May 16th: On Bashō’s “The Narrow Road of Oku”

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Hours into a tornado watch, the skies remained clear. At  Dunaway Books, I got lost in its labyrinthine basement and emerged to darkened skies. I ran home in a downpour, new-to-me books clutched to my chest. My husband and I watched the storm from the porch until the rain turned sideways. The skies cleared. We returned to our routines. In the hours after, we began to see photos of toppled homes and splintered trees. There were calls for volunteers, nonperishables, toiletries, milk.

An article in St. Louis Magazine stated, “The [tornado] is canonized into the St. Louis lexicon as simply: May 16, burned into public memory with other era-defining moments in local history like the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 or the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in the 1970s.” And yet, for many St. Louisans, the date May 16 has no significance. This is the tragedy of a city that remains segregated.

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Three hundred thirty-six years earlier, Bashō sold his hut and set out with his friend, Sora, for a 156-day 1,200-mile journey on foot up through the northern interior of Japan and down along its northern coast. He wrote:

So it happened that, around 1689, I impulsively decided on this journey into Oku. Though the hardships of the long road would surely whiten my hair, I pinned my frail hopes on the thought of returning alive, full of all I had heard of but never yet seen…

Given that it was his third journey of the sort, he may have exaggerated the impulsiveness. He’d begun these wanderings in 1684, not long after he lost his home to a fire and began both to embrace a Zen acceptance of impermanence and to turn to nature as a font of spirituality. He and Sora composed poetry as they traveled, often recording each other’s verses. Bashō refined what he’d written for years after returning—further contradicting his supposed impulsiveness. It was published in 1694, the same year that he died. 

Bashō and his followers practiced haikai poetry, a term that encompasses hokku—the term “haiku” that we now use to designate a stand-alone seventeen-syllable poem was not coined until the late nineteenth century—as well as related forms such as renku, a game-like form of complexly regulated communal poetic composition, and haibun, the form most heavily associated with Bashō and his travels in which hokku are combined with prose. In her translator’s preface, Dr. Meredith McKinney writes: “We tend to read Bashō’s haibun as prose interspersed with poems that serve to illustrate the narrative, but for Bashō and his predecessors, the poems themselves were the natural core of the writing.” The hokku serve as transitions or pivot points, sometimes bridging one episode to the next, and always demanding that the reader pause and consider the moment. Haibun is a poetic form that demands reflection. The hokku at its core can only be understood in the context of what comes before and after.

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I decided to commemorate the anniversary of the tornado by walking its seven-mile path through the heart of St. Louis city, beginning at Art Hill in Forest Park, crossing Delmar Boulevard, over to Fountain Park, through Lewis Place, along North Newstead Avenue, and into O’Fallon Park. The tornado had touched down in Clayton, an affluent suburb just west of the city, but it reached peak velocity as it came upon the Black neighborhoods north of the Delmar Divide, a term that refers to Delmar Boulevard, an east-west street that has come to represent the socioeconomic and racial division of St. Louis. Recent census data indicates that city residents living north of the boundary are 99% Black while city residents living south of the boundary are 70% white, a division that is echoed by stark differences in average home value and formal education. 

I’ve lived in South City for nearly six years, though I am originally from the Chicago suburbs. My husband grew up an hour outside of St. Louis, visiting the city primarily for hockey games. In both cities, we’ve often heard from family and friends that there are neighborhoods that should be avoided. When they tell us a neighborhood is dangerous, we assume they mean the neighborhood is Black. It’s the kind of coded racism that feels inseparable from my experience of the Midwest. Just the other day his family urged us to reroute our drive to avoid going through the northside. We didn’t listen. 

We are both politically engaged—I care deeply about racial politics and have dedicated several years to working at a racial equity organization and volunteering with various nonprofits engaged in racial justice work. As a light-skinned multiracial woman, it feels like a way of reckoning with my privilege and encouraging my white husband to reckon with his. Despite this, I have spent little time in North City, setting foot there only two or three times before the tornado. 

On the morning of May 16, 2026, there were anniversary events happening all over the city, celebrating the recovery efforts that had happened so far and the resilience of those who’d been impacted. There were scheduled grief circles, volunteer street cleaning crews, barbecues, mutual aid fairs, documentary screenings, but I was looking for something else. I had volunteered in cleanup efforts in the immediate aftermath of the tornado, and it had felt somehow voyeuristic to drive into those sites of devastation for a couple hours only to return to the comfort of my South City home. I wanted to make sense of the grief and my relationship to the disaster. Bashō seemed to model a way of doing that. His long journeys in the later years of his life were a way not just of observing the world around him but also of following in the steps of his literary predecessors, quite literally walking where they had walked as a means of seeing what they’d seen so that he might make his own meaning. I had read the tornado recovery reports and the various newsletters from nonprofits on the ground, but I needed to see the scars of the tornado for myself. I wanted to make sense of it in writing. 

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Bashō’s account of his journey—Oku no hosomichi, which is translated into English variously as The Narrow Road of Oku, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Narrow Road Through the Provinces, The Narrow Road to the Interior, etc.—is considered one of the major texts of Edo-period Japan and has been translated into countless languages, with at least eight major translations into English alone. McKinney, who also translated Sei Shōnagon’s eleventh-century classic The Pillow Book as well as works by Natsume Sōseki, considered the first modern novelist of Japan, adds to the canon of Narrow Road translations with a slim, pocket-sized edition, newly released by New Directions. Unlike most editions, hers contains only a brief translator’s preface, focused not on the biographical details of Bashō’s life as many past introductions have, but rather on the haikai poetry style and the challenges of translating hokku without rendering it “into flat banality or heavy-handed wordiness.” McKinney is keen to capture the sparkling ease of the original text. She writes about the original:

“Sentence structures can almost collapse under the stress of intense concision and elision, with feeling and language seemingly welded together: ambiguity, suggestion, sudden flashes of startling and bewildering imagery or language, and the constant flickering shadows of other works and other writers reaching back centuries through Japanese and Chinese literature.”

She goes on to express the impossibility of capturing all of this in English, stating that attempting to do so “would be disastrous for the delicate, almost dancing flow of the spacious haibun surface.” The main body of the text is only fifty-four pages long, and unlike many translated editions, the text is not bloated with heavy commentary or bundled together with other Bashō writings. This new edition considers the aesthetic experience of Bashō. It’s Bashō not for scholars but for literary readers and the curious, those drawn, at any level, to poetry, Zen Buddhism, or spiritual wandering. There are enough footnotes to contextualize historic proper nouns or references that may otherwise cause readers to stumble, but the text is otherwise fairly sparse, inviting readers to respond to the text on their own. Unlike many translations, the hokku are presented without the corresponding Japanese or romanization, which helps McKinney ensure the pauses taken by readers are the ones that were intended by the original text. 

Consider this passage from early in the text as Bashō and Sora are first setting out:

Each moment is a parting of ways in this phantom world of ours, yet I wept salty tears now to say goodbye.

Spring passes —

     birds cry, fishes’

eyes swim with tears

This was the first poem I recorded for the journey, my spirits still reluctant to set out. People lined the road as we went, surely watching until our departing figures disappeared.

I compared McKinney’s translation to those of Hiroaki Sato (Stone Bridge Press, 1996), Donald Keene (Kodansha, 1996), and Sam Hamill (Shambhala, 2000). McKinney’s translation prioritizes a sense of ephemerality and sensuality. She describes a “phantom world” compared to Sato’s “illusory world” or Keene’s “dreamlike existence,” and she is the only one of the four to note the tears as “salty.” Hamill, by comparison, seems to take the greatest artistic license, distilling the first line of the quoted passage to “I saw it through farewell tears.” There’s a romance in McKinney’s version that captures not only a swelling of emotion but also nature’s transience and its mystery. I love the use of the verb “swim,” which calls to mind not just the salty tears and the river beside Bashō’s home but also the movement and aliveness of a fish slipping in and out of view. McKinney describes Bashō’s feelings around leaving as a reluctance of his spirits. By comparison, Keene writes of Bashō’s wistfulness at leaving behind his friends. Sato writes simply, “I was still reluctant to venture farther,” while Hamill gives the somewhat bristling and characteristically overboiled, “I started.” McKinney, Sato, and Keene all agree on the use of the word “parting,” which is an idea Bashō returns to at the text’s conclusion. The word “parting” feels revelatory here, capturing not just the feeling of parting from loved ones, but also the parting from the familiar and the inevitability of always parting from the present. 

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A few months after the tornado, I audited a creative writing class at Washington University. During one class, we visited the home studio of photographer Michael Eastman, who showed us sculptural bits of trash that he had collected and hoped to turn into art. On his shelves was an assortment of twigs that resembled little figures. Our professor asked us to select photographs from Eastman’s website and to write an ekphrastic response. I was drawn to Eastman’s “After the Storm” portfolio, which documented the devastation of trees in the aftermath of the tornado. I thought about my time in the weeks after the tornado, picking up fiberglass and roof tiles with gloved hands, sawing at fallen branches, and clearing drains, but I thought also about Eastman’s studio, all that devastation becoming art to be sold. I wondered about the potential of art to reckon with disaster. I wrote a series of haibun. 

I sold this essay to the Cleveland Review of Books in the period between writing those haibun and setting out to walk the tornado’s path, meaning that every step of the walk, I was aware that I too was turning devastation into art to be sold. It heightened my sense of complicity. But for me, art has always made sense as a response to suffering. I thought about my visit to a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan at the age of twenty—the metal caravans were brightly painted in pinks, blues, and greens, murals of trees and rainbows and flowers and technicolored people hand-in-hand. Volunteers had taken the time to make the caravans beautiful because art is a way of creating hope. 

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We drove four miles northwest of our South City home and parked at Art Hill, from where we would set out on foot. It was raining lightly, but we left our umbrellas. I thought about how Bashō too had encountered rain early on in his journey. He wrote about “anticipat[ing] the charm of the blue sky to follow.” I brought only a slim backpack, which contained a bottle of water, a protein bar, a journal, a pen, and McKinney’s translation. Bashō’s words echoed in my head: “That first day, my greatest trial was the weight of the backpack on my bony shoulders.” We looked like a pair of yuppie hikers: I wore sneakers and a black workout set with a white camp shirt thrown over the top. He wore hiking boots with black gym shorts and a black tee. We followed the sloping sidewalk down Fine Arts Drive, which quickly merged into Lagoon Drive, with its landscaped water features on either side, the very place my husband had proposed to me five years prior. I tried to walk slowly, scanning my surroundings for evidence of damage. I considered what it might look like to instead look for evidence of hope. 

I was struck most by the absence of trees. I remembered reading that over 5,000 trees had been damaged within Forest Park alone. Over 3,000 had toppled or otherwise been irreparably harmed. A year later, many damaged trees had been removed, but there were stumps that remained. There were also the many armless trees, with new branches, thin as fingers, just beginning to emerge.

We crossed through the Missouri History Museum, which was set up for a “One Year Later” event. We exchanged nods with the folks just beginning to gather, a mix of joyful community and somber remembrance visible on their faces. We continued down DeBaliviere Avenue and into the urban landscape. We spoke little as we walked. I listened: the rolling whir of cars on the wet streets, pigeon wings flapping, the hiss of air as a bus kneeled to open its doors. As we made our way down Delmar, that infamous divide, the rain faded and stopped. 

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Bashō traveled in the guise of a Buddhist monk. During the Edo period, domestic travel was highly restricted and monitored via checkpoints, but religious pilgrimages were viewed as a socially acceptable reason for travel; as such, this manner of dress aided him in crossing borders. Bashō did study Zen—he supposedly considered becoming a monk but felt unwilling to give up his poetry—and its wisdom infuses his writing. Referencing the Zen practice of kōan, a type of dialogue used to deepen spiritual insight, Hamill writes in his translator’s introduction, “Zen discipline is built in part around the idea of truth articulated in spontaneous response. A ‘correct’ response to a Zen koan for instance, need not be obviously rational or logical.” The same is true of Bashō’s writing, which is episodic and not always clearly linked beyond the momentum of the journey itself. It is known that he spent at least four years revising the text, both fabricating and omitting details freely as indicated by disagreements with Sora’s diary of the trip. Still, he captures a feeling of spontaneity that feels true and timeless.

About midway in his journey, Bashō writes:

Many places are known to us from ancient poems, but mountains crumble, rivers change their course, roads are altered, stones are buried in the earth, and trees grow old and are replaced by young ones. Time passes and the world changes, obscuring any trace of what was.

It’s a reminder that everything—even things that feel as permanent to us as mountains and rivers—is ephemeral. It’s also a reminder of the role of poetry in recording our past.

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Along Union Boulevard, the evidence of architectural wreckage was apparent. As we crossed through Academy, we spotted a Nine PBS news truck. A volunteer crew of twenty or so in highlighter green vests worked to clear debris. It pained me that the neighborhood still resembled the neighborhoods we’d helped to clear a year prior, fallen trees, scattered bricks, cluttered drains. A group of three boys, all around ten years old, helped their mom in stacking branches. We continued walking.

It was my first time seeing Fountain Park, and the architecture astonished me. Had I simply been stuck in my South City routines or had I let the biased cautions of those around me keep me from visiting? We walked through Lewis Place, emerging on the other side to discover Miss Henrietta’s Garden, labeled as such with a little sign. She had an apple tree that was already bearing small fruits and a series of manicured garden beds. There were yellow roses and a tall tree shaped strangely like a person reaching out to help.

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In his 1970 overview of Bashō’s work, Makoto Ueda suggests that Bashō’s writing can be divided into phases of stylistic maturity. Early works prioritized wordplay, humor, and mimicry of what was popular at the time, but later, Bashō began to clarify his voice. By the time he wrote Narrow Road, Bashō had come to favor the idea of sabi. Ueda writes: “The noun sabi originally derived from an adjective, sabishi, which meant ‘lonely’ or ‘solitary,’ usually describing a person in want of company.” Bashō saw a connection between “loneliness” and “quietness,” and poems from this phase of his work included revisions where the two words were interchanged. 

Bashō’s writing from this time and beyond has a characteristic emotional detachment. He resisted artificiality and sentimentality, favoring instead poems that suggested an emotional response rather than describing one. He intentionally created a sense of ambiguity in his work and often brought together unlike subjects so that readers might determine for themselves the connective tissue. Consider:

Under the same roof

    courtesans slept the night —

bush clover and moon

Bashō composed this poem after overhearing two courtesans at the same inn as him and Sora. As Ueda suggests in his commentary, there is considerable distance between the ground-hugging bush clover and the moon in the sky, and yet they can be seen in proximity. Such is the distance between the old traveling poets and beautiful women. 

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We were heading down the long stretch of Newstead. The sidewalks appeared and disappeared, and were sometimes unwalkable due to debris. I wondered if this was a normal amount of trash or if it contained remnants of the tornado. I had not been here before and had no point of comparison, but maybe there was also something more sinister behind that thought—had I expected the northside to be more littered than the south? Purple chicory flowers peeked out among the dandelions and overgrown grass. I considered how easy it was to describe wreckage as something beautiful, like ancient ruins. Bashō, too, largely encountered ruins on his journey—many of the poetic sites he sought had long since been recovered by nature. But these were not ruins. These were sites of recovery. 

Nearby, a group of residents had set up a community barbecue, where they beckoned passersby to grab a plate. A trio squeezed by us on the sidewalk, completely unfazed by encountering a couple hikers in their neighborhood. 

We passed Prince Hall Family Support Center. It felt like a return. A year prior, we had parked in this lot when we volunteered, which meant we’d walked this stretch before. I watched as a little yellow butterfly fluttered through a weedy hellstrip.

My husband asked me, Was it what you hoped?

It’s what I expected, I told him. 

Though really, I hadn’t known what to expect. What does recovery look like in a disinvested community? And what had the community been like before disaster? I had never seen it as its most vibrant. I knew only how it looked in the weeks after the tornado, the landscape devastated but the people rallying, and how it looked now, still scarred but with people still showing up, to gather, to celebrate, to work.

There was a cool breeze as we climbed the inclined path that curved into O’Fallon Park. There were megaphone voices in the distance and huge dirt circles where trees once stood, each marked with a petite yellow flag. I thought we would see the same torn trees we had last spring, but instead, there were signs of growth. The trees had been replaced by young ones. 

We made our way to the YMCA and called a ride. As we stood waiting, the sky to the north darkened and a few tentative drops began to fall. A girl in a tiny denim jacket and teal spandex shorts, hair swinging in pink clipped braids, ran out of the Y, trailed by her family. It’s raining, she cried, twirling and squealing with joy.

I composed: 

Blue cornflowers smile,

     trees planted, while I was far—

summer after rain