Tag: Japanese Masters

A Passage from Issa’s Oraga Haru (The Spring of My Life)

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Leave a comment

Introduction: This essay examines a passage from Issa Kobayashi’s Oraga Haru (The Spring of My Life), The commentary highlights the cultural context of Issa’s work, noting that while readers can resonate at some level with his themes, a deeper understanding of the piece often requires knowledge of his life and the significance of the cultural and historical details in his writing.

Biography: Issa Kobayashi (1763-1828), a renowned Japanese poet, was 54 years old when he wrote Oraga Haru (translated as The Year of My Life or My Spring) in 1816. This acclaimed book of prose and haiku captures a year of profound personal loss, including the death of his first-born son, set against the backdrop of his native village. Written in the late Edo period under the Tokugawa shogunate, it was a time of political stability on the surface but deepening hardship for ordinary people. Years of poor harvests and the aftermath of serious famines had left many peasants in poverty and insecurity, while rigid class structures kept social mobility low and pushed already struggling samurai and commoners into further distress. Economic strain, rural unrest, and the daily visibility of suffering would have surrounded Issa as he mourned his own family tragedies, helping to shape the somber, world-weary tone and acute awareness of human pain that run through his work from this period.

A Passage from Issa’s Oraga Haru (The Spring of My Life)

Still clothed in the dust of this suffering world, I celebrate the first day in my own way. And yet I am like the priest, for I too shun trite popular seasonal congratulations. The commonplace “crane” and “tortoise” echo like empty words, like the actors who come begging on New Year’s Eve with empty wishes for prosperity. The customary New Year pine will not stand beside my door. I won’t even sweep my dusty house, living as I do in a tiny hermitage constantly threatening to collapse under harsh north winds. I leave it all to Buddha, as in the ancient story.

The way ahead may be dangerous, steep as snowy trails winding through high mountains. Nevertheless I welcome the New Year just as I am.

New Year greeting-time:
I feel about average
welcoming my spring

And although she was born only last May, I gave my little daughter a bowl of soup and a whole rice cake for New Year’s breakfast, saying:

Laughing, crawling, you’re
exploring — already two
years old this morning

No servant to draw wakamizu, New Year’s “first water.”

But look: Deputy
Crow arrives to enjoy
the first New Year’s bath

Relating to and Understanding the Cultural and Historical Illusiong in the passage:

David Lanoue, an Issa scholar, stated that Issa’s writing is “unpretentious, blunt, non-censoring and, often, tongue-in-cheek.” This is apt when applied to the passage from Oraga Haru..

Relating on a Personal Level

Having recently become a new grandfather, I can relate to his delight with young daughter. I also related to Issa’s thoughts and feelings about the holiday season (“I celebrate the first day in my own way“) and (“. . . like the actors who come begging on New Year’s Eve with empty wishes for prosperity. The customary New Year pine will not stand beside my door . . . “). Both passages provided a taste of the Japanese culture of his era. And they seem like statements we, or at least I, might make in reference to the commercialization of our holiday seasons in our 21st century world.

Exploring the deeper cultural and historical Levels

So, if we can understand Issa on this sort of personal level, do we need to dig deeper to fully appreciate his writing? The answer is “yes” and “no.” Yes, we can understand some of his message. No, there are deeper allusions in much of his writing and if we want to fully undersand his writing we need to examine the historical and cultural background. And non-Japanese readers, it’s unlikely we can do so with out a little help.

Issa Scholar Steven Carter makes this point with respect to earlier period hokku (the predecessor of haiku):

Does the many-layered allusive nature of … hokku mean that we cannot understand it without knowing … background circumstances, allusions, and so forth? The answer is, of course, no. Like all texts, hokku survive the demise of the events that produced them, taking on a different life. Carter goes on to indicate what can be gained by deeper exploration of context:

What the exercise of exploring the rhetorical complexity of poems … does teach us … is that hokku when they were first composed, were seldom straightforward poems of natural description, even when they may easily be understood that way which was usually true for later haiku as well.

The passage I selected comes early in Oraga Haru and is more or less an introduction. It has a focus on Issa’s feelings about New Year’s celebrations, observations of his daughter, comments about his poverty and preparation for a forthcoming journey, a spiritual quest, which forms the basis for his full travel journal.  

Initially, Issa states his feelings about the falseness and materialism of Japanese holidays:

… I am like the priest, for I too shun trite popular seasonal congratulations. The commonplace “crane” and “tortoise” echo like empty words, like the actors who come begging on New Year’s Eve with empty wishes for prosperity. The customary New Year pine will not stand beside my door. … (tr. Hamill)

As well as the commentaries that come with translations of the masters’ works, the Internet can be a rich source of contextual information. For example, the crane and tortoise are two of the longest lived animals and are used in greetings to express something akin to our own New Year’s toasts: “To a long life and happy new year.” (Miyokographix) With respect to the pine, many Japanese households … put up pine decorations known as “kadomatsu” on either side of entrances. The gods are said to descend from the heavens and dwell in the earthly realm for three days, after which time the decorations are burnt, releasing the spirits back to their realm. So Issa’s reluctance to put a pine beside his door is perhaps akin to me not putting a lit Christmas tree in my window and not having Christmas symbols on my lawn.

A second prose theme in Oraga Haru alludes to the difficulties of the path Issa has chosen:

My own way of celebrating the first of the year is somewhat different (than the priest’s), since the dust of the world still clings to me. . . .  I live in a tiny cottage that might be swept away at any moment by a blast from the wild north wind. . . . I will leave all to Buddha, and though the path ahead be difficult and steep, like a snow-covered road winding through the mountains, I welcome the New Year—even as I am. (tr. Yuasa)

Again, context is important, but not essential. Issa isn’t clothed in dust simply because he’s travel worn. This passage serves as a preface to the start of his year-long travel as a spiritual journey. And some might suggest, is aimed at settling the dust always swirling in our minds.

New Year’s rituals in both Issa’s and our times lead to family gatherings and ritual celebrations. In the next passage, Issa shifts from his negative attitudes about the rituals to the joy of seeing his young daughter explore the world.

And although she was born only last May, I gave my little daughter a bowl of soup and a whole rice cake for New Year’s breakfast, saying:

Laughing, crawling, you’re
exploring — already two
years old this morning
         (tr. Hamill)

Here again, context lends further understanding:

… the Japanese New Year (shogatsu ) is today the most significant holiday in Japan. . . . On Japanese New Year’s Day, the family starts the New Year with a ” breakfast of mochi” or rice cake … (Japan Today website, ibid.)

For us, the rice cake offered his daughter would be viewed as a sparse and inexpensive celebration treat. After all, our typical holiday banquets consist of abundant spreads of sumptuous foods and our problem is obesity, not near starvation. For the poor in Issa’s time, a rice cake would have been an expensive gift to a child too young to appreciate the sacrifice.

The passage may have simply been a joyful moment worth noting, but it may also serve as a metaphor for Issa’s wish that his forthcoming journey will be approached with the freshness of a child experiencing the early years on life’s path. Indeed, many of Issa’s haiku reflect the attitude that becoming child-like was a worthy aim:

turning into a child
on New Year’s Day…
I’d like that!
~ trans. Lanoue

David Lanoue explains: Issa’s decision to become a child again isn’t completely absurd, for it is his mission as a haiku poet to see the world with open, nonjudgmental, child-like eyes. Too many adults, in their daily rush, hurry past Nature’s treasures without paying attention to them, without really seeing them. This year, Issa vows to do otherwise. (Lanoue, The Haiku Guy Website)

Another contextual issue that might be considered is that a Japanese reader knowing about Issa’s life and particularly about the death of his daughter mentioned in the passage is likely to respond to the passage with more compassion than an uninformed western reader would.

The last passage and the third haiku takes us into Issa’s thoughts about transcendence through humor:

No servant to draw wakamizu, New Year’s “first water.”

But look: Deputy
Crow arrives to enjoy
the first New Year’s bath
(tr. Hamill):

Wakamizu, or the first water drawn on the morning of New Year’s Day, is believed to have the magical power to maintain health and prolong life. It is practiced today with ritualistic splendor. (see the Ryukyu Gallery website for images and commentary).

Given this, my reading of the passage is that Issa is sharing his delight in watching the crow enjoy a bath in a rain puddle and perhaps at the same time spoofing yet another of the many formal rituals of his time. Crows figure prominently in Issa’s haiku. In my present culture, the crow is considered by many to be a noisy, invasive pest, and in a mythical or superstitious sense, a harbinger of bad news or even death. However, in Issa’s era the crow may have been seen in a more positive light. In China and Japan, for example, the crow has a positive mythology: three-legged crow lives in the heart of the sun and his three legs represent the morning, afternoon, and evening. And Issa with his focus on creatures is likely to have had a positive view of crows as the social, intelligent and playful, yet noisy nuisances that they are. Here’s an example:

crow and nightingale
pass through it too…
purification hoop
(tr. Lanoue)

This seemingly lackluster haiku is better understood with Lanoue’s context:

This haiku refers to a hoop made out of miscanthus reed, used for a summer purification ritual. If one passes through it, one is protected from infectious diseases. In this haiku, both a crow and a nightingale pass through, suggesting that the hoop welcomes both commoners (crows) and nobility (nightingales). (Lanoue)

Summing Up

Even without the various pieces contextual information presented above, contemporary readers will readily understand Issa’s reactions to New Year’s celebrations and identify with his love of his daughter expressed at the delight of her at play.

While I have curmudgeonly attitudes about our Christmas celebrations, their materialism, falseness and lack of focus on Christian charity, I’ve always treasured the family gatherings. I was enchanted, for example, when my young daughters, dressed as elves, delivered the gifts handed to them by my father-in-law, dressed as Santa. I’m fairly certain that the girls had been psychologically transformed into elves during this family ceremony. On the other hand, a greeting card from my auto dealer or dentist leaves me cold.

With respect to Issa’s focus on human suffering, we may as readers be able to intellectually understand Issa’s Buddhism with its focus on humanity’s suffering. But it’s unlikely that many of us in the relatively rich Western world will embrace the idea of his intended journey as a traveler who will suffer severe privations as a remedy for the world’s suffering. Nor do many in the west believe that such a journey would lead to personal salvation.

One of Issa’ haiku that provides his feelings about the suffering Issa witnessed during his lifetime is and about the indifference of those better off is:

in our world,
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers
– Issa (trans. Robert Hass)

The haiku is an apt depiction of western readers who are likely to understand such wholesale suffering only from a distance. One has only to be tuned into today’s (bad) news to know that the Four Horsemen have been particularly active in our lifetimes. But our suffering is more in the form of guilt at the plight of the poor in our own countrys and of third world peoples. Yes, we contribute funds, encourage foreign aid, adopt children, sponsor various development missions, build schools, send medical teams, contribute to food banks. But for the most part, feeling hopeless, we ignore the situation elsewhere as best we can and go on ginkos and sniff the flowers.

Conclusion:

To summarize, to an extent, Issa’s haibun can be understood and identified with on personal level even across the gaps of several centuries. However, even this brief exploration into context has helped me to understand Issa’s particular circumstances which informs his prose and haiku.

Notes: The translation of The Spring of My Life: And Selected Haiku by Kobayashi Issa (Author), Sam Hamill (Translator) Format: Kindle or Hardcover edition can be purchases on Amazon.com.

About Issa’s and Basho’s travel journals.

In preparing this essay on Issa’s journal I noticed how different Issa’s style and structure is to Basho’s. I corresponded on this issue with Jeffrey Woodward, founder/editor of Haibun Today, and he offered the following in an email correspondence:

Basho situates his own book within the travel genre; its organization therefore follows his itinerary which, as Japanese literary tradition would have it, is centered around “poetic places,” spots made famous by poems written over the generations. These poetic places offer a chronological sequence in his visitation and allusion (based on the poems previously composed about them).

The very absence of any such convention in the UK or North America, of poetic places with conventional associations based upon the poems composed there, is one reason that travel haibun in English are so often impoverished.

The structure of Issa’sOraga Haru doesn’t have an itinerary, as his intended pilgrimage is comically cut short by his own homesickness, and so, at a first glance, his haibun seem to be a tissue of anecdotes, some concerning himself, others concerning memorable characters such as the New Year’s priest, the gardener with his false paper peonies, etc.

You cannot look at Basho for parallels but must turn, therefore, to Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, Kamo no Chōmei’s An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut and Yoshida Kenkō’s Essays in Idleness.

While Issa presents what superficially appear to be many disconnected anecdotes, the anecdotes, observations and poems are like so many beads quietly joined by unifying threads (motifs) such as his daughter’s death and his general reflections upon mutability, his impoverished status and his willingness to “leave it all to the Buddha.” The repetition of major motifs, with variations, is what makes the chaotic surface phenomena cohere at the deeper level.

A Monk’s Journey

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Leave a comment

courtesan and monk,
we sleep under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover
~ Bashō

Outside, apple blossoms glow in the dusk. She lies on her side, head propped up on a pillow, her eyes telling me that something important is coming, my eyes taking in the candlelight on her breasts.

“I need to know more about you,” she says.

“Do you mean about being a monk?”

“Yes, because right now you don’t seem very much like a monk.” She glances at my hand wandering slowly along the curve of her hip.

“You’re thinking about Christian monks, the ones who lived in dank cells, ate lentils and hard bread; the ones who whipped themselves. Think instead about Bashō, the Japanese monk who traveled extensively, shared his poetry with peasants and samurai nobles, loved flowers, enjoyed the company of women. Think more of a European troubadour with haiku as his song – but in this case, an older guy, with gray hair.”

I’m a wanderer
so let that be my name –
the first winter rain
~ Bashō

“Does this mean that I’m just someone who happens to sleep with you?”

“No, but I’ve been a partner all of my life and for now I need not to be.”

“So what am I?” she asks. “I don’t know how to tell my friends whatever it is we’re doing. It feels like more than dating or having sex and it’s not friendship because I don’t sleep with my friends.”

how reluctantly
the bee emerges
from deep within the peony
~ Bashō

“Can’t we simply enjoy what we have,” I reply.

“I’m reluctant to give up the feel of your skin against mine, but I’ll have to think about this.” She pecks a kiss, dresses and leaves.

A week later her note arrives: “I have such good memories of our moments together. It’s a gift to desire and be desired, but we need such different things.”

winter seclusion –
sitting propped against
the same worn post
~ Bashō

monkshood bloom
the whine of mosquitoes
seems dimnished
~ Ray Rasmussen

red bar

haibun: First published in Simply Haiku, 6:4, Winter 2008.
Ray Rasmussen’s haiku was published in Modern haiku.
Basho’s haiku are translations found at the website titled “Bashō” which cited R.H. Blyth, W.J. Higginson, J. Reichhold and Sam Hamill as among the various translators.

A Winter Renewal with Issa

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ 3 Comments

| Comments on Issa’s Haiku | A Few Haiku by Issa |

Issa and I have resided in this remote Ontario cabin for a month now. He speaks to me through his writing and accompanies me on my walks. I speak to him by writing about his poetry. Today, he’s lecturing me on compassion:

don’t worry spiders
I keep house
casually
~ Issa

So instead of engaging in my usual spider mayhem by employing the broom as a weapon of web destruction, I try to keep spidy and friends at a comfortable distance as I write this haibun and commentary based on an excerpt from Issa’s travel journal, Oraga Haru.

Finished writing for the day, I don snowshoes for a walk. The wildlife tracks are numerous: fox, deer, coyote, porcupine, rabbit, squirrel, endearing tiny tracks, and for the first time in a long while, wild turkey . . . and I wonder how a wild turkey would taste . . . 

don’t worry turkeys
I hunt
quite ineptly
~ ray rasmussen (after Issa)

Back in the cabin, the radio informs me about the corona virus pandemic. And Issa shares some of the angst of his era …

in this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers
~ Issa

It’s winter, Issa, no flowers here. Will this leaf hanging from a small shrub do? Today I’m capturing images of the bluish tree shadows cast by the setting sun. I can’t help but feel remiss in my compassion for humanity while enjoying winter’s sublime beauty. 

in this world,
a virus plagues our minds,
gazing at tree shadows
~ ray rasmussen (after Issa)

I look out at the maple, ash and oak trees, all stripped of their leaves, and see myself, self-isolated, stripped of friends and obligations, and yet some weathered leaves have remained through winter on the beech trees, just as warm memories of friends and family have remained in my heart while away.

And so Issa shows me a way through adversity:

what good luck!
bitten by
this year’s mosquitoes too
~ Issa

Thank you, Issa mentor-friend . . .

what good luck!
yet another day refreshed
by frigid winds
~ ray rasmussen (after Issa)

~ end ~

Notes

The haiku by Issa are translations by Robert Hass. My 3-line poems are modelled on Issa’s.

The commentary on Issa’s haibun that I referenced in the haibun above appears as a feature in A Hundred Gourds 3:3 June 2014.

Below is an excerpt (with a few modifications) about the life of Kobayashi Issa taken from David G. Lanoue’s Haiku Guy website. If you’d like to know more about the poet that many Japanese think of as their favourite haiku master or peruse many of Lanoue’s translations of Issa’s haiku, the Haiku Guy website is the place to visit.

Koybayashi Issa (1763-1828) practiced the art of haiku (then called haikai) as he wandered the length and breadth of Japan. Though his real name was Kobayashi Yatarô, he chose Issa (Cup-of-Tea) as his haiku name. He also referenced himself as “Shinano Province’s Chief Beggar” and “Priest Cup-of-Tea of Haiku Temple.” His work was imbued with Buddhist themes: sin, grace, trusting in Amida Buddha, reincarnation, transience, compassion, and the joyful celebration of the ordinary. ~ David G. Lanoue (statement modified a bit by Ray Rasmussen)

A Commentary on Basho’s Hiraizumi

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Leave a comment


“Haraizumi” is single passage (aka chapter/haibun) from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Ono no Hosomichi)

“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” ~Salvatore Quasimodo

Part I: Commentary

Bashō’s travel journals are some of the earliest examples of haibun and prose passages in early Japanese literature. His journals are accounts of his late-in-life walking journeys through Japan. They are often cited as important reading for serious students of the form and for anyone who writes in the haiku and haibun genres. More generally, they are held up as good reading for anyone who enjoys prose passages mixed with haiku and who wants a glimpse of the spirit of a man who lived several centuries ago.

For this commentary, I’ve selected the passage “Hiraizumi” from The Narrow Road to the Deep North about the demise of the Fujiwara clan. I chose it because as Quasimodo suggests, Bashō expressed a feeling in this piece that I recognized as my own in my recent travels in the Southwest United States. You may wish to read “Hiraizumi” prior to reading this commentary. If so, go here to open a second window.

There are several keys to understanding Bashō’s success in establishing haibun as a serious form of Japanese literature. The first is amount and level of descriptive detail – what might be called ‘reportage’ – that provides a context for the poetry that accompanies it. Examples include:

“The ruins of the main gate greeted my eyes a mile before I came upon Lord Hidehira’s mansion, which had been utterly reduced to rice-paddies…”

“The ruined house of Lord Yasuhira was located to the north of the barrier-gate of Koromogaseki, thus blocking the entrance from the Nambu area and forming a protection against barbarous intruders from the north.”

Of course, descriptive detail without some measure of lyrical phrasing would be monotonous. Lyrical passages that touched me included:

“It was here that the glory of three generations of the Fujiwara family passed away like a snatch of empty dream,”

“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive.”

And haibun prose allows a third key element ― some telling as well as showing:

“I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.”

A fourth element is Bashō’s closing haiku which can be viewed both as a succinct summary of his feelings, but also as a more general poetic expression about that most serious human foible called ‘war.’ As with many of the haiku in Narrow Road his haiku step out to a new level of insight and lyricism:

summer grasses
all that remains
of soldiers’ dreams

~ Bashō (trans. L. Stryk)

Putting it all together, what is haibun according to Bashō?

• Rich descriptive detail that sets the stage
• Poetic phrasings that stir the reader
• A modest amount of showing as opposed to telling
• A haiku that steps out from the prose and takes us to a new level of feeling and insight
• An overall succinctness that allows us to enter and leave a scene in a short reading

While these are the nuts and bolts of haibun, they don’t explain the whole. Haibun is a form of storytelling and these nuts and bolts have to be put together in a way that captivates the reader. As such, haibun prose goes well beyond a typical account of an outing which as Cobb has put it “is often as disorganized and unrooted in thematic content as a set of holiday snaps.”1 Haibun also goes far deeper in its storyline theme than the “go here, see this, eat that, pay this much” type of travel writing that one finds in newspapers and magazines. Of course, good travel writing can also be literary. Nor is haibun mere journalism. As Cobb has put it, “I view the haibun writer as a literary artist, someone who has high regard for authenticity, but not afraid to bend facts when it suits, setting poetic truth above a factual narrative, and free to rearrange chronology.” Cobb further reports that according to Yuasa, Bashō, did indeed “take such liberty as to change the natural course of events, or even invent fictitious events.”

With his long term perspective on the English-language haibun scene, Ken Jones states that “The haibun has come a long way in recent years. Bald narrations of country walks, rendered in flat, deadpan prose, and enlivened only by their haiku (“diamonds in mud banks”) are now mercifully few—though still occasionally published.”2

Summing up, “Hiraizumi” is a good story with the key compositional elements of haibun to support it. Bashō’s piece takes the reader into the Japan of several centuries ago, into the cultural-historical sensibilities of its people, and into the poetic style of expression that he made famous and that instructs us today, as writers. It is an eloquent statement about the transient nature of our lives and the futility, yet omnipresence, of war.

Part II: A Personal Recognition

“Hiraizumi” brought to mind the ruins that I had recently come upon in one of southern Utah’s sandstone canyons. After hiking several hours, I had found a way down into a remote, seldom-visited place named “Slickhorn Canyon.” There I came unexpectedly on the ruins of ancients who have been given the name “Anasazi” by the Navajos who now occupy the nearby lands.

Some of the ruins looked as if they had been abandoned only yesterday; others were reduced to little more than piles of rubble. Still visible were the finger impressions made when the builders pressed mud as mortar in between the building stones. One spot of mud-mortar had an impression of a baby’s foot.

Bashō doesn’t tell us what led to the demise of the Fujiwara clan, but from the omnipresent wars of our last century and from the records of Japanese historians, we can readily infer the causes. And what about the Anasazi? They disappeared around 1100 AD. While there is neither a written nor an oral remembering of the Anasazi, research from the natural record, the ring thickness of sections of 1000 year old trees and the carbon dating of debris from the sites, tell us that they faced a 100 year drought. We can guess that skirmishes developed between those whose farms had failed and had thus become nomadic raiders and those who had managed to carry on (and sometimes had their farming efforts plundered).

I sat in the shade near one ruin that had handprints painted above the dwelling’s doorway. I could imagine men gathered after a fruitless hunt, women preparing the evening meal from the sparse pickings dictated by a prolonged drought and the children, hungry, perhaps dying of starvation. All about me were pot shards, the broken remains of generations.

Like Bashō, I felt a deep sadness for the plight of these ancient peoples.

Part III: A Conversation of Sorts with Bashō

After reading Bashō haibun, I decided to pen a haibun modeled on “Hiraizumi.” I wanted to explore the structure of his style while utilizing my own experiences in Slickhorn Canyon as context. Whether my piece succeeds or fails is of little importance. Writing it helped me to identify with Bashō’s journey through his Japan. And it reminded me that the plight of the Anasazi is one that has been repeated throughout our disaster- and war-inclined human history, that these ruins were not just interesting artifacts, but places where families and entire clans once lived and then disappeared.

After writing it, I felt as if I had had a deep conversation with a travelling monk who loved to write poetry.

Notes:

1. David Cobb, “A Few Timely Heresies about English Haibun,” Blithe Spirit 10:3 September 2000 and reprinted in Haibun Today 5:4 December 2011.

2. Ken Jones, “Writing Reality: Fictional Haibun Stories,” Contemporary Haibun Oonline 3:3, Sept 2007.

3. Ray Rasmussen’s haibun, “Slickhorn Canyon,” which was modeled on Bashō’s “Hiraizumi” is published in Haibun Today 5:4 December 2011.

4. Salvatore Quasimodo, poet and literary critic, was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1959.

Conversations with Issa: A Haibun

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Leave a comment


I’ve resided in a remote Ontario cottage for several weeks. Yesterday, a blizzard was blowing and so I stayed in and enjoyed conversing with Issa via the medium of his translators’ books. As I read and write notes, I notice a particularly ominous spider web and remember that Issa offers this haiku for consideration . . .

Don’t worry spiders
I keep house
casually
~ Issa

And instead of engaging in my usual spider mayhem by employing the broom as a weapon of web destruction, I keep my eye on the spider and move my desk a comfortable distance away while I continue to read Issa’s travel journal, Oraga Haru (The Spring of My Life).

Today the sun is out and I don snowshoes and come across numerous tracks: wild turkey, fox, deer, and porcupine . . . and, again, recalling Issa’s haiku, mentally compose derivatives. This is one I felt came close, since it closely replicates Issa’s, yet has my own context.

Don’t worry turkeys
I hunt
ineptly
~ after Issa

As Issa and I move through a mixed hardwood forest we come across a wildflower meadow, which brings to mind a walk last summer with Nancy, my partner, whom I’m missing.

Issa offers these thoughts on flower gazing . . .

We walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers
~ Issa

No wildflowers here in winter, Master Issa, but I’m taking photographs of the long blue-grey tree & shrub shadows cast by the setting sun. And yes, I agree, photographing scenes is akin to enjoying flowers while ignoring humankind’s woes. And, having confessed, I went about building my own version of Issa’s haiku.

We live in a world of chaos,
while building snowmen
~ after Issa

On my last evening with Issa, I look out at the leafless trees, and think about how for a month I’ve shed routines, obligations, news reports and friends – no phone or email here – and felt the dual pains of loneliness and regrets.

And Issa, I know from the biographies of your life, you had many painful experineces to overcome, and I read that you offered your thoughts on transcendence:

What good luck!
Bitten by
This year’s mosquitoes too.
~ Issa

True enough, Issa, may I call you ‘friend’. Although bitter cold, this has been a good winter retreat for beauty, your companionship and contemplation of your sense of compassion and thoughts about transcendence.

What good luck!
Chilled by
This winter’s biting cold too.
~ after Issa

afterword:

I wrote this piece with the view in mind that it would do more for me to try to write haiku (and haibun for that matter) with Issa’s work as a model than to simply enjoy reading Issa’s work and leave it at that. While I like some of my derivative haiku above, I don’t like all of them. While I think Issa’s last haiku, for example, works, I don’t think my derivative is as accessible as is the irony in his. And, I’m pretty certain that if the editors of a haiku journal looked at my derivatives without having known about or ever seen any of Issa’s work, they’d not accept my three haiku derivatives as good enough to publish. But, after all, Issa wasn’t appreciated in his day by the other prominent haiku masters and pundits of his day.

What about haiku orthodoxy. If you scour the Internet for the ‘what is’ and ‘how to’ of haiku, a common pronouncement is that you mustn’t personify animals and inanimate objects. Did you notice that Issa is breaking that “rule”? He’s personifying spiders by speaking to them. His second haiku also breaks the “rules.” It’s more a philosophical musing than a focus on immediate images drawn from his environment. His third haiku is a clever bit of wit, what some would call a ‘ditty’ or ‘witticism.” And thus some editors will insist it’s a senryu, a haiku in form, but not a pure haiku … it’s more focused on humour and sentiment than the natural world.

Here’s a comparison of a haiku of mine that was published in Modern Haiku that used some of the same natural context, but that the editor accepted as focused on the natural world.

monkshood bloom –
the whine of mosquitoes
seems diminished

Both mention mosquitoes, but Issa’s strikes me as a bit removed from nature and, again, more of a philosophical musing.

Isn’t derivative writing also a bad thing?

If you’re interested in this idea that you can expand your own writing repertoire by modelling the work of other writers (and acknowledging that you’ve done so), you might be interested in my article on the subject that appeared originally in Contemporary Haibun Online: The Role of Modelling in Haibun Composition.

notes:

The haibun was previously published in the A Hundred Gourds journal.

The haiku in italics are by Kobayashi Issa (Trans. Robert Hass).

If you enjoy Issa’s haiku, a website I often visit is David G. Lanoue’s “Haiku of Kabayashi Isssa.”

Read an excerpt from Issa’s haibun journal and commentaries on his style.

The two tranlations of Oraga Haru I read and relied on are: Sam Hamil, Kobayashi issa: The Spring of my Life and Selected Haiku; Nobuyuki Yuasa, The Year of My Life: A Translation of Issa’s Oraga Haru.

A Monkish Guy’s Post-Divorce Journey

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ 3 Comments

Haibun by Ray Rasmussen with poems by Basho

courtesan and monk,
we sleep under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover
~ Basho

Outside, apple blossoms glow in the dusk. She lies on her side, head propped up on a pillow, her eyes telling me that something important is coming, my eyes taking in the candlelight falling on her breasts.

“I need to know more about you,” she says.

“Do you mean about me joking that I’m a monk?”

“Yes, because right now you don’t seem very much like a monk.” She glances at my hand wandering slowly along the curve of her hip.

“You’re thinking about Christian monks, the ones who lived in dank cells, ate lentils and hard bread, the ones who whipped themselves. Think instead of Basho, the Japanese monk who traveled extensively, shared his poetry with peasants and samurai nobles, loved flowers, enjoyed the company of women, the warmth of taverns. Think more of a European troubadour with haiku as his song.”

I'm a wanderer
so let that be my name—
the first winter rain
~ Basho

“Does this mean that I’m just someone who happens to sleep with you?”

“No, but I’ve been a partner all of my life and for now I need not to be.”

“So what am I?” she asks. “I don’t know how to tell my friends whatever it is we’re doing. It feels like more than dating or having sex and it’s not friendship because I don’t sleep with my friends.”

how reluctantly
the bee emerges from deep
within the peony
~ Basho

“Can’t we simply enjoy what we have,” I reply.

“I’m reluctant to give up the feel of your skin against mine, but I’ll have to think about this.” She pecks a kiss, dresses and leaves.

A week later her note arrives: “I have such good memories of our moments together. It’s a gift to desire and be desired, but we need such different things.”

winter seclusion—
sitting propped against
the same worn post
~ Basho

~ end ~

Author’s comments:

This haibun is my text intertwined with translations of Basho’s haiku and headed by Toshimine’s artwork. It was first published in the journal Simply Haiku.

I thought of this piece as a conversation with two Japanese artists: the haiku by Matsuo Basho, based on his work and poetic sensibilities while living as a traveling poet-monk in 17th century Japan and the woodblock print by “Moon and Bush Clover” by Tsutsui, Toshimine (1863-1934) which he painted on a fan.

Unless we’re Japanese scholars and/or citizens and/or zen practitioners or students of Japanese woodblock art, it’s unlikely we can understand the full illusions and sensibilities of Basho’s poetry and Toshimine’s artwork. Still, his words as translated speak to me and fit my sensibilities as a man growing up in 20th century North America, and in particular, one who found himself immersed in the “dating game” several years after a painful divorce. And there I was, once again, “in seclusion, sitting propped against the same worn post.” In case you’re worried, I’m fortunately paired up now with a wonderful gal who has a firm hold on my heart.

Notes:

All haiku are by Basho. The translations above were found at website titled “Basho” and cited R.H. Blyth, W.J. Higginson, J. Reichhold and Sam Hamill as translators of various haiku. “A Monk’s Journey” is haibun with a mix of my prose intertwined with translations of Basho’s haiku. It was first published in the journal Simply Haiku. I present it to show how writers can work in conversation, so to speak, with the Japanese masters and other contemporary poets. . . .