Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  haru tachinagara with the coming of spring

  shito o shite stands pissing

  It was a convention of classical poetry that Sahohime, the beautiful goddess of spring, should stand in the midst of a spring mist, which became her robe. The added verse, which uses the vernacular phrase shito o su (to piss), parodies that classical convention by having the princess urinate while standing, as commoner women did in those days. The same homonym tatsu, which means both “to stand” and “to begin” (as in the coming of spring), applies to both socio-cultural worlds.

  MATSUNAGA TEITOKU AND THE TEIMON SCHOOL

  In the first half of the seventeenth century, haikai radically changed with the founding of the Teimon school by Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), a noted scholar, waka poet, and teacher of classical literature. Teitoku and his disciples wanted to maintain and encourage haikai as a popular art, one that would be accessible to a wide but not necessarily highly educated audience, and also to make it a respectable form and part of the larger poetic tradition. Their answer was to concentrate on using “haikai words,” which gave haikai its popular character, while rejecting or tempering the kind of ribald, irreverent humor and language found in earlier haikai, which they regarded as immoral and vulgar. The Teimon school continued the lexical play and parody that characterized earlier haikai but restricted the haikai words to Chinese words (kango) and acceptable vernacular Japanese, excluding vulgar and highly colloquial phrases. The New Mongrel Tsukuba Collection (Shinzō inu tsukuba shū, 1643), a haikai anthology edited by Teitoku, presented Teitoku’s response to the “robe of mist” poem cited earlier:

  kasumi no koromo A robe of mist

  suso wa nurekeri soaked at the hem

  tennin ya

  Heavenly creatures

  amakudaru rashi descending it seems—

  haru no umi the sea of spring

  Except for the haikai word tennin (heavenly creatures), a Chinese compound with no vulgar implications, the content is the same as that of an elegant verse in classical renga. The Puppy Collection (Enoko shū, 1633), edited by Teitoku’s disciples, contains the following hokku by Teitoku under the topic of New Year’s Day (ganjitsu):

  kasumi sae Even the spring mist

  madara ni tatsu ya rises in spots and patches—

  tora no toshi Year of the Tiger

  In this poem, Teitoku links “spring mist” (kasumi), a classical word, to “tiger” (tora), a haikai word, through two “pivot words” (which are used twice): madara ni (in spots and patches), associated with both mist and tiger, and tatsu (to stand, rise, begin), a verb for the tiger “getting up,” the mist “rising,” and the New Year (the seasonal topic) “beginning.” In Teimon fashion, the gap between the classical image (spring mist) and the contemporary vernacular is humorously bridged through puns and lexical associations.

  KITAMURA KIGIN

  Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705), a disciple of Matsunaga Teitoku and a prominent member of the Teimon school of haikai, was a noted poet, scholar, and commentator on such Heian classics as The Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. One of the important objectives of the Teimon school and of Kigin in particular was educating commoners in the poetic and literary tradition, specifically the poetic and literary associations of seasonal words, which were required in each hokku for linking by means of word association. In Essential Style for Haikai (Haikai yōi fūtei, 1673), Kigin wrote:

  In haikai, words are used to describe the ways of the present world, but that style must also be one with the poetry of the Kokinshū. Since haikai is a poetic art, the heart of the poet should enter into the way of classical poetry, admire the cherry blossoms, yearn for the moon, and establish the way of father and son, ruler and subject. It should not forget love between men and women. . . . If one does not read books of poetry like The Tale of Genji or The Pillow Book, if one does not soak one’s spirit in the ancient style, if one does not use that language in various ways, how can one know true haikai?

  THE MOUNTAIN WELL (YAMA NO I, 1648)

  The Mountain Well, a haikai manual written by Kigin in 1648, categorizes poetic words and topics by season, explains their poetic associations and use, and gives illustrative examples of haiku. Its elegant prose passages have also been considered an early form of haibun, or haikai prose. The Mountain Well, which was extensively used by later haikai poets, is the forerunner of kiyose or saijiki, poetic seasonal almanacs, which modern haiku poets still use to learn seasonal words and poetic associations. The following passage alludes to the various classical sources and legends related to the summer topic of the firefly, associated in the literary tradition with burning passion. It also demonstrates the method of haikai linking in which the participant uses a word from the previous verse as a link to a new verse. Here the writer moves from “firefly” to “Hyōbukyō” to “Itaru” to “buttocks of monkeys” to “fox fires,” as one would in haikai linked verse.

  Fireflies

  In composing haikai about fireflies, those that mingle among the wild pinks are said to share the feelings of Prince Hyōbukyō1 and the ones that jump at the lilies are said to be like the amorous Minamoto Itaru.2 The ones that fly on Mount Hiyoshi are compared to the red buttocks of monkeys,3 and the ones that glitter on Mount Inari are thought to be fox fires.4 Fireflies are also said to be the soul of China’s Baosi5 or the fire that shone in our country’s Tamamo no mae.6 Furthermore, poetry reveals the way in which the fireflies remain still on a moonlit night while wagging their rear ends in the darkness, or the way they light up the water’s edge as if camphor or moxa were in the river, or the way they look like stars—like the Pleiades or shooting stars.

  Kōyasan At Mount Kōya

  tani no hotaru mo Even the fireflies in the valley

  hijiri kana are holy men7

  [Kinsei haiku haikai bunshū, NKBZ 42: 455–464, translated by Haruo Shirane]

  NISHIYAMA SŌIN AND DANRIN HAIKAI

  Danrin haikai became popular in the 1670s, especially in the Enpō era (1673–1681), and dominated the haikai world after the decline of the Teimon school in the late 1660s. It used many of the techniques found in Teimon haikai: word association (engo), homophonic wordplay (kakekotoba), parody, and visual comparisons (mitate). However, for Nishiyama Sōin (1605–1682), the founder of Danrin haikai, haikai was not an intermediary stage for entering the world of classical poetry. Unlike the haikai of the Teimon school, which was based in Kyoto, the center of aristocratic culture, and evoked the classical tradition, Danrin haikai developed in Osaka, the new center of commerce, where a new society of increasingly wealthy and powerful urban commoners was creating its own culture. If Teitoku tried to impose order on linked verse, Sōin, who came from Osaka, stressed spontaneity and freedom of form and movement, linking verses without excessive concern for rules or precedent. Indicative of the Danrin’s iconoclastic character was the practice of using an excessive number of syllables (jiamari)—surpassing the formal limit of seventeen—usually adding to the last five syllables of the hokku. Instead of placing constraints on haikai’s language or avoiding the vulgarity of the Mongrel Tsukuba Collection, Danrin poets explored the myriad aspects of contemporary culture, including that of the pleasure quarters and the popular kabuki theater.

  Like the Teimon poets before them, the Danrin poets also parodied classical poetry and narratives like The Tales of Ise and well-known historical events, but they did this in a bolder and more dynamic fashion, not hesitating to concentrate on the popular or vulgar. Far less educated than their Teimon predecessors, the Danrin poets’ knowledge of the classics was extremely circumscribed, limited almost entirely to the famous classical poems in the Kokinshū and Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Old and New Poems, 1205); to well-known passages from nō plays, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji; or to some of the Chinese poetry by Bo Juyi (772–846) and others. Danrin poets used these classical fragments, along with yoriai (established lexical associations), to link verses, and it was these kinds of associatio
ns that helped Ihara Saikaku to engage in rapid solo sequences of immense length—the yakazu haikai, or “countless arrow,” haikai.

  Danrin poets deliberately heightened the tension between haikai words and classical diction, believing that the greater the collision was between the two languages, the greater the haikai effect would be. Teachings Collection (Indōshū, 1684), a Danrin haikai handbook edited by Saikoku (1647–1695), a merchant from Bungo (Kyushu) and a disciple of Saikaku, uses the following verse as an example of the Danrin method:

  mine no hana Making sea lions and whales

  no nami ni ashika swim in the cherry blossom waves

  kujira o oyogase at the hilltop

  This hokku links cherry blossoms—which were closely associated with waves and hilltops in classical poetry—with sea lions (ashika) and whales (kujira), two haikai words. The poem comically deconstructs a familiar classical convention, “the waves of cherry blossoms,” by using this figurative cliche in its original, literal meaning as the “waves of water” in which sea lions and whales swim. The resulting disjunction, in which two different socially inscribed languages inhabit the same word, produced not only haikai humor but what Itchū (1639–1711), a Danrin spokesman, referred to as gūgen (allegory), making possible what is not possible. Saikoku observed that it is easy to combine deer with mountain but that it takes ingenuity to make the sea lions and whales swim in the waves of flowers at the mountain peak.

  nagamu tote Gazing at

  hana ni mo itashi the cherry blossoms

  kubi no hone I hurt my neck bone

  Sōin here alludes to a noted Saigyō poem in the Shinkokinshū (1205; Spring 2, no. 126): “Thinking to gaze at them, I grew extremely close to the cherry blossoms, making the parting ever so painful” (nagamu to te hana ni mo itaku narenureba chiru wakare koso kanashikarikere). He then explodes the serious tone and content of the foundation poem: the classical word itashi (extremely) becomes the haikai vernacular word itashi (it hurts), and the sorrow of parting with the short-lived cherry blossoms is replaced by the neck pain resulting from gazing up at the cherry blossoms for too long.

  OKANISHI ICHŪ

  When Nishiyama Sōin published a hundred-verse sequence entitled Swarming Mosquitoes: One Hundred Verses (Kabashira hyakku, 1674), the Teimon school immediately criticized it in a work called Astringent Fan (Shibu-uchiwa), whose title suggests a fan to beat off the Danrin mosquitoes. Astringent Fan also takes to task Soin’s verses for “having lost the essence of poetry” and notes: “Isn’t haikai after all a form of waka? Poetry is a way to assist government and to edify people.” It fell to Okanishi Ichū (1637–1711), a disciple of Sōin and the leading Danrin theoretician, to defend the Danrin’s position.

  HAIKAI PRIMER (HAIKAI MŌGYŪ, 1675)

  In the passage from Haikai Primer translated here, Ichū argues that the wild humor, the unrestrained expression of imagination and spirit, and the relativity of perspective found in the Zhuangzi represent the essence of haikai.

  The essence of the Zhuangzi is completely embodied in haikai. Lin Xiyi writes in his notes on the “Carefree Wandering” chapter of the Zhuangzi: “Most readers don’t understand the place where the author intends to be humorous; it is a technique that people today call disconnected speech.”8 Lin also writes in his notes: “When reading the Zhuangzi, one finds that the essence of the text lies in allegory [gūgen].”

  The spirit of the Zhuangzi can, for example, be seen in the passage “In the Northern Depth there is a fish called Kun. The fish is so huge that no one knows how many thousand li it measures. The fish changes and becomes a bird called Peng. No one knows how many thousand li the back of the bird measures. When the sea begins to move, Peng sets off for the Southern Depth from the north. Its wings beat the water for three thousand li, and riding on the wind, the bird rises up ninety thousand li.”9 Here is the heavenly wandering of mind, the ultimate freedom of change and spontaneity. In the same way, today’s haikai should free itself from the narrow mind and leap into the vastness of heaven and earth. It should mix things that exist with those that do not and be unrestricted in its methods and styles. That is the truth of haikai. We should maintain this spirit when composing verses on mountain travel, outings in the fields, cherry blossom viewing, and appreciating the autumn leaves. Isn’t this the carefree wandering of haikai? Let us take the great length of the five mountains of Mount Tai that extend over Qi and Lu and make it tiny, and let us make the tip of an autumn hair huge. Let us take the short life of a child who died at three months and make it long, and let us make the seven hundred years of Pengzu’s life a passing moment.10 Such mixing of big and small, of the eternal and the ephemeral, the making of fabrication truth and of truth fabrication, the taking of right as wrong and of wrong as right—these not only are the allegories found in Zhuangzi but also the very nature of haikai.

  [Koten haibungaku taikei 4: 83, 98, translated by Peipei Qiu]

  ________________________

  1. This passage alludes to the “Fireflies” chapter in The Tale of Genji, in which Prince Hyōbukyō, the brother of the Shining Genji, catches a glimpse of the young Tamakazura in the light of the fireflies that Genji released behind her screen, causing Prince Hyōbukyō to immediately fall in love with her. The wild pinks (tokonatsu) refer to Tamakazura.

  2. This passage refers to episode 39 in the Heian-period Tales of Ise in which Minamoto Itaru peers into a woman’s carriage with the aid of light from fireflies.

  3. Mount Hiyoshi, also known as Mount Hiei, is a mountain in Ōmi (Shiga) Province, behind Hiyoshi Shrine. The messenger to the god of Hiyoshi Shrine is the monkey.

  4. Inari Shrine is at the western foot of Mount Inari, north of Fushimi in Kyoto. The word “foxfire” (kitsunebi), which originally referred to the fire that was thought to come from the mouth of a fox, refers to strange fires or lights that appear in the hills and fields at night. Inari Shrine was associated with both foxes and foxfire.

  5. Baosi (J. Hōji) was the beloved daughter of Emperor You (J. Yūō) of Zhou. According to the Kagakushū, a Muromachi-period dictionary, after Baosi died, he became Japan’s Tamamo no mae.

  6. Tamamo no mae was a nine-tailed golden fox that bewitched the cloistered emperor Toba by disguising itself as a beautiful woman. The emperor loved Tamamo no mae, but the light that shone from her pained him, and he had to call on Miura no suke Yoshiaki to exorcise her. Tamamo no mae, according to legend, was turned into the rock Sesshōseki (“The rock that kills”) in Nasuno in Shimotsuke Province.

  7. Kōyasan, in Wakayama Prefecture, is the headquarters of the Buddhist Shingon sect. The hokku plays on the word hijiri, which means both “holy men” and “fire buttock” (lower part of a hearth), implying homosexuality, which was not uncommon among priests in the medieval period. Hijiri, hotaru, and Kōya are tsukeai, or associated words used for verse linking.

  8. Lin Xiyi was a scholar and official of Song China. His dates of birth and death are unknown. His commentary on the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi Juanzhai kouyi (1253), was reprinted in Japan during the seventeenth century and was widely read by the haikai poets.

  9. Ichū’s quotation seems to be an altered version of the original. For an English translation of the original, see Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 29.

  10. These two sentences allude to specific passages in Zhuangzi: “There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount Tai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and Pengzu died young.” (Watson, Complete Works of Chuang tzu, p. 43). As Watson notes, the strands of animal fur were believed to grow particularly fine in autumn; hence “the tip of an autumn hair” is a metaphor for something extremely tiny.

  Chapter 5

  THE POETRY AND PROSE OF MATSUO BASHŌ

  Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) was born in the castle town of Ueno, in Iga Province (Mie), approximately thirty miles southeast of Kyoto. Although Bashō’s grand-father and great-gr
andfather had belonged to the samurai class, for reasons that are unclear, they were disenfranchised. By Bashō’s generation, the family had fallen so low that they had become farmers with only tenuous ties to the samurai class. Bashō at first served as a domestic employee of the Tōdō house, presumably as a companion to Toshitada (better known by his haikai name, Sengin), the son of the Tōdō lord. During this time, Bashō adopted the haikai name Munefusa, or Sōbō, and became a devotee of the Teimon style of haikai, the school led by Matsunaga Teitoku. In 1666, Sengin died prematurely, at the age of twenty-five, apparently forcing Bashō to leave the Tōdō house and severing his last connection with the samurai class.

  In the spring of 1672, at the age of twenty-eight, Bashō moved to Edo to establish himself as a haikai master who could charge fees for his services. There he came under the influence of Nishiyama Sōin, with whom he composed poetry in 1675. By the mid-1670s, Bashō had attracted the nucleus of his disciples and patrons—notably Kikaku, Ransetsu, Sanpū, and Ranran—who played a major role in the formation of what later came to be known as the Bashō circle (Shōmon). In the winter of 1680, at the age of thirty-six, Bashō left Edo and retreated to Fukagawa, on the banks of the Sumida River. By moving to the outskirts of Edo, Bashō also left behind the urban haikai, which by then had become highly commercialized. During the next four years, he wrote in the so-called Chinese style, creating the persona of the recluse poet who was opposed to the materialism and social ambitions of the new urban culture. One of Basho’s literary achievements was fusing the earlier recluse poet tradition established by waka and kanshi poets like Saigyō, Sōgi, and Ishikawa Jōzan with the new commoner genre of haikai and haibun (haikai prose). He took his poetic name from the bashō plant, or Japanese plantain, whose large leaves sometimes tear in the wind, thus representing the fragility of the hermit-traveler’s life.