LaSpina.org - By David LaSpina

Saturday, 27 July 2024

Broken Sticks and Dead Branches

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.

枯枝ほきほき折るによし
kare-eda hoki hoki oru ni yoshi [1]

dead branches
it’s pleasing to
snap them
—Hōsai[2]

ChatGPTs interpretation of the original haiku + my translation and this post — 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.

All in all, an interesting poem from Hōsai!

Thursday, 11 July 2024

Temperatures Rising at the Bathhouse

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.

See: Pronunciation of Japanese ↩
See: a note on translations ↩
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. ↩

Saturday, 6 July 2024

Smells, Memories, and Haiku

Memory is the strangest thing sometimes. Here is a haiku I wrote the other day.

as I leave the building
a smell drifts by—suddenly I’m six again
the memories
—David LaSpina

I’ve often heard it said that smell is our most powerful sense. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly seems to be the one most connected with our memories, and a random smell can trigger a memory instantly and better than anything else. It’s funny—we don’t seem to really remember smells, at least not in the same way that we remember a tv show or a love affair or a best friend. We can’t recall any smell in the same way that we can these other things. At least I can’t—I don’t know about all of you. But ironically smells can remind us of things in a way that doesn’t seem possible.

I was leaving the library with my son and a smell hit me just right. I don’t know what it was. Tobacco smoke from some old guy smoking nearby mixed with the smell that asphalt makes when the sun has been baking it all day combined with the pollution from passing cars and who knows what else. This mixture of smells hit me and suddenly I was back at a pizza place in my hometown that we used to go to when I was only six or seven. It closed not too long after that. Great pizza place, but bad location, on the edge of town, and closer to the poor part of town at that. The owner, a guy named Howie, knew it was a bad location, but it was the only one he could afford. His family worked like hell to make the place work. It was a Shakeys franchise, but later they left the franchise and renamed it Howie’s Place.

I only remember all that background info because years later I had him as a journalism professor at my university and towards the end of the year he did a unit talking about his family business. There is a famous sociological study in America that has looked at my hometown, Muncie, several times in the past century, studying it as a typical American city. The year his business was failing happened to be one of the years the study was in our town. They made a movie about it.

But don’t let that background info dump mislead you—I haven’t thought about that place since college, and before having him as my professor I hadn’t thought of it since we stopped going when I was around seven. All I really remember about the place is the arcade games, the dark tavern atmosphere, and the picnic bench style tables. I remember it fondly, but I couldn’t really tell you why I remember it fondly. I suppose I was a kid and pizza and arcade combined to make it fun and that was enough to make me remember it fondly.[1]

Anyway, I smelled that smell and I was instantly back there. That wave of nostalgia rolled through me, then it was gone just as fast as it had come and I was left grasping at the smell, trying to hold on to it, but it was already gone and it took the memory with it.

I told my son to wait a minute, pulled out my notebook and jotted down a few versions of the above haiku. I still need to massage it a bit. It’s too long as is. I’ll revisit it again later. It’s into the haiku box for now. But I wanted to share it as is right now.

The only game I remember clearly from there is Kangaroo a strange but fun game in a bit of a Donkey Kong style. ↩

Thursday, 4 July 2024

Airing out the Quilt in the Dog Days

We are approaching the dog days of summer. Things are already hot and they may be about to get a lot hotter. These days I think mostly people just run to the AC and escape the heat, but traditionally there was a cleaning activity of sorts associated with this time. Here Kikaku is writing about it.

夜着をきてあるいて見たり土用干
yogi o kite aruite mitari doyō-boshi[1]

trying on a quilt kimono
and walking around in it
summer airing
—Kikaku[2]

A lot of things to unpack here. On the surface this is just a nice, pleasant scene, the kind that Kikaku, more than any of Bashō’s disciplines, excelled at. He airs out his belongings during the summer; when it comes time to freshen up his winter kimono quilt, he decides to try it on. We don’t know why: maybe someone recently gave it to him and he wanted to try it on, or maybe he wanted to see if it was in good enough condition to keep, or maybe he just was in the mood to put it on—who knows. It’s a scene we can probably still relate to even today.

If you want to dive in and understand more, there are a few things to look at. First of all, what is this “summer airing”? In this haiku it is literally calling it “Dog Days drying” (土用干, doyō-boshi), but more commonly this is called “drying the bugs” (虫干, mushiboshi).

The Dog Days are of course the hottest part of summer. Historically in Japan it was also drier than the rest of summer, which is incredibly humid. Well, at least compared to the rainy season which would have just ended, it was dryer. So back in the day, this time period was used to air out anything in the house that may have absorbed water during the rainy season and beginning of summer, to prevent mildew and kill any unwanted bugs. This airing out would have mainly included clothes and books, but anything that was suspected of needing the fresh and warm air might also come out. I don’t think this is a common thing to do these days, although some temples still do “air out” their treasures, but I think that is more for tourism these days.

The other curious thing this haiku mentions is the “kimono quilt”, yogi (夜着). In the early Edo period, poor people usually didn’t use a blanket on their futon, but instead would sleep in these thick kimono to keep warm.

So there you go. Kikaku trying on his kimono quilt while putting things outside for the summer airing during the Dog Days. Like I said above, a simple yet vivid slice-of-life scene reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting—if he had been Japanese rather than American.

Thursday, 27 June 2024

Hazy Evening and Memories

Sometimes when we get hazy days in spring it gives a strange feeling to the day. Not necessarily a bad feeling, but it can make us feel a little bit more isolated and push our thoughts in certain directions. Such was the case for Kitō on a spring long ago. He wrote:

夕霧おもへばへだつ昔かな
yūgasumi omoeba hedatsu mukashi kana[1]

this evening haze…
thinking of the past
how far away it seems
—Kitō[2]

Often when we try to think back to the past, it is a little hazy. Some things we can recall pretty clearly, but most are more unclear, as if so far off that our vision of them is no longer clear. This is echoed quite nicely by the natural mist or haze that often appears in spring mornings and evenings. Just as with our hazy thoughts, with the fog we can’t be entirely sure what is there, if anything.

In haiku, mist itself symbolizes impermanence. The evening mist in particular evokes a sense of nostalgia. I’m not sure how old Kitō was when he wrote this, but it has the feeling of an older man looking back on his life.

Kitō was a student of Buson. As such, he followed his master’s practice of incorporated visual elements into his haiku, making them very picturesque. With this, we can imagine a classical Chinese image of a sage staring off into a mist shrouded landscape, at something visible in the painting but only hinted at.

Mist/haze (kasumi) is a season word for all of spring.

There is more in the archives