A Poet's Roving Thoughts: Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past by Chen-ou Liu

(Author's Note: My essay, "Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Basho's Transformation of Haikai Prose," was first published in Simply Haiku, 8:1, Summer 2010, then reprinted in Haibun Today, 6:1, March 2012, and now featured in the Encore Articles section of  contemporary haibun online, 18:2, August 2022)

Make Haibun New through Chinese Poetic Past: 

Basho’s Transformation of Haikai Prose

Basho believed that the poet had to work along both axes. To work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting. To work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world. 

-- Haruo Shirane

In the narrow sense of the word, haikai, which gave birth to haiku, originally referred to the humorous poems found in the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry.  It was later used to describe popular comic linked verse (haikai no renga), distinguishing itself from the more refined, classical linked verse (renga).  Broadly speaking, it is used to “describe genres deriving from haikai or reflecting haikai spirit, such as haiku, haibun, renku, and haikai kikobun, literary travel account”.1 During the second half of the 17th century, there were innovative movements within Japanese haikai circles, and they had transformed haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form.2 Furthermore, haiku, originated from hokku which was the opening verse of a haikai sequence, has flowered for four centuries and established itself not only as an autonomous genre of Japanese short verse form, but as a globalized verse form in many languages. As the putative founder of haiku, Matsuo Basho made enormous contribution to the refinement, success, and popularization of Japanese haiku and its related genres.3

As Koji Kawamoto emphasizes in his essay dealing with the use and disuse of tradition in Basho’s haiku, “the key to [haiku’s] unabated vigor lies in Basho’s keen awareness of the utility of the past in undertaking an avant-garde enterprise, which he summed up in his famous adage “fueki ryuko,”4 which literally means “the unchanging and the ever-changing.” This haikai poetic ideal was advocated during his trip through the northern region of Japan. He stressed that “haikai must constantly change (ryuko), find the new (atarashimi), shed its own past, even as it seeks qualities that transcend time.”5  However, his notion of the new “lay not so much in the departure from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in the reworking of established practices and conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past.”6 In Edo culture, the ability to create the new through the old was a more preferred form of newness than the ability to be unique and individual7. This Japanese view of “newness” still pervades and is in sharp contrast with that of  the West .

Veteran haiku poet and editor Cor van den Heuvel gives an incisive explanation about these perspective differences: “The writing of variations on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly different ways of ‘seeing anew’ for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their ideas of uniqueness and Romantic individualism, to accept. But some of the most original voices in haiku do not hesitate to dare seeming derivative if they see a way of reworking an “old” image.”8

For Japanese haikai poets, these literary associations, poetic diction, classical Japanese and Chinese texts were regarded as the source of authority as well as the contested ground for re-visioning. Haikai thus emerged from the “interaction of socially and temporally disparate worlds, from the interaction of a seemingly unchanging, idealized past (that included China) with a constantly, rapidly changing present, the centripetal force of the former serving to hold in check the centrifugal force of the latter.”9 In typical haikai fashion, it operates on two axes: on the horizontal axis, it captures a moment of keenly perceived, a description of a scene from the contemporary world; on the vertical axis, it leads back into the poetic past, to history, to other poems10. The skilful juxtaposition of these two disparate worlds can enrich and deepen one’s haikai.

Take one of Basho’s most famous haiku as an example:

summer grasses –

traces of dreams

of ancient warriors

The haiku above is taken from a climatic episode in his most-read travel journal, The Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi).  It operates on two axes. The fragment (line 1) is a scenic description from the present world, the site of a formal battlefield; the phrase (lines 2 and 3) “refers to the passage of time: the summer grasses are the ‘aftermath’ of the dreams of glory.”11 Thematically speaking, this haiku resonates well with the opening lines from one of Tu Fu’s poems: “The state is destroyed, /rivers and hills remain./ The city walls turn to spring, /grasses and trees are green”.12 Furthermore, this dual vision of a former battlefield can be found in its Chinese archetype in The True Treasury of the Ancient Style: Essay on Mourning for the Dead at an Ancient Battlefield by Li Hua, in which “ the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, listens to the voices of the dead, before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past.”13 In juxtaposing these disparate worlds, past and contemporary, Japanese and Chinese, the dreams in Basho’s haiku are the dreams of not only Japanese warriors, but also of those who have fought their battles. More importantly, summer grasses (natsukusa), a classical seasonal word for summer, was used to be associated with “eroticism and fertility;”14 through allusion to Tu Fu’s famous poem on the transience of  civilization, Basho transformed this seasonal word into the one associated with the “ephemerality of human ambitions.”15

As Haruo Shirane demonstrates in his groundbreaking book, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Basho believed that "the poet had to work along both axes: to work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting; to work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world."16 Viewed as a key figure who elevated haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form, Basho had developed a set of related poetic ideals widely utilized by his disciples, fellow poets, and successive followers since the mid-1680s.17 These new ideals were their sincere efforts to deal with the fundamental paradox of the late-seventeenth-century haikai, one "which looked to the past for inspiration and authority and yet rejected it, which parodied the classical (and Chinese) tradition even as they sought to become part of it, and which paid homage to the 'ancients' and yet stressed newness."18

The haikai Basho envisioned was marked for its newness, for "both new perspectives and new sociolinguistic frontiers in contemporary Japan as well as in reconstructed versions of the Japanese and Chinese past."19 In what follows, I will discuss how Basho re-established and refined a mixed genre of verse and prose called haibun (haikai prose), which is exemplified, through his incorporation and recontextualization of the Chinese poetic past in his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Interior.

First of all, broadly speaking, haibun was developed before Basho and written in the form of short essays, prefaces or headnotes to hokku, such as Kigin's Mountain Well (1648). Its prose style resembled that of classical prose.20 In 1671, a well-known Teimon poet Yamaoka Genrin (1631-1672) published his experimental work of haibun, entitled Takaragura (The Treasure House), and in it, he "[emulated] Zhuangzi's gugen [(Chinese, yuyan)]21 by revealing beauty and virtue in ordinary household apparatus."22 His work was "highly metaphorical and allegorical,"23 it didn't have great influences on the way haikai poets at the time wrote their haibun.

It was not until shortly after Basho returned from his journey to Oku that he became more focused on developing a different style of prose, which was infused with a haikai spirit. Around 1690, in a letter to Kyorai, he named this new haikai prose haibun, which was characterized by the "prominent inclusion of haikai words (haigon), particularly a combination of vernacular Japanese (zokugo) and Chinese words (kango)."24 After the publication the first anthology of the new haibun, entitled Prose Collection of Japan, Basho was recognized as "the first to create such a model [for haikai prose] and breathe elegance and life in it."25

Secondly, as Haruo Shirane stresses, Basho's The Narrow Road to the Interior, "may best be understood as an attempt to reveal the different possibilities of haibun in the form of travel literature."26 A lot of commentators also point out that Basho's work is less a factual record of a travel journal account, where haiku commemorate real but isolated moments keenly perceived on the journey, than it is a highly related set of about fifty haibun structured to convey a specific literary effect.27

For example, Basho's travelling companion, Sora, recorded in his diary that on their visit to Nikko, they first visited the temples and shrine on the mountain and then rested at Hotoke Gozaemon's inn on their last night. Basho rearranged this series of events – resting first and visiting later – in separate Nikko haibun in order to dramatize their stay with Hotoke Gozaemon. In doing so, he was able to compare/contrast three schools of thought: 1. Shinto (the shrine and its history); 2. Confucian (Hotoke Gozaemon reminded Basho of one important passage from The Analects of Confucius); 3. Buddhist (describing in two passages Sora's religious preparations for the journey and their improvised Buddhist "summer purification retreat").28

Furthermore, it is "best considered a long prose poem, which gives vernacular and Chinese phrases the cadence and tonality of poetry."29 That is because many commentators observe that Basho's prose conveys poetic beauty through concise imagery, making the boundary between prose and verse disappear.30

Therefore, there is no general agreement on exactly where the haibun breaks occur. The majority of English translations do not indicate them. As a result, most readers will look upon The Narrow Road to the Interior as a travel journal infused with haiku.31 Nonetheless, the haibun is used to divide the text into subsections, indicating a "discrete passage which characteristically ends in one or more haiku."32 This is such a non-linear text, freely mixing prose with verse in a way as to demand a relational reading. Significant meaning of a work of this sort is embedded with the interaction of text and context.33

Thirdly, as is well known, Basho made use in his prose of the associative techniques utilized in haikai composition. "To create associations is to set up correspondence (taio) . . . that [novelist and literary essayist, Atsushi Mori,] sees as characterizing the work's movement and source of energy."34 He describes taio as "something akin to fields of tension and balance between all manner of concrete and abstract things: between words, phrases, or images, between motifs or themes, between human beings, ideas, places, poems, and most importantly between Basho's text, the Oku no Hosomichi itself, and other literary texts of the past . . . States of tension and balance are achieved and then broken against a background of newly formed balances."35 According to Mori, the balance Basho had in his mind was "balance as antithesis,"36 a notion that is more in line with the Chinese cosmological concept of yoking yin and yang and being transformed. In his The Narrow Road to the Interior, attentive readers can see Basho's constant employment of the interplay of opposites (yin and yang) that brings about transformation.

From a structuralist perspective, Mori claims that this law of change is embodied in the following four-part pattern as a structural principle at work in The Narrow Road to the Interior: First, there is a beginning (Japanese, ki ), and it is matched with an apt response (Japanese, sho); later, ki and sho, one after the other, are matched by transformation (Japanese, ten), the newly-formed element(s), and finally all three are matched by a ending (Japanese, ketsu).37 This ki-sho-ten-ketsu- structure mirrors that of Chinese short verse, jue ju. A jue ju is composed of four lines, with each line containing five or seven Chinese characters and carrying two or more parallels of content and phonetic tone. The structural function of each line is described as follows: line 1 sets the theme (Chinese, qi), line 2 develops the theme (Chinese, cheng) through expanding imagery and mood, line 3 transforms the theme (Chinese, zhuan) by comparing/contrasting with line 1, and line 4 resolves all into an ending (Chinese, he).

Mori argues that the ki-sho-ten-ketsu principle shapes Basho's work as follows: the ki part not only includes the opening passage but also extends to the Shirakawa Barrier crossing, the sho part is made up of the sections between the Shirakawa Barrier crossing and the visit with the painter Kaemon in Sendai, the ten part includes the sections describing the travelers' passage along a portion of the road from Sedai en route to the Tsubo no Ishibumi, and finally the ketsu part corresponds with the sections portraying the often hurried walk down the Echigo-Echizen road along the Japan Sea coast and into Ogaki.38 Mori's reading of Basho's work is heavily dependent on his conception of taio, and in his view, the most numerous correspondences are those between verses: between waka and Chinese verses, for instance, of the type discussed in the Kurobane passage or between two hokku in the same, or in contiguous, or in widely separate haibun."39

Fourthly, in terms of writing style, The Narrow Road to the Interior is characterized by a "highly elliptical, rhythmic, Chinese style of parallel words (tsuigo) and parallel phrases (tsuiku)."40 Unlike classical Japanese prose which was based on an alternating 5/7 syllabic rhythm, Basho's haibun was accorded with "Chinese prose models, particularly Six Dynasties parallel prose (p'ien-wen) – which used four- and six-word parallel phrases, emphasized verbal parallelism, and stressed tonal euphony and allusion – and the Ancient Style (ku-wen), which emerged in the Tang period in reaction to the p'ien-wen style and which often generated a rhythm based on the four-character line."41

Chinese parallel prose is marked for its parallel phrases, tending toward rhyming and frequent allusion. Part of the reason is because of the monosyllabic structure of its language "represented by discrete symbols of uniform size and vocally expressed through a phonological structure capable of sophisticated rhyming."42 Due to linguistic differences, literary Japanese is not disposed to tonal parallelism. However, a kind of parallelism, such as syntactical and semantic ones, is possible through stressing paired words or phrases, parallel syntax, parallels of content or theme.

Take the passage on the Tsubo Stone Inscription for example:

    Mountains disappear, rivers flow,

    roads change;

    rocks are buried, hidden in dirt,

    trees age, saplings replace them;

    the virtues of travel

    the joys of existence

    forgetting the labors of travel

    I shed only tears.43 

The skillful use of parallel syntax and contrastive words – such as mountain and river, rock and tree, and travel and life – generates a "folksong type of rhythm and a Chinese poetic pattern."44

This renewed haibun style was widely adopted by haibun writers, such as Yokoi Yayu, one of the most famous literary triad in the second half of the eighteenth century, an era praised for the revival of haiku and haibun.45 From the open line of the haibun on tobacco in Yayu's well-known haibun collection entitled Uzuragoromo, we can see a striking example of syntactical parallelism:

    You may get drowsy journeying along a road at night,

    but you cannot dangle a teapot from your waist to refresh yourself.

    You may awake forlorn one autumn day,

    but you cannot feed yourself when you cannot reach the rice-cakes on the shelf.46 

This passage is almost immediately followed by,

    It may well be that Tsai Yu looked for a firebrand in the kitchen stove

    so that he might light up after his afternoon nap,

    and that Kojiju craned her neck toward the lamp to light her tobacco

    as she waited through the night for her love.47 

In addition to syntactical parallelism, an attentive reader can notice a semantic parallel: "'stove' in the first line is complemented by 'lamp' in the second, and '(day) nap's eye-opener' by 'nightwaiting.'"48

Besides parallelism, the frequent use of allusion is prominent in Chinese parallel prose; it can also be found in The Narrow Road to the Interior. As Shirane demonstrates in Traces of Dreams, Basho's prose and poetry is highly allusive.49 For example, the opening passage is the most important section of the work that determines the theme, tone, movement, and goals.50 It also describes multiple departures – "the hermit-poet's philosophical departure from a particular way of life and his actual physical departure from the hermitage, a symbol of life he abandons"51 – and it is a haibun written in a Li-esque style. In his book, Mori discusses the complexity and richness of Basho's allusion to Li Po's poem and his skilful use of parallelism.52

There has been a steady stream of collections of essays by major Japanese scholars on Basho's relationships to earlier literary traditions. Jiro Hirota's multiple studies on Basho and his Chinese and Japanese classical connections since 1968 began a new era of Basho scholarship. He first researched on Chinese Taoist, then Neo-Confucian and later Buddhist influences.53 Beacuse he "examines the primary and secondary sources to which Basho could have had access (popular poetic handbooks, collections, and commentaries, for instance) and documents possible Japanese and Chinese sources in each of the genres in which Basho and his disciples worked . . . his studies have become, among other things, one of the most reliable sources (reference works, really) on the process by which Basho mixed a variety of languages."54

Finally, in addition to modelling on Chinese parallel prose, Basho adopted his haikai approach to the Chinese fu, a dominant genre of Han Dynasty literature.55 It was a kind of rhymed prose poetry based on the ornate and extravagant style of Chu ci (Chu lyrics). The prose provides the necessary exposition written in the form of questions and answers for exploration of an object or natural phenomenon, and the verse its rhapsodic language. It employs complex rhyme patterns and balanced parallel phrases. Take one of Basho's haibun on Matsushima for example:

"Well, it has been said many times, but Matsushima is the most beautiful place in all of Japan. First of all, it can hold its head up to Tung-t'ing Lake or West Lake. Letting in the sea from the southeast, it fills the bay, three leagues wide, with the tide of Che-chiang. Matsushima has gathered countless islands: the high islands point their fingers to heaven, those lying down crawl over the waves. Some are piled two deep, some three deep. To the left, the islands are separated from each other, but to the right they are linked. Some islands seem to be carrying islands on their backs, others to be embracing them, like someone caressing a child. The green of the pine is dark and dense, the branches and leaves bent by the salty sea breeze – it seems as if the branches have been deliberately twisted. The landscape creates a tranquil, soft feeling, like a beautiful lady powdering her face. Did the god of the mountain create this long ago, in the age of the gods? Is this the work of the Creator? What words could a human being use to describe this?"56 

The language of the passage above is highly figurative and allusive. In the opening lines, Basho tried to elevate the beauty of Matsushima to an iconic status through comparison with and allusion to one of the Great Four Lakes of China, Tung-t'ing Lake, and the famous tidal bore on the Chien-tang River in Che-chiang province, two iconic scenes portrayed by numerous classical Chinese poems. Later, he employed the parallel, contrastive phrases – such as the high islands point their fingers to heaven, those lying down crawl over the waves – that resemble "the couplet structure of the Chinese fu while possessing haikai humor."57 At the end of the passage, he stirred emotions about and reflection upon the status of Matsushima in the reader through a series of heartfelt questions, which is another technique utilized in the Chinese fu. In the classical Japanese poetic tradition, Matsushima was used to be associated with hovels, beach shelters, boats of the fisherfolk, and Ojima island,58 and it was now transformed into the most beautiful place in Japan through Basho's fu-esque haibun. The same techniques were also utilized in his description of Kisagata, a "notable example of Chinese-Japanese hybrid style, interweaving Chinese, fu-esque motifs with classical Japanese prose."59

In The Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho explored a variety of prose styles by combining conventions of classical Japanese travel literature with Chinese prose models infused with socio-historic-literary references, opening up the diverse possibilities of haibun composition. Unlike the majority of the haibun we have read in the English language haiku-related and haibun journals that place an unbalanced emphasis on the principles of shasei ("sketch from life") and the here-and-now, Basho's haibun are allusive, figurative, and infused with parallels phrases and contrastive words, all of which are used to enhance literary effects and add aesthetic-historical depth to the poems. In my view, maybe it is time for anyone who is interested in writing haibun to re-think Basho's poetic ideal of "the unchanging and the ever-changing" situated in one's own socio-historic-cultural contexts, and to make haibun anew through the poetic past of one's own literary legacy and shared ones from the rest of the world.

Notes:

1 Peipei Qiu, Basho and the Dao: the Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, p. 200.

2 Ibid., pp. 1-12.

3 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams : Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 1-29.

4 Koji Kawamoto, “The Use and Disuse of Tradition in Basho’s Haiku and Imagist Poetry,” Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), p. 709.

5 See Shirane, p. 294.

6. Ibid., p. 5.

7 Ibid.

8 Cor van den Heuvel, The Haiku Anthology : Haiku and Senryu in English, New York : W.W. Norton, 1999, p. ix-x.

9 See  Shirane, pp. 4-5.

10 Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths”, Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000), http://www.haikupoet.com/definitions/beyond_the_haiku_moment.html

11 See Shirane, p. 238.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 239.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 See Shirane, Modern Haiku.

17 See Shirane, pp. 254-78.

18 Ibid., p. 28.

19 Ibid., p. 8.

20 Ibid., p. 213.

21 Gugen is a literary device functioning like allegory or parable. In the Zhuangzi, it often refers to the words spoken through the mouths of historical or fictional figures to make them more compelling. Genrin took it as the essence of the Zhuangzi.

22 See Qiu, p. 6.

23 Ibid., p. 20.

24 See Shirane, p. 213, 215.

25 Ibid., p. 215.

26 Ibid., p. 212.

27 Christine Murasaki Millett, “’Bush Clover and Moon.’ A Relational Reading of Oku no Hosomichi,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 327.

28 Eleanor Kerkham, “And Us Too Enclosed in Mori Atsushi’s Ware Mo Mata, Oku no Hosomichi,” in Matsuo Basho’s Poetic Spaces : Exploring Haikai Intersections, Eleanor Kerkham, ed., New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 196.

29 See Shirane, p. 216.

30 Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970, p. 112.

31 See Millett, p. 330-1.

32 Ibid., p. 328.

33 Ibid., p. 327.

34 See Kerkham, p. 176.

35 Ibid., pp. 175-6.

36 Ibid., p. 176.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., pp. 177-80.

39 Ibid., p186. For further discussion on this issue, see pp. 186-8.

40 See Shirane, p. 217.

41 Ibid., p. 327.

42 Lawrence Rogers, “Rags and Tatters. The Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 281

43 See Shirane, p. 218.

44 Ibid.

45 See Rogers, p. 279.

46 Ibid., pp. 281-2.

47 Ibid., pp. 282.

48 Ibid.

49, Ibid., p. 22-3.

50 See Kerkham, p. 188.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., pp. 188-95.

53 Eleanor Kerkham, “Reviewed work(s): Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho by Haruo Shirane,” The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Apr., 2000), pp. 107-8.

54 Ibid., pp.107-8.

55 See Shirane, pp. 220-3.

56 See Shirane, p. 220.

57 Ibid., p. 221.

58 Ibid., p. 220.

59 Ibid., p. 221-3.

FYI: I wrote the following haibun written in response both to the frequently mis/used editorial comment --"it has been done before" -- and to "nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes, 1:9)

Editorial Advice

for Basho

rejection notice

a sunflower bending

to the wind

“You will notice that we veer away from authorial comment, abstract language, and most importantly, from the imposition of human qualities on the natural world. Instead, we choose haiku that achieve resonance through the juxtaposition of disparate images, credibly present in the same place at the same time.”

Sunlight slanting through the window on my coffee-stained desk. Reading Basho’s death poem, I can’t help but wonder: if he were alive today, would he be published at all?

rewriting haiku --

a scribble of swallows

over the moors

Contemporary Haibun Online, 17:1, April 2021

Cool Announcement: Haruo Shirane's Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

On September 30, 2012, Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University and author of Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho and Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts, gave a talk, titled "Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts,"  the first one in a series of lectures focusing on the Rinpa aesthetic in Japanese Art at the MET

Listen to Haruo Shirane's Talk.

The talk began and ended with the following waka and haiku

So briefly rests the dew upon the bush clover.

Even now it scatters in the wind

by Genji on the impending death of Murasaki

("The Rites," The Tale of Genji)

Lodging for the night at Akashi

octopus traps --

fleeting dreams

under the summer moon

by  Basho

Below are the main pointes:

Secondary Nature: cultural surrogates for primary nature

-- textual (poetry, tales, etc.)

-- cultivated (gardens, meisho, ikebana, bonsai, food, etc.)

-- visual representations (painting, ukiyoe, architecture, dress, etc.)

-- performative (noh, kauki, festivals, annual observances)

Contrastive Typographies of Nature

waka-based nature: elegant, highly encoded, emphasis on color, scent, and sound (birds, insects, deer), harmony.

Satoyama (farm village)-based nature: nature as bounty/harvest, nature as feared and worshipped,animals/plants as gods (kami), and everyday animals, birds, and plants

Below are relevant excerpts from  Haruo Shirane's new book, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts:

One of the major reasons for the prominence of nature and the four seasons in Japanese literary and visual culture is the impact of Japanese poetry, particularly the thirty-one-syllable waka (classical poetry), the main literary genre of the premodern period. Indeed, all the major types of Japanese poetry -- kanshi (Chinese-style poetry), waka, renga (classical linked verse), and haikai (popular linked verse) -- use natural themes extensively.

Even those poems that appear on the surface to describe only landscape or nature serve to express particular emotions or thoughts. Japanese poetry rarely uses overt metaphor (for example, 'My love is a rose.'). Instead, the description of a flower, a plant, an animal, or a landscape became an implicit description of a human or an internal state.

Metonymy, especially the construction of a larger scene from a small detail, also played a crucial role, particularly in short forms like waka and seventeen-syllable hokku (opening verse of renga sequence). From the perspective of the reader, all such poetry will potentially have a surface (literal) meaning and a deeper meaning. Representations of nature in aristocratic visual culture -- whether painting, poetry, or design --- are thus seldom simply decorative or mimetic; they are almost always culturally and symbolically encoded, and that encoding tends to evolve with time and genre.

Each seasonal topic generated a cluster of associations, and the seasons (along with famous poetic places) developed associative clusters that became part of a cultural vocabulary.

The highly encoded system of seasonal representation created by poetry provided an enduring foundation for an increasingly complex and multilayered view of the four seasons.

In a country in which little original wilderness survives, reconstructed nature -- in the form of replanted forests, cultivated gardens, famous places (meisho), and shrinesand temple grounds -- has contributed to the greening of both the countryside and the urban environment. For city dwellers, who make up the vast majority of the population, representations of nature . . . raise awareness of the seasons . . . Although nature may be far away, it is relived or recaptured  in the cultural imagination.

The pervasiveness of secondary nature in Japanese culture has often been mistaken for a closeness to or a belief in Japanese harmony with nature.


Updated, Nov. 4:

The following is a relevant excerpt from Haruo Shirane's essay, titled "Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry: "

 An even more important feature of Japanese poetry, particularly of waka and haiku, is the use of poetic topoi (dai), which provides a base frame for the content of the poem. One of the chief characteristics of Japanese poetry, from at least the tenth century, was the practice of composing on an established poetic topic, usually taken from the seasons, nature, or famous places, each of which was centered on a "poetic essence" (hon'i), an established cluster of literary and cultural associations. Rain, for example, took on a different name according to the season and the type. Harusame (spring rain) referred to the soft, steady drizzle of spring; samidare (literally, rains of the Fifth Month) meant the wet season or the extended rains of summer; and shigure signified the brief, intermittent showers of early winter. In the poetic tradition these became seasonal topics with specific poetic associations, which were derived from classical precedent and commonly recognized as the most appropriate subjects of composition.

Spring rain, for example, became associated with soft, dreamy thoughts; the wet season, particularly that of the Fifth Month, implied a sense of unending depression; and the intermittent showers of winter connoted impermanence and uncertainty. These poetic topics and their associations are, in a fundamental sense, imaginary worlds, which join the poet and the reader, and represent a communal, shared imagination. In writing about the scattering of the cherry blossoms, the Japanese poet is not just writing about a specific, direct experience; he or she is writing a supplement to or a variation on a commonly shared body of poetic associations with respect to the seasons, nature, and famous places based on centuries of poetic practice. Here, as in the allusive variation (honkadori), originality or individuality is not the touchstone of literary genius, as it often is in the Western tradition. Instead, high value is given to the ability to rework existing subject matter.

 The waka and haiku are very short forms in the context of world poetry. The advantage of the short form is that it is very versatile; it can be employed by a wide range of people in a wide variety of social, religious, and political settings in highly performative ways. The disadvantage of the short form is that it does not allow room to indicate the context in which an individual poem was first performed. This potential weakness is offset in part by the reconstruction of contexts in prose and the extensive use of headnotes. The poem can also exist intertextually, as in an allusive variation that connects the new poem to a pre-existing text, or it can exist as part of a long tradition of compositions on an established topic. Later generations cannot reproduce the original context or the performative aspect, but they can read the poem in relationship to earlier poems and topics, which are preserved and transmitted. So while the poem as performance is eventually lost, the poem as text continues to exist in a larger, communal, trans-historical context.

Poetic Musings: Plum Blossom Scent, A Haikai Sequence in the Karumi Style by Basho and Yaba

Plum Blossom Scent (Ume Ga Ka, 1694)

In the plum blossom scent

the sun pops up --

a mountain path

                                                        Basho

Here there pheasants

crying as they fly away

                                                        Yaba

Beginning

house repairs in

spring's slow season

                                                       Yaba

From the city: news

of a rise in the price of rice

                                                       Basho

tarns. by Haruo Shirane

In the early spring of 1694, Basho composed with Yaba in Edo a haikai sequence, "Plum Blossom Scent," ("Ume ga Ka"), and later died in the early winter of the same year. As one of his last sequences, "Plum Blossom Scent" demonstrates his "karumi" style ("lightness") developed in his last years, one that "stressed everyday common life, contemporary language and rhythm, and avoided heavy conceptualization or allusions to the past" (Shirane, p. 201). This style was strongly supported by Rural Shomon poets and the sequence was later included in the verse anthology, Charcoal Sack, which was considered by some of his followers as the “epitome of good haikai.” (Crowley, p.28) 1

The plum blossom scent in the hokku, or opening verse, is a seasonal word for early spring, and with the aid of the sun image in L2, this verse is "implicitly on the spring topic of lingering winter cold" ("yokan," Shirane, p. 201). And the aurally effective use of "pops up" ("notto," a colloquial adverb with a roundish, warm sound," Ibid.) enhances the emotional appeal of the verse.

The main function of the second verse is to "expand on the content of the hokku,...maintaining the same season and filling out and extending the setting" (Ibid.). Surprised at the sound of the speaker's footsteps in the hokku, the pheasants fly out from the mountain grass, crying as they flee. "The sharp cries of the pheasants connotatively echo the startling, bracing feeling of the sun” portrayed in the hokku. These two verses are linked through a scent link (Ibid.)

Linking with the second verse while turning away from the opening verse, the third verse turns the reader's attention to the human world, describing the farmer's house repairing in the spring's slow season. The pheasants portrayed in the second verse now are implied in the third verse, wandering outside the house being repaired.

Linking with the third verse while turning away from the second verse, the closing verse announces good news from the city: an increase in the price of rice, which definitely brings a big smile to the farmer's face.

Note: Below is excerpted from my essay, titled “Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival,” which was first Published in Haijinx, 4:1, March 2011 and then reprinted in Simply Haiku, 9:1, Spring 2011:

After his death in 1694, [Basho’s] disciples had varied views on writing haikai, emphasizing different aspects of the “Basho style,” and eventually formed their own followings. Within years, Basho’s school faded quickly, and his disciples and their followers used his name and legacy to form individual factions, fighting fiercely with each other to expand their local base of poetic influence.

Over years of grouping and regrouping among Basho’s disciples and their followers, there were two major factions: the rural Shomon, which was divided into two sub-factions, the Mino and Ise factions, and the urban Shomon. The division was related to the different periods of the Basho style during which he made stylistic changes exemplified in various anthologies published by his supporters. 14

Rural Shomon poets looked to the style with which Basho experimented in the last years of his life, the karumi (lightness) style. This style “emphasized simplicity and ordinary language and situations,” 15 and the verse anthology, Charcoal Sack, was considered by the followers as the “epitome of good haikai.” 16 Urban Shomon poets closely followed the style of Basho’s developed in the Tenna period (1681--84), the kanshibuncho or Chinese style. “[It] was a literary, elevated style that drew on kanshi (poetry in Chinese) for its model,” 17 and the verse anthology, Empty Chestnuts, was regarded as the “‘quintessential expression of Basho’s kanshibuncho period.” 18

References:

Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Cheryl A. Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, Boston: Brill, 2007.

To the Lighthouse: Tentori (Point-Scoring) Haikai and Haikai Twist

In the narrow sense of the word, haikai, which gave birth to haiku, originally referred to the humorous poems found in the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry. It was later used to describe popular comic linked verse (haikai no renga), distinguishing itself from the more refined, classical linked verse (renga). Broadly speaking, it is used to "describe genres deriving from haikai or reflecting haikai spirit, such as haiku, haibun, renku, and haikai kikobun, literary travel account."1 During the second half of the 17th century, there were innovative movements within Japanese haikai circles, and they had transformed haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form.2 … Matsuo Basho made an enormous contribution to the refinement, success, and popularization of Japanese haiku and its related genres.3 (excerpted from my essay, "Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Basho's Transformation of Haikai Prose," which was first published in Simply Haiku, 8:1, Summer 2010 and then reprinted in Haibun Today, 6:1, March 2012)

Although literary historians have often talked about three successive major schools of haikai -- the Teimon, Danrin, and Shomon (the Basho school) – in the later half of the seventeenth century and “have identified the Genroku period (1688--1704) with the ‘Basho style’.” 12 However, recent studies have showed that even at the summit of his career, Basho was just one of several prominent haikai masters, and was far from having the largest number of followers or having formed the most influential school. 13 After his death in 1694, his disciples had varied views on writing haikai, emphasizing different aspects of the “Basho style,” and eventually formed their own followings. Within years, Basho’s school faded quickly, and his disciples and their followers used his name and legacy to form individual factions, fighting fiercely with each other to expand their local base of poetic influence…

During the first four decades of the eighteenth century, most of Basho’s first generation disciples passed away. The internal fighting became worse, and haikai lost the elegance and beauty that Basho had imparted to the form. “The ‘grandchildren disciples’ of Basho either reverted to the superficial humor of the Teitoku and Danrin schools, or else wrote verses of such utter simplicity and insignificance that they hardly merit the name of poetry.” 19

Even worse was the rise and great influence of a highly commercialized form of haikai -- tentori (point-scoring) haikai. During Buson’s day, there was a group of professional verse-markers (tenja) who mainly relied on their literary talents to make a living. Through the aid of a go-between, the verse-marker set the verse, the haikai practitioners responded to it with their verses, and then the verse-marker graded them with points (ten). The verse-marker and the go-between were paid for their service, and the practitioners got their points and competed with each other to see who earned the most points. This type of haikai has helped popularize the genre and also been highly successful in the early eighteenth century. 20

However, there were a lot of downsides to this popular trend. The verse-markers were mainly driven by commercial rather than educational goals: the more the practitioners, the greater their income. As for the practitioners who indulged themselves in this type of  haikai, “it no longer was necessary to display depth of feeling or even a knowledge of tradition provided one was clever enough to twist the seventeen syllables into an amusing comment.”  21 One of the poetic characteristics the haikai masters had advocated was to create a haikai twist, and its creation was dependent on the poet’s “skillful balancing of  the conventional meaning, i.e., the honi, of a topic with whatever new and startling insight [he/she was] able to add to it, typically creating a clash between the worlds of ga [the elegant and refined] and zoku [the mundane or commonplace].” 22 (excerpted from my essay, "Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival," which was first published in Haijinx, 4:1, March 2011 and then reprinted in Simply Haiku, 9:1, Spring 2011)

Take Basho’s famous frog haiku below as an example:

The old pond;                               Furu ike ya
A frog jumps in --                         kawazu tobikomu
The sound of the water.                 mizu no oto

Basho added an extra layer of meaning or surprise by using a kigo, kawazu (frog), in an unusual way. With its circle of associations, kawazu provided a special pipeline to the reader, increasing the complexity and capacity of the poem. 9 For example, there are some 140 poems classified under the section titled “ponds” in Fubokusho (Selected Poems from the Land of the Rising Sun), a standard waka anthology, none of them depicts a frog. 10 More importantly, read in the context of classical Japanese poetry and the haiku poetics, kawazu is a seasonal word for spring used in poems since ancient times, and had always referred to its singing and calling out to a lover. The preface to the first imperial anthology titled Kokinshu describes “listening to the warbler singing among the blossoms and the song of the frog dwelling in the water” 11 as in the following poem:

On the upper rapids

a frog calls for his love.

Is it because,

his sleeves chilled by the evening,

he wants to share his pillow? 12

Instead of giving “the song of the frog,” Basho focused on the water sound of a diving frog. He was the first poet ever to defy the poetic essence (honi) of the frog by emphasizing the “splash” that it makes, working against what one would expect from reading classical waka or renga. 13 In juxtaposing these two seemingly incongruous worlds and languages of ga (elegance) and zoku (vulgarity), Basho humorously inverted and recast established cultural associations and conventions of the frog. In doing so, he created a comical effect: a “parody of classical poetry that refers to the frog as expressive of romantic longing.” 14 (excerpted from my essay, "The Ripples from a Splash: A Generic Analysis of Basho’s Frog Haiku," which was first published in Magnapoets, 7,January 2011 )

The tentori practitioners were less versed in waka and renga, learned little from their commercially-minded verse-markers, and thus concerned themselves with the craft of haiaki less than with writing some seemingly dazzling poems to score high points and to impress their fellow practitioners. When writing haikai, they favored the zoku over the ga to score points, failing to create a haikai twist on the honi of a topic. 23

The most obvious and harmful result of this trend was that haikai became a commodity. The verse-markers didn’t help cultivate literary taste and knowledge of haikai, but rather they focused on producing points for the haikai practitioners who showed little interest in the craft of haikai, only in accumulating the points needed to impress each other. This pitiful situation did not improve until a group of Edo poets published the anthology, Ink of Five Colors, in 1731, emphasizing the skillful use of literary devices, such as word plays and similes. 24  This publication stimulated some aspiring poets to advocate the “Back to Basho” movement that openly expressed its opposition to the prevailing tentori haikai. It took almost a decade to let the haikai revival proper begin. In 1743, the fiftieth anniversary of Basho’s death, a memorial anthology was published by his followers, firmly indicating their intention to spread his poetic ideals. Furthermore, some dedicated poets followed Basho’s journey to the north of Japan, building memorial sites along the way. 25 …Finally, the Basho Revival movement “came to the fore in the 1760s and climaxed during 1770s – 1780s… [and was] led first by Taigi (1709 – 71) and then by Buson (1716 – 83).” (excerpted from my essay, "Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival," which was first published in Haijinx, 4:1, March 2011 and then reprinted in Simply Haiku, 9:1, Spring 2011) For more information about the movement, see Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, pp. 33-7.

To the Lighthouse: Ideal of the Bunjin (“Scholar-Amateur”)

Despite the fact haikai was a native Japanese poetic genre, it was closely linked with the world of sinophile intellectuals that flourished in [the eighteenth century], and the Basho Revival owned much to the ideas and notions that circulated within it.

-- Cheryl A. Crowley,  Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival (p. 47)

In the afterword to his influential book, Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese & English Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Richard Gilbert emphasizes that

The last decade has been a journey of discovery, involving meetings and discussions with “primary sources," living authors. One of the remarkable aspects of the poets represented here, and what is generally true in the contemporary gendai world, is that notable poets are often just as creative and articulate in the field of literary criticism as that of poetic composition. These two fields, separate and intellectual worlds in the west, ride in tandem. This seems due to an ancient, abiding social structure, based on kukai (translated as 'haiku gathering-party) The practice of haiku naturally requires introspection, yet the poem is routinely wedded to social occasion.... Haiku gatherings are energizing, festive, educational, and enjoyable (p. 299).

(Note: With his kind permission, I repost one of  M. Kei (‏@kujakupoet)'s today's tweets, which is relevant to our discussion here: Tanka experts are people devoted to tanka, who read, practice, and study it... emphasis mine)

In my view, one of the main reasons why “notable poets are often just as creative and articulate in the field of literary criticism as that of poetic composition” is that like Chinese literati, these notable Japanese poets grew up with a tradition of the ideal of the "bunjin" (Chinese original: "wenren," which means "scholar-amateur").

Below is excerpted from my essay, entitled "Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival," which was first published in Haijinx, 4:1, March 2011 and reprinted in Simply Haiku, 9:1, Spring 2011):

The Japanese term "bunjin" has a centuries-old history beginning in the Heian period (794--1185) known for its poetry and highly influenced by Chinese Tang culture. Its original meaning was “a literate person serving in a civil capacity” as opposed to bujin, who is in military service).” 34 some scholars stress that it was not until the eighteenth century that there was the “emergence of a more specific bunjin phenomenon,…presented as follows: discontent among the educated and a concurrent upswing in the study of Chinese philosophy, literature and art, stimulated some intellectuals to take the image of the Chinese [scholar-amateur] (the wenren)…as their model.”  35

The concept of “wenren” is highly related to that of “renwen” (wenren written inversely in Chinese). It can be found in Yi Jing, also known as The Book of Changes, which is one of the oldest of Chinese classics. 36 Renwen can roughly be translated as meaning the "arts of humanity," one component of the three-fold Chinese universe: heaven, earth, and humanity. It "embodies all that is of the highest value to the society, and interacts with the other two: the spiritual and philosophical (tianwen) and the environmental and ecological (diwen). 37 A person cultivated in renwen was originally called wenren. However, the meaning of wenren has changed over time. In its most idealized form, wenren referred to “scholar-officials who – either through misfortune or because of some political conviction – withdrew from circles of power, and spent their time writing poetry, practicing calligraphy and painting, and enjoying the company of like-minded friends. Wenren did not sell their work, but used it as a means of contemplation and self-cultivation.” 38 Generally speaking, these wenren embodied a finely cultivated artistic sensibility They were dedicated to the “amateur ideal” and therefore denounced the commercialization of art. John Rosenfield once summarized the ethos of this learned gentry as follows:

Scholar-Amateurs… practiced calligraphy, poetry, and painting with more or less equal facility; they played musical instruments, collected antiques, carved seals, and engaged in literary scholarship. No matter how adept they might become in these avocations, they refused to think themselves as professionals. ‘if you fall into the demon world of the professional painter, ‘ wrote the [Chinese] theorist Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), ‘there is no medicine that can save you.’ In their concerns for self-expression they refused to work for unsympathetic patrons or for the marketplace.  39

For example, in 1751 the Kyoto poet Mootsu published an excellent verse anthology that he hoped would revive interest in the haikai of the past masters, especially that of Basho, and he invited Buson to write a preface. 40 At age thirty-five, Buson was a struggling painter with a good reputation in Edo who had a sharp eye for the socio-poetic development of the haikai, strongly criticizing the mainstream tentori haikai in the preface:

Nowadays those who are prominent in haikai have different approaches to the various styles, castigating this one and scorning that one, and they thrust out their elbows and puff out their cheeks, proclaiming themselves haikai masters They will flatter the rich, and cause the small-minded [i.e., tentori poets] to run wild, and compile anthologies that list numerous unpolished verses. Those who really know haikai frown and throw them away. 41

Buson’s discontent with a highly commercialized form of haikai was an “inextricable part of the image of the [bunjin]” of his day. 42 In fact, historically and educationally speaking, point scoring was not in itself an evil tool, but rather an educational means widely used by the masters of waka and renga for centuries. 43 Buson also used it to inspire his disciples to achieve the highest possible standard of haikai: “mediocre verses received no points, but better verses merited scores of seven, ten, twenty, and twenty-five points depending on their quality… and [he] used special seals to mark the verses that used phrases that made allusions to famous Basho’s hokku.”  44 For example, the verses that made skillful allusions to Basho’s frog hokku merited twenty points. 45 It was the cheapening effects of popularizing and commercializing haikai that made Buson hostile towards tentori practitioners. The only thing on the minds of those practitioners was to write seemingly more dazzling, zoku-favored poem in order to score more points. But, for Buson and his fellow Basho Revival poets who embraced the bunjin ideal, “how to balance zoku and ga in haikai was a perennial question.” 46

As Cheryl Crowley emphasizes in her well-researched book, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, ideologically speaking, there were “two points of intersection between the bunjin ideal and the Basho Revival.” 47 The first point was that reading and writing poetry was not only a joyful pleasure, but also the “cultivation of the spirit.” 48 The second was the genuine, deep-rooted contempt for any form of commercialized art. 49 Furthermore, in order to assert their options of choosing patrons, many scholar-amateurs “declined to work even for the imperial count when they believed it to be corrupt and debased in taste.” 50

In Buson’s day, a lot of serious-minded haikai poets were closely associated with the sinophile intellectuals who helped give rise to the idealization of bunjin, particularly those poets who wrote kanshi 51 Among his fellow poets and friends, Miyake Shozan ( 1718--1081) and Kuroyanagi Shoha (1727--71) exerted great influences on him in broadening and deepening his knowledge of Chinese literature. 52 Shozan was known for publishing kanshi anthologies, and one of his most important works was his 1763 Haikai Selected Old Verses, an influential Basho Revival collection of verses that was modeled on one of the most greatest Chinese verse anthologies, Tang Selected Poems. 53 Buson’s frequent use of imagery alluding to Chinese literature was in part due to Shozan’s influence. 54

Shoha studied Chinese classics first in the school founded by Ito Jinsai (1627--1705), a fundamental parts of whose teachings was to “organize and recapture the classics of the past,” 55 and later he studied with Nankaku, with whom Buson also studied. Shoha wrote a lot of kanshi in his early life, and came to learn haikai later with Buson. Of his students, Shoha was among “those with the strongest ties to the literate, sinophilic culture that engendered the ideal of the bunjin.” 56 His conversations with Buson on haikai later became the key component of the preface Buson wrote for the Shundei Verse Anthology, and this preface was one of the most influential texts for the Basho Revival, revealing that Buson’s view of the poetics of haikai was shaped by Chinese influences. 57 (Due to its significance on how to write good haiai, I quote the following lengthy passages from Crowley’s translation):

I went to visit Shundei-sha Shôha at his second house in the west of Kyoto. Shôha asked me a question about haikai. I answered, "Haikai is that which has as its ideal the use of zokugo (ordinary language), yet transcends zoku (the mundane). To transcend zoku yet make use of zoku, the principle of rizoku, is most difficult. It is the thing that So-and-So Zen master spoke of: 'Listen to the sound of the Single Hand,' in other words haikai zen, the principle of rizoku (transcending the mundane)." Through this, Shôha understood immediately.

He then continued his questions. "Although the essence of your teaching must be profound, is there not some method of thought that I could put into use, by which one might seek this by oneself? Indeed, is there not some shortcut, by which one might, without making a distinction between Other and Self, identify with nature and transcend zoku?" I answered, "Yes, the study of Chinese poetry. You have been studying Chinese poetry for years. Do not seek for another way." Doubtful, Shôha made so bold as to ask, "But Chinese poetry and haikai are different in tenor. Setting aside haikai, and studying Chinese poetry instead, is that not more like a detour?"

I answered, "Painters have the theory of 'Avoiding zoku:' 'To avoid the zoku in painting, there is no other way but to read many texts, that is to say, both books and scrolls, which causes the qi to rise, as commercialism and vulgarity cause qi to fall. The student should be careful about this.' To avoid zoku in painting as well, they caused their students to put down the brush and read books. Less possible still is it to differentiate Chinese poetry and haikai." With that, Shôha understood. 58

In the passages above, Buson clearly tells Shoha that

1) the key point of writing good haikai is to make good use of the ordinary language and yet transcend the mundane world, and that 

2) the direct route to achieve this goal is to study Chinese poetry.

Buson’s theory of “avoiding zoku” basically paraphrases the one that is articulated in Mustard and Garden Manual of Painting compiled by Chinese artist Wang Gai (1645-- 1707), a book with which many renowned Chinese painters began their drawing lessons, and which was particularly influential among Japanese nanga artists. 59 As Cheryl Crowley stresses, “despite the fact haikai was a native Japanese poetic genre, it was closely linked with the world of sinophile intellectuals that flourished in [the eighteenth century], and the Basho Revival owned much to the ideas and notions that circulated within it.” 60 We can see this clearly in the poetic career of Buson, the central figure in the Basho Revival movement who is often regarded as the second greatest of the haikai poets.

To the Lighthouse: Inventing the New through the Old: The Essence of Haikai

In the narrow sense of the word, haikai, which gave birth to haiku, originally referred to the humorous poems found in the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry. It was later used to describe popular comic linked verse (haikai no renga), distinguishing itself from the more refined, classical linked verse (renga). Broadly speaking, it is used to "describe genres deriving from haikai or reflecting haikai spirit, such as haiku, haibun, renku, and haikai kikobun, literary travel account."1 During the second half of the 17th century, there were innovative movements within Japanese haikai circles, and they had transformed haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form.2 Furthermore, haiku originated from hokku which was the opening verse of a haikai sequence. It has flowered for four centuries and established itself not only as an autonomous genre of Japanese short verse form, but as a globalized verse form in many languages. As the putative founder of haiku, Matsuo Basho made an enormous contribution to the refinement, success, and popularization of Japanese haiku and its related genres.3

As Koji Kawamoto emphasizes in his essay dealing with the use and disuse of tradition in Basho's haiku, "the key to [haiku's] unabated vigor lies in Basho's keen awareness of the utility of the past in undertaking an avant-garde enterprise, which he summed up in his famous adage "fueki ryuko,"4 which literally means "the unchanging and the ever-changing." This haikai poetic ideal was advocated during his trip through the northern region of Japan. He stressed that "haikai must constantly change (ryuko), find the new (atarashimi), shed its own past, even as it seeks qualities that transcend time."5 However, his notion of the new "lay not so much in the departure from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in the reworking of established practices and conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past."6 In Edo culture, the ability to create the new through the old was a more preferred form of newness than the ability to be unique and individual.7 This Japanese view of "newness" still pervades and is in sharp contrast with that of the West .

Veteran haiku poet and editor Cor van den Heuvel gives an incisive explanation about these perspective differences: "The writing of variations on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly different ways of 'seeing anew' for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their ideas of uniqueness and Romantic individualism, to accept. But some of the most original voices in haiku do not hesitate to seem derivative if they see a way of reworking an 'old' image."8

For Japanese haikai poets, these literary associations, poetic diction, classical Japanese and Chinese texts were regarded as the source of authority as well as the contested ground for re-visioning. Haikai thus emerged from the "interaction of socially and temporally disparate worlds, from the interaction of a seemingly unchanging, idealized past (that included China) with a constantly, rapidly changing present, the centripetal force of the former serving to hold in check the centrifugal force of the latter."9 In typical haikai fashion, it operates on two axes: on the horizontal axis, it captures a moment keenly perceived, a description of a scene from the contemporary world; on the vertical axis, it leads back into the poetic past, to history, to other poems.10 The skilful juxtaposition of these two disparate worlds can enrich and deepen one's haikai.

Take one of Basho's most famous haiku as an example:

    summer grasses –
    traces of dreams
    of ancient warriors

The haiku above is taken from a climatic episode in his most-read travel journal, The Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi). It operates on two axes. The fragment (line 1) is a scenic description from the present world, the site of a formal battlefield; the phrase (lines 2 and 3) "refers to the passage of time: the summer grasses are the 'aftermath' of the dreams of glory."11 Thematically speaking, this haiku resonates well with the opening lines from one of Tu Fu's poems: "The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain./ The city walls turn to spring, / grasses and trees are green."12 Furthermore, this dual vision of a former battlefield can be found in its Chinese archetype in The True Treasury of the Ancient Style: Essay on Mourning for the Dead at an Ancient Battlefield by Li Hua, in which " the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, listens to the voices of the dead, before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past."13 In juxtaposing these disparate worlds, past and contemporary, Japanese and Chinese, the dreams in Basho's haiku are the dreams of not only Japanese warriors, but also of those who have fought their battles. More importantly, summer grasses (natsukusa), a classical seasonal word for summer, was to be associated with "eroticism and fertility."14 Through allusion to Tu Fu's famous poem on the transience of civilization, Basho transformed this seasonal word into the one associated with the "ephemerality of human ambitions."15

As Haruo Shirane demonstrates in his groundbreaking book, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Basho believed that "the poet had to work along both axes: to work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting; to work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world."16 Viewed as a key figure who elevated haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form, Basho had developed a set of related poetic ideals widely utilized by his disciples, fellow poets, and successive followers since the mid-1680s.17 These new ideals were their sincere efforts to deal with the fundamental paradox of the late-seventeenth-century haikai, one "which looked to the past for inspiration and authority and yet rejected it, which parodied the classical (and Chinese) tradition even as they sought to become part of it, and which paid homage to the 'ancients' and yet stressed newness."18 The haikai Basho envisioned was marked for its newness, for "both new perspectives and new sociolinguistic frontiers in contemporary Japan as well as in reconstructed versions of the Japanese and Chinese past."19

-- An excerpt from my essay, "Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Basho’s Transformation of Haikai Prose," which ans first published in Simply Haiku, Vol.8. No. 1, Summer 2010, and then reprinted in Haibun Today, 6;1, March 2012


Note: The following is an excerpt from Colin Stewart Jones's article,  "Humor in Haiku," which was published in Notes from the Gean, 3:4, March 2012.

Basho’s use of humour is equally effective in the following haiku:

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams 2

On first reading one feels the poet’s sadness and there is no denying the pathos. The poem is a rather damning indictment on the futility of war. On second reading, one is struck by the inclusion of the word ‘great’. Surely, not all soldiers are great in stature or deed. One may ask; how would Basho know if they were ‘great’ now that the grass is covering them? He didn’t. By showing us that something as simple as the grass has covered the mighty, Basho is mocking them and, by extension, their noble ideals.

1 Trans; Sam Hamill,The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa and Other Poets, (Shambala, Boston 2000) p.6 One may argue over the precision of some translations but I have chosen the versions that I believe best highlight  humour of haiku...and I don’t have many books.

2 ibid, p.34

The decontextualized review and the notes above clearly show Jones's fundamental methodological flaws and intellectual laziness.