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A collection of three hundred modern haiku by different poets, curated from Ozawa’s commentary in the magazine Haiku Arufa from 2008-2018

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By Ozawa Minoru, translated by Janine Beichman, photographs by Maeda Shinzō and Akira (Japan Library, 2021)

Review by Cody Poulton

Ozawa Minoru is a celebrated haiku poet, winner of the 2006 Yomiuri Literature prize in Poetry, and contributor to a variety of newspapers and literary journals. Well-Versed: Exploring Modern Japanese Haiku is a collection of roughly three hundred modern haiku by different poets, curated from Ozawa’s commentary in the magazine Haiku Arufa over the course of a decade, from 2008-2018. This volume, translated by Janine Beichman, resembles an earlier anthology she translated by Ōoka Makoto: Oriori no Uta: A Poet’s Anthology (1994). As in the previous collection, Ozawa devotes a full page to each haiku.

In his preface Ozawa describes the basic conventions of haiku: seventeen syllable prosody (usually 5/7/5), a seasonal word (kigo), and a caesura or “cutting word” (kireji). Mind you, he tells us that in the modern form, practically all these rules can be broken. Haiku can be longer or shorter than seventeen syllables and don’t necessarily demand a seasonal word. Still, the vast majority of the haiku he has selected are seventeen syllables long, and only three of the nearly three hundred poems are without a seasonal word.

Haiku are perfectly designed little machines for seeing. In fact, the form engages all the senses, but what they conjure up most is a singular image in the mind’s eye. Each poem opens onto its own universe and the present volume presents us with over three hundred pictures of the cosmos to contemplate. Nature reins (or rains) but here we also have portraits of the weather of the human heart. A book of this sort can be read from cover to cover—one could start reading it on New Year’s Day, then slowly, daily, dip into the poems page by page following the course of the seasons so as to enjoy how each poem savours the particular time and place of each day. If you live in Japan, the seasons will match what’s caught in the book. Another way is just to dip in, trawl through the book as one might any kind of anthology, landing on a word or image that captures the eye. Linger there, read Beichman’s accomplished translations and Ozawa’s illuminating commentaries. The anthology follows the seasons but not the course of historical time. The oldest poets—giants who essentially invented modern haiku, like Masaoka Shiki and Takahama Kyoshi—share company with contemporary poets.

For the uninitiated, allow me to elaborate on the structure of haiku according to the Japanese. The basic unit of a haiku is not counted by “syllable,” per se, but by what linguists call “mora” (“morae” in plural). This makes a huge difference in Japanese, where vowels can be short or long, and glottal stops and the labial consonant also count as morae (the final “n” in “ten,” for example). Morae are the building blocks and generators of rhythm and time in haiku. A word like Tokyo, for example, will look like only two syllables in English (or possibly three, if you pronounce it “To-kee-yo”), but in Japanese it counts as four since those “o”’s are long (as in tō-kyō). As a consequence, trying to keep to a seventeen-syllable count in English usually results in a long-winded poem. Haiku are better when less than seventeen English syllables.

Gary Snyder wrote that haiku resemble mantras or koans, and that one has to meditate on them to get their message: “the words stop but the meaning goes on.” Certainly many of the best haiku operate like riddles and some contemporary haiku can be very abstract, even surrealistic.

Ozawa notes in this anthology the predilection in haiku to inhabit the feelings of other animals and natural phenomena. New Criticism used to call this kind of impersonation the pathetic fallacy, but Ozawa chalks it up to a kind of animism that is congenial to the Japanese. Lafcadio Hearn more vaguely called it sympathy. Just one example of such a haiku, by Abe Seiai (1914-1989):

The rainbow itself

believes

in time

(niji jishin / jikan wa ari to / omoikeri)

Classical poets, Ozawa tells us, avoided rainbows as poetic subjects, sensing that they were ominous things. Here Seiai ascribes agency to the rainbow, an awareness that it, like us, is subject to time: here for a moment then gone.

In his preface Ozawa tells us that haiku typically tumble vertically in Japanese, in a single line like a yorishiro lightning rod connecting the gods from heaven to earth. In English, like other European languages, the letters crawl like snails, horizontally. Beichman tries to capture something of the original effect by having her lines dribble diagonally down the page (see our excerpt).

Haiku are as sociable as they are solitary. Ozawa tells us that “haiku at its core is a poetry of greeting” (p. 191). The medieval origin of the form, haikai no renga (comic linked verse) began as a party pastime, where groups of poets would get together and compose a chain of verse starting on some given theme, with one poet kicking off with a hokku (5/7/5) and his or her companion following with the next line, the ageku, a couplet (7/7). On its own, this would constitute a 31-syllable (morae) tanka, but the party would carry on for at least a hundred lines or so. Novelist Ihara Saikaku got his start as an ex tempore haikai no renga poet, giving solo marathons, in one case topping off at as many as 23,500 verses over the course of a single day and night in the summer of 1684.

It was the short-lived Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) who effectively created the modern haiku—isolated snapshots of reality—or what he called shasei, sketching from life. (Like a number of other literati, Shiki’s friend Natsume Sōseki has a haiku in this book.) As this collection shows, haiku can also portray the inner, psychic world without what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative”: something in the outside world that reflects the poet’s sensibility. Given the form’s brevity, much is required of the reader’s imagination to complete the image. Still, haiku can often pack a punch, as in this poem by Takeshita Shizunojo (1887-1951), comparing herself to her male colleagues in the public library where she worked:

I’m worth that

whole mob of lazy men

reeking of sweat

(ase kusaki / noro no otoko no / mure ni gosu)

Here the seasonal word is ase, sweat. This is a good example of how Beichman negotiates the image. Japanese syntax generally runs in the opposite direction from English, a challenge for any translator, especially of this poetic form. While the original begins with “sweat,” Beichman ends with it, so the punch is laid in a different place. Much of the pleasure of any poem is its musicality—its rhymes, its assonance—and this is also true for haiku. The task of the translator is not just to capture the sense but also the sound of the poem. An impossibility, one might say, especially with two languages as different as Japanese and English. A good translator of poetry must be a poet herself and by all accounts Beichman, whose superb biographies and translations of Shiki (Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works) and Yosano Akiko (Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry) have made her worthy of that name.

Haiku aren’t just social (or, like the above, anti-social?), they’re also fun. Here’s one by Nagashima Yū (b. 1972):

Mackerel sky—

for the dog, the interesting things

are other dogs

(sabagumo ya / inu no kyōmi wa / hoka no inu)

Ozawa’s commentary is also a delight. I quote in part:

Somehow this strikes me as a picture of the essential nature of a dog, and, by extension, the essential nature of all living creatures. Except for people, that is. We humans often have an excessive interest in our own selves rather than others. Could it be there is something fundamentally unhealthy about the human spirit? (p. 245)

He goes on to note the contrast between the poet, who gazes at the sky, and the dog, whose eye is trained on other dogs. The poet is looking at the grander picture.

Like dogs, haiku are sociable creatures, and these poems shine especially in the company of others. The genius of a good anthologist is placing them together to create a larger conversation, which is essentially to return them to their roots in linked verse. Much of the pleasure of a collection like this is in reading a sequence of poems and their commentaries. I’ll give just one example of a pair here (they appear on pages 90-91), by the writers Kubota Mantarō (1889-1957) and Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973):

Mantarō:

The clock store’s clocks

on a night in spring—which one is

telling the truth?

(tokeiya no / tokei haru no yo / dore ga honto)

Nobuko:

The pleasures of truth

pale next to those of lies

under spring lamplight

(makoto yori / uso ga tanoshi ya / harutomoshi)

Mantarō’s haiku is a kind of visual joke. Back in his day, windup clocks were notoriously inaccurate measures of time, and here’s a shop, closed for the night, where all the clocks are telling different times. This is a good example of how many haiku set up an image for a surprising and witty punchline at the end. Nobuko’s haiku, on the other hand, begins with a counterintuitive declaration, an ethical challenge. Then follows the seasonal image, which evokes an erotic tryst. Romance thrives on lies, but “in haiku too, it is the same,” writes Ozawa. “There is a space between word and thing, and lies step in to bridge the gap. Poetry without lies is no poetry at all.” (91) This is a brilliant observation.

As I write this, my haiku calendar phone app tells me we are in the little heat. As this goes to press, we enter the big heat, so let me conclude with a haiku by Ozaka that captures this micro-season:

With every cell

of my body I greet

the season of Greater Heat

(waga saibō zenko taisho to narinikeri)

Additional Notes:

Romanization and a literal translation of each haiku is provided at the bottom of each page, with a short biography of each poet. Seasonal words float on grey-fill against the black type of the transliterations. Ozawa has added at the end of the book (without commentary), twenty of his own haiku, which prove that he is not only a fine critic but an excellent poet in his own right. Useful notes and handy indexes of seasonal words and poets’ names complete this volume.

See BOA Podcast: Janine Beichman on Translating Japanese Haiku and Tanka