The Body of the Wanderer: Interpreting Saigyo, Basho, and Hosai through Paul Ricoeur

2024/08/23

Many of us living in modern society, especially urban dwellers, harbor a sense of difficulty in living—a feeling of "is this where I truly belong?" I hear that many young people take the plunge and move abroad, while others spend their retirement in nature-rich locations. However, the working generation with families cannot do so. They have no choice but to face their harsh daily lives while carrying these question marks. Yet, such conflicts are not unique to modern people. The seclusion seen in Japanese classical literature like Hojoki (An Account of My Hut) and Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) is the result of withdrawing from the city. Furthermore, there were those who were not satisfied with mere seclusion and wandered out to nowhere. These are the "wanderers" defined in this book: Saigyo, Basho, the eccentric disciples of the Basho school like Izen and Rotsu, and in the modern era, free-verse haiku poets like Hosai and Santoka. Although their historical backgrounds differ, they all dreamed of some kind of freedom in their wandering, even at the cost of abandoning their homes and families.

This book interprets the freedom they dreamed of through concepts such as "hesitation" and "indecision" presented in the early work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary. For example, Izen composed the verse: "Unable to crawl through the world, I seek a snake's hole." The "world" refers to early modern Japan, which was undergoing rapid economic development. Izen could not fit in there, yet he did not feel right about confining himself to the "hole" of seclusion either. In Izen's raw wandering—simply crawling like a snake—there is no goal like in a game of Sugoroku; the will to wander swings back and forth repeatedly from "hesitation" to "resolve" and from "resolve" back to "hesitation." Ricoeur termed this "indecision." Yet, Ricoeur argues that it is precisely in this "indecision" that human beings are free.

The above is a glimpse of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 examines the influence of Lao-Zhuang thought and Zen Buddhism from mainland China on Japanese wanderers. Chapter 3 refers to Western literature and examines the cities from which wanderers try to escape, particularly the development and maturation of the monetary economy.

Now, while this book is placed on the Japanese classical literature and phenomenology shelves in bookstores, researchers and enthusiasts of Saigyo and Basho may not read Ricoeur, and Ricoeur scholars may have little interest in Japanese classical literature. Therefore, I, who am not a specialist in either, decided to write it. The book is not as difficult as the title might suggest.

The Body of the Wanderer: Interpreting Saigyo, Basho, and Hosai through Paul Ricoeur

Yu Kondo

Sairyusha

336 pages, 3,300 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.