Read the Original here

 

 

 

kera naku ya/kyoshi onore ni/kaeru jikan

a mole cricket's song...
it's time for a teacher to
return to himself

It is rather surprising that Shuson does not seem to have written that many haiku on school scenes or being a teacher. This haiku is one of a few exceptions I could find, and a very intriguing one at that.

A mole cricket itself is a summer kigo season word, but its singing is an autumn kigo like all other crickets' songs. In English, they are all "crickets," but in Japan, there are many varieties, each given different names, many of which are highly literary, such as "bell," "grass skylark" or "wind through pines."

Listening to them and enjoying their songs has long been an elegant hobby of the Japanese since the Heian period (794-1185). The word "songs" itself is too literary because crickets do not sing. They rub their wings together and the friction creates a kind of singing noise.

A mole cricket lives in the ground during the daytime and emerges and flies about at night. Is this what Shuson is talking about? If so, he could not have thought too highly of the teaching profession he had chosen.

zeiri ase-shi/kyoshi kane nashi/warai au

taxman sweating,
me, a teacher, with no money,
we laugh together

This is another example of the rare haiku on his being a teacher. Even with the summer kigo--sweating--this verges on senryu. Western poets seem to be obsessively and endlessly interested in arguing about the differences between haiku and senryu and to take immeasurable pleasure when they find a poem that it is impossible for anyone to categorize. Apart from scholastic or refined points made on very rare occasions about it, nothing is more boring and meaningless than this argument.

The main characteristics of haiku or senryu are the most important essentials we should focus on. The borderline cases are really neither here nor there, except for one thing--whether or not they are good poems. They can be haiku or senryu and it doesn't matter which at all. And there, it is up to the author to name them one way or the other. In this example, the sense of humor is mixed with pathos of a worthy profession of meagre income that is nevertheless hunted down by the taxman. Shuson must have had at least mixed feelings about his occupation.

shizuka naru/chikara michi-yuki/batta tobu

silent strength
swelling and swelling, and then
the grasshopper jumps

Shuson's power of observation in this haiku should indeed be praised, but more importantly it is the quality of his sense of humor that needs special mention. Everybody knows that grasshoppers look stationary or even frozen. But then they jump at an unexpected moment. That is why children like to poke at them to force them jump.

To see some inner power building up quietly before they jump is quite astonishing. What about fleas--another excellent jumping species? Shuson must have been amused by the behavior of the grasshopper. The whole picture of the author with the insect exudes a refined sense of humor, which is an essence of haiku and by extension an essence of Japanese sensibility.

chindon-ya/kareno to iedo/ashi odoru

a ragtag band
even in the withered field,
their steps still dancing

We used to see a lot of them in Japan just after the end of World War II, clad like clowns with drums, bugles and noisy bells, dancing in a comic way. They were figures from the bygone days of a Japan still struggling for reconstruction after the devastation of defeat. I was one of the children following them merrily and innocently in the street.

However, I did stop sometimes and wonder if there would ever be a day when they would disappear from the community along with such people as sandwich men or supposed war veterans in white uniforms, playing accordions and begging on crutches with a fake amputated leg.

There were also not a few men and women out in the street who had gone mad from shell shock or the trauma of bombing raids, but most of them seemed harmless. One of them continually repeated all day long, "The Great Imperial Japan has entered into the state of war against the United States and Great Britain." Such was the climate of the day.

Shuson was a middle-aged man. It is interesting to conjecture what was going on in his mind when he wrote this haiku. To find out, let us see some of his haiku on war:

genbaku-zu chu/kuchi aku ware mo/kuchi aku kan

atomic bomb illustration:
victims' mouths wide open, my mouth, too,
wide open, severe cold

Shuson must have visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in winter. When I went there some years ago, an exhibition was being held of watercolor paintings by atomic bomb survivors who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the explosion and who were now invited to paint whatever they could remember seeing. This column is not the place to relate what I felt seeing all these incredible eyewitness accounts in painted form, but I can feel very deeply what was going through Shuson's mind when he wrote this haiku.

hi no oku ni/botan kuzururu/sama wo mitsu

through the fire
I gaze at the way peonies
collapse

There is a long maegaki (foreword) for this haiku. It talks about the large-formation air raids during the night of May 23, 1945. Shuson had just come back home after helping his mother evacuate to Kanazawa. As his house was burned to ashes, he had to get his younger brother from the sickbed and carry him around all night long while searching for other missing family members.

It is tempting to think that even when his house was burning down the poet Shuson took time to watch the beautiful flowers being destroyed. However, that would be too good to be true. In reality, he must have been panic-stricken and in the depths of despair.

What is great about this man is that afterward, when he had precious time to reflect on what had happened, he could still summon his poetic courage and jot down the rare moment when he chanced to see the burning peonies in the shape of haiku.

wagaya naki/tsuyu no daichi zo/yoko-tawaru

my house gone,
only the ground lies there
with dew drops

One of the most powerful of his haiku, this poem more or less represents the feelings of the entire defeated nation. It would be unimaginable from the present generation of prosperous Japan. What has not changed is the phenomena of nature such as dew drops. And yet dew is a word that has long been used in Japanese literature to mean this world we live in and this life we lead, which, like morning dew that disappears all too soon, is short, transitory, evanescent and ephemeral. Our life is also called kari no yo, or a provisional world or a mock world.

What is ultimately left in this haiku is the ground, and therein lies the possibility of all our hopes. No green grass, it was firmly believed, would ever shoot again on the ground of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Now, this city is one of the greenest in Japan.

ue semaru/hi mo kagiri naki/kien kana

endless days
of our hunger pangs...
leaving swallows

Swallows migrate south in autumn. Although they do it for their own reasons, it looks to us humans as if they are abandoning us, adding to the melancholy of autumn. This feeling must have been especially stronger for Shuson and millions of the Japanese after the war who were suffering from a lack of the very minimum necessities of human survival. Shuson may have envied the migrating birds as they at least had somewhere else to find food and the means to get there.

* * *

(Dec. 21, 2006)