by Hiroaki Sato
In fact, some questioned calling what Ikuya wrote “haiku” from the outset. The poet Yoshida Issui, for one, began his preface to Spherical Sense: “As a sentence that forms as an independent poetic phrase that relies on Japanese syntax, the ‘haiku’ is maximum,” and “Katō Ikuya’s phrases may be fragments [French] of modern poetry but they are no longer haiku.” Issui made this judgment despite the fact that Ikuya dedicated one piece in it to “Master Yoshida Issui.” The dedicatory piece apparently refers to Issui’s poem “The Swan” and goes:
白鳥は来る！垂直のあんだんて
Hakuchō wa kuru! Suichoku no andante
The swan comes! Perpendicular andante
With his second book of haiku, Ektoplasma, published in 1962, Ikuya’s writings suddenly turn mostly unintelligible—at least on the face of it. Here’s the opening piece:
落丁一騎対岸の草の葉
Rakuchō ikki taigan no kusa no ha
Defective book a mounted warrior the opposite bank leaves of grass
The syllabic count runs 4-3-5-4, although this assumes that the reading as transliterated is correct. The “translation” here is nothing more than a word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase rendering. Is there any clue in kusa no ha, “leaves of grass,” because the phrase, though with no distinction between singular and plural in Japanese, refers to Walt Whitman’s famous book of poems? Is Ikuya possibly alluding to Whitman’s three-line poem “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”? If so, how does this allusion affect the rest of the piece? Now, with this piece we can at least recognize all the individual words and phrases, but what do these words and phrases mean as a whole? “A poem should not mean / But be,” Archibald MacLeish famously declared, but unintelligibility was not what the Librarian of Congress was promoting, was it?
Here is the second haiku in the original only:
四月、やらはれ矢場のやたがらす
Shigatsu, yarahare yaba no yatagarasu
The transliteration here follows the conventional readings of the kanji (Chinese characters). Done that way, the meanings of certain words are clear: shigatsu, “April”; yaba, “an archery ground”; and yatagarasu, the crow said to have guided the first Japanese emperor Jinmu—a mythological figure—when he set out from the southern island of Kyūshū to conquer the East and unify the archipelago. The transliteration of the crow could then be Yatagarasu, with the first letter capitalized.
But what does yarahare mean? “Driven out,” “exiled,” as in yarahare bito, “an exiled person”? Or, despite the comma after the first word—unusual in haiku—is it related to shigatsu?
Noticing that the syllabic formation is 3-7-5, I wonder: Could there be a trick with the first word, shigatsu? After all, there were a number of poetic (if you will) names for each of the twelve months in Japan before the lunar calendar was replaced by the solar calendar in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shigatsu is the prosaic word that simply specifies the order in which the month appears in the year, here “Fourth Month.” So I check and find about twenty old names for the month and, among them, one with five syllables, Torikutsuki, “birds-come-month.” Intrigued, because the reference to birds may be an associative introductory to the crow, I check the word yaba, “archery ground,” and find another meaning it has: “house of ill repute,” “brothel.” Then it occurs to me that the mythological Imperial avian guide (Jinmu had another guide, too, a monkey) is said to have had three legs. Then it dawns on me that yarahare may be two words yara and hare, the first of which can mean “Is it?” or “It must be,” and the second, an exclamation, “Good!” or “Wonderful!”
So what does this haiku mean or describe? Perhaps it is saying, in a deliberately abstruse way, something like: “oh April, I’ve come out of a wonderful brothel, with my phallus swollen!”
Actually, with these attempts to comprehend Katō Ikuya’s haiku, I have ineptly tried to imitate the way at least two of the seventeen poets and critics puzzled out some of them. One is Matsuyama Shuntarō, a scholar of Indian literature and Sanskrit. He begins his essay on Ikuya by quoting Ikuya: “Pursuing the ‘meaninglessness’ in haiku and meditating on the prototype of meaning, the asphyxial condition of being moved . . . I thought of extracting meaning out of meaninglessness.” As far as Ikuya goes, Matsuyama is known for solving the puzzle, as it were, of this haiku:
切株やあるくぎんなんぎんのよる
Kirikabu ya aruku ginnan gin no yoru
What Matsuyama did was to rearrange the words to read Kirikabu ya aru kugin nangin no yoru and apply ideographic kanji to the hiragana syllabary to come up with this reading: 切株や或る苦吟難吟の夜, meaning, “Stumped, one night of struggling to turn out a haiku, a difficult haiku.” This trick is possible because in Japanese, which uses two alphabetical syllabaries—hiragana and katakana—as well as kanji, you are free not to use kanji where normally you might use them. Here, for example, Ikyua could have written: 切株や歩く銀杏銀の夜, which can be translated as, “tree stump: [I] walk, ginkgo, silver night.”*
For the next piece, Matsuyama tried to cook up a few possible allusions.
五月, 金貨漾う帝王切開
Gogatsu, kinka tadayō teiō sekkai
May, gold coins drift cesarean section
“Gold coins” here, Matsuyama suggests, alludes to Yoshida Issui’s poem “Pearls” (Shinju), which has the line, “Captain of Tour de Mond who bets the daybreak banquet on the swirls of gold coins,” and also to Rimbaud’s poem “Après le Déluge,” which has the line, “Oh the precious stones that were hiding,—the flowers that were already peeking out” (translated by John Ashbery), and because Ikuya—here Matsuyama’s explanation becomes confusing—must have read Kobayashi Hideo, whose encounter with Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer at age twenty-three is legendary, he must have known that “precious stones” actually meant “raindrops.” Furthermore, Matsuyama thinks Ikuya’s piece alludes to Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s three-line poem “Fine Weather” (Tenki), which, Junzaburō himself explained, alludes to some lines in John Keats’s Endymion.† As to the cesarean section. . . .
The other fellow I mentioned who plunged into Ikuya’s riddles is Tanemura Suehiro, a scholar of German literature whose erudition on the weird and mysterious is such that he has been called by one of his students “a monster in the endless labyrinth of the intellect.” Let’s look at one example in his essay on Ikuya:
香炉げたったばたふらいな蕩いのヘレン
Kōro getatta batafurai na tayutai no heren
Three words in the original make conventional sense: kōro (“incense burner,” because it is given in kanji), batafurai (“butterfly,” though it’s given in hiragana, not in katakana), and heren (“Helen,” because foreign names are conventionally given in katakana). But the whole haiku or fragment doesn’t appear to make any sense.
Tanemura begins by stating that this piece is an idyllic tune, that it is one of his favorites in Ikuya’s haiku selection, Idyllic Melon (Bokka melon). The word kōro suggests kōrogi (“cricket”), so “crickets rise,” and batafurai dance, and, by similarly twisting the written letters, the rest means “I long for a spring field that makes you melt,” Tanemura says. That means, he adds, that the season is winter, and the writer is in a seedy strip joint that serves as a cinema which shows old foreign movies, and thus the poet is watching Helen of Troy, Robert Wise’s 1956 film, starring Rossana Podestà and Jacques Sernas.
The details of the movie are my additions, though Tanemura asks, “Non-confidence in language? Destruction of language? But such an assertion has the recognition of the present status that the national power owns as its own that which is originally a public legal institute,” etc., but are such extended, extraneous interpretations warranted?
* * *
Postscript: I wrote this essay based on books Katō Ikuya published up to the early 1970s. Ikuya went on
to live long despite his vaunted binge drinking with Shibusawa and any number of other outré writers. While working for Nippon TV and running his own trading company, he wrote a great many more books of haiku and non-haiku poems, as well as books of criticism and novels. In 1998, he established a haiku prize in his name. Among his last haiku books, two of them won prizes named after Yamamoto Kenkichi—notable in view of the fact that Yamamoto was one of the most knowledgeable explicators of traditional haiku. Ikuya died in 2012.
* * *
* How the word “ginkgo” originated in China, came to Japan, and reached Europe via Engelbert Kaempfer’s error in transliterating the Japanese name in the Roman alphabet is a fascinating story, but here let me just note that the original Chinese name that became the Japanese ginnan means “silvery apricot.”
† See Sato's translation of The Modern Fable by Nishiwaki Junzaburō (Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2007).
In the Cancer Ward: Tada Chimako
The poet Tada Chimako was also known as an outstanding translator. As one story has it, when Mishima Yukio read her translation of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, he expressed amazement to his protégé, Takahashi Mutsuo, asking if a woman had actually translated it. This episode might make Mishima appear sexist, but the sexuality of those involved in this case was a bit complicated. Yourcenar, at any rate, wrote Mishima, ou la vision du vide, a literary biography that would have moved Mishima himself with its penetrating understanding.
Tada published books of poems and collections of essay, while translating several more books—among them, Saint-John Perse’s Poésie, Georges Charbonnier’s Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss, Antonin Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’Anarchiste couronné, more of Youcenar, Joseph Kessel’s Le lion—topping them all with a co-translation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in 2001. That same year she won the Yomiuri Literary Prize for her book of poems published in the preceding year, The Country with a Long River (Nagai kawa no aru kuni) and the Mediterranean Studies Prize. Her last work was a nō play, Maiden Mountain Grandma (Otome yamauba), which came out in 2002.
In November 2001, Tada was diagnosed with cervical cancer. By April of the next year, the cancer had spread to her bones and liver. She declined further treatment. In August, she elected to live in a hospice. The cancer spread to her brain. She died on January 23, 2003, at seventy-two. It was during her illness that she took up haiku. Her daughter, Maya, told me how that came about.
At the time of her mother’s diagnosis, Maya was a graduate student. During an intensive class, the lecturer, a clinical psychologist, cited some of the haiku he had written while recovering from cancer surgery. So she told her mother about this, how composing the shorter forms of haiku and tanka might work as distractions when composing longer poems could be physically demanding and mentally straining.
Takahashi Mutsuo volunteered to be Tada’s guide. The two poets admired each other and, with another poet and scholar Washizu Shigeo, had edited a literary quarterly The Symposium (Kyōen). Also, Takahashi is an exception as a poet in Japan. There, the reverence for—or even insistence on—specialization holds for poetry writing as well, so those who write tanka are called kajin, those who write haiku haijin, and those who write poems that belong to neither genre are called shijin, and they usually do not write outside of their chosen field. In this milieu Takahashi, who started out as a shijin, went on to excel in the genres of tanka and haiku as well, and won major prizes in all three branches.
Tada had not limited herself to non-haiku, non-tanka poems. She had written some tanka and collected them in her seventh book of poetry, Water Spray (Suien), in 1975. But apparently this was the first time she tried haiku. As it turned out, she also had a fine sense of style, backed up with her erudition. Above all, she had a solid grasp of what was possible in the sharply confining genre of haiku.
A selection of about one hundred and sixty of Tada’s haiku, edited and arranged by Takahashi, was posthumously published in two formats: one as part of a memorial book titled To Unseal (Fū o kiru koto) and the other as a book not for sale, titled A Wind’s Memento (Kaze no katami). During the memorial ceremony, Takahashi proposed to call the day of her death “Wind-Grass Anniversary” for the last haiku in the collection.
In the following selection, I’ve added one haiku that didn’t appear in Takahashi’s collection. Tada included it in a letter she wrote to her friend in the summer of 2002. In the headnote to the opening haiku below, “Cancer” is both the name of the constellation and the Zodiac sign deriving from the Latin for “crab.” The Leonid meteor shower peaks in November, the month Tada was diagnosed with the fateful disease.
Cancer that is Crab and also Cancer
獅子座流星雨果てて蟹座の病棟へ
Shishi-za ryūseiu hatete Kani-za no byōtō e
Leonid meteor shower ended, I to Constellation Crab Ward
身のうちに死はやはらかき冬の疣
Mi no uchi ni shi wa yawarakaki fuyu no ibo
Inside my body death is a soft wintry wart
冬の日の熟れて梢にふるへおり
Fuyu no hi no urete kozue ni furueori
Winter sun is ripened trembling at the treetop
つはぶきの蔭や小猫のされかうべ
Tsuwabuki no kage ya koneko no sarekōbe
In a leopard plant’s shadow lies a kitten’s skull
Tsuwabuki (Farfugium japonicum), here given as “leopard plant,” is also called “Japanese silverleaf.” Its yellow daisy-like flowers bloom above roundish, fleshy leaves. The painter and haikai poet Sakai Hōitsu of the late period (1603–1868) wrote a hokku that goes: “The leopard plant’s shade is cold: kitten’s nose.”
繃帯をほどけば春のミイラかな
Hōtai o hodokeba haru no miira kana
The bandages unwound I’m a mummy of spring
春愁や薬水てふ驛ありて
Shunshū ya Kusurimizu chō eki arite
Vernal wistfulness: here’s a station called Drug Water
The station Kusurimizu, “Drug Water,” is in Nara. The name comes from a nearby wellspring, which according to legend was named by Kūkai, the great Buddhist of the ninth century, originally so named.
眼差の當るやはたと椿落つ
Manazashi no ataru ya hata to tsubaki otsu
My eye hit it and the camellia drops with a thump
波は波をくるんで轉ぶ春の沙
Nami wa nami o kurunde marobu haru no suna
Waves rolling up waves tumble over spring sand
来む春は墓遊びせむ花の蔭
Komu haru ha haka asobisemu hana no kage
Come spring my grave would play with flower shade
水すまし水を踏む水へこませて
Mizusumashi mizu o fumu mizu hekomasete
A water strider treads the water denting the water
むかし父ありき麻服パナマ帽
Mukashi chichi ariki asafuku Panama-bō
Once there was Father in a hemp suit a Panama hat
むかし母すだれ巻き上ぐる腕白し
Mukashi hana sudare makiaguru ude shiroshi
Once Mother rolled up sushi with a mat her arms white
Sushi can be prepared in eight or nine different ways. The kind described is rolled up in a bamboo mat and then cut into pieces.
夏痩せやすこし増えたる死の重み
Natsuyase ya sukoshi fuetaru shi no omomi
Summer-thin: a little gaining the weight of death
忘れ盡くして軽き頭や籠枕
Wasuretsukushite karoki kashira ya kagomakura
Having forgotten all my head’s light on a basket pillow
A “basket pillow” is a pillow made of wicker or bamboo. It is used during the summer.
いなびかりしぶき蹴立てて雨走る
Inabikari shibuki ketatete ame hashiru
Lightning kicking up splashes the rain runs
谷暮るるたぎち白きは白きまま
Tani kururu tagichi shiroki wa shiroki mama
The valley darkening seething up white remains white
流れ星我より我の脱け落つる
Nagareboshi ware yori ware no nukeotsuru
Shooting star: from my self my self drops away
海怖ろし波がつぎつぎ手を擧げて
Umi osoroshi nami ga tsugitsugi te o agete
Sea frightens: one wave another raising its hand
葉を脱いで欅すらりと月の中
Ha o nuide keyaki surari to tsuki no naka
Leaves dropped the zelkova svelte in the moon
がらんどうの夜汽車明るく盲ひたる
Garandō no yogisha akaruku meshiitaru
A vacant night train lit bright runs blind
秋深き隣にたれか爪を切る
Aki fukaki tonari ni tare ka tsume o kiru
Autumn deep neighbor someone clips her nails
Toward the end of his life, Bashō wrote a hokku that goes: “Autumn deep my neighbor: what does he do?”
玉葱や七皮剥けば何もなし
Tamanegi ya naka-kawa mukeba nani mo nashi
Onion: peel away seven skins and nothing’s left
Tada may be referring to the German saying: Eine Katze hat neun Leben, wie die Zwiebel und das Weib sieben Häute, “A cat has nine lives, just as the onion and the woman have seven skins.”
皺の手が皺のシーツをのばす冬
Shiwa no te ga shiwa no shiitsu o nobasu fuyu
My wrinkled hand straightens the wrinkled sheet winter
病みほけて鳩を蔑する鴉かな
Yamihokete hato o namisuru karasu kana