by Hiroaki Sato
Bush warbler: I’ll rest my hands in the kitchen sink
In those days, people used to wear clothing made of paper, called kamiko. Eccentrics concludes its account of Chigetsu with the following episode:
Once, in her old age, this nun brought paper and a brush to Bashō and, holding the sleeves of her kamiko together, requested that he write something for her to remember him by after his death. Bashō nodded in assent and wrote something and gave it to her, saying playfully, “Well, you are nearly sixty and ask me for something to remember me by after my death. How can I muster enough strength to do that?” It appears that she had some premonition of the nearness of her teacher’s death. Before the end of the year, she received the news of his death in Naniwa.
There are at least two women haikai poets by the name of Shūshiki (秋色), which means “autumn color.” Though the two are often confused, Shūshiki Sr., so to speak—(the junior was born in 1727 and died in 1784)—is the more famous partly because of a legendary tale attached to her. As Eccentrics tells it:
Shūshiki was a resident of Edo; at first, while she was the wife at the cookie shop Daimoku, in Terifuri-chō, her name was O-Aki. From a young age, she had the mind to be fūryū. One spring, when she was thirteen, she went to see cherry blossoms in Ueno. When she saw the cherry tree near the well behind the Kannon Hall of Kiyomizu Temple, [she made the following hokku]:
井戸端の桜あぶなし酒の酔
Idobata no sakura abunashi sake no ei
The cherry by the well is risky for someone drunk
The resident monk in those years was keenly interested in elegant things; every day he collected the kanshi, tanka, and haiku left on the trunks of cherry trees, assessing and commenting on them. In the end, he chose this hokku as the best from those years. No wonder the tree became famous as the Shūshiki Cherry for generations.
Shūshiki is known to have had a number of children. The following hokku describes one of them:
しみじみと子は肌へつくみぞれ哉
Shimijimi to ko wa hada e tsuku mizore kana
Intimately my child clings to my flesh: sleet
Andō Tsuguo, an indefatigable seeker of the meaning of haikai, says that what makes this hokku tick is the “disposition” of the phrase shimijimi to and the kireji, kana.
Episodes of Eccentrics ends its account of Shūshiki with her farewell- to-this-world hokku:
見し夢の覚めても色のかきつばた
Mishi yume no samete mo iro no kakitsubata
Awakening from a dream, too, the color the iris
The best-known woman haikai poet during the Edo period (1603–1868) well be Kaga no Chiyojo. Among other things, she was asked to write the preface to one of Buson’s haikai collections, and did. Eccentrics says this about her:
Chiyojo was born in Mattō, Kaga [today’s Ishikawa]. From her youth, she was friends with Shikō’s disciples. After Shikō’s death, she couldn’t find a teacher. When Rogen-bō, of Mino [today’s Aichi], came [to Mattō] on pilgrimage, she visited him at his inn and became his disciple. She had studied painting with Go Shunmei and was good at it. Once asked to make a painting above and words below, she painted a drooping morning glory above and, below it, wrote:
朝顔や地に咲くことをあぶながり
Asagao ya chi ni saku koto o abunagari
A morning glory’s afraid to bloom on the ground
This should show you how instantly, divinely, she could respond. When she went to bed for the first time with her husband:
渋かろかしらねど柿の初契り
Shibukaroka shiranedo kaki no hatsu chigiri
If puckery I don’t know but a persimmon’s first love
When she lost her child:
蜻蛉釣今日はどこまで行つたやら
Tombo-tsuri kyō wa doko made itta yara
Dragonfly-catcher, how far has he gone today?
. . . Late in her life she became a nun calling herself Soen 素園 [“Simple Garden”]. She must have decided the best thing to do was to train in Buddhism. To express the heart of “three realms all in the mind”:
百なりも蔓一筋の心より
Hyaku nari mo tsuru hito-suji no kokoro yori
Even a hundred gourds come out of a single vine
At the time haikai flourished, but few attained her exquisite state of mind.
“The three realms all in the mind” (三界一心), also known as “threefold world in the mind,” means that the world of desire, the world of form, and the world of formlessness are all in the mind. It is a phrase in the Avatamsaka Sūtra or the Flower Adornment Sutra.
Notably, Eccentrics omits what could easily be Chiyojo’s most popular, best-known hokku:
朝顔に釣瓶とられてもらひ水
Asagao ni tsurube torarete morai mizu
The well-bucket taken by morning glories: water borrowed
The immense popularity of this hokku during the Edo period can be seen through its recasting and translating into Chinese verse (kanshi) by two Japanese poets. The first to do this was the Buddhist monk Naemura Jishū, who wrote many kanshi. The Chinese name of the morning glory (牽牛花), “oxherd’s flower,” serves as the title, and not the Japanese name asagao (朝顔),“morning face.”
井辺移植牽牛花 狂蔓攀欄横腹斜
汲綆無端被渠奪 近来乞水向隣家
Planted near the well, the morning glory has
wildly climbed up its frame, creeping sidewise;
the dipper-bucket completely taken away,
she quickly turns to her neighbor to beg for water.
The second to attempt a translation was the scholar and educator Tsusaka Tōyō. He must have been dissatisfied with Jishū’s try, thinking that it didn’t convey the true intent of Chiyojo’s hokku. His recasting in Chinese goes like this.
一夜秋風爽気回 梧桐露滴井欄隈
牽牛上綆花方発 故向隣家乞水来
One night the autumn wind has passed round freshly,
the parasoltree dripping dew on the well frame.
The morning glory is about to bloom on the well-bucket,
so she heads for her neighbor to beg for water.
As the scholar of haikai literature and haiku poet Ueno Sachiko says, it would surely be hard to say which of these expressed the “true intent” of Chiyojo’s hokku. Early on, Chiyojo became aware of the fame of this piece, so that it seemed she avoided it when, for example, asked for a painting with a hokku. Still, her name readily evoked it, and in time her reputation came to rest on it. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, an ukiyo-e painter born two decades after Chiyojo’s death, pictorialized the hokku. Daisetz Suzuki judged this hokku to be as profound as Bashō’s pond frog.
So why didn’t Gengen’ichi include this hokku in his short narrative? Is it because it was too well-known? Or, as some modern students of haikai literature insist, because the hokku betrays too much of “her plebeian taste (tsūzokumi),” that “it reeks of intellectual elegance (richiteki fūga) and “contains rationalization (rikutsu)”? Kōda Rohan went so far as to call it “fraudulent.”
Whatever the reason, we can’t leave Chiyojo without citing another hokku of hers:
川ばかり闇はながれて螢かな
Kawa bakari yami wa nagarete hotoru kana
Only the river the darkness flows: fireflies
In his essay “Fireflies,” Lafcadio Hearn imagined Chiyojo might have written this after watching the great spectacle over the Uji River south of Kyoto, “the Hataru-Kassen or Firefly Battle.”
The stream there winds between hills covered with vegetation; and myriads of fireflies dart from either bank, to meet and cling above the water. At moments they so swarm together as to form what appears to the eye like a luminous cloud, or like a great bal
l of sparks. The cloud scatters, or the ball drops and breaks upon the surface of the current, and the fallen fireflies drift glittering away; but another swarm quickly collects in the same locality. People wait all night in boats upon the river to watch the phenomenon. After the Hotaru-Kassen is done, the Ujikawa, covered with the still sparkling bodies of the drifting insects, is said to appear like the Milky Way, or, as the Japanese poetically call it, the River of Heaven.
Following this description, Hearn provides his “free” rendition of the hokku: “Is it the river only?—or is the darkness itself drifting? . . . Oh, the fireflies! . . .”
Before moving on to more recent times, I’d like to cite three more women from Episodes of Eccentrics, though one of them isn’t known as a haikai poet: the painter Ikeno Gyokuran, the wife of the painter Ikeno Taiga. Taiga appears in Eccentrics because he also wrote haikai, while Gyokuran, who preferred tanka to haikai, is mentioned because her famous devotion to her husband shows a fūryū spirit. As Eccentrics puts it:
They were always poor, but she served her husband well, remaining chaste. They often wore each other’s clothes, not disliking it a bit. Once, when he managed to buy some sake and tidbits and brought them home to enjoy them with his wife, she played the koto, it is said, stark naked.
This reminds me of William Blake romping around naked with his wife in their garden. The two artist couples weren’t far apart in time, either.
The other woman haikai poet is identified as Nishijima’s wife. Eccentrics says:
The Nishijimas lived somewhere near Asakusa, Edo, and both husband and wife had a taste for haikai. One night, when it snowed heavily, Nishijima prepared to go to someone’s haikai gathering taking a boy clerk with him. His wife, seeing him off at the door, admonished:
わが子なら供にはやらじ夜の雪
Waga ko nara tomo ni wa yaraji yoru no yuki
If my child I wouldn’t let him go with you: tonight’s snow
Admiring this, Nishijima is said to have gone by himself.
In When Is the Past? (Itsuo Mukashi), a collection of hokku compiled by Kikaku, the same hokku is attributed to Nozawa Ukō, who was married to Nozawa Bonchō, and in that collection the boy is identified as Jirō (“second son”).
The third woman I want to mention was a prostitute. Eccentrics includes the work of six prostitutes with a sum of ten hokku, noting that the Confucian Book of Odes said “there are always prostitutes near the water,” and observing that some of the more famous Japanese anthologies took care to include poems of prostitutes. One of them is Utagawa:
There was a woman named Utagawa in the village of Mikuni, Echizen [today’s Fukui]. There was a man who came to visit her often enough but never stayed for two nights in a row, going away at dawn. Lamenting this, she said:
行水の一夜どまりや薄氷
Yukumizu no hitoyo domari ya usugōri
Going water’s just one night stay: thin ice
Yukumizu, “going water,” “flowing water,” is a metaphor for passing by—that which doesn’t stop.
Modern Haiku
I have dwelt on the behavior of haikai poets as described by the authors of Episodes of Eccentrics because, for all the admiration expressed for Bashō, the prevailing view of the haikai spirit in the Edo period was that it was not as serious as it was playful or clever. Haikai for most people was a manifestation of “poetic dementia,” to put it in somewhat extreme terms.
What the reformer Masaoka Shiki tried to do from around the end of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth, through his advocacy of shasei (“copying what is observed”), was to reduce or eliminate that somewhat amused Edo outlook in order to make the genre more “literary” in the Western sense—although this does not necessarily mean that he took his own haiku seriously. Indeed, he did not go far beyond regarding the haiku as a medium for expressing “simple thought” and, as someone who undertook a massive classification of classical hokku, retained the ability to appreciate old-fashioned haikai. Still, even during Shiki’s time, the Western-style preference for complexity and seriousness began to gain the upper hand, and the Edo-style haikai spirit faded out within a few decades. But it’s worth emphasizing the point again that this doesn’t mean the genre, now called haiku, has lost all of its light touch, which I think is inherent to this short poetic form.
I hope to show what I mean through a sampling of three women haiku poets: Sugita Hisajo, who was among the first important haiku women with a modern sensibility, in the early twentieth century; Hashimoto Takako, who initially studied haiku with Hisajo; and Mayuzumi Madoka, who hit haiku stardom in the mid-1990s.
Hisajo—her original name simply Hisa—was born in 1890 to a fairly well-to-do bureaucrat father, but her marriage to Unai, a schoolteacher who taught painting, ended in bitter disappointment. Not only did he lack any artistic inclination or ambition—the fact that he came from a wealthy family and had studied Western painting gave her a false dream of him taking her to Europe to further his artistic studies—but he turned out to be a nag, a scold, especially after 1920 when she suggested they divorce. The following haiku, written in 1921, was left out of her first haiku collection, edited by her daughter, Ishi Masako, and published in 1952, six years after her death.
足袋つぐやノラともならず教師妻
Tabi tsugu ya Nora tomo narazu kyōshi-zuma
Mending tabis a schoolteacher’s wife didn’t even become Nora
Nora is the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. Hisajo was a strong-willed woman. One time she annoyed Takahama Kyoshi, the leader of the Hototogisu group of which she became a member in 1934, and was “excommunicated” (hamon). What Kyoshi actually did was publish a special notice in the October 1936 issue of his magazine Hototogisu that he was “removing” (jomei) Hisajo and two other members, both male, from the magazine. That the act was perceived as an excommunication reveals a good deal about the tendency among Japanese haiku poets to form tight-knit groups, not to mention the dictatorial grip Kyoshi held on his, the largest of its kind.
花衣ぬぐやまつはる紐いろいろ
Hana-goromo nugu ya matsuwaru himo iroiro
The flower robe disrobing strings clinging various
What’s given here as “flower robe” originally meant the aristocratic ebigasane, “red-violet layers,” an outer robe with a white layer that is transparent enough to show the red-violet layer under it, as Liza Dalby describes in Kimono: Fashioning Culture. In more recent times it has come to refer to the kimono women wear to view the cherry blossoms, though not necessarily pink.
Wearing a kimono properly requires a number of accessories: nagajuban, the “underkimono,” as well as at least five different sashes or strings to hold up the nagajuban and kimono: datejime, a sash to keep the nagajuban in shape; obi, the broad sash that gives the kimono a distinct appearance; obi’ita or mae’ita, a sash “board” placed between the kimono and obi; obimakura, “obi pillow”; obijime, a string to tie up the obi. The word iroiro, which literally means “color-color,” “colorful,” on the surface means “various,” “of many kinds.”
Hisajo described what prompted this haiku: “Returning from cherry-blossom viewing and being sweetly tired, I wanted to indulgently, boldly, state the impression of that act [of taking off my kimono] and the beauty of the complex colors” [emphasis in the original]. Quoting this, the haiku scholar Ueno Sachiko imagines Hisajo standing in front of a tall mirror, narcissistically enchanted as she languidly removed strings, sash, kimono. Kyoshi praised this haiku extravagantly, saying “it stands in a position that doesn’t allow any man to imitate.”
谺して山ほととぎすほしいまゝ
Kodama shite yama hototogisu hoshii mama
Echoing a mountain cuckoo as it pleases
This haiku won the gold medal in a landscape contest held by the Imperial Art Academy in 1931. For this contest, 1
33 famous places all over Japan were designated and 100,300 haiku were submitted. The judge was Kyoshi. Hisajo submitted six haiku on Mount Ehiko, astride Fukuoka and Ōita, and famous for shugendō, a school amalgamating Shinto and Buddhism that believes rough physical training is essential for enlightenment; in the past it produced many monk-soldiers. This haiku was engraved on a stone memorial in the precincts of the Mount Ehiko Shrine in 1965, with Hisajo’s own script. She was trained in calligraphy.
春の夜のねむさ押さえて髪梳けり
Haru no yo no nemusa osaete kami sukeri
Spring night suppressing sleepiness I comb my hair
髪巻いて夜長の風呂に浸りけり
Kami maite yonaga no furo ni hitarikeri
Hair rolled up I remain immersed in long night’s bath
夕顔やひらきかゝりて襞深く
Yūgao ya hiraki kakarite hida fukaku
A moonflower about to open with its folds deep
玄海の濤のくらさや雁叫ぶ
Genkai no nami no kurasa ya kari sakebu
Genkai with its roaring darkness wild geese scream
Genkai, literally “dark sea,” is the sound off the northwest coast of northern Kyūshū known for its perpetually turbulent sea. In 1914, Hisajo moved with her husband to Kokura, the (then) city at the northeastern edge of Kyūshū. During the Second World War, she suffered from a food shortage even as her dementia worsened. Soon after the war ended, she was taken to a mental hospital in Dazaifu, Fukuoka, where she died in January 1946. The direct cause was kidney failure.
Hashimoto Takako, whom Hisajo initially guided in haiku, also wrote one on Genkai that became famous.
乳母車夏の怒濤によこむきに
Ubaguruma natsu no dotō ni yokomuki ni
The perambulator sidewise against summer’s roaring waves
In 1917, Takako, then eighteen, married Hashimoto Toyojirō, who had fallen in love with her. The wealthy scion of a man who had studied civil engineering and architecture in the United States, Toyojirō bought a farmstead in Ōita for her upon their marriage. He then built a Western-style mansion for her in Kokura at a spot overlooking the Genkai Sound and moved in himself. The two started a salon where in no time Takako came to be known as the most refined, and no doubt the most beautiful, hostess of the day.