On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

Sōseki, known mainly for his novels, was for a while prominent as a haiku writer, at least in Shiki’s estimation, leaving behind a total of 2,600 haiku. He studied English at the Imperial University of Tokyo, and taught it in Matsuyama and then Kumamoto, when, in May 1900, the government sent him to London to study English literature, where he stayed until December 1902.

  But his basic education was in classical Chinese, which he loved; he could write verse and prose in that difficult language at will. Naturally, he was familiar with Zen and its terms, though not all the koans or ready responses to them. In fact, from late 1894 to early 1895 he stayed in the Engaku Temple in Kamakura, which had been founded toward the end of the thirteenth century by the Chinese Zen monk Mugaku (Wuxue). But, as Sōseki admitted years later in his introduction to a selection of Takahama Kyoshi’s short stories Cockscomb (Keitō), “I don’t know what is called Zen. Years ago I trained with Monk Sōen and was whacked by his question, ‘What is your original face before your father and mother came into being?’ Since then I have been a layman yet to meet my original face.” A few years later, he incorporated this experience of non-enlightenment at the Rinzai Temple in his somber 1910 novel, Gate (Mon).

  In that case, what did Sōseki mean by “Zen flavor”? To summarize his thought in the same introduction where he treated the “haiku flavor” (haimi 俳味) and Zen flavor (Zenmi 禅味) as the same, he wrote that if the state in which you concern yourself with matters related to life and death and can’t overcome them, as in Henrik Ibsen, is termed “primary,” the state in which you have destroyed the barrier (gate) between life and death and can ignore both will be “secondary.” So put, the Zen flavor or haiku flavor is what you get in the latter, Sōseki proposed.

  In 1911, Sōseki, apparently responding to a simple question posed by a journalist, asserted:

  The hobby of haikai? I’ll say it doesn’t exist in the West. Something like senryū exists in Western poetry, but a haikai hobby doesn’t exist even in poetry, and it doesn’t form the essence of poetry. You may say it’s unique to Japan.

  After all, in Japan and in the West, even architectural decorations are different; in Japan a small thing like a tanzaku hung [on the wall] can be an adornment, but in a large Western structure such an insignificant thing, even if you put it up, won’t stand out in any way.

  There will be no progress in haiku; there will be only change. No matter how complicated you may make it, how you may clutter it with things like a department store, you can do nothing about it. Just as Japanese clothes are convenient, just as the Japanese house is convenient, so is haiku convenient.

  Strictly speaking, Sōseki may have been right, but by the time he spoke these words, Imagism had already come into being.

  Still, you can generally say that the desire or effort to see Zen implications even in the pond-frog hokku has markedly receded in the decades that followed Shiki, Chamberlain, and Sōseki. Among some of the more prominent commentators on haikai and hokku, the academic Ebara Taizō and the poet Andō Tsuguo, both from the standpoint of what makes haikai tick, did not take up the pond-frog hokku in their commentaries on Bashō’s pieces, while the haiku critic Yamamoto Kenkichi said, first in his comments on a selection of Bashō’s hokku, that Zen may have to be taken into account in considering the quick acceptance and popularity of pond-frog hokku, but in commenting on all of Bashō’s hokku, later said that the hokku simply described what was observed.

  But, again, this does not mean that Zen has largely lost its place in hokku interpretation or in haiku writing.

  For example, Ogiwara Seisensui, who advocated “free-rhythm hokku”—that which ignores the set form of 5-7-5 or a total of 17 syllables—and promoted it through his magazine Cumuli (Sōun), which he started in 1911, trained in Zen. And through it he attained “state-of-mind-ism” (shinkyō-shugi) over “literariness.” That “state” may be difficult to clarify, as he admitted, but it was clearly an Eastern ideal posited against Western idealism, and that led to Seisensui’s advocacy of the merging of the trinity of “nature, self, and freedom,” the title of a book he wrote toward the end of his life. In that book he urged the abandonment of the term haiku and whatever may be associated with it for the creation of a “new short poem,” even as it catches things “impressionistic, symbolic, and flash-like”—a very Zen concept.

  Two of the contributors to the magazine Cumuli later became prominent in “free-rhythm” haiku: Taneda Santōka and Ozaki Hōsai. Of the two, Santōka entered the priesthood at a Sōtō Zen temple—through the simple rite of tokudo that doesn’t require rigorous training—before turning himself into an itinerant, and Hōsai involved himself with Buddhism in the last few years of his life, albeit largely as a sexton.

  Let us look at haiku written by these poets from the early issues of Cumuli. The numbers at the end of each show syllabic breakdowns. Here’s one of Santōka’s:

  燕とびかふ空しみじみと家出かな

  Tsubame tobikau sora shimijimi to iede kana

  Swallows flit back and forth in the sky feelingly the runaway

  (7-7-5 or 7-2-5-5)

  Here’s one by Hōsai:

  海が明け居り窓一つ開けたり

  Umi ga akeori mado hitotsu hiraketari

  The sea is dawning one window has opened

  (7-5-5)

  From Seisensui’s selection of his own, two may be given:

  たんぽぽたんぽぽ砂浜に春が目をひらく

  Tampopo tampopo sunahama ni haru ga me o hiraku

  Dandelions dandelions on the sand beach spring opens its eyes

  (4-4-5-8 or 7-4-8)

  朝日したたり流るる山の底の家

  Asahi shitatari nagaruru yama no soko no ie

  Morning sun dripping flowing at mountain’s bottom a house

  (7-7-5)

  These examples may not be too far from the total of seventeen in syllable count, but in later periods Seisensui would write long pieces all in one line, as may be seen in the first of the following three, extracted from After a Hellfire (Gōka no ato), Sensensui’s selection published in 1927. Four years earlier the Great Kantō Earthquake had struck, killing 100,000 people.

  蟹の喰べ方上手下手の皆で喰べてしまった蟹の殻

  Kani no tebe kata jōzu heta no minna de tabeteshimatta kani no kara

  How to eat crabs skilled and unskilled all of us have eaten up crabs’ shells

  (7-6-4-7-5)

  地震の懼れつづく日の蜘蛛は巣をつくる

  Jishin no osore tsuzuku hi no kumo wa su o tsukuru

  The fear of the earthquake continuing the day spiders are making webs

  (7-5-8)

  屍軆が寄り来る汐に渡しを待たされる

  Shitai ga yorikuru ushio ni watashi o matasareru

  Corpses drift closer with the tides where we’re being kept waiting for the ferry

  (8-13)

  The haiku writer best known for his dedication to Zen in more recent years may well be Nagata Kōi. Upon graduating from vocational high school, Kōi found employment with Mitsubishi Paper Mills, where he stayed until his mandatory retirement in 1955. His interest in Zen started early, in 1920, when he attended a session at a temple in which he heard Zen questions and answers. It was also about the same time that he started writing haiku and submitting them to newspapers and magazines. He also joined various haiku groups.

  Kōi defined “the essence of the haiku spirit” as kaigyaku, as “humor,” “banter,” “witticism,” and placed “the ultimate of kaigyaku in a vulgar (hizoku), lofty (kōmai), ‘making fun (of someone or something)’ (chakasu)” act, adding that “the superior function of chakasu applies to one’s own state where one can ‘turn one’s self and others into a void.’” He said that his argument for “fundamental haiku” (kongen haiku) was based on “Oriental nothingness.”

>   Kōi pursued various arts, including calligraphy, and in his sixties started holding one-man calligraphy shows. Among the Zen masters he admired, Ikkyū was at the top, and when he saw one of Ikkyū’s calligraphic works he compared it to a shrub where all the bamboo has been chopped away, leaving only their sharp, dangerous stubble rising noisily up as a bush warbler’s beautiful song—exquisite, unpolluted—descends from heaven. Ikkyū is reputed to have loved a woman forty or fifty years younger than he when he was in his late seventies and early eighties. Kōi wrote several hokku thinking of the Zen master. Some of them are included in his autobiography:

  淫乱や僧形となる魚のむれ

  Inran ya sōgyō to naru uo no mure

  Lasciviousness: turning into a monk shape a school of fish

  抱きこめば女体虚空の匂いのみ

  Dakikomeba nyotai kokū no nioi kana

  Hold a female body tight and only a smell of void

  骸骨が舐め合う秋も名残かな

  Gaikotsu ga namaeau aki mo nagori kana

  Skeletons licking each other as autumn lingers

  Here are a couple of his hokku from an album of his calligraphic hanging scrolls published when he turned ninety-two years old:

  大晩春泥ん泥泥どろ泥ん

  Dai-banshun doron doro doro doro doron

  Great late spring muddy mud mud mud muddy

  泥鰌浮いて鯰も居るというて沈む

  Dojō uite namazu mo iru to iute shizumu

  Weather loaches float up, saying we’ve got also a catfish, sink

  Dojō, the weather loach or weatherfish (Misgurnus anguillicaudatus), is regarded as particularly full of nutrition, and are scooped up with a basket for food. The catfish has a special Zen-like reputation. Kōi was proud of the following irregular, hypersyllabic haiku inspired by the famous Zen painting Gourd Catfish Picture.

  圧さえた鯰と共に笑う身の節々

  Osaeta namazu to tomo ni warau mi no fushibushi

  Laughing along with the pushed-down catfish my body joints

  (8-6-6)

  The painting, attributed to Josetsu, depicts a funny-looking bearded man standing by a stream, holding a gourd with both hands, and a large catfish swimming in the stream beneath him. It is said to have been made when asked by the fourth Ashikaga shogun Yoshimochi to pictorialize the koan, “Holding down a catfish with a gourd,” which means “very difficult,” for you can’t really hold down the scaleless, slippery catfish with your hands, let alone with a gourd. Thirty-one Zen masters of the day composed poems inspired by Josetsu’s painting.

  If we turn to Zen and haiku in America for a moment, one poet to be noted may be Jack Kerouac of On the Road fame, although a large selection of his haiku was not published until 2003. According to Regina Weinreich, who edited Book of Haikus—the plural “s” is the poet’s—Kerouac first came to Buddhism through the Indian philosopher-poet Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha, probably in E. B. Cowell’s 1894 translation, then to Zen through Dwight Goddard’s 1932 anthology of Buddhist texts, A Buddhist Bible. Later, in 1955, while associating with Gary Snyder (who was introduced to Zen through Daisetsu Suzuki), Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, Kerouac immersed himself in haiku through R. H. Blyth’s books explicating Japanese haiku, which were all based on his assertion that “haiku is Zen.” He fictionalized his immersion learning in sections of his 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, presenting Snyder as Japhy Rider and himself as Ray Smith. At one point, the two go mountain climbing and engage in a discourse à la Virgil and Dante:

  “Rocks on the side of the cliff,” I said, “why don’t they tumble down?”

  “Maybe that’s a haiku, maybe not, it would be a little complicated,” said Japhy. “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.”

  “The greatest haiku of them all” is one of Shiki’s early, seldom anthologized pieces, which reads: ぬれ足で雀のあるく廊下かな Nure ashi de suzumi no aruku rōka kana.

  At one point Kerouac began calling his haikus “pops,” providing the definition: “American (non-Japanese) Haikus, short 3-line poems or ‘pomes’ rhyming or non-rhyming delineating ‘little Samadhis’ if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming towards enlightenment.” Here are some of his pops.

  Useless! useless!

  —heavy rain driving

  into the sea

  What is Buddhism?

  —A crazy little

  Bird blub

  Prayerbeads

  on the Holy Book

  —My knees are cold

  Haiku, shmaiku, I can’t

  understand the intention

  Of reality

  The fly, just as

  lonesome as I am

  In this empty house

  Around the time The Dharma Bums appeared, a young man named Richard Baker encountered the pond-frog haiku at Harvard University. Helen Tworkov tells the story in her Zen in America.

  After three years he left college for a year and joined the merchant marine. On his return to Harvard he studied with Orientalists John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer. During one lecture, Reischauer, the man credited for saving the Japanese temple-city Kyoto from American bombs, read Basho’s famous haiku:

  Old pond

  Frog jumps in

  Watersound

  “I was sitting there,” recalls Baker, “in this semi-satori experience of light and bliss, and then Reischauer said, ‘Well, I never understood it. I still don’t get it.’ Shortly after that I quit Harvard forever.”

  Incidentally, it wasn’t Reischauer but Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson who saved Kyoto from an atomic bombing. If Stimson had followed his military planners’ recommendations, Gary Snyder wouldn’t have studied either at the Shōkoku-ji, an important temple of Rinzai Zen, in 1956, or at the Daitoku-ji, another important temple of the same school of Zen, in 1959.

  Richard Baker would go on to become a Zen master.

  To go back to Zen and haiku in Japan, many Japanese readers may be surprised to learn that Nagata Kōi found Zen embodied in some of the haiku of Takayanagi Shigenobu. Takayanagi, after all, was at the forefront of the avant-garde haiku movement in postwar Japan, writing and publishing lineated, hypersyllabic pieces—not just more than seventeen, but some called “twenty-six-syllable songs” and others “thirty-one-syllable songs,” to wit, “tanka songs”—where “unwritten law had existed that haiku must be written in one vertical line,” and with a strikingly non-haikuesque sensibility. In fact, one must admit that most of his pieces at the height of his fame may be included in the “haiku” category only because Takayanagi regarded himself as a haiku writer (haijin).

  Here’s one example from his 1952 selection The Count’s Territory (Hakushaku-ryō):

  <黒い孤島> “Kuroi Kotō” “A Dark Solitary Island”

  咲き Saki Blooming

  燃えて moete burning

  灰の hai no ashes’

  渦 uzu a whirl

  輪の wa no pool’s

  孤島の kotō no solitary island’s

  薔薇 bara rose

  The “count” in the title of this collection refers to comte de Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The French writer of Romantic idealism and cruel sensuality greatly appealed to a generation of Japanese writers, among them Mishima Yukio.


  Then, in 1980, just a few years before his death, Takayanagi published a collection of haiku written mostly in seventeen syllables and printed in one line, under the clearly concocted name of Yamakawa Semio, which means “Mountain-River Cicada-Man.” It was in some of these seemingly tame, traditional pieces that Kōi discerned Zen.

  Takayanagi must have felt he owed his readers some explanation. In his afterword to this collection, he noted that he’d written these to “simply restore the custom of writing haiku,” skipping the act of turning ideas into multiple lines before writing them down. Also, in doing so, he imposed upon himself a constraint of turning out each piece within, say, five minutes.

  In fact, many of the one-line haiku in this selection were actually Takayanagi-esque in subject and imagination, if shorn of the edginess of the lineated pieces. In any case, it is interesting that Kōi, who had joined Takayanagi’s group in 1958, found Zen in pieces not displaying Takayanagi’s hallmarks. One of them, in particular, reminded him of an anecdote about the Chinese Zen master Tōsan Ryōkai (Dongshan Liangjia), the founder of Sōtō (Caodong) Zen, as it presents, Kōi said in his autobiography, “a spectacle of a self pausing simultaneously separating into several entities.”

  水過ぎゆくここにかしこに我立つに

  Mizu sugiyuku koko ni kashiko ni ware tatsuni

  The water passes as I stand right here and right there

  In the anecdote Kōi cited, given below, Ungo (Yunju) Dōyō was Tōsan’s student who later spread his teacher’s Zen.

  As the master was about to cross a river with Ungo, he asked, “How deep is the water?”

  Ungo replied, “It’s so shallow it won’t even wet my feet.”

  The master said, “You’re a crude fellow.”

  Ungo said, “I beg you to guide me, master.”

  The master said, “It never runs dry.”

  Among other Takayanagi one-line haiku Kōi quoted in this connection were the following:

  水中に寝てゐる石を見てゐるなり

  Mizunaka ni neteiru ishi o miteirunari

  I am looking at a stone lying in the water

  ざぶざぶと子供が歩く川の中