Planning to go down the Mogami River by boat, we waited for fair weather at a place called Oishida. Here the seeds of haikai had once fallen and spread; the people, longing for unforgettable flowers of the past, eased their simple hearts as if playing reed flutes, and wandered on this path of haikai, lost between the old ways and the new, with no one to guide them; so, unable to refuse, I left them one kasen sequence. This journey of poetry had reached even such a place.
The Mogami River flows out of Michinoku, with Yamagata at its upper reaches. It has fearful rapids called Goten and Hayabusa. It flows north of Mount Itajiki and empties at last into the sea at Sakata. Mountains loom on both sides, and the boat goes down through thick woods. Boats loaded with rice must be what they call inabune. The White Thread Falls drop amid the green leaves, and the Sennin Hall stands facing the bank. The water was swollen, and the boat was in danger.
"Samidare o / atsumete hayashi / Mogamigawa" (Gathering the early summer rains, how swift it runs: the Mogami River.)
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This verse was first composed at a poetry gathering at a boat inn in Oishida as "Samidare o / atsumete suzushi / Mogamigawa," "gathering the early summer rains, how cool," a greeting to the people of Oishida praising the cool river breeze. But after actually riding a boat down the Mogami and feeling the force of the swollen rapids himself, Basho changed "suzushi," cool, to "hayashi," swift. With a difference of a single word, a mild verse of greeting was reborn as a grand verse of nature's power.
The Mogami River runs south to north through Yamagata Prefecture into the Japan Sea, about 230 kilometers long, and is counted with the Fuji and Kuma rivers as one of Japan's three great rapids. Today you can still ride the "Mogami River boat trip" along the stretch Basho went down, from Furukuchi in Tozawa village to Kusanagi.