Page 272 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

provinces inspired a long line of pilgrims, who, in the words of Lady Nijó (b. 1258), desired to "renounce
this life and wander wherever my feet might lead me... and make out of this a record of my travels that
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might live on after my death." Saigyó's travels motivated a number of artists, including Taiga, Bashô,
and Buson (see cats. 164,167,168).
From very early times elaborate precautionary practices grew up around travel, echoes of which
reverberated down the centuries. Central to many of these was the belief in the magical power of words
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(kotodama). Poems in particular were believed to embody special protective powers. For the traveler
they functioned, mantralike, as prayers for a safe journey. Through poetry the traveler could win the
blessings of the gods. This is why so many written odysseys — Narihira's, Saigyo's, and Bashô's, to name
a few — devote so much space to poetry: it was a way of propitiating the unknown, the dangerous, 271
and the strange.
The institutional conditions making possible the rise of travel during the Edo period are well
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rehearsed in scholarly literature. Roads, inns, restaurants, and the "mobility industry" of packhorse-
men, porters, ferrymen, and river waders made travel less perilous and less unthinkable than it had
been before the Edo period, while the proliferation of guidebooks, maps, and other kinds of travel litera-
ture certainly made it more rewarding. By the nineteenth century the infrastructure was fully in place
to support mass movement.
Two popular models for travel imagery during the Edo period were the quasi-religious quest
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for enlightenment and the self-indulgent pursuit of pure fun. Basho's haikai journeys recounted in
Narrow Road to the Deep North exemplify the time-honored literary voyage of self-discovery; it was later
illustrated by Yosa Buson (cat. 168). Shank's Mare (Hizakurige) by Jippensha Ikku (1766-1831), a comic

account of the trip down the Tokaido by a pair of roguish down-and-outs named Yaji and Kita, views
travel through the irreverent lens of popular fiction. Shank's Mare inspired Hiroshige's series Fifty-three
Stations of the Tôkaidô (cats. 179 -184). Different in flavor as they are, both written works reveal many
of the period's indispensable travel tropes. They include in abundance that essential element, poetry.
Bashó, Yaji, and Kita not only tote their requisite guidebooks but frequently consult them. All three
end up at the Ise Shrine, after celebrating the famous places (and savoring the famous products)
encountered en route.
As Bashó wrote in the preface to Narrow Road to the Deep North, "Life itself is a journey; and as
for those who spend their days upon the waters in ships and those who grow old leading their horses,
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their very home is the open road. And some poets of old there were who died while traveling." When
the gods beckoned, it was impossible for Bashó to stay home, despite the dangers on which he dwelt
at length. He abandoned his house — but not before inscribing a poem on one of its pillars in the time-
honored tradition of Saigyó — mended his traveling clothes, strengthened his legs with moxa, and set
off, dressed as a monk, with an attendant named Sora.
Basho's chronicle contains as much melancholy as that of any Heian-period poet at the height
of cherry blossom season. At the ruins of the Sato family's castle at Maruyama (scroll i, section 6),
which he visited on the fifth day of the fifth month, Bashó "wet his sleeves" (wept) at a monument
commemorating the poignant legend of the battle-widowed wives of this local warrior family. 27 The
women had donned their dead husbands' armor so their mother-in-law could pretend to see her sons

return victorious. At Hiraizumi, the next scene in the scroll (section 1.7), Bashó likened the glory of
the three generations of northern Fujiwara to a "brief-remembered dream.... But what a fleeting thing