It’s Obon, Japan’s ghost festival. Around 100 years ago on another Obon, Santōka wrote:
うちのようなよそのようなお盆の月夜 uchi no yōna yoso no yōna obon no tsukiyo[1]
similar here as elsewhere
a moonlit Obon night
—Santōka[2]
Bon Odori, by Takahashi Hiroaki
Obon is a three day festival in Japan when the dead ancestors of a family come back to visit. It is a time for celebration and there are many festival events for the entire period, culminating in a large community dance, called bon odori. It’s a fun event, not entirely dissimilar from Mexico’s Day of the Dead
There is a unique feeling in the air during Obon nights. The boundaries between this world and the next feel blurred and the night air has a certain feeling that enhances this mysterious time.
Santōka was writing this haiku from his hermitage. He might have been being simply matter-of-factly pointing out that the Obon moon was the same for him alone at his hermitage as for all the people doing bon odori at the shrine. Given the festival, he might have also been commenting about this world (here) and the next (elsewhere). You decide!
Summer is over? Or is it? The calendar and our senses disagree.
is summer ending?
the heat says otherwise
but autumn has started
—David LaSpina
夏や果まだ熱いが秋初め natsu ya hate mada atsui ga aki hajime[1]
Rishū (beginning of autumn) by Nishijima Katsuyuki
By the Japanese almanac, autumn started two days ago, on the eighth, was the start of Risshū (立秋), the first microseason of Autumn. Historically, even back in the days before global warming, August 8th was still hot, yet it was considered the turning point: past the peak of the heat when gradual signs of the true autumn will daily start to appear. In otherwords, it’s all downhill from here.
Well, that was the idea way back when, anyway. I’m not sure if it still holds very well these days, when the temperature of summer has swelled up much higher than it once was and seems to linger on far longer. Last year it was still pretty hot even into December, and this year is shaping up to be much the same.
Reflecting on this dissonance inspired the above haiku. After I wrote it, it reminded me very much of a similar haiku from Bashō, which probably means mine was subconsciously influenced by his. His was written on a day long ago when the solar-based Japanese almanac didn’t quite line up with the lunar year; according to the almanac, spring had started, but according to the moon, New Years was still two days away. He found the situation amusing because the image is that the first day of the year was the first day of spring, so he wrote the following:
春や来し年や行きけん小晦日 haru ya koshi toshi ya yukiken kotsugomori
is spring here?
is the year over already?
second-to-last-day
It goes without saying that in Bashō’s day everyone would have been aware of the Japanese almanac and would have gotten his little joke, whereas most of my readers probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Hmm… I suppose there is humor in that situation too!
Unfortunately I have long suffered from headaches. My mom has had daily headaches since she was a little girl, so I blame her genes. I don’t get them as often as her, thankfully, but they do come once every few weeks, or when I’m lucky, every few months; when they do they knock me out for awhile. Sometimes they morph into migraines, in which case they knock me out for an even longer while. Despite tracking food I consume over the years, I’ve never been able to figure out a trigger, so I live with them.
The other day I woke up around 2:30 am with a headache. In my misery, I wrote the following.
robbed of sleep
a gift from
my family tree
Headache by Takehisa Yumeji
Sometimes I can ignore the headaches enough to fall back asleep, but not this one: this one was bad enough to wake me up and keep me up. I tried to deal with it for awhile, but eventually I resorted to a painkiller. Those aren’t good for my body, I know, but when faced with a head screaming in agony, I sometimes just don’t have the mental fortitude to withstand the pain. Often the painkiller doesn’t work very well. A lifetime of taking them has built up my tolerance and made my body fairly resistant I suppose, but this time it was magic. Unfortunately painkillers in Japan almost always have caffeine in them, even when it isn’t listed on the bottle, so even though I was now pain-free, I couldn’t get back to bed. Oh well. I laid there for awhile, letting my mind drift to where it would. I figured even if I wasn’t asleep, I was resting in a sense so maybe would be able to avoid some of the tiredness of the day.
But before I knew it, it was 5am and I needed to start getting ready for my day. Oh well.
After publishing this, a reader with a similar reoccurring headache suggested allergies might be a cause and she shared what helped reduce them for her. So maybe I got more from this ordeal than then the haiku! ↩
The other day I was on a walk with my son and he seemed to find a neverending supply of sticks and twigs on the ground. He’s pick one up, use it as a play sword for a few blocks, then discard it for the next. This isn’t an uncommon thing. He seems to constantly find them.
Anyway, the other day I was reading a book about Hōsai and came across this haiku of his and immediately recalled my son finding so many sticks. Let’s look at it.
dead branches
it’s pleasing to
snap them
—Hōsai[2]
ChatGPT’s interpretation of the original haiku + my translation and this post
As usual for Hōsai, this is a very short haiku, shunning the traditional form for a free verse interpretation. I’d almost say it works better as two lines in English, but I’ll go with three just out of convention. The middle of the haiku hoki hoki is just an onomatopoeia (a sound effect word), so literally we have snap snap, making it more literally something like:
dead branches snap snap
good to break
That might actually work better than what I wrote at the top. Hmm… what do you think?
“Dead Branches” is a kigo (season word) for winter, but since Hōsai rarely used season words, we are left to wonder if the setting here indeed is winter or if he just wanted a scene with dead branches. There are many dead branches to be found at other times of the year, after all. The kigo typically refers to dead branches that are still in the tree, anyway, whereas in Hōsai’s poem I get the feeling they are on the ground.
What we might be slightly more certain of is that it is likely a subtle nod to Bashō and one of his most famous haiku:
枯朶に烏のとまりけり秋の暮 kare-eda ni karasu no tomari keri aki no kure
on a withered branch
sits a crow—
autumn nightfall
—Bashō[3]
That one is often considered the first really great haiku Bashō ever penned and the one to elevate him to the most famous haiku poet in the country. It is so famous that any mention of kare-eda in haiku immediately brings it to mind. As a student of the genre, Hōsai absolutely would have been aware of this, making his choice of words purposeful.
Hōsai’s haiku poems very often featured a starkness or emptiness and sense of depression, echoing his own depression, so the setting here also fits well with his normal theme. At the same time, the dead branches setting also evokes the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, embracing the beauty of the impermanent.
It is hot this year, already. So hot that tempers are rising. But as proof that there is really nothing new about this, let’s turn back the clock to around 130 years ago and this haiku which would have been written around then.
銭湯に客のいさかふ暑かな sentō ni kyaku no isakau atsusa kana[1]
in the bathhouse
the customers argue
ah, the heat!
—Sōseki[2]
Interior of a Public Bath by Ochiai Yoshiiku
The bathhouse is still a fairly common feature of Japanese life, but it was even more so back in the day when few people had a bathtub in their house. It was a place to clean, of course, but also one to socialize. The heat mentioned in the last line wouldn’t be the heat of the bath water, but the heat of summer. Maybe that summer heat had something to do with the argument between customers.
When we think of Sōseki, we usually don’t think of haiku. He was one of the most famous novelists of modern Japan, often likened to Dickens. He wrote some several thousand haiku in his life however. He was mentored in haiku by Shiki, whom I’ve written about many times here. Shiki was from Matsuyama, but came up to Tokyo for school and met Sōseki there. They became friends. Later when Sōseki began his teaching career, he was coincidentally sent to Matsuyama.[3] Shiki returned to his hometown the same year and it was there that their friendship deepened and Shiki began to train Sōseki in haiku.
Due to the influence of his teacher, Sōseki’s haiku are all very vivid, visual, and
picturesque, reflecting Shiki’s reformist shasei style (“sketching from life”) instead of the more traditional introspective and abstract style, such as we see with Bashō. We can definitely see this in the above haiku.
He would write about his experiences teaching in Matsuyama in one of his most famous novels, Botchan. A fantastic book. If you read it, I recommend the J Cohn translation. ↩
