The Sound Tobikomu Implies

Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

Just seventeen syllables, written by the Japanese haiku poet Basho. Japan’s single greatest work of travel literature.

However, all the translations of this you’ve ever read stink, and that’s simply because of the second line—actually, the second word of the second line, tobikomu. In English, this line gets turned into “a frog jumps in,” but the real question is what sound does tobikomu imply? Splash? Plop? Kerplunk?

Doesn’t translate.

I was on pilgrimage in Japan, working the Saigoku 33-temple route, which starts south of Wakayama—the train ride there went past the only open, unused flat land I ever saw in Japan—then works its way up through Kyoto, Nara, around Lake Biwa (including a stop on an island inside an island), and on to the Sea of Japan.

Earlier that day, I’d met a friend of mine; we were going to hit four or five of the temples together, while catching up on what had been happening in the year since we’d last seen each other. This was a pretty standard gaijin-Japanese relationship: she spoke to me in Japanese, I spoke to her in English, and we got along just fine. And even though that night when we stopped for dinner, I didn’t understand everything the old man said to her that made her stand up and yell at him, before she dragged me out of the restaurant, my Japanese was more than good enough to get the gist.

The problem with traveling with a Japanese, though, meant that nobody we met believed I could speak Japanese. We came up to the temple, the priest came out and completely ignored me, standing next to her and starting to explain the large, concrete frog that overlooked a pond roughly the size of a kitchen table.

It was Basho’s pond. This is the old pond where the frog jumped in.

I asked the priest a question in Japanese. He looked blankly at me, so my friend repeated it, using exactly the same words. He answered her.

It’s a pretty little pond, some nice moss and good rocks around it. The concrete frog, though, is something of a problem. It had to weigh a good forty pounds; it was the size of a beagle.

If that was the size of the frog Basho watched, then the sound had to be something like the fat kid from grade school doing a cannonball.

All the best travel writing does two things: makes you think you’ve been somewhere; and makes you wonder what the place was like, what the experience was like. We hold a pond in our imagination. When we hear the poem, we have the picture. Seventeen utterly brilliant syllables, says everything you need to know, just like that wonderful single-sentence novel Italo Calvino liked to quote: “When I woke in the morning, I found the dinosaur was still there.”

So we have the picture.

And we are blessed with the mystery: what is the sound tobikomu implies?

Reason enough to go.