In Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, published last January, Natalie Goldberg, author of the writer’s handbook Writing Down the Bones, blends memoir, travel writing, and literary criticism to explore the history and essence of haiku.
Goldberg makes two pilgrimages to Japan, one to fulfill a vow made nineteen years earlier to visit the grave of Buson, the other to retrace the steps of Basho in his Narrow Road to the Deep North. She explores the way of haiku through the lives of its greatest practitioners–Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki; through the landscapes, teahouses, and temples in which they were written; and through her own attempts to practice the form. She emerges, streaming, from a frigid mountain lake: “I can’t take a step without stepping on a haiku. All about me, they’re waiting.” And yet, “I am a bear grasping after a flower petal.” She also discovers the work of Chiyo-ni, a woman master of the way of haiku, born a few years after Basho’s death. “She wrote with prostitutes; created collaborative art with samurai; and wrote haiku as gifts for foreign visitors.”
Traveling through the countryside, Goldberg paints Japan in brushstrokes of people and places–the 17th century sculptor Enku who “traveled around Japan, vowing to carve two hundred thousand Buddha statues out of tree stumps or wood scraps . . . with a few strokes of a hatchet,” often to comfort the sick or dying; or a temple of whose fifteen standing stones only fourteen can be seen from any position, representing the constant presence of the unknown. There are also moments of humor and incongruity as she navigates a culture often foreign to her sensibilities.
Three Simple Lines is in part an exercise in what it explores. Goldberg writes of a teahouse she encounters on a walk, “I feel as though we’ve entered inner Japan–the Japan of carefully placed stones and small trimmed shrubs that look like clouds. The perfect sense of sabi, subtle, always-present impermanence, the passing of seasons, and its exquisite perception of longing, loneliness, and surrender.” At its best, her own writing evokes the quality of sabi embodied by the haiku she studies. Snow lands “on the sharp rocks, on the stunted branches of the two dwarf pines, and, vanishing, on the dark water.” Walking through a village, “we feel the close bite of winter. But it’s still late autumn, with persimmons the color of apricots dangling from otherwise naked trees.”
At Buson’s grave, fulfilling her vow of nineteen years earlier, she bows. “I stand up, suddenly shy. ‘What can I say?’ I tell Buson. ‘Your haiku have touched me, centuries later, in another country. Thank you.’”
Haiku, she writes, “is a refuge when the world seems chaotic, when you are lost, frightened, tangled, and nothing is clear.” Richly illustrated with haiku from the masters, this slender volume itself provides such a refuge.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
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