12. This vow is found in the Book of Songs, 3:6, 4; 6:9, 3.
13. This poem encapsulates Issa’s emotions when in 1813, at the age of fifty, after a long dispute with his stepmother and stepbrother, he was able to claim his portion of his father’s inheritance and return to his hometown of Kashiwabara. Having decided to stay there for the rest of his life, he looks at the deep snow and imagines it covering his grave. An earlier version had shinu tokoro ka yo (the place where I will die!) for the middle line, which apparently was too blunt. Kaneko Toota observes that the first line is colloquial, the second is classical, and the last is harsh reality. The five feet of snow is not the beautiful snow found in classical poetry but the snow that implicitly oppresses, that is harsh and powerful.
14. The wild rose (ibara), a seasonal word for early summer, is associated with nostalgia, much like the “old home” (furusato), but instead of enjoying the fond memories of the past, Issa is wounded everywhere he turns by the thorns on the rose. According to the Seventh Diary, which includes this poem, in the Fifth Month of 1810, Issa traveled from Edo to his home town of Kashiwabara, where he unsuccessfully attempted to obtain from the mayor the will left by his deceased father. The cold reception given him by the mayor, his stepmother and stepbrother, and others in his hometown provides the backdrop for this poem.
15. Issa, who grew up in Japan’s “snow country,” wrote frequently about snow. In this poem he focuses on big flakes of snow, falling down slowly, almost as if they could be eaten like candy. Fūwari, fūwari suggests the snowflakes’ light, floating movement. The hokku is typical of Issa in taking the perspective of a child. But Kuriyama Riichi points out that the poem is unusual for Issa, since he usually treats snow as an enemy.
16. Yukidoke (snow thawing) is a seasonal word for midspring. In the snow country, the heavy accumulations of the snow begin to melt with the arrival of strong sunshine in midspring. Instead of the expected floodwaters, the village is suddenly filled with children, eager to play outside in the sunshine. Because of spring’s late arrival, the transition to warmth is sudden and festive, a mood captured in the phrase mura ippai (village overflowing).
17. This poem is about Issa’s life as a transient in Edo. Here the suzukaze, a cool breeze bringing relief on a hot summer day, has to bend and twist; that is, it has to travel through the crooked backstreets of Edo, where the poor people live, to get to the poet’s house, which is at the farthest remove. The poem suggests that Issa, now with a house in Kashiwabara, is looking back on his Edo days with considerable detachment and amusement.
18. This poem notes that Issa has seen a frog battle. In the spring, during the mating season, male frogs gathered to fight over a single female frog. In this context, the poet is calling out encouragement to a frog that appears to be losing the battle. The poem has been interpreted as showing Issa’s sympathy for the small, weak, and vulnerable creatures (like himself). In this larger context, it also may mean that Issa, single and without a family for most of his life, is talking to himself about his marital prospects. “Don’t give up!” (makeru na Issa kore ni ari) is a military phrase used by a commander to urge on his troops.
19. Ari (ants), a word that does not appear in waka, and kumo no mine (towering clouds, with flat bottoms rising straight up into the sky) are seasonal words for summer. The poem sets up a striking contrast between the black ants and the white clouds, the small and the large, the close and the distant.
20. This poem suggests a bystander warning the little sparrows to step aside as a horse approaches. A more interesting interpretation is that a child is on a bamboo play-horse, telling the baby sparrows to get out of the way. The phrase “step aside, step aside” (sokonoke, sokonoke) was the command used to clear the road when a samurai procession was passing through. The honorific word ouma (honorable horse) implies that the horse belongs to a samurai, a member of the social elite, whereas baby sparrows (suzume no ko), a seasonal word for spring, suggest someone of low status
21. This poem is frequently cited as an example of Issa’s compassion for helpless creatures. In typical Issa fashion, the fly (hae)—a summer seasonal word that does not appear in waka—is personified. Issa liked to write about those creatures—flies, mosquitoes, lice—that were hated by humans and on which he projected his own sense of victimization and alienation.
22. Yatarō was Kobayashi Issa’s given name. The poetic persona here is that of a child who feels deep sympathy for the orphaned sparrow; Issa himself had lost his mother at an early age. An 1814 entry in Seventh Diary suggests, as here, that Issa was six or eight years old when he wrote this, but he was in fact about fifty-one.
23. A name suggesting satoru, or to achieve spiritual awakening.
24. This refers to a sequence of nursery games in which an adult and/or a child claps his hands together, pats his open mouth to make an “ah-wa-wa-wa!” sound, pats his head with both hands, and then shakes his head from side to side. The names Issa uses to describe these amusements (te-uchi te-uchi a-wa-wa, otsumu ten-ten, kaburi kaburi) are onomatopoeic baby talk.
25. For deceased relatives.
26. A childish attempt to say Namu Amida Butsu, a ritual invocation meaning “Hail Amida Buddha!” The chanting of this formulaic salutation, known as the nenbutsu, or meditating on the Buddha, was the core practice of members of the Pure Land sects of Japanese Buddhism. It was seen as a means of attaining salvation by rebirth in the Western Pure Land of Amida Buddha.
27. Sato (who was born on June 6, 1818) is one year old. Issa, following the contemporary Japanese system of counting a child as one year old at birth, calls her a two-year-old.
28. That is, in the style worn by children five to eight years old: shoulder length and parted in the middle.
29. The twenty-five bodhisattvas who, together with Amida Buddha himself, are said to come to Pure Land believers at the moment of death, mounted on purple clouds and playing exquisite music, to escort them to their rebirth in the Pure Land.
30. This refers to a parable related in chapter 8 of the Lotus Sutra, the “Prophecy of Enlightenment for Five Hundred Disciples,” about a man who dines at the home of a prosperous friend, gets drunk, and falls asleep. While he is sleeping, the friend sews a priceless jewel into the lining of his robe and then leaves. The man awakens and sets out on a long journey full of hardships. Years later he encounters his friend again, and the friend, who symbolizes the Buddha, rebukes him and shows him the jewel, a metaphor for the innate buddha wisdom, which he had in his possession all the while.
31. That is, the mother tenderly touches each tiny wound on the infant’s skin as she nurses her. The word soeji, rendered here as “gives the breast,” actually indicates lying side by side with one’s baby while nursing.
32. A paraphrase of a famous line from the yuefu “Song of the Autumn Wind” (Qiufeng ci), by China’s Han emperor Wu (156–87 B.C.E.): “At the height of our enjoyment, sorrow burgeons.”
33. A traditional ceremony to purify the afflicted person of the disease. The deity having been enticed aboard, the straw disk was floated off downstream.
34. Sato died on August 10, 1819, at the age of fourteen months.
35. Paraphrased from similar passages found in numerous Japanese and Chinese classical works. For example, a waka by Fujiwara no Tadafusa reads: “That I did not go before you—regrets for this come eight thousand times; sad it is that flowing water comes not back again” (Kokinshū, no. 837). And from fascicle 17 of the Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhist classic The Jingde-Era Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (Ch. Jingde chuan deng lu, J. Keitoku dentōroku), compiled by Daoyuan in 1004: “A broken mirror reflects no more; a fallen blossom cannot waft up to the branch.”
36. The term tariki (other power) refers to the Pure Land Buddhist approach of seeking salvation by depending on the power and beneficence of Amida Buddha, in contrast to seeking salvation through one’s own efforts, as advocated by other schools of Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhists refer, often derisively, to this lat
ter approach as based on jiriki, or “self-power.”
37. Beings reborn in Amida Buddha’s Pure Land are said to be born with skin of gold, like that of Amida Buddha himself.
38. As a member of the True Pure Land sect, Issa follows the teachings of its founder, Shinran (1173–1263), who asserted that if performed with complete faith, even a single repetition of the nenbutsu was sufficient to ensure rebirth in the Pure Land. Here Issa is describing two extreme interpretations of Shinran’s doctrine that Pure Land believers are liable to accept. The first extreme is trying too hard, concentrating so intensely on one’s faith in Amida’s salvational power that one’s own concentration itself becomes the true object of concentration, leading to the bondage of excessive self-consciousness. This, he suggests, is in fact a self-power approach to an other-power discipline. The other extreme is being too lazy: taking Shinran’s assertion too simplistically and arrogantly regarding oneself as already saved, as though Pure Land rebirth were something one could simply order up like a new kimono. This again, Issa argues, is a misconception based on an essentially self-power attitude. From this point, he goes on to expound his view of the true meaning of faith in other-power, in effect charting a middle way between these two extremes.
39. Ana kashiko: an auspicious interjection of awe and gratitude (a bit like “Hosanna!” or “Glory! Hallelujah!”). It was traditionally spoken at the end of every section when reciting a certain type of True Pure Land text.
40. That is, I simply leave everything in the hands of Amida Buddha.
41. February 13, 1820. By premodern Japanese reckoning, this was the last day of the year and the eve of a new spring. The book’s opening verses are dated New Year’s Day, the first day of the First Month of the second year of Bunsei. Complementing that date, this final passage rounds out both the volume and the year.
Chapter 26
WAKA IN THE LATE EDO PERIOD
Although the quality of prose fiction generally deteriorated toward the end of the Edo period, it was a rich and interesting period for waka, owing to the work of such talented provincial poets as Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843) from Tottori, Ryōkan (1758–1831) from Echigo, Tachibana Akemi (1828–1868) from Fukui, and Ōkuma Kotomichi (1798–1869) from Chikuzen. Both Ryōkan and Akemi were deeply influenced by the Man‘yōshū, the eighth-century anthology of poetry, but wrote about everyday, commoner life. Kotomichi also wrote about everyday life and is noted for his poetic treatises, which stress individuality and freedom in vocabulary.
OZAWA ROAN
Ozawa Roan (1723–1801) was born in Osaka. Although his father had been a samurai in Matsuyama, a castle town in present-day Nara, he had left his position and moved to Osaka. Roan grew up in Osaka but moved to Kyoto, where he was adopted by Honjō Katsuna, a samurai there. When he was around thirty, Roan became the student of Reizei Tamemura (1712–1774), a noted court poet who had received the secret transmission of the Kokinshū, the early-tenth-century imperial anthology of waka, and was the leading member of the aristocratic Reizei school. Roan took his Ozawa family name again when he was about thirty-five and entered the service of another samurai. In 1765, his position as a samurai was terminated, and for the remainder of his life he concentrated on waka, while working as a teacher, poet, and scholar of the classics and Chinese studies.
Roan greatly admired the Kokinshū and loved the Kokinwaka rokujō, another Heian anthology of waka. He is best known for his advocacy of “direct-word poetry” (tadakoto uta), in which the poet expresses his or her thoughts as they are naturally, without restriction in language or rhetoric. Roan became known during the Kansei era (1789–1801) as one of Kyoto’s “four kings” of commoner (jige) waka—as opposed to the court (dōjō) waka of his teacher Tamemura, who eventually expelled him from the Reizei school. Roan had close relationships with such men of letters as Ban Kōkei, Ueda Akinari, Motoori Norinaga, and Rai Sanyo and produced a number of outstanding disciples, the most notable being Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843), who became the leader of Kyoto-Osaka commoner waka in the late Edo period.
WAKA
Ōigawa By the Ōi River
tsuki to hana to no the moon and the cherry blossoms
oboroyo ni enveloped by the evening mist—
hitori kasumanu all that remains unclouded:
nami no oto kana the sound of the waves!1
Uzumasa no
The fierce roar
fukaki hayashi o of the wind
hibikikuru echoing through the deep forest
kaze no to sugoki of Uzumasa—
aki no yūgure autumn dusk2
[Kinsei wakashū, NKBT 93: 262, 282, translated by Peter Flueckiger]
THE ANCIENT MIDDLE ROAD THROUGH FURU (FURU NO NAKAMICHI, 1790)
Roan’s pronouncements in The Ancient Middle Road Through Furu,3 which he wrote late in life and portions of which are translated here, represent a major break with earlier views of waka. Roan attacked Kamo no Mabuchi for what he regarded as a serious contradiction: Mabuchi attempted to express human emotions directly, but he composed in the Man‘yōshū style and with Man‘yōshū vocabulary, which were foreign to contemporary readers. Roan, by contrast, argued that poetry should be without rhetorical artifice and should express thoughts and emotions using the language of the present, a poetic ideal he referred to as tadakoto uta (direct-word poetry). This term appears in Ki no Tsurayuki’s kana preface to the Kokinshū, where it is listed as one of the “six poetic styles” (rikugi). Roan, however, offers his own interpretation of it, that it refers to poetry produced from a correct (tadashi) heart using direct or ordinary (tada) words (koto). In the first passage from the section called “Dust and Dirt”4 and in the last passage from “Responses to Questions,” Roan presents another theory, that of the notions of “universal emotion” (dōjō) and “fresh emotion” (shinjō), which have been compared with Bashō’s haikai notion of the “unchanging and ever-changing” (fueki ryūkō). Here Roan contends that human emotions (ninjō) as expressed in poetry remain unchanged over time and thus are the “same emotions” (dōjō) in both past and present. At the same time, however, poetry directly expresses an individual’s heart and in this sense has no poetic predecessors. That is, the constant changing of individual emotions is what gives poetry its freshness and vitality.
Dust and Dirt
There is nothing that comes before one’s own heart. One does not compose poetry by following others, nor does one compose based on precedent. This shows that poetry is without rules and without teachers.
Although this principle is apparent, when I see what has been composed by the ancients, my own ignorance and incapacity drive me to want to imitate them. This is the second principle of poetry. But when we view this from the perspective of what I described earlier, we find that all our own feelings are in accord with what has been composed by the ancients.
As far as heaven and earth extend, in both past and present, human emotions are the same. Therefore when I concentrate my heart fully, it is completely in agreement with the spirit [kokoro] of the poetry of the ancients. This should not be confused with the “freshness” that I spoke of earlier. The universal character of human emotions is unchanged from past to present. “Freshness” refers to the way in which these emotions constantly change. Whether we come to know emotions through the poetry of the ancients or whether we come to know them through what we originally feel, we come to know the same thing. . . .
Ki no Tsurayuki spoke of direct-word poetry [tadakoto uta]. His personal poetry collection5 is based on this notion. Its poetry flows easily, and its meaning is clearly expressed. In this style, it is easy to speak one’s heart. In judgments of poetry matches, when the comment is made that a poem is “too direct,” it refers to this style. The fact that directness is despised is surely a sign of the decline of poetry. I consider it good for the heart to be correct and the words to flow freely, and bad for the heart to be labored and the words to be crafted.
Reed Sprouts
Poetry is the nat
ural Way [onozukaranaru michi] of this country, so when composing, we should not try to be clever, nor should we try to be exalted. We should not try to be entertaining, or graceful, or unusual. It is a natural Way, so if we seek a certain manner, we will lose naturalness. Poetry simply involves expressing the things we feel in the present moment, using words that are intelligible and that we use in our own speech.
For example, in a moment when I feel joyful, upon seeing blossoms I will compose the words “The flowers too bloom with the color of joy!” In a moment when I feel sad, upon hearing a bird, I will compose something like “Does the bird cry out because it too is sad?” The preface to the Kokinshū says that poetry “expresses what is felt upon seeing and hearing things.”
There is nothing, then, that comes before our own heart. Day and night, it is constantly in motion and never stands still, and the thoughts that we have at each moment are always in flux. There is nothing fresher in the heart than this, and we express these feelings directly.
For example, “hot!” is a poem, and “cold!” is also a poem. The preface to the Kokinshū says, “Upon hearing the warblers crying among the blossoms and the voices of the frogs in the water, can we say that there is any living thing that does not produce poetry?” Living things do not cry out if they do not feel anything in their hearts. To express this in two or three lines is also a poem. To express it in a konponka, in a thirty-one-syllable waka, in a sedōka, or in a chōka is all poetry.6 When there are many lines, they can express the heart at greater length.
Responses to Questions
The distinction between universal emotions [dōjō] and fresh emotions [shinjō] can be explained using a metaphor. From the beginning of the universe until the present day, it has remained the case that even though many rivers flow into the sea, the sea is able to receive them all without overflowing. This represents what is the same in both past and present. But day and night, the water never ceases to gush forth from the sources of these rivers. It is constantly in motion, together with the creative force of the universe, and is not the same water as in the past. The water that we can see gushing forth in each successive moment is like the human emotions that are spontaneously produced anew upon contact with external things.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 131