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]
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.
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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. ↩