literary travel journal, in which the prose descriptions are essentially incidental to the poetry composed along the way.
As a leading poet of his day, Yūsai is made welcome along the way much as Sōgi and other renga poets were before him, and his journal reveals the central place that renga still held in the upper echelons of society.
The traditional tanka was still considered the paramount poetic form, but Yūsai’s journal also records numerous hokku that he composed for the renga sessions that he was invariably invited to lead, and he does not hide the fact that he found this role onerous at times.
He was a highly skilled poet but not a great one, and his poetry generally follows the taste of the day with much playful punning, often on place names (which loses much of its force in translation). His occasional serious tanka on time-honoured themes such as transiency and longing seem more poetic exercises than deeply felt, and the real energy is in his lighter poetry,
observes McKinney. She then discusses the transition from renga to haikai by the famous Matsuo Basho in the 17th century.
Thirdly, a special word about the epigraph to the book [from D. H. Lawrence], that’s gonna thrill the travel buff –
The great home of the soul is the open road. 😊
Fourthly, the translator’s preface, in which Meredith admits that, Classical Japanese poetry is notoriously resistant to translation – especially the rhythm, a delight in punning word play, the crucial role of allusion, pivot words and the syntactic folding together of meaning, concision, ambiguity, linguistic nuance and more besides: all these are virtually impossible to reproduce.
However, she also assures the reader that, she has tried her best to ‘honour the literary qualities of the writing, while simultaneously aiming as far as possible to remain faithful to the linguistic level of the text’ from Manyoshu to Basho! Her panoramic sweep of Japanese Travel writing that ranges well over a thousand years of their literary output, is simply outstanding!
Moreover, she observes that,
Although Japanese underwent considerable changes over the course of the thousand years covered here, its literary written language remained essentially remarkably stable.
Finally, this book was gifted to me by one of our best students ever – Ganesh Aadhitya, exactly two years ago. Hence, this post is also dedicated to you, dear Ganesh!
I should admit that, it took me some time to really start reading the book, and I could sense that, each page was really leading me deeper into the soul of Japanese Travel writing!
Thank you dear Ganesh. 😊
I would like to end this post with a suggestion for the avid travel buff! You can think of doing your higher research and / or present papers on themes that connect with Japanese travel writing just for you to switch gears to higher, ethereal and epiphanic planes of awareness and modes of realisation! 😊
PS: You may also want to read out past five-part series on Travelogues and Travel Writing in Literature HERE on our blog.
