Haiku, Japan, and the misunderstood
I’m a few days late on this. I watched the game, but hadn’t gotten around to posting.
To be fair, the Yankees lost game 5 more than the Dodgers won. They made a series of blunders. The Dodgers, however, were able to take advantage and come from behind to win 7–6.
Ohtani gets his first World Series title![1]
LINK: Dodgers upend Yanks with historic comeback for 8th World Series title
First of many? ↩
In a preëlectric world, moonlight served as both lamp and guide, illuminating our paths. Bashō wrote:
月ぞしるべこなたへ入らせ旅の宿
tsuki zo shirube konata e irase tabi no yado[1]
the moon’s is your guide:
please come this way
a traveler’s inn
—Bashō[2]
This was one of the first haiku Bashō ever published, written when he was only 21. At this time, the popular style for renga, of which haiku—called hokku at the time—was the first verse, was to make clever allusions to poems and songs from the past. Bashō was very good at this. He discarded it later in life as he attempted to find the true essence of haiku, but when he was young he was quite the master at doing it.
The reference here is to a Noh play called “Tengu on Mount Kurama” (鞍馬天狗, kurama tengu) where cherry blossoms instead of the moon are a guide. This kind of fun allusion is why the popular style of renga at the time was called haikai no renga—“comic renga”—often shortened to simply haikai.
To go off on a tangent, the tengu in that Noh play is Sōjōbō (僧正坊) the king of the tengu.[3] It was said he had the strength of 1000 normal tengu. Sōjōbō is best known for (supposedly) teaching Minamoto no Yoshitsune the art of swordsmanship and strategy, tips that Yoshitsune would use well when he led the Minamoto forces to win over the Taira in their war for control of Japan way back in 1180–1185. But that is a story for another time.
Anyway, moon (tsuki) is an autumn season word, making this an autumn poem.
On an autumn night not so long ago, a frustrated author wrote:
かいもなき眠り薬や夜半の秋
kai mo naki nemurigusuri ya yowa no aki[1]
I take the pills,
yet they bring no sleep—
autumn midnight
—Ryunosuke Akutagawa[2]
If you know Japanese or World literature, you may know the name Ryunosuke Akutagawa. He was famous in the Taishō Era (1912–1926), perhaps most so for Rashōmon, which was made much more well-known outside of Japan in 1950 when the Kurosawa film of the same name was released. The film made Toshiro Mifune an international star and is today considered one of the greatest films ever made. The film actually borrows more from another Akutagawa short story, called In a Bamboo Grove.
Akutagawa’s brilliant career was cut short in 1927 when he committed suicide by overdosing on Veronal, a sleeping drug. He had long been suffering hallucinations and anxiety, and his mother also had a mental disorder, so his suicide didn’t come out of nowhere. At any rate, it does give this haiku from him a darker overturn.
There is a feeling of frustration in this haiku, but it is more towards weary disappointment instead of anger. Anyone who has suffered from insomnia can probably understand this feeling as they lie awake hoping against hope that the drug will finally bring a long-awaited rest. …but the minutes tick by and sleep doesn’t come.
The frustration is amplified by the kigo (season word) yowa no aki, “autumn midnight”. Autumn nights are filled with the singing of insects; this is normally a welcome sound in Japan, but for someone chasing sleep, those same noises can easily shift from soothing to irritating. Autumn is also the time when we can easily notice how the nights are getting longer. This too leads to a feeling of isolation in this haiku.
In my translation above I tried to capture the weariness at the pills not working, but a slightly more literal translation would be something like this:
they bring me no rest
these worthless sleeping pills—
autumn midnight
I leave it to you to pick the one you prefer.
Somehow I missed this when it happened three weeks ago. At the Miyazaki airport, a 250kg (500lb) bomb from WWII suddenly exploded, leaving a 7m (23ft) wide and 1m (3.2ft) deep crater in the middle of a taxiway, with asphalt fragments were scattered over a radius of 200m (656ft). No one was hurt, but it is a little alarming that just minutes before it exploded a plane with 93 people on it had passed over that exact spot.
It is kind of mind-blowing that 79 years after the end of the war, not only do bombs remain but that at least some as proven by this case evidently still remain active.
LINK: Buried Second World War Bomb Explodes at Japanese Airport
Speaking of the Dodgers. Their Japanese superstar, Shohei Ohtani, recently entered the 50–50 club. More correctly, he founded the 50–50 club, as it didn’t exist before he broke the record and he is currently the only member. This is for 50 steals and 50 home runs, an accomplishment never before reached in professional baseball, and not likely to be reached again for a long time. He actually finished the regular season pretty close to 60–60, with 54 homers and 59 stolen bases.
Anyway, the home run ball that pushed him into the club, home run #50, has just sold for 4.39 million dollars. The previous record was 3 million dollars for Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball in 1998.
Amazing that anyone would pay so much for a baseball.
LINK: Ohtani’s 50-50 Ball Sells at Auction for 4.39 M. Dollars