On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  Legend has it that Takako’s interest in haiku was stirred while Kyoshi was visiting the salon with his entourage in 1922. A camellia fell from a vase on the mantelpiece and Takako picked it up and threw it into the fireplace; thereupon Kyoshi made the following haiku:

  落椿投げて暖炉の火の上に

  Ochitsubaki nagete danro no hi no ue ni

  A fallen camellia thrown onto the fire of the fireplace

  It is said that Takako was deeply impressed by the way Kyoshi made the haiku on the spot and the novelistic atmosphere the piece created within the confines of seventeen syllables. A dozen years later, in 1935, however, she left his group, Hototogisu, at the advice of Yamaguchi Seishi, who had revolted against Kyoshi and started his own haiku magazine, Yellow Flag (Kōki).

  月光にいのち死にゆくひとと寝る

  Gekkō ni inochi shi ni yuku hito to neru

  In the moonlight I sleep with one who’s alive dying

  Takako made this in 1937 while she was nursing her husband who had fallen ill at the start of the year and died that fall. Another haiku:

  死にちかき面に寄り月の光るをいひぬ

  Shi ni chikaki mo ni yori tsuki no teru o iinu

  Up close to his face near death I said the moon’s shining

  She missed her husband after his death. Among her haiku made in 1949:

  雪はげし抱かれて息のつまりしこと

  Yuki hageshi dakarete iki no tsumarishi koto

  Snow fierce how hugged I was breathless

  When told of the death of her initial guide in haiku, Hisajo, in 1946, Takako wrote:

  春湖に指をぬらして人弔う

  Harumizu ni yubi o nurashite hito tomurau

  In the spring lake I wet my fingers and mourn for her

  Eight years later, in 1954, when she visited the mental hospital where Hisajo had died, partly in neglect and starved, she wrote:

  万緑やわが額にある鉄格子

  Manryoku ya waga nuka ni aru tetsugōshi

  Myriad leaves there on my forehead the iron grille

  When she was hospitalized in 1963, Takako evidently did not know she was dying of liver cancer. She died on May 29. Two tanzaku found on her bed had the following haiku:

  雪の日の浴身一指一趾愛し

  Yuki no hi no yokushin isshi isshi itoshi

  Snowy day my bathed body I love each finger each toe

  雪はげし書き遺すこと何ぞ多き

  Yuki hageshi kaki-nokosu koto nanzo ōki

  Snow fierce how many the things I leave unwritten

  With the publication of her first book, Summer on Side B (B-men no natsu), in 1994, Mayuzumi Madoka was touted as “the Tawara Machi of haiku.” Seven years earlier, the tanka poet Tawara Machi had become a wild sensation with her collection The Salad Anniversary (Sarada kinenbi), which described a lighthearted love affair and sold nearly three million copies. Mayuzumi told me that her book sold only in the tens of thousands, but it, too, described a love affair of the “forbidden” kind. Still, with a beauty that turned her into a “kimono-queen,” she became a TV celebrity, as the The New York Times reported on January 20, 1996, in the article “The Land of Laureates: Japan’s Passion Is Poetry.”

  Both Tawara and Mayuzumi are traditionalists. For all her easygoing colloquialism, Tawara sticks to the thirty-one-syllable format. And despite her unusual decision to dedicate a book-length sequence to an illicit love affair, Mayuzumi adheres to the seventeen-syllable format and the use of kigo. Mayuzumi also keeps classical orthography and casually throws in difficult Chinese characters. Her father, Shū, was an award-winning haiku poet.

  Here are some of Mayuzumi’s haiku:

  梅匂ふ好きと嫌ひの境目に

  Ume niou suki to kirai no sakaime ni

  Plum scent on the borderline of I like you and I hate you

  春雷や嬰に男の匂ひして

  Shunrai ya yaya ni otoko no nioi shite

  Spring thunder comes with a hint of male scent

  春濤の昂ぶることもなく崩れ

  Shuntō no takaburu koto mo naku kuzure

  A spring wave collapses without climaxing

  会ひたくて逢ひたくて踏む薄氷

  Aitakute aitakute fumu usugōri

  Wanting to see wanting to meet him I step on thin ice

  風が好きひな菊が好きアナタが好き

  Kaze ga suki hinagiku ga suki anata ga suki

  I love winds I love oxeye daisies I love you

  マネキンの囁き合へる朧かな

  Manekin no sasayaki aeru oboro kana

  Mannequins whisper to each other in blurred moonlight

  水着選ぶいつしか彼の目となつて

  Mizugi erabu itsushika kare no me to natte

  I select a swimsuit taking on his eyes unaware

  平凡の二文字を嫌ひ髪洗ふ

  Heibon no ni moji o kirai kami arau

  Banality: hating this word I wash my hair

  “Thin ice” originally indicated winter, as in the prostitute Utagawa’s hokku, but Kyoshi put it among spring kigo. In the mannequin piece, the word oboro, “blurred moonlight,” is meant to suggest spring. In the last piece, kami arau, “hair-washing,” points to summer. The explanation: during the summer you wash your hair often because of dust and sweat.

  Noting such things does not, of course, detract anything from the attractive haiku that Mayuzumi wrote. But these examples show how tricky the realm of kigo can be.

  The Haiku Reformer Shiki: How Important Is His Haiku?

  In an email on October 4, 2015, Charlie Trumbull, the former editor of Modern Haiku, asked me: “Why have so few of Shiki’s haiku been translated? 100% of Bashō’s haiku have been translated into English at least once, about 50% of Issa’s, maybe 20% of Chiyo-ni’s and Buson’s, but only 6% of Shiki’s.”

  My immediate response had to be short—“For all his importance, Shiki was a mediocre haiku poet”—as I was halfway out the door, on my way to the Haiku Society of America’s autumn meeting to introduce Nishimura Kazuko during her visit to New York City.

  Let me now give a fuller response.

  First, to deal with the numbers, Issa is said to have left about 24,000 haiku, so I am rather surprised to hear that half of them have been translated. Twelve thousand haiku translated, really? As it happens, Shiki is judged to have written a similar number of haiku, about 23,000, so 6 percent of them means about 1,400 haiku of his have been translated. Compared with these, the number of hokku of Bashō is small, about 1,000, but even of that small number, the majority are regarded as “bad pieces, worthless pieces,” so quoth none other than Shiki.

  The count of the number of Shiki’s haiku varied over time, according to the haiku poet and scholar Tsubouchi Toshinori in his afterword to the 1993 Iwanami edition of Takahama Kyoshi’s 1940 selection of Shiki’s haiku. In the foreword to the selection, for which he picked 2,306 haiku, Kyoshi said he counted almost 20,000 haiku in what Shiki had left. Earlier, in 1909, when Kyoshi, along with his coeditor Kawahigashi Hekigodō, published a selection of 1,237 haiku by Shiki, he had counted around 10,000. Today, the count is put at more than 23,000.

  Second, as to the quality of Shiki’s haiku, glancing through the books related to Shiki, I see that my immediate response was based on what the haiku commentator Yamamoto Kenkichi had written in his foreword to Masaoka Shiki • Takahama Kyoshi. In sum:

  1. Of the three literary fields—haiku, tanka, and prose—that Shiki influenced as a reformer, haiku is the area where his influence was the greatest, but his own haiku, compared with his tanka and prose, is the least read.

  2. Shiki learned the concept of shasei (写生), “sketch,” through some of his friends who had studied with the Italian land
scape painter Antonio Fontanesi. He taught in Tokyo as a Japanese “government employee” for two years, from 1876 to 1878. When we talk about Shiki, we mainly think of shasei, which he began to stress with his book Outline of Haikai (Haikai taiyō) in 1895. But in fact he didn’t only stress “copying things as they are.” He emphasized the importance of “combining fantasy (kūsō 空想) and realism (shajitsu 写実) to create great works.”

  3. Of the haiku (hokku) writers in the past that he studied partly through his stupendous effort on haiku (haikai) classification beginning in 1891, Yosa Buson fascinated Shiki the most. He wrote the analytic essay “Haijin Buson” in 1896, which he revised in 1899. His call for the need to combine “fantasy” with “realism” was the direct result. He wrote a great many haiku under Buson’s influence, but he did not have Buson’s “resplendent” imagination. Most of them, especially those written with the idea of composing groups of pieces on given subjects à la Buson, are “flat.” His understanding of Buson was “too simplistic.”

  4. Shiki methodically and prolifically turned out “second-rate” pieces with his shasei method, and carefully saved all of them. Reading Shiki’s haiku is like reading mountains of haiku trash, and that makes it “boring.”

  About point two above, what Shiki had actually written in the Outline of Haikai went as follows: “The haiku you get with fantasy are either of highest beauty or of lowest clumsiness; it is rare to get those of highest beauty. . . . It is even harder to get haiku of highest beauty by copying actual scenes, but it is easier to get what may be termed second-rate [by doing so].”

  I should note that the word shasei was not a neologism coined under Fontanesi’s teaching, though it was often linked to Fontenesi because the Japanese government invited him to teach, specifically, the European style of drawing. In fact, the definition of shasei as a painterly method or school had existed at least since the Tang dynasty in China, and since the Kamakura period in Japan, and played an important role in the art of both countries. The tanka poet Saitō Mokichi, who as a high-school student was deeply moved by Shiki’s book of tanka, wrote a detailed 1920 (and 1929) essay on the term shasei, describing its historical use in China and Shiki’s use of it, while giving his own analysis, “Theories on Shasei in Tanka (Tanka ni okeru shasei no setsu).” In it, Saitō also raised the likelihood that the term might mean something different in the Western tradition, citing a passage from Isaac Watts’s Logic: “some admirable design sketched out only with a black pencil on a coarse paper.”

  But the shasei approach Shiki adopted couldn’t be the sole reason he didn’t turn out many good haiku. He only took it up seriously late in his life. And there is another reason many of his haiku may not appeal to his readers: Despite his weighty arguments on haiku, such as one detailing “the three study stages” for a haiku poet to follow, and for all the great deal of time he spent on the genre, he, like his great friend in haiku Natsume Sōseki, did not “expect much from haiku.” As Shiki put it in his Outline of Haikai, haiku only expressed “simple thought.” Sōseki, for his part, enjoyed writing haiku and in the end turned out 2,600 haiku in his lifetime, but switched his main attentions to novels and other writings.

  Sōseki, who, like Shiki, loved to compose kanshi, verse in classical Chinese with a “complicated” prosody, reflected late in his life while gravely ill on his verse-writing days in Things I Remember (Omoidasu koto nado): “at times I would line up seventeen syllables or combine a beginning, transition, twist, and conclusion to form a quatrain, but each time I did, I felt there was a draft somewhere because I couldn’t wrap up my whole heart without leaving the smallest corner in a verse or a haiku.” By “beginning, transition, twist, and conclusion,” he meant the kanshi. The standard quatrain is made up that way.

  Or, as he wrote to a friend: “While I dabble in haikai literature, in one aspect I’d like to try to grapple with literature with the fierce life-or-death, we’ll-exchange-our-lives spirit of the Restoration fighters”—the Restoration fighters being the men who had fought the Tokugawa shogunate to restore the emperor system. The regime change, as it were, had taken place less than half a century earlier.

  Why, then, is Shiki called “the haiku reformer”? That’s partly because he condemned the kind of hokku (haiku) written for tsukinami kuai, “monthly hokku matches.” During the Edo period (1603–1868), people would get together every month to compose and compare their verses: tanka, kanshi, haikai. With haikai, masters would rank the compositions by points, a practice that exploded with popularity in the early nineteenth century, as pieces with the highest points were published. This trend continued well into Shiki’s day. With rules on dos and don’ts and how-to books listing 5-, 7-, and 5-syllable phrases for possible combinations selling briskly, clichés were inevitable and more than abundant. It didn’t take Shiki any time to notice the sheer repetitiveness with his work of classifying the masses of classical hokku by season and topic. He fired his first blast in 1892 and the term he used was tsukinami-ryū, “monthly-session style.”

  餘の木皆手持無沙汰や花盛り

  Yo no ki mina temochi busata ya hanazakari

  Other trees all have nothing to do: blossoms in prime

  Quoting this hokku, Shiki complained that the phrase temochi busata, “have nothing to do,” was an example of the “clumsiest personification,” adding that “similar expressions [were] always found in tsukinami collections.” He wrote this in his “Haikai Talks in the Otter-Ceremony Library” (Dassai sho’oku haiwa), a column on haikai he was writing for the newspaper Nippon. Tsukinami has since come to mean “conventional,” “trite.”*

  By the time he published Haiku Questions and Answers (Haiku mondō) in 1899, Shiki summarized what he expected “new haiku” to do: (1) not to use “wit” (chisei); (2) to avoid “clichés” (chinpu); (3) to use novel words such as Western words where necessary; (4) to seek novel viewpoints when dealing with traditional topics; and (5) not to establish “schools” or “factions.” Let’s cite a couple of examples from his friend Natsume Sōseki.

  Sōseki’s earliest known haiku are found in his letter to Shiki, dated May 13, 1889. One of them goes:

  帰ろふと泣かずに笑へ時鳥

  Kaerō to nakazu ni warae hototogisu

  Don’t cry saying I’m going back but laugh, cuckoo

  This haiku relies on the allusive twist typical of tsukinami-style hokku. There’s an idiom linked to an ancient Chinese legend, “The cuckoo cries and spits blood.” Emperor Wang, who established the State of Shu, turned into a cuckoo upon his death. When his nation was destroyed by Qin, he cried, “I can’t go back!” and spat blood. Because of this story, “Unable to Go Back” became another name of the bird in Japan. There are a number of other Chinese names for the bird, each one deriving from a different story or legend. All of them were eventually adopted in Japan.

  As it happened, a few days before Sōseki wrote this letter, Shiki, whose personal name was Tsunenori, had spat blood and was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an incurable disease at the time. So he acquired the haikai name Shiki—one of the Chinese names of the cuckoo. Sōseki wove all of this into his haiku to tell his friend not to lose heart. In 1897, when Shiki and others started a magazine, they named it Hototogisu, the Japanese name for the cuckoo.

  Shiki’s tuberculosis, diagnosed in 1889 when he was twenty-two, spread to his spine, turning into Pott’s disease. From 1896 until his death in 1902, he was forced to lie in bed most of the time.

  In his survey of 1896 haiku, Shiki chose Sōseki among the poets of “new style,” citing about forty of his haiku and dividing them into several groups for distinct comments on each. The following piece was among those Shiki characterized as “powerful” (yūken) and “serious” (majime):

  底見ゆる一枚岩や秋の水

  Soko miyuru ichimai’iwa ya aki no mizu

  Bottom visible a single boulder: water of autumn

&nbs
p; In the end our original question comes down to the real worth of Shiki’s haiku, although, as with everything else, different people have different opinions. Take the “cockscomb dispute” over Shiki’s 1900 piece, which I remember from a school textbook in the latter half of the 1950s as being representative of Shiki’s “new haiku.” The haiku goes:

  鶏頭の十四五本もありぬべし

  Keitō no jūyogo-hon mo arunubeshi

  Cockscombs: there must be as many as fourteen, fifteen

  According to the tanka poet Saitō Mokichi, the origin of the dispute can be traced to the praise given to this haiku by fellow tanka poet Nagatsuka Takashi. Takashi, who had studied tanka with Shiki and absorbed the idea of shasei, at one time observed to Mokichi: “Today there may be no haiku poets who understand this haiku.” Following up on this, Mokichi wrote in 1916, “Herewith started Shiki’s genuinely mature haiku [along the course] that he was to take. They didn’t have a smidgeon of Bashō or Buson.” And in 1931 he wrote, “The way [Shiki] managed to depict, simply, plainly, an unfathomable feeling that he had when he happened to look at the garden while lying ill.” That’s what Yamamoto Kenkichi tells us in Modern Haiku (Gendai haiku).

  Takashi and Mokichi, however, appear to have been in the minority in thinking highly of the cockscomb haiku. In the kukai Shiki held in his house in September 1900, only two out of a number of participants are known to have voted for it. Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigodō were among those who did not vote for it, and later did not include it in the selection of Shiki’s haiku they coedited in 1909.

  As is well known, Kyoshi and Hekigodō went their separate ways after Shiki’s death. Kyoshi, who studied haiku with Shiki in normal junior high school in Matsuyama, followed the traditional wing of Shiki’s haiku through his advocacy of kyakkan shasei, “objective copying.” In contrast, Hekigodō, though he had also studied haiku with Shiki in the same school in Matsuyama, went on to advocate a “new tendency haiku,” which led to the abandonment of the set form of 5-7-5 syllables and the requirement of kigo.