LaSpina.org — Haiku, Japan, and the misunderstood

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 or 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 a more literal 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.

And that’s where it starts to feel a little too neat. The tidy thematic stacking would have irked Bashō. His aesthetic leaned toward indirection — suggesting one thing, implying another, and leaving space for what’s unsaid. He might’ve kept one of these “beginnings” explicit, hinted at a second, and replaced the third with something surprising or unresolved.

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.

I like both styles. Though I tend to lean toward Bashō’s more Zen-like restraint, I appreciate Issa’s playfulness and warmth. This piece may not be a “great” haiku, but it’s a vivid example of two master poets with very different philosophies.

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

[Last updated: 8 Sep 2025]

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.

[Last updated: 25 Aug 2025]

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.[2] 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 take them mostly just because 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.

[Last updated: 13 Oct 2025]

See: Pronunciation of Japanese ↩
For every haiku I think is ok enough to share here, there are dozens that will never leave my haiku notecard files once they enter them. ↩

Saturday, 15 February 2025

Cold Night and Loneliness

被き伏す蒲団や寒き夜やすごき
kazuki fusu futon ya samuki yo ya sugoki[1]

lying covered
under futon, yet
the night—so cold
—Bashō[2]

Night snow at Fushimi by Shoda Kakuyu — “Night snow at Fushimi” by Shoda Kakuyu

The breaks in my translation in the second and third lines are the same as Bashō uses. Normally cutting words come at the end of line 1 or line 2, but in this case we get two of them right in the middle of line 2 and line 3. It is a bit unusual, but Bashō purposely did it to give the feeling of stress.

It’s not Bashō who is so cold, nor is it the winter temperature that is causing the cold. He wrote this haiku for his student Rika, whose wife had died the previous year. He imagined how lonely and sad Rika must feel without his beloved wife on a cold winter night.

I’m sure you all know what a futon is. Unlike the Western couch-bed thing we call a futon, a Japanese futon is a nice and comfortable mattress laid directly on the ground for sleeping covered with a thick, warm blanket. The mattress is called a shikibuton and blanket a kakebuton, but confusingly either mattress or blanket by themselves can also be referred to as futon.

At the time Bashō wrote this, in Edo, futon covers were not a common thing. Typically poor people slept around the cooking area (irori), which was warm, and slept close together to warm themselves with each others’ body heat. On especially cold nights they might sleep under a quilt of seaweed or other cheap material.

So when Bashō says sleeping under futon, he isn’t referring to a kakebuton—it is literally sleeping under the futon. A cold night for Rika—colder still without his wife.

Rika, by the way, is the student who helped Bashō plant the banana trees (bashō) at his hermitage, from which he took his famous pen name.

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