Bashō and Sora at Matsushima and Hiraizumi

After visiting Shiogama, Bashō and Sora hired a boat across Matsushima Bay. Bashō describes islands rising, lying low and overlapping, their pines bent by sea winds. At an inn overlooking the water, he opens poems sent by friends before departure. Matsushima was already celebrated; his account responds to a place surrounded by earlier writing.

At Hiraizumi, the landscape changes. Bashō sees fields where Fujiwara Hidehira’s residence had stood and climbs Takadachi, associated with Yoshitsune’s final resistance. In his verse, summer grass covers warriors’ vanished ambitions. Sora supplies a second poem about the aged retainer Kanefusa. Their chosen figures connect the visit with inherited stories of the defeated.

The account then turns to Chūsonji’s halls. Its Golden Hall holds the Fujiwara rulers’ coffins and Buddhist images, protected by an enclosing building against wind and rain. Bashō’s rain poem makes that survival the counterpart to the grass-covered ruins. The two stops supplied different scenes: scenery experienced through a boat trip and friends’ poems, followed by political loss and a religious building that continued to preserve the dead.