by Hiroaki Sato
Takajo published her fifth and last collection, Japanese Beech (Buna), in 1970. Her complete haiku, Mitsuhashi Takako zen-kushū, came out in 1976 and listed 2,146 haiku. Her complete works, Mitsuhashi Takako zenshū, was published in 1989 in two volumes, one of them devoted to a selection of her essays on haiku.
Mishima Yukio and Hatano Sōha
Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Mishima Yukio—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of it, though, if you go to school in Japan, you will automatically be asked to compose haiku in grammar school or, at any rate, in junior high school. Also, sometimes, not often, your parents will meticulously preserve every scrap of your school compositions, or the school magazines printing your stuff survive. Both happened to Mishima. As a result, we have about one hundred eighty of his haiku collected among his complete works.
Mishima was a literary prodigy. With haiku, it also helped that his Japanese-language teacher in the Middle Division of the Peers School was Iwata Kurō. Iwata didn’t just encourage his students to write. After the war, he established his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai, publishing, among other things, a large compilation of commentaries on all of Bashō’s hokku.
One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old:
おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな
Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana
My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves
The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on to become a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Morocco and Portugal.
Now, in English translations, Mishima may not be known too well as a playwright, despite Donald Keene’s Madame de Sade and Ingmar Bergman’s famous staging of it, my work, My Friend Hitler and Other Plays, and a few others. But he wrote more than seventy plays, beginning in his early teens, and most of them were staged in his lifetime. In fact, as Donald Richie observed, “life was but a stage” to Mishima, his staging of his own seppuku the most meticulous construct he pulled off.
His first commercial success in theater was the grand costume drama Rokumeikan, in 1956, and it had to do with a political and familial intrigue set around a building of the same name—the British-designed Renaissance-style social center that the Japanese government built at great cost in 1883. The sole purpose of the large building was to encourage social intercourse between foreign dignitaries and members of the Japanese aristocracy. Japan had opened itself to Western nations only about two decades earlier.
The Rokumeikan, named after a phrase from the Confucian Odes, survived for half a century until 1933, when Mishima was eight. By then, though, it had long been a fading social club for Japan’s high society, a phantom reminder of “the Age of the Rokumeikan” when copycatting Westerners represented the height of sophistication and social achievement.
Mishima wrote a set of five haiku referring to the Rokumeikan and its age. He was sixteen, and he was prompted to write them, one is tempted to imagine, when he saw a Western dress and some paraphernalia—remnants from the youthful days of his grandmother Natsuko among the clothes taken out to air for mushiboshi, a seasonal word for summer. Natsuko famously or infamously influenced Mishima as a child, monopolizing him until well into his early teens. But as Muramatsu Takeshi has suggested in his perceptive literary biography of his friend, it is highly unlikely that Natsuko attended any of the balls at the Rokumeikan. She was simply too young for that and not aristocratic enough. Here are Mishima’s haiku preceded by a heading, “About the Rokumeikan and Such”:
香水のしみあり古き舞踏服
Kōsui no shimi ari furuki butōfuku
Here’s a stain of perfume on an old ball gown
虫干や舞踏服のみ花やかに
Mushiboshi ya butōfuku nomi hanayaka ni
Airing clothes only the ball gown elegant
遠雷や舞踏会場馬車集ふ
Enrai ya butō kaijō basha tsudou
In distant thunder horse carriages gather for the ball
蛍あまた庭に放ちて舞踏会
Hotaru amata niwa ni hanachite butōkai
Numerous fireflies released in the garden then the ball
舞踏会露西亜みやげの扇かな
Butōkai Roshia miyage no ōgi kana
At the ball a souvenir from Russia a fan
Other than mushiboshi, each of the four other haiku contains a summer kigo: kōsui, “perfume,” thought to help dispel the smell of perspiration; enrai, “distant thunder,” because there’s more thunder in the summer than in other seasons (there are about ten kinds of thunder listed as kigo); hotaru, “fireflies”; and ōgi, “fan.”
The fan here is obviously of a decorative variety, and that prompts me to add: Before Japan defeated Russia in the 1904–1905 war during the period of global imperialistic expansion—has it ever stopped?—or even before the Russian Revolution, Japan’s high society looked up to the Russian aristocracy like the aristocracy of any other European country, and treated things from that country as admirable exotica, although, I must also add, those decorative fans may well have been made in Japan and exported.
In the fall of 1968, Mishima took time out to write an appreciation of the haiku of Hatano Sōha for Haiku magazine. Mishima had completed serializing his extended essay Sun and Steel (Taiyō to tetsu) that made unmistakably clear his intent to kill himself with a blade sooner or later. He also made official the formation of the paramilitary Shield Society, one member of which would help him in his seppuku as decapitator. In the meantime, his life remained as full and intense as ever or, as he put it, “murderously busy.”
Yet when Haiku solicited an essay on Sōha, Mishima obliged. Even though Sōha had published just one book of haiku, The Flower on the Road (Michi no hana), in 1956, he was Mishima’s upperclassman at the Peers School, where he formed the haiku group Magnolia Society, which he managed with Mishima. In addition, he had sent Mishima every issue of Blue (Ao) after starting it in 1953. The magazine was based on the haiku group he had started with some students of the University of Kyoto that he had attended. In 1948 he had become the youngest member of Hototogisu, though in less than ten years he made comments critical of the magazine.
Mishima agreed to Haiku’s request because he was punctilious and courteous to a fault in such respects. One might imagine, too, that he may have wanted to relive the genre he had given up nearly three decades earlier. Mishima wrote in his essay:
A junior-high-school student, I tagged along with [Sōha], taking part in kukai [haiku sessions] and going on ginkō [haiku excursions]. Mr. Kyōgoku Kiyō, a Peers School alumnus and a haiku writer of the Hototogisu group, greatly loved him for his talent, which may have been one reason he approached the group. The haiku sessions in Viscount Kyōgoku’s residence were elegant and classical, as they were held in the guest room with its floor covered with a ceremonial scarlet carpet, even in wartime. Finding myself seated at the end of the honored guests, cowed by the atmosphere, I made myself small.
Sōha, at any rate, wasn’t particularly productive as a haiku writer. Mishima wrote his appreciation with the manuscript of what was to become Sōha’s second book years later. In fact, the book still hadn’t been published in the late 1970s when Rippū Shobō planned a six-volume set of modern haiku, asking each poet he included, Sōha among them, to make a selection of four hundred pieces plus the writer’s own comments on a dozen or so of them. Those comments—called jikai, “self-explications”—are often at once revealing and confusing, even as they remind you that reliance on them is a clear violation of the New Criticism’s “intentional fallacy.”
Sōha’s self-explications reveal, for example, that the reading of the Chinese characters 舗道 in the title of his first book is not the standard hodō but michi. The title
derives from the following haiku, he said, casually adding that the last phrase is in five syllables, not six as one might have thought:
金魚玉とり落としなば舗道の花
Kingyodama toriotoshinaba michi no hana
Should I drop the goldfish bowl: a flower on the pavement
The parenthetical “it would shatter into” could be added after the colon for clarity. In the summer, goldfish vendors at street fairs used to sell ball-shaped glass bowls tied with a string to carry your purchase (though later plastic bags replaced the glass bowls). Sōha explains that, even though he wasn’t quite sure about this haiku when he submitted it along with a group of other haiku to Hototogisu, the manuscript came back with a double-circle (A++) approval on the piece from the magazine’s founder and editor, Takahama Kyoshi. So he decided to use the word michi (“road, path, pavement”) as the title of his book. One consequence of doing this was the impression among readers that this was his representative haiku, which prompted some to point out the structural weakness of the haiku.
Sōha’s self-explications also cast into doubt both “shasei,” re-creating faithfully what you see, an approach Masaoka Shiki advocated, and “objective shasei,” an approach Takahama Kyoshi advocated as head of the Hototogisu group. In the 1960s Sōha started associating with avant-garde haiku writers. Take these two pieces:
桜貝長き翼の海の星
Sakuragai nagaki tsubasa no umi no hoshi
Cherry clam: its long wings among the stars of the sea
夜の湖の暗きを流れ桐一葉
Yo no umi no kuraki o nagare kiri hitoha
Flowing in the dark of the night lake a paulownia leaf
Sōha says he wrote the first by the sea and the second by a lake, both at night, but he also makes it clear that there is really no way of seeing a “cherry clam,” a small pink bivalve (Nitidotellina hokkaidoensis), moving about in the sea, or a paulownia leaf afloat on a lake. He explains that the first was a fanciful description of a particularly bright star, and the second a description of what he imagined might be afloat on a lake off the beach.
In writing his appreciation, Mishima divided Sōha’s haiku into four categories: (1) refreshing pieces that had initially impressed him as a member of the students’ haiku group at the Peers School; (2) those representing a kind of symbolism he discerned Sōha gained in haiku; (3) those that are demonic or scary; and (4) those expressing the bleakness of life. Let us look at one haiku from each of Mishima’s categorizations.
Refreshing haiku
ドレスの背につきまとふ蚊よ遠い月
Doresu no se ni tsukimatou ka yo tōi tsuki
Around the back of her dress a mosquito clings: distant moon
This falls into 6-7-5, though syntactically the first thirteen syllables form one unit. Sōha wrote hypersyllabic haiku often enough.
Haiku containing symbolism
竹葉降り子犬も固き糞をする
Takeha furi koinu mo kataki mari o suru
Bamboo leaves falling a puppy too issues solid droppings
As we’ve already seen, reading Chinese characters when used in Japanese is often problematic. 竹葉 is here read takeha simply because take no ha chiru 竹の葉散る is a kigo; otherwise, it can easily be read chikuha or even chikuyō. In the original, mari, given in a Chinese character meaning “shit” or “manure,” is so read because Sōha specified this reading with a ruby; otherwise, 糞 is likely to be read kuso. Etymologically, mari originally referred to the Japanese equivalent of “potty,” and it is a euphemism. Some argue that Sōha made a cute picture even cuter by specifying the reading for “shit.” What kind of symbolism Mishima saw in this haiku is anyone’s guess.
Demonic or scary
蟹歩き亡き人宛にまだくる文
Kani aruki nakihito ate ni mada kuru fumi
A crab walks and letters still addressed to the deceased
This haiku hints that the letters appear in a horizontally-written foreign language because a language so written is called kaikō-monji, “crab-walking letters.”
Bleakness of life
雨の鵙書信の濡れをかなしめば
Ame no mozu shoshin no nure o kanashimeba
A rainy shrike as I sorrow over an epistle that’s wet
The shrike is a kigo for autumn. Was Sōha echoing the following haiku by Katō Shūson?
かなしめば鵙金色の日を負ひ来
Kanashimeba mozu konjiki no hi o oi ku
As I sorrow a shrike flies in against the golden sun
Shūson’s piece reminds us that Mishima famously associated the moment of death, violent death, with the word kakuyaku (kakueki) 赫奕, “brilliantly,” “glitteringly,” as when he described the moment of disembowelment of the young terrorist Iinuma Isao at the end of Runaway Horse (Homba), the second volume in his tetralogy. He had planned to end his life upon completion of the project, and he did. In this respect, Mishima’s imagination may have been closer to Shūson’s than to Sōha’s.
Outré Haiku of Katō Ikuya
Among the haiku poets who may be characterized as anti-traditionalist, Katō Ikuya stands out. He began by writing seemingly conventional (albeit “modern”) haiku, but soon turned to such heavy use of puns and allusions that he ended up “slaughtering words,” so that, even as Ikuya’s haiku showed “the romantic, scarlet over-eagerness à la Théophile Gautier, I can’t help feeling the smell of death in each of his colorful words,” according to Japan’s authority on the Marquis de Sade, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. By that, Shibusawa, who professed “no interest in the avant-garde turned quotidian, let alone the quotidian turned avant-garde,” didn’t mean to denigrate Ikuya’s haiku in any way. Nor, one might add, did his assessment have much to do with the fact that Ikuya had slept with his wife, the poet and translator Yagawa Sumiko, and written about it in a poem dedicated to her, “Love in Death by Drowning” (Dekishi’ai).
Interestingly, the incomprehension of much of Ikuya’s haiku that resulted from the words “slaughtered” and “dead” attracted a number of writers known for their erudition in esoteric, outlandish fields. In 1971, when the publisher Shichōsha added Ikuya to its “modern poetry” paperback series, as many as seventeen poets and critics contributed essays to his volume, with yet another person providing a pictorial “portrait of Ikuya.”
Ikuya’s father, Chūyō, was a scholar of classical haiku (hokku) and wrote books on Bashō, Buson, Issa, and others. He studied haiku with Hasegawa Reiyoshi and became a haiku poet himself, under the name Shishū (“Purple Boat”). He started his own haiku magazine, which Ikuya inherited. Here are two of Shishū’s haiku that are said to have shown to be “new art haiku”:
岩魚一つはしり白樺だけの夏
Iwana hitotsu hashiri shirakaba dake no natsu
A single char has run a summer only with white birches
秋といふ海音さささ指鳴らす
Aki to iu kaion sasasa yubi narasu
Called autumn the sea sound sough sough snaps its fingers
These are among Shishū’s pieces that the poet and professor of French literature Kubota Han’ya—one of the seventeen mentioned above—cites in his essay where he goes on to quote Ikuya’s words expressing his indebtedness to Saitō Sanki, “the leader of the Newly Rising Haiku,” along with Sanki’s haiku that Sanki himself said had “opened his haiku eye”:
水枕ガバリと寒い海がある
Mizumakura gabari to samui umi ga aru
The water pillow zwoomps there’s the cold sea
This piece flashed into his head, Sanki wrote, when he was running a temperature of 104 degrees with lung tuberculosis.
In fact, most, if not all, of the pieces in Ikuya’s first book, Spherical Sense (Kyūtai kankaku), published in 1959, are comprehensible—literally and syntactically,
if not as a whole—and they are also rendered in the traditional 5-7-5-syllabic formation. The main section of the book opens with:
冬の波冬の波止場に来て返す
Fuyu no nami fuyu no hatoba ni kite kaesu
Winter waves roll in and out over the winter breakwater
and ends with:
一満月一韃靼の一楕円
Ichi mangetsu ichi Dattan no ichi daen
One full moon one Tartar’s one ellipse
Both of these haiku employ epizeuxis—the repetition of a word in succession—although the effect in the first is lost in transliteration. As the Japanese original shows, the ideographs for fuyu no nami are visually repeated because ha of hatoba uses the same character as that for nami. The Japanese word for “breakwater” may be literally given as “wave-stopping place.”
Still, discordant notes set in even in this first collection, like this one:
“Que sais-je” 傾き立てるいたどり
“Que sais-je” katamuki tateru itadori
“Que sais-je” leaning as they stand knotweeds
Incorporating a foreign word or phrase in the original directly into haiku wasn’t an innovation of Ikuya’s, but how do you parse this piece with the French? Count the syllables of Que sais-je in the standard Japanese pronunciation of the French expression, ku-se-ju, and you get three, so the haiku consists of 3-7-4 syllables. But then what does this haiku mean? Did Ikuya imagine volumes of the famous French series for “haute vulgarization” from a stand of Japanese knotweeds (Fallopia or Reynoutria japonica), the stems of which look like bamboo? If Ikuya included a pun or puns in this piece as it seems he did, I fail to detect any.
And as he started writing more and more haiku that veered toward incomprehensibility, Ikuya started to ignore the traditional syllabic count—even as he stuck to the monolinear format—to such an extent that you can categorize his one-liners as haiku only because he calls them “ku,” shorthand for “haiku.”