LaSpina.org – By David LaSpina

Friday, 14 March 2025

Old Poets and School Reading

I was reading something today and a very old and famous poem from Narihisa showed up. His old poem also brought this haiku about him to mind.

業平の歌よりはじむ夏期講座
narihira no uta yori hajimu kaki kōza[1]

summer classes
begin with a poem
by Narihira
—Ozawa Katsumi[2]

Narihira watching the birds on the Sumida River by Hiroshige

I think we all remember that feeling of dread in high school upon learning we’d be studying some old, archaic poem in English class. It’s likely that many students in Japan can relate to this feeling.

The name mentioned in the haiku is Arihara no Narihira (在原業平), one of the most famous poets in Japanese history. Narihira is considered one of the Six Poetic Geniuses, is featured in the Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首), a very famous collection of poems, as well as having many poems featured in other imperial anthologies. All the kind of stuff that makes him required reading in school.

But it’s not all boring. Besides poetry, Narihira is renowned for his many love affairs. It is said he had an affair with the high priestess of Ise Grand Shrine, as well as famed poetess Ono no Komachi, and with the emperor’s consort, Fujiwara no Takaiko, an act that caused a big scandal and got him in so much trouble that he fled east for a time. The Tales of Ise, a collection of poems and stories which he inspired, suggests that he fathered Emperor Yōzai. To this day, he still appears in media as the model handsome, amorous nobleman.

He died in 880 at the age of 54/55, and his death poem reflects his shock at his sudden end.

つひにゆく道とはかねて聞きしかど昨日今日とは思はざりしを
tsui ni yuku michi to wa kanete kikishikado
kinō kyō to wa omouwazarishi wo

although I had
heard of the road
we all must travel in the end—
yet I never thought
it would come for me so soon

Looking for the ghost of Ono no Komachi by Yoshitoshi

Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Split Attention in Parenthood

The things they don’t tell you about being a parent…

they call to me:
“papa, look here”
“no, papa, look here”

When you first become a parent one thing you quickly learn is that it can be exhausting playing with your child. Don’t get me wrong, playing with your kid is one of the most wonderful parts of parenthood—seeing the joy on their faces as they do simple things, hearing their laugh, feeling their excitement and energy—but it can also be exhausting, because they never stop and want to keep playing long after your energy is gone. Not to mention sometimes in today’s world we have to do remote work from home, and kids don’t really understand that boundary very well and will continue to request play no matter how much you might say you need to work.

That in mind, when a second child comes along, you may harbor a fantasy that the kids will play with each other and give you some free time to do your own thing once in a while or just relax. While it is true that they will play together sometimes, which is great, too often it is closer to each kid trying to get your attention and then becoming angry when you give your attention to the other one. In other words, it becomes not only exhausting but tricky.[1]

Now—don’t be fooled by my complaint. Having kids is amazing and I enjoy almost every minute of it. But, well, sometimes it can be frustrating. One of those frustrating times inspired the above haiku.

At least this is my experience right now when they are still fairly young. I have some hope it might lesson when they get older. ↩

Friday, 28 February 2025

A Spring Day ~ Issa and Bashō

On a spring day, 200 or so years ago.

有明や鶯が鳴く綸が鳴る
ariake ya uguisu ga naku rin ga naru [1]

dawn!
a bush warbler sings
an altar bell rings
—Issa[2]

The altar bell he is talking about is a small Buddhist bell, called rin (磬/鈴) in Japanese, often found as part of a home altar or temple. In the West we wouldn’t call it a bell at all, but rather a singing bowl, the kind that is seating on a tiny cushion and is struck and allowed to sound until the vibration runs out. Bell is the more direct translation, but using the Western name might help you picture the scene better.

With that in mind, an alternative translation might read:

dawn!
a bush warbler cries out
a singing bowl rings

I would change “bush warbler sings” to “cries out” to avoid repeating that word twice; while it does kind of sound ok leaving it as “sings”, it’s a little too “Dr Seuss” to my ears.

Anyway, Issa is giving us a nice picturesque scene here. This is a scene you can easily picture at the beginning of a movie or TV show to set the scene. Beyond the nice image, there is a repeating theme of beginnings. The day begins, spring begins—signified by the bush warbler’s cry, a sound that everyone in Japan associates with the coming of spring—and a Buddhist ritual of some sort also begins.

Like I said, it’s a nice scene. But, a little too nice. While this kind of neat and tidy layered theme is cute, it does somewhat go against the classical idea of haiku. Bashō would not have approved. He would have only directly stated one of those “beginnings”, replaced one of the others with something unexpected or ambiguous, and indirectly hinted at the other (if not dropping it entirely).

Does that make it a bad haiku? Judging it by Bashō’s standard, yes, but Issa often was a bit more direct and he also maintained a childlike clarity that gave rise to more straightforward style.

That’s why I share this haiku. I like both styles. Though I often lean toward Bashō’s more Zen-like style, I sometimes appreciate Issa’s playfulness and find myself drawn in that direction in my own haiku writing. Hmm… like I said, I like both styles. It is a nice scene—a good, though not a great haiku—but it also is a great example of how two of the people considered the greatest haiku masters in history differed.

If Bashō sought “the beauty of what is left unsaid,” Issa often found charm in “the beauty of saying it anyway.”

Saturday, 22 February 2025

Winter Remains

Written a few nights ago…

静かな夜残る寒さやまだここに
shizuka na yoru nokoru samusa ya mada koko ni[1]

quiet outside
and cold; winter is still
here

I wrote this on a relatively chilly night a few days ago. I know winter is still hanging on in the eastern half of the US,[2] but here in Japan I was thinking it was over or almost over. The ume blossoms are beginning to bloom, their delicate petals appearing here and there, and their wonderful fragrance filling the air. Traditionally, this signals that spring is near.

But wouldn’t you know it? A cold wave hit, and suddenly… it was cold again. This is also not entirely unusual and isn’t unexpected, but it is always a bit disappointing when it comes. On spring or near-spring days that start warm, you can almost expect that by noon, the first wind of spring—haru ichiba—will arrive, bringing back the cold by evening.

So as I sat there at my kotatsu, a low heated table, this haiku came to mind and I wrote it down.

I would normally remove the “and cold” from the beginning of the second line. The information seems redundant given that the very next word is “winter” and that suggests cold. One personal rule of haiku I like to adhere to is not to use words where none are needed. But at the same time, as I reread it “winter is still here” doesn’t seem to me to necessarily suggest cold in this case given the first line, so I think it works better specifying “and cold”.

In Japanese, there are many kigo (season words) for the idea of “winter is still here”. Initially, I considered using 余寒 (yokan), which means “lingering cold” or “the cold remains.” However, when translating the haiku, I felt that yokan didn’t quite fit the nuance I wanted. Instead, I chose 残る寒さ (nokoru samusa), which conveys a similar but subtly different feeling of lingering winter chill.

As always, I feel like my Japanese translation is both shorter and more concise. Is that an improvement? You’d have to ask a Japanese speaker. Since Japanese words tend to be longer, haiku in Japanese often feel much shorter than in English even when following the 5/7/5 structure. In English I don’t feel like syllable count is necessary (in part because 5/7/5 feels too long in English[3]), but in Japanese I often try to stick close to it.

See: Pronunciation of Japanese ↩
As my friends and family keep telling me. ↩
I have a lot to say on this subject, but this article might give an idea. That’s my piece, but I haven’t republished it on this site yet. ↩

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

Must…Finish…Writing…

Last night before going to bed, I wrote

目が重いでも終わらせるこの俳句
me ga omoi demo owaraseru kono haiku[1]

eyes heavy
but I must finish
this haiku

As I’ve written before, I try to make myself write at least one haiku everyday. I don’t really think most of them are very good, but I write anyway. That’s not me being modest, just realistic. Even the best baseball players rarely hit much above .300 (that’s a 30% hit rate for the baseball illiterate). To continue the baseball metaphor, I don’t take so many swings because I’m expecting to hit them all, I mostly just want to stay in the habit—and I enjoy writing them too.

The other night I was tired and ready for bed. It had been a long day. But then I realized I hadn’t yet written any haiku for that day. So I pulled out a notecard and … sat thinking. And thinking. And thinking. I might have nodded off a few times in there.

Then, it came to me, and I wrote down the above. And almost immediately went into the bedroom and fell asleep.

A little meta, perhaps, and playfully, but some haiku are both those things. Issa, who is generally considered the one of the greatest haikuists of all time, wrote some 20,000+ haiku in his life—which works out to several every single day of his adult years—and many of them were meta too, so I’m in good company.

See: Pronunciation of Japanese ↩

There is more in the archives