Playlist: Tokugawa Japan: Bashō (1644-1694) – Master of The Haikai and Haiku Forms

Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) is commonly referred to by his given name, Bashō, rather than his family name, Matsuo. This is the custom with certain Japanese writers.

Transcript

[Haiku by Bashō]

te wo uteba

kodama ni akuru

natsu no tsuki

as I clap my hands

with the echoes, it begins to dawn —

the summer moon

Robert Oxnam: Bashō was a master of the haiku form, which not only retains its popularity in today's Japan, but has also been introduced into American schools at all levels.

Haiku evolved from the haikai, linked verse, that was written in the Tokugawa period. Every haikai begins with an opening verse of seventeen syllables. This opening verse was called a hokku. It was written in three lines of 5, then 7, then 5 syllables to make the total of 17 syllables. Bashō took this opening verse, the hokku, and refined it to become what is now known as the haiku.

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Haiku from Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 317.

Transcript

Haruo Shirane: Matsuo Bashō was a haikai master. "Haikai" means popular linked verse.

Linked verse was this great socio-cultural activity that the Japanese engaged in from the medieval period onward. It's different in Bashō's period. Bashō is late seventeenth century, the beginning of the Tokugawa period. It's a whole new society, an urban society, with the development of capitalism, urban townsmen, and mercantilism, so we have a whole new commoner populace that is now participating. It's not just the aristocrats or the elite samurai.

What's interesting about the seventeenth century that marks it off from the others is that it's the first time we have mass education; this is the first time we have printing. Until this point everything was very carefully duplicated by hand. This is the first time you had books, you had libraries, you had schools. Everyone is trying to learn. And haikai — comic linked verse — was kind of a way to learning, a way of learning. It was in linked verse that you would allude to the Tale of Genji, to Ise, the Kokinshū, but you could also talk about your daily life, the things that happen in your kitchen, talk about your dog. [The Tale of Genji, Tales of Ise, and the Kokinshū are famous works of literature and poetry from Japan's classical period (6th-12th centuries).]

[Haiku by Bashō]

susuhaki wa

ono ga tana tsuru

daiku kana

housecleaning day —

hanging a shelf at his own home

a carpenter

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Haiku from Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, p. 374.

Transcript

Haruo Shirane: Haikai meant that people got together, perhaps three people, four, five — it could be any number of people — and one person would compose the opening verse, referred to as hokku, and that was seventeen syllables. And that later became what is now called haiku, but in Bashō's time was referred to as hokku ("hokku" means opening verse). And then the second person would then add a verse — he would link to that hokku — and then that would be a fourteen-syllable verse. So we start out with seventeen, five-seven-five, that's seventeen. I would add fourteen, that's seven-seven. Then we would get another five-seven-five, [then] another seven-seven. So, seventeen, fourteen, seventeen, fourteen, et cetera.

Each verse simply requires that the next verse take some part of it. The two verses come together to form a new poem. And then the next verse creates yet another poem. So you're moving away from the previous poem by linking. You can only have two verses together form one poem, so you're constantly moving away and kind of jumping by leaps and bounds from one association to another.

This was a great hit among commoners, among the new urban popular audience, and this painting here shows commoners enjoying themselves underneath the cherry blossoms, drinking, eating, as they compose these verses.

[Excerpt from a haikai, "Beneath the Boughs"]

beneath the boughs

the soup with fish and vegetables

flecked with cherry petals

— Bashō

beneath the boughs

the soup with fish and vegetables

flecked with cherry petals

the sun goes gently to the west

extending the day's fine weather

— Chinseki

the sun goes gently to the west

extending the day's fine weather

the single traveler

walks on scratching where lice bit him

as spring comes to a close

— Kyokusui

the single traveler

walks on scratching where the biting lice

as spring comes to a close

not yet grown used to wearing

his sword in a protective case

— Bashō

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Excerpt from Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri, trans., The Monkey's Straw Raincoat And Other Poetry of the Bashō School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 82.

Transcript

Haruo Shirane: The opening verse, the hokku, has to have a seasonal word. Let's say it anchors that opening verse in a particular moment in time. So, if there's the word hototogisu, the cuckoo, it means that this is being composed in the summer.

hototogisu

ōtakeyabu wo

moru tsukiyo

a cuckoo —

through a vast bamboo forest

moonlight seeping

Robert Oxnam: Every haiku has two parts to it. It's divided in the middle by what's called a "cutting word." It's a structure that is designed to engage the reader, and it permits multiple interpretations to this potent poetic form.

kareeda ni

karasu no tomarikeri

aki no kure

on a bare branch

a crow has alighted

autumn evening

Haruo Shirane: The kigo, or seasonal word, is very obvious: it's the autumn. And there's a, what's called a kireji, or cutting word, in the middle, and it comes right after "has alighted," tomarikeri. So we have two parts to what's now called the haiku, but what was then called the hokku. "On a bare branch a crow has alighted," and then there's a break, and the second half is "autumn night fall" or "end of autumn."

Now, the important part about the cut, the kireji, which cuts the two parts of the haiku is that it leaves the poem open for the reader to complete. So, it's like the linked verse. You have one verse, the verse is basically unfinished. The next person has to complete that by adding a verse. The same thing happens within the bounds of the haiku, or the hokku. The two parts are sliced in half, and there's an open space which the reader, the audience, is supposed to enter into.

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First poem from Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, p. 314. Second poem from a translation by Haruo Shirane.

Transcript

Donald Keene: The haiku is so very short that often it is very difficult to understand what it means. Sometimes it's possible to get two different interpretations of the poem. This, to a poet, would not be a bad thing. To have more than one interpretation increases the richness of it, the possibility of stimulating the person who reads it.

Haruo Shirane: This is a very famous poem, "Akebono ya." Akebono ya means "early dawn":

akebono ya

shirauo shiroki

koto issun

in the twilight of dawn

a whitefish, with an inch

of whiteness

Haruo Shirane: You see the sun is just coming up. Shirauo is "little white fish." Shiroki koto, whiteness itself. Issun, just half an inch. And we have here akebono ya, "early dawn," and the ya is the cutting word, so that sets the scene. It's as if we draw a line, and we enter into the picture, and then what's characteristic of the haiku, it draws a big scene, a large vast scene — here it's dawn — and then it focuses in on a little detail, and that little detail is the little fish, and it says shirauo — and here, this is that one line, shi, coming all the way down here. And then shiroki koto, the whiteness of half an inch.

And part of the power of the haiku is this ability to focus in on a little detail in a large setting. Another aspect of it is temporal, in that it has the ability to kind of suggest a vast, long period of time, but also to catch that little moment when the light is flickering, when the frog is jumping into the pond.

And the fish is so small, it's translucent. It says "white," but white here means really translucent. So, it's the play off of the faint white light of early dawn and the transparency of the small fish, and it's up to the reader to bring those two together somehow. The poem never tells you what the relationship is between early dawn and implicitly the sun coming up. It doesn't even tell you about the sun, it says simply "early dawn." And the little fish, it doesn't tell you what the little fish is doing or where it is. That's all left to your imagination.

So each commentator says, some people say the fish are caught in a net, some commentators say the fish are lying on the sand. Some people say that he [Bashō] has come across the fish as he's walking. And all of those interpretations are legitimate, and they're part of the art of haiku — that it elicits different kinds of interpretations and also forces the reader to jump across. It's kind of like a lightning-rod effect. You jump between the two parts of the haiku, trying to bring them together. And it's only you who can do that.

People get together to compose haiku, to talk about it, and the haiku, because it has a seasonal word, is the snapshot. It commemorates that particular meeting you had.

The Japanese have been kind of satirized for carrying cameras around, but before the camera, it was the haiku. So you climbed the famous mountain and you composed the haiku. And that meant that you had been there. And you pulled out your diary and you read that poem and it reminded you that you were there or you could send that haiku to your friend to show that you had been there.

kirishigure

Fuji wo minu hi zo

omoshiroki

in the misty rain

Mount Fuji is veiled all day —

how intriguing!

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First poem from a translation by Haruo Shirane. Second poem from Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, p. 102.

Transcript

Haruo Shirane: What Bashō does is he takes this very popular form and raises it to new heights. And he's important in a number of respects: one, he becomes the embodiment of the Japanese tradition for subsequent generations. And this is for a number of reasons. One, because he draws on the medieval tradition, so he represents the medieval tradition in some sense. He comes from the Tokugawa period, and he's addressing the Tokugawa period audience and has commoner concerns, he's using the commoner language. And he's also refining the hokku, the opening verse, into what would become haiku, the most popular form in Japanese literature, in Japanese culture. And so he's looking forward to the modern period when haiku becomes the most important poetic form.