Setting Out旅立ち

The months and days are the travelers of a hundred generations, and the years that come and go are travelers too. Those who float a whole lifetime upon a boat, and those who take hold of a horse's bridle and go out to meet old age, are on a journey every day, and they make the journey their home. Among the people of old, too, many died upon the road.

I too, from some year or other, have been drawn along like a wisp of cloud on the wind, and the longing to drift has never stopped. I wandered by the seashore, and last autumn I swept the old cobwebs from a broken house beside the river, and while I stayed there the year came to its close. When spring stood and I looked at the misted sky, I wanted to cross the Shirakawa Barrier. The god who bewitches travelers took hold of me and drove my heart mad, and the road god Dōsojin beckoned me, so that I could lay hold of nothing at all. I mended the tears in my leggings, changed the cord of my hat, and burned moxa at the sanri point, and already the moon over Matsushima was on my mind before anything else. I handed the house where I had been living to another and moved to Sanpū's villa.

Even a grass-thatched house, in a world where the dwellers change / will now become a house where the hina dolls are set out

I hung the first eight verses on a pillar of my hut. It was the twenty-seventh, the end of the third month. The dawn sky was dim, the moon was a waning moon whose light had faded, and yet the peak of Fuji could be seen far off. Wondering when I might ever see again the treetops of the cherry blossoms at Ueno and Yanaka, my heart grew forlorn.

Those closest to me gathered from the evening before and rode in the boat to see me off. When we left the boat at a place called Senju, the thought of three thousand li of road ahead choked my breast, and in that street of illusion I shed the tears of parting.

Spring is going / the birds cry and there are tears in the eyes of the fish

I made this the first writing from my brush case, yet my feet would hardly go forward. People stood in a row along the way and saw me off, it seemed, until my back was out of sight. Was this the second year of Genroku? I had set out on the long pilgrimage to Ōshū on nothing more than a sudden resolve. There is the saying about piling up the grief of white hair under the skies of Wu, and yet this was a country I had only heard of and had never seen with my eyes. So I staked an uncertain hope on returning alive, if I should live, and that day I reached at last a post town called Sōka.