Haiku Hankerings

The joy of reading a book in classical Japanese is probably experienced by only a few Westerners.  There are probably many more who have had to struggle to read and dissect a work in classical Japanese for a dissertation or something, but I am talking about joy-- no strings attached, pure, unadulterated joy.  I have read several works in classical Japanese, just for the sake of reading them, to see what wisdom I could gleam from them.  I can say that they’ve all had a large impact on my life, so I will share several anecdotes about them...

Many of you reading this may have encountered classical Japanese (in translation) and didn't even know it. I first encountered a form of classical Japanese in the fifth grade of elementary school, when we studied haiku.  Haiku, for those of you who don’t remember the lesson, is a short poem of 5-7-5 syllables, and traditionally includes a word that indicates the season.  When I was given the homework to create my own haiku, I remember using the word butterfly, but over the years have lost the context.  However, the basics for writing haiku poems have stayed with me for decades.   

Over the years, and through college, I remember encountering other haiku-like poems, mostly by Ezra Pound.  It was all the rage back then, I guess, and it made me feel like I had been born in the wrong time.  I was sure I could write haiku if I really tried, but that was the key—I never really tried. That is, until I went to Japan. I went to Japan to investigate the possibility of going to graduate school, but ended up teaching English at private high schools for seven years. The first five years I lived and taught in the major industrial city of Nagoya, located in the central area of Japan. 

My interest in haiku blossomed under the tutelage of an engineer I met at the local bus stop in Nagoya while on my way to work one morning.  I had started teaching English, and had a commute that was about 20 minutes long.  I had seen him at the bus stop before—a white-haired Japanese man that, as it turns out, had been eyeing me for some time in hopes that he could practice his English on me. He worked at the factory that was located near the school where I taught, but his house was just beyond the bamboo grove across the street from where I lived.  One morning he saw his opportunity, sat next to me on the bus, and started asking questions, and that was how our friendship started.

Over time, we gradually came to know each others' interests.  It was he who introduced me to his friend when I told him I was interested in studying Buddhism, and that's how I ended up going to a temple near the center of Nagoya for Zen meditation on Friday nights when I had the chance.  When I began to study Buddhist texts, he helped me with some of the difficult words.  He was quite the intelligent man, and a poet, as I was to discover.

As my interest in Buddhism grew, so did my interest in Japanese literature.  I would spend my time after work or during the extended summer vacation reading.  I read most of the works of Natsume Soseki, an early twentieth century Japanese writer, and delved into some classical Japanese literature.  I finished reading “Hojoki” (An Account of My Hut, written in 1212) and progressed into another easy work, “Oku no Hosomichi” (Narrow Road to the Deep North, written in the later years of the 17th century after the famous haiku poet Matsuo Basho took a trip to Northern Japan in 1689) at the recommendation of my new friend.  We would go over the contents of what I was reading in his study.

 

My engineer friend talked to me about poetry, and encouraged me to give it a shot.  I didn’t believe I had the skill, so I fudged on the issue.  After we began to know each other a little more, he kept asking me if I wanted to go places with him on short day trips.  At first, I turned him down, only because my finances were pretty tight.  After I found a little more financial leeway, I finally accepted his invitation, and met him and his friends for a little excursion into the countryside.  As it turns out, he had an ulterior motive: he and his friends were all poets and had formed a ginko-kai, which is basically a group of people who have come together to create poetry based on their trips.

I eventually caved in and joined my friend on short trips to various places in Japan.  He would point out various phenomena and tell me the Japanese words for it, and I would later look up the words in the dictionary.  That is how I learned that Daphne bloomed near the path that I took to work, and that the Japanese called the sudden rain when the sun is shining “kitsune no yomeiri”, literally “a fox marriage”.  An early spring drizzle was “shigure”.  We visited various places, even made a trip to the birthplace of the man most famous for haiku, Matsuo Basho. 

My haiku teacher praised me for my sensitivity.  It was more likely pure luck, but even I liked some of the poems that I produced.  Some of the better ones were put into a magazine my friend published, so I have the right to say I am a published poet.  One of the first ones later proved to be the key to a great practical joke that I played on a Board of Education member in northern Japan, and I will get to that later.  Another early poem won first place at the monthly ginko-kai meeting, and that made me very proud.

My mother’s cookies                  How I want to eat them now!                   Golden autumn leaves

The Japanese original differs slightly than my English translation of the same poem.  In the Japanese version, the fall foliage of the tochi (Japanese horse-chestnut) tree is the centerpiece.  These leaves, as I learned the day I created the poem, are fairly long, and when they dry up, they turn yellow and curl into hollow cigar shapes.  When the other members of the poetry group were walking around the park, they stepped on the fallen leaves and made a crunching sound with every step.  With the aroma from a nearby bakery wafting through the chilly autumn air, and the being surrounded by crunching leaves, I was taken back to my hometown, and my mother’s homemade breads and chocolate chip cookies, and the daydream of those delectable delights brought me to the verge of drooling and a huge wave of ensuing homesickness brought forth the poem.  

(More on my haiku experience in future posts.)