What makes Japanese Travel
Writing Unique?
Travels with a
Writing Brush
Meredith McKinney |
Reflections
#lovelyreads
Epigraph comes first you
see! ๐
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! ๐ 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!
๐
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… ๐
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 ลtomo 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 Manyลshลซ 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, Yลซsai is
made welcome along the way much as Sลgi 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 Yลซsai’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. ๐
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. ๐
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! ๐
PS: You may also want to
read out past five-part series on Travelogues and Travel Writing in Literature HERE on our blog.
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