On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  Sick and wasted a crow looks down upon a dove

  病鴉遂に病巣の中に巣ごもらむ

  Byōa tsui ni byōsu no naka ni sugomoramu

  A sickly crow will finally nestle in her sickly nest

  草の背を乗り継ぐ風の行方かな

  Kusa no se o noritsugu kaze no yukue kana

  Riding from one blade of grass to another the wind goes where

  Receiving a Falconer’s Haibun

  I lay baking utensils on the kitchen counter like a high priestess before an altar. Some are old and belonged to my mother; the chipped flour sifter, hand eggbeater, and glass juice squeezer. There is no sacred cloth but I wear the green Viyella Robe my brother gave me last Christmas. My missal is a battered wooden card box with the faded decal of a potato that says “Bridgehampton.” Long ago, when we were still a farming community, a friend drew the decal for class fundraising. At the time I chose to place it on this box that contains index cards with recipes written in my mother’s hand. Today those recipes, with ink smudges and kitchen drippings, respond to ritual like old rocks.

  Moving like a dancer I cream the room-temperature butter and sugar. Mother advised 150 turns of the spoon a minute and warned that scraping the bowl does not count as a beat. It takes longer than the electric mixer but I need to expand this activity. It’s all I can do. Everything else has failed. My brother’s AIDS has progressed to its final stage. He’s on morphine. I know I am here to see him through. I’m his big sister, just the two of us.

  I add each ingredient to the ancient mixing bowl with silent prayer. This orange cake is a requiem made with my own hands. Although I am alone in the kitchen, I hear Mozart in the background while I prepare to lose the one who carries my archive.

  requiem…

  praying

  a second time

  —Mary Ellen Rooney, “Baking for My Brother: A Haibun”

  * * *

  One thing that surprised me as I began to learn about the haiku world in the United States after serving as the president of the Haiku Society of America from 1979 to 1981 was the writing of haibun in this country. That’s why, when in 1987 I had the first chance to write a book in Japanese about haiku in English, I included three American poets to represent haibun: Hal Roth, John Ashbery, and Judith E. Winston. Roth, who edited the magazine Wind Chimes, wrote a description of his visit to Antietam, a Civil War battleground, in Behind the Fireflies; Ashbery had six haibun in his 1984 selection, A Wave: Poems; and Winston, a marine biologist specializing in bryozoans and, at the time, the curator of the Department of Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, wrote Letter from Port Royal, Jamaica: Marine Treasures in a Pirate Cove.

  In contrast, in Japan today, haibun largely refers to a certain type of prose, usually interspersed with verse, that was written during the Edo period (1603–1868). The reason is simple. The literary background that spawned the genre and made it distinct faded and disappeared as Japan abandoned its semi-isolationist policy in the mid-nineteenth century and eagerly began to absorb European culture and thought.

  In retrospect, it seems haibun wasn’t really clear as a literary genre from the start. Matsuo Bashō, who instigated the genre, wrote in a letter to Mukai Kyorai in Eighth Month of 1690: “He says that he doesn’t know anything about haibun (誹文), but I’d sorely regret that it wasn’t different from jitsubun (實文).” Scholars today differ on what Bashō might have meant by jitsubun, some suggesting he meant kanbun, “prose written in Chinese,” others that he meant a formal writing, Japanese or Chinese. Regardless, Bashō had asked Kyorai’s older brother, Gentan, to look at his prose piece for improvement, and Gentan had demurred. A renowned Confucian physician serving the Imperial Palace, Gentan was well-versed in classical Chinese literature. For one thing, Bashō told Kyorai that he expected his brother to straighten out some of the allusions in his writing for him, although Bashō’s main purpose was for him to better the piece by making additions if necessary. But Gentan wasn’t sure about “haibun” that Bashō must have mentioned.

  The piece Bashō wanted Gentan to read was called, in Burton Watson’s translation, “The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling” (Genjūan no ki). Circulating manuscripts among teachers and trusted friends for revisions and suggestions was common practice at the time. As a result, there remain at least two pairs of different versions of this piece: one pair without any hokku, the other with one or two hokku. Later Gentan wrote a kanshi—a verse composed in classical Chinese in accordance with Chinese prosody—in praise of it or at least for one of them, as was also customary.

  At any rate, there is some confusion as to what Bashō meant by haibun, because what he said was cryptic, although it is clear that he meant “haikai prose.” Again, modern scholars differ, some arguing that Bashō meant gabun (雅文), “elegant writing,” belles lettres, others arguing that he meant “explanatory, descriptive, regular prose,” which today we might call “practical writing.” One reason for the confusion comes from the fact that by that time, Bashō was striving to take haikai from the realm of the “comic” and “humorous” to the height of propriety and respectability.

  Kyorai, a samurai of rectitude noted for his faithfulness in conveying Bashō’s teachings on haikai, tried to explain haibun by quoting him in his treatise Kyorai’s Notes (Kyorai shō). To paraphrase, it goes like this:

  What is generally presented as haikai prose is that which recasts Chinese-style prose into Japanese or that which mixes Chinese-style writings into tanka-esque Japanese prose. Either way, it often comes out clumsy and vulgar. Even when writing about human sentiments, such writings get into details in describing what’s happening in real life these days. This is typically shown by Saikaku in his base, despicable writings.

  Those of my school should compose writings in which the intent is clearly made, and even where Chinese-style writings are brought in, the flow must be smooth, and even where the subject has to extend to earthy affairs, it should be put attractively.

  This passage is known for Bashō taking a swipe, via Kyorai, at his contemporary Ihara Saikaku, who had first made a name for himself by turning out great numbers of hokku in one sitting, within a short period of time—1,000 to 10,000 haiku overnight, let’s say—and then turned to reportage and fiction, which proved immensely popular. In contrast, Bashō left only about 1,000 haiku in his lifetime and no fiction.

  Behind these ideas was China’s heavy influence on Japan in culture and thought from the very beginnings. In writing, this was particularly acute, even though Japanese and Chinese are two very different languages. Not only did Japan’s writing system grow out of China’s, which is based on logograms and ideograms, but the need to read and, shall we say, imitate Chinese writing (kanbun; hanwen in Chinese) spawned the practice of (kanbun) yumikudashi—“reading (Chinese writing) as written,” or an extreme form of translatese—that was accepted as legitimate and taught. As a result, the Japanese could easily infuse their writings with difficult, not to say undigested, Chinese characters, words, and idioms, whether the intent was to impress the reader or not. That explains why a Japanese encyclopedia definition of haibun says, “‘Haibun’ is traditional belles-lettres, kanbun yomikudashi, prose combining Japanese and Chinese.” In this regard, the role of the Chinese language in Japan up to the mid-nineteenth century may have been comparable, to some extent, to that of Latin in Europe up to the mid-eighteenth century. Or so I gather.

  But the Japanese dependence on Chinese writing and the literary consequences of it dissipated as the semi-isolationist Tokugawa regime collapsed and the country opened itself to the wider world, eagerly learning Western culture and, along with it, English, German, French, Russian, and other languages. The nature of writing itself changed accordingly, and the kind of haikai prose Bashō envisioned quickly lost its raison d’être. The last notable haibun in the modern period may well have been those Takahama Kyoshi w
rote and assembled and published in New Haibun (Shin-haibun) in 1933. Short essays with a haiku or two—and with kanshi in earlier times—have continued to be written since the Edo period, but under some other name than haibun.

  So I found it fascinating to learn that haibun had been revived in the United States in more recent times. According to Jim Kacian, who started editing Contemporary Haibun Online with Bruce Ross in 2000, the English acceptance of the literary genre occurred formally in 1972, when Robert Spiess published “Five Caribbean Haibun.” Spiess was among the first to treat haiku as “an American poem.” In his short note on himself for Cor van den Heuvel’s first volume of the important series, The Haiku Anthology, in 1974, he stated that he “inclined to haiku upon reading Harold Henderson’s The Bamboo Broom,” and began to see his haiku in American Poetry Magazine in 1949. I haven’t seen The Bamboo Broom, which Henderson had published in Kobe in 1934, but it may well have been the direct predecessor of his 1958 book, An Introduction to Haiku, a small book that translated and discussed important Japanese haiku poets up to Masaoka Shiki.

  When I reflect on it, I marvel and wonder: How was it possible that Spiess, a Wisconsin native, absorbed haiku, a literary artifact of the enemy nation, just four years after his country utterly crushed it in a horrendous war that the American historian John W. Dower aptly called a “war without mercy”?

  This is what I was thinking about when Mary Ellen Rooney, the falconer, sent me her haibun for comment. I had learned she was a falconer from Rita Gray, a coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. Sure enough, the first article Rooney sent me was one she had written for the North American Falconers’ Association that describes how she became enraptured by falconry after seeing a man on horseback in Kyrgyzstan hunting with an eagle. As we corresponded, I learned that she had been writing all her life, and also worked as a journalist.

  When Rooney wrote me, at any rate, I happened to be reading Natsume Sōseki to revise my old article “Haiku and Zen” (included in this volume as “Haiku and Zen: Association and Dissociation”) in particular, the series of essays he wrote for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, from October 1910 to February 1911, where he reflected on the days of his recovery from a severe stomach ulcer that would eventually kill him. These essays were later collected and published as Things I Remember and Others (Omoidasu koto nado). Sōseki is now far better known for his novels, but he wrote haiku as Shiki’s friend, and ends many of these convalescent essays with a haiku or a kanshi, the other verse genre in which he excelled. But he didn’t call any of them haibun. Why?

  With his familiarity with classical Chinese literature and professorial knowledge of English literature Sōseki’s perspective, you could say, was far wider than what Bashō and other literati during the Edo period could have imagined. Sōseki turned from teaching to fiction writing when the Asahi Shimbun contracted him to write at least one novel a year that would be serialized in their pages. It was while working on his tenth novel, in the summer of 1910, that he was diagnosed with a serious stomach ulcer. He moved to a sanatorium—in truth, a hot-spa inn that still exists called Kikuya (“Christmas Inn”) in Shuzenji on the Izu Peninsula. There, on August 17, 1910, he vomited a mass of blood that looked “like a bear liver”; then again on August 24—this time it was so bad that he was practically dead for about half an hour, as his wife later told him, or, as he put it, “I once died.” For some time thereafter, Sōseki was fed only very thin gruel until he grew so skinny and weak he found he could no longer raise his arms. He couldn’t even write in the diary he had been keeping while in Kikuya, and was unable to jot down anything in it from August 24 to September 9.

  The section that ends the eighteenth essay in Things I Remember and Others, which is excerpted below, does not include any European reference, but while laid up at Kikuya, Sōseki read foreign books. His references to foreign writers elsewhere in these essays range from the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea to the American psychologist William James and his brother, the novelist Henry James; from the French painter Henri Harpignies to the Scottish poet and folklorist Andrew Lang; from the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn to the English physicist who believed in psychics Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge. Not to mention the wide and deep knowledge of classical Chinese literature and Zen that Sōseki gives us glimpses of here and there.

  My heaven and earth partitioned into a narrow futon until yesterday suddenly grew narrower again. Now to me, who had lost the ability to get out except for one portion of the futon, the futon that had felt narrow until yesterday looked even larger. The points at which I contacted the world were now only my shoulders, my back, and the soles of my feet that extended thin. —My head, needless to say, was resting on the pillow.

  Last night it seemed he wouldn’t be permitted to live even in a world cut so small, those near me must have felt in their hearts. That was pitiful even to me, the one unable to understand anything. Yet, because only the places where my body contacted the futon were my world, and because those contacting places never changed a bit, the relationship between me and the world was very simple. It was utterly static. Therefore it was safe. Lying stretched out in a coffin matted with cotton for a long time, I don’t get out of the coffin, no one assaults a coffin, that mood of a dead man—assuming that a dead man has any mood—wouldn’t have been much different from that of mine.

  After a while, my head began to grow numb. I felt as if the bones of my hips became just bones and were placed on a wooden board. My legs grew heavy. Thus, even in the narrow heaven and earth of mine alone for which safety was guaranteed from social dangers, too, appropriate pain was born. And I had no ability to escape even an inch from that pain. I wasn’t at all aware of which people were sitting around near my pillow, in what way they were seated. The appearance of the people to take care of me, occupying the nearby places unreachable to my view, were the same as those of gods. Lying face up, immovable, in this small world peaceful but full of pain, I ran my eyes from time to time to the places that my body couldn’t reach. And I stared at the long thread hooking up the ice bag from the ceiling. That thread, along with the cold bag, was sharply pulsing, pulsing, on my stomach.

  朝寒や生きたる骨を動かさず

  Asasamu ya ikitaru hone o ugokasazu

  Morning cold: I don’t move my bones that are alive

  * * *

  the silent flutter

  when a falcon lands

  on my arm

  Mary Ellen Rooney (1934–2018)

  Through the Looking Glass

  for Mary Jo Bang

  My friends Cynthia and Sarah Lindberg, mother and daughter, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass and sent me via cell phone a shot of the plaque explaining the rationale for the show because it reminded them of me. It begins: “The exhibition’s subtitle, ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ translates into Chinese as ‘Moon in the Water,’ a phrase that alludes to Buddhism.”

  That brought to mind what I’d written more than forty years ago in my essay, “Borges Possibility”:

  It’s said that an English saying, translated into Chinese, then back into English, read: “Remote insanity.” The original was: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  Reading detailed English commentaries on an English translation of a Japanese translation of an English film script for General Motors to make a second Japanese translation, I, a Japanese, think of this possibility: The English translator, another Japanese, had the English original at hand in making his translation of the Japanese translation, and the commentator, still another Japanese, decided to go bananas.

  When I wrote this piece, I certainly didn’t know that the Japanese idiom corresponding to “out of sight, out of mind,” 去る者は日々に疎し (Saru mono ha hibi ni utoshi), comes directly from the first line of an “old poem”—the fourteenth of the “Nineteen Old Poems,” to be exact—in China’s Anthology of Li
terature (Wen Xuan), a thirty-volume anthology of verse and prose that Crown Prince Zhaoming compiled and edited during the early sixth century. The poem reads, in my inept translation:

  The one who departed grows distant by the day.

  the one who arrived grows closer by the day.

  I step out of the castle gate and look,

  and I see only hills and mausoleums.

  Old graves, plowed, are now paddies,

  pine and oak, cut, are now firewood.

  White willow flowing in sad wind

  bleakly makes me aggrieved.

  I think of returning to my old village,

  but there’s no way by which to go back.

  The speaker cannot go back to his homeland because the country is at war and in chaos.

  The original character in the third line for what’s given here as “castle” is 郭 (guo) and really means “enclosure”—the pictograph said to show an aerial view of tall walls with watchtowers in the north and south corners. In ancient China, a large congregation of people or a town was surrounded by a tall wall to protect it and, when a new congregation of people grew up around the wall, another larger, outer wall was built, creating double walls. A feudal lord, or emperor, lived with his court in the inner sanctum. That explains why the character郭 is often taken to be the same as “castle,” 城 (cheng), which in turn is taken to mean “city,” as in Burton Watson’s rendition of “Spring Prospect,” the celebrated poem by Tu Fu:

  The nation shattered, hills and streams remain.

  The city in spring, grass and trees deep:

  feeling the times, flowers draw tears,

  hating separation, birds alarm the heart.

  Beacon fires three months running,

  a letter from home worth ten thousand in gold—

  white hairs, fewer for the scratching,