Strange fire and scorching dew

Milton, Basho and the Killing Stone

The Killing Stone cracked open in 2023. The two parts are linked by a rope. All photos by me.

Before the end of summer, I took a short break from the heat of the Kanto plain and escaped to the hills and mountains of Tochigi prefecture.

When you travel to the north from Tokyo, it can be hard to avoid following the footsteps of Matsuo Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North”. Basho (1644-1694) was, of course, one of Japan’s most celebrated haiku poets.

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Narrow Road to the Deep North describes a journey the poet made in 1689. It was published five years later, the year in which he died.

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I was following Basho at a speed of just under 200 mph—the speed of the shinkansen, or bullet train, that travels north from Tokyo.

Basho walked.

At the start of my journey the book I was reading was Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus, an homage to the masque of that name by John Milton. Hill’s poem sequence was published in 2005.

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Milton’s masque Comus was first performed 391 years ago, on September 29, 1634. It was played before John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle.

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The lives of John Milton and Basho overlapped for 30 years. Their careers, cultures, writing styles and content are utterly different. But somehow both were walking with me on my own journey.

Both poets carried illness and pain with them on long journeys.

Basho suffered much of his life from an unknown stomach complaint, which was the probable cause of death.

Milton turned blind in 1652, probably because of glaucoma. He died in 1674, either of consumption or gout.

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Another companion on my journey was the sound of crickets, the sure harbingers of autumn. I heard them in the wooded valleys and on the slopes of the mountain near 2,000 metres.

Crickets have been highly prized for their melodious chirping in Japan and were kept as pets for their songs (and for fighting), especially the species known as Suzumushi.

Suzumushi is the title of chapter 38 of The Tale of Genji, authored by Murasaki Shikibu. For unknown reasons, it is the only chapter skipped in Arthur Waley’s translation of the book.

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On my travels, I learnt of the legend of the Killing Stone (殺生石, Sesshōseki). Apparently, a nine-tailed fox, or kitsune, took the form of a legendary beauty, Tamamo-no-Mae.

She was apparently plotting the overthrow of the emperor. When the fox was killed by a loyal warrior, legend has it that the body of Tamamo-no-Mae became the stone.

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In 2023, the Killing Stone cracked and broke open, and one fragment fell a couple of metres down the slope of the hill. The local government paid for a religious ceremony in case the evil spirit was released.

The day of my visit to the stone, I happened to read these lines from Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus:

It’s like a monument to a mythic poet.

Better, to the commander of a rearguard.

Whether of stone or bronze it is found fractured

if not by vandals by some intrinsic

flaw proper to originality and the medium,

material witness to a state of things

in which our freedom is a type of fate within

the shifting bounds predictable.

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It seems Basho originally intended to visit the nearby shrine, where some stones are etched with his haiku. It’s a beautiful spot on one side of the steep, heavily treed valleyside.

However, although we know he visited the Killing Stone, which is very close by in the same valley, it’s not clear whether he also visited the shrine. He left no mention of having done so.

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This is a passage from Basho’s account of his travels from Narrow path to the deep north:

Taking leave of my friend in Kurobane, I started for the Murder [Killing] Stone, so called because it kills birds and insects that approached it. I was riding on a horse my friend had lent me, when the farmer who led the horse asked me to compose a poem for him. His request came to me as a pleasant surprise.

Turn the head of your horse
Sideways across the field,
To let me hear
The cry of the cuckoo.

The Murder [Killing] Stone was in the dark corner of a mountain near a hot spring, and was completely wrapped in the poisonous gas rising from it. There was such a pile of dead bees, butterflies, and other insects, that the real color of the ground was hardly discernable.

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The valley which surrounds the Killing Stone is almost oppressively narrow and made me think of these lines from Milton’s Comus: ¹

This dim spot,

Which men call Earth, and with low-thoughted care

Confin’d, and pester’d in this pin-fold here.

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Baasho’s haiku about this place ² is now recorded on a stone plinth at the site:

The stench of the stone

the summer grass red,

the scorching dew.

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The smell of sulphur (mixed with arsenic?) is still strong in Sesshōseki. In places it is almost overpowering, though I didn’t see any dead insects.

Perhaps the gases are not as poisonous as they were in Basho’s day. Just as well, since it’s a popular tourist spot now.

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In the chemical composition of the place, I found another Milton parallel. Sulphur gets a mention in Book I of Paradise Lost: ³

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all, but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed

With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

and

There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top

Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire

Shone with a glossy scurf—undoubted sign

That in his womb was hid metallic ore,

The work of sulphur.

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A more modern addition to the site of the Killing Stone are the jizo, small statues of Jizo Bodhisattva. There are one thousand jizo, a sign says, though this might just mean there are a lot. Here the little statues all sported knitted hats.

I didn’t count them.

Just as eye-catching were the grey stones punctuating the green vegetation to one side of the path.

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On his travels in this area, Basho met a small girl of around 5. He found her name, Kasane, delightful and wrote a celebrated poem (a tanka) about her:

Spring passes by

again and again in layers

of blossom kimono

may you see wrinkles

come with old age

The poem is a play on her name. “Kasaneru” means “to layer”. The layers of the kimono (in this case a special one for cherry blossom viewing) are part of this, as well as the layers operating over time with the kimono being passed from mother to daughter.

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A poet like Basho can see so many layers to life even in a simple sight. His play on the word made me think, while in the valley of the Killing Stone, of the layers of rock representing geological time.

And considering how time has transformed this place from a place of dread and fear into a tourist attraction made me think of words from Belial in Paradise Lost, who seems to foresee the gradual cooling and easing of their torments: ⁴

These raging fires

Will slacken, if his breath stir not their flames.

Our purer essence then will overcome

Their noxious vapour; or, inured, not feel.

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The site is not only a tourist attraction but also a kind of pilgrimage for some. In addition to the presence of the many jizo, there are many tiny piles of stones near the Killing Stone.

Apparently, since the 19th century, the jizo have been seen as guardians of children and travellers. They are also protecting the spirits of those children who died early and whose spirits are unable to cross into the afterlife. The lost spirits of these children build little stone towers to gain merits for their parents in the afterlife.

The little stone towers are left by travellers who wish to ease the Sisyphean burden of the lost children. The piles of stones do not represent paradise regained.

But they are visible signs of once-shattered hope being rebuilt, one stone at a time.

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Contemplating the scene of the Sesshōseki, the Killing Stone, one last time before my departure, I felt how Milton and Basho both offer deep and reassuring seriousness. But I also felt the vast difference between them in both scale and perspective.

Milton’s mountain of words in Paradise Lost was a vantage point from which to survey the universe (and “justify the ways of God to man”).

Basho’s tiny haiku, on the other hand, are like the tiny stone towers at Sesshōseki, an offering to ease the individual burden.

1. Lines 5-7. You can access the text online here.

2. You can read it in Japanese here.

3. You can access the text here.

4. Book II, 213-16.