On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  Again, for comparison, Mizuhara Shūōshi published his first book of haiku, Katsushika, in 1930. It foretold his break with Kyoshi, not over the yūki-teikei format but over what to describe in haiku.

  馬酔木咲く金堂の扉にわが触れぬ

  Ashibi saku kondō no to ni waga furenu

  Where ashibi bloom I touch the Golden Hall’s door

  Shūōshi would adopt ashibi (Pieris japonica), a shrub that grows “drooping clusters...of lily-of-the-valley-like white flowers in early spring,” as the Missouri Botanical Garden puts it, for the name of the magazine he started the following year. The plant is known to be toxic, however, and thus its name “tree that makes the horse drunk.” This haiku is said to describe an ancient temple in Nara that Shūōshi loved, Akishino-dera. Katsushika, the name he chose for the title of his first book, is an area in Tokyo.

  Kaneko Tōta and His Avant-garde Spirit

  When reflecting on the great divergence from the standard mode of haiku that took place after Shiki’s death, even as those who stuck to yūki-teikei traditions firmly held their ground, it is clear that Kaneko Tōta, who is put forward as the leader of gendai haiku by Richard Gilbert and others, was not really much of a rebel. He at times wrote haiku hypersyllabic enough to render the results almost shapeless, but unlike Hekigodō, Mudō, and those who agreed with them did, he did so sparingly. He at times wrote without a kigo, but not always. For that matter, Kaneko never really abandoned the use of “literary language.”

  Let us consider some of his haiku—keeping in mind that I’ve only picked out a few out from Kaneko’s vast oeuvre. The collections of his haiku published in 2002 alone come to four fat volumes, each averaging five hundred pages.

  In his account of his own “postwar haiku history” (1985), he noted the following two were from the period when he began to discuss with friends things like “plebeianism and the avant-garde spirit” in haiku—that is, around 1956 or so.

  向き合う二階の夕餉たがいに秋灯満たし

  Mukiau nikai no yūge tagaini akibi mitashi

  Supper face-to-face on the second floor filling each with the autumn lamp

  This one is close to being shapeless as it comes out as 4-7-4-6 or, syntactically, 11-10. Kaneko discussed “rhythmical” and “syntactical” breaks in haiku.

  車窓擦過の坂の一つの焚火怒る

  Shasō sakka no saka no hitotu no takibi ikaru

  The train window swishes by a slope a single bonfire angry

  This piece is hard to scan at first, perhaps because the alliteration of sibilants of the first half trips up the reader. When you repeat it a few times, though, you might be persuaded that this may well be one of the haiku of which Kaneko was proud from the viewpoint of “rhythm.” In the end, it works out as 7-7-6, not far from 5-7-5. As it happens, this takibi (“bonfire”) haiku was chosen for commentary by Katō Shūson in Kōdansha’s sumptuously illustrated 1,670-page “seasonal account,” Nihon dai-saijiki, published in 1983. Yamamoto Kenkichi provides detailed historical backgrounds for many of the more important kigo in it.

  Let us compare Kaneko’s haiku with some of the others on the same subject, “bonfire,” in the Nihon dai-saijiki by some well-known poets—all in yūki-teikei format. A “seasonal account” always lists haiku for each kigo, ranging from a few to more than a dozen.

  焚火かなし消えんとすれば育てられ

  Takibi kanashi kien to sureba sodaterare

  The bonfire’s sad; as it tries to fade it’s stirred up

  Takahama Kyoshi

  夜焚火に金色の崖峙てり

  Yo-takibi ni kin’iro no gake sobadateri

  Right by the night bonfire rises a golden bluff

  Mizuhara Shūōshi

  焚火火の粉吾の青春永きかな

  Takibi hi no kona a no seishun nagaki kana

  Bonfire fire sparks: my youth lasted long indeed

  Nakamura Kusatao

  日雇の焚火ぼうぼう崖こがす

  Hiyatoi no takibi bôbô gake kogasu

  Day laborers’ bonfire aflame aflame scorches the bluff

  Saitō Sanki

  I’d like to cite two more of Kaneko’s haiku from the viewpoint of teikei, if not from yūki-teikei. Kaneko does write haiku in the 5-7-5 syllabic form. Often, though, he seems intent on thwarting expectations even when the total syllabic count comes to seventeen. The following may be a good example:

  何処か扉がはためくケロイドの港

  Doko ka to ga hatameku keroido no minato

  Somewhere a door flaps a keloid in the port

  Kaneko, a lifelong employee of the Bank of Japan, wrote this while stationed in Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped. The word keroido, “keloid,” quickly came to be associated with the atomic bombs in Japan because these abnormal skin growths appeared most often on the bodies of those exposed to their high-temperature blasts. For Kaneko, this haiku may well be a good example embodying the shakaisei, “sociality,” that he was known for emphasizing. Apart from that, it’s hard for non-haiku aficionados to read this as a haiku because syntactically it demands to be broken into 3-6-8.

  The last piece I’d like to cite is one Kaneko wrote around the time the Gendai Haiku Kyōkai collapsed and he and his group started Marine Distance. It is chosen here because it represents what makes gendai or zen’ei haiku at once charming and puzzling.

  果樹園がシャツ一枚の俺の孤島

  Kajuen ga shatsu ichimai no ore no kotō

  The orchard is my island only in a shirt

  From the standpoint of teikei, Kaneko could have easily used a ruby—a typographical device that gives a writer’s preferred reading of a particular word—and have the last word “island” read shima; if he had, this piece would have fallen perfectly into the 5-7-5 pattern. That would have made it a haiku formalistically, though the poet’s meaning would still be something of a puzzler, even as the reader guesses what he’s trying to say. In truth, this slightly off-balance aspect of their use of teikei constitutes at least one characteristic of the gendai haiku Kaneko and other nontraditional haiku poets compose.†

  * * *

  * Kaneko died in February 2018, at age ninety-nine. He was the most popular haiku writer in the last decades of his life.

  † See The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century (Tokyo: Modern Haiku Association, 2008) for a generous selection of traditionalist and nontraditionalist haiku in English translation.

  Mitsuhashi Takajo: Some Further Explication

  Mitsuhashi Takajo was born in 1899 to Mitsuhashi Jūrōbē and Mitsu in Narita, Chiba. Her father was an executive of the famous temple complex Naritayama Shinshō-ji, and the deputy mayor of Narita Town. Her original name was Fumiko (文子). She later changed it to Takajo (たか子).

  Takajo initially wrote tanka under the influence of Yosano Akiko and Wakayama Bokusui, two representatives of romanticism in tanka, the former writing in a passionate mode and the latter in a wistful one. She married Azuma Kenzō, a dentist who wrote haiku, in March 1922. Their son, Yōichi, was born in January 1923. Eight months later, the Great Kantō Earthquake struck, killing 100,000 people, 50,000 in Tokyo alone; Takajo’s house collapsed, and she was buried under the rubble with her infant son. Both were miraculously rescued, with only one of her legs injured.

  Takajo switched from tanka to haiku in 1926, adopting the haiku name Azuma Fumie. In 1928, with her husband and neighbor, she started a haiku gathering called the Waseda Haiku Quartet, because her husband’s dental clinic was near Waseda University. She adopted her haiku name Takajo, “Hawk Woman,” in 1934, by changing the taka part of her name, originally given in hiragana たか, to the Chinese character 鷹, meaning “hawk.” Jo is a suffix indicating “woman,” although ko子, “child,” is most often used to end a personal name to indicate a woman. She nev
er seemed to have explained the choice of “hawk.” Among haiku writers, adopting a haiku name remains a rule, though it is not de rigueur. In 1942, when her older brother died, she and her son inherited the Mitsuhashi name and became known as Mitsuhashi Takajo.

  In any survey of modern Japanese haiku, Takajo is counted among the Four T’s—the four outstanding women haiku writers whose personal (or haiku) names happen to begin with T. The three others are Nakamura Teijo (given name: Hamako), Hoshino Tatsuko, and Hashimoto Takako (given name: Tama). This nomenclature of Four T’s echoed the Four S’s among male haiku writers: Mizuhara Shūōshi, Awano Seiho, Takano Sujū, and Yamaguchi Seishi.

  Of the Four T’s, Hashimoto Takako has already been discussed, so let’s first turn to a few haiku by Nakamura Teijo and Hoshino Tatsuko. Teijo is said to have written a fan letter to Sugita Hisajo, who was famously assertive, and they became close friends.

  とどまればあたりにふゆる蜻蛉かな

  Todomareba atari ni fuyuru tonbo kana

  As I stop around me increasing dragonflies

  薔薇の香か今をゆき過ぎし人の香か

  Bara no ka ka o yuki sugishi hito no ka ka

  Scent of a rose the scent of someone who just passed?

  あはれ子の夜寒の床の引けば寄る

  Aware ko no yosamu no yuka no hikeba yoru

  Poor child: on night cold I pull his bed and it comes close

  The picture here is one of a mother lying on her futon while her child lies on his own, smaller and much lighter futon.

  Hoshino Tatsuko, Takahama Kyoshi’s second daughter, aimed for the “objective shasei” that her father advocated in haiku.

  父がつけしわが名立子や月を仰ぐ

  Chichi ga tsukeshi waga na Tatsuko ya tuki o aogu

  My name Tatsuko my father gave me: I look up at the moon

  The name Tatsuko, 立子, on the face of it, simply means “standing child,” but we don’t actually know what was behind Kyoshi’s choice of the name.

  アラビヤの空を我ゆく夏の星

  Arabia no sora o ware yuku natsu no hoshi

  Through the Arabian sky I go: summer stars

  Tatsuko may well have been inspired by the children’s song that became immensely popular in the mid-1920s, “Desert in Moonlight” (Tsuki no sabaku). Katō Masao’s lyrics with his own illustrations for girls’ magazines did not mention Arabia but did mention camels, a prince and a princess, and, of course, the desert, so readers readily thought of Arabia with its exotic setting. The poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke’s retelling of One Thousand and One Nights for children also appeared in 1925.

  In the brief autobiographical note appended to her first collection, Sunflower (Himawari), published in 1940, Mitsuhashi Takajo reflected that she felt “dissatisfaction and bleakness with traditional haiku and started to dare attempt adventuresome haiku.” Apparently mindful of this and her background, the haiku critic Yamamoto Kenkichi observed in Selection of Modern Haiku (Gendai kushū):

  Mitsuhashi Takajo may be the most distinctive woman [haiku] writer. She entered the haiku world, enchanted by Sekitei in his Mount Yoshino period; but even as she belonged to various groups after that, she was never dyed any color, maintaining the sole Takajo tone from start to end. Nurturing discontent with the haiku far, she stood outside any of the currents of the age. She was incomparable in her bold timing in seizing a momentary lightfooted flash candidly, stating it in unadorned fashion.

  Sekitei is Hara Sekitei, who was considered one of the leading proponents of Takahama Kyoshi’s ideal in haiku. His “Yoshino period” refers to the time he lived in isolation in deep Yoshino, the southern, mountainous part of Nara traditionally admired for extravagant cherry blossoms. Let us first look at the two haiku Yamamoto chose for his comment on Takajo in his survey of modern haiku.

  虹消えてしまえば還る人妻に

  Niji kieteshimaeba kaeru hitozuma ni

  The rainbow banished I’m back to being a wife

  This haiku includes a tricky word that’s hard to carry across in English translation: hitozuma, literally “someone’s wife.” It has a somewhat more aloof sense than “married woman.” Since the speaker of the haiku apparently is the poet, the word has the effect of objectifying herself. The last part of the translation may be better as “being someone’s wife.”

  This piece was included in the 1950 section, “Like Ice,” of Takajo’s third collection, Skeletons (Hakkotsu), which was published in 1957, containing 524 pieces. The selection covers haiku Takajo wrote in the ten-year period from 1941, when her son entered the Imperial Army’s Accounting School, to 1951, when Japan was recovering from the devastations of war. Takajo explained in the afterword that she chose “skeletons” (literally “white bones”) for its title, praying that she’d end up as beautiful as those bones when she finally shed the kleśa—a Buddhist term denoting all the worries that trouble our mind.

  罌粟散ってこころに抱くは鳥獣

  Keshi chitte kokoro ni daku wa tori-kemono

  Poppies scattered my heart embraces birds beasts

  Keshi, “poppy,” is one of the words that become kigo only when combined with certain other words: keshi no hana, “poppy flowers,” indicates summer; keshi bōzu, “poppy pods,” summer; keshi maku, “sowing poppy,” autumn. The poppy here is assumed to be any of the varieties grown for their flowers, not for opium: corn poppy, Flanders poppy, Iceland poppy, etc. The haiku before this one in Takajo’s book goes:

  罌粟散るを見しより男老い初めぬ

  Keshi chiru o mishi yori otoko oi-somenu

  Since seeing poppies scatter the man’s begun to age

  The haiku following this one is:

  けし散りぬ掟は人の世に重く

  Keshi chirinu okite wa hito no yo ni omoku

  Poppies scattered the law heavy on human society

  These three pieces are included in the 1936–1938 section, “Phantom,” of her second collection, The Fin of a Fish (Uo no hire), published in 1947, which contains 619 pieces.

  I’d like to look at a few other pieces. Takajo was in her prime when Japan was at war in one way or another.

  曼珠沙華咲けりいくさの場を思ふ

  Manjushage sakeri ikusa no ba o omou

  Red spider lilies bloom I think of a battlefield

  Red spider lilies are associated with death in Japan. Its Japanese name, manjushage, which comes directly from the Sanskrit manjusaka, “flower in heaven,” is only one of its many names—some say it has a thousand names, several of them related to the netherworld or things macabre: higanbana, “equinoctial flower,” “flower on the other shore” (i.e., the other world, the world of the dead); yūreibana, “ghost flower”; shibitobana, “dead person’s flower”; sutegobana, “abandoned child’s flower”; and so forth, although some names are more benign, such as tengaika, “dome flower,” and kintōka, “golden lantern flower.” The wildflower indigenous to Asia blooms around the time of the autumnal equinox, when some believe the dead come to visit the living. It is now cultivated widely in the United States and elsewhere.

  Another thing to be noted is the word ikusa (“battle,” “war,” “army”), which is archaic. Takajo may have chosen it over the direct, more harsh-sounding word sensō for its poeticism.

  Like the “poppy” pieces, this haiku can be found in the “Phantom” section of The Fin of a Fish. The one placed after it brings in death more directly.

  つはものの命は消ぬる曼珠沙華

  Tsuwamono no inochi wa kenuru manjushage

  Warriors’ lives have vanished: red spider lilies

  Here, the word tsuwamono, which means “soldier,” “warrior,” “stalwart,” is also archaic, and its use reminds us of Bashō’s hokku:

  夏草や兵共のゆめの跡

  Nats
ukusa ya tsuwamono-domo no yume no ato

  Summer grass: where the warriors used to dream

  In contrast, Takajo’s haiku cited earlier—“I’d ride a bomber; I treadle the rainy season sewing machine”—sounds a bit like war propaganda. It is in the section “Thistles in the Rainy Season” in Sunflower. She wrote the following piece after the war was over. It comes with a headnote: “On February 4 in the 21st Year of Shōwa [1946] my child miraculously came home alive.” After Yōishi headed to China on May 19, 1944, there had been no communication from him.

  あはれ我が凍て枯れしこゑがもの云えり

  Aware waga ite kareshi koe ga mono ieri

  Oh my frozen withered voice said something

  The last haiku I’ll cite comes from the 1959 section “Strait” in Takajo’s fourth collection, Fern Hell (Shida jigoku), published in 1961, made up of 381 pieces. At the time she experimented with wakachigaki, inserting spaces between words within a line. As I explained in my 2008 anthology, Japanese Women Poets, haiku writers have tried several things within a monolinear formation.

  雪をよぶ 片身の白き生き鰈

  Yuki o yobu katami no shiroki iki-garei

  Calling snow forth one side white the live flatfish

  In Japan, the flatfish (flounder, fluke, sole) whose eyes have migrated to the right side as an adult is called karei (Pleuronectidae), “right-eye flounder” in English, and the one whose eyes have migrated to the left side is called hirame (Paralichthys olivaceus), “olive flounder” in English. So technically the translation should end with “the live right-eye flounder.” Karei represents midwinter, and hirame late winter.