Hisajo in the Light of
English Haikai Movement
Chapter 3: Kyoshi and the Irony of Shiki’s Modern Haiku
Movement
Is a sensei or one sole teacher, essential for a haiku poet?
I
have never belonged to any haiku kessha, or bonded
organization, myself. Being a member of AIR, the Association
for International Renku, for more than ten years, I have
written quite a few hokku, or a starting verse of renku that
was renamed haiku by Shiki. I have learned and am still
learning renku, a collaborative poetry that has been practiced
for 1000 years, but I do not have any one fixed teacher with
untouchable authority per se. We use both Japanese and English
languages as we proceed to weave our poetry and at the end of
each session we have two separate texts, one in Japanese, the
other in English.
I have
recently realized that the English language has been sending
us such a transparent wind all these years that we have
neither become authoritative nor turned stale or stuffy both
in the way we write and in the way we run our group.
In the
case of “haiku-jin”, or renkujin who write only in the
Japanese language, it is expected that a poet belong to a
kessha presided by a haijin of some importance. There is
nothing wrong with this as long as open-minded discussion
among members including the leader is comfortably ensured and
by-laws work to protect each member. Unfortunately, however,
this has not necessarily been the case in many kesssha in
Japan. Most Japanese people shall nod to the following: “If
you desire to survive in a haiku kessha, you are to learn its
culture and conform to it.” It must take rather demanding
efforts to avoid stuffy mannerism that can choke a poet with
individual voice creeping into a kessha. At the same time a
kessha can be a paradise where a leader and his/her followers
keep confirming the hierarchical relationship in a lukewarm
air. How can poets avoid that?
Basho and his fresh poetry
When
Basho (1644~1694) heightened haikai no renga, from the
word-play or parody verses of the Teimon and Danrin schools,
the sources of his fresh wind were Saigyo (1118~1190), the
waka poet of medieval Japan and To-Hu, the Chinese poet who
lived in the Tang Dynasty (618~907). All his life Basho
managed to avoid becoming stereo-typed, due not only to his
individual depth, determination and genius as a poet, but also
because he would have to be forever creative in his
understanding of Saigyo and To-Hu if he had wanted to
transplant their poetry into haikai no renga, a completely
different genre of literature. After Basho died, haikai no
renga flourished all through the Edo period (1619 ~1868) in
regard to the number of participants, but it is said that the
poetic height attained in Sarumino, the best kasen anthology
edited by Boncho and Kyorai of the Basho school, had hardly
been exceeded even by Buson who meant to go back to Basho’s
poetry.
Were all renku masters after Basho tsukinami (stale and
conventional)?
Even
before Basho died, Enomoto Kikaku (also known as Takarai
Kikaku) was a star haijin in the city of Edo, having many more
followers than Basho. Some people say that Basho’s fame was
established because Basho was the teacher of this brilliant
Kikaku. His doctor father had a grand plan for educating his
son and chose young and unknown Basho as one of his private
teachers. Kikaku was 15 years old when he met Basho and learned
fast. He was the very first disciple Basho had, but Kikaku
clearly acquired his own poetic voice and style, which Basho
never taught.
In
studying Kikaku I was impressed by one comment of his:
“Compose a verse on your tongue, and you can blow away your
doubts and pains. Know that you find yourself turn to a Buddha
which you can dedicate to the world.” He had grasped renku
composition as poetry therapy!
A renku
session that people shared was a magnetized field where rich
imageries and good thoughts were in constant exchange among
the participants. In feudal society where people were divided
by the class they belonged to, renku provided a space where an
individual could regain humanity. So many samurai and
merchants composed renku together under their master. Even in
a rural village a designated renga place was available and
villagers composed there on a regular basis.
It may be
true that their poetry, if evaluated strictly from the
literature point of view, was not as excellent as Basho’s, and
some masters became rather stale and money-oriented…but that
does not mean we could ignore these 200 years when haikai no
renga or renku nurtured Japanese society…
There
were quite a few women haijin also, Chiyo-ni, Sutejo.
Kikusha-ni, Taniguchi Denjo, Igarashi Hamamo, Enomoto Seijo
come to my mind as the names of poetesses who composed most
beautifully in renku sessions. Regrettably not many modern
scholars have explored the 200 years between Basho and Shiki
and so few books on these years are readily available. It is
amazing that Hisajo did read their poetry and left her
analysis on them.
Tsukinami
literally means monthly average. Just like we schedule AIR
sessions in advance, renku masters of the Edo period scheduled
the session monthly. Verses composed “on desk” without fresh
encounter with nature were labeled a tsukinami verse by Shiki.
Young Masaoka Shiki on and around 200th Death
Anniversary of Basho
In 1853
the Edo people were awakened from Japan’s seclusion by
Commodore Perry and the U.S. frigate. The Tokugawa shogunate
had to disappear from history in 1868. The society was in a
gigantic turmoil for decades and a uniquely energetic young
man, who was born in 1867 as the eldest son of a fallen
samurai class, appeared on the stage of journalism and
literature. We all know this charming man of peculiarly
feverish interest in people and all sorts of objects: Masaoka
Shiki (1867-1902).
Shiki quit
Tokyo University in March 1893 when he was 26 and started his
career in a news paper company called Nippon. Kuga Katsunan,
the owner, let Shiki, his mother and his sister live next to
his house, didn’t say “No” when Shiki with health problems
insisted on going to China as a war reporter, soothed Shiki
gently when he was in utmost physical pain, let him write on
the futon whatever he wanted to write, kept him on the
company’s payroll until he died. All started in 1893. He began
writing “Basho Zatsudan”, or things about Basho from Nov 13,
to January 22, 1894. In July that year, before working for the
news paper company, he had taken a trip tracing Basho’s famous
trip: the narrow road to the deep north. What annoyed him a
great deal and made him furious at the end was the attitude of
quite a few tsukinami renku masters who were busy securing
their businesses and social positions by building a Basho’s
pavilion, a Basho’s haiku stone or the likes for his 200th
death anniversary. Shiki deplored to see Basho turned into a
religion that defied any criticism. He had to fight. His
method was so practical that he dared to say: Basho wrote so
many bad haiku, so few great haiku. He wanted to shock those
who blindly followed the religion of Basho. His research into
the long haikai history had the fruit of finding Buson, an
established painter as well as a haijin. He wrote a superb
thesis on Buson.
Shasei and modernization of traditional poetry
Shiki was
gravely ill by the time he clearly realized his mission to
modernize Japanese traditional poetry. He was 29 years old
then. When reading his announcements, argument, thesis and
essay, readers have to bear in mind that he was writing with
“death waiting for him at genkan, the entrance door,” if I
borrow one researchers’ phrase.
What is
most surprising is that Shiki took advantage of his situation
instead of lamenting on his illness or becoming a believer of
some religion. He was most eager to devour everything on the
side of life. He was extremely open-minded and wrote with
tremendous honesty and pleasant clarity.
Shiki
learned a lot first from Buson, the Edo painter, and then from
Nakamura Fusetsu, a painter of his time (Western style oil
paintings). Shiki’s famous principle of shasei, or objective
sketching, has a strong proof of success in his essay,
brilliance in his tanka, but only rather occasional success in
his haiku, which must have been inevitable because 17
syllables allowed for haiku that are often too tight if the
poet depends on objective sketching only.
In his
hasty declaration for Modern Haiku, Shiki stated that renku
with a forever shifting theme in each link did not deserve to
be called literature, but that a hokku with its independent
value could be a modern poem. After his declaration he did try
composing renku and what fun he had, what discovery he made!
But he did not have time to fully appreciate the splendour of
renku. He had to modernize tanka too! And he did it even more
successfully than haiku modernization.
Who Shiki
was and what he did was in synchronization with the times, the
time of Japanese society’s modernization. He aspired for a new
age with an individual allowed to have an individual voice
like poets in Western society. He became a fighter. And when a
fighter is gravely ill, how do his opponents feel? Those
tsukimami renku masters who depended on a set of fixed
traditions, in many cases by putting Basho on pedestal, were
silenced.
Shiki loved Takahama Kyoshi
Yet Shiki
knew his haiku modernization could not be completed in his
time alone and the fight must go on after his death. Takahama
Kyoshi (1874-1959), who was younger than Shiki by seven years, looked up to Shiki,
the Tokyo University student, whenever he returned to Matsuyama, their home town. There was another boy, Kyoshi’s
best friend by the name of Kawahigashi Hekigotoh (1873-1937)
who also looked up to Shiki and corresponded with him to learn
haiku. The two boys moved to Tokyo before completing their
high school courses in Sendai. One day Shiki summoned Kyoshi
and asked him to become the successor of the haiku
modernization movement. A young Kyoshi declined. He had a
vague dream of becoming a novelist, a more legitimate genre of
literature. Kyoshi as well as Hekigotoh remained close to
Shiki all his life and they took turns in sitting by Shiki’s
futon in his very final days.
Let me
introduce one haiku bedridden Shiki wrote in those days:
Sayoshigure/Ueno o Kyoshi no/kurunaran
quiet
winter drizzle—
Kyoshi must be scurrying Ueno
to come see me
After I
walked the route from Ueno station to Shiki’s house a few
years ago, this haiku and Shiki become close to my heart.
It was
Kawahigashi Hekigotoh who succeeded Shiki’s haiku column in
Nippon, the newspaper, after Shiki died. For about
ten years Hekigotoh led the modern artistic haiku movement
rather seriously taking lecture trips all over Japan.
Eventually he went so far as to write free-form haiku, then
wrote haiku without a kigo. I love some of his most
impressionistic haiku, but he couldn’t go on breaking rules
forever. He tended to write solely from his acute sensual
senses of an artist, which brought about a tragic division in
his group members, an eventual tragic end to his haiku. It was
in 1933 that he finally admitted his retirement from haiku
publicly. His endeavour was never in vain, though. There arose
a few important haijin, including Santohka, who succeeded
Hekigotoh’s aspiration.
Hototogisu,
the magazine
Unlike
Shiki who never had time for marriage, Kyoshi married young
and had eight children in total. In 1899, in order to support
his wife and the first-born daughter, he decided to undertake
Hototogisu magazine from Yanagihara
Gyokudoh, another hot-blooded Matsuyama man who was a
political activist as well as Shiki’s admirer. While Shiki was
alive, Kyoshi remained a dutiful publisher, not the leader of
the Hototogisu group. After Shiki died in 1902,
Kyoshi successfully transformed Hototogisu into
a magazine of various literary texts including novels. Kyoshi
realized at that point that he had no chance to prevail over
Hekigotoh in writing haiku.
Kyoshi
successfully transformed an obscure haiku booklet published in
Matsuyama city with the circulation of only some hundreds at
the most into a substantial literary magazine of Tokyo that
sold well (8000 copies in 1905). It was to Hototogisu
in 1905 that Natsume Sohseki, Shiki’s best friend in Tokyo
University, contributed his first novel: “I am a cat.” In
1907, when Soseki became employed by Asahi Shimbun newspaper
company as their exclusive writer, the circulation started to
decline.
Kyoshi, in
his business effort to boost Hototogisu magazine
again, decided to go back to haiku, partly because the
magazine could not afford paying a manuscript fee to each
contributor any longer. Needless to say Kyoshi had another
reason too. He wanted to counter Hekigotoh’s free form haiku.
He started writing articles in Hototogisu titled
the path haiku should take in 1914. There he advocated
yuki-teikei, i.e., the fixed form of 575 (five-seven-five
syllables) and the inclusion of a kigo. He declared he “is a
conservative who protects conventions”. Let me write the
haiku he composed on this occasion:
shunpuu
ya(5) tohshi idakite (7) oka ni tatsu (5)
spring
breeze—
embracing my fight
I stand on the hill (translated by ey)
Kyoshi’s social power and Hisajo
What would
have Shiki responded had he been alive? Both Hekigotoh and
Kyoshi, roommates in high school days, were so precious to
Shiki, like real younger brothers… The two boys who loved and
respected Shiki together became stark rivals in their forties
and it was Kyoshi who came forth as a glorious victor.
Kyoshi was
a man of polished manners and finest demeanor which he
acquired through his long years of practice in the Noh play,
the discipline which could impress almost all decent Japanese.
In fact Noh had been practiced through the line of Ikenouchi (Kyoshi’s
family name when he was born) when they were samurai clans.
Kyoshi also had the business talent of waiting for the best
timing to do things. Kyoshi knew the importance of an office
address too and moved the Hototogisu office to
Marubiru, the most prestigious new building of the time,
located right between the Emperor’s Palace and Tokyo Station
of the National Rail Way Network.
More
importantly Kyoshi knew the difference between uncompomising
pursuit for art and the fun of being recognized through
creative writing.
Being a
good student of Shiki, he learned the teaching method which is
not just for the gifted few but effective especially for
ordinary people at large.
Like
Shiki, he was a capable teacher and emphasized the importance
of “shasei” or objective sketching. I believe English haijin
associates this with lesson one of haiku: show don’t tell.
Many of
his disciples were important citizens such as doctors and
high-ranking government officials. In later years those
disciples gave him a VIP welcome everywhere he visited. And
often his adult daughter, or son accompanied their father. In
a way Kyoshi in his middle to old age could have looked like a
high-handed feudal existence if Shiki had been there to make
observations…And it must have been Kyoshi himself who knew
this in his bones. Unlike Shiki, Kyoshi wrote sophisticatedly
but inconclusively. He must have known the convenience and
the power of silence. When he wrote, his text reads often very
ambiguously, and even impudently at times due to rarely used
lexicon that deter naïve beginners. Kiyoshi (his real name)
takes one kanji meaning clean and Kyoshi takes two kanji, the
first meaning falsehood, the second child. Here is one haiku
Kyoshi wrote in 1918:
Hatsusora
ya (5) dai akunin Kyoshi no(7) toojoo ni (5)
first sky
over his head
Kyoshi, the monster (translated by ey)
I must add
that Kyoshi did write quite a few haiku that many people still
memorize, respect and love. Yet he himself boasted of his
haiku appreciating ability and called that his art. On his
return to the haiku world he succeeded in bringing in such
brilliant haijin under the Hototogisu umbrella
as Murakami Kijoh, Hara Sekitei, Iida Dakotsu, Watanabe Mizuha,
and Maeda Fura with the power of his kanso, or his text
describing how he appreciated their haiku. In other words
Kyoshi managed to become the center of haiku forces.
As
Hototogisu editor he must have read hundreds or even
thousands of haiku every year. It became an almost unspeakable honor for
anyone if his was chosen by Kyoshi to be printed on the first
page of Hototogisu.
I wrote
“his”. In those days haiku was meant for men, in comparison
with tanka that was taught in girls’ schools and many women
wrote in their adult life. Kyoshi, the father of daughters,
realized anew that half the population belonged to another sex
and they could become Hototogisu
subscribers/contributors just as well. After some trial
teaching to close family member females, in 1916 a call
appeared in Hototogisu asking for Kitchen Haiku
from women readers.
That was
the year Hisajo started writing haiku.
The core of the Hisajo Tragedy
When I
created a pamphlet, “What is Renku?” for AIR in 2000, I had to
start explaining the difficulty of using the English word:
poet.
several
words frequently used in Japan all translate into “poet.”
Kajin is a poet who composes tanka, an elegant short poem with
1500 years of tradition. Millions of haijin of present day
Japan are poets who compose the shortest poem, haiku. There
are shijin who are proud of their lofty spirit and they write
as they wish. We Are renkujin and we seem to keep the lowest
profile today. (phamphlet, "What is Renku?")
Ohka
Makoto, a contemporary poet /critic once wrote: I even think
like this:
If Shiki
and Yosano Tekkan were one and Shiki had lived 40 more years,
Japanese tanka, haiku, and shintaishi (western style free form
poetry) could have found a certain way to come under a general
flag. It was a pity that Shiki had to die so young and that
Tekkan was weak in his theories (Kokubungaku (Japanese
Literature) October, 1986 issue).
Kyoshi
does not seem to have shared this concern around the division
of poetry genres. In later chapters I will have to examine how
Kyoshi grasped haiku in relation to poetry.
I would
also like to examine how Hisajo identified herself as a writer
of small haiku poems and how Hisajo defined haiku. In so doing
I will have to examine the shasei method in haiku writing. How
did Hisajo digest this teaching? Wasn’t this also one of those
arguments only gravely-ill Shiki was justified to make? The
reason why Kyoshi was so adamant in his refusal of writing his
introduction for the first kushu of Hisajo’s must be addressed
too.
For now,
readers, let me conclude this chapter by quoting Stanford
Forrester, editor of my favorite English haiku magazine,
bottle rockets.
It’s my
belief that the only way that a publication can avoid becoming
stale is by welcoming and celebrating new voices of poets who
have the courage to follow their inner voice instead of
following and imitating someone else’s. My first wish, though,
is that bottle rockets acts as a vehicle to
create art, make the reader think, and touch his or her soul.
(from
bottle rockets issue #20)
