Somewhere Between the Ruins and the Sea: On Matsuo Bashō, Travel, and Exhaustion

Bashō’s journeys were bounded by friction. Ours are bounded by signal. Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi, the seventeenth-century travel diary usually known in English as The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is one of the great (shorter) works in world literature. Yet its English titles clearly disagree about the nature of the journey. Sam Hamill’s The Narrow Road to the Interior shifts the centre of gravity from geography toward consciousness. Donald Keene’s The Narrow Road to Oku, a work he translated four times over the course of his life, stays closest to the original place-name, preserving its specificity (the northern hinterland of Japan's main island, Honshu).

Taken together, the three translations mark fairly major divergence in interpretation. The “Deep North” gives the journey a remote and mythic distance, a crypto Thule-like quality. “Interior” makes it inward, almost psychological. “Oku” leaves the reader nearest to Bashō’s own horizon, where a real region and an elusive depth remain folded into one another. Even before Bashō’s prose begins, the translator has already decided how much mystery to leave intact.

What these editions make easy to forget is just how physically taxing the journey was. When Bashō set out in 1689, he was already in poor health. He walked slowly, stopped often, relied on charity, waited out bad weather, and repeatedly had to abandon plans. Travel was not restorative. Yet he tired in ways that still resolved according to the rhythms of biological clocks.

Bashō’s road may have been stacked with obstacles, but they were intermittent. When illness forced him to stop at a shabby inn during a storm “bitten by fleas and lice,” he wrote, “I slept in a bed, / A horse urinating all the time / Close to my pillow,” the misery was acute, even comic, but it was ultimately bounded. The rain passed, the insects bounded to their next victim, and when the River Oi swelled with rain, he waited, composing: “A long rainy day of autumn, / My friends in Edo / Are perhaps counting the days, / Thinking of us at the River Oi.”

Modern exhaustion is harder to describe because it is less dramatic. It is, in medical terms, chronic. One sees it in the small hotels and apartments of places that seem designed for recuperation: Lecce, Chiang Mai, Penang, Ubud, Tbilisi, Trieste, Luang Prabang and the slower quarters of Vienna. The people who arrive are not exactly tourists but they're hardly exiles either. They wear the accumulated pressure of having undergone an never-ending trial: too much low-grade demand, too little interruption and too few genuine off-switches. They come looking for rest and find only the bewilderment of those who aren't quite sure how it works.

What many of these travellers have lost is not stamina but rhythm. And their problem is not effort per se, given the resilient nature of most, but a life deprived of intervals or relief. Bashō’s world was harsher in many ways than ours but it also contained immeasurable lulls. His hardship had contours. Ours is more diffuse and harder to dispel.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when exertion retained such boundaries. The factory whistle marked the end of the shift. Shops shuttered in whatever hours they wished. Even war contained its breaks. Effort and recovery moved in counterpoise, like the systole and diastole of a functioning heart. Now, however, something has changed in the architecture of demand. The young man at the next table cannot put down his phone. The woman in the corner opens her laptop at breakfast and keeps it open through lunch. They may have removed themselves from their respective metropoles but their invisible tethers remain taut.

Intensity has lost its episodic has become atmospheric. It is no longer an event but a medium, something one moves through, breathes in and absorbs. The body is treated as a machine requiring no maintenance, only fuel, a stance that ensures that attention is harvested and performance can be monitored with the cheerful relentlessness of managerial concern.

A decisive moment in Bashō’s literary life came in the spring of 1686, when he composed the hokku later known as “the old pond.” A later anecdote by his disciple Kagami Shikō places him at his hut in Edo. Another disciple, Kikaku, reportedly suggested opening the poem with yamabuki ya, “yellow rose,” a conventional image. Bashō chose furuike ya, “old pond.” The follower had tried to supply beauty in advance, using ready-made charms, while Bashō did the opposite, stripping the scene back to something so plain that, in the end, the frog’s splash does not decorate the world but awakens it.

That is not just a lesson in literary style; in fact, style is a tawdry byproduct of the real issue, which is attention. Bashō’s art lies in clearing away whatever prevents perception from becoming vivid on its own. Such perception requires time, as well as pauses that are long enough for the world to come forward. Ostensibly, this poesy can come across as centered on the natural world, as if Bashō were Japan's answer to Bill Oddie, but really it is about the conditions under which a single sound can still be heard as revelatory, or at least charged.

Bashō’s road kept generating those conditions. Walking, stopping, waiting for ferries, sheltering from rain: the journey advanced in fits and starts. The poems survive because they emerged from those pauses, not despite them. At Nikkō, visiting the sacred shrines, he wrote only “It was with awe / That I beheld / Fresh leaves, green leaves, / Bright in the sun.” Four lines to record the fact of having seen leaves. Nothing is embellished or forced; the effect comes from a pared-back attention that could easily be parodied were it not for its brute insistence that the concrete world is sufficient in its supply of wonder.

Meanwhile, contemporary forms of travel promise respite but tend to deliver only displacement. The traveller carries his conditions with him. The inward tempo does not change simply because the view improves. It remains possible to photograph the sunset, document the meal, praise the slower pace, and stay entirely untouched by any of it. Travel, then, becomes less a change of rhythm than a change of backdrop, because no moment is ever allowed to become sufficient to itself.

To be fair, there are still cities and quarters that preserve different logics. Rome contains the rus in urbe not only literally, in places like Villa Borghese or the Janiculum, but as a tempo. Kyoto retains it too. You don't use the Spanish Steps or walk the Philosopher’s Path because they are efficient, but because they are there. These places still acknowledge that life consists of more than the shortest distance between two points. Contrast this with the gleaming precincts, now ubiquitous, where every surface has been optimised for throughput and rest itself has been designed out. These environments treat the human body as an infinitely compressible resource, capable of absorbing friction without complaint.

What's remarkable is how long people endure this before recognising it. Human beings adapt to extraordinary loads but adaptation often obscures as much as it reveals. A shepherd may walk distances that would break an office worker, yet the shepherd sleeps while the executive lies awake blinking at their phone at 4am. The difference is whether effort is allowed to fluctuate or remains pinned at a sustained rev count. Music obeys the same principle. A fortissimo passage thrills because it emerges from and returns to quieter alternatives. Played without interruption, even magnificence becomes noise and noise, prolonged, becomes numbness.

The body keeps account with sleep growing light and attention fracturing. Simple tasks begin to require a disproportionate effort. And because this deterioration lacks drama, it is often misread as private weakness rather than what it more often is: a signal that load has exceeded design. In one of the cruellest ironies of modern life, structural excess is experienced as personal failure.

That is why today's forms of escape feel thinner than many older ones. Earlier departures often ran toward a project: Bloomsbury to Charleston, Pound and Bunting to Rapallo, the Lost Generation to Paris, Lu Xun to Shanghai’s International Settlement. Whatever else one says about them, those movements were generative in that they sought the conditions for work. Now, withdrawals are more defensive with people simply wishing to enjoy a deep sleep, think a thought to completion, or move through a day sans demandes incessantes. It is a retreat toward minimal viability rather than heightened possibility.

This is not to invoke some imagined past ease. Bashō’s world was harsh and travels often miserable. When he died in 1694, his final poem returned once more to the road: “Seized with a disease / Halfway on the road, / My dreams keep revolving / Round the withered moor.” The past was not gentler but its hardship arrived in forms the body could register and answer, while our own often sits more like a climate.

It is easy to sentimentalize the migrations of tired people drifting toward sea-facing towns or slower cities, or dismiss them as pursuing nothing more noble than bougie self-care. Their real importance, however, is in showing what happens when people who have been braced for continuous demand briefly encounter environments that ask less of them. Their relief is often disproportionate because the baseline load was higher than they had allowed themselves to recognise.

What this suggests is not that we have become weak, but that we have been asked to absorb individually what was once distributed structurally. To give a fairly representative, if extreme, example, the thinker Mark Fisher died aged 48 in 2017 just before the publication of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie. Pushing close to the nub of this, the writer Simon Reynolds noted that “the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be understood or healed if it is [continually] viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.” Equally darkly, at some point over the last few decades, a basic relation has quietly inverted itself. Human capacity is treated as the instrument, endlessly stretchable and privately repairable, while what was once understood as instrumental — the organization of work, communication, productivity, capital — increasingly presents itself as an end. No one announced this inversion, yet it governs relentlessly and all the institutions of prudence, from pension funds and private equity to HR software and shareholder value, have had a hand in it.

Bashō’s journeys were hard but heavily punctuated. Ours are easier in almost every material sense, yet often take place under conditions that make stopping difficult even when nothing visible stands in the way. His road was bounded by weather, illness, distance, bad inns and flooded rivers. Ours is bounded by signal. And the latter may be the more exhausting.