Howard Norman

Why I Love

The Ghosts of Northern Japan

WEDNESDAY, May 21, @ 7:00 pm

An Interview with Howard Norman

© David Dobbs & Howard Norman, 2008

David Dobbs: Why the ghosts of northern Japan?

Howard Norman: Ever since I was in the Canadian arctic (l970s and l980s), I have been aware that the world is populated by invisible and visible residents in equal measure. Spirits. Ghosts. Depending on local beliefs as archived in indigenous languages and mythologies.

In the autumn of 2007, I retraced, mainly on foot, the okunohosomiche ("Narrow Road to Far Provinces"), a journey taken in l689 by the iconic haiku master Matsuo Basho, under the sponsorship of National Geographic Magazine, which published twenty diary entries in the February 2008 issue. I am completing a book about these travels.

On that journey, especially in the mountains of northern Japan, I stayed in a number of Buddhist monastaries at which rooms were kept for ghosts of ancient travelers, some of whom were said to have been wandering the region for centuries. The contingencies and origins of these ghost-travels varied from place to place. I often asked about them. So, in my informal "lecture" I want to talk a little about this in particular, and about the the Narrow Road to Far Provinces in general, a journey full of unforseen rewards.

DD: What led you to take this walk?

Norman: In the late l970's I worked with a linguist named Helen Tanizaki in Churchill and Eskimo Point, Manitoba, in the Canadian arctic. Helen introduced me to Japanese literature and to Matsuo Basho, arguably the most accomplished writer of haiku and the prose-poem form called haibun. In Japan they call Basho the "Shakespeare of Japan." His life and work indeed loom very large in Japanese literary and aesthetic history.

The walk came about when National Geographic asked what my "dream project" might be. I went with a wonderful translator, Kunio Kadowaki, really amazing guy, about age 66. Often I was alone. I spent l4 hours, for example, on Mt. Gassan --- saw a mountain bear, which was a gift. And the bright red Ruddy Kingfisher.

DD: Does Basho have an American equivalent? Frost comes to mind, but he seems awfully crusty and grumpy by comparison. 

Norman: It would be difficult to make a comparison, say, with an American writer. Not enough time has passed. Time was the thing in Japan -- one feels it acutely.  I often visited notable trees. Some were nine hundred years old.

DD: Basho expected trouble and danger on his journey -- he actually expected to die along the way, perhaps killed by bandits. I hope your troubles were of a different sort?

Norman: When Basho set out, accompanied by his student Sora, he was 45 years old [and] the life expectancy of men at that time was roughly 48. Indeed, he was often given to melancholy, for lack of a better way to put it. Let's just say that melancholy was an intensifying element not only in his life but in his writing.... He made the journey because he wanted to pay homage to his mentor, Monk Saiygo, from centuries before, but also to visit certain religious, military and literary sites that he had not seen but wanted to see before he died.  

He traveled roughly six months, on foot, of course, sometimes by boat or horse.

"Narrow Road" is a work of poetic genius -- intuitive, forthright, meditative, with a subtle symphonic structure that makes it very readable in even the poorer translations.

It's true he faced many physical rigors along the way. Illness, crossing of political boundaries, harrowing passages and so on. It would be hubris, at best, to make any comparison to my own journey. I did attempt to get "in shape," because I knew it was typhoon season and it would be awfully hot and humid, let alone the fact that I'd be walking hours and hours per day, in different terrains, and then there was that l4 hours on Mt. Gassant, a story unto itself.  I really liked seeing that mountain bear. I couldn't get off my tatami mat the next morning -- I thought, maybe I've entered the afterlife.

DD: Basho is known for his haiku, the venerable form with lines of five, seven, and five syllables; and for his travel writings. You too have alternated between works of striking formal structure -- your novels -- and nonfiction based on travel and place. Was part of this assignment's attraction that it let you combine the two? 

 

Norman: I think the basic attraction was to fulfill decades of reading and curiosity through what one Japanese scholar calls -- wonderful phrase -- "wandering scholarship."   Of course I had a demographic agenda.  I wanted to stop at every single place Basho visited, which I did.Sometimes these would be tucked away on a side street in a fairly large town -- it is the 21st century, after all. Other times, a Basho site would be completely preserved in a monastery or park or private area of some sort.

I wrote every night in a journal. I wrote down conversations, descriptions, odds and ends, translations of things, such as the names of so-called love hotels which are all over Japan. These are boutique-type hotels for brief relationships, if you will.  My favorite was called "Cunning Activity."  

DD: Basho took his journey as a sort of escape from the pressures of teaching and literary celebrity; in his fatigue, he said, he "felt the breezes from the afterlife cross his face." He wanted to be "one who moves without direction." Your path on this trip was more conscribed -- by his. Did the trip serve a similar retreat-like purpose for you?

Norman: At the time of his death, it is estimated that Basho had close to two thousand students in the so-called "Basho school" of haiku. He was worn to a frazzle....

As for me, I have little, if any, what might be termed "celebrity." So there's no correspondence there in the least.... [But there's a parallel] in terms of taking a journey during which, inevitably, you would need to think about new things, assess life constantly, and so on... It was a great sustenance, and a kind of dream come true. I sensed that it would be exhausting and exhilarating, and it was. [Now] the experience can sort of percolate.... There is, of course, the transcribing of these notebooks: the conversations alone have taken six months to get in decent order.

DD:  As you described your journey in Basho's footsteps, how conscious were you of echoing his writing? Would a Basho reader recognize any echoes?

Norman: Basho uses a phrase with a student, in which he refers to the kind of mental and emotional relationship he hoped to establish and sustain with Monk Saiygo, his mentor, along the way: "Travel with ghost and ghost-to-be." No pun intended, but this haunted me. I immediately adopted it. I chose, in the privatemost and non-dramatic way, to have rather quotidian "conversations" with Basho along my own journey in Japan. I was alone a lot. I had very little of the language. I enjoyed both circumstances immensely. And there were any number of moments, especially along the most physically harrowing passages in the mountains, where I just wondered how those guys managed to navigate those terrains. Well, they had no other choice, did they?  That's how people traveled in the late l7th century. Ghosts. Bandits. All sorts of interventions and perils and wonderments.  Basho noted them all.

DD: I can't imagine I'd take such a trip without trying my hand at some haiku. Did you do so, and do you have any you'd care to share with us here?

Norman: I wrote some haiku. How could I not, really? I will not vouch for it on any level. None. But I started writing -- with dedication but no intent for publication-- a form the novelist Haruki Murakami called, at dinner, "novels made of haiku."

You have to have a narrative, a story, time passing, while the thing has to be comprised, basically, of one haiku succeeding another -- and take some basic liberties with structure and locution.  Here's one:

                                                                        

NOVEL MADE OF HAIKU

by Howard Norman

                 Insomnia, fish far off at sea. Just after dark the train and my love have gone, a lunar haze appears. Now, across the street

                 comes the lighting of lamps in the girl's school, the oldest raven in the prefecture is on the lawn. The night-long

                 concert ends on the radio, suddenly I have a ravenous thirst. At my age, I finally understand why my mother

                 bit into hard apples to calm herself. Yesterday morning I had to fill out a resume: in a hothouse once I actually

                 saw an orchid open, and, in the end, that was the one item I included. Rowing on the pond, the old neighborhood

                 doctor leans out of his rowboat to put his stethescope to the moon's reflection, listens and looks worried. The

                 train returns, how can a pheasant sleep so close in weeds to the tracks? No one steps off; my love has stayed

                 in the city; now I'll be just another fool standing under unripe persimmons, telling a sad story. One of the things

                 insomnia has to offer is you get to see the train depart and arrive, a white egret atop a dining car, transluscent in

                 the moonlight.