Matsuo Basho’s travelogue Nozarashi Kiko purchased by Kyoto Museum

The scroll of Matsuo Basho's travelogue Nozarashi Kiko was purchased by the Fukuda Art Museum in Kyoto, provided by Fukuda Art Museum in Kyoto. It was announced on May 24 that it had purchased the long-missed illustrated scroll of a travelogue by the poet Matsuo Basho from an art dealer in Osaka City.

Nozarashi Kiko Journal of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton is Basho's first travelogue describing his journeys from Edo present-day Tokyo to his hometown of Iga in present-day Mie Prefecture and the Kinki region between 1684 and 1685.

He also illustrated it.

Shinichi Fujita, professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Kansai University, said I was stunned to know that the scroll exists. Two scrolls of Nozarashi Kiko remain in existence but it was not known for a long time who owned this one, which was purchased by the museum, although there were photos of it.

Only one of the two scrolls has illustrations. The scroll will be displayed at the museum in October.

Basho authored Oku no Hosomichi The Narrow Road to the Deep North on his travels in Oshu, part of the present-day Tohoku region five years after writing Nozarashi Kiko. Nozarashi Kiko was a precursor of Oku no Hosomichi and established Basho as a travel poet, Fujita says.

The scroll measures almost 23 centimeters in width and about 14.5 meters in height.

The travelogue begins with a haiku Nozarashi wo Kokoro ni Kaze no Shimu Mi Kana, which means that I could fall and be a skeleton during this journey, but the wind already penetrates my heart at the beginning of the trip. The travelogue contains the haiku that Basho wrote during his eight-month journey around the world, such as Nara, Iga and Kuwana. It contains 21 of his illustrations.

The scroll has changed hands in recent years, according to the Fukuda Art Museum. It can't find any record of the scroll being exhibited at a museum in the past 40 years.