The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki 9780231535311

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the winter sun shines in

Asia Per spectives: History, Societ y, and Culture Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Asia Per spectives: History, Societ y, and Culture A series of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Carol Gluck, Editor Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, trans. Suzanne O’Brien The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society, by Pierre François Souyri, trans. Kathe Roth Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan, by Donald Keene Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: The Story of a Woman, Sex, and Moral Values in Modern Japan, by William Johnston Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841, by Donald Keene The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, edited and translated by Rebecca L. Copeland and Melek Ortabasi So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, by Donald Keene Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, by Michael K. Bourdaghs

donald keene

the winter sun sh i n e s i n a life of masaoka shiki

C Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Donald Keene All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keene, Donald. The winter sun shines in : a life of Masaoka Shiki / Donald Keene. pages cm. — (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16488-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53531-1 (e-book) 1. Masaoka, Shiki, 1867–1902. I. Title. PL811.A83Z6776 2013 895.6'14—dc23 [B] 2012048137

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 book & cover design by Chang Jae Lee Photographs and images in the insert courtesy of the Shiki Museum.

For Lindsley Miyoshi, who enabled me to become a Japanese

contents

Introduction

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1. The Early Years 13 2. Student Days 27 3. The Song of the Hototogisu

44

4. Shiki the Novelist 59 5. Cathay and the Way Thither 75 6. Sketches from Life 7. Hototogisu

91

108

8. Shiki and the Tanka 123 9. Shintaishi and Kanshi 140 10. Random Essays (Zuihitsu), 1 11. Random Essays, 2 171 12. The Last Days 187 Notes 203 Bibliography 233 Index 237

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the winter sun shines in

introduction

I

n 1867, the year that Masaoka Shiki was born, Japanese literature was at one of its lowest points. The quality of all varieties of literature had steadily declined, though readers were not necessarily aware of this unfortunate change. A half dozen writers, all that were left of the group of novelists who had flourished half a century earlier, provided readers with endless variations on the plots of old stories. On the surface, it might seem that poetry was thriving. Many self-appointed masters of the haiku made a living by correcting poems written by disciples and by transmitting to them (in return for suitable fees) the secrets of composing haiku in the style of Bashō. A very large number of haiku were turned out by such teachers and disciples, but not a single poem of this period is remembered today except by specialists. A similar situation prevailed among poets of the tanka, the other major poetic form. The dismal condition in poetry was saved by one man, Masaoka Shiki, whose poetry and criticism of poetry, at first known mainly in the provincial town of Matsuyama, before long were read and imitated in all parts of the country. Matsuyama was a strange place for a literary revolution

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to begin. As Shiki himself admitted, nothing of literary importance had ever been written in the town or fiefdom, though it was not totally without culture. There were in fact local poets of haiku and tanka who gave Shiki, still a young man, rudimentary instruction in poetic composition, but nothing they taught him would be of use when he initiated his revolution in poetry. Shiki’s first poems were probably composed in classical Chinese as part of his basic education. At the school he attended, for boys of the samurai class, he was required to compose poetry in Chinese, rather as students at many European schools were expected to compose poetry in Latin, mainly as a duty of persons belonging to a superior class. During the rest of his life Shiki would continue to write poems in Chinese, generally when he wished to express observations or sentiments that did not easily fit into the seventeen syllables of a haiku or the thirty-one syllables of a tanka. Shiki did not begin to compose haiku until he was in his early twenties. A haiku composed in the summer of 1891 (when he was twenty-four) is notable not only for its sensitivity to nature and the seasons, typical of Japanese poetry, but also for its unusual combination of imagery: ajisai ya kabe no kuzure wo shibuku ame

Hydrangeas— and rain beating down on a crumbled wall1

The rain gives the hydrangeas their fresh beauty but at the same time beats down mercilessly on the dead wall. Other poems of interest are scattered among Shiki’s early haiku, but most of the haiku for which he is known today were composed later on, after he had developed his characteristic style, known as shasei (sketching from nature). The ideal of shasei as found in Shiki’s haiku owed much to Nakamura Fusetsu, a mediocre painter who, after studying European paintings, had reached the conclusion that art of any kind must faithfully reflect

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whatever it portrays. This variety of realism contrasted markedly with the ideals of Japanese painters of the time, who made it their practice to imitate closely the works of their teachers, painting the same “poetic” landscapes, not feeling any need to discover fresh scenes or viewpoints of their own. The paintings they produced—mountains in the mist, men crossing flimsy bridges over gorges, and so on—were pleasing to the eye but lacked both originality and fidelity to any actual landscape. During the discussions between Shiki and Fusetsu that began soon after they met in 1895, Shiki at first defended traditional Japanese painting, preferring its artistry to European realism; but Fusetsu eventually convinced Shiki that shasei was essential not only in painting but in the haiku. Once convinced, Shiki made up his mind that his haiku would treat the experiences of daily life, and he turned his back on cherry blossoms and colored autumn leaves, the hackneyed subjects of Japanese poetry. He would write instead about what he himself had seen or felt, regardless of whether or not it was conventionally beautiful. Although Shiki was determined to write in a style unlike that of his predecessors, he was by no means indifferent to their poetry. For years he poured over old books of haiku, classifying each of them and searching for anything that might benefit his own poetry. He insisted that his disciples also study the history of the haiku no less diligently than himself. When his most trusted disciple, Takahama Kyoshi, refused to devote himself single-mindedly to study, Shiki resignedly broke with him. Shiki, though well read in the poetry of the past, by no means worshipped it unconditionally. He greatly admired the Man’yōshū and at times borrowed words in his tanka from this classic of the ninth century, but he denounced the tenth-century Kokinshū, considered by many to be the supreme anthology of tanka poetry, calling it boring and even silly. He did not hesitate to declare that Ki no Tsurayuki, the compiler of the Kokinshū, was a bad poet. He even criticized the great Bashō, the sacrosanct saint of haiku, saying that not one in ten of Bashō’s haiku lived up to his reputation. Shiki was often harsh when evaluating the

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celebrated poets of the past, but he was happy to make discoveries. Buson’s poetry had been completely ignored until Shiki published a superb essay establishing Buson as a great poet. He went so far as to express greater admiration for Buson than for Bashō, an example of the sometimes startling independence of his opinions. Shiki’s criticism, at times marked by intemperate condemnation of what he disliked, was the weapon with which he demolished the prevalent worship of the poetry of the past. He demanded the creation of a new poetry that embodied the poet’s experiences and perceptions and was not simply a restatement of well-known “poetic” themes. He was remarkably successful in persuading other poets to accept these controversial views. Hototogisu, the magazine founded by his disciples in 1897, quickly established itself as the outstanding haiku journal, though it was at first published in Matsuyama, far from the center of culture. It remains a force in the world of haiku even today, over a hundred years later; one can say that no haiku poet is without a debt to Shiki. The creed of Hototogisu was shasei, the outlook on art that Nakamura Fusetsu had taught Shiki. Shiki’s belief in shasei led him to conclude that haiku poetry must include the ordinary and even ugly elements of daily life. The shasei realism in his haiku sometimes startles by the ordinariness of its subjects, as in an 1896 haiku: aki kaze ni koborete akashi hamigakiko

As it spills over In the autumn breeze, how red it looks— My tooth powder!

Autumn breezes were, of course, frequent in Japanese poetry, but “tooth powder” marks this as a poem of the Meiji era. This insistence on modernity was shared by Shiki’s chief poetic rivals, the poets of the shintaishi (modern-style poetry). Shiki has little to say about the competition he faced from the poets of the shintaishi school, who first became prominent with the publication in 1882 of Shintaishi shō (Selection of

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Poems in the Modern Style), a collection of nineteen poems translated from the English, including “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and soliloquies from Hamlet. These translations were mocked from the start for their lack of poetic beauty. This was not surprising considering that the translators were scholars who had studied science abroad and had learned English in the process but had little training in literature. The collection, despite its faults, exerted extraordinary influence on Japanese poets because it was their first experience of European poetry. Many poems were written in Japanese along the lines of the content and style of the translated European poetry. The poets were delighted not to be bound by traditional restrictions on the length and subjects of poetry and, ignoring the established poetical diction, wrote their poems not in classical Japanese, the language that continued to be used for haiku and tanka, but in easily understood modern Japanese. The translators of Selection of Poems in the Modern Style declared that poems composed in the Meiji era must be distinctly of that era, a prescription that Shiki followed when he began writing shasei haiku fifteen years later.2 The modern-style poets for a time dominated new poetic composition. Shiki mentions gatherings at which crowds assembled to hear modern-style poets read their poetry aloud, a novelty, and he was carried away by the enthusiasm of the young poets. It would not have been surprising if he had abandoned the haiku and joined a movement with which he shared many ideals and whose members included some of the most famous poets of the Meiji era. However, Shiki, far from abandoning the haiku, became the instrument of its salvation by making it relevant to contemporary life. He did not explain in his criticism why, despite his desire to be modern, he had chosen to adhere to the haiku, a traditional form of poetry, instead of taking advantage of the freedom enjoyed by poets of the modern style. Perhaps his readings of poems in English had disillusioned him with poetry created by writers who, not bound by any regulations, could compose poems that were as long as they liked. He recognized the beauty found in many English poems, but

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their length and the unchanging meter bored him. A haiku could be perfect from beginning to end, but a long poem inevitably contains passages of lesser interest; the second stanza of a poem is rarely as memorable as the first. A striking defense of the brevity of the Japanese traditional poem was given by a near contemporary of Shiki’s, Ishikawa Takuboku. He wrote, A poem should be a strict report of events taking place in one’s emotional life (for want of a better term)—a straightforward diary. This means it has to be fragmentary, it can’t have unity or coherence. . . . People say the tanka is too short to work with. But I think that is precisely its advantage. Isn’t it so? A small poem, that doesn’t take time, is best—it’s practical. It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Japanese, having this tanka form.3 Takuboku was a tanka poet, but his comments held true, to an even greater extent, for the haiku. Shiki may also have been dismayed by the political or intellectual content of many early shintaishi. “On the Principles of Sociology,” by Toyama Chuzan, one of the compilers of Selection of Poems in the Modern Style, was an extreme example. This long poem opens, The characteristics the parents possess Are transmitted by heredity to the children; The fit go on flourishing, The unfit perish. The theories of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, even when cast in alternating phrases in seven and five syllables, do not make for poetry. Chuzan attempted to sweeten the lesson he was teaching by inserting conventionally poetic passages:

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In the present world, all that exists— Bellflowers, pampas grass, the wild valerian, Plum blossoms and cherry blossoms, clover and peonies, And, associated with peonies, the Chinese lion-dog . . . This profusion of botanical attractions could not have impressed Shiki. Other shintaishi were obvious imitations of Shelley and Browning. A poem by Susukida Kyūkin, inspired by Browning, opens, Oh, to be in Yamato Now that November’s there! It is easy to make fun of these attempts to write modern poetry in the European manner, but it should be remembered that during the long period of Japan’s isolation from most of the world that preceded the Meiji era, Japanese poetry, lacking stimulus from the literature of other countries, had been completely on its own. Isolation had at first been beneficial, leading to the development not only of poetry in traditional forms but also of fiction and drama, but by the end of the Tokugawa period the gold of the old traditions had been fully mined. When, with the Meiji Restoration, the isolation of two hundred fifty years ended, foreigners and their literature freely entered Japan. In the excitement of the discovery of a rich and exciting world, traditional Japanese poetry was all but forgotten by the shintaishi poets. Shiki also wrote shintaishi occasionally, when he felt that a particular subject demanded full statement as well as suggestion. His shintaishi have seldom been discussed, but they contain aspects of his life not found in his other poems, and some are deeply moving. Shiki, like some shintaishi poets, also experimented with rhyming in the European style. His experiments were not successful if only because rhyme is so easy in Japanese as to be hardly noticeable. If noticed, it may produce a comic effect. However, for all his experiments, Shiki almost always exactly

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obeyed the traditional five-seven-five rhythm of the haiku. His rare departures were sometimes caused by proper nouns that could not be squeezed into the allotted number of syllables, as in this example: jūnisōrō gosō atari ni natsu no Fuji

The twelve-story building— Fuji in summertime looks A mere five stories high.

Jūnisōrō, the popular name of the tallest building in Tokyo (constructed in 1890), contains seven rather than the normal five syllables. The point of the haiku, written in 1896, is that from Shiki’s vantage point at the top of a lofty tower even Fuji seems small. This lightweight haiku is an example of Shiki at his most up-to-date. A much better haiku uses a place-name to achieve a superb effect: kaki kueba kane naru nari Hōryūji

As I eat a persimmon The temple bell tolls at Hōryūji.

This haiku bears a prefatory note stating it was composed at a teahouse near Hōryū-ji, the oldest and most impressive temple in Nara. However, it is probable that the last line was originally Tōdai-ji, another great temple in Nara. Mention of either temple conveyed an effect of contrast: even as Shiki eats a persimmon—a quite ordinary, soon forgotten moment of pleasure—he hears the solemn boom of a bell that has tolled for centuries. Perhaps Shiki even had the momentary illusion that biting into the persimmon has made the bell boom. But why should he have changed Tōdai-ji to Hōryū-ji? Most likely it was because of the sound. Hōryū-ji has a far deeper, more prolonged resonance than Tōdai-ji and makes a more powerful contrast with the lightness of Shiki’s biting into the persimmon. The

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lightness is transmitted by the staccato sounds of ka, ki, and ku at the opening. Although Shiki advised students about many aspects of haiku composition, giving specific instructions about the language, he did not discuss the role of sound. He may have considered that the sounds of a haiku come intuitively to the poet and could not be taught. Strange as it may seem, to this day most haiku poets, unlike tanka poets, remain indifferent to the sound.4 The influence of Shiki’s haiku and haiku criticism was immense. In a sense, he changed the reasons for the composition of haiku. The haiku of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were most often display pieces that revealed the poet’s skill at playing with words. Later, the glory of cherry blossoms and autumn leaves took first place in the haiku poet’s attention. Such standbys of the past either disappeared after Shiki’s revolution or became ironic. Understatement was more typical, requiring readers to consider what lay behind the prosaic words and unremarkable events: aru tsukiyo kotogotoku kago no mushi wo hanatsu

One moonlit night I released every last bug From its cage.

In this haiku the repeated k and o sounds in kotogotoku may suggest freed insects rustling as they make their escape from the cage. Shiki does not say why he released the insects, nor how he felt afterward. Releasing the insects, like releasing doves after a ceremony today, may have been a gesture of mercy, but perhaps Shiki merely wanted the insects to share in the beauty of the moonlight. In shasei terms, the haiku on the escape of the insects was an event that Shiki witnessed and recorded without comment. The reader can interpret the haiku as he pleases, but he will not forget the rustling of the escaping insects. The strength of Shiki’s haiku often came from the overtones of the last line, as in this 1895 haiku:

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kumo korosu ato no sabishiki yosamu kana

After killing The spider, what loneliness— The cold of night.

Killing a spider was not a subject mentioned in traditional poetry, but Shiki makes us sense how this unpoetic and even horrifying act affected him. The haiku encapsulates his reactions in an absolute minimum of words. Shiki is also known as a seminal practitioner of the modern tanka. As might be expected of him, Shiki rejected the dead weight of tanka tradition and was severe on the professional “masters” of the art who imposed stereotyped rules on their disciples. Both his haiku and tanka of his last years suffered because all of nature that Shiki could see from his sickbed was a corner of his garden, visible through a window, and nature was his chief subject. In 1900 Shiki wrote a tanka about seeing in the garden a small flower with the auspicious name fukujusō (happiness and long life plant): itatsuki no neya no garasu no mado no uchi ni fuyu no hi sashite sachikusa sakinu

Through the glass window in my sickroom winter sun streams in— my good luck plant is blooming5

Perhaps irony was involved in citing the plant’s name: nothing else in his life at this time suggested that he was happy or would enjoy long life, but all the same, the pale winter sun and the little flower blooming in the cold gave him hope. Shiki’s last years were spent in his sickbed, suffering from a prolonged and extremely painful caries of the spine that reduced him to virtual immobility; he was unable even to sit or turn in his bed. He continued nevertheless to write, not only poetry but also daily essays

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(zuihitsu) for the newspaper Nippon, diaries, and criticism. It is amazing that in his condition he could keep at this daily obligation, never missing an episode, even though, being unable to leave his bed, he seems at times to have had trouble finding interesting subjects to discuss in his articles. Shiki left behind a staggering amount of writing, especially considering that he died at thirty-five; his zenshū (complete works) consists of twentytwo volumes of small print, each over five hundred pages. Most of his best works were written during the last seven years before his death in 1902. Among the poems of his last years, a ten-poem tanka sequence on the pot of wisteria in his sickroom, written the year before he died, is famous. The sequence opens, kame ni sasu fuji no hanabusa mijikakereba tatami no ue ni todokazarikeri

The sprays of wisteria arranged in the vase are so short they don’t reach to the tatami6

At first reading, this tanka seems little more than a statement that consists of a single sentence; but if the reader is aware that at the time Shiki composed the poem he was lying immobile in a sickbed, unable to touch the wisteria because it did not reach as far as the tatami, the poem becomes unforgettably poignant. The unadorned plainness of the expression adds to the strength; this is not so much a poem as a cry. The remainder of the sequence is mainly in the same vein. Readers who do not know Japanese may find the sequence among the most difficult of Shiki’s poems to appreciate fully, even with Burton Watson’s excellent translation to assist them. The bareness of expression is likely to seem prosaic, but with time, as is true of minimalist music, the bareness may seem the essence of poetry.

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On the last day of his life, Shiki called for a brush and paper. His sister held a sheet of paper over his head and, with great difficulty, Shiki wrote three haiku that were his farewell to the world. He knew he was dying, but there is a humorous touch in these poems, as if Shiki remembered that the haiku had originally been a comic genre. He had long hoped for death as a relief from incessant pain, but wishing it or not, he had kept living, much longer than anyone expected, though he died so young. The influence of Shiki’s haiku and haiku criticism was immense and long lasting. It is hard to imagine any serious haiku poet reverting to the style of haiku prevalent before Shiki’s revolution. For Shiki, as for all modern haiku poets, there was no subject that could not be treated in a poem. The haiku and tanka were all but dead when Shiki began to write his poetry and criticism. The best poets of the time had lost interest in short poems. Shiki and his disciples, finding new possibilities of expression within the traditional forms, preserved them. The millions of Japanese (and many non-Japanese) who compose haiku and tanka today belong to the School of Shiki, and even poets who write entirely different forms of poetry have learned from him. He was the founder of truly modern Japanese poetry.

1 the early years

M

asaoka Shiki was born in 1867, the year before the Meiji Restoration changed the lives of the Japanese people. His family, of the samurai class, had for generations served the daimyo of Matsuyama, a town that at the time he was born had a population of about twenty-five thousand.1 Shiki’s father was a low-ranking samurai, but the family led a fairly comfortable life on the stipend he received from the Matsuyama han (domain).2 Members of the samurai class had little income apart from their stipends, the size dependent on their rank and the wealth of the domain. The samurai, even those who lived most humbly, never doubted the superiority of their class to the peasants, artisans, and merchants who made up the bulk of Japanese society, and even those of the mildest disposition felt deep attachment to their swords, though most had never had the occasion to use one. The reforms of the Meiji era, largely the work of the samurai class, had ironically deprived the samurai of their stipends, reducing some to poverty and others to taking up such ignoble occupations as pulling a rickshaw; but most managed to maintain a semblance of family pride.

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Shiki wrote a brief account of his ancestors going back to his greatgreat-grandfather, Masaoka Ippo, a samurai official who had served the Matsuyama daimyo as an expert in the tea ceremony. Shiki was told that Ippo was a man of great taste, dedicated to his profession, who had amassed a fine collection of accessories of the tea ceremony. Ippo, however, lost almost all his possessions in an 1869 fire that destroyed the Masaoka house. All that was left were some ten letters from a famous tea master and a two-panel screen Ippo had received when he celebrated his seventieth birthday. Shiki related that the old gentleman, when making courtesy calls at the New Year, always carried a spray of early-blossoming plum in his sleeve and greeted people he met with, “Spring, gentle spring has come.” The great-great-grandfather was also remembered for having insisted that his bath be heated with charcoal, rather than ordinary firewood, evidence that he was a true aesthete.3 That was about all Shiki had to say about his great-great-grandfather, but they shared one experience, the fire that consumed the great-greatgrandfather’s collection. On the day of the fire Shiki, only two years old, was taken by his mother to visit a relative. In the middle of the night cries of “Fire!” were heard coming from the direction of their house. Shiki’s mother, worried, took him in her arms and hurried home, where she discovered that the house on fire was her own. Shiki years later blamed the fire on his great-grandmother and his father, both of whom were heavy drinkers. They had probably fallen into a drunken sleep and neglected to extinguish the kitchen fire. Shiki recalled (or, more likely, his mother told him) that he had been enchanted by the fire, supposing the bright light of the flames was a great cluster of paper lanterns. When, however, Shiki discovered that his favorite red sandals had been burned in the fire, the loss saddened him. He would comment years later, “Innocent child though I was, a spark of worldly attachment had been ignited.” He added, “Those who had experienced the terrible earthquake of the Ansei era [in 1854] laughed at people who were frightened by the usual little earthquakes, but ever since the disaster my family dreaded any fire. It was a case of ‘Burnt boys fear fire.’”4

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Shiki’s account of his ancestors moved next to his great-grandfather, who, unlike the artistically gifted great-great-grandfather, was an expert in handling such samurai weapons as the sickle and chain and taught younger men how to use them. He, too, was a confirmed drinker. Shiki had no paternal grandfather because his father had been adopted by his great-grandfather, skipping a generation. Shiki’s description of his father is unflattering. If we can take his words literally, all he ever learned from his father was calligraphy; he gave Shiki lessons, almost until his last day. The father, incapable of accommodating to the new regime and the loss of his stipend, spent his time mainly in drinking. Shiki wrote, My father died at the age of forty in 1872, when I was six, too young to know anything about his personal habits, but everyone said he was a heavy drinker who put away about a shō [two quarts] of sake every day. This weakened him physically and led to his untimely death. . . . My father did not excel in the martial arts. Nor, for that matter, was he devoted to learning. The only book in the house was one of mathematics along with some hundred black and white sticks. Someone told me he had studied them a little, intending to make fireworks or something of the kind.5 Summing up, Shiki reported that his father was obstinate, arrogant, and bad tempered. Shiki described his reactions to the death of his father in these terms: At the time there was a doctor of Chinese medicine in the neighborhood who often paid house calls. When my father was taken ill, the doctor came and examined him. At first he said it wasn’t anything serious and that my father would get better in a couple of days, but even after a week had passed, he not only did not get better but also his condition grew visibly worse. After another few days went by, my father became so weak that the family, in alarm,

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the early year s

sent for another physician, but it was too late; there was nothing the second doctor could do to cure the illness. A day or two later my father died. I heard these details some years later when I was ten or more, and it made me hate the first doctor. I detested him so much that if I accidentally ran into him on the street I thought my heart would burst with fury. I gnashed my teeth, thinking that in the old days I would have been obliged to take vengeance on my father’s enemy. But the year before last, when I began to suspect that the cause had been cirrhosis, I realized that there was no way the doctor could have cured that disease, and my feelings of resentment disappeared. About the time my father’s illness started to get worse, the house filled with people who had come to ask about my father’s condition. Delighted to have so many visitors, I made quite a rumpus, enough to disrupt the treatment my father was receiving. I was sent to stay with my maternal grandfather, Mr. Ōhara.6 Shiki’s account continues, On the seventh day of the third month I was seated at the foot warmer playing with my grandmother and my young uncle. Suddenly a messenger arrived from my house informing us that my father had succumbed. I hadn’t the slightest idea what “succumbed” meant, but when I got back home, carried on the messenger’s back, there were a dozen or more people gathered in the sitting room. Nobody said a word. Even as I was thinking how strange this was, my mother picked me up in her arms. I looked at her face and noticed that her eyes were swollen with weeping, and this struck me as being even more peculiar. She had me sit on her lap. Still weeping, my mother took my finger and dipped it into the water in a cup by my father’s pillow. Then, guiding my finger

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with her hand, she had me wet my father’s lips. I didn’t know the meaning. After the funeral, I went every day, a straw hat on my head, to pray at my father’s grave. This lasted forty-nine days, the period of the chūin.7 At no time did I feel sad. Considering I was a child of six or so at the time, there was no excuse for me not to have understood what it meant to lose my father. Worse, I had virtually no awareness that my actions at the time were truly shameful. How stupid of me! It was disgraceful. Although Shiki’s account of his father is unsparing in the portrait it gives of a man whose life had been a total failure, he was careful to use the proper honorifics when relating his father’s actions, however unimpressive.8 By the time Shiki wrote this account in Fudemakase, a collection of brief essays (zuihitsu) written between 1884 and 1892, a Confucian education had firmly implanted in him respect for his parents. After the death of the father, the immediate family consisted of Shiki, his mother, Yae (1845–1927), and his sister, Ritsu (1870–1941).9 Shiki’s mother came from an educated family (her father was a Confucian scholar), but little in her words, as recorded in interviews, suggests learning; she seems to have been a simple woman who consecrated herself to raising her children in the samurai traditions. She had difficulty, however, in maintaining a way of life suitable to members of a superior class. With the abolition of the domains in 1871 and the ending of stipends, Shiki’s mother was obliged to sustain the family after the father’s death with the meager income she received from the lessons in sewing she gave to girls of the samurai class, supplementing this with needlework. Ritsu said of her that she was absolutely imperturbable, no matter what misfortune arose.10 During Shiki’s long illness at the end of his life, she selflessly watched over him, never eating any of the delicacies that she bought for the sick man. But it never occurred to her that her son was a great poet, a man worshipped by his many disciples.

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Her recollections of Shiki, as narrated in an interview,11 opened with the declaration that as a baby Shiki was extremely ugly. His flat nose was the worst feature. She added that it wasn’t until he was eighteen that he finally acquired average looks. As a child, he was both small and overweight, no match in strength for other boys of his age. He was, in his mother’s words, a weakling. He was also slower than other children to learn words and to pronounce them correctly. She recalled that she once had a maid named Haru whom Shiki always addressed as Abu, unable to detect the difference in sounds. During the interview the mother confined herself to such recollections without one word of surprise that her inarticulate son, born of a drunken father and an utterly prosaic mother, had developed into a master of the Japanese language. Shiki’s sister Ritsu is only slightly more interesting. Shiki scholars have little to say about her except that she was married twice and that both marriages ended in divorce.12 Her recollections of Shiki, related to the haiku poet Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937), were similar to her mother’s. They opened with the statement that her brother had been a crybaby. “Whenever he went out of the house, he came back crying.”13 He was also a weakling; he almost never discussed anything scholarly with her; he drank fresh terrapin blood every day and did not make a face when he drank it; he liked watermelon and peaches boiled in wine; he wore a flannel shirt even in summer, no matter how hot it was. She recalled that the inkstones, brushes, and ink that Shiki habitually used were of embarrassingly poor quality; an elementary school pupil nowadays would use something more attractive.14 Such scraps of information do not contribute much to our understanding of Shiki. One gets the impression that his mother and sister knew almost nothing worth remembering about Shiki, not even his passion for baseball. They had no comments to make even about his final illness, though it was the center of their attention for years. We must turn to the disciples for more personal information. Kawahigashi Hekigotō recalled seeing Shiki for the first time when he was seven or

the early year s

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eight. Shiki was six years older. Hekigotō described his face as beautiful, despite what Shiki’s mother said. He wrote, “There was no inharmonious ugliness in his face, nor was it comically lopsided [as in sketches made of Shiki]. His broad forehead, combined with thick lips that were usually turned down and looked as if they covered buck teeth, though his teeth did not actually protrude, suggested abundant, burning passion and penetrating discernment, together with unusual severity.” Shiki’s pallor was noted by everyone who described him, but Hekigotō recalled that one day, just after Shiki had his hair cut, “he looked as beautiful as a prince. His ragged trousers made a sharp contrast with the beauty of his face.” Above all, Shiki’s eyes captivated the disciples. Hekigotō wrote, “In short, I felt purified in the light of his eyes.”15 Another disciple, Ioki Hyōtei (1870–1937), wrote soon after Shiki’s death, His face was mild with a touch of melancholy. The upper half of the face was particularly notable. His eyebrows were long but not thick, his single-fold, wide eyes drooped somewhat at the corners and were set rather far apart. The unusually wide space between his eyebrows made his face seem exceptionally broad. The painter Nakamura Fusetsu, who is at present studying in Paris, used to make people laugh with his comic portrait sketches of Shiki in the manner of Punch. He exaggerated the features of Shiki’s face, depicting him with eyes as far apart as a flounder’s.16 He noted that Shiki was somewhat taller than average and was strongly built.17 “One might go so far as to say he was robust, but his skin was pale and smooth, and his fingertips were all but translucent.”18 Hekigotō declared that anyone who saw Shiki’s face after his death would shed all conventional ideas of facial beauty.19 We need not, however, depend on the descriptions of Shiki given by the disciples to become familiar with Shiki’s facial features: a surprising

20

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number of photographs and sketches show Shiki at all periods of his life. This is not true of his contemporaries, especially of writers who died early.20 He certainly does not have classically handsome features, but one can imagine why his disciples thought he was beautiful. Ioki Hyōtei feared that Shiki’s rather long neck was a sign he was tubercular but added that the strength of Shiki’s stomach made up for this apparent weakness: even when he was in such pain that he could hardly move on his sickbed, his appetite suffered no diminution. Ioki believed the strength of Shiki’s stomach gave him the energy that enabled him, “even after being confined to a six-foot bed for seven or eight long years, to keep fighting, never yielding in his battle with a cruel, atrocious, almost unimaginable monster of an illness.”21 From early in his life, however, Shiki’s family was worried because he seemed too delicate and insufficiently masculine. Even as a child he was attracted by beauty rather than by toys. He wrote about the fire that destroyed the family house when he was an infant, Even before the calamity, nothing in the house of a poor, lowranking samurai gave one a feeling of beauty. When I was seven or eight and saw the manuscript of a Chinese poem that somebody had corrected in red, I was overcome by the beauty of the red and thought I would like to grow up quickly so I could write in that way; and when I saw the pink flower bowl that a friend of mine owned, I was struck by its beauty. In my childish heart I felt envious of the friend, who was born into a rich family. When I celebrated the Dolls’ Festival, arranging on a red rug the few things that had escaped the fire, and worshipping for three days a pair of palace dolls,22 a pair of paper dolls, and a big, ugly hishi-sama;23 or, when celebrating Tanabata24 in our garden, I cut paper of five colors into strips, took dew from the taro plants, and rubbed it on my inkstone to make “ink”—these were the happiest, most plea-

the early year s

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surable diversions of my whole year. At New Year we decorated willow branches with hand balls my sister made in place of mochibana.25 This was also lots of fun, and I even enjoyed taking a needle and stitching the hand balls. From a long time back I have always enjoyed girlish pleasures.26 Shiki recalled that his mother had taught him not to say omedetō. “That’s woman’s language. You should say medetō like a man.”27 Her determination that Shiki become a proper samurai made her insist that he wear a sword even as a boy. When wearing swords was forbidden in 1871, she made Shiki wear a dagger instead. He wore the dagger until he was nine, when his hair was cut for the first time in Western style. His grandfather, thinking that a samurai boy should be familiar with the Noh theater, persuaded his mother to take him to a performance, but the boy was so frightened by the drums that they had to  leave the theater. One can imagine the embarrassment of Shiki’s mother. Yanagihara Kyokudō (1867–1942), whom Shiki met in 1881, when he was sixteen, wrote that Shiki’s complexion was pale and his face was pudgy. His body was well fleshed, but his muscles were not well-knit. “There was something that struck one as feminine in his disposition, and his self-possessed, composed manner and solemn-looking, almost expressionless face gave one an impression of being not childish but excessively grown-up.”28 From early in his school days Shiki was teased by his classmates. Their mockery began with the name Shiki had received at birth, Tokoronosuke. This long name reminded his classmates of tokoroten, a kind of jelly. His maternal grandfather, Ōhara Kanzan, sympathizing with the boy, changed his name to Noboru, the name friends called him for the rest of his life,29 though his legal name was Tsunenori.30 Getting a new name, Noboru, did not stop the bullying. Shiki recalled,

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From the time I was a small child I was called a weakling, a crybaby, and after I began going to school, I was often made to cry. For example, supposing I was leaning against a wall. A friend, standing beside me, would, half in fun, push me. If that made me stagger to the left, another friend would push me from the other side. That was as much as I could stand, and if somebody stepped on my toes or poked me a bit hard in the ribs, that was all I needed to burst into tears. Just being poked two or three times was enough for me to begin crying. Some boys took pleasure in tormenting me.31 Shiki was left-handed, another reason for his classmates to tease him. His mother recalled that, even as an infant, if somebody offered him a toy he would always reach for it with his left hand. At first he wrote with his left hand, but he was compelled to correct this: a samurai did not write with his left hand. He was scolded when he ate with his left hand and was made to sit at the end of the row of pupils so that his left-handed manipulation of his chopsticks would not clash with the chopsticks of the boy next to him. Shiki’s mother told an interviewer that she had come to think he was so unlike other boys because he was physically weak. His sister Ritsu, by contrast, was something of a tomboy, and when her brother was being taunted by his classmates, she threw stones at them.32 Shiki was clumsy at pastimes that boys usually enjoyed—flying a kite or spinning a top— preferring to stay at home and read books from a lending library. From the time he was fourteen or fifteen he enjoyed practicing calligraphy and composing poetry in Chinese. His uncle Saeki scolded him, saying he shouldn’t go in for such nonsense. One day this uncle, telling Shiki a man must be able to swim, took him to a riverbank, but Shiki was so clumsy he never learned. According to his mother, Shiki, unlike other boys, never talked about his hopes for the future. Most samurai boys dreamed of becoming officers of the army or navy, but Shiki never entertained such dreams. The mother

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concluded, “In the end he became a haiku poet, but this may have been because of his illness.” This was her only recognition of his profession: his illustrious career as a haiku and tanka poet meant nothing to her.33 It is possible that Masaoka Yae, following samurai traditions, was reluctant to boast about her son’s achievements; but her responses to interviewers suggest that, far from being proud of Shiki, she was dismayed by his weakness. Shiki’s education began with informal lessons in calligraphy with his uncle Saeki. He first attended school at the age of five in 1872. In the previous year Emperor Meiji, in a rescript on the importance of education, had announced the government’s decision to make education compulsory. All children from the age of six were to attend school. To make this possible, 53,760 elementary schools (as well as higher schools) would be built. This decision was said to be in fulfillment of the promise he had made in his Oath in Five Articles, proclaimed in 1868, that knowledge would be sought throughout the world in order to strengthen the country. The school Shiki attended was a temporary structure on the grounds of a temple. Although it was forbidden to select pupils on the basis of their class, in practice only boys of the samurai class attended Shiki’s school. This seems to have strengthened his awareness of belonging to that class.34 Years later, he sent Natsume Sōseki an article stating that although boys of the artisan and merchant classes performed well in the classroom, they did poorly once they graduated. Samurai boys, in contrast, did not do so well at school but showed their true superiority after graduation. Sōseki at once sent a reply deploring Shiki’s prejudice. He attributed the success of samurai boys after graduation not to their ability but to their birth, which made it easier for them to get ahead in the world.35 Shiki’s closest friend at school was his second cousin Minami Hajime (1868–1940). Minami was an only child and Shiki had no brothers; this may be why the two became close. Whatever Shiki did, Minami was sure

24

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to follow. From the age of eight the two read Chinese texts with Ōhara Kanzan, Shiki’s grandfather. Every morning at five they made their way to Kanzan’s house for sodoku instruction, reading Chinese texts by rote in Japanese pronunciation without at first understanding the meaning. This was a tedious way to learn a foreign language, but it worked. Shiki came to love the concise expression of classical Chinese and composed many kanshi (poems in Chinese), beginning with one written when he was eleven: One cry under the lonely moon; It coughs blood, I cannot bear to listen. Halfway through the night, I strain my ears in vain, Ten thousand ri of clouds over my old home.36 The boys absorbed not only classical Chinese but also some of Kanzan’s anti-Western prejudices. Minami remembered in particular a line from one of Kanzan’s kanshi: “All my life I have refused to read crab writing.” “Crab writing” was horizontal, in contrast to the vertical writing of China and Japan, and was so called because crabs walk sideways; it was used to mean European writing. But despite his prejudices, Kanzan was not ignorant of the West; he even made copies of several books describing the West. Kanzan exercised considerable control over the boys: he had refused to cut his own hair in Western style, which might be interpreted as toadying to foreign countries, and also insisted that the two boys not cut theirs. They were the only boys in the school who continued to have their hair dressed in the traditional manner, and it made them miserable. Minami’s father, taking pity on the boys, begged Kanzan to allow them to have their hair cut. Kanzan finally yielded.37 Instruction at the school, as was traditional in Japan, emphasized good penmanship as the most important indication of the degree of a man’s education. The pupils accepted this judgment and combined

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calligraphy with sodoku. After Kanzan died in 1875, Shiki and Minami, anxious not to forget their Chinese, studied with another Confucian scholar. By the time they reached the upper grade of elementary school, they read the classics not by rote but by understanding their content.38 Apart from the traditional education they received at school, the boys were given private instruction in mathematics, and they borrowed more enjoyable books from a lending library. Shiki’s favorites were historical romances, especially those of Takizawa Bakin, and he copied out favorite passages. Later, they attended lectures on Confucianism given by Kawahigashi Seikei, Hekigotō’s father, and, with Seikei’s encouragement, formed clubs for reading Chinese poetry and for practicing calligraphy and painting. Minami related, We drew landscapes and often expressed our desire to live in such tranquil places; this became our ideal. But first, we thought, how about taking a hike to a mountain with good scenery? We finally settled on Iwaya. Iwaya, about seven ri south of Matsuyama, is one of the eighty-eight sacred places in the pilgrimage route around the island of Shikoku. . . . This was our first trip together. What made us choose Iwaya? There were reasons. Obviously, it was for the scenery, but a boy named Umeki had recently joined our group, and since he came from the region, he could guide us. . . . Up to the halfway point, the road was good and we had no problems, but going through Misaka Pass proved to be difficult. The scenery was fine—from there you can see right below your eyes the whole Dōgo plain. Shiki was then fifteen, and we were two years older. The hike wasn’t much of a struggle for us, but Shiki, being younger and not very strong, got extremely tired on the way. We took turns helping him to walk, his hands on our shoulders. By the time we reached Morimatsu and could see Matsuyama Castle, it was getting dark

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and Shiki was no longer able to walk. People in the village told us of a farmer who also worked as a rickshaw man. We went to his house and, with some difficulty, persuaded him to take Shiki back home in his rickshaw.39 Shiki was apparently not discouraged by his inability to walk the entire distance. A few years later he recorded his remembrance of the journey in these terms: In 1881, when I was fifteen, Minami, Ōta, and Takemura40 urged me to accompany them to some caves. Courage suddenly welled up within me, and I paid no attention to my mother when she begged me not to go, saying that with my weak legs I wouldn’t be able to keep up with boys older than myself. I put on straw sandals and set off full of confidence. It was fun inspecting the caves at Kuma Mountain, some of them only ten ri from where I was born, but after spending a night there, my legs were so tired that on the return journey I could hardly take a step ahead. I fell again and again.41 After the disappointing end of this journey, anyone but Shiki might have concluded that his mother was right: he was not strong enough to make a difficult hike. But Shiki was not one to give up easily.

2 student days

I

n elementary school Shiki had joined with friends to publish a literary magazine that circulated in the school. His contributions were not much more than what one might expect of a bright twelveyear-old, but they are varied and give some promise he might develop into a writer. These are his oldest surviving writings. He composed no poetry in Japanese. Shiki entered middle school in 1880. The Matsuyama Middle School was founded in 1876 with Kusama Tokuyoshi (1853–1932) as its first principal. Kusama, a graduate of Keiō University, had studied with Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), the great advocate of the “Japanese Enlightenment.” Far more active politically than usual among school principals of this period, he encouraged students to discuss current issues, but his liberal views led to a dismissal from his post. He not only lost his job but also, a year later, was sentenced to house arrest for having published an article entitled “Repressive Governments Should Be Overthrown.” His superiors considered he had no right to express controversial opinions.

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At the time the government was disturbed by the threat that the fledgling Jiyū Minken (Freedom and Civil Rights) movement seemed to pose to the stability of the country. The dismissal of Kusama in 1879 was part of much wider efforts to suppress antigovernmental views. Kusama had been so popular with the students that when he was dismissed, many students left the school; however, according to Minami Hajime, Kusama’s influence lingered on: students continued to read such works as Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, and Rousseau’s A Treatise on the Social Contract.1 The students, also under Kusama’s influence, practiced speaking on political subjects. According to Minami, one could always hear speeches emanating from the classrooms. Students, eager to learn about politics, attended public hearings at the newly founded prefectural assembly. At the same time, there was a revival of samurai interests, notably martial sports and the Noh. Minami recalled, We were not particularly interested in singing Noh, but, as samurai, we wanted to learn kendō [fencing], and I still had all the necessary gear in my house. After school, the five of us would generally gather in the inside courtyard of my house and start exchanging thrusts. Shiki of course was one of the most enthusiastic. He was definitely not effeminate.2 In October 1881 Emperor Meiji issued an edict stating that a parliament would be convened in 1890. About this time Shiki frequently cut classes in order to attend political rallies. He wrote Minami, then living in Tokyo, that he envied his being able to hear speeches delivered by famous politicians. This interest had the effect of temporarily distancing Shiki from such earlier enthusiasms as Chinese poetry. He wrote Minami on October 22, 1882, comparing unfavorably run-of-the-mill Confucianists with scholars of Western learning. He declared that anyone

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who did not read Western books was likely to be dismissed as a hidebound old fogey.3 Shiki not only listened to speeches but also delivered his own at school. One friend who heard them wrote that Shiki spoke in a weak, low voice and that the contents of the speeches were literary and emotional rather than political.4 Surviving texts of the speeches indicate that although Shiki seemed at times rather radical in his demands that the Japanese enjoy the freedom of Europeans, his speeches tended to be mild and repetitious. A typical speech, delivered on January 14, 1883, in anticipation of the first session of a national assembly, bears the farcical title of “Heaven Is About to Vouchsafe a Black Lump” (“black lump” [kokkai] is a homonym of the term for “National Assembly”).5 There is nothing humorous in the speech itself, but occasionally we hear Shiki’s youthful voice in such exclamations as, “If anyone impiously dares to go against His Majesty’s will and says that the creation of the black lump should be postponed, should he not be called a despicable scoundrel?” Shiki’s speeches were for the benefit of fellow students, not for the public, but Yanagihara Kyokudō, who later became Shiki’s close friend and disciple, recalled that a teacher had interrupted Shiki’s “Black Lump” speech and warned him that the police were always on the lookout for anyone who criticized the government. Students were asked not to make political speeches, for their own sakes and for the sake of the school.6 Shiki became obsessed with the necessity of going to Tokyo. In a speech he delivered to the Young Men’s Association on December 17, 1882, he urged his listeners to leave provincial Matsuyama, no place for a hero to reside, and to head as soon as possible for Tokyo. “You won’t find whales swimming in shallow water,” he declared.7 Shiki wrote his uncle Katō Tsunetada (1859–1923),8 who was living in the capital, saying he wanted to go to Tokyo. At first the uncle advised Shiki not to come, but Shiki, anticipating that he would eventually yield,

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in May 1883 withdrew from the Matsuyama Middle School intending to transfer to a middle school in Tokyo. Finally, on June 8, a letter came from Uncle Katō giving his permission. Overjoyed, Shiki said that nothing since his birth had given him such happiness. He wasted no time in departing for the capital; he left Matsuyama by ship on June 10, reaching Tokyo two days later. His account of his impressions, written a year later, is in the familiar vein of the reactions of a boy from the country to his first visit to the big city. Shiki’s ship docked in Yokohama, and from there he went by train to Tokyo. He described his search for a friend in the capital, his former classmate Yanagihara Kyokudō: I arrived in Shinbashi Station in Tokyo for the first time on June 14, last year. The rickshaw I took went by way of a back street of the Ginza to the Hisamatsu residence9 at Hamano-chō in Nihonbashi Ward. I never expected Tokyo to be so dirty. After visiting the residence, I made my way to an inn called Baishitsu on the other side of the river and asked if Yanagihara was there. I was told he had moved to the house of a Mr. Suzuki in Yumi-chō, Hongō. I had no idea where Hongō was, but I set off without bothering to ask directions. The woman at the inn, laughing, called to me, “You’re going the wrong way.” I changed course immediately and headed in the direction she indicated. It was still before nine in the morning. I followed along the river until I came to Kodenma Street. Here I found myself before the tracks of the horse tramcar. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure whether it was all right to cross over the tracks. While I hesitated, I noticed a man striding over them, so I hesitantly crossed. I don’t remember which street I took afterward, but I think I went over Izumi Bridge (or was it Eyeglass Bridge?). I was now wandering in the Yushima area. I didn’t know you could ask directions of a policeman, but after asking the way at various shops, I finally reached Yumi-chō.10

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When Shiki finally found Yanagihara’s house and rang the bell, Minami appeared at the door. Both were astonished: neither expected to find the other in Tokyo. Some days afterward Shiki and Minami went to Mokubo Temple on the island of Mukō-jima, where they were joined by Uncle Katō. Shiki would later recall that his burgeoning interest in philosophy was the result of the uncle’s description that day of the difference between essence and appearance. Shiki added, however, “I still did not know what philosophy was. Moreover, when my uncle asked me what my aim in life was, I said it was to become a politician.” His uncle said jestingly, “I suppose you hope to become the prime minister.” “That’s right,” replied Shiki. In more serious terms, he wrote, If I had to say why I settled on the law and politics as my vocation, it’s because while I was still in Matsuyama someone told me I must have a vocation. This perplexed me extremely. My taste was for composing poetry and prose, but because I had adopted the attitudes of scholars of Chinese learning, I thought that being a poet or a painter was unworthy as a man’s lifetime vocation. But no other profession attracted me. I detested medicine, and of course I abominated physics and chemistry. I thought it would be preferable to choose the law or politics, and that is how I decided on my vocation.11 A month after his arrival in Tokyo he entered Kyōritsu Gakkō,12 where he was delighted with the lectures he heard on Zhuangzi; he says he had never imagined philosophy could be so interesting. By the spring of 1885 he had definitely made up his mind he would be a philosopher. He declared that he would not waver in this resolution, regardless of what people might say.13 He also studied English. Shiki was fortunate in his English teachers. At Kyōritsu Gakkō the instructor was Takahashi Korekiyo (1854–1936).14

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Shiki had little to say about Takahashi, though he was an outstanding economist who would eventually rise to be the prime minister. Later, during the summer of 1884, Shiki studied English at a cram school, where his teacher was Tsubouchi Shōyō (1849–1935), who would establish himself the next year as the leading Japanese literary figure.15 Shiki commented, “This teacher’s lectures were as enjoyable as a professional raconteur’s anecdotes, and while listening to them, I got quite carried away. But he did not help beginners like myself in our study of English.”16 Shiki’s next teacher of English (at the First Higher Middle School), the well-known historian James Murdoch (1856–1921), corrected Shiki’s first surviving English composition (1890). For example, in Shiki’s opening phrases (“Before we start for the description”) Murdoch replaced Shiki’s “for the description of” with “to describe.” The corrections, though careful, were not so extensive as to suggest Shiki was as hopeless in English as he often insisted.17 His essay “Baseo as a Poet,” written two years later, in 1892, is virtually free of errors. It opens, If the rule is the best is the simplest holds good in rhetoric, our Japanese “hotsuku” [pronounced “hokku”] must be the best of literature at that point. Hotsuku, which is composed of 17 syllables, should perhaps be the shortest form of verses in the world. . . . We shall try to translate some of Baseo’s poems, words by words (neglecting the metre and rhyme) to show the Japanese rhetoric. He followed this with a translation of Bashō’s most famous haiku: The old mere! A frog jumping in, The sound of water.18 Shiki seems to have read a surprising number of literary works in English. Minami Hajime remembered having lent Shiki an English

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translation of Goethe’s Faust.19 Shiki read it and expressed his interest in the alternation of poetry and prose, an interest that may have influenced the composition of his story “Manjushage.”20 Shiki was moved by the European novels he read, perhaps most profoundly by the English translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. His only reference to this work is a diary entry in Byōshō rokushaku (A SixFoot Sickbed) for November 16, 1897, where he mentions reading it;21 but his disciple Satō Kōroku (1874–1945) mentioned how he, along with other disciples who gathered around Shiki’s sickbed, heard the “lectures” Shiki frequently gave on the book. Satō also recalled that Shiki had been planning to block the back gate of his garden to keep out undesired visitors, but when he read in Les Misérables how Father Myriel had allowed a convict to enter his house, he decided to leave the back gate unlocked.22 Shiki’s Japanese translation of a section of one chapter of the English translation is all that survives.23 It is difficult to determine when and why he made it, and whether or not he planned to translate the whole book.24 Further proof of his ability to read English is found in the account of the fire that destroyed his house when he was still a baby. He wrote, “Years later, I read an English novel (I think it was Lytton’s Godolphin). Close to the end, the hero, frustrated in his ambitions, dejectedly returns to his birthplace. As he approaches his old home, he looks up in its direction and sees, at the crest of the hill, his house is in flames. At this point in the novel, my breast began to heave and my heart filled with grief. I sympathized with the hero’s cruel fate and could not but recall my mother’s account of the long-ago fire.”25 Godolphin, like all of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s turgidly written novels, is not easy reading today even for a native speaker, but Shiki not only read such books in English but was moved by them. He also read philosophical works by Herbert Spencer and an English translation of a novel by Émile Zola. On several occasions he wrote essays comparing Japanese works of literature with European novels.26

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Shiki came to believe at this time that although poetry continued to appeal most to him, the novel was the most important form of literature. He would attempt several times to compose poetic fiction, but never successfully. Shiki’s first love (as we have seen) was for poetry in Chinese, and almost to the end of his life he continued to compose kanshi. He briefly studied tanka in 1885 with Ide Masao (1837–1909), a Matsuyama poet; and his interest in haiku grew stronger in 1887, back in Matsuyama, after meeting the haiku poet Ōhara Kijū (1812–1889). Kijū chose for inclusion in his haiku magazine, Masago no shirabe, one of ten haiku Shiki showed him. This was Shiki’s first haiku to be printed: mushi no ne wo fumiwake yuku ya no no komichi27

Trampling through Insect cries, I create A path through the fields.

It was unusual for a poet to study poetry in three distinct forms (kanshi, tanka, and haiku), but Shiki refused to be confined. He was one of the first to use the word shika to include all varieties of poetry.28 He described his months while at Kyōritsu Gakkō, a student of philosophy with a marked interest in literature: “Although I had decided on philosophy, I had a passion for poetry, and I was so fond of novels that I was sure I couldn’t live without them.” Unable to decide between philosophy and poetry, he told people that philosophy was his vocation and poetry merely a diversion. He wished there were some way of combining the two but feared they were incompatible: Buddhist priests did not write novels and he had never heard anyone say that Spencer had composed poetry. The essay ends on a cheerful note. “Later on, I discovered there was something called aesthetics, and that it was possible to discuss in a philosophical manner arts such as poetry and painting. I felt like jumping for joy. My career was finally headed in the right direction. It was the big

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event of the year.” In a note he added, “I mentioned Spencer because at that time I probably did not know the name of any other philosopher.”29 Shiki’s joy over the discovery of aesthetics did not last long. In 1890 he received from his uncle Katō a volume of Eduard von Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Schönen. Shiki could not read German, but he got help from Minami Hajime, who later became a professor of German. Natsume Sōseki recalled that Shiki childishly brandished his copy of Hartmann’s text at school in the hopes of impressing other students with his knowledge of philosophy,30 but the strain of attempting, even with help, to read a language of which he was totally ignorant proved too much for Shiki and he abandoned the study of aesthetics. At first, however, Shiki was so carried away by optimism at having found his métier that he decided to take the entrance examination for Tokyo University Preparatory School31 instead of graduating from Kyōritsu Gakkō in the normal number of years. He was well aware that he was insufficiently prepared. His English (at least in his opinion) was fatally weak, but he took the exams in September 1884 for the experience and the fun, resigned to probable failure. Although Shiki hadn’t prepared for the exam, he found the questions in most subjects surprisingly easy. The big problem, as he anticipated, was English. When the examination sheet was distributed, he picked it up, all fear and trembling. One look was all he needed to realize that he understood almost nothing in the five English questions. He recalled, In the first place, there were so many unfamiliar words that there was no chance of guessing the meanings, no matter how long I pondered the questions. During the exam my classmates were seated in a row at desks in one corner (we had promised in advance to have secret communications with one another). My neighbor passed to me the meanings of difficult words in the questions, and this gave me something like a general idea of what the questions meant. I wrote my answers more or less at random. At one point,

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when I was having difficulty with an English word, the man next to me informed me it meant hōkan. I should say that the man seated closest to me was just as ignorant of English, and the answers that reached me had in fact come again and again from another man two or three desks away. However, if the word actually meant hōkan [a clown], the sentence simply didn’t make sense. I doubted this could be the meaning, but in my ignorance, I had no choice but to write “clown” in my translation. When I think back on it now, I realize that it must have been the homonym hōkan, a judge. In the process of being whispered by one man to the next, hōkan [the word for “judge”] had become hōkan [homonym meaning “clown”], and that was the cause of my mistake.32 It was extremely funny, confusing a clown with a judge.33 The day when the results of the examinations were posted, I didn’t feel there was enough chance of having passed to justify traveling all the way to the preparatory school, but a classmate persuaded me to go. Much to my surprise, I had passed, and the man who kindly revealed to me the meaning of English words had failed. I felt terribly sorry for him. Five or six of my classmates had taken the exams, but only Kikuchi Senko34 and I had passed. His success in passing the examination indicates that, even if he didn’t know the meaning of “judge,” his English was superior to that of his classmates; one must read with caution his insistent declarations of incompetence in English. Cheating on examinations, of the kind that helped Shiki to pass the exam, was quite normal. Shiki first learned how to cheat when he took the entrance examination, and in time he came to think nothing of it. However, about two years later, it occurred to him that borrowing somebody else’s strength to answer examination questions was not only dishonest but also extremely contemptible, and from then on he never again cheated, regardless of the circumstances.35

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After he had safely entered the preparatory school, he seems to have lost his interest in studying: I thought I should do some studying, and I actually did study for a while, but only English. Study in my case consisted of spending one night a month at my books. I made almost no daily preparations for classes. What did I do when I went back to my room from school? I would either chat with friends or read ninjōbon by Shunsui.36 It was not surprising that a young man of seventeen found love stories more enjoyable than texts of philosophy, but it is surprising that this young man seems to have had no romantic attachments, not even dreams of finding someone he could love. Later on in his life, when he was stricken with severe illness, a love affair was, of course, out of the question, but even while he was in good health he seems never to have experienced love. Despite the efforts of Shiki scholars to find a love interest in his life, none has been discovered. The most promising candidate as a lover failed to show any sign of recognition when Shiki’s friends told her of his death, much to the disappointment of the friends.37 It is conceivable that Shiki had one or more affairs with women or experienced love but that stern Confucian beliefs made him reluctant to mention parts of his life that a superior man was supposed to keep to himself. In this respect Shiki differed diametrically from his near contemporary Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), who amply documented his love life. The closest Shiki came to feeling love may have been with nature, the subject of much of his poetry. Shiki wrote in 1896, Along about the time that I came of age, I sought from the world what everyone seeks from the world, but I discovered that it could not satisfy my passion. I decided to seek it from nature. When I gazed on nature with passion, nature, which hitherto had seemed

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apart from me, suddenly sprang into life, and everything surrounding me began to talk to me with feeling. . . . The most important element in the beauty of nature is the colors. Nature has hundreds if not thousands of colors; the colors of the world of human beings are dull and clouded.38 Shiki’s pleasure in nature contrasted with his indifference to his study of philosophy. Philosophy was a new branch of learning in Japan. The word tetsugaku had been created only fifteen years earlier by Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) as a translation for the English word.39 As a philosophy major, Shiki took Professor Ludwig Busse’s course Introduction to Philosophy, but he confessed that he had not the slightest comprehension of Busse’s lectures. He gave as an example of his bewilderment the question of whether or not there is a reality of substance. He recalled, “I thought I didn’t want to study philosophy if it was so incomprehensible. That is why I rarely attended philosophy classes.” 40 Shiki felt no compunction about cutting classes, but he could not avoid exams. In 1891 he decided to prepare three days before a philosophy exam by taking his lecture notes with him to the quiet surroundings of Mokubo Temple on Mukō-jima, the place where he had been profoundly impressed by his uncle’s philosophic discourse. The proprietress of a restaurant said he could stay in a second-story room that happened to be vacant. He wrote, I climbed upstairs and began reading my hectographed notes, but something like a fog lay over them and I had difficulty in understanding anything. I couldn’t make sense of the philosophy and the hectograph was blurred. On top of that, my brains were in bad shape, and there was no likelihood I would understand what I read. After skimming through twenty pages, I couldn’t take any more. My mind was in a daze. So, pencil and a notebook in hand, I went for a walk. Outside, it was lovely late spring weather. The

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double cherry blossoms had fallen, and on a path through the fields the milk vetches were at their peak. Thinking that something might be turned into a haiku, I strolled along a ridge through the rice fields. I was in wonderfully good spirits. Not a trace remained of my brain fever. After I had walked about an hour, I returned to my upstairs room, but once I got back, the fatigue returned and I did not feel like returning immediately to my studies. I opened my notebook and eagerly tried revising some halffinished haiku. I still had absolutely no understanding of haiku, but inspiration in fact came rather frequently all the same. Any stupid haiku I managed to compose I would think a masterpiece, and this would make me uncontrollably happy. I would try also to twist my words into silly tanka. That is how it happened that in three whole days I barely managed to read through my notes one and a half times. By contrast, I had composed some twenty or thirty haiku and tanka. All the same, I somehow got through the exam in one way or another. I might mention that Professor Busse was said never to fail anyone, so I can’t be sure that I really passed.41 Shiki was temperamentally unsuited to the study of philosophy, at least as it was taught at this time. Even so, he did better in the philosophy exam than one in geometry, which he failed. He claimed it was not because he was incapable of learning mathematics but because his teacher insisted that only English could be used in the geometry class. Shiki complained that he had been forced to take on two enemies at the same time—English and mathematics—and that was more than he could stand. He repeated the course, and this time (because the teacher did not insist on English) he passed without difficulty.42 Occasionally he felt envious of boys who knew more than himself. In the middle of 1886, while he was living in Saruwaku-chō, he had an unexpected visitor, a student named Yoneyama Yasusaburō. A classmate of Shiki’s, they occasionally had exchanged casual greetings. Shiki, though

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he was at first unimpressed by Yoneyama, was aware that he knew something about mathematics (his father was a noted mathematician), but in every other respect he seemed childish. He invited Yoneyama in, wondering why he had paid a visit. Shiki’s first “shock” came when Yoneyama started to discuss the highest realms of mathematics—differential and integral calculus. “Then,” Shiki related, “I had my second shock: his conversation switched from mathematics to metaphysics. It had never occurred to me that he might know about philosophy. I had a third shock: he had already read several books of philosophy, at any rate Spencer’s Tetsugaku genron.” 43 The last and worst shock was the fourth: he was two years younger than Shiki. In Matsuyama he had been younger than any of his friends, and being the youngest was in fact his biggest source of self-satisfaction. At Kyōritsu Gakkō, he was always ranked as a boy (shōnen), and was relieved that there were no outstanding students of the kind he expected to find in Tokyo. But Yoneyama was younger, and his subjects of conversation were all on high-browed, transcendent matters far beyond Shiki’s most arcane thoughts. His mind was stimulated as never before. That evening they had dinner at Matsumoto, a Western-style restaurant. Afterward, they went back to Shiki’s lodgings and conversed until midnight. Reluctant to separate from him, he asked Yoneyama if he would spend the night. He accepted and remained until the next morning. Shiki recalled, “That day I was to play baseball with the upperclassmen, but I didn’t feel like it. A friend came and urged me to join the others. I couldn’t refuse. Fortunately, the game that day was called off. But my elevated intellectual state did not last two days.” 44 Shiki’s excitement over his brilliant new friend did not last long, but baseball developed into something of a mania. His photograph in which he is wearing a baseball uniform and holding a bat has often been reproduced, inducing many people to suppose that Shiki introduced the sport to Japan. A baseball field near Bunka Kaikan in Ueno has been named after him. Baseball had in fact been taught to students of the First Higher

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Middle School in 1873 by an American professor, Horace Wilson. A game between the students and a team of American residents in Yokohama took place five years later; this is considered to mark the beginning of baseball in Japan. Shiki presumably learned the game from acquaintances at the First Higher Middle School. He not only learned the rules of baseball but also taught his disciples to play. Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937) recalled, I learned about baseball from Shiki. At the time it was known only to the students of the First Higher Middle School. I recall it was in the summer of 1880, when I had just turned sixteen. An older brother who was studying in Tokyo told me about an interesting game called baseball and urged me to meet Masaoka, then back in Matsuyama. He said he had borrowed a ball and a bat. It wasn’t poetry or literature that made close friends of Shiki and myself, it was baseball. And that’s how it happened baseball came so early to a place in the sticks like Matsuyama. I took a strange pride in being one of the founders of baseball in Matsuyama. He explained what to do when the ball came in high, and what to do when it came in low. This first lesson in baseball was rather like physics and was probably the first real conversation I ever had with Shiki. Unlike my brother, there was something elegant in his way of talking, and his attitude was one of warmth and gentleness. I was shy and nervous from beginning to end. .  .  . I also visited Shiki’s house for the first time, because he promised to explain the general rules of baseball. At the time there were still no suitable translations of baseball terminology as there are today, and I was extremely weak in English.45 Shiki subsequently made translations of the terms, some still used today.46 His interest was genuine, but it is hard to understand what in baseball so attracted him. He gave as an explanation of the superiority of

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baseball the scarcity of indigenous Japanese sports, some of which (like kemari) were played only by the nobility. Baseball was supreme because it not only provided the players with excellent exercise but also trained them in tactics. Shiki’s pleasure in the sport was conveyed by a haiku composed on April 7, 1890: harukaze ya mari no nagetaki kusa no hara

Spring breezes— How I’d love to throw a ball Over a grassy field.

Shiki’s first meeting with his main disciple, Takahama Kyoshi (1874– 1959), also took place on a baseball field. Kyoshi, at the time a middleschool student, was practicing batting when some young men, dressed in Tokyo-style finery, appeared on the field. They asked the Matsuyama boys to lend them a bat and ball. One of them, less well dressed than the others, hit a ball that landed close to Kyoshi. He returned the ball and the young man thanked him. Kyoshi only later learned that he was Shiki.47 Shiki was no doubt sincere in his enthusiasm for baseball, but it was surprising in view of his previous dislike for sports. Journey to Mito, written in 1889, opens with a statement giving Shiki’s attitude toward exercise: “I have been a weakling from the day I was born. Hating every form of outdoor activity, I remained shut up in my room, clinging to the gold of poetic language.” 48 Early overnight hikes had left him exhausted and incapable of walking, but he had not renounced travel. The journey to Mito would prove a disaster marked by terrible weather, inedible food, and nasty innkeepers. Shiki was eager to accept pain. He explained, I’ve always prided myself on being able to endure anything. I go in for exercise that is both irregular and excessive, considering how

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weak I am. This only leads to pain, but I think nothing of it. If I am dressed, I hate to take off my clothes. If I have taken off my clothes, I hate dressing even more. Even when it is bitterly cold, I often go outdoors in thin clothes, though I am sensitive to the cold. That is how it happened that all I brought with me in preparation for the journey to Mito was one lined kimono and one silver-thread shirt. I didn’t bring a change of clothes, but even when I was shivering all over, I merely noted that it was cold and, serene as Daruma after gaining enlightenment, I did not consider whether being cold was good or bad. That wasn’t all. In the midst of these experiences, I had the revelation that exposing myself to the elements would make me strong and train my mind. Such thoughts were certainly stupid. My frightening experience aboard a boat would, a month later, give me the name Shiki.49 Shiki was constantly testing himself, subjecting himself to unnecessary pain in the stoical effort to overcome physical weakness. Despite his aversion for outdoor activity, he was intrigued by baseball. He doubtless was attracted to a team sport unlike any in Japan, but he may have enjoyed not so much the pleasure as the painful exercise. He pushed selfpunishment to a dangerous extreme—the boat ride in freezing weather, described in the account of his journey to Mito, caused a bout of severe seasickness, and this, combined with the cold, led to his coughing blood a month later. Or so he was convinced.

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n May 9, 1889, Shiki suddenly coughed blood. At first he supposed the blood had come from a lesion in his throat (as had happened once before), but on the following day the doctor whom he consulted diagnosed the cause as lung disease. The doctor warned him that he was likely to run a fever and urged him to rest, but Shiki chose instead to attend on the same day a gathering that he felt he could not avoid. The same night, about eleven, he suffered another bout of coughing blood. Between then and two in the morning he composed forty or fifty hokku1 about the hototogisu, the bird whose song sounds as if it is coughing blood. They included u-no-hana wo megakete kita ka hototogisu

Has he come heading For the deutzia blossom? The hototogisu.

u-no-hana no chiru made naku ka hototogisu

Does it plan to sing Until the deutzia blossoms fall? The hototogisu.

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When writing these hokku, Shiki used for the first time the nom de plume Shiki.2 The word u-no-hana (deutzia; literally, “rabbit flower”) appeared in these hokku because the season was uzuki, the rabbit, or fifth, month of the lunar calendar, when the deutzia bloomed. It also refers to Shiki’s birth in unotoshi (the year of the rabbit). The flower that Shiki associated with his life is menaced by a bird that sings of death. The next morning, perhaps out of fatigue from having composed hokku until late the previous night, his coughing of blood resumed. It would be repeated every night for a week.3 Shiki at first was optimistic. In the letter he wrote his uncle Ōhara on May 11, he described his illness as an inflammation of the right lung and said that the doctor had predicted he would recover completely in a few days.4 The doctor in fact had advised him to return to Matsuyama and recommended that he bathe in the sea, drink wine, and get plenty of fresh air. Shiki could not take this advice immediately because of exams, but once they had ended, he left Tokyo by train on July 3 and traveled in easy stages to Kobe.5 From there he went by ship to the port of Mitsu, and finally by rickshaw to Matsuyama, arriving on July 7. These developments are related by Shiki in a curious work called “How I Coughed Blood” (Teiketsu shimatsu) that recalls, mainly in a humorous vein, how he was summoned by Enma, the Great King of Hell, to stand trial for the grave misdemeanor of having contracted a serious illness. The Great King himself and his two prosecutors, a red and a blue devil, interrogate Shiki on the causes and effects of his sickness. Shiki’s answers are detailed and on the whole factual, going back as far as the nickname “crybaby” that he was given as a child because of his weakness and fear of others. He has always disliked outdoor exercise and avoided it. This may be why he was susceptible to illness; but now he shares with ordinary people a fondness for “base-ball” 6 and says that he plans to continue playing “base-ball” even after he becomes a hungry demon in hell. He asks if there are big, level fields in hell, and the red devil, assuring him that there are such fields, promises that once Shiki arrives in hell, the demons will treat him as a ball and beat him with iron bats.

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The device of an interrogation by devils enabled Shiki to give the most detailed account of the early history of his illness to be found in his writings. He traced the successive stages beginning with what the doctor in Tokyo had told him after he first coughed blood. Next Shiki gave the rather different opinion of a doctor in Matsuyama after he returned home in July, and this is followed by the probable cause of the illness— the boat trip he took during his excursion to Mito. The cold had made him shake all over, and for about two weeks after returning to Tokyo from Mito he suffered severe abdominal pains and shivering three times a night. The red devil declares that Shiki committed a serious crime in catching lung disease without even the excuse of heredity. He was guilty of unfilial behavior toward his father because he had done nothing to increase the prestige of the family. Causing his mother anxiety because of his illness had also been an act of unfilial behavior. From the standpoint of philosophy (his chosen profession), he is a criminal who, though born in the world, has failed to do all his duties as a human being; he was unable to study sufficiently the principles of philosophy and, even granting that he studied them a little, he had failed to put them into practice. From the standpoint of his duties as a citizen, he had been unable to perform military service and had done nothing to increase national glory. He had neither contributed to the country’s prosperity nor promoted industry. One has no choice but to call him a parasite, worse than an animal. In view of these grave crimes, he would be allowed no more than another ten years of life, but he would be given a deferment of from five to thirty years before being sent to hell. Concluding his summation, the red devil expresses the opinion that it would be appropriate for Shiki to suffer in a burning hell because on earth he was always complaining of the cold. Shiki replies somewhat lamely, blaming his sickness on poverty. At this, the Great King declares the session is adjourned and that a sentence will be forthcoming.7

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This farcical account of trial and punishment was written in September 1889, at a time when Shiki was bedridden. He gradually recovered his health and was able to visit old friends and teachers in Matsuyama. By the end of September Shiki felt strong enough to return to Tokyo, but the remission would prove to be short. From the inception of his illness, friends in Tokyo and Matsuyama visited him often and sent him letters. This was his greatest pleasure. None of the letters he received was more welcome than those from Natsume Sōseki. Sōseki and Shiki met in 1884 when they entered the university preparatory school at the same time. At first their acquaintance was casual, but the friendship of the greatest novelist and the greatest poet of the Meiji era became intimate after 1889 and would last until Shiki’s death, although, apart from their student days and one relatively brief period when they shared a house in Matsuyama, letters were their only means of communication. Shiki and Sōseki made an unusual pair. Shiki had been brought up in a small town on the island of Shikoku; Sōseki was born and raised in Tokyo. Shiki turned to Sōseki for advice and for information on exams, but he was astonished by Sōseki’s ignorance of everyday life. He related in A Drop of Ink that on one occasion the two friends had gone for a stroll in a part of Tokyo that had not been built up. Seedlings that had recently been transplanted to the wet fields were swaying in the wind. Shiki found this sight most attractive, perhaps because it reminded him of Matsuyama. To his astonishment, he discovered that the city-bred Sōseki was unaware that these seedlings produced the rice that the Japanese ate every day. He added, “It often happened that this gentleman from the city was unable to distinguish between beans and wheat. Any city dweller who wants to become a human being must live for a time in the countryside.” 8 Despite the differences stemming from their dissimilar backgrounds, Sōseki and Shiki were undoubtedly friends. One of Sōseki’s earliest letters to Shiki, dated May 13, 1889, relates his concern over Shiki’s illness.

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He wrote that, after paying a visit to Shiki’s sickroom, he had stopped on the way back home to ask a doctor his opinion. He was told that Shiki’s illness was not serious and would not require him to be hospitalized; but the doctor also warned that a cold easily develops into any one of a hundred kinds of illness. It was crucial that Shiki get sufficient rest. Sōseki, not satisfied with this diagnosis, in the letter urged Shiki to go to a nearby hospital for ten days of treatment and rest. This should cure him completely, perhaps in as little as five days. He appended the English phrase “to live is the sole end of man!” and two haiku: kaerō to nakazu ni warae hototogisu

I’ll be leaving, Laugh and don’t weep, Hototogisu

kikō to te tare mo matanu ni hototogisu9

Nobody is waiting To hear you sing Hototogisu

The tone of Sōseki’s letter (though it lacks the humor displayed in later letters) is not foreboding. It did not occur to him or to any other friend that Shiki was stricken with tuberculosis, a dangerous and often fatal disease. Shiki had seen friends die young. Shimizu Noritō, who had lived in the same dormitory, died of heart failure induced by beriberi in April 1886. Shiki had watched over his last moments and made the funeral arrangements.10 Shiki did not in his writings express fear that he, like Shimizu, might die young, but surely the thought must have occurred to him. Sōseki’s next letter, sent two weeks later to Shiki at the dormitory where he resided, made no mention of his illness but was instead a critique of Nanakusa shū (Collection of Seven Grasses), perhaps Shiki’s oddest composition.11 In the standard edition of his complete works Nanakusa shū opens with sixteen photographs of picturesque scenes around Tokyo that Shiki had visited during his summer vacation in 1888.

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The photographs are followed by an account written in kanbun of the pleasant holiday Shiki spent with his friends Minami Hajime and Fujino Kohaku, sightseeing and admiring the beauties of nature along the Sumida River. A separate section is devoted to descriptions of places of exceptional beauty, also couched in kanbun, and it is followed by fortyone kanshi.12 The language of the text shifts at this point to Japanese, a barrage of tanka that rarely rise above prose. One tanka bears the title “When a Friend Came to Pay a Visit”: marebito no kyō wa kinikeri kusa no to ni chikara no kagiri fuke ya kawakaze13

Someone from afar Has come to visit today; Into my thatched hut, With all the strength you possess, Blow, you wind from the river.

Needless to say, the wind is being urged to blow so as to cool the visitor in the summer heat, not in order to scare him away. Another tanka was written in the persona of a merchant who sold sakura no mochi:14 hana no ka wo wakaba ni komete kōbashiki sakura no mochii tsuto ni se yo15

The flowers’ fragrance Permeating the young leaves Is sweet smelling. Buy my cherry-blossom cakes As souvenirs to take home.

These tanka are so uninteresting that surely no one reading them would have predicted that Shiki before long would develop into a major poet. Only occasionally, when an event affected him emotionally, did the poetry rise above flat statement. The best is a haiku about his grandfather’s second wife, who, though not related by blood to Shiki, had shown him special affection:

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On hearing that the old lady who looked after me when I was a small child had passed away, I choked in tears. soetake no The bamboo support orete chi ni fusu Has broken and on the ground 16 uri no hana Lies a melon flower. The section of Nanakusa shū devoted to Japanese poetry is followed by Shiki’s only Noh play. It opens in a traditional manner with a song of the chorus disclosing that, because the season is late spring, cherry-blossom petals are floating on the water. Next the waki appears and identifies himself, as a waki generally does, but with up-to-date details: I am a wandering student. Of late I have traveled to the countries of the West, but now I have returned to Tokyo. It has been such a long time since last I saw cherry blossoms by the Sumida River that I think I shall go now to Mukō-jima. This may have been the first Noh play to be set in Meiji Japan. Again, unlike the waki of the standard Noh, a Buddhist priest who is making a pilgrimage to holy places, this waki is a student just returned from the West. He is definitely a man of the Meiji era, but, like every other waki, he informs us that, because he has hurried, he has arrived unexpectedly soon at his destination—Chōmei Temple on Mukō-jima, where Shiki first felt the allure of philosophy. The waki, surprised by the great changes that have occurred since his last visit, recites Ariwara no Narihira’s most famous poem. tsuki ya aranu haru ya mukashi no haru naranu wa ga mi hitotsu wa moto no mi ni shite

Is that not the moon? And is the spring not the spring Of a year ago? This body of mine alone Remains as it was before.

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He sees by the river a cherry tree in full bloom. He decides to pick a branch, only for a young woman to appear and urge him, as the tree’s guardian, not to molest the tree. Intrigued, he asks her to tell her story, and she agrees, more readily than most ghosts. Some ten years ago, there was a shop here called the Sakura-ya. For over a hundred years it had been selling cherry rice cakes, and it was famous throughout the neighborhood. However, about ten years ago, another shop called the Mukai-ya opened. It also sold cherry rice cakes. It is the way of the world that novelty attracts people, and business at the Sakura-ya declined day after day. This so upset Hanako, the daughter of the owner, that she fell ill, but just before she died, she asked people to bury her at this spot and plant a cherry tree there. They obeyed her dying wish, and the tree is the one you now see splendidly covered with blossoms. Fewer and fewer customers visited the Sakura-ya and in the end they stopped coming altogether. Hanako’s aged parents grieved more than ever, and soon afterward they and the rest of the family departed this world. Then, strange to say, the Mukai-ya also lost its customers and finally closed. Now the village is completely deserted, and visitors rarely come here even to see the blossoms. Hearing this sad tale teaches the waki the meaning of evanescence. The shite, after performing a dance around the tree, reveals that she is the ghost of Hanako of the Sakura-ya. After she and the student exchange religious truths, she disappears.17 Shiki was perhaps attempting to demonstrate that in the Meiji era the rivalry between two rice-cake shops is worthy of being celebrated in a Noh play; but a contemporary reader may find Shiki’s play less a tragedy than a parody. The source of grief is not passions that transcend death but a pastry shop’s loss of customers. At the end the sole survivor, the ghost of the girl from the Sakura-ya, extends the tragedy to the rival shop.

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The seeming parody extends to the vocabulary. Shiki uses the traditional language of the Noh, sprinkling the text with typical stylistic devices, and there are phrases typical of Noh like yume ka utsutsu ka (is it a dream or reality?). If nothing else, the play is impressive as an example of Shiki’s virtuosity. Although he had yet to write anything of lasting literary value, he demonstrated in Nanakusa shū that he possessed the skill to write in any form he chose—poetry or prose, Chinese or Japanese. Most important, his play is set in the present, not in some vague, unchanging time, and the central figure is a girl who works in a shop. The depth he found in ordinariness distinguished his haiku and tanka from more “poetic” imagery; his poems were affecting because they were fresh. A haiku composed in the winter of 1898 is without precedent: hitorigoto nuruki tanpo wo kakaekeri

Talking to myself, hugging a hot water bottle gone tepid.18

Shiki gave the seven sections of Nanakusa shū the names of different autumnal flowers, emphasizing the variety. The conclusion of the work is a section called, in English, “Criticisms on Nanakusa shū.”19 It includes comments made by friends to whom Shiki had sent the manuscript asking them if they found even one of his “flowers” interesting. Their reactions include both praise and criticism, but all chose as their favorite the “morning glory” section, the one with the Noh play. Sōseki wrote on May 25, 1889, a kanshi describing the story of the play. It was signed Sōseki, probably his first use of this name.20 Sōseki sometimes praised Shiki’s writings but did not hesitate to point out their failings. His most pointed criticism appears in a letter of December 31, 1889, that opens with an account of the books he has been reading, including essays by Carlyle. Two or three days earlier he had begun Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. Now he asks Shiki,

the song of the hototogisu

Have you started writing the novel of ideas [shukō] that you mentioned before? This time what style do you plan to use? I fully intend to give you detailed criticism as soon as I have read it, but I can say right now that your style is too delicate [nayonayo]. You haven’t been able to shake off your habitual ladylike manner. I gather that of late you have shifted to a style more like Kōson’s.21 This is a great change, but your writing still lacks straightforward vitality, and for this reason, in my opinion, little in it excites people or gives them pleasure. Perhaps the secret of achieving beauty of style is to express directly what is in your heart, without decoration, simply and without pretension. . . . Writers who have not an idea in their heads and do no more than toy with words are of course not worthy of consideration. Even if they happen to have ideas, if they cling for no reason to the old prescriptions of style, they will not be sincere and they are unlikely to move people. Those who call themselves “contemporary novelists” have not the slightest originality of thought. All they do is ponder and criticize wording. Those who pride themselves on being “masters” of style give one the feeling of natives of Hokkaido dressed in city clothes. . . . In my opinion, if you wish to enter on a literary career and to raise a red banner that will flutter for all time to come, you must first cultivate your ideas. Once you have ripened and filled your stomach with ideas, you should take up your pen straightaway, describe what you have thought, and pour it out all at once, with the force of a sudden shower into the tumult of a great river. The beauty of the words, the rules of expression, should be considered only at three removes; I believe that they neither increase or decrease the value of the Idea itself. I am sure that you, too, have probably become aware of this, but I imagine that you are so busy writing morning to night22 that you haven’t the time to cultivate

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this Idea. Of course, if writing is a pleasure, I have no reason to insist that you stop, but writing day and night without stopping is just like a child’s writing practice. There is no likelihood that any original idea will germinate from storybooks. I can guarantee you that the pleasure you can obtain from Ideas is ten thousand times greater than the pleasure of writing practice.23 Shiki responded to Sōseki’s recommendation that he read more by saying that he didn’t own the appropriate books and didn’t even know where they could be found. Moreover, unlike Sōseki, he couldn’t read English easily. Sōseki replied brusquely that Shiki should ask someone if he didn’t know which books to read. If he couldn’t afford to buy books, he should borrow them. If he couldn’t read English, it would be a good idea to study it, and in the meantime he should read the Japanese and Chinese classics.24 Sōseki never lost his friendship for Shiki, though he criticized him not only in letters but in his recollections. He recalled, “Masaoka never appeared at school. Nor was he the kind of guy who goes to the trouble of borrowing somebody else’s notes so he can copy them. Just before exams he would ask me to come to his place. I would go and briefly describe what was in my notebooks. He, being the kind of guy he was, would listen without paying much attention, then say he understood, though he didn’t really understand.”25 Shiki would eventually reject Sōseki’s advice about the greater importance of ideas than “rhetoric,” but he was not yet sure enough as a writer to respond to the letter seriously. He had written nothing of literary significance, whether haiku or tanka, nor had he published the criticism of other men’s poetry that would soon bring him fame. Sōseki, who had read and absorbed the writings of the English critics, attempted to transmit to Shiki the fruits of his study, but his explanations, written in a mixture of English and Japanese, were not easy for Shiki to understand or accept. Sōseki wrote,

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My definition of bunshō is the following. Bunshō is an Idea that is expressed on paper by means of words. . . . Best bunshō is the best idea that is expressed in the best way by means of words on paper. The meaning of the underlined words is that when expressing one’s Idea on paper, the only function of Rhetoric is to enable the reader to understand exactly the Idea (no more, no less). Bunshō (as I use it) certainly does not refer to Rhetoric alone, but I would like you to understand that it has the meaning I have given it above.26 Shiki wrote Sōseki on January 18, 1890, declaring that there can be no literary composition without rhetoric, by which he meant aptness and beauty of language.27 The debate between the two men as to which is more important, thought or language, would continue for some time without damaging their friendship, though there were moments of tension. On August 9, 1890, Sōseki wrote Shiki a letter of despair: Of late the world has become somehow repellent. The more I think about it, the less I can overcome this feeling. But is the fact that I haven’t the courage to kill myself a sign that there is still something human about me after all? Faust prepared the poison he lifted to his lips, but in the end he could not drink it. Remembering Goethe’s work, I laugh bitterly to myself.28 Shiki’s answer on August 15 was cheerful. It opens with a flippant account of the recent heat wave, and then offers some humorous observations on such subjects as eyesight and sleep, and also describes a case of Confucius’s being unsuccessful as a lover. His letter contains not one word of comfort for a friend in agony, suggesting that although they enjoyed each other’s company, the marked difference of personality sometimes impeded communication. Sōseki was solitary and sensed a chasm separating him from the world. Shiki was gregarious. He wrote in

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Fudemakase in 1889, “I enjoy company. But I also dislike company. Why do I like company? It is because when you have a good friend, you can discuss with him whatever is on your mind, and you and he can help each other when in trouble.”29 In this instance Shiki had not acted as a good friend. His cheerfulness was welcome, but it made it difficult for him to sympathize with or even to refer to Sōseki’s despair. In the same section of Fudemakase Shiki listed nineteen friends, identifying each with a word that evoked his special qualification as a friend. Sōseki was listed as “revered friend.”30 Sōseki, who wrote surprisingly little about Shiki, may have thought of him as a gifted and amusing man who lacked an understanding of the concerns that constantly tormented Sōseki. Despite his professed admiration of philosophy, Shiki had little interest in abstract thought or methodology. His criticism of the writings of other men would be based mainly on an intuitive appreciation of their literary worth, not on analysis nor evaluation of their contents. He took what he needed from the books that impressed him. In 1889 he read Herbert Spencer’s The Philosophy of Style and was so impressed with the dictum “the shorter the writing, the better” that it became his fundamental principle of composition. He also quoted Spencer’s phrase “minor image” in his discussion of Bashō’s celebrated haiku on the frog jumping into the old pond, taking it to mean using a small part to suggest a whole.31 He asked what better argument could there be for the excellence of the haiku, an extremely short verse form that suggests far more than it states. In 1887 Shiki, recovering from his illness in Matsuyama, took lessons with the aged haiku poet Ōhara Kijū, the central figure in Matsuyama haiku, though (according to Shiki) he was half deaf and half blind.32 Shiki wrote of Kijū, “He was literally my first teacher of haikai, and I have never had another teacher since then.” Shiki would be increasingly dissatisfied with the haiku composed in his day, but he found it equally difficult to assent to Sōseki’s insistence on plain and straightforward ex-

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pression. A haiku or a tanka without “rhetoric” was likely to be no more than a brief observation without poetic tension or illumination. Late in 1891 (the date is not certain) Shiki began work on Haiku bunrui (Haiku Classified), a classification by subject of haiku composed from early in the sixteenth century, when the haiku originated as a form of comic linked verse, to the haiku Shiki most admired, those of the late eighteenth century. This was an immense project—he wrote that if he made a stack of all the books of haiku he had examined, it would be taller than himself. He went every day to the university library to copy old books,33 but the number was daunting. He never explained what had made him undertake this monumental task; he said merely that he was ignorant of haiku, as if this were sufficient reason to attempt to read every haiku ever published. He mentions in Haikai sankeisho jo (1899), the preface to a discussion of haiku by Bashō and Buson, that he had a reason for having undertaken to classify haiku, and that in the process of making the classifications he had acquired a taste for haiku. He did not explain the nature of his “reason.”34 Some of the haiku Shiki read in the course of making this compilation came as pleasant surprises, notably the haiku of the previously neglected Buson, but the facetious humor and tedious plays on words of the early haiku before long ceased to amuse. Even such experiences would be of value when Shiki devoted himself primarily to the composition of haiku, if only because they taught him what to avoid. The great haiku of the past taught him far more, and he threw himself into the dreary process of assigning haiku to categories of season or subject with an ardor that contrasted with his lackluster performance as a student. He had awakened to haiku and to the possibility of making haiku his lifework. He wrote, Along about 1891 I became rather enthusiastic about haiku and thought of studying it seriously. I thought I would try to evoke in my haiku a few actual scenes, but the haiku I composed were by

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no means successful. I was unable to shake off my elegant, delicate manner. In the winter of this year I read for the first time the Shichibu shū35 and the Sanketsu shū and was greatly impressed. I very much wanted to go on a walking tour.36 I packed food for barely three days. I tramped over Musashino and returned. I managed to compose only ten-odd verses on the way there and back, but, unlike the day before, the tone was not feeble and the design was not delicate. There was something rather new in these haiku that captured an actual scene or showed imagination, and betrayed few traces of reworking. It was from this time that the construction of my verses became tighter and I shed the slackness.37

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ardly had Shiki acquired the confidence he could compose haiku that were distinctly his own than he decided to drop poetry and devote himself instead to works of prose he called novels (shōsetsu).1 The shift of interest was accidental, as he explained in the preface to Gin sekai (The Silver World). The magazine of the Tokiwakai, the literary club of his dormitory, had announced in December 1889 a prize for the best story submitted on the theme of “The Silver World,” a poetic but hackneyed way of referring to a snow-covered landscape. Only two writers had responded to the call for manuscripts, and neither submission was satisfactory. Shiki urged friends to take part in the competition, but all declined, declaring they had nothing new to say about snowy landscapes. Shiki, in order to make the competition more meaningful, decided to dash off a “novel” on the assigned topic without worrying too much about the plot. In January 1890, back in Matsuyama for the New Year, he wrote The Silver World. As we have seen, Shiki greatly enjoyed reading works of fiction. As  a boy he had been captivated by the novels of Takizawa Bakin

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(1767–1848), particularly the lengthy Hakkenden.2 He and a friend in Matsuyama had at one time planned to write a novel based on another work by Bakin, Suikoden,3 setting it in Japan instead of China. Shiki left for Tokyo before he had time to carry out this ambitious plan, but we know from essays in Fudemakase that his admiration for Bakin (typical for young men of the time) continued long after he had become entranced by the quite different charms of the ninjōbon. The appearance in 1886 of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Tōsei shosei katagi (The Character of Modern Students), a work describing university students of the Meiji era, greatly increased Shiki’s interest in contemporary fiction. He wrote, “It was so exciting. It all but made me leap into the air. I read it again and again, never wearying, delighted that such a book had been conceived.” 4 He later recalled, “When The Character of Modern Students was first published there was fierce controversy concerning its merits, but I found it fascinating, regardless of literary theories or anything else.” 5 Shiki next read Shōyō’s Imo to se kagami (A Mirror of Sister and Brother). This work never enjoyed the popularity of Modern Students and is all but forgotten, but Shiki was so impressed by the style and the intellectual discussions among the characters that for a time he preferred it to Modern Students. He wrote, “Modern Students was aimed at students and that made it enjoyable, but as a novel it was extremely childish.” 6 In an essay written somewhat later, tracing the history of the Japanese novel from The Tale of Genji to recent times, Shiki once again changed his mind about the value of Modern Students, this time stressing its importance, not because of its portrayal of Japanese student life, but because it displayed Shōyō’s commitment to the novel as a form of art. Shōyō, especially in his critical work Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), also written in 1886, had accused writers of the previous generation of justifying literature in terms of its importance in encouraging virtue and chastising vice, hiding behind their moralizing the contempt they felt for their own writings.7 His own opinions had been formed

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largely by his readings in European literature and criticism. Modern Students was intended to demonstrate how these views could be embodied in a work of literature. Shōyō’s proclamation of the artistic value of the novel inspired young men, even those whose education had been severely Confucian, to express themselves and their convictions in the form of works of fiction. This ran contrary to the scorn that Confucianists had usually exhibited for writings that they dismissed as fit to be read only by women and children; but the young men of the new Japan were heartened in their admiration for the novel when they discovered that Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister of the most powerful country on earth, had published works of fiction. It was not surprising that Shiki should have joined others of his generation in attempting to write novels. Unfortunately, his knowledge of fiction was still restricted largely to popular works of the late Tokugawa period and a few Meiji novels, and these were not the best models for a new literature. The Silver World is hardly a novel. It consists of an introductory section followed by four brief episodes connected only by repeated mentions of snow or silver. The introductory section consists of tableaux in the form of a peep show. Scenes are presented from the biographies of illustrious men of China and Japan whose lives were in some way connected with snow. A guide explains, in colloquial language that contrasts with the reverential tone of the author’s descriptions, the meaning of each tableau. This opening episode is amusing, but the humor is pedantic, more a display of Shiki’s familiarity with the Chinese classics than a work of comic talent. The second episode of The Silver World is in two parts. The first part describes a handsome young man and a beautiful girl as they stroll in Ueno Park on a spring day. We gather that they are in love, but the man, with surprising equanimity, compares his present happiness to cherry blossoms fated to disappear in the rain and wind of a single night, leaving only the uncertainty of whether they were real or merely a dream.

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He revives, however, at the thought that the flower of today is the fruit of tomorrow. The girl is deeply impressed by this profound revelation. Unlike the heavily Chinese flavor of the first episode, the second is almost entirely in old-fashioned Japanese, with a rich admixture of clichés. The sentences, following Heian precedents, are notably long, suggesting that Shiki was attempting to demonstrate he was capable of rivaling Murasaki Shikibu. The second part of this episode is also set in Ueno, but forty years later. It was springtime when the couple first visited the park. Then they had imagined that the cherry blossoms on the boughs were snow; but now it is winter and the snow clinging to the trees brings back memories of cherry blossoms. They know that for them spring will not come again. The old temple buildings in Ueno were destroyed in the fighting at the time of the Meiji Restoration. The man has suffered because he was on the losing side. He realizes that the world is truly uncertain; he is not the first to make this discovery. The man had anticipated that the springtime blossoms would one day turn into fruit, but when autumn came, the fruit failed to ripen. Now is the winter of his discontent. The second episode is too short and uncomplicated to be effective as a work describing the hardships brought about by the Restoration, but it contains an element of surprise. The reader is likely to expect that the uncertain glory of youthful happiness will, with the passage of time, be replaced by the quiet, autumnal happiness of a couple who have grown old together. Instead, the old man has lost hope and his wife is unable to comfort him. The work is marred by Shiki’s overreliance on timeworn phrases, but it concludes with the untraditional implication that not only bad but good men are sometimes punished at the end. Shiki may have been attempting in this episode to reject both the frivolity of the ninjōbon and its opposite, the moralizing of Bakin. The third episode is in a quite different mood. The unnamed narrator relates how one day he was enjoying a ride in a balloon when suddenly

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it turned upside down. A brilliant light blinded him, and he felt as if he were being pulled upward by reverse gravity. When his eyes open again, he sees beneath him a great house roofed with silver. The trees and plants in the garden are all of silver or gold. Letting the air escape from the balloon, he descends just in time to see a young woman emerging from the house. The robes she wears, whiter than snow, give her the appearance of a celestial nymph. She asks the man if he comes from the Land of the Rising Sun in the iron world. The narrator replies that he is indeed from Japan but asks what she means by “iron world.” She explains that he is now in the silver world. It is not part of the solar system but at times comes close to the earth. The balloon was drawn into the silver world because its gravity is stronger than the earth’s. She tells the man the history of the silver world. In the past it had been an iron world where people fought for fame or riches, but it eventually turned into a silver world where all is beautiful and there is no deceit or rivalry. One day the silver world will turn into a golden world where there is only absolute purity. The narrator asks the woman how she knew about Japan. She tells him she was born in China and her name is Jōga. A sip of the elixir of immortality had enabled her to travel to the silver world. The narrator recalls the legend that Jōga stole from her husband an elixir that was a present from the Queen Mother of the West. He asks if she fled to the palace of the moon for safety. Jōga replies that she had indeed lived in the palace of the moon but another elixir enabled her to reach the silver world. The narrator asks, “Is it because of the elixir that you shine like silver?” “No,” she replies, “Do you see the long river over there? It’s called the Silver River, and its waters are quicksilver. Anyone who bathes in this river sheds all greed, and after two or three baths his senses are all purified.” The narrator bathes in the river and emerges, completely purified. His body, which had been soiled by worldly preoccupations, now gives off a silver light. Jōga guides him to a silver palace, where they have a conversation about language.

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Man: How is it you speak Japanese though you weren’t born in Japan? What language do people here use? Jōga : People of the upper classes use ancient Japanese [wago]. We prefer it because it’s so graceful. Man: That’s something I never expected. In Japan, it’s just the opposite. Few people know the old language of their country. Those who’ve acquired a little learning prefer to use nothing but Chinese.8 Jōga informs the man that, regretfully, she must say good-bye. Disappointed, he asks to spend one night with her, but she informs him that the law of the land decrees that men and women must not meet at night. If he truly loves her, he should cross the river and become a shepherd. It is befitting for a man to be a shepherd just as it is befitting for a woman to weave. One night each year a bridge built by silver magpies will enable the Shepherd and the Weaver Maiden to meet. The man makes his way to the magpie bridge. As he leans on a post, exhausted from the long walk, he notices that his body no longer gives off a silvery light. Just as it was before he came to the silver world, it is the color of iron or copper. The bridge begins to shake and he falls into the river. When he opens his eyes, he is lying in his bed in Japan. He lifts his head and looks out the window. Three feet of snow have fallen overnight. This episode, Shiki’s attempt to give new life to old legends from the Chinese past, is not persuasive as a work of fiction, but his literal interpretation of the phrase “the silver world” may be unique. His use of the familiar legend of the Shepherd and the Weaver Maiden who meet once a year on a bridge built by magpies is unconvincing; but his mockery of Japanese who lard their compositions with Chinese phrases and ignore the beauty of their native language seems to reflect Shiki’s irritation with Japanese who delight in speaking English. The fourth episode is in a totally different mood. It takes place on a winter’s night. A young woman, a small boy on her back, is painfully

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making her way through the snow. The boy asks where they are going, and the woman replies that she is taking him to his father. The mother falls in the snow and faints. Just then two palanquins all but run over the mother and child. An old man emerges from one and, approaching the woman in the snow, offers her medicine. A young man steps from the other palanquin. At this point the woman regains consciousness. The glances that she and the young man exchange reveal they have met before. The man asks why the woman was wandering in the snow. She replies that because the boy kept asking for his father, she has come to find him. The old man says, “I can imagine how happy the boy’s father would be if he knew. But you are still young. You must have parents at home. How grief-stricken they will be to think you have abandoned them. I have a son who is my prop and stay. If he left my house and abandoned me or refused to follow my instructions, I think I would wish such an unfilial son were dead. It would be rubbing mud in his father’s face.” He urges the woman to return home. Nobody will help her in the snow, and her parents will grieve for their lost child. He concludes, “Human beings must endure pain. . . . The periods of suffering are like the winter. During the cold of the winter, snow and frost make the plants and trees wither. But when spring comes, buds burst forth in profusion on the trees and plants that seemed to have died, and soon the flowers bloom. But only if one has endured the winter can one realize the blessings of the spring.” 9 The old man’s words of wisdom are inspired by sympathy for the parents rather than for the woman shivering in his presence. His Wisdom of the East may remind one of the Wisdom of the West voiced by Polonius. Neither is necessarily mistaken, but their counsels are of no use, and there is unintentional humor in both. After he has left, we discover that the old man is the young man’s father, and the parents of the little boy are none other than the young man and the woman. The young man reveals that his father has ordered him never again to lay eyes on his illegitimate child. He urges the woman to be

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patient a while longer. He puts the mother and child into the palanquin vacated by the old man (who is walking home) and boards the other palanquin. The two vehicles go off in different directions. The story recalls those of Higuchi Ichiyō, but the characters lack individuality and the setting is barely sketched. The only part worthy of Shiki is the sanctimonious speech of the old man. The language is realistic and appropriate as an old man’s interpretation of the meaning of filial piety. The final episode of The Silver World is in the form of ten brief monologues about snow by people of different professions. The speakers include a merchant, a student, an official, a geisha, and a farmer. Each monologue is less than a page in length, but the speakers are more interesting than any character in the preceding episodes. This is Shiki at his best as a writer of prose. He knows, having observed and listened attentively, how people of different classes express themselves, and he records their words with the exactness he would bring to his haiku. Shiki might have developed the fifth episode into a longer work, but he had not yet decided in what language or style to cast a novel. His enthusiasms changed repeatedly. He wrote in 1890 that if he read Bakin, he fell in love with Bakin. When he read Shunsui, he fell in love with Shunsui. Reading Saikaku and Chikamatsu, he was dazzled by the Genroku style. Reading Genji made him yearn for the beauty of its style. In his youth he had admired the writings of Tsubouchi Shōyō and such works as Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud) of Futabatei Shimei.10 Recently, Shiki had been stunned by the short novel Fūryūbutsu (The Buddha of Art, 1889), which he had found by chance in a peddler’s stall.11 The style of The Buddha of Art is typical for the time: sections narrated by the author, Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), are in a language reminiscent of Saikaku, but the conversations are close to contemporary Japanese. Shiki at first found Rohan’s style difficult to understand, but he eventually found the work captivating, a masterpiece.12 He was so carried away by Rohan’s novel that he hoped “even once in my lifetime” to

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write something like The Buddha of Art.13 Not long before his death in 1902 he recalled his first reading of The Buddha of Art: When I began my reading, the opening section was so extremely difficult that I could hardly make sense of it. Of course, at that time men like Kōyō and Rohan were already reading Saikaku and imitating the “Saikaku style,” but I had been unable to free my tastes completely from the seven-five rhythms of Bakin and his school. Even Mr. Tsubouchi, who favored a compromise between elegant and colloquial language, was unable to liberate himself from conventional usage; that is why, as I recall, there are passages in seven-five rhythms in works of his like A Mirror of Sister and Brother. But although I initially had trouble understanding the Saikaku style, after several readings I came quite naturally to understand the meaning, and this was not all: the passages in the Saikaku style were so entrancing that I was now convinced that, as a style, it was unsurpassed. The Buddha of Art took materials that were basically Western and converted them skillfully into Japanese. Even now, some people question its unabashed description of a naked woman, but obscenity is the last thing a reader would feel. On the contrary, the reader is moved to extremely lofty feelings almost as if he had been transported to heaven. That is how it happened that I, who had hitherto thought that no novel could compare with The Character of Modern Students, changed my mind completely: The Buddha of Art now seemed the noblest of novels. I thought that if I were to write a novel, it would have to be like The Buddha of Art.14 Admiration for Rohan’s use of Saikaku’s style strengthened Shiki’s resolve not to abandon the riches of the literary language. He recognized that the colloquial, as used by Futabatei Shimei, could be vivid but doubted that it could ever be beautiful. He was absolutely opposed

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to writing poetry, whether haiku or tanka, in the colloquial, a language without echoes from the literature of the past and without intrinsic beauty. In 1889 he set down his views on genbun itchi, the doctrine, gaining acceptance at the time, that modern authors must use the language of common speech and not the rich but sometimes obscure literary language: According to the proponents of genbun itchi, the most important thing for an author is to write in such a way that anyone can understand what he has written. They believe this is best done by writing the same language that one speaks. They claim that when Murasaki Shikibu wrote Genji, she used the language of her time as it was then spoken, and that it was no more than the prejudice of later times to suppose that she used some ancient and elegant language; it was simply that the words had changed. I don’t know anything about such theories, and I don’t feel competent to judge if the most important thing in writing (even of literature) is easy intelligibility. But my basic reaction is great aversion to genbun itchi. My aversion depends on the particular case. I find it quite proper to write lectures, conversations, notes on sermons, the dialogue in novels, and travel accounts and the like in the colloquial. It is also appropriate that the colloquial be used, because it is easily understood, in proclamations directed at uncouth or badly educated persons, in letters, and in works of literature and instruction intended for small children such as pupils in elementary schools. The colloquial is often better than normal writing in communicating a tone of voice, at filling words with overflowing emotion. It can be grasped in a single quick reading, making it easier to understand than tedious explanations. But in the case of literature, what need is there to go to the trouble of writing genbun itchi? It is so tedious, bothersome, and long-winded, so hard to understand that it is apt to inspire yawns.15

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Later in this essay Shiki contrasts the concision of the literary language with the prolixity of the colloquial; but his main reason for opposing genbun itchi was the conviction that literature should not be aimed at the ignorant masses. It took a serious writer considerable time to acquire a mastery of the rich vocabulary of traditional literature, but once acquired, it enabled him to shade his expression in a way not possible in the language of daily speech. To insist that an author restrict himself to words that are immediately intelligible even to badly educated people was to hamstring his powers of expression. There is a rather unpleasant haughtiness in this argument. Shiki, typically of someone of the samurai class, had little sympathy for ignorant people. Like others of his class, he took pride in the richness of his knowledge of the vocabulary of kanbun and kanshi. He was sure that the mastery of language necessary to a writer could not be picked up from casual conversations. Writing is an art, rather like playing a musical instrument. No one wishes to hear the scrapings of an amateur violinist, nor should anyone wish to read the inarticulate, repetitious mutterings of someone who was unacquainted with the vocabulary and traditions of superior literature. In 1891, Shiki began to show the first signs of impatience with being a university student. He wrote his uncle Ōhara Tsunenori on April 6 that he was suffering from depression and was thinking of taking a walking trip for a vacation.16 In a letter dated May 7 sent to a friend, Ōtani Zekū (1867–1939), he wrote that at times he thought he was falling, still alive, into the depths of hell. Zekū had written him in March of the previous year describing his extreme depression, brought on by melancholia, that often made him think he must be half insane, causing him to weep helplessly.17 Shiki answered that he felt much the same.18 The cause of Shiki’s intense depression (assuming he was not exaggerating in order to comfort his friend) is not clear. Perhaps it was no more than disappointment over failing an exam. His choice of philosophy as his subject of study had been a mistake; he was so bored with the

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lectures and the assigned books that he had stopped studying. But even after he shifted from philosophy to Japanese literature, he failed an important examination in June 1891. Apart from this failure, 1891 should have been a happy year for Shiki. In this year a letter from Takahama Kyoshi initiated a relationship of teacher and disciple that would last (with some difficulties) the rest of Shiki’s life. In June, on his return to Matsuyama, Shiki made an extensive detour, going by way of Kiso. His account of his two weeks in Kiso, Kakehashi no ki (The Hanging Bridge Journey), was his finest travel diary. He may have chosen Kiso because it was the setting of The Buddha of Art, but in the diary he referred more often to Bashō, who many years before had traveled to the same places, recorded in Sarashina kikō (A Journey to Sarashina, 1688). Shiki at this time also composed many haiku and immersed himself particularly in the collections of Bashō and his school. Later in the year, he passed a makeup examination in history. He apparently enjoyed the companionship and literary friendships of the dormitory, but in October he wrote his uncle Ōhara that he was thinking of moving because his collection of books had outgrown a dormitory room. This seems an inadequate reason for leaving his friends, but it may reflect his impatience with a life that seemed not to be pointed in any direction. On October 21 he wrote Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907), a newspaper publisher, asking if he knew of a fairly large room for rent in a quiet neighborhood not too far from the university. Shiki had met Kuga before, in 1883 when, at the insistence of his uncle Katō, he had visited Kuga’s office. On that occasion, Kuga recalled, Shiki (dressed like a youth fresh from the country) had been too bashful to utter a single word.19 Kuga, attempting to draw the boy out, encouraged Shiki to visit him at home; he mentioned that he had a nephew of about Shiki’s age. Gradually Kuga realized that despite Shiki’s shyness he was an exceptional young man. It was strange all the same that eight years later Shiki felt emboldened to ask a man he hardly knew to help him find suitable

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lodgings. One day Shiki appeared, this time in student uniform, transformed from an inarticulate country boy into a promising young man: In the autumn of 1891 he visited my house in Negishi. He was supposed to graduate the next year, but he said he intended to leave the university because of his illness. I said I didn’t know anything about the nature of his illness but urged him to endure it and to graduate. But he had made up his mind and wouldn’t be budged. He said he had been studying haiku of late and had come rather to enjoy it. He had been thinking of leaving the university in order to devote himself entirely to haiku. He said that if there were a room to rent in a house in Negishi, he would like me to make arrangements. With this, he departed.20 Shiki would have been happy if he could have found some way of supporting himself, his mother, and sister in Tokyo with his income as a haiku poet, but it was almost unthinkable that he could earn a decent living by writing haiku. It occurred to Shiki that he might be more successful as a novelist. Of course, novels were sometimes failures, but a novelist had a better chance of making money than a haiku poet. A noisy dormitory, in any case, was not a place for writing a novel. As a first step toward becoming a novelist, he left the dormitory and rented a house in Komagome where he could write undisturbed.21 He spent about two months there, mainly working on the novel Tsuki no miyako (The Palace of the Moon). However, he had by no means lost interest in haiku. He not only composed haiku but also commented on the haiku sent by friends. In addition, in the winter of 1891 he began the mammoth task of classifying the haiku of the past three hundred years. On December 31 Shiki wrote Takahama Kyoshi expounding his literary views. He had come to judge Japanese literature in terms of Emerson’s criteria of Beauty and Sublimity. He admired, for example, the beauty in Chikamatsu’s plays but faulted Chikamatsu for lacking

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the sublimity of Shakespeare. Among Meiji writers, he singled out Kōda Rohan as unique in possessing both virtues. Shiki considered that The Buddha of Art was not only the finest work of the Meiji era, it was also the finest work of Japanese literature and even of world literature, the work that most completely embodied Beauty and Sublimity.22 He continued, “I am now, for unavoidable reasons, writing a novel. I am well aware of its ineptness, but to tell the truth, although I have been refusing to see visitors ever since the winter vacation, this has not been enough. I don’t know how many times I have written a page only to stop, or written half a page, then thrown down my brush. Please try to imagine how painful it is to be obliged to write something I find so unpleasant and stupid.”23 If Shiki was not exaggerating his distaste for what he was writing, it is clear that writing a novel was giving him no pleasure. He plunged ahead nevertheless, tormented not only by the strain of writing but also by a constant and depressing lack of money. On January 13, 1892, he wrote Hekigotō, “Of late I have been in such straits that I am almost out of paper and, as you can judge from my handwriting, my brush has almost lost its point.”24 A week later he wrote Hekigotō, “I shall end up this month without a penny. Last night, as I was correcting my novel, my one and only brush went completely flat and there was nothing I could do about it. All I have left in my pocket is one sen, six rin.”25 Shiki had chosen as his model for The Palace of the Moon the work he most admired, Rohan’s The Buddha of Art.26 He imitated Rohan in mixing descriptive passages in literary language with narration and dialogue in the colloquial. The work opens with a long, archly humorous run-on sentence that abounds in references to the literature of the past and concludes with the only item of relevance to the story, the name of the hero, Takagi Naoto. The second sentence is not quite so overpowering: “If Naoto had been born in the shade of a veranda where a wind blowing from under the bottle-gourd trellis billowed out the tetera27 and futano,28 he would surely at the time of the wheat harvesting, as a dancer of the

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bon-odori at the festival of the village shrine, have yearned in the shade of a grove for the moon and disliked the night wind on paths through the rice fields.”29 This sentence informs us, in a maddeningly “poetic” manner, that Naoto was not born into a villager’s family. The next sentence states, in almost equally complicated language, that he wasn’t born into a merchant family either. No, the third sentence says, he was born in the capital and he had read many books. A bit later, mention of Socrates, girl students, and equal rights for men and women informs us that, despite the old-fashioned language, reminiscent of Saikaku, the story takes place in the Meiji period. With the second chapter the language becomes a good deal easier to understand, but Shiki was unable to refrain from ornamenting; he evidently believed that “rhetoric” made a work literary and distinguished it from daily utterances. The Palace of the Moon, though modeled on The Buddha of Art, concludes with a reworking of the Noh play Hagoromo, the story of the fisherman who finds a celestial maiden’s robe of feathers. She dances for him before she returns to the moon.30 At the end of The Palace of the Moon the woman (Onami) dies, leaving a note for Takagi Naoto (now a Buddhist monk) revealing she is about to return to the moon. The distraught monk is so frantic that he loses his senses and disappears in a storm. His rain hat is later found flowing on the waves. Inside the hat are the words tsuki no miyako ni kaeri sōrō (I have returned to the Palace of the Moon). The language of the work owes much to the Noh plays and Saikaku (as well as to Rohan).31 The text is overly ingenious, filled with unnecessary allusions and conventionally beautiful images; but Shiki believed he had composed a masterpiece worthy of comparison with Rohan’s. He decided to show Rohan the manuscript, in the hopes that praise and recommendation from the great man would launch him on a career as a novelist. Although Rohan was the same age as Shiki and had the same low-level samurai background, Shiki displayed the deference due a

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revered senior. Rohan had published two successful novels and this created a major difference; Shiki swallowed his pride, desperately needing Rohan’s praise. Shiki took the manuscript to Rohan, explaining that he had “stolen” so much from The Buddha of Art that he felt obliged to obtain the author’s permission. He asked Rohan to read and criticize the work. Rohan did not read the manuscript on the spot, saying he had visitors. Two days later he returned it by messenger, enclosing a note. Rohan offered hardly a word of criticism, but certainly not the praise that Shiki had expected.32 Shiki was crushed. His relations with Rohan remained friendly, but he never again attempted to write anything in the manner of The Buddha of Art. On May 4 of the same year he wrote Takahama Kyoshi that he wanted to be not a novelist but a poet.33

5 cathay and the way thither

O

n February 29, 1892, Shiki moved to 88 Kami-negishi. Kuga Katsunan had found a house for him next to his own. Shiki’s last ten years would be spent in this house and (from February 1, 1894) at 82 Kami-negishi, a somewhat larger house on the same street. On the day of the move to 88 Kami-negishi Shiki suffered from a severe headache, brought on by the strain of waiting for the movers, who were hopelessly inept when they finally arrived. The house was an even greater shock. A train went by every hour making the house shake as if in an earthquake.1 Shiki cheered himself by writing some sarcastic haiku, including the following: sono hen ni uguisu orazu kisha no oto2

In this neighborhood There are no song thrushes— The roar of the train.

A letter to Kawahigashi Hekigotō, written on March 1,3 gives details of the exasperation attending the move to his new house. To calm his

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nerves afterward, he read the Noh play Semimaru. This somewhat alleviated his splitting headache, and, taking advantage of the proximity of his new house to Kōda Rohan’s, he walked there and the two men spent over three hours in conversation. According to Shiki’s letter to Hekigotō, Rohan did most of the talking, but by the end of their meeting Shiki’s headache had left him. The new house was certainly not ideal, but Shiki’s close connection with Kuga Katsunan would change his life. When Shiki first became Kuga’s neighbor, he was still a university student with only the vaguest ideas of how he would make a living. Kuga had earlier advised him to complete his studies; no doubt he thought that a degree would help an awkward, unprepossessing young man to find a job. However, as the result of seeing Shiki frequently as his neighbor, Kuga came to think of him almost as a son. It occurred to him that Shiki might develop into someone who could write for the Nippon, the newspaper that Kuga had founded in 1889.4 Kuga’s assistant, Kojima Kazuo (1865–1952), who first met Shiki in 1883 when he visited Kuga’s office, recalled that the editors of the Nippon had for some time been thinking of hiring someone to write a cultural column, not a specialist in any particular branch of the arts but a generalist who could write on a variety of topics.5 They hoped that covering cultural developments in the manner of the major newspapers might increase the circulation of the Nippon, whose pages up to this point had been devoted to current events, with rarely a mention of culture. Kojima, who described himself as a nonintellectual incapable of understanding Shiki’s poetry, initially opposed Kuga’s intention of taking Shiki on as a reporter, insisting that a reporter needed something more than a college education. Before long, however, he changed his mind and supported the decision to publish in the Nippon Shiki’s poetic account of the journey he had taken the previous year to Kiso. This travel diary, Kakehashi no ki (The Hanging Bridge Journey), was Shiki’s first publication apart from contributions to school and haiku magazines. It was

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popular with readers, and it did not take long for Shiki to gain recognition as an outstanding correspondent of the Nippon. The Hanging Bridge Journey appeared in six installments between May 27 and June 4, 1892. Like its model, Sarashina kikō, the description Bashō wrote of his journey in 1688 to many of the same places that Shiki would visit some two hundred years later, it combined descriptions of sites of historical or literary interest with a haiku composed at each. It was followed on June 26 by the first installment of Shiki’s work of haiku criticism, Dassai shooku haiwa (Chats on Haiku from the Otter’s Den).6 The new serial continued to appear until October 20. The favorable reception given to this extended work of literary criticism may have ended Kuga’s uncertainty about the advisability of hiring Shiki as a reporter. He urged Shiki to send for his mother and sister from Matsuyama, strong indication that he expected Shiki would soon be working regularly for the Nippon. Shiki at first was offered only a half-time job. He dutifully asked permission of his uncle Ōhara before accepting. The uncle did not object, and Shiki was soon frequenting the newspaper office. On November 9 he left for Kobe, to meet his mother and sister and escort them to Tokyo. Shiki took his time for the journey; he and his family did not reach Tokyo until November 17. He was later scolded by his uncle for having traveled second class on the train but defended this extravagance, saying he felt sure that he would never again in his lifetime have such an opportunity to be a filial son.7 Shiki officially became a regular member of the staff of the Nippon on December 1, with a monthly salary of fifteen yen. Kuga suggested that if Shiki could not live on so meager a salary, he should write for some other newspaper. He offered to introduce him to editors, but Shiki replied that no matter how much he might be offered, he would not write for any newspaper but the Nippon.8 His loyalty to Kuga did not waver in the years to come, even after he had become famous and could easily have obtained a far more remunerative position with another newspaper.

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He never forgot that Kuga had been his benefactor, and he also expected his disciples to follow his example. In 1898 Shiki’s disciple Samukawa Sokotsu (1874–1953) asked his advice about which of three or four offers of employment from different newspapers he should accept. Shiki answered, “I recommend without hesitation the Nippon, though it pays the worst.” Sokotsu followed this advice.9 On December 1, 1892, the day that Shiki officially became an employee of the Nippon, the warship Chishima sank off the coast of Shikoku with a loss of seventy-four lives. Shiki, in his capacity as a newspaperman, composed a timely haiku: mononofu no fugu ni kuwaruru kanashisa yo

How sad it is to think Of warriors being devoured By globefish

Shiki contributed a haiku each day to the Nippon and also published a series of articles. These articles do not indicate that he had been affected by the highly nationalistic bias of the Nippon. In the first issue, which appeared on February 11, 1889, Kuga had written an editorial indicating what he expected the future political stance of the Nippon to be: In recent years the Japanese have been losing their inborn characteristics, doing all they can possibly do to rid themselves of everything native to their country. Virtually the whole population is trying its utmost to be naturalized as Westerners, and Japan, as these islands are called, seems fated to become eventually no more than a meaningless name on maps of the world. . . . The Japanese people are drifting in a whirlpool, apparently having lost their roots. The Nippon hopes to stop this drifting and make Japan stable once again. It has set itself the task, first of all, to restore the “national spirit” from its state of temporary oblivion, and to exalt it.

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Although the Nippon plans to restore and exalt the national spirit, it is not ignorant of the splendid achievements of Western culture. It highly values the Occident’s human rights, its freedom, and its equality; respects the principles of its philosophy and morality; and loves certain aspects of its customs. It especially admires the West’s science, economics, and industry. However, if Japan adopts them, it should not be because they are Western but because they contribute to the profit and happiness of Japan. The Nippon will not preach any revival of narrow xenophobia. We shall restore and exalt the national spirit but within the bounds of world awareness.10 The typical insistence in the pages of the Nippon on the importance of the Japanese national character (kokumin no seikaku) would at times develop into strident denunciations of the pro-foreign government and the upper-class worship of the West. The Rokumeikan, an elaborate hall where Japanese and foreigners danced and ate French cuisine, became a particular target. The Rokumeikan embodied the belief of upper-class Japanese that if they danced in evening dress imported from London or Paris, it would convince foreigners that the Japanese were civilized and should be treated as equals. Kuga deplored this subservience to foreign customs. He had studied abroad and was familiar with European theories of government, but he was certain that Japan was unlike any other country and must not discard its unique traditions. He wrote, “If the culture of a country should, under the influence of the culture of another country, entirely lose its special characteristics, this would mean that the people of that country had lost the basis for their independence.”11 Shiki’s writings show that at times he shared Kuga’s views, but he never supposed, even as a boy, that everything Japanese was superior to all foreign equivalents. In his brief essay “Yōken-setsu” (On Foreign Dogs), written in 1878 (when he was eleven), he declares,

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Dogs, the kings of the animals, can do what human beings can’t do. Japanese dogs are of use only in hunting or in keeping away burglars at night, but foreign dogs can rescue drowning people or, in cold countries, save travelers who are buried under heavy snow. Or, they can pull sleds and perform innumerable other useful actions. This shows that foreign dogs are without doubt superior to Japanese dogs. What great merits foreign dogs possess!12 Shiki’s mature writings reveal concern for the preservation of Japanese characteristics, not because he feared that borrowing from the West might result in a drastic loss of cultural identity but because he sensed a danger that foreign borrowings might destroy the small, quiet beauty that had always characterized Japanese literature and other arts. He wrote, In Japan, a small island nation, everything is also small but has a compensating delicacy of flavor. In poetry and prose it is the short works that have developed, and in painting, the casual sketch and the impressionistic rendering. But when, as today, the whole world is one, a country devoted exclusively to uneconomic smallness will lose out in the struggle for existence. So we import everything— cows, horses, strawberries, cherries—and try to make small things big so that they will be economical. I am in favor of this, but I hope it will not as a result destroy the special Japanese flavor. This reminds me of the subject of improvement of the race that was so much discussed a few years ago. If human beings could be improved like oxen, I suppose it would be possible after some years for Japanese to boast physiques as powerful as the Westerners’, to be strong, free from illness, economical human beings, any one of whom can do the work of three men today. But I wonder if in that case the special qualities of the inborn nature of the Japanese people would continue to exist. I doubt it somehow.13

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In The Silver World Shiki had made fun of Japanese who larded their every utterance with difficult Chinese phrases. He felt much the same about intellectuals who pretentiously dotted their utterances with English words; but Shiki did not hesitate to use the occasional English word if it better expressed his intent than a Japanese equivalent. Nor did his respect for tradition cause him to reject importations. The sickroom where he spent his last years was a kind of museum of curiosities, some unmistakably Japanese, like the old-fashioned rain cape and hat he had worn on his travels, others objects from remote parts of the world, including a portrait of George Washington. Far from lamenting the many changes that had turned the beautiful city of Edo into the dreary expanses of Tokyo, he was fascinated by what he had learned about the latest developments from newspapers and visitors to his sickroom. He drew up a list of the sights of the new Tokyo he would most like to see if, by a miracle, he could leave his sickbed. They included moving pictures, bicycle races and stunts, beer halls, women fencers, Western-style plays, and athletic meets of girl students wearing maroon trousers.14 Regardless of the themes of his writings, Shiki’s first years as a reporter for the Nippon were highly productive. His output of haiku also increased considerably. He made several journeys to different parts of the country, including one to the north to places Bashō had described in Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku).15 Shiki continued to produce literary articles for the Nippon until a major event made publication difficult. In 1894 tensions with China over the political future of Korea led readers to seek detailed information on the crisis, and this demand increased when war broke out in August 1894. The war went unexpectedly well for Japan. Foreign correspondents had unanimously predicted that Japan would be no match for the mighty Chinese empire, but Japanese troops in fact had no trouble in defeating the Chinese in every engagement they fought. The delighted readers of the Nippon could hardly wait for each day’s newspaper, and it sold extremely well. However, articles describing the victories (and

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anything else related to the war) took up so much space in the Nippon that there was little room left for cultural matters. Kuga decided he must maintain literary articles as a vital part of journalism. To this end he created Shō Nippon (Little Japan), a newspaper devoted mainly to culture. It provided Shiki with the space he needed for poetry and poetic criticism. Kuga appointed Shiki as the editor of Shō Nippon. He was only twenty-seven, but at the time it was not unusual for a young man to be placed in charge of a literary publication.16 The contents of Shō Nippon were of high quality,17 but sales were poor, and in July 1895 publication was discontinued. Shō Nippon was a failure, but, as we shall see, it changed the history of haiku. Despite his editorial duties, Shiki had sufficient time to work on his project of classifying old haiku as well as for composing his own poems. At first he paid little attention to the war; his letters to friends hardly mention it, though the war was the first to be fought with a foreign country in over three hundred years. However, on August 18 he broke his silence by publishing five marching songs and on August 24 ten related haiku on naval battles, testimonies to his patriotism but not to his poetic skill.18 Shiki’s interest in the war gradually mounted as his nationalism was stimulated. He decided that it was incumbent on him to participate in the war as a reporter with the troops. Little in his writings of the time reveals what had changed his feelings from seeming apathy about the war to patriotism, but the short novel Wa ga yamai (My Sickness), written six years later (in 1900), is probably a fairly accurate account of his reactions to the outbreak of war: I was so accustomed to peace that the news that war had broken out could not help but startle me. Was there no danger that the war might bring about the destruction of Japan? Perhaps enemy soldiers might, even tomorrow, fight their way into Tokyo, forcing us to escape somewhere. If that should happen, it would be a pity to leave behind my books, but what else could I do? I wor-

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ried needlessly over such things, but gradually I felt more secure after the newspapers proclaimed the great victory of our troops at Asan. The accounts by our war correspondents of the fall of Pyongyang in particular lifted me to heaven. I felt unbearably envious of Oda Daikō, a man in the same organization as myself. He’s a war correspondent. . . . If I had not chosen to devote myself to literature, I am sure I could have managed in one way or another to become a war correspondent. It’s a crying shame that even though I work for a newspaper, I can’t accompany the troops simply because I’m in charge of a literary column. One might say that describing the war is a writer’s professional duty. It’s something that happens only once in a lifetime, and yet, though other people are serving with the troops, I haven’t got even the right to protest. Besides, with my weak body I can hardly volunteer to serve at the front. It’s true that I don’t give a damn about my sick body, but just supposing I were unable to perform my duties as a reporter adequately—it would be unfortunate for the newspaper, and that’s why I’ve made it my practice not to say a word. That is really painful. Unless I can somehow serve with the troops, I had no business being born as a man.19 The novel, departing somewhat from the facts at this point, describes how Shiki was able to experience war service thanks to a colleague who reported to the Nippon editors that another war reporter was urgently needed. In fact, members of the newspaper, knowing of Shiki’s illness, attempted in vain to dissuade him, sure he would be going to his death. In the end they decided to let Shiki have his way. He recalled that ten years earlier, when he first received permission to study in Tokyo, he had felt this was the greatest joy of his life. Now, on learning that he would be allowed to go to the front, he experienced an even greater joy. The remainder of My Sickness follows the facts of Shiki’s service as a war correspondent quite closely, though there are novelistic improvements.

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Shiki left for Hiroshima, the site of Imperial Headquarters during the war, on March 3, 1895. Before leaving Tokyo, he had dinner with Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigotō, his two senior disciples, and presented each with a letter couched in highly formal language that explained his resolve to accompany the troops as a war correspondent. After humbly identifying himself as a person without talent or learning, wealth or position, he declared that his aspirations were nevertheless immeasurably high. He then discussed what had been achieved in the war, declaring that the Japanese victories at Port Arthur and Weihaiwei had made Japan the “divine land” (shinshū), the strongest country in the world. The soldiers with their bravery and the common people with their loyal obedience had exalted national prestige. It was his duty to do his part by serving as a journalist with the troops.20 Hekigotō believed that Shiki’s eagerness to serve alongside the troops stemmed from a desire to observe with his own eyes the new and strange world of the battlefield, a spectacle he might never again have an opportunity to observe. He also felt that Shiki was convinced that battlefield experience would give a new dimension to his art. It was unusual for a poet like Shiki to wish to go to the front even at the risk of his life, but perhaps his reason for defying death was quite uncomplicated. A photograph taken just before Shiki left for China shows him seated, wearing a formal kimono, and holding a sword clenched in his left hand.21 Newspaper correspondents did not normally wear swords even in battle areas, but Shiki was resolved to live to the full the role of the samurai, unflinching, never bringing disgrace to the class symbolized by the sword. The likelihood of experiencing hardships on the battlefield probably also appealed to Shiki. Hardships would give him the opportunity to surmount his physical shortcomings and to display manly courage. The letters he gave to Kyoshi and Hekigotō were not farewell notes sent to disciples whom he feared he might not see again; they were written in the impersonal vocabulary of the samurai hero who sets forth for combat without turning back for a last glimpse of those he loves.

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Of course, Shiki was curious about China, a distant country that was in some ways familiar because of his Confucian training, but there is no note of anticipation in his letter. He expressed no hope of seeing famous rivers like the Xiao and Xiong, the subjects of innumerable paintings, nor the red cliffs of which Su Shi wrote, nor any site associated with Confucius. There is no note of pathos either—no fear that he might die before he completed his life’s work. He had no time for sentimentality. Shiki’s career as a war correspondent was extremely frustrating. He arrived in Hiroshima on March 6, 1895, expecting to leave at any moment for China. Instead, he was kept waiting until the twenty-first, when he finally received permission to travel to China. Most disappointing of all, on March 30 an armistice was signed between Japan and China. This meant that the Japanese and Chinese would stop killing one another and Shiki would be deprived of a chance to see combat. In a letter he sent to his uncle Ōhara on April 5 he expressed dismay over the winds of peace that seemed to be blowing. He worried that, after all his efforts to gain permission to go to China, he might have no choice but to put himself to sleep, tears of frustration in his eyes. But, war or no war, he wanted to leave Japan as soon as possible.22 The Konoe division, to which Shiki was attached, sailed for China on April 10. Shiki’s quarters aboard ship were in a tiny cabin that he shared with a number of soldiers. This was his first taste of the treatment he and other newspapermen would receive from the military. It never ceased to irritate him that he, a newspaper correspondent, was considered to rank no higher than the lowest ranks of soldiers. The ship reached Dalian on April 12, but Shiki was not permitted to go ashore until the fifteenth. He was then guided by a fellow journalist to the sites of the warfare at Jinzhou and wrote for the Nippon the first part of the article “Jinchū nikki” (Frontline Diary). It appeared in four installments between April 28 and July 23, 1895. “Frontline Diary,” though its title disingenuously suggests that Shiki was describing wartime experiences, is intermittently a moving account of

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all that happened to him from the time he decided to join the Japanese troops in China. It opens with the farewell party given in Tokyo by his friends on March 3. The atmosphere is festive, appropriately for the day of the doll’s festival, but no women are present. Shiki wrote the following haiku: hina mo nashi otoko bakari no momo no sake

Not even any dolls— Only men are drinking The peach wine.23

He hurried to Hiroshima only to be kept waiting for permission to be granted for him to go to China. He took advantage of this undesired idleness to make a quick trip to Matsuyama, where he prayed at his father’s grave and enjoyed another farewell party with old friends. After his return to Hiroshima, he at last received qualifications as a war correspondent and boarded the Kaijō Maru, the ship that would take members of the Konoe division to China. He was enraged by the treatment he received from the army officers, but the excitement of travel helped him to forget the cramped accommodations. When the ship passed Shimonoseki, the joy over leaving Japan for the first time in his life was too great to be described in words. The sight of seagulls occasioned a haiku: haru no umi kamome ga uite omoshiro ya

The sea in springtime Seagulls float on the water— What a lovely sight!24

The soldiers who shared a cabin with him, unable to endure the tedium of having nothing to do, spent their days singing war songs and their nights singing ballads to the accompaniment of loud laughter and cursing. This was probably Shiki’s first contact with badly educated men. We might expect that he would take the opportunity to broaden his knowledge of

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their songs, but we know from this and other writings that Shiki felt insulted to be housed in the same room with such beings. He was sure that he belonged in the officers’ quarters and noted with satisfaction at one point, “We were invited to the officers’ mess, where we were treated to tea and cakes.”25 Shiki found tea and cakes more appropriate to someone of his stature than the fare the soldiers were given. When the ship came in sight of China, Shiki (like every other Japanese) was struck by the truth of all the clichés he had ever heard about the country. The mountains were bald, not at all like the green Japanese mountains. There were beggars everywhere; some rowed boats up beside the Kaijō Maru in order to beg for food. The boats looked filthy, and there was a danger if one got too close one would catch some terrible disease.26 The first thing everyone wanted to see in the towns, naturally, were men with their hair twisted into pigtails.27 The Chinese language, which Shiki had hitherto known as the vehicle of poetry, when spoken sounded like crude, unintelligible noises. The only thing in China that Shiki found to admire was the handwriting on signs.28 But the people all smelled of garlic. Shiki hardly mentions the traces of recent warfare in the areas he visited. One example is the following: Crossing over Misakiyama we made our way through fields in the valley. There were piles of stones and gently blooming violets. Two or three skulls and several large bones were lying on the ground. They had already lost the pathos of human beings. Nobody would ever come to ask them who they were. nakihito no Hide the corpses mukuro wo kakuse Of the men who have died— haru no kusa Grasses of the spring.29 The most moving section of “Frontline Diary,” however, is not related to the war. After arriving in China, Shiki received a letter from Hekigotō

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informing him that Fujino Kohaku, Shiki’s cousin, had died of a selfinflicted gunshot wound. Shiki had always thought of Kohaku as a younger brother. When they were boys he envied Kohaku, whose house had a beautiful garden, but Kohaku in turn envied Shiki (who was four years older) because he knew so much more about literature. Now Kohaku has “gone ahead” of Shiki. Shiki concluded these remembrances with the following haiku: haru ya mukashi Kohaku to ieru otoko ari

It is spring— Once there was a man Whose name was Kohaku.30

A year later (in January and February 1896) Shiki published in the Nippon two additional articles about his experiences as a war correspondent. They contain no poetry. Jūgun kiji (War Correspondent’s Diary) is a long, uninterrupted denunciation of the treatment Shiki received at the hands of officers, who acted as if reporters had no higher standing than dogs or cats.31 The officers sometimes referred with contempt to newspapermen as shinbun-ya, a term that Shiki found especially disagreeable. One officer even denounced newspapermen as thieves and declared they were as little worthy of respect as the lowliest soldiers.32 Even worse than the officers were the sergeant majors, who bellowed orders and abuse at the journalists in tones that Shiki had never before heard. Another article, “Yamai” (Sickness), published in 1899, described his illness aboard the ship taking him back to Japan from Dalian. One day when he was lying in his bunk someone called out saying a shark could be seen, urging him to hurry if he wanted to see it. Shiki rushed to the deck, but no sooner was he there than his throat filled and he had to spit. He spat into a stream of water that flowed along the side of the ship, but what came out was not phlegm but blood. Startled, he took one look at the shark before rushing down to his cabin. He swallowed some medicine he carried in his suitcase, then lay down in his bunk.

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The only medicine the ship’s doctor had to dispense was for cholera. Shiki from time to time drank his own medicine but continued to cough blood. He felt cold, but he had only the clothes he was wearing and an overcoat. Putting on everything he had, he lay in his bunk able to think of only one thing—returning to Japan as soon as possible.33 The ship finally reached Japan, and the soldiers aboard were happy to see the green mountains, so unlike the mountains in China that they seemed to be painted. There were shouts of joy, but the joy lasted only a few hours. It was reported that a laborer employed by the military had died of cholera aboard ship. An order was issued for the ship to remain in quarantine for a week. That night a quarantine officer came aboard and ordered all those suffering from diarrhea to go ashore. Shiki begged to be permitted to accompany them, but the officer refused, saying he was not authorized to take ashore anyone not suffering from diarrhea. That night Shiki suffered a particularly severe bout of coughing blood.34 When the order was at last given for all aboard to go ashore, Shiki painfully made his way, using his sword as a walking stick. Every step he took made him cough blood. When he could go no farther, he sat helplessly on his suitcase, lacking the strength to raise his voice to summon help. Fortunately, someone he knew came by. Shiki asked him to get a stretcher. After a two-hour wait, a stretcher was finally brought. Shiki was taken to Kobe Hospital, not arriving until it was growing dark. He was taken into a room where, when he got into a bed with clean bedding, he felt as if he were in heaven. He felt so happy he thought he would not mind dying. This almost happened. He was unable to eat and his condition grew steadily weaker. Kuga Katsunan, learning of Shiki’s illness, sent a telegram to Kyoshi in Kyoto asking him to go to the hospital and look after Shiki. Kyoshi went immediately and was soon joined in the sickroom by an uncle of Shiki’s from Matsuyama and by his mother and Hekigotō from Tokyo, who arrived in response to messages from Kuga reporting Shiki’s critical condition.35 Kuga arranged to pay hospital expenses.

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Kyoshi found Shiki lying on one side, deathly pale, unable to move or talk. He whispered in Kyoshi’s ear that the doctor had told him not to move because he was still coughing blood. To stop the flood of blood, a heavy ice bag had been placed on his body. A young doctor at length realized that the ice was giving Shiki frostbite. Shiki miraculously survived, despite the primitive treatment. The revolution in the haiku and the tanka would take place.

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hiki convalesced for two months in Kobe Hospital, followed by a month at Suma Nursing Home. Takahama Kyoshi, who visited Shiki on July 23, 1895, the day that Shiki was released from the hospital, wrote that he seemed to be overflowing with joy. Shiki was so happy to leave the hospital that he looked as if he had been reborn. On the night of July 24 Shiki had dinner with Kyoshi and on this occasion asked him to be his successor. He said, I won’t forget for a long time the way you looked after me while I was sick. I was lucky to stay alive, but I have no idea how many more years of life I have left. I can’t count on having a long life. That’s why I keep thinking of who my successor will be. Unless I have one, the work I have started will vanish into thin air. As you know, I haven’t any children. My relatives have many of them, but most have aims in life quite different from my own. That’s why, though I realize I may be imposing a burden on you, I have mentally chosen you as my successor.1

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Kyoshi had not expected the request and was at a loss how to respond. Of course, it was a great honor to be asked to be Shiki’s successor, but he wondered if he was equal to the responsibility. He felt as he listened as if a heavy weight had been placed on his shoulders, but, as he later wrote, “I lacked the courage to refuse his request. As I listened to him, all I could do was nod, as if in a trance.”2 Kyoshi left Suma soon afterward and went to Tokyo, where he planned to attend Tsubouchi Shōyō’s lectures on Shakespeare at Waseda University. He decided to take a room in the same lodgings in Tokyo where the unhappy Fujino Kohaku had formerly lived. Shiki remained in the nursing home until August 20. He returned to Matsuyama a week later. At Sōseki’s invitation, he moved into the house where Sōseki, then teaching at Matsuyama Middle School, was living. Shiki was afraid that Sōseki might catch his disease, but Sōseki insisted that Shiki stay and turned over to him the ground-floor apartment. Shiki spent the next two months recuperating in Matsuyama. This period, the longest the two writers spent together, was undoubtedly beneficial to Shiki. At times he helped Sōseki with his haiku, but in return he heard the views on literature and art of the most informed Japanese writer of the time. Shiki wrote poetry while in Matsuyama. His haiku had definitely improved. On August 30, 1896, he wrote, shiro mukuge ōmizu hiite ie ko nari

White rose of Sharon: When the floodwaters retreat Just one house remains.

The haiku conveys the loneliness in the wake of a flood. All that remains of a village is one house with a rose of Sharon tree. These flowers are usually pink or dark red, but they have turned white in mourning. The rather unusual word ko (single) suggests new skill, but the haiku lacks the personal flavor typical of his later haiku. Shiki met the local haiku poets of

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Matsuyama, including Yanagihara Kyokudō (1867–1957), who before long would figure in Shiki’s life as the publisher of a haiku magazine. Shiki’s chief critical work of 1895, Haikai taiyō (An Outline of Haikai), opens with the bold declaration, “Haiku is a part of literature. Literature is a part of art. The standards of art should therefore be the same as those of literature. The standards of literature are those of haiku. In other words, the same standards should apply to painting, sculpture, music, theater, poetry, and novels.”3 Shiki no doubt intended this opinion to startle. Before the Meiji period, each of the arts had been considered distinct and normally not considered in relation to others. No Japanese word covered all the branches of writing that today are grouped under the rubric “literature”; works of poetry, drama, or fiction were not discussed in the same critical essays. The Noh plays, despite their magnificent poetry, were not discussed as literature. There was a name for every variety of poetry (tanka, kanshi, haiku, etc.), but no word for “poetry.” The most striking exception to this statement found in classical literature occurs in Bashō’s diary Oi no kobumi (Manuscript in My Knapsack, 1691): “One and the same thing runs through the waka of Saigyō, the renga of Sōgi, the paintings of Sesshū, the tea ceremony of Rikyū. What is common to all these arts is their following nature and making friends of the four seasons. Nothing the artist sees but is flowers, nothing he thinks of but is the moon.” Bashō understood that these arts, seemingly so different, were alike in their close connection to nature and the seasons. Bashō expressed himself in haiku rather than in tanka or kanshi, but he was of course deeply affected by poetry in other forms; he worshipped Saigyō and Sōgi. Shiki composed in many poetic forms, though haiku undoubtedly meant most to him, and in Outline of Haikai felt moved to explain at length why it, no less than the older tanka or kanshi, ranked as an important art.4 Few of Shiki’s early haiku suggested he would one day rank as a major poet. His haiku were competent and sometimes even brilliant, but his

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language and perceptions tended to be ordinarily poetic; he had yet to acquire a distinctive voice. Shiki’s decision to take a job with a newspaper might have brought to an end his uncertain career as a poet if he had been obliged by his employer to perform the normal duties of a reporter, but becoming an employee of the staff of the Nippon was in fact a vital step in his development into a first-rate poet. The president of the Nippon, Kuga Katsunan, encouraged Shiki to write poetry and criticism of poetry; he did not expect Shiki to write about crimes or the rise and fall of commercial companies. Kuga’s astuteness in choosing what Shiki could do best was rewarded by the popularity of the Nippon among readers who otherwise found little else to interest them in the newspaper. Writing regular contributions for the newspaper did not interfere with Shiki’s work as a poet. In 1893 alone he composed over four thousand haiku, the most of any year of his life. On January 18, 1893, just six weeks after he joined the Nippon, Shiki wrote an account of the haiku composed at a gathering by himself and several other poets. Brief comments on the merits or flaws of each haiku effectively conveyed the camaraderie of the poets.5 This was the first time such an article had been published in a Japanese newspaper, and its success led Shiki to write similar articles. Shiki’s haiku criticism appeared every month in the newspaper, helping to establish in the minds of general readers the importance of the haiku. No longer would the haiku be of interest only to poets; a much larger number of newspaper subscribers now read and, as amateurs, composed haiku. The articles Shiki published between June and October of 1892 in the Nippon were gathered together in May 1893 under the title Chats on Haiku from the Otter’s Den. This was Shiki’s first book.6 In the spring of 1894 Shiki met Nakamura Fusetsu (1866–1943), who had applied for a position at the recently founded newspaper Shō Nippon. Kuga, planning to have Shiki’s articles illustrated (a departure for a Japanese newspaper), had advertised for an artist. He was correct in

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supposing that illustrations would heighten interest in Shiki’s articles. Fusetsu’s delightful drawings captivated newspaper readers. Fusetsu is all but forgotten today. His major paintings, not often displayed even in the museums that own them, depict mainly scenes from ancient Japanese or Chinese history in which large, allegorical figures strike academic poses. Fusetsu had been trained by the important artist Asai Chū (1856–1907), in turn a pupil of the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi (1818–1882).7 The quality of Fusetsu’s work was apparent from the samples he brought to the Shō Nippon office, and he was at once offered the job. Shiki was greatly impressed by Fusetsu, and a friendship developed between them that would change the history of haiku. Years later (in 1901) when Fusetsu was about to sail for France for study,8 Shiki, unable to leave his sickbed to say good-bye to Fusetsu on the pier, wrote an essay describing their friendship: Nakamura Fusetsu will be leaving for the West on the twenty-ninth of this month. I won’t be able to see him off on the pier in Yokohama, waving my handkerchief and grieving over our parting. Nor will it be possible for us to express regrets over separation while eating a Western-style meal for fifty sen each. . . .9 I first met Fusetsu around March of 1894. The place was the office of the Shō Nippon newspaper at Awaji-chō in Kanda. When I started working for the newspaper I had the greatest difficulty in finding a suitable artist. Some, like the students at the art schools of the time, were not what we needed. In fact, apart from the ukiyoe painters, there were hardly any artists worthy of the name, good or bad. This was the background of Mr. Asai’s introduction of Fusetsu. When I think back to when I first saw Fusetsu, it seems like something in a dream; my opinions and tastes have been changed so often by what I learned from him. The same was true of him: from the day we met his whole life followed a course quite

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unlike what it had been a day earlier. A seemingly inconsequential meeting was in fact a great turning point for both of us. When I examined the four or five drawings that Fusetsu showed us, they were very small, about two inches long,10 sketches of famous places like the Kōdōkan in Mito, but the brushwork was strong and quite exceptional. I looked him over. His eyes were roundish, his face rather intimidating, and his clothes sloppier even than those worn by the average student. I knew at once from his face, his clothes, the strength of his brush he was no ordinary painter. I bought the pictures and published them in the newspaper. These were his first pictures to appear in a newspaper.11 Shiki and Fusetsu became fast friends, although they disagreed completely on the only subject of conversation Shiki mentioned in his account. Shiki at this time was so devoted to Japanese painting that he refused to admit that Western painting had anything to recommend it;12 perhaps the nationalistic bias of the Nippon had contributed to this attitude. Fusetsu, on the contrary, insisted on the truth of Western paintings; unlike Japanese paintings, which were usually stylized, they were faithful to the objects they portrayed. In addition, Japanese paintings tended to depict only scenes that everybody knew to be beautiful from having seen other paintings of the same scenes; but Western paintings could depict any scene, even those without obvious charm. When Shiki replied defensively, “Fuji’s a fine mountain, isn’t it?” Fusetsu said it was ordinary. Shiki insisted that the pine was a splendid tree only for Fusetsu to declare that it too was ordinary.13 Shiki found it incredible that two people could have such contrary opinions. But on reflection, it occurred to him that mention of Mount Fuji in a haiku tended to make it commonplace, and although pines do appear in many haiku, most are commonplace. Haiku about trees in winter are more likely to be refined. Shiki had been aware of this truth for some time, but he had been unable to apply it to painting. “Just

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as  someone who does not understand haiku is delighted to read one about Fuji, I was somehow happy to see Fuji in a painting. Once I understood that the two cases were the same, I felt as if my eyes had opened for the first time.”14 Before long, Shiki was able to appreciate Western painting without, however, losing his fondness for Japanese painting. Shiki was indebted, above all, to Fusetsu for teaching him the importance of shasei, sketching from life. A person familiar only with Fusetsu’s paintings of the gods and goddesses of Japan15 or of the wise men of ancient China is likely to have trouble discovering any trace of shasei in these works, but in his less-ambitious paintings Fusetsu displayed more of shasei realism. Shiki adopted shasei as the guiding principle of his haiku and, later on, his paintings. A shasei haiku describes not the poet’s emotions on observing a certain scene, nor the memories the scene brings back, but what he has just observed; the more exactly he conveys his perception of the sight, the better the poem. Shiki praised Bashō’s famous haiku on the frog jumping into a pond as a prime example of shasei; he believed it was exactly what Bashō saw on a certain occasion. His essay on this haiku opens with a question from a visitor, who asks Shiki why it was that, although everyone agrees that Bashō’s haiku on the frog is a masterpiece, nobody explains what makes it one. Shiki replied, The meaning of the verse about the old pond is nothing more than what appears on the surface. It has no other meaning. However, vulgar “masters of haiku” preach that the poem has a deep meaning and that this meaning cannot be comprehended by ordinary mortals. One reason why such masters never provide an explanation is that they undoubtedly hope to deceive ordinary people by making their private knowledge seem more impressive than it actually is. Another reason is that they don’t know anything about the connections of this haiku with its historical background. .  .  . A hundred theories about its meaning have

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been advanced, and these have evolved into a fantastic compendium that succeeds only in leading ordinary people astray. There is no better way to appreciate the value of this poem than by studying the history of the haiku before it was composed. With respect to the meaning, there is no need to add the slightest particle to the fact that Bashō heard the sound when a frog jumped into an old pond. Anything added to the poem would not be the truth of the haiku about the old pond. This is absolutely clear. The special feature of this poem is that it hides nothing, covers nothing, does not use the slightest artifice, contains not one ambiguous word.16 Shiki’s was not the first attempt to question the mystique that had come to surround Bashō’s most famous haiku. As far back as 1692, Bashō’s disciple Kagami Shikō insisted on the quite ordinary circumstances under which the haiku was composed: The sound of frogs leaping into the water could frequently be heard, and the master, moved by the remarkable beauty, composed the second and third lines of a haiku describing the scene: “A frog jumps in / The sound of the water.” Kikaku, who was with him, suggested the first line might be “The yellow roses,” but the master settled on “The ancient pond.”17 Shiki’s emphasis on the lack of artifice in this haiku may make one wonder how it happened that an unadorned statement of a quite ordinary occurrence became Bashō’s most popular poem. Popular haiku normally contain some striking image or unexpected connection between seemingly disparate images, but Bashō’s poem contains nothing in the least remarkable. The meaning is certainly clear, but it is hard to agree that Bashō’s only aim was to achieve realism. The words “the old pond” have overtones beyond their bare meaning; “the yellow roses” that Kikaku had proposed would have ruined the poem.

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Furuike (old pond) was not a term familiar from having already appeared in countless haiku; it may even have been invented by Bashō. It makes a perfect opening for the haiku, but one can imagine a reader asking, “Aren’t all ponds old? Why did Bashō bother to say this pond was old?” Bashō emphasized the antiquity of the pond in order to make a contrast with something that was diametrically opposed to the old and unchanging—the sudden leap of a frog into the water. The splash of the water marks the conjuncture of the eternal pond with the momentary leap of the frog. Bashō’s disciple Shikō, who was present when Bashō composed the poem, wrote that frogs had been leaping into the pond all day, but kawazu in the haiku surely denotes only one frog. A dozen frogs splashing into the pond would dilute the importance of the moment when the stillness of the old pond was suddenly broken. Shiki asserted that this haiku was transparently clear and had no unspoken implications behind the words. This was probably not because he had failed to detect the overtones but because he was disgusted with professional teachers of haiku who claimed to be the sole possessors of important, secret teachings about haiku. Such teachers were happy to inform their students, on payment of a fee, of the hidden meaning of the poem on the frog. Bashō left no secret teachings or clues into the hidden meanings of his haiku, but after his death, some of his disciples tried to establish themselves as his heirs, each bolstering his claim with forged documents that he allegedly had received from the master. Shiki had no need of the aura of secrets to establish the validity of his views on the art of the haiku; on the contrary, he quickly published every discovery. It was only after he had created a distinctive style of haiku that he began to search in the poetry of the past for works that seemed to complement his own. When he first discovered the beauty of the haiku of Buson, he had absolutely no desire of keeping his discovery a secret. By explaining in detail what he admired in Buson’s haiku, he established the reputation of Buson as a master of the haiku.

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Shiki’s long essay Haijin Buson, first published serially in the Nippon in 1897, was one of the most important documents in the history of haiku. Buson’s haiku had been barely known even to admirers of his paintings, but as the result of the praise in Shiki’s essay, Buson came to be considered as second in importance among haiku poets only to Bashō. Without Shiki’s essay, Buson’s recognition would certainly have been delayed and might never have occurred. Shiki’s praise of a forgotten poet did not necessarily bring the poet back from the dead. His admiration for the tanka of Hiraga Motoyoshi (1799–1865) led to no great reevaluation of his poetry. The difference was that Shiki’s praise for Buson’s poetry was based on poetic excellence, but he seems to have praised Hiraga’s poetry mainly for its political views, which were similar to those advocated by the Nippon. He was also impressed by Hiraga’s masculine Man’yōshū manner and vocabulary, in contrast to the “effeminate” grace of much tanka. Buson was a genuine discovery. It was not easy for Shiki to elevate Buson from obscurity to second place among the haiku poets. The adulation of Bashō prevalent among run-of-the-mill haiku poets tended to prevent critics from daring to compare other poets with the divine Bashō. Bashō’s many disciples, by now fifth generation, were reluctant to recognize anyone who could not claim spiritual descent from the master. Shiki did not attempt to prove that Buson was a better poet than Bashō. He preferred instead to think of the two as halves of beauty—the negative beauty of Bashō matched by the positive beauty of Buson. He found examples of both types of beauty not only in poetry but also in all the arts and declared that neither should be considered superior to the other. European art and literature tended to be positive, but Asian art and literature were prevailingly negative. It is true that Bashō wrote some haiku of positive beauty, but most of his finest works were negative. That is why poets who belonged to the school of Bashō often spoke of sabi, hosomi, and the like as the touchstones of beauty and tended to think of the positive beauty of Western art as crude and inferior.

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As an example of the positive beauty of Buson’s poems, Shiki mentioned Buson’s preference for spring and summer, especially summer, as the season of his poetry. These were the seasons of positive beauty, unlike the darkening autumn and winter. At least as far back as the compilation of the Kokinshū at the beginning of the tenth century Japanese poets had devoted their greatest attention to spring and autumn, the seasons of the cherry blossoms and red autumn leaves they never tired of celebrating. Buson chose instead to compose his haiku most often about the sights of summer. Bashō wrote splendid haiku in Oku no hosomichi, the account of a journey taken in the summer; but flowers appear in his summer haiku more often as indications of the season than as objects of intrinsic interest. A haiku by Buson that mentions a flower, by contrast, is more likely to catch something unique in this particular flower: botan chitte uchikasanarinu nisanpen

The peony scatters And the petals have piled up Two or three at a time.

Shiki’s praise for this haiku, an objective description of a peony crumbling, led him to a discussion of the beauty of objectivity. He stated that subjectivity and objectivity were equally capable of moving the reader— there was no way to choose between the two—but he clearly leaned in favor of the objectivity in Buson’s poetry. Bashō had been more successful than earlier haiku poets in achieving objectivity, but he was far from Buson’s equal. Shiki was convinced that extremely objective beauty was the chief characteristic of both Buson’s paintings and his haiku. He otherwise analyzed Buson’s haiku under various headings—ideal beauty, complicated beauty, poetic diction, technique, grammar, material, and so on. The analysis is an impressive display of Shiki’s critical ability; there is nothing comparable in earlier Japanese discussions of poetry. Shiki ignored, however, aspects of Buson’s poetry that did not fit into his definitions. He paid no attention at this time, for example, to

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the beauty of sound in Buson’s haiku, which often contributes to the meaning. haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana18

The sea in spring All day long slowly coming in Slowly coming in.

Another feature of Buson’s haiku not adequately treated by Shiki was his concern for social issues: sararetaru mi wo fungonde taue kana

The divorced woman Plunges into the paddies— It’s rice-planting time.

We can visualize the woman, up to her waist in mud, throwing herself into backbreaking labor, perhaps alongside the husband who divorced her. Buson’s manner was objective, but he surely felt compassion. Shiki less often expressed such emotion. Shiki took from Buson what he needed—haiku that revealed Buson’s mastery of shasei, and passed over the rest. This makes Haijin Buson incomplete as a study of Buson, but this critical discussion of a forgotten poet was remarkably good. Shiki had little or no help from teachers in learning to write such perceptive criticism. Shiki might never have discovered Buson if he had not met Nakamura Fusetsu. The influence of Fusetsu’s advocacy of shasei led Shiki to search for this characteristic in the haiku of the past. Once found, as in Buson’s poetry, it enabled Shiki to compose poetry in his most distinctive manner. With few exceptions, the haiku for which Shiki is remembered today were composed after writing Haijin Buson in 1895, the year he returned, seemingly a dying man, from China. It was with Haijin Buson that Shiki, previously known only to a relatively small circle of admirers of his haiku and criticism, attracted the attention of the general public.19

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In the winter of 1895 Shiki returned to Tokyo. It was about this time that he began to complain about the pain in the small of his back. Shiki never again would show on his face the spontaneous joy he felt on being released from the hospital in Kobe. But pain never kept him from composing poetry or defying the lingering effects of illness to travel. He took advantage of the return from Matsuyama to Tokyo to enjoy the sights of Osaka and Nara, though he dragged his feet as he walked. He blamed this disability on rheumatism, but the cause was not rheumatism. It was the beginning of the spinal tuberculosis that would make him an invalid and finally kill him. Kyoshi met Shiki at the station in Tokyo and was shocked to see how sadly altered he was. They went into a shop, where Shiki bought some cheap sweets. He asked Kyoshi again and again whether or not he was studying. Kyoshi knew that he was being asked indirectly whether or not he was willing to be Shiki’s successor. Although he sympathized with Shiki, particularly because he seemed sure that he had not more than a year or two to live, Kyoshi was a hedonist and was not ready to give up his pleasures and consecrate himself to the study of haiku. He told Shiki that he was not totally without interest in study but was not prepared to spend his life poring over books.20 Shiki was pained by Kyoshi’s words. He said, “In that case, you and I have different aims. Up to now I have scolded you for not being more like me, but that was my mistake. As of today, I will not force you to be my successor. In other words, I no longer have the right or the duty to give you advice.”21 Kyoshi felt depressed at the thought that he had been rejected by his teacher, but at the same time he felt as if the ropes that had bound him had been loosened and he was now free to live as he pleased. Shiki, in the long letter sent at this time to another disciple, Ioki Hyōtei, mourning the loss of his most precious disciple, described the break with Kyoshi: Even while I was in Suma, I gave him all kinds of advice, and I went so far as to tell him plainly that I intended to make him my

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successor. Kyoshi seemed to have more or less decided to accept. I was secretly delighted and in my heart I cried “Long live literature!” Last month, when I returned to Tokyo, I carefully observed Kyoshi’s behavior and saw he had reverted to his old childishness. What I urged on him was scholarship, that and nothing else. Kyoshi must have heard me pronounce that word hundreds of times. I made up my mind in Suma that the advice I gave him there would truly be my last. Kyoshi was his former self. He stared at me blankly.22 Shiki described their conversation in Tokyo immediately before the break between them occurred. “We finally reached the teahouse, sat down, and began a serious conversation. ‘Do you or don’t you have any wish to study?’ “After a great many questions and answers, he finally came out with, ‘I hope to become a writer. But of course I have no hopes of being famous even after I’m dead. Not even while I’m still alive.’ “ ‘I thought you wanted to study. Why don’t you feel like studying?’ “ ‘I don’t see there’s anything wrong if a person studies, hoping to become famous. But I personally don’t like the idea of being consumed with ambition for fame. In short, I’d like to be a writer, but not so much that I’d be willing to devote myself to scholarship, something I detest. . . . I’m grateful for your extreme kindness, but I’m not courageous enough to accept what you recommend and carry it out.’ ”23 Shiki, hearing these words, could not help but realize that there was no hope of Kyoshi’s agreeing to be his successor. He wrote Ioki that he did not intend to break totally with Kyoshi. He would associate with him as an ordinary friend and as such had surrendered the “privilege and duty” of giving Kyoshi advice.24 Despite the disappointment caused by Kyoshi’s refusal, Shiki continued to compose haiku prolifically, exploring the possibilities of the shasei style. The haiku he composed from 1896 capture the essence of some-

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thing he has seen, whether in nature or in the actions of human beings, expressed in plain, easily understood language that may, however, have elusive overtones. It may take the reader some effort to appreciate fully the skill of Shiki’s shasei haiku written at this time. harusame ya kasa sashite miru ezōshiya

spring rain: browsing under an umbrella at the picture-book store.25

Janine Beichman has commented perceptively, “A quiet feeling of spring rain is splendidly evoked, but the identity of the browser is deliberately left vague in order to evoke better the quality of the rain.”26 This is an excellent example of a shasei haiku. There is never mention of a “you” or “I,” but the atmosphere is perfectly evoked. Shiki was still able to walk in 1896, and his haiku frequently evoked sights of a journey: samidare ya karihashi yurugu Ōigawa

Early summer rains— The temporary bridge shakes Over the Ōi River.

This is another straightforward example of shasei: rain has swollen the waters of the Ōi River and the current makes the wooden bridge shake dangerously. Occasionally there is a reference to his illness: tatan to su koshi no tsugai no saekaeru

When I try to stand The hinges of my back Are bitterly cold.

Shiki might have been disappointed if he had been informed that this personal haiku is more likely to move readers than those of pure

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shasei, but he must have known that “hinges” was at once realistic and imaginative. Shiki wrote an extended account of the world of haiku in 1896.27 It opens with a list of the harsh words of criticism that had been leveled at the haiku of Shiki and his “school” of poets. Some said that the haiku was the lowest form of literature. Others claimed that the haiku is incapable of treating complicated human matters. Still others said that the haiku is something like a private language that can be understood only by specialists. But whatever the particular angle from which the attack was launched, the general purport of the criticism was that the haiku was not worth studying.28 Shiki’s answer was to compare the situation with the Sino-Japanese War. The war was necessary in order for Japan to gain world recognition as a major country; in the same way the haiku had to pass through the vilification of the critics before it could be recognized as a part of literature. Already there were signs of eventual triumph: from 1896 most newspapers began to publish haiku.29 Shiki’s account of developments in the world of haiku gave special mention to the introduction of striking new features in the haiku of Shiki’s disciples Kawahigashi Hekigotō and Takahama Kyoshi. In 1896 both disciples rejected the necessity of strictly obeying the five-seven-five structure of haiku.30 In this essay Shiki also touched on the question of ambiguity in the haiku. Many of the haiku of the past, especially those of the Danrin school, which had depended on plays on words, had become extremely difficult to understand, and even modern haiku were so involuted in expression as to require lengthy explanations. Shiki did not answer this question directly, but in principle he favored clarity of expression. He wrote, “Clarity of effect is the most important element in painting. If one attempts to achieve clarity of impression in a haiku, it should be as much like a painting as possible.” But he was aware that making a haiku absolutely clear might destroy its overtones. He wrote, “Clarity of impression is an element of beauty, but of course one should not judge the

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value of a haiku solely on whether or not it is clear. Some poems, though quite clear in their expression, contain deep yūgen, and it may also happen that a clearly expressed poem is shallow and without flavor.” 1896 was the year when Shiki’s friend and disciple in Matsuyama, Yanagihara Kyokudō, decided to publish a haiku magazine centered on Shiki’s works.31 The title would be Hototogisu, an alternative reading of the characters for Shiki. The magazine, which first appeared at the beginning of the following year, would develop into the chief organ of haiku poetry and brought Shiki recognition as the outstanding poet of his time.

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he first issue of Hototogisu appeared on January 15, 1897. Shiki contributed a short essay ostensibly intended to celebrate the publication of the magazine, but it was hardly enthusiastic. Shiki’s essay was devoted mainly to a description of how little literature had ever been composed in the province of Iyo.1 Although Iyo had been civilized from ancient times, its isolation on the island of Shikoku, cutting it off from easy access to the centers of Japanese culture, prevented it from absorbing many of the changes that had enriched Japanese culture. Iyo was so remote that it had not even been involved in the warfare that repeatedly broke out in regions closer to the capital; in fact, for over two thousand years nothing of significance had taken place in Iyo. Although some persons in Iyo were acquainted with the arts and literature, not one was noteworthy. The barely one or two haiku and tanka poets were secondrate, and there were absolutely no other poets. But now, in the thirtieth year of Meiji, there were signs of a burgeoning of literary activity. The publication of the haiku magazine Hototogisu exemplified this new tendency.

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Shiki hoped that Hototogisu would be a success and that many splendid haiku would appear in its pages. He hoped also, though there was not a single haiku poet of distinction in Iyo, publication of a magazine might bring together a group of local poets who could write haiku that was distinct from those produced anywhere else in Japan. Perhaps with the improvement in communications between Iyo and the rest of Japan, brought about by inventions such as the railways, steamships, the telegraph, and so on, the isolation might be ended. But it would be most unfortunate if people from elsewhere were to say of the new magazine with a sneer, “That’s the best you can expect from islanders.” A hototogisu has been born, but it is still wrapped in a cocoon, and in order for it to achieve the strength that will enable its voice to shatter the moon and splinter the mountains, help must be obtained from all with like aspirations.2 As these lukewarm congratulations suggest, Shiki had doubts that a successful haiku magazine could be created in a region with so meager a literary heritage as Iyo’s. After reading the first issue, however, his tone became more enthusiastic. In a letter of January 21, 1897, to Yanagihara Kyokudō, the publisher, he expressed surprise that the magazine was so much more attractive than he had expected. He had quite a few criticisms to make but recognized that faults were, of course, unavoidable in a magazine published in a rustic backwater. Shiki’s criticisms were on the whole concerned with editorial matters rather than with content. He declared, for example, that it was a great lapse to place the section of Hototogisu devoted to haikai essays earlier in the magazine than messages expressing congratulations on the publication of the new magazine. This and other criticisms revealed that Shiki had carefully considered the proper arrangement of the different sections of the magazine; but he said nothing about the quality of the haiku or the essays. Perhaps Shiki intended to convey by his silence his low opinion of the contents; he urged Kyokudō to ask his disciples Kawahigashi Hekigotō, Takahama Kyoshi, and Ioki Hyōtei for haiku, promising

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that he himself and Naitō Meisetsu3 would contribute haiku even without being asked. Toward the end of the letter, Shiki reproaches Kyokudō for having sent so few copies of Hototogisu to persons in his circle of haiku poets and asked him to send any remaining copies. Meisetsu also asked for five or six additional copies. The publication of Hototogisu had made Meisetsu proud and almost unbearably happy. Shiki added, “To tell the truth, I don’t feel quite so proud as Meisetsu. I was initially happy to see the first issue, but later on I felt somewhat dissatisfied. But I would like, insofar as I can, to make it perfect.” 4 The letter concludes, “Meisetsu says he will send you some haiku by Lord Shukuzan5 for the second issue. I plan to keep writing Hogobako (Wastepaper Basket) for a long time. I expect to write other things as well.” 6 Despite the many small faults that Shiki found to criticize in the makeup of the magazine, the three hundred copies of the first issue of Hototogisu quickly sold out. The purchasers included amateur haiku poets from Iyo, delighted to see their poems in print, but many copies were sold outside the prefecture. It was an auspicious start. Shiki’s serial, given the full title of Haikai hogobako, began to appear in the first issue on January 15 and continued monthly until the March issue.7 This work of haiku criticism opens, in Shiki’s usual manner, with a paradox. If anyone should ask me of what use haikai was, I would have to answer that it serves no use whatever. Something that serves no use is, in a word, useless. If someone were to say that rather than write useless things, it is better not to write at all, I would not recommend that he compose haikai. But I confess I have not abandoned haiku despite its uselessness. This is because something useless is better than something harmful. Perhaps there is something like a use of the useless.8

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Shiki, of course, did not really consider haikai poetry to be useless. His statement was humorous, intended perhaps as his response to the comment an imaginary philistine might make—“I don’t see what use writing haiku serves.” A little later in the essay Shiki speaks in quite other terms about haiku: Haikai is something that reveals quite unconsciously the true feelings of the poet. Even if he tries to distort his feelings when he is making a haiku, his true feelings will be revealed somewhere in the poem. For this reason, a person with a heart that is base and mean will naturally compose haiku that are base and mean. . . . If you would like to compose noble haiku, you must first be noble-hearted.9 There is nothing particularly surprising in such comments, but Shiki, thanks to his study and classification of a great number of haiku, knew how seldom haiku poets of the past had intentionally communicated their feelings in their poems. This was true especially of the early haiku poets, who tended to shun the emotions in favor of ingenuity. As a result of reading masses of the old haiku, Shiki was fully aware that ingenuity, when divorced from feeling, quickly becomes tedious if not irritating. Some contemporary poets nevertheless had turned back nostalgically to the old, facetious haiku, hoping to find phrases they could use in their own poems. Shiki was in favor of reading the old poems in order to understand how the haiku had developed, but he warned that a modern poet who borrows too much from them is likely to produce an effect of staleness. Haikai hogobako moves next to a discussion of problems faced by beginners in haiku: The beginner when he looks at a landscape and decides to describe it in a haiku often has trouble deciding what in the landscape he

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should choose to suggest in his haiku. Landscapes, not having been created in order to serve as material for haiku, inevitably contain features that cannot possibly be used in a haiku. Some landscapes remain uninteresting even after they have been transformed into a haiku, and other landscapes contain so much material for poetry that not all can be squeezed into the seventeen or eighteen syllables of a haiku. . . . When writing about an actual landscape, one must discard the ugly parts and consider only the beautiful ones. At times the artist will change bit by bit the placing of objects in the actual features of a landscape, or he may even modify the actual landscape by subjectively bringing in things not present in the view before him. A landscape is like a naturally beautiful woman; it often has a few small defects.10 Shiki gave examples of haiku that successfully captured the true appearance of landscapes. The first was by Bashō: ara umi ya Sado ni yokotau ama no kawa

Turbulent the sea— Across to Sado stretches The Milky Way.

This example of poetic realism evokes with exactness and beauty a magnificent scene. The twelve other examples of descriptive haiku that Shiki quoted with admiration are (with one exception) by totally forgotten poets, a reminder of the perishability of the reputation of haiku poets. Whether because of modesty or because he did not think them worthy of quotation, Shiki rarely used his own haiku as examples when discussing poetry. The essays that make up Haikai hogobako were intended mainly for inexperienced haiku poets, but they are of considerable interest to the reader and typical of Shiki’s views on his art. The point of the following section is that every word in a haiku must be absolutely essential; to

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waste even one syllable of the allotted seventeen is the mark of an incompetent poet. If you see a flower and think it is beautiful, this is a quite normal and widespread reaction, so all you have to say is that you see a flower; it is not necessary to mention it is beautiful. If you see a flower and don’t think it’s beautiful, this is an occasion when you should definitely mention what you feel. If you say something that everybody knows even without your mentioning it, this is not only unnecessary but kills whatever interest there is in your poem. uguisu mo The nightingale, too, yoi toki kitari Has come at the right time: io no hima At ease in my hut. This verse, which includes a number of unnecessary words, is totally devoid of interest. Nightingales sing in lonely, quiet places, and those who live in such places are mainly either men of leisure or persons who temporarily have nothing to do. There was no need to reinforce the image of the nightingale with mention of the hut where a man quietly enjoys his leisure. If the nightingale had made its appearance in a noisy city and its song somehow reached the ears of a busy man, one would have to make it clear that the man had no leisure to appreciate birdsong; but it is a waste of space to state that a man in a hermitage is enjoying a day of leisure. Moreover, if the man is at leisure, it goes without saying that any time is equally good for him to listen to a nightingale; it doesn’t have to be the “right” time. The poem includes both “ease” and “right time,” but they denote the same things for the man; mentioning both is totally unnecessary. The only necessary words in this verse are “nightingale . . . has come . . . hut”; the rest is superfluous.11 Haiku poets often expanded the content of a haiku beyond what could be stated in seventeen syllables by including images that immediately

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called up unspoken associations. In the haiku that Shiki so harshly criticized, the word “nightingale” itself established the site; it was not necessary to insist on the quiet by mentioning a hermit’s hut (io). Haiku poets were expected to hoard their words and not use two words with the same associations in a single poem. Shiki was dismayed by what he took for padding. One problem of composing haiku, little discussed by Shiki at this time, was whether or not a haiku had to be readily intelligible. He advocated clarity of expression (inshō meiryō), but a haiku by Shiki, even one that seems no more than a sketch from life (shasei) expressed in simple language, may prove difficult for the reader to understand, especially if he has had no previous training in haiku and knows little about the poet’s life at the time he composed the haiku. In addition, the extreme concentration required by the brevity of the haiku may result in the omission of particles that normally indicate the subject of a verb, the object, and so on. These problems in understanding a haiku did not originate in Shiki’s time. Consider, for example, the following well-known haiku of Bashō: ta ichimai uete tachisaru yanagi kana

They sowed a whole field And only then did I leave The willow tree.

Understanding this haiku requires the reader to be aware, first of all, that Bashō is referring specifically to a willow described by the great Saigyō in one of his poems; it is not merely a willow that happens to be growing by a field. But even if the reader recognizes the allusion, it may not help him to understand who went away—the farmers after sowing the field or Bashō, who was so reluctant to leave Saigyō’s willow that a whole field was sowed while he lingered. Either interpretation is possible. Some scholars have even suggested that it was Bashō who sowed the field, a grammatically possible but unlikely conjecture. Yet, despite the uncertainty, the haiku remains beautiful and even unforgettable.

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Shiki in his discussions of haiku, written for the most part to enlighten his disciples, neither praised nor condemned the use of ambiguity. A disciple of Shiki’s who obeyed the master’s command not to include unnecessary words might leave out so much that he produces a haiku that only the poet himself (or possibly Shiki) can understand. One celebrated example of Shiki’s ambiguity occurs in a haiku written in 1902, toward the end of his life. It is in the shasei mode and seems to offer no problems of interpretation. keitō no jūshigo hon mo arinu beshi

Cockscomb— There must surely be Fourteen or fifteen stalks.

The question here is not the meaning but what makes the seventeen syllables a poem. On the surface it seems no more than a casual observation. Unless the reader knows the circumstances of its composition, it lacks emotional content; but if he is aware that Shiki was close to death, it is not difficult to visualize Shiki gazing from his window at the plants growing in his garden and guessing (because he cannot leave his bed) the number of stalks. This still does not necessarily make it an interesting poem. The reader will either find the poem a failure or suspect that something else, an ambiguity, is behind a seemingly placid observation. At the time it was composed, the poets closest to Shiki did not consider this an important haiku. Neither Takahama Kyoshi nor Kawahigashi Hekigotō included it in the collections they made of Shiki’s best haiku. Another critic defied anyone to state what difference it would make if “seven or eight stalks” were substituted for “fourteen or fifteen stalks.” However, the critic Yamamoto Kenkichi (1907–1988), the most passionate admirer of this haiku, insisted on the importance of the sound of the words and argued that anyone who argues exclusively on the meaning does not understand poetry. He also claimed, “It was a tremendous assertion for the poet to have said, ‘There must surely be fourteen or

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fifteen stalks” of cockscomb.’ When we read this poem we cannot imagine it was possible for there to be more or fewer cockscomb than fourteen or fifteen.”12 Above all, Yamamoto contrasted the vitality of the flowers with the immobility of the dying Shiki.13 Konishi Jin’ichi (1915–2007), a great scholar of Japanese literature who was particularly devoted to haiku, after giving a brief history of the ups and downs of the reputation of this haiku, ended with the comment, “Strange to say, the various authorities who have praised this haiku in the highest terms have never attempted to explain what makes this a superior haiku. Probably the superiority results from something like religious inspiration; it is not criticism that can be traced back to literary experience.”14 It can hardly be doubted that the admiration expressed for this and others of Shiki’s haiku may be based not so much on literary principles as on affection for the man and faith in the sincerity of his utterances; but Shiki did not teach his pupils to be absolutely sincere in their expression of emotions or, conversely, to be interestingly ambiguous; he taught them instead to describe nature truthfully. Between August 1897 and April 1898 he published in Hototogisu a long series called Shimon (Questions), intended to help beginners write better haiku. It is in the form of questions about every aspect of haiku composition together with the correct answers. The first question, for example, asks the beginner to fill in the blanks in a haiku printed with three syllables missing.15 Shiki’s answers are assured and somewhat dogmatic. With the publication of Hototogisu he had established himself as a master of the haiku, and he was eager to create a school. Shiki wrote for the January 1898 issue of Hototogisu a congratulatory piece on its accomplishments during the year since it was first published. He was a great deal more enthusiastic than a year earlier, but he warned now of the danger that Hototogisu, having made great progress, might lose sight of its ultimate goal, a revolution in the haiku, and rest on its laurels. Still, there was much to celebrate. Hototogisu was now read by

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people living far from Iyo; and what had started as a local magazine seemed likely to exert a strong influence over haiku circles throughout the entire country. Shiki must have felt some pride that a magazine published in the town where he was born was now a commanding voice in the world of haiku. He had gradually come, however, to think of Tokyo as his home. It was not only the capital of Japan, the place where the great men of the Meiji government were gathered, but also where new literature was most likely to burgeon. Shiki had begun to think it an anomaly that a magazine that stood in the forefront of the haiku revolution should be published in rustic Matsuyama. In August 1898 the twentieth issue of Hototogisu carried Shiki’s explanation of why the magazine would henceforth be published in Tokyo. He likened the growth of Hototogisu to a tide that had first swept over Shikoku, later over the Kyoto area, and still later over the more distant northeastern provinces. This gave reason to hope that Hototogisu was destined to become the sole national organ of the new haiku. He rejoiced that this outstanding magazine had been founded in Matsuyama, but Matsuyama was inconveniently located for communication with the rest of the country. Letters from other parts of the country traveled first to Tokyo and from there to Matsuyama, resulting in long delays. His conclusion was that Matsuyama was not suitable as the headquarters of a nationwide movement. It was decided that the twentieth would be the last issue published in Matsuyama, and that the offices would then move to Tokyo. In keeping with its new role as a nationwide publication, the contents of the magazine would be increased to include all varieties of poetry, not only haiku, as well as criticism of art and literature. The circulation was increased to five hundred copies. Shiki wrote, Hototogisu must be successful as the organ of the new haiku. It must stand from this time on at the center of the maelstrom of the struggle for existence. And we must edit, preserve, rescue, and

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expand Hototogisu. Speaking of myself, the unrelenting effects of illness have made it impossible for me even to stand, much less to travel anywhere. I am in a state I do not enjoy so much as a single day without pain. I wait for good moments and I write. I endure the pain and I write. Lying in bed, I write. I stay up all night and I write. Even as I was writing for Hototogisu, then just a regional magazine, the pain was indescribable. When I think that from now on I shall be writing for Hototogisu, a magazine published at the center, I cannot help feeling somehow as if I were being dragged off to the scaffold. Yes, I want to live together with Hototogisu, beginning and end. But even if I die, Hototogisu must not die. The day that Hototogisu dies—that must be the day I die. Hototogisu is my life.16 The change in Shiki’s attitude, from the skepticism with which he viewed the first issue of Hototogisu to his cry that he could not go on living if Hototogisu failed, indicates how powerfully he now felt a sense of mission. He would no longer be content with writing haiku or with enlightening a small circle of disciples; he would be the champion of the new haiku. Even if he dies, the magazine must continue; but if the magazine dies first, it will cause the death of his haiku and of himself. The last line of the article states that with the move to Tokyo the editorship of Hototogisu would pass from Kyokudō to Takahama Kyoshi. Kyokudō had been a generous benefactor who supplied the initial financial support for the magazine, but Kyoshi, a much finer poet, was better qualified to be the editor. He seems to have regained his good spirits and was again Shiki’s friend, now that he knew he would not be asked once more to be his successor. Shiki’s health, however, continued to deteriorate. He had first felt back pains in 1895. The doctor initially informed him that they were caused by ruchū,17 but by March 1896 it became clear that he suffered not from ruchū but from caries of the spine, and that this illness was in its

Shiki with his mother, Yae ( July 1885). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki and his friend Ōtani Zekū (1887). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki in student uniform (1890). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki in baseball uniform (March 1890). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki, sword in hand, about to leave for China (March 30, 1895). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki, not bedridden, but ill on his return from China (1899). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki, in bed (1898). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki props himself up in bed for a photo (April 1900). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

A profile portrait of Shiki (April 5, 1900). Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

A watercolor self-portrait. Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki’s painting of Chinese asters. Original in the Tokyo National Museum. Copy in the Shiki Museum. Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Shiki’s painting of begonias (shukaido). Original in the Tokyo National Museum. Copy in the Shiki Museum. Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Illustration to the diary entry for September 13, 1901, in Shiki’s diary Gyōga Manroku (Supine Notes). Copy in the Shiki Museum. Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

Illustration for September 30, 1901, in Shiki’s diary Gyōga Manroku (Supine Notes). Copy in the Shiki Museum. Courtesy of the Shiki Museum

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final stages. He had an operation on March 27, 1897. It was unsuccessful. On the following day he wrote Kyoshi, Yesterday Doctor Satō [Sankichi] came and I had an operation. I asked Hekigotō to be with me and he came.18 I felt that I didn’t care how painful the operation might be, if only I could go outdoors the next day, but the swelling had returned by last night. I realized that the operation had done no good. Satō said on leaving that if, after a month and a half, the swelling resumed, he would perform another operation. But it looks as if in a week, not a month and a half, my legs will be in the same state as before. I thought I would see if I could at least turn over freely but, to my great disappointment, even that wasn’t possible. There was no likelihood that anyone as prone to illness as myself could be cured, no matter what was done, but just like any other man, I thought I might get better, miserable fool that I am. It makes me angry when I recall that last year I went to see the cherry blossoms at Ueno, but even that may be impossible this year.19 There are several postscripts to this letter. In one, Shiki mentioned that someone had asked him to write a life of Bashō. At first he refused, but in the end he agreed to write a short account. Of late he had been reading about Bashō, particularly Hanaya nikki (Flower Shop Diary),20 the account of Bashō’s death published in 1810 by the priest Bungyō. As he read the descriptions of Bashō’s last hours, written by his disciples, Shiki could not stop the flow of tears; and when he read how Kyorai had rushed to Bashō’s side as soon as he learned of his master’s illness, Shiki sobbed so much that he couldn’t continue reading and his throat hurt.21 Perhaps he visualized his own death with Kyoshi arriving at the last moment.22 The next postscript says, “I have the feeling somehow that I am capable of living one hundred years or even two hundred years, so I don’t

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say I’m going to give up my great work because of illness. However, logically speaking, I may die tomorrow. I have reached the conclusion that the ease with which I am moved to tears comes from being in a weakened state; the hour of death is approaching. But no matter how logical this conclusion may be, I cannot conceive of dying tomorrow or the day after. If I had to say which was right, my feeling or my logic, of course the logic is correct. The fact that, despite this, I still keep thinking that my feeling is correct shows I am an average man among average men. If human beings were not ordinary, even pleasure wouldn’t mean a damn.”23 Kyoshi, who had returned to Matsuyama in order to look after his ailing mother, sent a reply conveying his grief over the failed operation. He had attempted several times to compose a letter but couldn’t find the appropriate words. He mentioned in particular having burst into tears when he read the passage in Shiki’s letter where he wrote of feeling he might go on living for one or even two hundred years. The thought of Shiki’s death filled him with desolation. He concluded the letter with the hope that Shiki would live even one day, even one hour longer, and that he would compose even one more haiku.24 At the end of April Dr. Satō performed a second operation. Like the first, it was a failure. On May 3 Shiki wrote Natsume Sōseki, “I am exhausted by the second operation. One inch ahead of me is pitchdarkness.”25 At the end of May Shiki ran a high fever, and on the twentyninth Dr. Satō cut him up again. Although this drained a great deal of pus from Shiki’s body, the fever continued unabated. But Shiki miraculously clung to life. Shiki’s physical condition gradually improved by the middle of June, but the letter he sent Natsume Sōseki on June 16 makes it clear that he was still extremely depressed. He wrote, At the end of last month I was tormented by a fever of over thirty-nine degrees for four or five days running. The fever didn’t go down at all whether in the morning, in the evening, or at night, and this kept me from sleeping. I cannot remember ever having

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suffered such pain. I thought that I was probably on my way to the other world, and I waited for this with impatience, but at the beginning of this month my temperature went down and now I enjoy my food a great deal. I think I’ll hang on in this world a bit longer. But my condition is gradually getting worse. Now I feel an extreme weakening. I can’t carry on a conversation. I often have trouble uttering even a few words. My uncle, because he lives in Tokyo, has helped me in many ways. I now have a nurse at my bedside. It seems a bit too grand for someone like myself who hasn’t long to live, but as long as I’m alive I’ll be extravagant to the full and enjoy myself even if it’s only for one day. Of course, this is no more than taking advantage of something I have been offered, but since there is no chance I’ll ever return the generosity, I feel somehow sorry for my uncle. I have a grudge against even the rain that falls every day. If the weather improved, and my temperature was low, I would be almost unbearably happy, but I have no such hopes. All I do is torment myself with the sorrows and joys of one day after the next. To tell the truth, I have no hopes except for death.26 Near the end of the long letter he mentions that his legs pain him unbearably, but as he lay inside his mosquito net, moaning, a hototogisu passed overhead, its voice so close he thought it might be on the roof, and this somehow aroused a poetic state of mind. He composed the following haiku: hototogisu shibaraku atte ame itaru

Hototogisu Here for a little while, It has begun to rain.27

This haiku is followed be the notation, “This is only an actual scene [jikkei]; I hope it makes you laugh.” Although the haiku is seemingly

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uncomplicated, it has been interpreted in quite different ways, depending on what the reader decides is the subject of the middle line. It would seem to be a hototogisu that doesn’t linger once the rain starts; but Awazu Norio, doubting that the haiku was created casually in response to hearing a hototogisu, argued that the subject is Shiki, whose days are curtailed by the illness and pain that chain him to his bed.28 Regardless of the interpretation of the middle line, it is surely significant that Shiki, though yearning for death as a release from terrible suffering, heard the hototogisu, the bird that gave its name both to the poetry magazine he cherished and to himself. It may have told him he would not die, that his most important works had yet to come.

8 shiki and the tanka

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hiki composed not only haiku but also many other varieties of Japanese poetry, even the sedōka that he unsuccessfully attempted to revive after a thousand years of oblivion.1 He maintained his interest in each of these genres of poetry, but he is known today primarily as a poet and critic of haiku. He is almost as well-known as a tanka poet, though he did not compose tanka seriously until years after he had acquired a reputation as a haiku poet. In an early (1892) essay Shiki gave the reasons why Japanese had first been inspired to write “short poems,” the literal meaning of tanka.2 First and most important was the beauty of the landscapes of Japan, not only at the celebrated sites but almost everywhere else. Their beauty had aroused in the Japanese a natural impulse to capture them in words, in a manner “more lyrical than narrative; and, even more than lyrical, descriptive of nature.” Shiki added, “To put it in another way, Japanese poets have rarely attempted to celebrate the peace and happiness of our people by considering human society in all its complications and proclivity for change.”

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This was true too of Shiki; his poems were primarily about nature, not people; he seldom wrote a poem that did not in some way touch on nature.3 However, his poems differed sharply with one important aspect of Japanese tradition: love had inspired Japanese poets of all periods, but Shiki composed no love poems. Besides love, the anthologies of courtly poetry contained poems on travel, religion, and other topics, but there were great areas of human experience not depicted in traditional Japanese poetry except in the Man’yōshū, the richest but least typical anthology. Unlike Western or Chinese poets, Japanese poets normally did not describe warfare, loss of status, or other causes of suffering. Shiki attributed this absence to the harmony that had always prevailed between those who ruled and those who were ruled. He wrote, “In our country, ever since ancient times, the rulers have always behaved in a manner worthy of rulers and the subjects in a manner appropriate to subjects; that is why the relations between the two have been so close.” 4 This opinion suggests that Shiki was influenced by the nationalist ideology of the newspaper Nippon, but in fact he extolled the harmonious relations between the rulers and the ruled in Japan not by way of explaining why Japanese poetry was superior to the poetry of other countries (as one would expect from a nationalist) but as the reason why the tanka had failed to develop into truly great poetry. Because the guidance of enlightened rulers was so benevolent, the lives of the Japanese people had been untroubled by disasters and there had not been “even one or two great painters or three or four great writers; instead, many minor painters and many minor writers were produced.” Shiki seems to have believed, at least at this time, that the creation of great painting or great poetry required suffering of a kind that the Japanese, luckily for them, had never experienced. Of course Shiki recognized that there were exceptions to his generalization about the lack of great Japanese poets. The poets of the Man’yōshū had composed magnificent chōka, long poems that provided them with sufficient space to

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describe (and not only to suggest) powerful emotions. The Noh plays contain poetry that is powerful by any standard. When, however, Shiki rated Japanese poetry as minor he was thinking of the tanka, the classic Japanese verse form, not of the Man’yōshū or the Noh plays. Graceful and moving tanka had been composed by the poets of every generation, but they rarely possessed the intensity or the immediacy of the great European poems. The passions they described were muted. Shiki went on to give a brief account of the changes in Japanese poetry that had occurred over the centuries. The chōka, after its flourishing during the eighth century, the time of the great Man’yōshū poets, was abandoned and the tanka became virtually the only form of Japanese poetry. The preface to the Kokinshū, the great collection of court poetry, did not explain why this had happened but listed instead circumstances that move men to create poetry (flowers blooming, birds singing, the emotions aroused by haze and dew and so on). Such sights can be well evoked in a short poem and do not require the detailed description of a chōka. A tanka, even if it presents no more than a single memorable impression, can satisfy, but a chōka must sustain its themes. The aristocrats (whose tastes in tanka were dominant during the Heian period) sought to make their tanka perfect in every syllable. They hoped to capture, if only slightly more effectively than their predecessors, perceptions of beauty and sadness. Perfection was possible in a short poem, but an attempt to maintain exquisite phrasing throughout a long poem risked failure. The chōka was gradually abandoned,5 and the tanka came to possess absolute importance in the lives of the aristocracy, as we know from such works as The Tale of Genji, in which tanka are frequently quoted in the conversations of members of the court. Poems that had appeared in the imperially sponsored anthologies were memorized and allusions to these poems were recognized from a few words; it was not necessary to quote an entire poem. Poetry made even casual conversations elegant, but Shiki insisted that poetry must be more than an aristocratic diversion: “The genuine artist or writer, no matter in

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which country he was born and no matter the nature of the times in which he lives, stands alone, towering over others. In defiance of all difficulties, he goes in whichever direction he chooses, ignoring conventional restrictions, and in this way creates sublime works that bring him glory.” 6 So romantic a view of the poet surely owes much to Shiki’s readings in European poetry. In fact, the mass of Japanese poets gladly obeyed conventional restrictions and never wearied of such themes as the uncertainty of a love affair, a woman’s realization that her beauty has faded, the remembrances awakened by the scent of plum blossoms. Poems on such subjects were phrased in language that hardly changed over the centuries: poets were required by judges of poetry to restrict themselves to words mentioned in the Kokinshū. The sameness of themes and language helped to make readers feel they shared the emotions of the poets of the distant past, but repetition of similar thoughts in virtually the same words as one’s predecessors could lead to banality. By Shiki’s time it had become almost impossible to say anything new in a tanka. This had not caused tanka poets any despair: on the contrary, more tanka than ever were composed—far too many in Shiki’s opinion. The tanka was so short that a poet could easily compose thousands in his lifetime. Tanka were composed on every occasion, but with little individuality. Shiki, irritated by the smugness of the tanka poets, had resorted to mathematics to prove that sooner or later all possible combinations of thirty-one syllables would be exhausted. It would become impossible to compose an original poem.7 Shiki believed that the warfare of the middle ages had all but brought an end to poetic composition. He did not explain why warfare, which stimulated the composition of poetry in Europe, should have destroyed poetic composition in Japan. Probably he was disappointed that the tanka poets of the Japanese middle ages never described adequately the warfare of the times in which they lived, so unlike those of the Kokinshū poets, who never experienced a battle. Shiki at first did not realize that there had in fact been an important poet even during the age of warfare,

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but he eventually discovered the poetry of the shogun Minamoto Sanetomo (1192–1219). Sanetomo had not only rejected the Kokinshū manner but had also looked back to the Man’yōshū for inspiration and for vocabulary. A famous tanka touches on his life as a soldier: mononofu no yanami tsukurou kote no ue ni arare tabashiru nasu no shinoharu

As the warrior Rearranges his arrows, Hail falls and bounces Off his upraised sleeve of mail, In the bamboo plain of Nasu.

As Shiki pointed out, this is a most unusual tanka. Not only is the imagery unusual but the poem is so packed with nouns and verbs that there is almost no room left for the particles that ordinarily lend both nuance and clarity to a tanka. However, very few such poems were composed during the medieval period. Most tanka poets continued to mention oftdescribed beauties of nature—the melting of the ice in the early spring rivers, the coloring of the autumn leaves, and the other eternal, hackneyed themes, indifferent to how greatly the world had changed. Shiki linked his unsympathetic account of the limitations of the traditional tanka to the smallness of Japan.8 Yes, he said, Fuji is a tall mountain and the Enshū Sea9 is quite a big stretch of water, but compared to the lofty mountains and boundless seas elsewhere in the world, these are no more than anthills or cow puddles. Even Japanese history is on a miniature scale. Such events as the Mongol invasion or the conquest of Korea seem impressive when compared with the land and sea battles fought within Japan, but even they were hardly more than children playing at war or dogfights. Japanese poets were inescapably drawn to the miniature subjects with which they were familiar, and this diminished the size of their brains or hopelessly distorted them. For centuries the tanka was the sole poetic form practiced by the Japanese. Poets never doubted that the tanka was the most exalted form

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of literature even though an outsider (if one existed) would have judged that it had withered and was threatened with extinction. Fortunately, Shiki declared, the stalemate in Japanese poetry was broken with the creation of the haiku in the Tokugawa period. The haiku was not constricted by rules of poetic diction, and poets bored with the elegance of the tanka brought freshness to their haiku by using new and even coarse language. Shiki related these opinions with the utmost confidence, but it did not take him long to change his mind. In the essay “Bungaku zatsudan” (Idle Thoughts on Literature), published in 1893, only three months after his essay on the short poem, he compares Japanese and European poetry in these terms: European and American poems are mainly about human affairs. Japanese and Chinese poems are mainly about nature. Because human affairs are complicated and confusing, poems about them tend to be long. Because poems describing nature are simple and pure, they tend to be short. People infatuated with Europe and America say that not one Japanese poem ranks as a masterpiece. I wonder if only long poems can be called masterpieces, and if works of sublime thought and superb spirit can germinate only from the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Besides, is it not the case that wordiness and vulgar taste are most numerous in long works dealing with worldly matters? I don’t know much about Western poems, but when by chance I read one, I feel that although it contains elegance and beautiful language, the elegance is overpowered by vulgarity and the beautiful language is sandwiched in between ugly words, making me feel something close to disgust.10 Later in the same essay Shiki discusses the differences between poetry and prose.

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Poetry is writing in meter; prose is written without meter. Lines may be in five or seven syllables. The many varieties of meter include iambic, trochee, and so on. When they get mixed without order they may be called prose even if they are in fact close to being poetry. The Chinese fu and ci are examples of this practice. Scholars of Western literature insist that there must be a clear distinction between poetry and prose, but this is absurd. When I read Western poetry, it does not give me much pleasure because the meter is always uniform, and uniformity in a long poem makes me yawn. Among works of Japanese literature, the tanka and haiku are so short that they contain little variety of meter, but the novel, the military tales, the Noh plays and the jōruri texts sometimes seem to be in meter, sometimes not, making it difficult at times to decide whether a given work is poetry or prose. If we say of a work that it is in prose, we soon discover that half of any work of Japanese prose is likely to possess the rhythms of elegant poetry. Japanese literature, quite apart from purely poetic forms like the waka and haiku, includes extremely long works in prose embellished with lengthy poetic passages. Then, can we say of a given work that it is neither poetry nor prose? We should in fact say that Japanese literature, in addition to poetry and prose, possesses a unique and wonderful form of writing.11 Shiki gave as an example of this special feature of Japanese literature the novels of Takizawa Bakin, which are written mainly in prose but contain many passages in alternating lines of five and seven syllables and are permeated by a prevailing poetic tone. “Should these novels be rejected because there are no similar works in the West? Or should they be proudly displayed to people of foreign countries as examples of uniquely Japanese inventions?”12 Shiki, like most young men of his generation, was enamored of the poetic style of Bakin. This may be why for years he rejected in his criticism

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the unpoetic prose of genbun itchi; but his attitude shifted, and by the time he wrote the essay “Jojibun” (Narrative Prose, 1900) he had come to believe that genbun itchi, like the unadorned “sketches from life” he advocated in poetry, was the best prose style for depicting reality. He urged writers of prose to shun unfamiliar words and to avoid “poetic” words even if this meant sacrificing nostalgic associations; genbun itchi was the style for the modern world. Shiki’s awakened interest in the tanka came relatively late in his life. In 1897 he received a gift of persimmons from an acquaintance named Amada Guan (1854–1900), a member of the samurai class who at one time was a professional photographer, later visited the countries of the West, and eventually became a Zen priest. Guan, learning that Shiki’s favorite fruit was the persimmon, sent him fifteen. Shiki responded with a letter of thanks that included three comic haiku. The first was the following: mi-hotoke ni sonae amari ni kaki jūgo13

Leftover from An offering to the Buddha— Fifteen persimmons.

Guan replied with a tanka, and Shiki answered with six comic tanka beginning with this: mi-hotoke ni sonaeshi kaki no amaritsuran ware ni zo tabishi to amari itsutsu

These, I suppose, are leftovers From the persimmons offered To the Buddha— Ten plus five of them And I ate every one.

The tanka at first glance may seem hardly more than the haiku with padding added to make up thirty-one syllables; but Shiki, by including himself in the poem as the happy recipient of the persimmons, changed the emphasis and metamorphosed the haiku into a tanka.

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The humorous exchange of tanka with Guan seems to have been the stimulus that inspired Shiki not only to write tanka of his own but also to reform the tanka much as he had reformed the haiku. Kawahigashi Hekigotō recorded the moment of this development. He described a visit to Shiki: It was a day in February [1898]. A pamphlet, not ten sheets of paper in length, was tossed before me. I don’t remember very well whether or not it had a cover, but it was some sort of manuscript in Shiki’s beautiful handwriting, every stroke of the characters clearly drawn in formal calligraphy. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but the writing seemed high-spirited and rather commanding, not like his usual gentle style.14 Hekigotō was surprised to discover that the pamphlet that Shiki had tossed to him was filled with tanka. At first he had trouble believing that Shiki, who had shown little interest in the tanka, had written so many, but then he remembered the comments about the tanka Shiki had made from time to time during the preceding year. He had decided to test the validity of his views by composing some tanka. They had not come easily. Composing haiku was no problem for him, but the tanka was a different matter. He had spent four sleepless nights writing them. Despite the lack of sleep, Shiki was ebullient over his venture into new poetic territory.15 Hekigotō urged Shiki to publish the tanka in the Nippon, and they appeared, ten at a time, in 1898. In the same year Shiki also published nine tanka on baseball, including the following: ima ya kano mittsu no bēsu ni hito michite sozoro mune no uchisawagu kana16

The bases are full, Men of the other team On all three bases; In spite of myself I feel My heart pound with emotion.

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Although he had not written his views on the tanka, Shiki must have been thinking of reform for some time. He published in quick succession in 1898 ten “letters” addressed to tanka poets. The first, as one might expect of Shiki the reformer, lamented the present state of the tanka. “Honestly speaking, it has not flourished since the Man’yōshū and Sanetomo.”17 Shiki praised Minamoto Sanetomo’s originality, profundity, and poetic skill and deplored the humble status he had been assigned as a poet despite his unique ability to write with the masculine strength of the Man’yōshū. Shiki singled out for praise only one poet of the five hundred years after the death of Sanetomo, Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), a scholar who had worshipped the Man’yōshū. Unfortunately, Mabuchi had written unfavorably about a few Man’yōshū poems, and this had provided ammunition for those who disliked the collection. The tone of the first letter was historical rather than combative, but the second letter opened with a bang: “Tsurayuki is a bad poet and the Kokinshū is a stupid collection.” Shiki admitted that he himself had long worshipped the Kokinshū, believing that refinement was essential to the tanka and that the Kokinshū was the most refined of the collections. However, his eyes had been opened and now he angrily wondered how he could have been bewitched for three years by such a dreadful woman.18 Shiki mocked the first poem in the Kokinshū with its quibbling over whether the beginning of spring should be called this year or last year;19 he said it was as stupid as asking if the child of a Japanese and a foreigner should be called a Japanese or a foreigner. The other poems in the Kokinshū were all equally bad, filled with childish puns and plays on words. Worst of all was the fact that for hundreds of years poets had continued to imitate and further debase the style of the Kokinshū. The Shin Kokinshū, Shiki grudgingly admitted, was somewhat superior, but the truly excellent poems in that anthology could be counted on the fingers of one’s hands.

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Shiki’s third letter attacked the tanka poets for their ignorance of other kinds of poetry. They knew nothing about haiku and even less about Chinese poetry, and they had not the slightest idea whether or not poetry existed in the West. If, however, they were asked if novels and plays could properly be called “literature,” they would probably stare in amazement that anyone would think such inferior kinds of writing could be discussed in the same breath with the tanka. The fourth letter was concerned mainly with the faults of poems that were generally regarded as masterpieces. He particularly disliked ingenuity (rikutsu) in the conception of the poems. At times his remarks verged on insults, as when he discussed a poem by Hatta Tomonori (1799–1873): “I haven’t yet read his collected poems, but if this is his masterpiece, I have a pretty good idea of what the rest are like.”20 In the fifth letter Shiki took up the famous poem by the tenth-century poet Ōshikōchi no Mitsune: kokoro ate ni oraba ya oran hatsu shimo no okimadowaseru shiragiku no hana

I can only pluck at random for I cannot tell apart in all this whiteness— white chrysanthemums from the first frost.21

Shiki commented, “This poem is in the Hyakunin isshu and so everybody recites it, but it is a stupid poem not worth a penny, not even half a penny. The poem is based on a falsehood. There is no reason why one couldn’t detect a white chrysanthemum if it was covered by nothing more than first frost.”22 In the remaining letters Shiki discussed the conflicting claims of strength against melody, ingenuity as opposed to objective description, sincerity against artificiality. At times his discussions of poems reveal influences from foreign scholars of aesthetics.

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The eighth and ninth letters were devoted to poems by Sanetomo and various Shin Kokinshū poets. In the last letter he listed some of the failings of contemporary tanka, such as using “poetic” names for ordinary things. He wrote, underlining the words, “My basic principle is to convey as clearly as I can whatever poetic qualities I feel are beautiful.”23 Shiki’s insistence that every tanka must contain some element of beauty remained at the heart of his poetry. The techniques he favored may have been realistic, but his attention was always focused on sights that he found beautiful. Even when he used foreign words or modern Japanese terms that to a traditionalist would have seemed vulgar, the shasei realism was usually softened by conventional beauty. Shiki, stimulated by his disciples, between 1897 and 1900 wrote most of the tanka included in the posthumous collection Takenosato uta (Poems from the Bamboo Village, 1904). The prolonged illness of his last years did not prevent him from engaging actively in the meetings of his poetry society. His illness occasioned some of his most moving tanka, such as one composed in 1898 with the headnote “On first getting up and leaning on a stick”: yotose nete hitotabi tateba ki mo kusa mo mina me no shita ni hana sakinikeri

Four years spent in bed— I got up for the first time To find the trees and plants, All of them, before my eyes, Had burst into flower.24

Shiki’s criticism of the Kokinshū and later tanka is sometimes intemperate. He wrote in harsh terms because he was desperately eager to preserve the tanka in the modern world, and this was only possible if he destroyed the mystique surrounding the old traditions. However, apart from his unqualified praise for the Man’yōshū and his recommendation that its strong, masculine expression be adopted, he offered little specific guidance to poets who wished to save the tanka.

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Shiki’s own tanka do not resemble either those in the Man’yōshū or Sanetomo’s. Their striking feature, the one the reader is most likely to remember, is their background: the terrible illness that confined Shiki to a sickroom and kept him from nature, the object of his worship. A sequence of ten poems written in 1901 at a time when he lay immobile in bed is considered his finest accomplishment as a tanka poet. A brief introduction by Shiki describes his pleasure at seeing a vase of wisteria blossoms on a table in his room. He was moved to express his feelings in tanka, though he had neglected the tanka of late. A reader of the sequence who is ignorant of the background of these poems might find them repetitive and prosaic, but as the testament of a poet suffering from an illness that will sooner or later take his life, the poems are poignant.25 These tanka, examples of Shiki’s shasei style, may at first seem of little interest, just objective descriptions of flowers in his sickroom that reveal nothing personal; but the reader who knows the circumstances of their composition can infer the unspoken sadness. One is particularly striking: fujinami no hana wo shi mireba Nara no mikado Kyō no mikado no inishie koishi mo

When I look at The waves of wisteria blossoms I yearn for the long ago days Of the emperor in Nara, The emperor in Kyoto.

The purple of the wisteria brings back nostalgic memories of days, known from poetry, when long-ago emperors resided in Nara and later in Kyoto, grandly dressed in the color of royalty. Perhaps this tanka has the overtone of being a contrast to the black-and-white photograph of Emperor Meiji in military uniform. The nostalgia for the past violates the shasei insistence on the present, but it is close to Buson. Shiki nowhere stated why he had taken to composing tanka.26 Perhaps, having achieved a revolution in haiku, he felt emboldened to take on an even more formidable adversary, the sacred tanka. Although most

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poets considered the haiku and tanka so dissimilar that no one could successfully write both, Shiki as far back as 1894 had stated that there was no basic difference between the two. He wrote, “Waka and haiku are the closest forms of literature. One could go so far as to say that apart from the difference in the number of syllables there is absolutely no basic difference between them.”27 Soon after Shiki published the ten controversial letters, tanka poets, responding to Shiki’s challenge, gathered around him, as haiku poets had done years before. The tanka disciples, perhaps less intensely devoted to Shiki’s teachings than the haiku poets, were slower to publish a magazine proclaiming the new tanka. Shiki’s haiku had immediately gained nationwide acceptance, but attacks directed at him by the tanka establishment persisted, compelling him to write long rebuttals of self-defense. The “golden age” of the Negishi Tanka Society lasted just two years—1899 and 1900. Shiki made an important discovery at this time, the poetry of Tachibana Akemi (1812–1868). His essay “Akemi no uta” (Akemi’s Poems), published in 1899, opens with an account of how he had been urged to read the poetry of Toshiyori, Fumio, and Akemi. These poets, though their works were totally dissimilar, were all known as iconoclasts who had violated accepted poetic practice. Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055?–1129?), though a high-ranking aristocrat, was known as a “radical,” a poet impatient with traditions. Inoue Fumio (1800–1871) published a book of poems with a preface that proposed new ideals for tanka poets: instead of describing “flowers, birds, the wind, and the moon,” they should exhort society, make clear what is true and what is false, promote wisdom, and rebuke unworthy motives.”28 Shiki, though attracted to these iconoclasts, found their poetry disappointing. Apart from the use of a few words outside the standard poetic diction, there was nothing remarkable about their poems. The poetry of Tachibana Akemi, however, was a revelation. He wrote,

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His tanka did not fall either into the staleness of the Kokinshū and the Shin Kokinshū or into the ready-made patterns of Mabuchi and Kageki.29 He studied the Man’yō but freed himself from the Man’yō. He ran around in all directions, gathering up trivial, quite ordinary matters, but with none of the vulgarity of the old poets. In particular, he had a poor opinion of poems decorated with mentions of the wind and the moon; instead, he revealed directly what was deep in his heart. That is why his outlook is so lofty, so able to transcend the ordinary. And yet, although people have heard about Toshiyori and Fumio, they do not even know Akemi’s name.30 Shiki was profoundly impressed by Akemi’s poetry, contrasting its natural fragrance with the poems of Tsurayuki, who would not have known the beauty of nature even if it was dangled before his nose. It seemed a miracle that Akemi had suddenly appeared after the darkness of the centuries and the innumerable ramifications of Tsurayuki’s kind of poetry. Shiki was attracted by what he termed Akemi’s pure poverty. Akemi was desperately poor but never complained about clothing, food, or shelter. Shiki quoted a poem from Akemi’s sequence on “Solitary Pleasures” that alludes to his poverty: tanoshimi wa mare ni uo nite kora mina ga umashi umashi to iite kuu toki

It is a pleasure When, a most infrequent treat, We’ve fish for dinner And my kids all cry with joy “Yum yum” and gobble it down.

This was clearly a personal experience and not the feigned poverty of the bunjin, who pretended to be indifferent to worldly goods. The foods that Akemi mentions in his poems (like fried tofu) are what poor people like himself actually ate.

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Shiki not only praised Akemi’s sequence on solitary pleasures but imitated the personal tone in his ware wa (I who) sequence of 1898: mukashi seshi warabe asobi wo natsukashimi ko yori hanabi ni yonen nashi ware wa

I who think so often of the fun I had as a boy, and watch the fireworks more intently than a child.31

Shiki admired Akemi’s truthfulness. He wrote, “Akemi does not deceive. He does not say in the manner of a bunjin that he thinks of money as so much shit, but in a quite unsophisticated manner describes his joy when he has received it, and frankly confesses his joy when the sum is larger than expected.” Shiki concluded, “I see Akemi in an ideal world where he is like an immortal, like a Buddha, like a child, like a god. I am virtually unable to think of him as someone who lives in this world. His heart was spotless and pure, his poems were brilliant and transparent.”32 Akemi’s complaints were concerned mainly with his unhappiness over the political situation in Japan. Like other poets of the late Tokugawa period, and like Shiki at times, he deplored foreign influence in Japan and favored expelling all the foreigners: tanoshimi wa emishi yorokobu yo no naka ni mikuni wasurenu hito wo miru toki

It is a pleasure When, in these days of delight In all things foreign, I come across a man who Does not forget our empire.

Despite Shiki’s extravagant praise, Tachibana Akemi never became a household name,33 but Shiki found in Akemi’s poetry a way to incorporate in his own poems the opinions expressed in his letters to the tanka poets. His tanka would not be in the tradition of Ki no Tsurayuki, which

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he despised; nor would he follow the other court poets who devoted their poems to descriptions of the changing flora of the seasons. Akemi wrote very few seasonal poems and Shiki, cut off from nature by his illness, wrote tanka not about the seasons but about his illness. The language he used was essentially modern. Although Shiki boundlessly admired the Man’yōshū, he was aware that attempts to write poems in the language of the eighth century could only lead to pastiches. He praised Akemi for freeing himself from the Man’yōshū after once steeping himself in its traditions; that was his own attitude. The tanka was perhaps not a major element in Shiki’s writings, but the sequences are memorable. He was eager to establish his authority in all the different varieties of Japanese poetry, and in the tanka he largely succeeded.

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S

hiki devoted many hours to his vast project of classifying haiku from the sixteenth century (the period when it first acquired literary importance) to the late eighteenth century (when it reached its highest point of development.) For ten years, whenever he found the time, he returned to this work, maintaining his interest, though most of the haiku he classified had little appeal. The results of this consecrated endeavor, not published until after his death, would be of value to haiku poets as a guide to the manner in which their predecessors had treated the topics of their haiku; but Shiki’s own poetry does not seem to have benefited much from the knowledge he acquired from reading thousands of haiku. He at one point admitted, “The history of the old haikai is dry as dust; it is like chewing on wax. It can serve only to make me yawn.”1 The influences from the haiku past that affected Shiki’s poetry were limited mainly to what he learned from two master poets, Bashō and Buson. Bashō had by Shiki’s time become a deity. In 1806 the court bestowed on him the title of Hion Myōjin, literally “Jumping Sound Bright Deity,”

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alluding to Bashō’s haiku on the frog that jumped into an old pond. In 1885 the government recognized the “Old Pond Church” (Furuike Kyōkai) as a religious body affiliated with the Bashō sect of Shinto.2 Buson’s poetry, by contrast, was barely remembered, though his paintings were much admired. Shiki’s “discovery” of the haiku of Buson, which met his ideals more closely than Bashō’s, brought Buson belated fame. In order to demonstrate the superiority of Buson’s haiku, Shiki sometimes belittled the haiku of the normally sacrosanct Bashō. His harsh comments were inspired mainly by his contempt for professional haiku teachers who idolized Bashō and insisted that pupils join in unquestioning worship. Shiki, though comparatively little known when he began his efforts to gain recognition of Buson at the expense of Bashō, put forward his views with absolute confidence. In the essay “Bashō zakkan” (Miscellaneous Thoughts About Bashō, 1895), he declared, Most of Bashō’s haiku have been forgotten because they are either bad or stupid. Those deserving to be called masterpieces are no more than a tenth of his output. No, even if one searches for haiku by Bashō that are merely passable, they are as rare as morning stars. Bashō wrote a few more than a thousand haiku, but of this number only some two hundred are passable, a bare fifth of the whole. Does that not make it quite appropriate to say they are as rare as morning stars?3 Elsewhere in the same essay, a questioner asks Shiki why he devoted no attention to Bashō’s renpai (linked verse in the haikai tradition). He reminded Shiki that the hokku deserved special attention as the first verse of a linked-verse sequence. Shiki’s reply was brief: “The hokku is literature. Renpai is not literature and for this reason need not be discussed.” 4 Bashō had often joined in linked verse composition with other poets, and when he could not be present, one of his hokku was often used to start a renga sequence; any haiku he wrote was potentially a hokku.5 The

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linked verse sessions in which Bashō participated are today read with reverence and provided with detailed commentaries, but Shiki dismissed them with a single derisive comment. Shiki’s contempt for linked verse succeeded in killing it as a medium for serious poetry, though it had flourished since the sixteenth century.6 Although he composed many haiku in the 1890s, Shiki seems to have been bothered at times by the feeling that there were things that could not be communicated adequately in a poem of seventeen syllables. It would not have been strange if Shiki, as an advocate of modernity and change, had considered abandoning haiku in favor of the new, Europeaninfluenced shintaishi, but he chose instead to supplement haiku with kanshi (poems in Chinese). He had composed kanshi since childhood and admired the form because it enabled poets to treat areas of experience beyond the compass of the haiku. Shiki was also aware that other poets of his age, unwilling to encapsulate their thoughts in the seventeen syllables of a haiku, were writing in the distinctly modern style of the shintaishi. Shiki in fact had experimented with writing poems that were not in a fixed number of syllables. In the preface to Shishibue (The Deer Hunt Flute, 1896),7 he wrote, Recently I have been reading a collection of Rankō’s8 poems. Among them is this haiku: shishibue ni The sounds of flutes tanikawa wataru As I cross the valley stream oto sewashi Bring on restlessness. I put down the book and said with a sigh, “Ah, when a poet has only a mere seventeen syllables at his disposal, the overtones are pretty feeble!” That’s why I tried expanding this haiku into  a chōka. I hope people won’t laugh at the unnecessary additions.9 Shiki was admitting that with only seventeen syllables at his command, a poet might be unable to express himself fully. Bashō and members of his school, who had no difficulty accommodating them-

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selves to the rules of haiku, would have put the matter differently. They would have said that the fewness of syllables at the disposal of the haiku poet made it essential that each syllable be exactly and immutably right. If the poet succeeded in this objective, the seventeen syllables of a haiku could evoke richer overtones than a profusion of words. But Shiki, who had read European poetry, may have envied poets not bound by rules.10 Shiki had been impressed when he heard the early shintaishi poets read their poetry. How noble were their voices! How beautiful were the melodies of their poems! And how numerous were the audiences who cheered the poems! Yet today, when only a few years have passed, the dozens of shintaishi poets who people boastfully predicted would be immortal, have all vanished into thin air, and the echoes of the applause that once greeted them have died out completely.11 The excitement shared by the shintaishi poets and their audiences over the birth of a new kind of Japanese poetry did not last because the mediocrity of the early poems soon became obvious. Shiki commented that even though ignorant soldiers and schoolchildren still thought of Toyama Chuzan’s martial poem “Battōtai” (The Drawn Sword Unit) as a work of supreme excellence, “anyone with the slightest sensitivity to poetry spits on the book.”12 The shintaishi, however, was not dead, and despite Shiki’s harsh criticism, he gradually became aware of its possibilities. He may also have been attracted to the shintaishi for a nonliterary reason. He had become convinced that a time was coming when all possible haiku would have been composed. In an essay of 1895 about the future of the haiku, he wrote, It is true that individual poets bear the guilt for the monotony of the poems composed in recent times, but the narrowness of the scope of the tanka or haiku is surely also a factor. People ask me

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how much longer the tanka and haiku can survive. I answer that although no one can predict, of course, when it will become impossible to compose new poems in these forms, even if one grants that the haiku maintains a spark of life, surely the end must come during the Meiji era.13 The shintaishi had originated in 1882 with the publication of Shintaishi shō (Poetry in the New Style),14 a collection mainly of translations of European poetry. The translators insisted that foreign poems, unlike traditional Japanese poetry, were not fettered by artificial poetic diction. “The result is that anyone, even a small child, can understand poetry, providing he knows the language of the country.”15 The European poets were free to use an unlimited vocabulary, including quite ordinary or even coarse language. With such riches of vocabulary there was no danger of the poet’s being unable to compose a new poem. Shiki’s earliest shintaishi, “The Cuckoo,” written in 1888, six years after the appearance of Shintaishi shō, was said to be the translation of a European poem.16 Its foreign origin is suggested by the poet’s addressing the cuckoo, as Shelley had addressed the skylark; otherwise, the text consists of conventional Japanese poetic language cast in alternating phrases of seven and five syllables and embellished with decorative phrases, including fixed epithets from the Man’yōshū. These displays of poetic knowledge are not interesting enough to make it seem the work of a serious poet. Shiki soon moved on to bolder experiments. The shintaishi “Tokonatsu” (Everlasting Summer, 1890) is in the usual alternating phrases of seven and five syllables, but the printed text is divided into eight lines of varying lengths, arranged with a surprisingly modern typographical effect.17 It also contains some erotic imagery, a rarity in the poems of the rather prudish Shiki. Shiki’s shintaishi version of Takakuwa Rankō’s haiku on the deer flute is in 104 lines, making it one of the longest Japanese poems. When

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published on August 5, 1896, in the periodical Nippon, someone who styled himself Matsu-no-Manabito added the following postscript: What manner of man is Take-no-Satobito?18 He attracted considerable attention by unfurling his new banner in the world of haikai. Now he has made a fresh departure, trying his hand at shintaishi. He says he is eager to take on the opposition of the old practitioners. What will be the reaction of shintaishi poets on reading this poem? The “villager” will surely defend himself.19 Shiki called his expanded version of Rankō’s haiku a chōka, a term more commonly used to designate the long poems of the Man’yōshū.20 Shiki’s poem follows fairly closely the rules of the chōka, though the lines are sometimes longer than the orthodox twelve syllables, and the caesura may be after the fifth syllable rather than the seventh. The tone of the poem and the realistic story it tells of a hunt make it seem a shintaishi, but the precision of the language has suggested to some critics that Shiki’s chōka wore the “spectacles” of a haiku poet.21 Shiki’s poem opens with the description of a hunter stalking a deer. The language is easy to understand, as the Shintaishi shō editors prescribed. Mention of the musket and fuse that the hunter carries identifies the period. The lengthy account of how the man manages to track down the deer is a rare example of narrative Japanese poetry. The expression is vivid, but the poem is excessively long for the contents. Shiki’s search for a new medium of expression stemmed largely from his disgust with the tanka and haiku of his time. He favored changes, but he did not wholly agree with the editors of Shintaishi shō, who insisted that poems must be written in the modern colloquial. Shiki wrote several essays explaining his dislike of the colloquial in works of literature, but although he rejected this essential element of modern poetry, his expansion of Rankō’s haiku was in fact written in language very close to the colloquial. Shiki’s theories of literature and his practice were sometimes contradictory.

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The shintaishi “Chichi no haka” (My Father’s Grave) that Shiki published on August 20, 1896, in the Nippon is far more effective than the poem on the deer hunt. I find it one of Shiki’s most moving poems. It opens as follows: Thinking I would pay my respects at my father’s grave I came to Suehiro-machi, and when I looked around There were tracks cut across the temple grounds, And close to the graveyard a train was running. The tombstones had fallen over, the flowers were withered And deep in a dew-covered path, Among weeds mingled with bamboo grass, Stood a deserted grave. I noticed that the fence around the grave was broken And a step beyond was a cultivated field. The last lines of the first stanza describe Shiki’s actions when he reached the weed-covered gravestone: mune tsuburetsutsu, miru kara ni, awatete kusa wo mushiritoru wagate no ue ni hō no ue ni uetaru yabuka murete sasu.

My heart breaking, as soon as I saw it, I wildly yanked off handfuls of weeds, My hands and face stung By a swarm of hungry mosquitoes.

The poem, which is rather long, is moving throughout, even if one remembers the harsh description Shiki earlier gave of his father. Shiki composed in all some ninety shintaishi. Most date from the years between 1896 and 1898, but others are earlier and a few were composed toward the end of his life. The shintaishi are not ranked highly by

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specialists, who complain that Shiki’s outlook when composing shintaishi showed no grasp of the potentiality of the long poem.22 This criticism may be apt, but readers are likely to find the shintaishi affecting, evoking emotions rarely found in Shiki’s haiku or tanka, where an inborn reluctance to disclose personal feelings kept him at a distance from his readers. Shiki’s experiments in shintaishi composition included the use of rhyme. He chose to rhyme because it was characteristic of both European and Chinese poetry. He explained his reasons in a letter of February 14, 1897, to Takemura Kitō: This year I have begun to use rhyme. It is difficult but also fun. Of late I have been studying punctuation [kugiri].23 Ever since I began rhyming, I discovered that my poems had become more complex, making other people’s shintaishi seem like prose. No matter which Chinese poems or European poems I have examined, I have not found one as prosaic as present-day shintaishi. Not even Wordsworth, who, more than anyone else, disliked poetic diction and wrote in a deliberately prosaic manner, resembles the shintaishi of today. In my opinion, the contemporary shintaishi is not poetry.24 Shiki felt that the traditional linguistic and formal requirements of poetry, whatever the form, could not be ignored. One necessary element of every poem was beauty. One could, if one chose, write about a steam engine or any other modern device, even if it was unpoetic or ugly, providing the poet avoided an impression of bleakness by including in the poem some poetic insight or glimpse of beauty: kisha no oto no hashiri sugitaru kaki no to no moyuru kozue ni kemuri uzumaku

After the sound of The train goes rushing past, Outside the fence, In the burning treetops, Smoke is whirling.

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The roar of the train was aesthetically displeasing, not what poets generally commemorated, but Shiki softened its harshness by mentioning the smoke, like mist in the mountains of a Chinese painting, curling in the treetops after the train had passed. Shiki felt free to use images as modern and unpoetic as toothpaste but never failed to make the poem as a whole “poetic.” He wrote, Most of the “artifacts of civilization” are unpoetic and difficult to include in poetry. If one wishes nevertheless to write about them, one has no choice but to mention something poetic as well. If no such combination is made, and a poem simply states that “wind blows over the rails,” it is extremely desolate. The poem will be more attractive if the poet at least combines this statement with some other object such as violets blossoming beside the rails, or poppies scattering after the train has passed, or susuki plumes nodding.25 Shiki considered that the neglect of the traditional requirements of poetry by the shintaishi poets had impaired their works as literature. Although their shintaishi poems were printed in the format of poetry, they could hardly be distinguished from prose. Shiki was ready to jettison many rules for composing poetry and he reveled in the freedom of language, length, and subjects of the shintaishi; but he felt compelled to give his works poetic appeal. This was one reason for using rhyme. Shiki’s shintaishi varied in length from a few lines to more than a hundred. The short poems include Shiki’s description of a train pulling out of Ueno Station and another of the twelve-story building that was the wonder of the pleasure district of Asakusa. His long poems are more solemn, sometimes deeply affecting. “On Visiting the Grave of a Certain Old Lady” refers to the second wife of his grandfather, a woman he remembered with nostalgia because she had been unusually kind. The

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poem, written in 1897, is in twenty-eight rhymed couplets. It opens with these eight lines: ware osonakute on ukeshi uba no nagori no hakajirushi, semete wa mizu wo tamuken to yuku ya, yuzuki no mura no soto. mukashi tadorishi ta no komichi, tera wo megurite maisōchi, sannen sugureba ko wa ika ni. haka michimichinu, o ni tani ni.26

The grave marker is in memory of an old woman Kind to me when I was a boy— I go there, outside the village of Yuzuki Thinking to offer water, if nothing else. The path through the rice fields is one I tread long ago, And at the other side of the temple is the burial ground. In another three years what will it be like? Ridges and hollows filled with graves.

The punctuation marks are in the original. Each line of the poem consists of seven syllables followed by five syllables, though occasionally this pattern is deliberately broken by the punctuation. The couplets rhyme but not very effectively because rhymes of identical syllables are uninteresting. Rhyming is excessively easy in Japanese; because all words end in one of five open vowels, rhymes easily pass unnoticed. All the same, the poem should not be dismissed in the manner of some critics as no more than an expanded haiku or tanka. Shiki not only describes the graveyard but also conveys his feelings of loss. He searches for memories of an old woman whose kindness made his boyhood bearable. This was not his first visit to the graveyard—he walked there as a boy—but the site has become so crowded with gravestones that he

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supposes that in another three years they will cover the whole landscape. This poem, though seldom quoted, moves me more than most of Shiki’s haiku and tanka.27 Shiki wrote several other shintaishi of mourning. The most striking, “Kohaku no haka ni mōzu” (1897), describes his visit to the grave of his cousin Fujino Kohaku (1871–1896), a talented haiku poet who had committed suicide. The poem is long and contains repetitions of words and phrases; this awkwardness makes it seem an unpolished, heartfelt statement of Shiki’s grief. The poem is not only punctuated, but the seven and five components of each line of twelve syllables are separated by blank spaces, giving an impression of words of grief irregularly blurted out.28 Shiki’s shintaishi suggest that he had learned much from English poetry, despite his insistence on the inadequacy of his English. They also reflect his growing admiration for the poetry of Buson, who, though celebrated as a master of the haiku, had also composed several magnificent poems that may be called shintaishi. The lack of popularity of Shiki’s shintaishi, certainly when compared with his haiku and tanka, is perhaps due to their length. A short poem is easier to appreciate and to emulate. Shiki had many disciples in both haiku and tanka. The magazines devoted to each that he founded are still published and read by thousands who are convinced of his greatness, but he founded no magazine for shintaishi and had no shintaishi disciples. Another seldom discussed aspect of Shiki’s poetry is his kanshi, though this form of poetry was vital to him throughout his life. The kanshi was the poetry associated with the samurai class, and Shiki, proud of belonging to that class, composed kanshi at first almost as a proof of his ancestry. During his middle-school days he joined almost daily with classmates to compose kanshi. An equivalent in European terms would be a group of English schoolboys who met regularly for the fun of composing poems in Latin.

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Shiki’s early kanshi are mainly pastiches of imagery borrowed from Chinese originals, but some are of interest because they describe incidents of his daily life. A poem written in 1881 is entitled “Eating Crab on a Winter’s Day”: A frosty day, the river crabs are delicious The fragrance dissolves the grief in my heart. They make me recall Western writing That travels sideways all over the world.29 Shiki began to compose haiku and tanka as a diversion not long after writing this kanshi. These were casual compositions that anyone with his education could have written and showed none of the individuality that brought him fame ten years later. The composition of kanshi was Shiki’s principal literary activity until he moved to Tokyo, and even after moving, he continued to write kanshi although his main interest had shifted to haiku. His poem commemorating a visit to the zoo in Ueno Park describes his thoughts on seeing an eagle, probably the most unusual animal in the zoo; the zoo, founded only two years earlier, still lacked lions, tigers, or an elephant.30 Iron cage the whole year long, unbounded emotion Its cloud-soaring spirit has not diminished A sudden squawking from a flock of birds overhead— With watchful eyes it looks to heaven and emits a cry.31 A series of thirty kanshi published in 1892 was acclaimed as Shiki’s masterpiece by Kokubu Seigai (1857–1944), the reigning poet in the world of kanshi. These poems have a brilliant sweep of language that demonstrates Shiki’s mastery of the medium, but their contents are not exciting.

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The next cluster of kanshi activity occurred after his short stay in China. The fighting had ended before he arrived in Jinzhou, but the desolation left by the warfare moved him to write a series of kanshi. Innumerable Chinese poems composed in the wake of warfare provided models:

Chin- chou Cit y Flags and pennants, a hundred thousand, sweep the sky; one battle, a nation undone, bare bones heaped up. Dogs bark in empty compounds, people a desolate few. Wind and rain fill the city where apricot blossoms unfold.32 Shiki’s kanshi seldom directly express his feelings, though they are sometimes conveyed. One of his most affecting kanshi, written in 1896, is called “Poor Man’s Hut” and describes the sickroom that he knows he will never leave. A clutter of objects fills the room, each recalling a part of his life—the books he read as a youth, the clothes he wore when he traveled about Japan, the sword he took to China, as well as paintings and examples of calligraphy.33 Another kanshi, more subjective, mentions his mother and sister, a rarity in his poetry. The title is “Masaoka’s Song.” My mother stays at home; she’s fifty years old. She can’t serve us fresh fish, she can’t wear silk. My sister is twenty-six, married and divorced. She makes clothes, cooks, helps with the housework. Always prone to illness, I’ve turned my back on the world. I’m a good thirty, and still haven’t married. The mother pities her son’s loneliness and poverty, The son is sad his mother has no grandchild. While alive I haven’t revived my family; the line will die out. Dead, what face will I have to show my ancestors?

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People say I am short-tempered, quarrelsome—let them. I ask only to inscribe the name of Masaoka in history.34 This is one of Shiki’s most personal kanshi, giving details of his household he normally did not mention. It lacks poetic charm, but the last line suggests that, despite the darkness surrounding him, he has hope that the poem will bring him (and his ancestors) a kind of immortality. The tone is by no means cold, but the reader may miss the lack of a word suggesting affection for his mother. Writing kanshi, even for someone who had studied and practiced the art as long as Shiki, was not easy. Samurai proudly composed kanshi, but the kanshi were, after all, in a foreign language, and the rules of poetic composition were infinitely more difficult than those of Japanese poetry. Rhyme was required and had to conform to the Chinese pronunciations of centuries earlier. The correct patterns of the tones also had to be memorized, difficult because the Japanese language is not tonal. In order to write an acceptable kanshi it was necessary to be familiar not only with the Chinese poetry of the past but also with the history, legends, and anecdotes that Chinese poets know from childhood. One might suppose that the Meiji generation, eager for change and knowledge from the West, would have been reluctant to spend time learning the details of the Chinese past, but in fact the kanshi flourished in the Meiji era. Shiki, explaining its appeal, said that the rich vocabulary of the kanshi can transform the least appealing poem into an interesting and even elegant work; for this reason, he said, it is superior to the tanka with its limited vocabulary. He felt sure that the elegance in the phrasing of a kanshi could not be matched in the literature of any other country.35 Shiki did not realize it, but the Sino-Japanese War marked the beginning of the end of the thousand-year tradition of the kanshi as a major branch of Japanese literature. Overwhelming victory in the war made the Japanese decide that the Chinese had shown themselves unworthy of their great traditions. They, rather than contemporary Chinese, were the

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true heirs to Chinese culture. The kanshi survived for this reason, but it was doomed to lose its central role in Japanese education. Shiki was able to decorate his kanshi with arcane references from Chinese sources, but his reason for composing kanshi was not to display his learning. He found the kanshi the most congenial medium for poets to express their ideas, just as the haiku was the best medium for expressing feelings about nature. Young men of intellectual aspirations felt it was worth spending their days acquiring the complicated techniques of kanshi composition, rather as today they might study classical Greek. Shiki wrote, The reforms of the Meiji Restoration were the work of young men from the countryside twenty years of age, not of the old guard of the bakufu. The medical world of Japan was reformed by men of the younger generation; the doctors of Chinese medicine were not involved. The ones who caused the kanshi world of Japan to flourish were young men, not the old poets smelling of the Tenpō era.36

10 random essays ( zuihitsu ), 1

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he extraordinary influence of Shiki’s critical writings on the composition of both haiku and tanka make him a central figure in the Japanese literature of recent times. His own poetry continues to be read, learned by heart, and commented on by many people for whom the traditional forms of Japanese poetry (irrespective of content) have special appeal. For some, however, the most memorable parts of his oeuvre are his zuihitsu (random essays) because of what they reveal about a man whose life is of compelling interest. Fudemakase (Letting My Brush Write), Shiki’s first zuihitsu collection, consists of essays written between 1884 and 1892. Most are short and they are seldom linked. One gets the impression that, whenever anything attracted his attention, whether great or small, Shiki felt compelled to set down his reactions immediately. His sharp powers of observation bring even vignettes on trivial subjects to life. The most notable essays narrate personal experiences and recollections; Fudemakase is the best (and sometimes the only) source of information we have about Shiki’s life before he became a famous poet.1

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Shiki wrote the first sections of Fudemakase while living in a dormitory. Word must have got around that he was writing a book, and a friend, curious about what it contained, asked to read it. Renkyō2 came to my room with the intention of reading my zuihitsu. I cautioned him, “Before you do, listen to what I have to say. This zuihitsu is something like a collection of memos to myself. Or you might call it a collection of scribblings, written at random, about little things that happened to have caught my eye. Of course, it’s full of careless errors. When I started writing it some time ago, so many things came to mind that I wrote at breakneck speed, faster than a locomotive, not paying attention to style or grammar. The style is sometimes pure Japanese, sometimes kanbun, sometimes translationese. The grammar is sometimes ancient, sometimes modern, sometimes my own particular brand. Once I’ve finished setting something down, I haven’t gone back to look it over or to make corrections. Read it with that in mind. But there’s one more thing you should know. There are many ways to write Japanese literature, and how to standardize them is a matter of discussion among authorities; but despite the clumsiness of the style of this zuihitsu and despite its deficiencies, I have placed on the stage of the world my naked observations, just as they are, without powder, rouge, or fancy costume. Perhaps the very clumsiness and the deficiencies will be of reference when people attempt to improve Japanese style.3 Although Fudemakase contains humorous passages and delightful examples of Shiki’s playfulness, it is prevailingly the work of an earnest young man. The youthful idealism of the following entry, from 1885, a few lines in its entirety, may suggest the basic seriousness: “The ultimate in world civilization will be reached when every single country unites to form one country, and when every variety of human being belongs to

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one and the same race. At an even more advanced stage, people won’t even know what is meant by ‘country’ or what ‘race’ signifies.”4 Shiki’s declaration is likely to strike readers as being much in advance of its time; but it is perhaps not so surprising as the utterance of a young man of the early Meiji era, when the world had only recently been opened to the Japanese people. The thrill of discovery had made distant countries and their peoples magnetically alluring. However, three years later Shiki wrote, “Love of country or of one’s hometown is a strange thing. It’s quite illogical, but I often think how lucky I am to have been born in such a splendid country as Japan. I can’t explain what makes Japan so attractive, but I feel that black hair is somehow more pleasing than red whiskers.” 5 Shiki did not explain the change in his attitudes. Any opinion, no matter how strongly expressed, might change dramatically in the course of a month or even a few days; the important thing for Shiki was to write exactly what he felt, and if he later decided he had been mistaken, he unhesitantly discarded his earlier views.6 His zuihitsu were not composed in order to persuade readers to accept his point of view, and their greatest interest lies in following the movements of an unusual man’s mind. Fudemakase was not intended for publication.7 This no doubt is why Shiki made no effort to ensure there were no repetitions and that the succeeding episodes follow smoothly. Fudemakase is a grab bag of Shiki’s opinions, haphazardly put together, but highly appealing as the account of a young man’s discovery of the world. A random selection of successive episodes may suggest the kaleidoscope variety. A cluster of essays, written within a short time in 1890, opens with a critique of Spencer’s “Philosophy of Style.” Shiki passes next to an appreciation of Noh theater, and this is followed by reflections on moths, the origins of the Japanese language, the tomb of Noriyori, and paintings of multiple authorship.8 Fudemakase contains not only essays by Shiki but also letters received from friends. Those from Natsume Sōseki stand out because they relate

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his technically advanced theories of literary composition. Shiki seems not to have benefited greatly from Sōseki’s teachings; Sōseki’s logical analysis of works of literature was foreign to his nature. The overall impression produced by Fudemakase is of a man who is intuitive rather than scholarly, a man who is interested in many things and can hardly wait to express his opinions. Shiki’s next zuihitsu collection, Shōra gyokueki,9 was written in 1896. Although only four years had elapsed since the last entries in Fudemakase, Shiki’s attitudes had changed markedly, perhaps because of his serious bouts of illness during the intervening years. Even after he seemed to have recovered from coughing blood, his daily life was completely altered by illness, and his outlook had become much darker. By 1896 Shiki was so debilitated by illness that, confined to the room where he worked and slept, he rarely set foot outside his house and saw of nature only the part of the garden visible through a window. His world had shrunken, but there was still sufficient space for Shiki to compose haiku and to discuss the works of others. It was a kind of house arrest, and he knew that his implacable “jailers” would kill him if he attempted to break from confinement. He sometimes fretted over his inability to see the changes in Tokyo he knew about from the conversations of visitors to his sickroom, and he nostalgically recalled places that, because of his illness, he would never see again. Once in a while he felt strong enough to leave his bed and venture into the garden, as he describes in the entry for April 24, 1896: Taking advantage of a lull in my illness, I went for a walk in the garden, leaning on my stick. The garden is no bigger than the palm of my hand, but the sun was brightly shining and birds were flying in the sky. I felt indescribably happy. Two or three little pines had put out green shoots that seemed to rise up to the sky. I could see threads like red lips on the swollen buds of a rosebush that stands

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about a foot high. The autumn grasses had barely sprouted, so I couldn’t tell which were bush clover and which were bellflowers, but an iris had already opened a white blossom. In places where the ground had not yet dried after the rain, tiny insects were wriggling to show that they too were alive.10 Descriptions of moments of pleasure in nature are the most attractive parts of Shōra gyokueki. The longest entry, however, is a detailed account of baseball, one of the pleasures Shiki could no longer enjoy. Many pages are devoted to judgments on the books he was reading, whether recent novels or works of traditional literature. He is almost always severe, grudgingly handing out praise but more voluble in exposing the ineptness of the authors: As a writer, when I read a novel I keep thinking there’s nothing in the world so stupid as a novel. From the very outset, the thing that strikes me is the slackness of the style and the clumsiness of the language. If, after going through two or three chapters, I feel I know the characters, I am likely to think when I put the book down temporarily that some action wasn’t appropriate for a certain character or that some development in the plot had diminished the flavor of the whole; even trivial faults make my eyes hurt. When I finally put the book aside, it seldom happens that I think it was of interest. I suppose that in the case of writers who are still alive (especially if I know them by sight), there must be an element of jealousy in my reactions. I always used to enjoy novels, but I rarely read one now. In most cases, if I try reading one, the first few lines make me spit, or I throw the book away after reading half a page.11 The sourness of the tone may represent a development in his critical judgment, but (as he suggests) he may also have felt jealous of writers

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who, unlike himself, were not constantly threatened by death and who found publishers even for their inferior works. A rare exception to Shiki’s severity was his praise for Higuchi Ichiyō’s story Takekurabe (Comparing Heights). He characterized the work in these terms: “It is a single flower, plucked from something like a heap of filth, which, when it scatters its pure fragrance in the southerly wind, inebriates people with its fragrance.”12 The expression “heap of filth” probably reflects Shiki’s Confucian contempt for the pleasure quarters, the setting of Takekurabe. He noted also that Ichiyō’s style owed much to Saikaku and, though he normally disliked works that borrowed from Saikaku, whose works were enjoying a revival of interest at the time, he had to admit every line and every chapter of Comparing Heights startled him. His high opinion of Ichiyō’s work forced him to abandon another of his prejudices. He always disliked it when people spoke of the “writings of talented women.” In fact, it irritated him to hear anyone praise a book by a woman; but he was undoubtedly impressed by Ichiyō even though he could not resist mentioning that her work was not without failings.13 Despite his three prejudices—works that treated the licensed quarters, revealed the influence of Saikaku, or were written by a woman—he confessed that he could not think of any writer who was Ichiyō’s equal in combining tautness of style with easy to understand language. The most striking sections of Shōra gyokueki are those in which Shiki criticizes celebrated authors but also some men who were not known primarily for their writings. He recognized the importance of Itō Hirobumi’s service to Japan as prime minister and as the author of the Meiji Constitution, but he could not ignore Itō’s incompetence as a kanshi poet. Worst of all, he said, Itō insisted on showing his clumsy poems to other people. This elicited from Shiki the comment, “The intelligent man, if he is aware he has no gift as a poet, should not compose poems. Even supposing he composes them, he should not show them to other

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people. And if he feels he has to show them to others, he should first get the opinions of some experts in poetry.”14 Shiki’s discussion of the three masters of Genroku literature— Saikaku, Bashō, and Chikamatsu—was clearly intended to be controversial, in keeping with his characteristic fondness for overturning established opinions. His remarks on Saikaku mingled praise with criticism. Shiki praised him for having given literary value to Tokugawa fiction by imparting human feelings to what had been no more than childish stories; but he added, However, these human feelings were confined to lust between the sexes. This lust was without complications, without development, without connections, without consistency; it was the sole aspect of love that he described and used as his theme. One can sum up Saikaku’s writings with the single word chi [folly]. What I love about Saikaku is his style. His prose is concise without being simpleminded. He excelled at describing trivial matters but did not descend into vulgarity or tediousness.15 Shiki had earlier published a study of Bashō, questioning his reputation as the great master of the haiku. He asserted that few of Bashō’s haiku were of merit and searched for examples at which to sneer. In his essay on Bashō in Shōra gyokueki, after praising Bashō as the first serious poet since the days of the Man’yōshū, Shiki attacks him for a surprising reason; he accuses Bashō of cowardice. He based this charge on what he perceived as Bashō’s attempt to transcend the dust of this world in order to preserve a life of purity. Bashō’s preference for writing poetry about nature rather than human beings had led him to display more interest in religion than in literature. His withdrawal from normal human concerns constituted cowardice. It is true that Bashō’s attitude of looking down on literature and venerating virtuous conduct had brought

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him an exalted reputation, but if he had not been so revered, his poems might have been better and there might have been more of them.16 Shiki’s treatment of Chikamatsu was even harsher. He admitted that Chikamatsu was so commanding a figure that later dramatists were unable to escape his influence, but, he wrote, Chikamatsu was not a literary master of the Genroku era let alone of all time. If we were to judge his work by present-day standards, how much criticism could he escape? In the first place, his plays (with the exception of The Battles of Coxinga) are so childish as drama that they are no longer performed. Some people explain this by saying it was because Chikamatsu wrote for puppets that they suffer when performed by actors, but contemporary puppet companies and even the pre-Restoration companies did not perform Chikamatsu, evidence that the plays are not only unsuited to Kabuki but have little appeal in the puppet theater. His historical plays are excessively complicated and artificial; the characters are implausible and have no trace whatever of individuality. The sewamono are far better than the jidaimono, but the portrayal of the characters tends to be exaggerated, and many are completely unbelievable. Chikamatsu is said to have described every aspect of the world of his time, but if this was comparatively true in his day, by modern standards his plays do not treat more than an extremely small segment of society.17 Shiki attacked in detail the michiyuki in Love Suicides at Sonezaki, acclaimed as a masterpiece of Japanese expression in its own time and ever since. kono yo no nagori / yo mo nagori / shini ni yuku / mi wo tatōreba / adashi ga hara no / michi no shimo / hitoashi zutsu ni / kiete yuku /

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yume no yume koso / aware nare / are kazōreba / akatsuki no / nanatsu no toki ga / mutsu narite / nokoru hitotsu ga / konjō no / kane no hibiki no / kiki osame / jakumetsu iraku to / hibiku nari Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell. We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened? To the frost on the road that leads to the graveyard, Vanishing with each step we take ahead: How sad is this dream of a dream! Ah, did you count the bell? Of the seven strokes That mark the dawn, six have sounded. The remaining one will be the last echo We shall hear in this life. It will echo the bliss of nirvana. Shiki severely criticized Chikamatsu’s clumsy use of the same kanji18 three times within this one passage. He supposed that Chikamatsu had used the somewhat unusual phrase nanatsu no toki (the seventh hour) instead of the normal nanatsu no kane (the seventh bell) because he intended to use the word “bell” later on. The phrase kane bakari ka wa (not alone the bell) was what a boy of fifteen or sixteen might write if ordered to write a poem. In view of these and similar faults, Shiki found the michiyuki totally without interest. He decided that it was so riddled with faults and so lacking in unity that it can only be called a collection of inept phrases.19 It is hard to believe Shiki seriously meant this indiscriminate condemnation. Passing irritation may have inspired his absurd fault-finding. Or, more likely, his illness was to blame. The voice seems not Shiki’s but that of his worsening illness. Having disposed in this manner of the three titans of Genroku literature, Shiki turned his attention to Japanese art. Years earlier he had argued with Nakamura Fusetsu about the comparative worth of Japanese

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and foreign art, taking the side of Japanese art. In the manner typical of advocates of Japanese painting, Shiki had contrasted the spiritual qualities of Japanese art with the vulgarity of Western painting, but now he wrote, How can Japanese art be preserved? My answer to this question was, “Unless a master of Japanese painting, far superior to the socalled masters of today, makes an appearance and renews our putrefied Japanese painting, it cannot be preserved indefinitely. Unfortunately, however, regardless of the needs of society, such a master is not likely to appear very soon.” Shiki gave examples of the traditional method of teaching Japanese painting that tend to stultify the artistic talents of young painters. If the teacher paints leaping carp and floating waterweeds, the disciples paint leaping carp and floating waterweeds. If the teacher paints a rushing stream below a jagged mountain with a woodcutter crossing a fragile bridge, the disciples will also paint a rushing stream below a jagged mountain with a woodcutter crossing a fragile bridge. What an extreme lack of originality! Even if one is good with a brush and colors, unless one has one’s own ideas, it is not art; it is skilled workmanship.20 Shiki concluded that the survival of Japanese art was hanging by a thread. In the next episode he discussed the possibility that the use of shasei might save Japanese painting. Unless shasei were chosen as the guiding philosophy, it would be extremely difficult to paint good pictures. He thought it was useless to hope that the so-called masters, whose only wish was to preserve old models, would ever become adept in techniques like perspective and shading. Western painters would doubtless laugh at them.21

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Shōra gyokueki contains not only criticism of Japanese literature and art but also a more appealing theme: Shiki’s affection for his disciples, especially Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigotō. In November 1896 he suffered a severe bout of stomach cramps on a night of terrible lightning and thunder. Hekigotō and Kyoshi, who happened to be visiting at the time, took turns watching over Shiki’s bedside, never leaving him alone. He wrote, “I am indebted to them for their kindness last year and for this time too. My life is something in the hands of the two of them. When I am ill, if they are by my side, pain is not painful and I can also accept death.”22 This account of the devotion of his disciples takes him back to an earlier memory, his visit to Kyoto with Kyoshi in November 1892. They spent a day together, visiting famous sites in the area of Arashiyama, arguing about poetry as they walked. Shiki recalled, It would be difficult to describe in words how enjoyable a day it was. This was a time when I felt most fully my hopes for the future. I had broken all connections with my dire enemy, the school exams. I was enjoying this lovely place and was with this friend. Even if I had preferred not to rejoice openly, I couldn’t have helped it. I tried to control the joy, but it grew ever stronger, all but gushing forth. My face was a face of joy. My voice was a voice of joy. My behavior was the behavior of joy.23 Shiki was sure that no one except Kyoshi could understand his joy, just as he was the only one to understand Kyoshi’s joy. This may have been the one time in his life that joy, untouched by pain, attained such heights. He felt sure he would never again feel such happiness. His premonition was correct. Between the visit to Kyoto and the writing of Shōra gyokueki he suffered not only terrifying illness but also the shock of Kyoshi’s refusal to become his successor. They were again teacher and disciple, but Shiki spoke not of joy but of gratitude.

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Shōra gyokueki appeared in the Nippon in thirty-two irregularly published installments between April and December of 1896. It attracted little attention probably because critical attention to Shiki was mainly on his poetry and his essays about poetry, and little mention of zuihitsu was made. His next two zuihitsu, Bokujū itteki (A Drop of Ink) and Byōshō rokushaku (A Six-Foot Sickbed) are among Shiki’s most important works and deserved far more attention than they received. Bokujū itteki appeared in the Nippon almost every day for one hundred sixty-four installments between January 16 and July 2, 1901. Shiki’s physical condition had worsened considerably during the five years since publishing Shōra gyokueki. He was now not only unable to stroll in the garden; it was something of a miracle he was still alive. It was an even greater miracle that he kept writing a daily column even after he had become almost immobile. Unable to sit or stand, he wrote his manuscripts on sheets of paper pinned above his bed. Only a man of extraordinary willpower could have persisted at this task, day after day, in defiance of unending pain, always finding new topics about which to expound his opinions. Bokujū itteki opens with a description of Shiki’s sickroom. We know from other people’s accounts that it was a clutter of objects, a kind of museum. In this essay Shiki devotes most attention to a globe, just three inches in diameter, a present from a disciple.24 He noted that Japan is colored red, as is Taiwan, called New Japan. Korea, Manchuria, Kirin, and the Amur River are purple; in 1901 they had not been assimilated into New Japan. In a guileless display of patriotism, Shiki wondered what changes there would be by the end of the century in the size of the red and purple territories.25 No doubt he hoped Japan would become bigger and bigger. This was almost his only hope at the time. He wrote, It is customary for people’s hopes to be at first vague and big. Later on, they become small and precise. Mine, from the time I took to a sickbed, have been extremely small. Four or five years ago I thought

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that even if I couldn’t walk very far, I would be happy to be able even to walk in my garden. A year or two later, I thought that even if I couldn’t walk, I would be happy to stand. I told people how extremely limited my hopes were and I laughed. But from the summer before last I was no longer able to stand and the most I could hope was that the god of sickness would permit me to sit. My hopes continued to shrink. Next, having abandoned hope of sitting, I think how happy I would be if I could lie in bed peacefully even for one hour without feeling pain. This has been my hope, yesterday and today.26 Shiki had always thought that if ever a time came when he was too weak to write, he would hire someone to write for him. However, he had recently read Bakin’s account of how, when he became blind, for all his celebrity he had experienced great difficulty in finding a satisfactory amanuensis. Shiki realized that the same would be true of himself.27 He was fated to write his manuscripts unaided, regardless of his crippling illness. Shiki’s day as an invalid began every morning at half past six when he woke. Someone28 made a fire for him. He read a newspaper. This was followed by the agony of having his bandages changed and the first meal of the day. Shiki could not retain the food he ate, but eating remained his greatest pleasure. After breakfast on a typical day, he would read poems submitted to him for evaluation. Shiki’s comments on these poems were usually sarcastic, dismissing most as worthless, but he made one discovery. He had never heard the name of Hiraga Motoyoshi (1800–1865) until he happened to read a newspaper article in which Hiraga was portrayed as a disciplined scholar of Japanese literature who was also a notable slave to love affairs. The article made no mention of his poetry, which had yet to be published. An acquaintance of Hiraga’s subsequently collected the poems and sent a copy to Shiki. On reading them, Shiki was so impressed that he declared

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Hiraga was the only poet to have successfully composed poems in the style of the Man’yōshū. In his excitement over having discovered a great, unknown poet, Shiki devoted pages of Bokujū itteki to Hiraga and his poetry.29 He declared that in all the years since the Man’yōshū only four men deserved the name of poets—Minamoto Sanetomo, Tokugawa Munetake, Ide Akemi, and Hiraga Motoyoshi.30 This was a most unusual selection, omitting such masters as Teika or Saigyō in favor of Sanetomo and three largely unknown Tokugawa-period poets. What these poets had in common was a masculinity that contrasted with the feminine sensitivity displayed by the court poets from Ki no Tsurayuki on. Shiki characterized Hiraga in these terms: “Motoyoshi thought of himself as a heroic man, a son of Japan, a scholar of Japanese literature; for him poetry was no more than an avocation.”31 Shiki in most respects was totally unlike Hiraga. He was by no means a hero, and for him poetry was everything. Rather effeminate as a boy, he had fought this tendency by testing himself with arduous hikes and with baseball. He may have envied Hiraga, a poet who seemed to be masculinity itself without even trying. He may also have been attracted to the brute force of some of his poems, like the following, in which Hiraga urges the massacre of the foreigners who had invaded Japan:32 emishira wo uchitairagete kachitoki no koe agesomen haru wa kinikeri

The spring has come When, raising our voices In a shout of triumph, We will first celebrate The destruction of the barbarians.

Shiki eulogizes one other man in A Drop of Ink, the painter Nakamura Fusetsu.33 At the opposite pole from Hiraga’s nationalism, Fusetsu was cosmopolitan. In his conversations with Shiki he always insisted on the superiority of Western art and, as soon as he could, left for France to

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study. Shiki resisted Fusetsu’s arguments, so sure Japanese painting was superior that at first he hardly listened to Fusetsu’s arguments, but gradually he began to understand the importance in painting of structure and composition. In the end, he declared that Fusetsu had enabled him to understand art: “Having been taught by Fusetsu the essentials of art added so much pleasure to my life. If I hadn’t had this education, how dreary the years I spent lying in a sickbed would have been.”34 Shiki envied Fusetsu, who was content living in poverty, who devoted every free moment to study, who neither smoked nor drank, and who was always punctual in carrying out his promises. Shiki admired this hero in the Confucian mold. But even after he was won over to Western painting, he continued to have doubts about the desirability of the intrusion into Japan of foreign elements. Shiki, surprisingly in a poetic revolutionary, favored the retention of old customs and was delighted to read that ancient, traditional festivals were still being performed in Nara and elsewhere in the Kansai region. Perhaps this attachment to tradition is related to his reluctance to follow the poets of the shintaishi, a form of poetry with no ancestry in Japan. Shiki also reiterated his belief that the Japanese had an inborn preference for brevity. He did not consider contrary evidence—for example, The Tale of Genji or the extremely long novels of Bakin. Shiki would probably not have been disturbed if asked why he had failed to examine all sides of the issue. A zuihitsu was not an argument or even a sustained essay, and the writer enjoyed the freedom of switching from one mood to the next, not worrying about possible exceptions to his pronouncements. Despite his illness, he retained his sense of humor, as the following sardonic remarks may suggest: “When Count Itagaki was assaulted in Gifu, he uttered a famous phrase but, somewhat awkwardly, he went on living. Mr. Hoshi died without a word, most disappointing of him. It would have been much more interesting if he had said something like, ‘Et tu, Brute.’ ”35 Seeing the successive episodes of his serials in the Nippon each morning was one of Shiki’s greatest consolations. On one occasion Kojima

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Kazuo, the editor of the newspaper, fearing that Shiki was being overworked, decided to give him a rest by not printing an installment. The next morning, as usual, Shiki opened the Nippon expecting to see his article and was dismayed not to find it. Far from appreciating the editor’s kind intention, he was enraged.36 But the rage turned to resignation, and the next day’s newspaper, in which his article appeared, restored his good humor.

11 random essays, 2

B

yōshō rokushaku (A Six-Foot Sickbed) opens with the entry for May 5, 1902, in which Shiki explains the title:

A six-foot sickbed—this is my world. And this sickbed six feet long is too big for me. Sometimes I have only to stretch my arm a bit to touch the tatami, but at other times I can’t even relax by pushing my legs outside the covers. In extreme cases, I am tormented by such terrible pain that I’m unable to move my body so much as an inch or even half an inch. Racked by pain, anguish, shrieks, morphine, I search for a way out, helplessly craving a little peace on a road that leads to death. All the same, as long as I stay alive I intend to say whatever I feel like saying. Day in and day out, all I ever see are newspapers and magazines, but often I am in such pain I cannot read them. When I can, they make me angry or irritated; but once in a while something makes me so happy I forget my pain. Feeling like someone who has been sleeping for

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six whole years and knows nothing of the outside world, I write this preface by way of introducing myself.1 Unlike Shiki’s earlier zuihitsu, this passage and most of the rest of A SixFoot Sickbed are in the spoken language, making them seem particularly immediate and moving, though Shiki formerly had rejected genbun itchi. From this time on, the prose writings that he published would be mainly in this style, although he continued to use classical Japanese in his poetry. Shiki wrote this preface at a time when his illness had taken a marked turn for the worse. The pain he suffered was so intense he could endure it only with morphine. In July 1901 he sent his doctor, Ishii Yūji, a message congratulating him on his marriage, adding, “I take a small amount of morphine every day. This is my only pleasure.”2 In the letter to Dr. Ishii written on January 29, 1902, he wrote: I wonder how it happens that I, who so regret it even when a stranger dies, should feel not the slightest regret for my own life. I don’t need this precious life. I suppose you think it is because of the pain that I beg you to let me die, the sooner the better. You may if you wish rejoice over your success in prolonging my life, but it is my privilege to regret that I’m still alive. You have often explained to me how lamentable death is, but what effect can such persuasion have on someone who would welcome death, however hateful it may be?3 In the letters Shiki wrote at this time, notably one to his uncle Ōhara dated June 1, 1901, he declared that night and day he experienced only pain and anguish, and nothing gave him pleasure. Though the pains he suffered made him feel as if he had dropped into hell, nobody, not even his mother, was aware of this. He continued, “I haven’t the slightest hope left. There is no likelihood the pain will abate. I would like to say good-

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bye to the world, but my mind is still sound and it doesn’t look as if I shall die soon. I dread to think how long I must suffer in this state.” 4 He wrote Natsume Sōseki, probably his most trusted friend, a letter dated November 6, 1901, that opens, “I’m at the end of my tether. I seem to be spending every day in bitter weeping, and for no reason at all. That’s why I haven’t written anything for the newspapers and magazines. I’ve completely given up writing letters.” 5 Shiki enjoyed reading Sōseki’s letters from London published in Hototogisu and asked him to contribute another letter “while my eyes are still capable of seeing.” The increasingly dark tone apparent in both the letters and A Six-Foot Sickbed suggests that Shiki sensed he was coming closer to death. His family brought him no comfort, and he never hoped that Buddhism or any other religion might assuage his unhappiness. His most striking mention of religion was inspired by the visit to his sickroom of a Christian: A certain Christian came to my sickroom and lectured me. He said, “This world does not last long. The next world is eternal. If  you believe in the resurrection of Christ, it will bring you happiness.” I expressed my deep appreciation for his solicitude but said my present pains are so intense that I still haven’t found the time to plan for eternal happiness. Please ask God to grant me one day— twenty-four hours—when I can move my body freely and eat my fill. Once this has happened, I shall little by little try to consider eternal happiness.6 One of Shiki’s few consolations at this time was painting. He recalled, I have enjoyed painting ever since I was a child. I liked painting flowers and birds more than people, and simple paintings more

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than complicated ones. These preferences haven’t changed to this day, and that’s why, when I look at albums, I am more interested in a picture of a single camellia than the portrait of a princess, and I derive greater pleasure in a painting that shows a sparrow perched in a willow more than one of Zhang Fei brandishing his crooked halberd.7 Shiki followed these recollections with acidic comments on various well-known nineteenth-century artists. “People say Hōitsu’s paintings have voluptuous charm, but his haiku are so crude as not to bear looking at. When he inscribes one of his clumsy haiku on a voluptuous painting, it produces an extreme lack of harmony, like cheap wallpaper on the walls of a golden pavilion.” 8 Shiki’s judgment of Tani Bunchō’s paintings was equally severe, but he admired Watanabe Kazan: “Even when he paints prostitutes, ruffians, and the like, there is not a particle of vulgarity in his brush. This must be the result of his noble character.” 9 Shiki’s praise may reflect his predilection for painters of the samurai class more than an objective evaluation of Kazan’s work. Shiki was a skilled calligrapher, and his paintings have considerable charm,10 but he had little contact with the painters of his time. Apart from Nakamura Fusetsu, about whom he wrote in detail, he was friendly with only two, Asai Chū and Shimomura Izan (1865–1949). Asai was an important artist, an early advocate of the techniques of Western art, but the other two are today almost forgotten. Apart from what he learned about shasei from Fusetsu, Shiki’s art seems not to have been much influenced by these painters. Shiki’s long confinement to a sickroom made it difficult for him to paint landscapes, and he showed no interest in portraits, though he made a few sketches of himself. Instead, he painted flowers and vegetables, often from his garden, giving them new life as he gave new life to cockscombs and persimmons in his haiku. Those who enjoy his haiku

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may enjoy his paintings of solitary flowers more than a garden painted by Monet teeming with blossoms. Shiki was attracted above all by color. He wrote, “Pictures in color are better than those in black and white. When one discovers a painting in bright colors in an album that consists otherwise of ink paintings, it is like seeing a single red flower in a field of grass.”11 In a short essay called “Aka” (Red) speaking of the beauty of nature, he wrote of flowers, The most important element in their beauty is color. There are hundreds if not thousands of colors, but in general the colors of the world of nature are bright and beautiful; the colors of the world of human beings are dull and clouded. The blue of the sky, the green of leaves, the red, white, purple, and yellow of flowers are bright and cheerful. In contrast, the colors of the clothes, houses, utensils, and so on created by human beings are all gloomy and cold, looking as if they hide some sort of crime. But even among the colors of nature, the essential one is red. No matter how beautiful other colors of nature may be, they never come alive.12 Shiki wrote extremely little about music, not even about the music of the Noh dramas he so greatly admired. He had almost no acquaintance of Western music. Once a friend, seeking to divert him, brought a phonograph to Shiki’s sickroom and played records of both Japanese and Western music. Shiki recalled, “Among the Western songs was one called a laughing song. I couldn’t understand the words, but it was sung to a very rapid tempo and every now and then there was a burst of laughter. I was told that the recording was made by a celebrated singer and tried imagining what the song was about.” He hazarded three guesses, beginning with “Six crows came flying and dropped shit on Gonbei’s head. Ahha. Hahha. Ahahaha.”13

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Shiki’s ignorance of Western music was neither unusual nor retarded for a Japanese intellectual of 1901, but Ishikawa Takuboku, Shiki’s junior by nineteen years, though he grew up in a remote village of northern Japan, was already playing the violin and attending church for the pleasure of hearing music played on the harmonium. Shiki made fun of the one piece of opera he ever heard, but Takuboku wrote a eulogy of Wagner. The difference between two poets, born less than twenty years apart, vividly suggests the rapidity with which Japanese appreciation of Western culture spread throughout the country. On August 31, 1902, less than a month before his death, Shiki recalled that a year earlier he had set himself the task of reading each day Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: “It was especially difficult because I wasn’t accustomed to reading sideways, and the English text was in small print. After reading three pages I would stop, then read five pages more, and stop. Reading was painful, but the pleasure I received was very great. . . . Many people have read this book, even in Japan, but I doubt that anyone has felt it as deeply as myself.”14 It is not hard to imagine how profoundly Shiki would be moved by the account of a poor boy who, by diligence and mother wit, became rich and respected. Perhaps he was also under the lingering influence of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, the Bible of ambitious young men of the early Meiji period. In the same year (1901) that Shiki was reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Takuboku began translating John Gabriel Borkman, one of Ibsen’s gloomiest plays. Their tastes seem to be a century apart, the distance that separates Ibsen from Franklin. Shiki was in many ways a modern man, but Takuboku seems a contemporary. Shiki’s protracted illness was seldom broken by reprieves, but he maintained his wits and his worries until the last. He recalled in July 1902, four months before his death, It is already seven years since I first became ill. At first it didn’t seem all that painful. My body hurt from time to time as my ill-

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ness got progressively worse, but whenever the pain moderated, I forgot it completely, and it left no scars. But last year I suffered such spiritual anguish that I went so far as to wish I might lose my senses altogether. I had become increasingly a permanent invalid who needed someone at his side all day long looking after him. Unable to work, all I could do was endure the terrible pains, but all kinds of problems were brewing.15 The most urgent problem was money. Shiki’s income, never adequate for his needs, came from the serials and other articles he wrote for the Nippon and for Hototogisu. This income was not sufficient to hire a servant girl, much less a nurse, and the medicines and drugs Shiki needed cost a considerable amount of money. Shiki also expected and ate expensive food every day. In the absence of a nurse, the task of looking after the sick man fell on his mother and his sister. If they could have hired a professional nurse, someone skilled at caring for sick people, they might have brought him some relief from the pain he suffered; but the two women in the house, inexperienced in dealing with invalids, were clumsy, at least according to Shiki. At times their clumsiness made him so angry he would scream at them, compounding his usual pain. But he was aware, some of the time, that it was unreasonable of him to insist that they remain at his bedside when they were busy cooking for him, dusting, or washing his laundry. The women sometimes answered his complaints, saying that they had the house to look after and couldn’t stay with him all day long, but such objections served only to start quarrels. But even when these unpretentious women sat by his bedside, they could not amuse him with conversation and he quickly became bored. This led Shiki to conclude that a good education (including, if possible, high school) was necessary for women. Education would enable a woman not only to care for her husband when he was ill but also to supervise the children’s education and to maintain peace and harmony within

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the household. Shiki continued, “Of course, it’s necessary to clean the house, but one can’t say that a woman who sweeps and cleans from corner to corner is fully performing her duties if she disregards someone who is sick and groaning. There are times when she can skip cleaning for a day and clean once in two days, or even once in three days.”16 He similarly dismissed the importance of time-consuming duties in the kitchen that took his mother and sister away from his bedside when he was sick. However, he did not go so far as to say that tending the sick was a woman’s prime duty. Maintaining peace and harmony within the household was even more important. Shiki believed that peace and harmony were traditionally lacking in a Japanese home, and this was because of the insufficient education of women. He declared that the most likely place to create a congenial atmosphere within the household was at the dinner table. While the family is eating there should be conversation, and when the meal is finished there should be more conversation. Conversation makes a household cheerful; but the women in his house had neither the time nor the wit for conversation.17 Shiki’s insistence on the importance of conversation in the home reflected a basic deficiency in the education of women at this time. Even women of the upper classes who had learned to compose conventionally pretty tanka and to record them in acceptable calligraphy were not expected to have opinions; silence rather than wit was expected. The Confucian ideal of the good wife and wise mother (ryōsai kenbo) did not suggest that conversational skill was important. It was not surprising that, deprived of the pleasure of conversation at home, men sought it in the licensed quarters. The silent devotion of his mother and sister kept Shiki alive, but instead of expressing gratitude, he repeatedly complained about their lack of understanding. He accused his sister Ritsu of insensitivity but took it for granted that she should prepare all his meals. He was more likely to complain than to praise the food. He grumbled about the pain when his sister changed his bandages, never considering the unpleasantness of

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this task. Worst of all perhaps, Shiki seems never to have mentioned his work as a poet to either his mother or sister. He seems to have decided they were incapable of understanding the changes he had brought to both the haiku and tanka—in other words, what gave meaning to his life. He was probably right in thinking that the education of the two women had not prepared them to discuss literature, but he was wrong in interpreting their silence as impassivity. They probably were intimidated by him. Shiki recognized this. He wrote, “As my sickness and my pains grow more and more acute, everything irritates me. I have incessant bouts of anger. I scold people. My family is afraid and doesn’t approach me. Nobody understands what it really means to tend the sick.”18 Shiki seldom described his relations with his mother. Once, when he was tired, he asked his mother to read aloud articles in the newspaper. The entry in A Six-Foot Sickbed for July 29, 1902, relates, About nine o’clock, I was somewhat in pain after my bowel movement and as usual took morphine. I began to feel more cheerful even before the medicine worked. I asked my old mother to read the newspaper to me. Sometimes listening, sometimes not listening while she read me the childish articles, I felt myself dozing off as she stumbled over the words, unsure of the pronunciations. That was the most enjoyable thing that happened all day.19 Shiki could not openly vent his irritation with his mother and sister in the articles he published in the newspaper; unfilial comments might have antagonized the readers. He chose instead to keep simultaneously a secret diary called Gyōga manroku (Supine Notes) in which he freely wrote whatever he chose without worrying about the reactions of readers.20 He painstakingly recorded in this diary everything he ate or drank each day, his bowel movements, his temperature, the visitors to

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his sickroom, the presents they brought, and the pains he suffered. The generally somber tone of this diary is somewhat lightened by the haiku included, but relatively few passages are of literary interest. A memorable example relates how, when Shiki felt extreme pains in his abdomen, his mother and sister sat by his bed sewing and all three joined in  recalling their life in Matsuyama. He wrote, “It was most enjoyable.”21 This was the closest they came to experiencing the pleasure of conversation. It is not clear how Shiki found the time to keep this detailed diary while he was simultaneously writing the far more literary A Six-Foot Sickbed. For that matter, he never indicated why he kept this diary. Most authors keep diaries in the hope that their children or perhaps a wider public will read them and admire or at least sympathize with the author. Others, even if (like Takuboku) they instruct their wife to burn their diary after their death, hope it will be preserved. But Shiki showed no signs of interest in future readers. Much of Supine Notes is unexcitingly factual; he seems to have had no intention of creating a work of literature. Entries of this diary are often trivial, or of interest only to a sick man who has little to divert him: “A dog kept barking” is followed by “The neighbors’ clock struck nine.”22 Perhaps, like some diarists, he supposed that recording these minor events might lend actuality to the autobiographical work he would one day write. Shiki kept the diary a secret, probably to keep his sister from reading the cruel judgments he passed on her; but he did not reveal this in the manner of Takuboku in the Romaji Diary: “Why did I decide to keep this diary in romaji? Why? I love my wife, and it’s precisely because I love her that I don’t want her to read this diary. No, that’s a lie! It’s true that I love her, and it’s true that I don’t want her to read this, but the two facts are not necessarily related.” In short, we do not know why keeping this diary seemed so important to Shiki that, despite the great difficulty he experienced in writing, he continued to make entries, day after day.23

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Supine Notes, apart from some mildly interesting recollections of Shiki’s travels as a young man and comments on haiku submitted for competitions, is of unique interest because of startling pages that resemble nothing else in his writings: Ritsu is a heartless woman. She’s a woman without sympathy or compassion, a woman made of wood or maybe stone. It’s true that, out of duty, she looks after a sick man, but she never comforts the sick man with her sympathy. She does what the sick man commands her to do, but shows not the slightest understanding of anything he hints at indirectly. For example, even if the sick man says repeatedly that he would like to eat dumplings, no matter how often she hears him say this, she shows no reaction. If she possessed any sympathy, the sick man would only have to mention that he wished to eat dumplings for her to go out immediately and buy them for him. Ritsu is the only person who never does so. That’s why, if ever I want to eat dumplings I must order her in so many words, “Buy me some dumplings.” She would never disobey me. Her coldness goes beyond description. Her lack of sympathy is the same, regardless of who the other person may be. She shows real sympathy only toward the canary. She will sit before the canary’s cage for an hour or even two hours, staring at it and not doing a thing. But she spends little time with the sick man and hates to stay any longer. Once in a while I lecture her on sympathy, but it’s hardly likely that someone without sympathy will understand what I say, and my lecture has no effect. It’s disagreeable, but all I can do is to resign myself.24 Shiki wrote differently about Ritsu in his diary the next day: Ritsu is obstinate. She’s indifferent toward people. She is particularly shy toward men.25 She failed to make a success out of marriage. And that’s why she finally ended up as a nurse for her

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brother. If she had not been around when I got sick, I wonder what state I would now be in. I was in no position to hire a longtime professional nurse. Even supposing I could have hired one, she wouldn’t have been any better than Ritsu and wouldn’t have been able to do all that Ritsu does. Ritsu is a nurse and at the same time she’s also a kitchen maid. And at the same time that she’s a kitchen maid she’s also the household manager. And she’s not only the manager but my secretary. And, though she is not perfect, she takes care of the accounts for my books and makes clean copies of my manuscripts. Moreover, she doesn’t spend a tenth of what a professional nurse would charge for services. For her a meal consists of a vegetable, it doesn’t matter what kind, and some sort of pickle. She would never even dream of buying meat or fish for herself to eat. If she were not here for even one day the wheels of the house would stop turning, and it would be all but impossible for me to go on living. For that reason, it doesn’t bother me how severe my sickness becomes; all I pray is that she will not become sick. As long as she is around, I’ll get better somehow. If she were to fall sick, she, I, the whole house would be in a mess. I always think it would be better for me to die than for her to become sick. The fact that she married twice and came back both times was implicit proof that, being incapable of succeeding as a wife, she was destined to be her brother’s nurse.26 These two extraordinarily different evaluations of Ritsu are examples of how quickly Shiki might change his mind. The latter entry is followed by some haiku and then by a mysterious passage that seems to be describing another person. She [he?]27 has a terrible temper. She is obstinate. She is inconsiderate. She hates asking other people about anything. She is extremely clumsy with her hands. Once she has decided on

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something, nothing can change her mind. Her faults are too numerous to be enumerated. I sometimes get so angry that I think of killing her. But, to tell the truth, she is such a spiritual cripple that it makes me feel the fonder of her. It’s because I can imagine how her shortcomings will make her suffer if ever she goes out into the world that I always attempt to cure her of her temper. If she should lose me, I wonder if she will remember my admonitions.28 It is not clear whom Shiki was admonishing. Most likely it was Ritsu, but it may conceivably have been Takahama Kyoshi. (There is no pronoun to indicate the gender of the person described.) The tone suggests that the person was so close to him that he worried constantly about her. In any case, Shiki’s gloomy account ends at this point. The zuihitsu returns to Shiki’s favorite subject, food and drink, and lists everything he consumed that day. Haiku composed by himself and others are interspersed in the text, usually without comment. They and the gists he gives of amusing articles he has read in the newspapers sometimes lend a bright note to an almost oppressively dark diary, but more often Shiki describes incidents that have aroused his anger. He mentions, for example, his fury when a member of his family (kajin) who is outside the house fails to respond when he calls to her in a loud voice. Enraged, he gulps down milk, rice balls, and cakes, resulting in painful indigestion. He later scolded the kajin for not having heard his loud voice even though he could hear her if she merely whispered while in the garden. No, he concludes, there was no reason why she couldn’t hear him. She must simply have been inattentive.29 There is something displeasing about this anecdote. It is curious that Shiki should have referred to his sister not by her name or even as his sister but with the impersonal kajin (person of the house). He gives the impression he considers her no more than a menial who is obliged to respond instantly to his calls; but the menial committed a crime of

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inattention that brought on a stomachache. The next line in the text of Supine Notes states without comment that the family held a happy gathering (danrankai) that afternoon. Probably Shiki had by afternoon regretted his rage. In the interviews conducted by reporters with Shiki’s mother and sister after his death, neither intimated that life with him had been difficult. Shiki’s mother doubtless accepted his periods of ill temper, as she had accepted her husband’s drinking and fecklessness, because she had been taught this was the way to behave as the wife and mother of a samurai; Ritsu’s only defense against Shiki’s bad temper was to behave as if she really were made of wood or stone. The entry for October 2, 1901, in Supine Notes opens as usual with a careful listing of everything Shiki ate that day, a brief mention of his bowel movements and the changing of his bandages, and finally a more extensive description of his latest pains. On this day he also received from his uncle Ōhara the joyful letter that Shiki’s grandfather had written on October 8, 1867, announcing Shiki’s birth.30 The baby was healthy but not taking in milk sufficiently. The grandfather earnestly prayed he would soon outgrow this flaw.31 Shiki made no comment about his reactions on learning from the letter that his health had been a source of worry from his birth. On October 16, 1901, Shiki wrote the most memorable entry of Supine Notes: “Today again the food was no good. About two in the afternoon, after I had finished my lunch, the weather improved somewhat. Ritsu went out, saying she was going to the public bath. My mother sat beside my pillow, not saying a word.” Suddenly, a strange wave of madness seemed to pass over Shiki. He cried, “I can’t stand it anymore. What am I going to do?” As this uncontrolled feeling mounted, he kept repeating, “I can’t stand it!” His mother answered calmly, “It can’t be helped.” Shiki decided he wanted to send a telegram to his disciple Sakamoto Shihōta (1873–1917). His mother brought him a telegraph form and an

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inkstone. Shiki dashed off the words “Come to Negishi” and gave the form to his mother, who left for the post office. He wrote, Now I was alone in the house. Lying on my left side, I looked at the inkstone box. It contained four or five worn-out brushes and a thermometer. I could see a blunt little knife two inches long, and an eyeleteer (also two inches long) on top of the brushes. The suicidal impulse that sometimes comes over me even without such a stimulus suddenly surged through me. The thought, as a matter of fact, had already flashed through my mind while I was writing the telegram. But I could hardly kill myself with that blunt little knife and the eyeleteer. If I could get to the next room, I knew there was a razor there. If I had the razor, cutting my throat would be no problem, but unfortunately, I can’t even crawl. If I couldn’t do anything else, it would probably not be impossible to cut my windpipe with the little knife. Or, I could use the eyeleteer to drill a hole in my heart. I would certainly die that way, but it would be protracted and painful. Perhaps I would die more quickly if I drilled three or four holes. I tried thinking over every possibility, but in the end fear won out, and I couldn’t make up my mind. I wasn’t afraid of death but of pain. I thought that if I found even the pains of my illness unbearable, how much more dreadful it would be if I botched an attempted suicide. But that was not all. When I looked at the knife, I felt something like a current of fear welling up from deep within me.32 In the end, Shiki did not take the knife in his hand. He comforted himself with the thought that death would come soon even if he was unable to kill himself. The best thing to do until then was to enjoy life. He suddenly wanted to eat a marvelous dinner. He was ready to sell his books to pay for such a meal. But, he realized, he didn’t really want to sell his

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books. This uncertainty made him feel dizzier than ever. His anguish was brought to a close by the unexpectedly early return of his mother. One cannot but feel relieved that Shiki did not commit suicide, but it is surprising that he was saved from suicide by the reassuring thought that he would die soon anyway. His cheerful anticipation of an expensive last meal may seem frivolous. But no one who has not lived with terrible pain as long as Shiki is capable of judging his behavior.

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hiki continued to write installments of A Six-Foot Sickbed for the Nippon until three days before his death. Although it was a struggle for him to find interesting new topics, his persistence was rewarded each morning when he saw the latest installment in the newspaper. But the strain of writing became more pronounced each day. On August 20 he wrote, “This makes it the hundredth installment of A Six-Foot Sickbed. I know one hundred days is a very short period of time, but I feel as if I have been writing it for ten years.”1 His friends, worried by his obvious exhaustion, brought him gifts, some reputed to cure illness,2 others (like a doll in a glass case) intended to divert him, but Shiki’s interest in these gifts soon palled. Despite the fatigue, Shiki was absolutely determined to continue writing, testing (as often he had in the past) his ability to persevere in the face of pain. His idols, as he mentioned to disciples, were the priest Nichiren, who resolutely fought his enemies until he succeeded in establishing himself as a great religious leader, and Abraham Lincoln, who sacrificed himself for his principles, completely ignoring his own happiness and always giving credit to others.3

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The inspiration provided by such heroes was not enough for Shiki to surmount the pains from which he suffered almost without relief. When the pain became absolutely unbearable, he resorted to drugs. On August 6 he wrote that his greatest pleasure was making sketches of flowers after first swallowing morphine.4 By the middle of September the entries in his serial had become brief. The following was the entire installment for September 12, 1902: “I am told that even now they practice torture in China and Korea. Since yesterday I have been tortured day and night in every part of my body without respite. The pain is truly indescribable.” 5 The final installment of the serial, written five days later, was devoted to a letter and a poem that Shiki had received from an admirer. Shiki composed his last three haiku on the morning of September 18. He scrawled them on a sheet of the paper he normally used for his paintings. His sister Ritsu held the paper taut on a drawing board. Shiki said nothing as he wrote, choked by phlegm. No one else spoke a word; the only sounds were the occasional coughs of the sick man. The first of the three haiku that Shiki wrote on this occasion would be known as his jisei, or “farewell to the world”:6 hechima saite tan no tsumarishi hotoke kana

The sponge gourd has bloomed; See the Buddha Stuffed with phlegm.7

Shiki sees himself as a Buddha (a dead man), but even though this was his farewell to the world, it contains a touch of haiku humor, the incongruity of a Buddha being choked by phlegm. Shiki paused after writing each line of this haiku and before each of the final two haiku. When he had finished the third, he let the brush drop, apparently exhausted by the effort. Ritsu leaned the drawing board against a wall so that others in the room could read the poems. From then on, Shiki uttered only groans of pain. A dose of morphine failed to relieve his suffering. The doctor, who arrived late, after some

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hesitation gave Shiki another injection of morphine. This eased the pain and enabled him to sleep; but the double dose may have precipitated Shiki’s death. Shiki died early in the morning of September 19, 1902. He was thirtyfive years old. Hekigotō, together with Ritsu, washed the corpse and wrapped it in sheets. Hekigotō’s memoir describes the horrifying state of Shiki’s body: after seven years of confinement to a sickbed, only the upper half of Shiki’s body seemed to be alive.8 Most of the disciples present when Shiki died would soon publish essays in which they recalled the terrible night they spent by Shiki’s bedside.9 Feelings of grief over Shiki’s death mingled with thankfulness that, despite his prolonged illness, he had lived longer than anyone could have expected. Itō Sachio (1865–1913), Shiki’s outstanding tanka disciple, published in November 1902 the short, touching essay “We Who Have Lost Our Teacher.” It begins, “It goes without saying that the death of Masaoka-sensei has caused us extreme grief, but in fact we might more appropriately call it a blessing of heaven that his life was prolonged until September of 1902, a year or a year and a half longer than anyone had thought.”10 A month earlier Itō had written an essay about Shiki in which he attempted to dispel the commonly accepted image of Shiki as a coldly rational man who lacked normal feelings of affection. Itō did not share this view but had to admit that some of Shiki’s disciples, though they greatly revered him, had experienced trouble penetrating the wall of reserve that Shiki built around himself; they feared that if they attempted to treat him affectionately, like a friend, they might be rebuffed.11 In August 1904, two years after Shiki’s death, Itō wrote a much longer essay on the same theme. It began, Everyone knows that sensei was a highly rational person, but at  the same time he was also an emotional, tenderhearted man extremely given to weeping. This was probably because he had been ill a long time and confined to his bed. It was not unusual for

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him to become furiously angry for almost no reason, and after shedding tears of anger he might weep once again, this time raising his voice. On the other hand, he sometimes was delighted by quite trivial things.12 Two years earlier, when his uncle Katō Tsunetada paid Shiki a short visit just before leaving for Belgium to take up his post as minister, he was dismayed by the outpouring of tears with which Shiki greeted him. When Katō scolded him for this atypical behavior, not at all what he expected from the coolheaded Shiki, his reprimand brought from Shiki an uncontrollable flood of tears. Shiki raged, scolded, and wept in the company of members of his inner circle of disciples. Such displays of emotion were short-lived and not controlled by reason. Shiki’s disciples wrote less about his susceptibility to tears than about his impassive refusal to reveal his emotions openly. His longtime disciple Ioki Hyōtei (1871–1937) wrote after Shiki’s death, “He was known for his cold blood, his factualism. People who did not share Shiki’s opinions and were not accepted as members of his circle never experienced the intimacy he showed those he liked. Those not admitted to the charmed circle inevitably got the impression that Shiki was cold.”13 Shiki’s lack of interest in women, another aspect of his coldness, puzzled his disciples. They reasoned that there must have been at least one romance in his life. This led to a search for some woman with whom he might plausibly have been involved; they hoped to discover some experience that he normally hid behind his mask of solitude. The first such attempt was made in 1888, when he was twenty-one. His friend Ōtani Zekū recalled that in the summer of that year Shiki had taken lodgings on the second floor of a cake shop in Mukō-jima. Someone started the rumor that Shiki was having an affair with the daughter of the shop. Shiki, much upset by the rumor, wrote Nanakusa shū in part to clear his name.14 Like all subsequent searches for a hidden romance in Shiki’s life, this

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one was unsuccessful. Some attributed the lack of love affairs to Shiki’s feudalistic misogyny, but on one occasion when he and Itō Sachio were talking about buying prostitutes, Shiki reportedly gave a great laugh and declared, “When I was a student I went about once a month [to the licensed quarter] because I had to, but I never felt like going to the same woman twice. That was because I would suddenly start to inspect the woman and this exhausted all interest in her. I never felt like going again.”15 The story, if true, provides evidence that Shiki had physical relations with women but does not prove that he had experienced love. Itō, after narrating this conversation, produced a surprise: Shiki had in fact deeply loved a tanka poet, a young man of twenty-four. It was clearly not a physical relationship—by the time that Shiki and Nagatsuka Takashi (1879–1915) became intimate friends, Shiki was a hopeless cripple confined to his sickbed. But, Itō wrote, it gave Shiki great pleasure to impart to Nagatsuka not only his knowledge of tanka composition but also his philosophy, and he showed Nagatsuka a warmth that went beyond that of teacher and student. Itō wrote, “The intimacy of their relationship was too idealistic to be that between a father and son, too emotional to be that between a teacher and his disciple. That is why I call it an ideal love of a father for his son.”16 Itō’s description of Shiki’s love for Nagatsuka, published in October 1902, did not surprise anyone, nor did it terminate the usual gossip about Shiki’s lack of emotions. Criticism of Shiki is found even in panegyrics written by the disciples. Sakamoto Shihōta declared, for example, that once Shiki had made up his mind on a subject, he did not change it readily, even if it was wrong.17 This differs markedly from the remark made by Nakamura Fusetsu on the same subject, “Masaoka’s obstinacy was enough to make one angry. However, what was remarkable was that no matter how far he wandered on the wrong path, a time would always come, sooner or later, when he awoke to the truth and discarded the mistaken idea to which he had clung.”18

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The criticism offered by friends like Shihōta and Fusetsu was friendly, possibly intended mainly to prove to the world that the author knew even Shiki’s little foibles. Harsher criticism of Shiki was made by a onetime disciple named Wakao Ransui (1877–1961). At the outset of his essay on Shiki’s death, he declared himself to have been a faithful disciple who deeply respected Shiki. (He referred to Shiki throughout as sensei.) He praised the breadth of Shiki’s literary activity: Shiki had composed not only haiku and tanka but also kanshi, shintaishi, fiction, criticism, and so on. Ransui, however, broke off his praise of his teacher with the sudden assertion that Shiki had made no significant contribution to any of these genres. Ransui characterized Shiki’s haiku as derivative and lacking in originality. The many archaic words Shiki borrowed from the Man’yōshū made his tanka difficult to read and boring. His shintaishi were no more than stretched-out haiku. His fiction imitated Western works. Ransui believed that two varieties of people were responsible for the high esteem in which Shiki was held, far exceeding his real worth. The first are novice haiku poets, fresh out of school, misguided people who, having never had personal contact with sensei, possess absolutely no knowledge of his character. They suppose that by praising sensei, however foolishly, it will serve to qualify them as important haiku poets of the new wave. They twist their thin lips, affecting an attitude of mental anguish, when they hear news of his illness. They cut out newspaper articles by sensei and save but do not read them. No matter how clumsy a poem or a piece of prose may be, if it bears sensei’s name, they tilt their heads in wonderment, as foolish as some ignorant old woman who kneels in adoration before a lascivious priest. The second group is the bunch of rascals who call themselves sensei’s “direct disciples.” They comically boast of being the “seniors” of Shiki’s school, but when they address sensei, whether in

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speech or in writing, they act as if their chief fear is that the flattery and groveling they offer may not be sufficiently fulsome. They suppose that if their flattery is successful and enables them to obtain sensei’s approval, it will improve their reputations, false though they are. In extreme cases, they trumpet sensei’s celebrity in all directions, hoping this will gild their own fame and help them to gain some advantage they crave.19 Most unfortunate of all were the faults in Shiki’s character. Ransui declared, “If I were asked to paint sensei’s portrait, not holding back anything, a shocking image of his character would likely emerge.” He added, In my opinion, the worst of sensei’s failings is his extreme coldbloodedness. Some, like Takahama Kyoshi, though they worship him from their hearts, admit this. Others, like Samukawa Sokotsu, have often related to me instances of sensei’s iciness. Sensei, lifting his head from his pillow, used to stare at the visitor’s face with his long-slitted “three-white” eyes20 and relate with the greatest satisfaction stories that consisted for the most part of hateful personal attacks on other people, accounts of their blunders, or else amusing stories about the behavior of ignoramuses. Far from sympathizing with such people, sensei seemed to derive his greatest pleasure from sneering at them. . . . Although he was devoid of sympathy, sensei could not abide anyone else being cold toward himself. Of course, the suffering that sensei underwent from his illness was too horrible for any tongue to describe fully, but he complained about it and cruelly squeezed out his listeners’ sympathy to such a degree that they were unable to utter an ordinary word of comfort; but that still did not satisfy him. His mother and sister waited on him untiringly, day and night, but he scolded and cursed them for their lack of consideration.21

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It is difficult to know how to interpret Ransui’s accusations. One longs for some way to demonstrate that his criticism stemmed from nothing more than nastiness, perhaps aroused by his jealousy of disciples whom Shiki seemed to prefer. In any case, Ransui’s abuse of Shiki’s writings is scarcely worthy of consideration. He had no grounds for declaring that Shiki’s haiku were all derived from the masters of the past; Shiki had in fact worked a revolution in the haiku, making it an effective medium for conveying the poet’s response to contemporary life. His haiku certainly do not resemble those composed by the imitators who claimed to belong to the school of Bashō nor by the pun-loving practitioners of the early haiku. It is true that the archaic language found in some of his tanka may irritate the reader, but many of the old words seem fresh and moving. Ransui passed over Shiki’s kanshi and shintaishi with a sneer but showed no sign of having read any of them; and if, as Ransui claimed, Shiki’s fiction imitated Western works, we would like him to reveal just which works they were. In short, Ransui’s attacks on Shiki’s works were irresponsible. What of his severe condemnation of Shiki’s character? One cannot but recognize that certain of Ransui’s criticisms resemble those of more loyal disciples; it is difficult to shake off the feeling that Ransui’s hostile remarks may have had some basis in fact. Perhaps Shiki, resentful of the fate that condemned him to spend his life as a bedridden invalid though incompetent poets enjoyed good health, avenged himself by disparaging their work. Possibly the fairest judgment passed on Ransui’s assault on Shiki’s character was given by Ioki Hyōtei, one of Shiki’s most trusted disciples, who answered Ransui’s allegations in these terms: Of late a man named Ransui has written in Zuku, a haiku magazine published in the provinces, an article about Shiki. He describes his good qualities but enumerates at the same time his many failings: Shiki, he says, was cold-blooded, narrow-minded,

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jealous, partisan, arrogant, pedantic, given to abusing others without cause and to glorifying himself, extremely prone to selfadvertisement. Such were sensei’s evil deeds as pointed out by Ransui. I recall having seen this Ransui a couple of times. He was a frequent visitor at Shiki’s house in Negishi, so one can’t say that what he wrote represented nothing more than his powers of imagination. In fact, one gets the impression that he intended to set down exactly what he honestly felt. Probably various factors made him view Shiki in an unfavorable light. The man is still young and probably was not on close enough terms with Shiki to understand him. For another, he had been scolded by Shiki. Moreover, Shiki had boldly denounced Nakae Chōmin and other senior people who came from Ransui’s part of the country. Finally, he had been treated less kindly than other disciples. These circumstances made Shiki’s behavior seem to Ransui so unkind and unfair that he felt obliged to reveal what he believed was the truth. At a time when everyone else was feeling sorry for Shiki, he alone had the audacity to enumerate without reticence Shiki’s shortcomings. Ransui’s youthful concern, once stirred up, finally induced him to pass so harsh a judgment. At first, as is the wont of young men, he didn’t realize that what he was writing was so controversial, but as he wrote he got carried away, and what he wrote was at times extreme.22 The faults listed by Ransui neither make Shiki a man of evil character nor affect the quality of his poetry. It is unfortunate that Shiki did not sufficiently show his gratitude to his mother and sister for their patient care during the long years of his illness, but such failings should not color our appreciation of his work. It goes without saying that in every epoch of every country there have been men whose greatness was

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marred by vanity or greed or profligacy. Soon after Shiki’s death, his disciple Kuwamura Chikushi wrote in the essay “An Ordinary Great Man,” When we look at those considered by the world to be “great men,” in one respect they are extremely superior, but in others they have extreme failings. Moreover, the failings match the strong points and make them all the stronger. It’s like a deaf man whose eyes become more perceptive or a blind man whose ears become sharper. One might even go so far as to say that it is essential for great men to possess faults.23 Kuwamura does not plainly say that he made these generalizations about the beneficial aspects of faults by way of justifying them in Shiki, whom he termed a “typical great man”; he went no farther in his analysis of Shiki’s character than to note that his most distinctive qualities were to be found in his haiku. Ransui was banished from the ranks of Shiki’s disciples soon after his essay was published.24 About two weeks later, he published in another magazine a second essay, this one in a totally different mood, describing his attendance at a gathering of haiku poets at Shiki’s house three years earlier. Ransui seems to have been dazzled by the brilliant conversations of the guests; his description makes the little group that assembled in Shiki’s house seem rather like a French salon.25 It is strange that, after this exhilarating experience, Ransui should have attempted to divulge Shiki’s every fault. Almost all the other essays written after Shiki’s death reveal the degree to which his disciples worshipped him. His death came as a terrible blow not only to Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigotō, who emerged after Shiki’s death as his successors in the world of haiku, but also to poets who had known him only a short time. They remembered happy events shared with Shiki, some as far back as childhood, or related

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with nostalgia the circumstances of their first meeting. Many described Shiki’s features in detail, interpreting what his eyes, nose, or forehead revealed about his character. Not satisfied with the many photographs that had been taken of Shiki, they wanted Shiki to be remembered as they remembered him and to discover his beauty in the portraits they drew in words. Shiki was buried in the cemetery of Tairyū-ji, a temple in the Tabata section of Tokyo. He had told his disciples that he wished to be buried in Tokyo, rather than in Matsuyama, and they obeyed. A Buddhist temple in Ueno or Mukō-jima, parts of the city especially familiar to Shiki, would have been more appropriate for his grave than distant Tabata, but Ueno and Mukō-jima were famous for their cherry blossoms, and some disciples expressed fear that drunken men, after enjoying the cherry blossoms and drinking the sake that customarily accompanied blossom viewing, might blow breaths stinking of sake on Shiki’s grave or poke their sticks at the monument. The consensus was that another site was preferable.26 The disciples consulted a Buddhist priest about a quiet cemetery. He recommended two temples, one a Zen temple in Takada, the other a Ritsu temple in Tabata. Disciples went to inspect both. They were disappointed with the Zen temple, but Tairyū-ji, the Ritsu temple, was quiet and immaculately clean. The Ritsu sect, though its history went back to the seventh century, was very small and had no connection with Shiki’s family, but that was not an obstacle: Shiki had never shown any particular interest in Zen, the sect to which he belonged.27 Shiki’s mother, when asked if she approved of a member of the Masaoka family’s being buried in a Ritsu cemetery, answered tranquilly, “Do whatever suits your convenience.” The decision was accordingly made to bury Shiki within the precincts of Tairyū-ji. The question next arose which posthumous name should be inscribed on the tombstone.28 Various suggestions were made, but in the end it was decided not to change the name he had always

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used—Shiki. The inscription on the tombstone would be the one he had composed years before for this purpose. His disciple Satō Kōroku, who took part in the ceremony of placing Shiki’s body in the coffin, recalled, About eight on the twentieth, the rain cleared somewhat and the moonlight peeping through the clouds cast a quiet light diagonally on the glass doors. We placed sensei, who was lying on new white bedding, in his coffin and covered him with the same material. The coffin was five feet long, three feet five inches wide and one foot two inches deep.29 About ten o’clock I cleansed my hands and bowed three times. Then I opened the coffin so that I might purify his nose and mouth with an ointment. When I removed the white cloth that covered his face, I thought, “How emaciated he has become!” During his lifetime, no matter how thin he became, his spirit remained animated and some touch of his vitality sprang from within him; but he had returned to the Great Silence. His cheeks were so pitifully sunken that the bridge of his nose looked higher. Only his broad forehead remained unchanged, making his face longer than before. But I cannot bear to go on any further. I had the great honor of beholding the face of a great man after his death. It was an honor to be asked to write this account, and I wish I could write it to the end, but I am quite incapable of continuing. I looked intently at his face. This was the moment of our parting for this lifetime. I would not be able to see him again until I had died and, in the afterworld, could once again listen to his teachings. He was so sensitive that even the sound of a window being shut near his pillow upset him—how could I touch his face even with just one finger? O-Ritsu, mixing the ointment, was looking the other way. Hekigotō and Shihōta were standing grief-stricken on

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the other side of the coffin. Yoshirō and Sachio stood behind me. Nobody said a word, and the only sound we could hear in the stillness of the room was one another’s breathing. Light from the moon sinking to the south shone directly on the tatami next to the coffin, and the smoke of the incense rose in wisps, spreading as it climbed and stinging my eyes. I took the ointment in my hand and cleansed his face. Everything was done unconsciously as if I were walking on a road in a dream. At last it was done. There was a sound of sobbing behind me. Hardly had I lowered the lid than I threw myself down before the coffin.30 The death of a teacher, particularly a beloved teacher, is always the occasion of sorrow, but it was heightened in Shiki’s case by the belief of the disciples that they owed him everything that mattered most to them. Eventually, they would write poetry in distinctive voices, some quite unlike Shiki’s, but there was no question of their returning to the pallid haiku prevalent before Shiki began his work as a poet and critic. The disciples felt the excitement of having participated in a revolution. In the case of the tanka, new voices had been heard even before the Meiji Restoration, but although such men as Tachibana Akemi produced appealingly fresh tanka, their criticism of the old schools went largely unheeded; it took Shiki’s challenge to shock the tanka poets into realizing that the tanka was moribund. It also gave them the impetus to save it. Shiki was great because he appeared at a time when the haiku was threatened with extinction. The lack of notable poets and the appeal of new, Western-influenced forms of poetry had made the haiku seem trivial and even obsolete. Shiki created a new kind of haiku that excited his generation and by making haiku respond to the new culture preserved it as a major element of modern Japanese literature. If Shiki had not

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composed his haiku and written his critical essays, the tanka and the haiku might, like the renga, have ceased to be living poetic forms and become no more than playthings of antiquarians. Shiki felt sure that Hototogisu and his school of haiku would survive. He was perhaps less sanguine about the future of the tanka, but fortunately he had a successor in Ishikawa Takuboku who, though not Shiki’s disciple, undoubtedly was influenced by his criticism. He wrote in these terms: People say that the tanka form is inconvenient because it’s so short. I think its shortness is precisely what makes it convenient. We are constantly being assailed by so many sensations, both from within and without ourselves, that we forget them soon after they occur, or if we remember them for a little while, we end up by never once in our whole lifetime expressing them because there is not enough content to the sensations to sustain the thought. Most people look down on such sensations or, if they don’t, they let them escape with almost no show of interest. . . . A sensation may last only a second, but it is a second that will never return again. I refuse to let such moments slip by. The most convenient way to express these experiences is in the tanka, which, being short, does not require much trouble. One of the few blessings that we Japanese enjoy is having this poetic form called the tanka.31 Shiki, if he had so wished and lived long enough, might have developed into a major shintaishi poet, but he seems to have sensed that what he wanted to say was best said in a short poem. He also seems to have preferred to compose poems in accordance with an established form, whether through the number of syllables or the use of particles like ya and kana, rather than take advantage of the freedom or vague requirements of a shintaishi.

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When Shiki began his work as a poet and critic, there was only a waning interest in haiku and not one poet who is still remembered. Shiki’s importance can be measured in terms of the extraordinary popularity that the haiku has enjoyed ever since he began his work. Today more than a million Japanese regularly compose haiku in groups guided by a professional poet. Each group publishes a magazine of haiku composed by members. The newspapers every week devote pages to haiku by amateurs whose works are judged and awarded prizes by recognized poets. Interest in haiku is not confined to the Japanese. Thousands outside Japan compose haiku in their own language, observing the rules to the degree that their language permits. The art of composing “haiku” is taught in many American schools, and children who would be unable to compose sonnets or other Western poetic forms are encouraged to develop their poetic instincts in the haiku. Before translations of Shiki’s haiku began to appear, foreign students of Japan tended to dismiss haiku as epigrams, but they have come to recognize that the haiku (and tanka) can be poetry.32 Shiki’s early death was a tragedy, but he had changed the nature of haiku and tanka. His disregard of conventionally admired sights of nature did not, however, fundamentally change Japanese aesthetic preferences. The scent of plum blossoms and the clouds of cherry blossoms still delight the Japanese, today as in the Heian period, and many thousands, if not millions, of Japanese travel long distances to see the red autumn leaves; but poets hardly mention them any longer, preferring to compose haiku or tanka to describe the experience of living in a modern world. This was Shiki’s achievement.

notes

Introduction 1. Translation by Burton Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 17. 2. See Hinatsu, Gendaishi taikei, 1:300, for the early insistence on modernity in the shintaishi translators. 3. Translation by Carl Sesar, in Takuboku: Poems to Eat, 17. 4. When discussing the haiku of Bashō with a distinguished professional haiku poet, I was told that he did not consider aural effects when composing haiku. 5. Translation by Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 101 6. Translation by Watson, ibid., 105.

1. The Early Years 1. The population of Matsuyama in 1889 was 32,916; twenty years earlier it was probably closer to 25,000. Although according to Shiki’s haiku meigetsu ya / Iyo no Matsuyama / ichiman ko (the population of Matsuyama is ten thousand people), this was poetic rather than factual. See Wada Shigeki,

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Shiki to shūhen no hitobito, 1. Wada provides much useful data on the history of the Matsuyama fief. 2. The Masaoka family had a stipend of 140 koku. According to Matsui Toshihiko, Shikon no bungaku: Masaoka Shiki (Tokyo: Shintensha, 1986), 26, this sum probably enabled them to live as well as many samurai of higher rank in other domains. 3. Shiki zenshū, 10:148. See also Hasegawa, Shiki no seishun, 37. 4. Shiki zenshū, 10:151. See also Hasegawa, Shiki no seishun, 40. The English proverb quoted by Shiki is very old. A variant is found in the Proverbes of John Heywood, first printed in 1546, where it is given as “Burnt child fire dredth.” 5. The mathematics was a kind of algebra, originally imported from China but modified in Japan by Seki Takakazu (1640?–1708). The sticks were used for calculation and divination. 6. Ōhara Kanzan (1818–1875) was the chief Confucian scholar of the Matsuyama domain. Shiki would later study with him. 7. The preceding passages, from Shiki’s Fudemakase, are found in Shiki zenshū, 10:149–50. See also Hasegawa, Shiki no seishun, 8–9. Chūin is a Buddhist term for the period during which a person who had died waited for rebirth. In Japan this was commonly considered to be forty-nine days. 8. Many years later he would write a long poem of grief at his father’s grave. See chap. 9. 9. The sister’s name is given both as Ritsuko and Ritsu. Ritsuko was somewhat more dignified. 10. Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 257. 11. For the interview of Masaoka Yae, see ibid., 237–44. The interview can also be found in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:181–85. 12. See the article by Hattori Yoshika, “Shiki no haha to imōto,” in Shiki zenshū, 11, geppō, 12–15, for the two failed marriages. The first, when Ritsu was sixteen ( Japanese count), lasted only a few months; she may have been too independent for her husband, an army officer. Her second marriage was to a geography teacher at the local middle school, a man under five feet tall. It has been suggested that this marriage failed because Ritsu neglected her hus-

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band, spending most of her time looking after her brother; but it seems probable that the divorce occurred long before Shiki was taken seriously ill. See Koyano, “Shiki no kazoku, ” 185–86. 13. Kawahigashi Hekigotō and Masaoka Ritsuko, “Katei yori mitaru Shiki,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:284. 14. Ibid., 289–96. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. Ioki Hyōtei, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:157. 17. According to Wada Shigeki, Shiki no shūhen no hitobito, 131, Shiki was about 163 centimeters tall and weighed between 48 and 52 kilos, about average for the time. 18. Ioki, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 158. 19. Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 5–6. 20. Photographs are included in Wada Shigeki, Masaoka Shiki, Shinchō Nihon bungaku arubamu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1986). Over thirty photographs of Shiki survive, but there are extremely few photographs of his contemporaries Ishikawa Takuboku or Higuchi Ichiyō. 21. Ioki, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 158. 22. Dolls representing the emperor and empress, placed at the top of the levels of dolls displayed at the Dolls’ Festival (hinamatsuri) on the third day of the third month. 23. A female servant doll. 24. The Star Festival, observed on the seventh day of the seventh month. In preparation for the night when the Herd Boy star and the Weaver Girl star meet, slips of paper are inscribed with poems and hung on trees. 25. Mochibana usually consisted of small quantities of rice fashioned into balls. They were attached to branches at New Year as decorations but also as bringers of ample harvests of rice. Apparently the Masaoka household, unable to afford using rice, substituted small balls made of scraps of cloth. 26. Matsui, Masaoka Shiki, 13. The original text appeared in the December 1898 issue of Hototogisu. 27. Matsui, Masaoka Shiki, 18.

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28. Quoted by Awazu Norio in Masaoka Shiki, 8. 29. According to Kawahigashi Hekigotō, Shiki’s friends called him affectionately Nobo-san; see Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 242. 30. He signed some early works Tsunenori. He did not use the name Shiki until 1889. 31. Entry for April 8, 1901, in Bokujū itteki (A Drop of Ink). See Shiki zenshū, 11:159. 32. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:182. 33. Most of the remarks by Shiki’s mother are found in “Shiki koji yōji,” an interview with an anonymous reporter, published in the January 1, 1909, issue of Arare. The text appears in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:600–608. I have also quoted from Kawahigashi Hekigotō’s interview with the mother printed in the Nippon on November 3, 1902. It is reprinted in Ioki, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 181–83. 34. See Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 11; see also Matsui, Shikon no bungaku, 25. 35. Shiki’s comments were apparently made in an appendix to his essay “Tokiwa gōketsu dan” about “heroes” of the Meiji era. See Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 12, for Awazu’s conjectures about what Shiki wrote. For Sōseki’s letter, written on November 7, 1891, see Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:493–94. 36. Shiki zenshū, 8:16. See also Wada Shigeki, Shiki to shūhen no hitobito, 12. This early mention of the hototogisu, a bird whose cries suggest it is coughing blood, has an ominous ring as the work of an eleven-year-old, seeming to foretell Shiki’s death twenty-four years later. “Shiki” was the Sino-Japanese name for the hototogisu. The image of the hototogisu would run through Shiki’s writings. 37. Minami Hajime, “Shiki no shōnen jidai,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:168. 38. Their education is described in Minami, “Shiki no shōnen jidai,” 3:166–83. 39. Ibid., 174–75. 40. Minami Hajime, Ōta Masami, and Takemura Kitō (along with Shiki) constituted four of the “five friends” shown in the photograph given in Wada Katsushi, Shiki no isshō, 79. 41. From “Mito kikō,” in Shiki zenshū, 13:379.

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2. Student Days 1. Minami Hajime, “Shiki no shōnen jidai,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:176. Rousseau’s work was translated into Japanese in 1882 by Nakae Chōmin (1857– 1901). Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en Europe was translated in 1868. It was one of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s favorite books. Mill’s “On Liberty” was translated in 1868, but I have not discovered when Considerations on Representative Government (1861) was translated. The most complete list of translations is given by Chiba Sen’ichi in “Hon’yaku bungaku sakuhin nenpyō,” but he does not supply the original names of the translated works. 2. Minami, “Shiki no shōnen jidai,” 179. 3. Shiki zenshū, 18:31. 4. The friend was Shōda Kazue (1867–1948). See Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:361. See also Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 24. However, Yanagihara Kyokudō’s account of Shiki’s lecture on kokkai stated that Shiki’s talk, though encumbered with difficult words, was easy to understand and enjoyable. See Yanagihara Masayuki [Kyokudō], “Shiki no seinen jidai,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:185–86. 5. Text in Shiki zenshū, 9:118–21. Shiki wrote the characters for “black lump” on the blackboard before beginning his speech, as if to deny (at least on the surface) that his talk had a political message. 6. Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 26. See also Yanagihara, “Shiki no seinen jidai,” 185–86. Yanagihara was impressed that an aesthete like Shiki had made a speech on the “black lump.” 7. Shiki zenshū, 9:118. 8. Also known as Katō Takusen, the third son of Ōhara Kanzan, Shiki’s maternal grandfather. He studied law in France and entered the diplomatic service, rising to the rank of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Belgium in 1902. After leaving the diplomatic service, he became a  member of the House of Representatives. His last office was mayor of Matsuyama. 9. Hisamatsu Sadashizu, the former daimyo of Matsuyama, maintained a residence in Tokyo. Shiki apparently paid a courtesy call. He may also have left

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his baggage there before looking for Yanagihara. Shiki had received a scholarship from the Hisamatsu family and was to stay at the Hisamatsu residence for about a month before moving into a dormitory. 10. Shiki zenshū, 10:14–15. See also Hasegawa, Shiki no seishun, 8–9. This section of Fudemakase was written in 1884. 11. Shiki zenshū, 10:39–40. Included in Fudemakase for 1888. See also Hasegawa, Shiki no seishun, 10–11. 12. This middle school had been founded in 1881. It was in the Kanda area of Tokyo. It changed its name several times; it is known today as Kaisei Gakkō. 13. Shiki zenshū, 10:40. 14. Takahashi had spent years abroad, beginning with a year in America as a slave. In 1936 he was assassinated in the February 26 Incident by army officers angered by his proposal, as minister of finance, to reduce expenditures for military purposes. 15. In 1885 Shōyō published both Tōsei shosei katagi and Shōsetsu shinzui. 16. Shiki zenshū, 11:210. 17. Murdoch’s corrections are given in Shiki zenshū, 9:812–17. Murdoch was evidently pleased with Shiki’s essay. At his recommendation it was published in the art magazine Museum (issue of July 9, 1890). Sōseki’s essay on a similar topic, also written as a member of Murdoch’s class, appeared in the preceding issue, suggesting that Shiki ranked second in the English class to Sōseki. Watanabe Katsumi, “Kaidai,” in Shiki zenshū, 9:829–30. 18. Text in Shiki zenshū, 4:16–18. Shiki gave Japanese words in accordance with traditional orthography rather than with normal pronunciations; this is why he wrote Baseo, rather than Bashō, and hotsuku rather than hokku. 19. Minami, “Shiki no shōnen jidai,” 183. 20. Manjushage is the name of a flower that blooms in early autumn. It is more often called higan-bana. Shiki’s story (written in the colloquial) appeared in 1897. 21. Shiki zenshū, 14:453 22. Satō Kōroku, “Shiki shūen gōki,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:370–71.

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23. The translation, given in Shiki zenshū, 13:371–74, is of book 2, sect. 11. 24. It is likely that the existing translation was made in 1897, the year of the entry in Byōshō shuki. 25. Awazu et al., Shiki kaitai shinsho, 12–13. The scene Shiki described does not occur at the end of Godolphin, though the book was in his library. He must have been thinking of some other novel by Bulwer-Lytton. Several of BulwerLytton’s novels were translated early in the Meiji era (see Yanagida Izumi, Meiji shoki no hon’yaku bungaku [Tokyo: Shōhakukan shoten, 1935]), but Godolphin seems not to have been one of them. In any case, Shiki’s sympathy for the hero seems genuine; his mistake was not due to a failure to understand the novel. 26. In 1889 Shiki wrote a brief essay comparing the pornography in Zola and in Tamenaga Shunsui; Shiki zenshū, 10:88. The Zola novel was probably Nana. He elsewhere (Shiki zenshū, 10:52–53) compared Scott and Bakin, BulwerLytton and Shunsui. 27. Quoted in Wada Shigeki, Shiki to shūhen no hitobito, 19. 28. The word shika, more commonly pronounced today as shiika, is found in Chinese texts, where it refers to a particular form of poetry, the shi. It occurs occasionally in Japanese texts as early as the seventeenth century, meaning kanshi [shi] and tanka [ka]. But only with the introduction of Western poetry after the Meiji Restoration did it acquire its present meaning of “poetry,” regardless of form. 29. Shiki zenshū, 10:41–42. 30. Ibid., 25:277. Shiki managed, with Mikami’s help, to read two or three pages of Hartmann’s book. 31. Daigaku Yobimon. This school was originally intended to prepare students for entering Tokyo University. It was later known as the First Higher Middle School and still later as the First High School. 32. In contemporary Tokyo speech the two words would sound identical, but in Shiki’s dialect the historical difference between haukan (judge) and houkan (clown) may have been preserved. Or, there may have been a difference of

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intonation. Or, Shiki may have invented this improbable story in order to lend humor to his chronicle. 33. Bokujū itteki entry for June 14, 1901; text in Shiki zenshū, 11:209–10. 34. Kikuchi Kenjirō (1867–1945), a classmate at Kyōritsu Gakkō. In “Mito kikō” Shiki described calling on Kikuchi’s father in Mito. 35. Shiki zenshū, 10:309–10. 36. Ibid., 11:210. Ninjōbon were novels, popular especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, that describe love affairs and are often set in the licensed quarters. The best-known writer of ninjōbon was Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843). 37. Awazu, Shiki no omoide, 110–12. The disappointed friends who met Yamamoto Oroku, the supposed sweetheart, included Shiki’s disciple Kawahigashi Hekigotō. He had hoped to find an “oasis” in the desert of Shiki’s unromantic life. 38. From the essay “Aka,” which originally appeared in Hototogisu in May 1889. See Shiki zenshū, 12:295–96. 39. Not a literal translation. Tetsugaku is “wisdom of the sages.” The earliest appearance of this translation of the English word “philosophy” is found in Inoue Tetsujirō’s Tetsugaku jii (1881). Perhaps he took the tetsu from his own name. See Yokota-Murakami Takayuki, “ ‘Tetsugaku’ kara ‘bungaku’ e,” in Awazu et al., Shiki kaitai shinsho, 106–7. 40. Shiki zenshū, 11:212. This and the following two excerpts are from the June 14, 1901, entry in Bokujū itteki. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 211. 43. It is not clear which work of Spencer’s this was. First Principles is the most likely. 44. Shiki zenshū, 10:349–50. 45. Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 14–15. 46. See Shōra gyokueki, in Shiki zenshū, 11:29–37, for Shiki’s extended explanation of baseball along with his translations. The present name for the game, yakyū, is mistakenly believed to have been Shiki’s translation. It has even been ex-

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plained humorously as no-bōru (field ball), a variation of Noboru, the name by which he was called by his family and friends. 47. Takahama Kyoshi, “Shiki koji tsuioku dan,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:12. 48. “Mito kikō,” in Shiki zenshū, 13:379. 49. Ibid., 401–2. The hototogisu, a bird also known by the Sino-Japanese reading shiki, was said to cough blood. Shiki took his pen name without at first realizing its connection with death. See the initial discussion in chap. 3.

3. The Song of the Hototogisu 1. Although hokku originally meant the first verse of a sequence of linked verse, Shiki used the term also to designate a poem complete in itself and not part of a sequence. He came to prefer haiku for the latter meaning, a term he invented that was almost universally adopted. 2. “Shiki” was the Japanese pronunciation of the characters most frequently used for the name of the “little cuckoo,” or Cuculus poliocephalus. The same characters could be pronounced hototogisu, the native name for the bird. 3. “Shiki-shi,” in Shiki zenshū, 9:295–96. 4. Ibid., 18:114. 5. The line between Tokyo and Kobe had been inaugurated only two days earlier, on July 1. Shiki made several overnight stops on the way, at Shizuoka, Gifu, and elsewhere. 6. Shiki, when he wrote the word in English, always included the hyphen, presumably reflecting American usage of that time. 7. Shiki zenshū, 9:302–5. See also Tsubouchi Yūzō, Masaoka Shiki, 7–22. 8. Shiki zenshū, 11:200. This entry in Bokujū itteki was published on May 30, 1901, in the newspaper Nippon. 9. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:462. In these haiku the song of the hototogisu again figures as ominous. 10. Shimizu’s death was movingly described by Shiki in Fudemakase; Shiki zenshū, 10:274–82. This section of Fudemakase was written in 1890.

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11. Nanakusa shū is included in Shiki zenshū, 9:195–288. 12. See Shimizu, Shiki kanshi no shūhen, 270–313, for a study of the kanshi in Nanakusa shū. 13. Shiki zenshū, 9:217. 14. These cakes consisted of glutinous rice, flavored with sweet bean paste and then wrapped in cherry-tree leaves. 15. Shiki zenshū, 9:218. The rice cakes would reappear in Shiki’s Noh play. 16. Ibid., 239. The last line was corrected by Shiki’s friend Takemura Kitō to read ko-uri kana (a little melon, ah). 17. Ibid., 241–48. The character was based on a real person, Yamamoto Oroku, the only daughter of the Gekkōrō, a sakuramochi-ya. She was fourteen or fifteen when Shiki lodged at her father’s house, giving rise to stories of romantic attachment. She was twice married and died in 1926. See Shiki zenshū, 18:175. See also, this volume, chap. 12, p. 190. 18. Translation by Burton Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 66. 19. Shiki zenshū, 9:263–88. 20. Watanabe Katsumi, the editor of vol. 9 of Shiki zenshū, called attention to this on page 826. By coincidence, Shiki had first used his pen name (Shiki) two weeks earlier, on May 9. 21. Aeba Kōson (1855–1922) was a novelist and drama critic of the early Meiji period. His novels reflect his admiration for Saikaku, and Sōseki may be referring to Saikakuesque mannerisms in some of Shiki’s early writing. 22. This may be a reference to Shiki’s Fudemakase, a series of essays that frequently appeared in Hototogisu, but perhaps also Shiki’s considerable production of kanshi at this time. 23. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:468. Italicized words are in English in the original. 24. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:473. See also Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 63. 25. Natsume Sōseki, “Masaoka Shiki,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:584. This is part of a conversation published in Hototogisu 11, no. 12 (1908). 26. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:471. This quotation from Sōseki’s discussion of what he meant by bunshō (a term usually translated as “composition” or “style”)

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is given in the lengthy analysis he appended to his letter of December 31, 1889. 27. Shiki zenshū, 18:123–24. 28. The entire letter is given in Fudemakase, in Shiki zenshū, 10:482–86. The letter includes English poetry that conveys his depression, such as a passage from The Tempest: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Toward the end of the letter Sōseki wrote, “When the spade unearths my whitened bones, will anyone know who Natsume Sōseki was when he was alive?” But the last words are “Please read this without a pained expression.” 29. Shiki zenshū, 10:113. 30. Minami Hajime was a “useful friend.” 31. See Shiki zenshū, 10:95. This is found in “Furuike no gin,” a section of Fudemakase written in 1889. 32. Shiki zenshū, 10:600. This comment occurs in a Fudemakase essay devoted to Kijū. The essay concludes (p. 606) with the statement that Kijū was Shiki’s only haiku teacher. However, in Dassai shooku haiku chōshō (1902) he discounted the importance of his meeting with Kijū, saying that he learned nothing from the old man except the pronunciations and meanings of various terms; see Shiki zenshū, 3:583. Awazu Norio doubted this statement, pointing out that Kijū sent Shiki letters afterward in which he corrected two of Shiki’s haiku; see Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 103. 33. Shiki entered Tokyo University in the autumn of 1890; he presumably could not have used the university library before that date. His classification of haiku no doubt started later. 34. Shiki zenshū, 5:380. 35. Presumably the seven collections of haiku by Bashō and his disciples, usually known as Haikai shichibu shū. I have not found mention elsewhere of the Sanketsu shū; the title suggests it was a collection of haiku by three great poets, but Shiki never considered any other haiku poet to rank with Bashō and Buson. Shiki published in the December 1899 issue of Hototogisu the essay

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“Haikai san keisho jo” (Introduction to Three Masterpieces of Haikai), in which he singled out Bashō’s Sarumino and two collections of haiku by Buson as basic to the study of haikai. See Shiki zenshū, 5:374–84. These books may be the Sanketsu shū. 36. Shiki seems to have felt that travel would help him to enter into the spirit of Bashō. Mention of packing provisions for three days goes back to Zhuangzi, who had written, “If you are going a thousand li, you must start getting provisions three months in advance” (translated by Burton Watson). However, Shiki probably borrowed not directly from Zhuangzi but from Bashō’s borrowing of this passage at the beginning of his Oi no kobumi diary. 37. Shiki zenshū, 4:481. From “Wa ga haiku.” See also Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 88.

4. Shiki the Novelist 1. The word shōsetsu included almost any work of fiction, regardless of the length. 2. The title means literally “biographies of eight dogs.” It refers to eight men who have the word inu (dog) in their surname. 3. Bakin’s translation and adaptation of the Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (sometimes translated into English as The Water Margin), published between 1805 and 1814. It is set in China during the Sung dynasty. 4. “Shōsetsu no shikō,” in Shiki zenshū, 10:85. 5. From “Harunoya-shi,” ibid. 6. Ibid., 86. From Fudemakase; probably written in 1889. 7. From “Nihon no shōsetsu,” in Shiki zenshū, 10:131. 8. Shiki zenshū, 13:44. 9. Ibid., 52–53. 10. Letter written in November 1890 to his cousin Fujino Kohaku; Shiki zenshū, 18:180. The Drifting Cloud was translated by Marleigh Grayer Ryan; see Japan’s First Modern Novel. 11. Shiki made this statement in the late, unfinished work “Tennōji-han no kagyūro” (1902). He begins this essay with an account of his readings from

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childhood, including the Chinese classics, Bakin, ninjōbon, the early political novels, the works of Tsubouchi Shōyō, as well as recent works by Ozaki Kōyō and Aeba Kōson. For his accidental discovery of The Buddha of Love, by Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), see Shiki zenshū, 12:567. The Buddha of Art, though usually described as a “novel” (shōsetsu), is a little more than thirty pages in most editions. 12. “Tennōji-han no kagyūro,” in Shiki zenshū, 12:568. 13. Ibid., 568–69. 14. Ibid., 568. As mentioned, this unfinished work was first printed in 1902, the year of Shiki’s death. The text suffers from a lack of editing. Shiki tended to be somewhat prudish. In 1897 he objected to a photograph of a nude statue being printed in a journal with which he was associated. See Gotō, Meiji bundan kaikoroku, 151. His acquittal of Rohan of the charge of obscenity is therefore of special interest. 15. Fudemakase, in Shiki zenshū, 10:143–44. This section was written in 1889. 16. Shiki zenshū, 18:186. 17. Shiki zenshū, bekkan 1:105–6. 18. Shiki zenshū, 18:191. 19. Kuga Katsunan, “Shiki genkōroku jo,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:193. 20. Ibid., 194. 21. He moved to Komagome prior to December 11, the date of his first letter from his new address; see Shiki zenshū, 18:223. He remained there until the end of February 1892. He pasted a sign on the entrance to his house saying “Visitors Keep Out.” See Shiki zenshū, 12:151. 22. Ibid., 18:227. 23. Ibid., 228. 24. Ibid., 234. 25. Letter of January 21, ibid., 242. One sen and six rin was about a cent and a half. 26. In a letter to Kawahigashi Hekigotō dated March 1, 1892, Shiki admitted having “stolen” the theme of his novel from Rohan but claims he had received Rohan’s permission. See Shiki zenshū, 18:277.

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27. A short undergarment or possibly a loincloth. The tetera and the futano were humble items of laundry billowing out in the wind. 28. An underskirt worn by women. 29. This translation is neither faithful nor complete; it is intended mainly to suggest Shiki’s excessively ornate style. 30. Takagi Naoto, the main character, takes the name Hakufū after he becomes a Buddhist priest. The fisherman in the Noh play is called Hakuryō. 31. Despite Shiki’s criticism of the traditional alternation of phrases in seven and five syllables, typical of the Noh plays, he followed it in The Palace of the Moon. 32. This account of Shiki’s visit to Rohan is found in Shiki’s letter to Kawahigashi Hekigotō, sent on March 1, 1892; see Shiki zenshū, 18:277. See also Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 88–92, for a fuller account of Shiki’s meeting with Rohan. 33. Shiki zenshū, 18:303.

5. Cathay and the Way Thither 1. Letter of March 1 to Ioki Ryōzō (Hyōtei); Shiki zenshū, 18:274. 2. This haiku appears in the letter Shiki wrote to Ioki Hyōtei describing the trial of the move to the new house; see Shiki zenshū, 18:275. Mention of song thrushes (uguisu) alludes to Uguisu-dani (Song-Thrush Valley), the name of the area where the house was situated. 3. Ibid., 277. 4. It would continue publication until 1906, when Kuga’s illness led to a halt in publication. 5. See Matsuda, Kuga Katsunan, 199. Matsuda does not give his source. Kojima’s recollections of Shiki are otherwise given in his dialogue with Takahama Kyoshi in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:397–406. Kojima’s account of guiding Shiki to the world of the Tokyo brothels is detailed. 6. This curious pen name was derived from the belief that otters spread out in a line the fish they have caught and pay homage to them before eating them.

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As we know from the accounts by Shiki’s friends, he spread out on the floor whatever books he would need before writing an article. 7. Letter of November 22, 1892, to Ōhara Tsunenori, in Shiki zenshū, 18:387–88. 8. So recorded in the letter Shiki wrote on November 19, 1892, to his uncle Ōhara Tsunenori. Kuga promised to try to raise the salary by five or ten yen in the following year but reminded Shiki that if he worked for the Asahi or the Kokkai, newspapers of much greater circulation, he might make thirty to fifty yen a month. See Shiki zenshū, 18:386–87. 9. See Samukawa Sokotsu, “Shiki koji to no zadan,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 3:368–71. The salary he received from the Nippon was so inadequate that Sokotsu eventually decided to give up journalism and take a better-paying job, though Shiki urged him to endure hardship rather than leave a profession that suited him. 10. Quoted in Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 138–89. 11. Quoted in Matsuda, Kuga Katsunan, 98. 12. Shiki zenshū, 9:14–15. I have omitted a few of the achievements credited by Shiki to foreign dogs. 13. Shiki zenshū, 11:208. This passage occurs in the June 14, 1901, installment of Bokujū itteki. 14. Entry for May 26, 1902, in Byōshō rokushaku, in Shiki zenshū, 11:252–53. Women students at the time generally wore maroon hakama with their kimonos. An athletic meet in this costume would be worth seeing. 15. Shiki’s account of this journey was called Hate shirazu no ki. It was published in the Nippon in 1893. Shiki’s account lacks the beauty of Bashō’s, but it is of considerable interest, especially in the contrasts it makes with Bashō’s descriptions of the same places. 16. In 1909 Ishikawa Takuboku was appointed as the editor and publisher of Subaru, the best literary magazine of the time, when he was twenty-four. 17. Among other works, Shiki’s novel Tsuki no miyako was first published in Shō Nippon. 18. See Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 161–62. The marching songs had the title “Shingunka goshu.” The ten related haiku have the title “Kaisen.”

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19. Shiki zenshū, 13:348–49. 20. The letter and Hekigotō’s interpretation of its meaning are given in Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 209–10. 21. The sword was a gift from Count Hisamatsu, formerly the daimyo of Matsuyama. 22. Shiki zenshū, 18:543. 23. Shiki zenshū, 12:77. The hinamatsuri is also known as momo no sekku, or the Feast of Peaches; hence, the reference to peach wine. 24. Ibid., 82. 25. Ibid. The “we” refers to other journalists. 26. Ibid., 83. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 85. 29. Ibid., 92. 30. Ibid., 91. The combination of the words mukashi and otoko recall Ariwara no Narihira in Ise monogatari and his poem that opens “tsuki ya aranu / haru ya mukashi no.” 31. Shiki zenshū, 12:155. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 352–53. 34. Ibid., 355. 35. A firsthand description of Shiki in the hospital is given by Takahama Kyoshi in Shiki, Sōseki, 45–48.

6. Sketches from Life 1. Takahama, Shiki, Sōseki, 50–51. Shiki went on to reveal that although at one time he had thought of naming both Hekigotō and Kyoshi as fellow successors, he now believed this would be inadvisable. He did not state his reasons. 2. Ibid., 51. 3. Shiki zenshū, 4:342–43.

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4. The work as a whole is didactic and rather tedious, but it is shot through with brilliant observations. 5. The article was entitled “Negishi-an shōshū no ki” (A Small Gathering at the Negishi Cottage). Among the poets who participated were Naitō Meisetsu (1847–1926) and Itō Shōu (1869–1897); text in Shiki zenshū, 4:36–39. Shiki seldom quoted his own poems. 6. A greatly augmented edition of Dassai shooku haiwa was published on September 5, 1895. The title was preceded with the words zōho shinpan (new and enlarged). 7. Fontanesi spent only two years teaching in Tokyo, but he exerted a greater influence on Japanese painters than any other European artist who resided in Meiji Japan. 8. Fusetsu spent about two years in Paris. He studied with Raphaël Collin, an advocate of pleinairisme who excelled particularly in depictions of the nude. 9. This was probably a somewhat extravagant meal. Sakamoto Shihōta, writing in 1902, said that fifty sen was sufficient for a meal of Western food for two. See Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:344. 10. Probably Fusetsu drew them in the size they would appear in the newspaper. 11. From Bokujū itteki, in Shiki zenshū, 11:217–18. 12. See “E” (Paintings) in Shiki zenshū, 12:435. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 486. 15. Fusetsu’s most acclaimed painting, entitled Founding the Nation (Kenkoku sōgyō), shows Amaterasu and various other gods, all depicted in the nude. It was awarded first prize at the show in the Tokyo Hakuran Kai in 1907. The nudity aroused such controversy that Fusetsu declined the prize. Presumably the nudity reflects the influence of Raphaël Collin. 16. “Furuike no ku no ben,” in Shiki zenshū, 5:94–95. 17. Quoted in Abe, Bashō, 114. 18. The verb notari is rare, perhaps invented by Buson. It suggests slow movement.

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19. This was the opinion of Takahama Kyoshi; see Shiki, Sōseki, 54. 20. Ibid., 56. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Letter of December 10, 1895; Shiki zenshū, 18:639. 23. Ibid., 639–40. 24. Ibid., 641. 25. Translation by Janine Beichman, in Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, 69. 26. Ibid. 27. It is called Meiji 29 nen no haikukai. 28. Shiki zenshū, 4:498. 29. Of course the Nippon had been publishing haiku before this time. 30. Shiki zenshū, 4:409. The new quality brought to haiku by Hekigotō (extreme clarity of images) is discussed on pp. 503–4, and that by Kyoshi (awareness of time) on pp. 520–21. The rejection of five, seven, five is discussed on pp. 527–28. 31. The circumstances of the founding of Hototogisu are given by Shiki in “Hototogisu daiyonkan daiichigō no hajime ni,” in Shiki zenshū, 5:432–33.

7. Hototogisu 1. Text in Shiki zenshū, 4:574–75. Iyo is present-day Ehime Prefecture. Matsuyama is the main city in the prefecture. 2. “Hototogisu no hakkan wo shuku su,” ibid. 3. Naitō Meisetsu (1847–1926) was a senior samurai of the Matsuyama fief who first became interested in haiku at the age of forty-five. He was closely associated with Shiki. 4. Shiki zenshū, 19:108–11. 5. Hisamatsu Shukuzan was a karō of the Matsuyama domain who composed haiku in the traditions of Kikaku. Inclusion of Shukuzan’s haiku in Hototogisu would show that Iyo was not quite devoid of a literary heritage. The second issue of Hototogisu was headed by an account by Meisetsu of Shukuzan’s haiku. See also Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 101.

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6. Shiki zenshū, 19:108–11. Shiki published the first installment of Hogobako in the initial issue of Hototogisu. 7. Shiki signed the work Dassai Shooku Shujin; see Hototogisu 1, p. 4. 8. Shiki zenshū, 4:576; from Haikai hogobako. 9. Ibid., 577. 10. Shiki gave as proof of this statement the fact that even beautiful women use cosmetics; ibid. 11. Ibid., 580. 12. Yamamoto Kenkichi, Gendai haiku (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1965), 26. 13. For translations from Yamamoto’s writings, together with her own analysis of the haiku, see Beichman, Masaoka Shiki, 64–65. 14. Konishi, Haiku no sekai, 266. 15. Shiki zenshū, 4:695. 16. Ibid., 5:71–72. 17. The word is given in katakana; see ibid., 19:127. It is not, however, a foreign word but the name of a severe disease resembling cancer. 18. Hekigotō’s account of the operation is in his Shiki no kaisō, 307–10. The details he gives of the operation make it clear that Dr. Satō was grossly incompetent. No anesthetic was used. The pain suffered by Shiki must have been excruciating. 19. Shiki zenshū, 19:148. Mention of an excursion to Ueno to see the cherry blossoms probably refers to Shiki’s rickshaw excursion on April 29, described in the essay “Shajō no shunkō,” in Shiki zenshū, 12:447–52. This essay, not dated by year, was first published in the July 1900 issue of Hototogisu, but it could not have been written at that time: by 1900 Shiki was no longer able to leave his house. 20. Bashō died in 1694 in a room above a florist’s shop in Osaka. Hanaya nikki was compiled from the diaries of various disciples of Bashō’s. Its original title, Bashō-ō hogobumi, was changed to Hanaya nikki in the 1830s when it was reprinted. 21. Shiki zenshū, 19:150. 22. The suggestion of Awazu Norio, in Masaoka Shiki, 234.

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23. Shiki zenshū, 19:148–50. 24. Ibid., bekkan 1:405–6. See also Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 235–36. 25. Shiki zenshū, 19:162. 26. Ibid., 168. 27. Ibid., 169. 28. Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 238.

8. Shiki and the Tanka 1. A poem in thirty-eight syllables arranged in six lines found in the Man’yōshū but seldom afterward. 2. The essay is called “Wagakuni ni tanpen inbun no okorishi yūen wo ronzu” (On the Reasons Why Short Poems Developed in Our Country). 3. “Wagakuni ni tanpen,” in Shiki zenshū, 14:13. 4. Ibid., 9–10. 5. The abandonment of the chōka, which were often devoted to deaths or remembrances of the dead, has also been linked with changes in funeral customs. 6. “Wagakuni ni tanpen,” in Shiki zenshū, 12. 7. This was even truer of haiku. In Shōra gyokueki Shiki gives numerous examples of haiku, composed by quite different poets, that were almost identical in theme and imagery. See Shiki zenshū, 11:65–73. 8. Shiki kept changing his mind about whether or not smallness was preferable to bigness. Here he blames the inadequacy of the tanka on the smallness of Japan, but a few months later he would question whether bigness was better than smallness. 9. Enshū-nada was the term given to a section of the Pacific off Shizuoka Prefecture. 10. “Bungaku zatsudan,” in Shiki zenshū, 14:17. This was not his reaction to all Western poetry. He made a beautiful translation of part of Gray’s “Ode on the Spring,” evidence that he appreciated some Western nature poetry. See “Shunshoku shūkō,” in Shiki zenshū, 14:71.

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11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid. 13. For the exchange of poems between Shiki and Guan, see Awazu, Masaoka Shiki, 240–44. Shiki mentioned “offering to the Buddha” because Guan was a Buddhist priest and as such made frequent offerings. 14. Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 342. 15. Shiki had in fact composed tanka as far back as 1882. His output of tanka had varied considerably depending on the year. His brief stay in China in 1895 had inspired a large number of tanka, but in 1897, the year he received persimmons from Amada Guan, he did not compose a single tanka. This may have made the hundred tanka of February 1898 seem like a fresh departure. 16. Shiki zenshū, 6:178–79. 17. Ibid., 7:20. 18. Shiki’s disillusion with the Kokinshū has been traced to his conversations about haiku and tanka with the poet Ayukai Kaien, whom he visited at Matsushima in the summer of 1893; see Shiki zenshū, 13:550. However, their meeting was five, not three, years earlier, as mentioned here, and Shiki’s brief account of their conversation did not indicate that they criticized the Kokinshū. 19. For an explanation of the two systems of deciding the first day of spring, see Katagiri, Kokin waka shū, 1:321–24. 20. Shiki zenshū, 7:30. 21. Translation by Peter McMillan, in One Hundred Poets, 31. 22. Shiki zenshũ, 7:32. 23. Ibid. 7:49. 24. See Keene, Dawn to the West, 2:52. 25. The ten wisteria tanka have been well translated by Burton Watson in Masaoka Shiki, 106–10. Robert Brower, in “Masaoka Shiki and Tanka Reform,” 403–8, discusses the wisteria tanka, which, taken by themselves are “very flat and prosaic,” but which acquire other dimensions when one takes into consideration the time of composition.

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26. In his letter to Natsume Sōseki of February 12, 1900, Shiki mentioned he was neglecting haiku in favor of tanka. 27. “Bungaku mangen,” in Shiki zenshū, 14:98. Waka is another name for the tanka. 28. The book, Fūka shinbun (News of Poetry), was published in 1868. For an account of its contents, see Koizumi, Gendai tanka taikei, 1:4–6. 29. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), the foremost authority on the Man’yōshū of his time, composed poetry in the Man’yōshū style. Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843) was the most accomplished tanka poet of the late Tokugawa period. 30. Shiki zenshū, 7:135. 31. Translation by Burton Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 98. 32. Shiki zenshū, 7:141. 33. When one of Akemi’s poems was read in English translation by President Gerald Ford as a greeting to the emperor and empress of Japan, Japanese newsmen had trouble identifying Akemi for their readers.

9. Shintaishi and Kanshi 1. Shiki zenshū, 5:95. 2. Matsui, Kindai hairon shū, 32, 37. 3. Shiki zenshū, 4:230. 4. Ibid., 258. 5. The terms haiku, hokku, and haikai were not clearly defined. The hokku was the opening “link” of a linked-verse series. It was usually the most memorable link of the entire series and for this reason was often quoted without reference to the links that followed. Shiki coined the word “haiku” to designate a poem in seventeen syllables that was complete and independent of any linked verse that might be appended. Haikai, the oldest of the terms, was at first used of poems with comic overtones, especially comic renga (haikai no renga), but later was used of any poem belonging to the traditions established in the sixteenth century by Yamazaki Sōkan.

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6. Shiki in a work of 1898 wrote, “The hokku of a renga [linked verse] could not help but be platitudinous and commonplace” (Shiki zenshū, 5:96). He gave a long list of hackneyed hokku by great masters of renga (96–102). A few scholars and poets today attempt to continue the renga tradition, more as a game than as poetry. 7. Japanese hunters believed that playing a flute that made sounds like a deer’s cry attracted deer to the vicinity. 8. Takakura Rankō (1726–1788), a haiku poet who was roughly Bashō’s contemporary. 9. Shiki zenshū, 8:371. 10. Some European poets gladly accepted rules. Wordsworth, writing about the “prison” of the sonnet, said, “In truth the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” 11. “Bungaku yattsu atari,” in Shiki zenshū, 14:29. 12. Ibid., 30. 13. Ibid., 4:160–61. This passage occurs in the section “Shin daimoku” in the long critical work Dassai shooku haiwa. Shiki’s fascination with the theory of permutation suggests that he did rather better in mathematics than he states in his memoirs. 14. Shintaishi shō was published in 1882. This first collection of shintaishi was compiled by Toyama Chuzan, Yatabe Ryōkichi, and Inoue Sonken. It consisted of nineteen poems, fourteen translation from the English, including excerpts from plays by Shakespeare. The translators were well acquainted with English but had no poetic talent. 15. Yatabe Ryōkichi made these remarks in the preface to his translation of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” 16. Shiki zenshū, 8:363–64. I have not been able to identify the original poem he translated, if indeed there was such a poem. 17. Ibid., 366. 18. The pen name Shiki used frequently in signing his shintaishi and his tanka. It means “the man from the bamboo village.”

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19. Shiki zenshū, 8:378. The “villager” (satobito) is a reference to Shiki’s pen name Take-no-Satobito. 20. Each line of a chōka consists of twelve syllables with a caesura after the seventh. The chōka of the Man’yōshū include some of the greatest Japanese poetry. The form as such fell into disfavor, but a few post-Man’yōshū poets wrote poems that exceeded thirty-one syllables. 21. This was the opinion of Saitō Mokichi, the great tanka poet. See Wada Shigeki, Shiki to shūhen no hitobito, 106. 22. See Saitō Mokichi, as quoted in Hasegawa Kai, “Kaidai,” in Shiki zenshū, 8:720. 23. In such poems as “My Father’s Grave” Shiki used commas and periods. Japanese poetry normally used no punctuation of any kind; a haiku or a waka was written in one unbroken line with no period at the end. Shiki had begun to experiment with the visual effects of a poem made possible by the use of punctuation. 24. Shiki zenshū, 19:123–24. Shiki may have been thinking of such poems as Toyama Chuzan’s “On the Principles of Sociology.” 25. Shiki zenshū, 7:37. 26. Ibid., 8:485–86. 27. Ibid., 485–88. 28. Ibid., 491–97. 29. Ibid., 37, 240. The sideways walk of crabs brings to mind Western writing, which is written sideways, unlike Japanese vertical writing. This recollection somewhat sours the pleasure of eating crabs. Perhaps written after an examination in English. 30. See Fujikawa Hiderō, “Shiki no kanshi to shintaishi,” in Shiki zenshū, 7:742. 31. Shiki zenshū, 8:90, 272. 32. Translation by Burton Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 114; text in Shiki zenshū, 8:195. 33. Translation by Burton Watson, in Masaoka Shiki, 116–17; text in Shiki zenshū, 8:212–13.

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34. Shiki zenshū, 8:195, 341. The word translated as “history” actually denotes prepared bamboo, which in ancient times, before paper had been invented, was used for recording important facts. 35. Fudemakase, in Shiki zenshū, 10:79–80. 36. Byōshō rokushaku, entry for June 18, 1902; see Shiki zenshū, 11:281–82. The Tenpō era was 1831 to 1845.

10. Random Essays (Zuihitsu), 1 1. I have quoted several passages from Fudemakase in the preceding chapters. 2. The pen name of Takemura Kitō, an older brother of Kawahigashi Hekigotō’s adopted into the Takemura family. See chap. 1 of this volume, p. 26; see also Bokujū itteki, in Shiki zenshū, 11:104. 3. “Zuihitsu no bunshō,” in Shiki zenshū, 10:87. 4. Fudemakase, in Shiki zenshū, 10:17. 5. Ibid., 44 (1888). 6. This was the opinion of Nakamura Fusetsu, as recorded by Wakao Ransui in “Shiki-shi no shi.” See Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:143. 7. An incomplete text was published in 1924, but the full text did not appear until 1975. 8. Shiki zenshū, 10:377–87. 9. The title is explained, by no means clearly, in the last section of the work; see ibid., 88–89. It is a facetious personification of the Chinese ink Shiki had used when writing his works. The two words are allusions that literally mean something like “precious drops from hanging moss.” 10. From Shōra gyokueki, in Shiki zenshū, 11:7. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. This diary entry was written in May 1896, the month when Ichiyō contracted the illness of which she would die in December of that year. 14. Shiki zenshū, 11:25. 15. Ibid., 54.

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16. Ibid., 55. 17. Ibid., 57. 18. The character is the second in nagori. It is used twice for the second part of that word and once, later on, in nokoru. 19. Shiki zenshū, 11:58. 20. Ibid., 60–61. 21. Ibid., 61. 22. Ibid., 86. 23. Ibid., 78. 24. See ibid., 93. The globe was a New Year’s gift. It is still preserved. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 99. 27. Ibid., 100–101. 28. Shiki spoke of kajin, an impersonal term that could refer to either his mother or sister. See ibid., 124. 29. Ibid., 108–20. 30. Ibid., 120. Ide was more commonly known as Tachibana Akemi. 31. Ibid., 116. 32. Saitō, Kinsei kajin hyōden, 111. 33. The eulogy appears at the very end of the zuihitsu; see ibid., 217–27. 34. Ibid., 220. 35. The two men were outstanding politicians in the Meiji era. Itagaki Taisuke (1837– 1919) was attacked by a would-be assassin in 1882. While still bleeding from his wound, he cried, “Itagaki may die, but liberty will never die.” He recovered, rather to his embarrassment. Hoshi Tōru (1850–1901) died without uttering a word. 36. Shiki’s letter to Kojima (Shiki zenshu, 19:646–47) has been dated as “about May 20.” It opens, “Life for me is now Byōsho rokushaku. Every morning’s awakening is as painful as dying, but amid the pain, if I open the newspaper and see Byōshō rokushaku, I come back to life. What was my pain when I saw this morning’s newspaper! I burst into tears when I saw that Byōshō rokushaku wasn’t there. It was too much to bear. If it is possible, could you publish a little (even half) and save my life?”

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Shiki’s letter of January 15, 1901, to his friend Samukawa Sokotsu (Shiki zenshū, 19:604–5) is about a strikingly similar incident but refers to Bokujū itteki.

11. Random Essays, 2 1. Shiki zenshū, 11:231. 2. Letter of July 27 to Ishii Yūji; Shiki zenshū, 19:622. 3. Ibid., 637. 4. Ibid., 619. 5. Ibid., 626. 6. Ibid., 11:139; entry in Bokujū itteki for March 15, 1901. 7. Shiki zenshū, 11:238. Zhang Fei was a fierce warrior of the Three Kingdoms period (220–280). Shiki knew about him because he appears in the popular Chinese novel known in Japan as Sangokushi. The text he read may have had an illustration showing Zhang Fei armed with a crooked halberd (dabō). 8. Ibid., 238–39. 9. Ibid., 240. 10. Many black-and-white photographs of his calligraphy and paintings are given in Yamagami Jirō, Shiki no shoga (Tokyo: Nigensha, 1981). 11. Shiki zenshū, 11:238–39. 12. Ibid., 12:296. This essay was published in 1899. 13. Ibid., 11:158; entry for April 5, 1901, in Bokujū itteki. The laughing song may be the famous one from Auber’s opera Manon Lescaut. 14. Ibid., 372. 15. Ibid., 314. 16. Ibid., 316. 17. Ibid., 318. 18. Ibid., 432. 19. Ibid., 335. “Unsure of the pronunciations” is an attempt to convey the mother’s dependence on furigana, pronunciations in kana printed next to Chinese characters.

230

11. R a n d o m E s s ay s, 2

20. The first entry is dated September 2, 1901. The last, extremely brief entry is for July 29, 1902. While he lived, very few even of his disciples knew of the existence of this diary. It was first published as a supplement to Hototogisu in January 1905. This edition omitted certain passages in which Shiki wrote about members of his family, in deference to their feelings. A complete text was not available until 1918. See Shiki zenshū, 11:574. 21. Ibid., 390. 22. Ibid., 422; entry for September 18, 1901. 23. The entire manuscript of Gyōga manroku is in Shiki’s own hand, unlike Bokujū itteki and Byōshō rokushaku, which were in part dictated to his disciples or his sister Ritsu. See ibid., 570 24. Ibid., 428. Entry for September 20, 1901. An equally unflattering portrayal of Ritsu is given in Shiki’s letter of June 1, 1901, to his uncle Ōhara Tsunenori. He said, “Because I am in pain day and night I am constantly losing my temper, but the people of my household show no understanding, and that baffles me. Ritsu seems to be made of wood or stone and is always doing something that, far from helping, always infuriates a sick man. If she wipes the dirt from my crotch with a bit of alcohol, my temperature goes up to 40 degrees. If she cuts my hair or shaves my beard, my temperature goes up to 39 degrees” (Shiki zenshū, 19:619). 25. “Shy” is in English, but perhaps “aloof” is the word Shiki intended. 26. Shiki zenshū, 11:430–31. 27. The other person is called kare, which today almost always means “he,” but Shiki used it to mean “she” as well. 28. Shiki zenshū, 11:431–32. 29. Ibid., 442. 30. He was born on the seventeenth of the ninth month according to the lunar calendar, or October 14 according to the solar calendar. 31. Shiki zenshū, 11:456. 32. Ibid., 466.

1 2 . T h e L a st Day s

231

12. The Last Days 1. Shiki zenshū, 11:354. 2. Naitō Meisetsu gave him a painting of Taishakuten, a Buddhist deity (Sakra Devanam Indra) who had appeared to Nichiren in a dream. He hoped Taishakuten would cure Shiki’s illness. Meisetsu probably knew of Shiki’s admiration for Nichiren. See Sakamoto Shihōta, “Omoiizuru mama,” in Shiki zenshū, 11:340. 3. See Ioki Hyōtei, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:179–80. The characterization of Lincoln was Shiki’s own. 4. Byōshō rokushaku, in Shiki zenshū, 11:343. 5. Ibid., 379. 6. It was customary for persons of consequence to compose such a poem when close to death. 7. The loofah (hechima) is a gourd commonly used as a sponge. Water taken from this plant, especially when the moon is full, was believed to be effective in dissolving phlegm. See Satō Kōroku, “Shiki shūen gōki,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:296. Although the loofah has bloomed, it is too late to use its water to save Shiki from choking to death. This haiku was his jisei. The other two haiku were considered to be zeppitsu (final words). 8. Kawahigashi, Shiki no kaisō, 478. Hekigotō mentions the maggots that crawled from Shiki’s rotting body. 9. The most detailed account was “Shiki-ō” published by Satō Kōroku (1874– 1949) in December 1902. See Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:358–72. 10. Itō Sachio, “Shi wo ushinaitaru wareware,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:249. First published November 1, 1912. 11. Itō Sachio, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” ibid., 101. 12. Itō Sachio, “Take-no-Satobito,” ibid., 447. 13. Ioki, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 175. 14. Ōtani Zekū, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” ibid., 92–93. For Shiki’s Noh play about the girl at the cake shop, see, this volume, chap. 3. It is not clear why Zekū

232

1 2 . T h e L a st Day s

thought this work cleared Shiki of suspicion of having had an affair with the girl. 15. Itō, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 101. 16. Ibid., 100–104. Nagatsuka became a distinguished tanka poet and wrote the novel Tsuchi (The Soil), a major work of Meiji fiction. 17. Sakamoto, “Omoiizuru mama,” 341. 18. See Wakao Ransui, “Shiki-shi no shi,” in Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:143. 19. Ibid., 145–46. 20. Eyes that are white below the iris and on the two sides. Some considered this sinister. 21. Wakao, “Shiki-shi no shi,” 146. 22. Ioki, “Masaoka Shiki kun,” 174. 23. Kuwamura Chikushi, “Heibon naru ijin,” Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:234. 24. Ransui in later years published several outstanding books of haiku and founded the haiku magazine Kaigetsu in 1921. This led to his being taken back into haiku circles; see Shiki zenshū, bekkan 2:154. 25. The essay, called “Sannen mae no Negishi an,” is found ibid., 236–48. 26. See Satō, “Shiki shūen gōki,” 293. 27. One of his infrequent references to Zen is found in the June 2, 1902, entry in Byōshō rokushaku: “Up to now I have always misunderstood the satori of Zen. I mistakenly supposed that satori was a way of dying tranquilly, regardless of the circumstances, but satori is actually how to live tranquilly, regardless of the circumstances.” See Shiki zenshū, 11:261 28. It was normal for a Buddhist to acquire a new name after death (kaimei), followed (in the case of a man) by the word kyo. 29. The Japanese foot (shaku) and inch (sun) were larger than their Western equivalents. 30. Satō, “Shiki shūen gōki,” 297–98. 31. Translation by Carl Sesar, in Takuboku, 15–16. Japanese text in “Ichi rikōshugisha to yūjin to no taiwa,” in Takuboku zenshū, 4:284. 32. The eminent poet W. S. Merwin is now (2013) making a translation of the complete haiku of Buson.

bibliography

My chief source has been the complete collection of Shiki’s writings contained in Shiki zenshū, nominally edited by Shiki’s adopted son, Masaoka Chūsaburō. It is in twenty-five volumes, of which the first twenty-two are devoted to poetry and prose by Shiki, the remaining three to reminiscences of Shiki by his friends and disciples. I could not have written this book without Shiki zenshū, but I cannot refrain from expressing my exasperation with a work so unhelpfully edited. There are virtually no notes; pronunciations of even the most unusual names are not given; and texts run into one another without warning and are seldom dated. Fortunately, a library of books about Shiki make up for the inadequacies in the collected works. I have listed books that I have consulted. Unless otherwise stated, all Japanese books were published in Tokyo. Abe Masami. Bashō denki kōsetsu. Meiji shoin, 1961. Akio Bin. Shiki no kindai. Shin’yōsha, 1999. Awazu Norio. Masaoka Shiki. Asahi shimbun sha, 1982. ——. Shiki no omoide. Shizuoka-ken, Shuntō-gun, Nagaizumi-chō: Zōshinkai, 2002.

234

bibliography

——. Shiki to kaiga. Shizuoka-ken, Shuntō-gun, Nagaizumi-chō: Zōshinkai, 2002. Awazu Norio, Natsuishi Ban’ya, and Fukumoto Ichirō. Shiki kaitai shinsho. Yūzankaku, 1998. Beichman, Janine. Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works. 2nd ed. Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2002. First published in 1982 by Twayne. Beichman-Yamamoto, Janine. “Masaoka Shiki’s A Drop of Ink.” Monumenta Nipponica 30, no. 3 (1975): 291–315. Brower, Robert. “Masaoka Shiki and Tanka Reform.” In Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, edited by Donald Shively. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Chiba Sen’ichi. “Hon’yaku bungaku sakuhin nenpyō.” In Obihiro Chikusan Daigaku Nihon bungaku, October 1990. Fukumoto Ichirō. Masaoka Shiki to jūnin no haishi: Yo wa kōsai wo konomu mono nari. Iwanami shoten, 2009. Gotō Chūgai. Meiji bundan kaikoroku. Bungakuteki kaisō shū. Chikuma shobō, 1967. Gyōga manroku. Ashiya: Kyoshi kinen bungakukan, 2002. Hakurosha, ed. Negishi no Sato to Shiki to Ritsu. Hakurosha, 2011. Hasegawa Kai. Shiki no seishun. Shizuoka-ken, Shuntō-gun, Nagaizumi-chō: Zōshinkai, 2001. Hinatsu Kōnosuke et al., eds. Nihon gendaishi taikei. 10 vols. Kawade shobō, 1950–1954. Iida Rigyō. Shiki kanshi to Sōseki: Kaidō no hana. Kashiwa bijutsu shuppan, 1993. Isaacson, Harold J. Peonies Kana: Haiku by the Upasaka Shiki. New York: Theatre Arts, 1976. Kajiki Gō. Shasei no bungaku. Tanka shinbunsha, 2001. Kamei Shunsuke. Kindai Nihon no hon’yaku bunka. Chūō kōron sha, 1994. Katagiri Yōichi. Kokin waka shū. Vol. 1. Kōdansha, 1998. Kawahigashi Hekigotō. Shiki no kaisō. Shōnan shobō, 1944. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. Vol. 2. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984.

bibliography

235

——. Landscapes and Portraits. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971. ——. Modern Japanese Diaries. New York: Holt, 1995. ——. Some Japanese Portraits. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978. Koizumi Tōzō. Gendai tanka taikei. Kawade shobō, 1953. Kojima Kazuo. “ ‘Nippon shinbun’ jidai yoroku.” In Shiki genkō, edited by Kawahigashi Hekigotō. Nihon toshi sentā, 1993. Konishi Jin’ichi. Haiku no sekai. Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko. Kōdansha, 1995. Koyano Atsushi. “Shiki no kazoku, seikatsu.” In Awazu Norio et al., Shiki kaitai shinsho. Lytton, Lord Edward Bulwer. Godolphin. London: Routledge, 1896. Masaoka Shiki to Ōtani Zekū. Tsuyama: Tsuyama kyōdo hakubutsukan, 2006. Matsuda Kōichirō. Kuga Katsunan. Kyoto: Minerva shobō, 2008. Matsui Toshihiko. Kindai hairon shū. Ōfūsha, 1965. ——. Masaoka Shiki. Ōfūsha, 1967. ——, ed. Masaoka Shiki. Sakka no jiden. Tōkyō shuppan sentā, 1995. ——. Shiki to Sōseki. Kashinsha, 1986. McMillan, Peter. One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Mitsutani, Margaret. “Zen to aku soshite tabi.” In Kamei, Kindai Nihon no hon’yaku bunka. Miyasaka Shizuo. Shiki shūku kō. Meiji shoin, 1996. Nakamura Mitsuru. Nakamura Fusetsu: Sono hito to geijutsu. Kōdansha, 1973. Oketani Hideaki. Masaoka Shiki. Ozawa shoten, 1983. Rimer, J. Thomas. A Reader’s Guide to Japanese Literature. Tokyo. Kodansha International, 1999. Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Sabaku no shitei tachi. Matsuyama: Matsuyama shiritsu Shiki kinen hakubutsukan, 1996. Saitō Mokichi. Kinsei kajin hyōden. Kaname shobō, 1949. Sesar, Carl Gordon. Takuboku: Poems to Eat. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1966. Translation of poems by Ishikawa Takuboku.

236

bibliography

Shiki ga netchū shita bēsubōru to Daitō-ku haikujin renmei kinen haiku sakuhin shū. Daitō kuritsu chūō toshokan, 2006. Shiki kara Kyoshi e. Ashiya: Kyoshi kinen bungakukan, 2009. Shiki to Kōyō. Matsuyama: Matsuyama shiritsu Shiki kinen hakubutsukan, 2009. Shiki zenshū. 25 vols. Kōdansha, 1975–1978. Shimizu Fusao. Shiki kanshi no shūhen. Meiji shoin, 1996. Shinchō Nihon bungaku arubamu: Masaoka Shiki. Shinchōsha, 1986. Sokotsu to Shiki. Matsuyama: Matsuyama shiritsu Shiki kinen hakubutsukan, 1996. Takagi Kiyoko. “Masaoka Shiki ni miru shūkyōteki kyōchi.” Ochanomizu Joshi Daigaku jinbun kiyō 24 (March 1971). Takahama Kyoshi. Shiki, Sōseki. Iwanami bunko (waido ban). Iwanami shoten, 2010. Takuboku zenshū. 8 vols. Chikuma shobō, 1986. Tsubouchi Toshinori. Masaoka Shiki. Iwanami shoten, 2010. Tsubouchi Yūzō. Masaoka Shiki. Chikuma shobō, 2001. Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. Wada Katsushi. “Gyōga manroku.” In Gyōga manroku. Ashiya: Kyoshi kinen bungakukan, 2002. ——. Shiki no isshō. Shizuoka-ken, Shuntō-gun, Nagaizumi-chō: Zōshinkai, 2003. Wada Shigeki. Shiki to shūhen no hitobito. Matsuyama: Ehime bunka sōsho, 1983. Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. ——. Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

inde x

aesthetics, 34–35, 133

173–75, 188, 229n10; Shiki’s

ajisai ya (Hydrangeas), 2

enjoyment of, 173–74; Shiki’s view

“Aka” (Red), 175

of, 3, 80, 93, 95–97, 101–2, 106, 118,

aki kaze ni (As it spills over), 4

124, 157, 163–65, 169, 174–75;

alcoholism, 14–15, 184

suffering as source of, 124;

Amada Guan, 130–31, 223n13

techniques of or training in, 25, 164,

ambiguity, 106–7, 115–16

169, 174

ara umi ya (Turbulent the sea), 112

aru tsukiyo (One moonlit night), 9

Ariwara no Narihira, 50, 218n30

Asai Chū, 95, 174

art: Chinese, 85, 148; controversial,

Awazu Norio, 122

219n15; European or Western, 100, 164, 168; in Shiki’s sickroom, 152; Japanese, 80, 164; Japanese– foreign comparisons, 3, 96–97, 100,

baseball, 40–43, 45, 131, 159, 168, 210–11n46 Bashō (Matsuo Bashō), 221n20; Buson

163–65, 168–69; literature and, 93,

and, 4, 99–101, 140–41, 213–14n35; frog

174; philosophy or standards of, 34,

haiku by, 32, 56, 97–99, 141; linked

93, 164; realism or clarity and, 3,

verse composition and, 141–42;

106–7 (see also shasei); Shiki’s,

literature, view of, 93, 142–143,

238

Index

Bashō (continued)

Byōshō rokushaku (A Six-Foot Sickbed),

161–62; reverence for, 1, 100, 140–41;

33, 166, 171–73, 179, 187, 228n36,

Shiki on, 3–4, 32, 56–57, 97–99,

230n23

112, 119, 141–42, 161–62, 208n18, 213–14n35; sowers and willow haiku by, 114–15; travels by, 70, 77, 81, 93, 101, 214n36, 217n15 “Bashō zakkan” (Miscellaneous Thoughts About Bashō), 141 beauty: of nature, 2, 9, 38, 49, 123, 134, 137, 175; of poetry or language, 5–6, 53–55, 64–66, 67–68, 71–72, 80, 98, 99–102, 106–7, 112, 134, 147; Shiki’s love of, 20–21

calligraphy, 15, 22–23, 25, 131, 152, 174, 178, 229n10 Character of Modern Students, The. See Tōsei shosei katagi cherry blossoms. See under flowers “Chichi no haka” (My Father’s Grave), 146, 226n23 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 66, 71–72, 161–63 China: in art or literature, 60–61, 63, 97;

Beichman, Janine, 105

compared to Japan, 87, 89; language

birds, 125, 136, 158, 173; cuckoo, 144;

or literature of (see Chinese); Shiki

eagle, 151; hototogisu, 44–45, 48,

in or on, 84–89, 102, 152, 188, 223n15;

121–22, 206n36, 211n2, 211n49;

war with, 81–89, 152

nightingale, 113–14 Bokujū itteki (A Drop of Ink), 47, 166–68, 229n36, 230n23

Chinese: art (see under art); classical, 2 (see also classics, Chinese); kanshi (see kanshi); poetry

botan chitte (The peony scatters), 101

compared to Japanese or Western

brevity. See shortness

poetry, 124, 128–29, 147; Shiki’s

Buddha of Art, The.

education in, 2, 20, 23–25, 28, 31,

See Fūryūbutsu Buddhists: death or funerary rituals

54, 61; Shiki’s writings in, 2, 20, 24, 34, 49, 52, 142, 150–54, 194,

and, 173, 197, 232n28; Nichiren, 187,

212n22 (see also Masaoka Shiki:

231n2; novels and, 34; in Shiki’s work,

kanshi by); in The Silver World,

50, 73, 138, 188, 223n13; Zen, 130

61–62, 64–65, 81; spoken, 87,

“Bungaku zatsudan” (Idle Thoughts on

153; tanka poets’ ignorance

Literature), 128 Buson (Yosa Buson), 4, 57, 99–102, 135, 140–41, 150, 213–14n35

of, 133; writing system of, 24, 87 chōka, 124–25, 145, 222n5, 226n20

Index

239

Christians, 173

blossoms, 3, 7, 9, 39, 49–51, 61–62, 101,

classics, Chinese, 24–25, 54, 61, 215n11

119, 197, 201, 221n19; chrysanthemums,

color, 38, 164, 175

133; cockscomb, 115–16; colors of,

Confucians, 17, 25, 28, 37, 61, 85, 160,

175; deutzia, 44–45; fukujusō, 10; on

169, 178, 204n6

graves, 146; hydrangeas, 2; poetry or art depicting, 113, 126, 135, 136,

Dassai shooku haiwa (Chats on Haiku from the Otter ’s Den), 77, 94, 219n6 depression, 69–70, 103, 120–21, 184–85, 213n28 drama, 7, 93, 162. See also Noh Drop of Ink, A. See Bokujū itteki

174–75; peonies, 7, 101; poppies, 148; plum blossoms, 126, 201; wisteria, 11, 135; violets, 87, 148 food, 42, 58, 87, 121, 137, 167, 177–78, 181–86 Fudemakase (Letting My Brush Write), 15–17, 56, 60, 155–58,

“Eating Crab on a Winter’s Day,” 151 education: college, 76; Confucian, 17,

212n22 fujinami no (When I look at), 135

61; elementary, 23–25; Shiki’s (see

Fujino Kohaku, 49, 88, 150

Chinese: Shiki’s education in;

Fūryūbutsu (The Buddha of Art), 66–67,

Kyōritsu Gakkō; Masaoka Shiki:

70, 72–74, 215n11

early life and education of; Matsuyama Middle School; Tokyo

genbun itchi, 68–69, 130, 172

University Preparatory School);

Genji, Tale of, 60, 66, 68, 125, 169

of women, 177–79

Genroku style, 66, 161–63

emishira wo (The spring has come), 168 emotions, 6, 49, 97, 102, 111, 115–16, 125–26, 147, 161, 189–91, 200 European art, literature, or culture. See Western art, literature, or

Gin sekai (The Silver World), 59, 61–66, 81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 55 graves, 17, 86, 146, 148–50, 163, 197 Gyōga manroku (Supine Notes), 179–81, 184, 230n20, 230n23

culture; Masaoka Shiki: Western culture and

Haijin Buson, 100–2 Haikai hogobako, 110–12

flowers: autumnal, 52; apricot blossoms, 152; camellia, 174; cherry

Haikai sankeisho jo, 57 Haikai taiyō (An Outline of Haikai), 93

240

Index

Haiku bunrui (Haiku Classified), 57

harusame ya (spring rain), 105

haiku: clarity in, 98–99, 106–7, 114;

hechima saite (The sponge gourd has

comic, 12, 57, 111, 130, 224n5; language and conventions of, 2, 5, 8–9, 68, 96–97, 100–1, 106–7, 113–14, 128–29, 142–43, 220n30, 226n23; magazines, 4, 34,

bloomed), 188 Higuchi Ichiyō, 66, 160, 205n20, 227n13 hina mo nashi (Not even any dolls), 86

76–77, 93, 107–10, 150, 194, 201

Hiraga Motoyoshi, 100, 167–68

(see also Hototogisu); nature or

Hisamatsu Shukuzan, 110,

landscapes and, 111–12, 154;

220n5

newspapers and, 78, 94, 106, 201,

hitorigoto (Talking to myself), 52

220n29; popularity of, 12, 94,

Hogobako (Wastepaper Basket), 110,

200–201; pre-Shiki, 1–3, 9, 12, 57, 107, 194, 199 (see also Bashō; Buson); reformation of, 5, 9,

221n6 hokku, 44, 141–42, 211n1, 224n5, 225n6

12, 82, 90, 95, 116–17, 131, 135,

Hōryū-ji (temple), 8

179, 194; shasei and, 2–5, 9, 97,

hototogisu (bird). See under birds

102–3, 104–6, 114–15; Shiki’s

hototogisu (haiku poem), 121

classification of, 3, 57, 71, 82, 111, 140,

Hototogisu (magazine), 4, 107–10,

213n33; Shiki’s (see Masaoka Shiki:

116–18, 173, 177; founding of, 107–8,

haiku by); shortness of, 6, 114,

220n31; Iyo or Matsuyama and, 4,

142–43

108–10, 117, 220n5; sales of, 110,

hana no ka wo (The flowers’ fragrance), 49

116–18; Shiki’s hopes for, 109, 117–18, 200; Tokyo and, 117–18

Hanging Bridge Journey, The. See Kakehashi no ki haru no umi hinemosu (The sea in spring), 102 haru no umi kamome (The sea in

Ide Akemi. See Tachibana Akemi ima ya kano (The bases are full), 131 Imo to se kagami (A Mirror of Sister and Brother), 60, 67

springtime), 86

ingenuity, 111, 133

haru ya mukashi (It is

Inoue Fumio, 136

spring), 88 harukaze ya (Spring breezes), 42

Inoue Tetsujirō, 38, 210n39 insects, 9–10, 146, 157, 159

Index

Ioki Hyōtei, 19–20, 103–4, 190, 194–95 Ishikawa Takuboku, 6, 37, 176, 200, 205n20, 217n16 itatsuki no (Through the glass window), 10

241

Kakehashi no ki (The Hanging Bridge Journey), 70, 76–77 kaki kueba (As I eat a persimmon), 8 kame ni sasu (The sprays of wisteria), 11

Itō Hirobumi, 160

Kamo no Mabuchi, 132, 137, 224n29

Itō Sachio, 189–190, 191

kanbun, 49, 69, 156

Iyo, 108–9, 117

kanshi, 24, 34, 49, 52, 69, 93, 142, 150–54,

Japanese: classical or literary, 5, 52,

Katō Tsunetada, 29–31, 70, 190, 207n8

68–69, 73–74, 107, 126, 139, 194;

Kawahigashi Hekigotō, 18, 25, 84–85,

160, 192, 194

colloquial or modern, 5, 61,

115, 131, 218n1; baseball and, 41; first

67–69, 72, 128, 134, 139, 145, 172,

meeting with Shiki, 18–19; haiku by,

208n20; pronunciation, sound,

106, 109–10, 196, 220n30; letters to

or rhyming of, 7–9, 18, 24, 32,

or from Shiki, 72, 75–76, 87–88;

101–2, 115, 147–49, 153, 179, 208n18,

Shiki’s illness or death and, 20, 89,

209n32, 211n2, 213n32, 229n19;

119, 165, 189, 198; Shiki’s affection

translations into, 5, 33, 36, 38, 41,

for, 165

144, 176, 207n1, 209n25, 210n39,

keitō no (Cockscomb), 115

210–11n46

Ki no Tsurayuki, 3, 132, 137, 138, 168

“Jinchū nikki” (Frontline Diary), 85–88 Jiyū Minken (Freedom and Civil Rights) movement, 28

kikō to te (Nobody is waiting), 48 kisha no oto no (After the sound of), 147 Kiso, 70, 76

“Jojibun” (Narrative Prose), 130

Kobe, 45, 77, 89–91, 103

Journey to Mito, 42–43

Kōda Rohan, 66–67, 72–74, 76, 215n11,

Jūgun kiji (War Correspondent’s Diary), 88 jūnisōrō (The twelve-story building), 8

215n14, 215n26 “Kohaku no haka ni mōzu,” 150 Kojima Kazuo, 76, 170 Kokinshū, 3, 101, 125–27, 132, 134, 137, 223n18

kaerō to (I’ll be leaving), 48 Kagami Shikō, 98–99

kokoro ate ni (I can only pluck at random), 133

242

Index

Konishi Jin’ichi, 116

Masaoka Ippo, 14

Korea, 81, 127, 166, 188

Masaoka Ritsu, 12, 17–19, 21–22, 71, 77,

Kuga Katsunan, 70–71, 75–79, 82, 89, 94, 217n8 kumo korosu (After killing), 10

152, 177–84, 188–89, 193, 195, 204n9, 204n12, 230n23, 230n24 Masaoka Shiki: advice for writers by, 9,

Kusama Tokuyoshi, 27–28

68–69, 111–12, 116, 130, 132, 135–36;

Kuwamura Chikushi, 196

ancestors of, 14–17, 152–53 (see also

Kyōritsu Gakkō, 31, 34–35, 40

Masaoka Shiki, family of); on art

Kyoto, 89, 117, 135, 165

(see under art); on Bashō (see under Bashō); on Buson, 4, 57, 99–102,

landscapes, 3, 25, 59, 111–12, 123, 174

141, 213–14n35; Chinese and (see under Chinese; see also Masaoka

leaves, 3, 9, 49, 101, 127, 175, 201

Shiki: kanshi by); death or burial of,

literature, Japanese, 1, 5–7, 12, 32–33, 50,

188–89, 197–99; disciples of, 3–4, 12,

54, 60, 70, 71–72, 80, 116, 125–30,

19–20, 84–85, 103–4, 115–16, 118, 134,

140, 153–56, 167–68; compared to

136, 150, 165, 189–99 (see also Ioki

other countries’, 33, 100, 124, 128–29,

Hyōtei; Kawahigashi Hekigotō;

144; nature and, 2–4, 101, 123–24,

Kuwamura Chikushi; Sakamoto

128, 201; Shiki on history of, 60, 106,

Shihōta; Samukawa Sokotsu; Satō

125–28, 140; Shiki and genres of,

Kōroku; Takahama Kyoshi; Wakao

1–5, 52, 93, 123–29, 144–47, 138–39,

Ransui; Yanagihara Kyokudō);

192, 200 (see also names of

distinctive style of (see shasei);

specific genres); Shiki’s criticism of

early life and education of, 2, 14–26,

(see Masaoka Shiki: literary

155; education of (see Chinese:

criticism by)

Shiki’s education in; Kyōritsu

Love Suicides at Sonezaki, 162–63

Gakkō; Masaoka Shiki: early life and education of; Matsuyama

Man ’yōshū: contents of, 124; influence

Middle School; Tokyo University

of, 100, 127, 132, 137, 144–45, 168,

Preparatory School); English and,

192, 224n29, 226n20; Shiki’s

6, 31–33, 35–37, 39–40, 41, 54–55, 81,

admiration for, 3, 124–25, 132, 134,

150, 176, 208n17; essays by (see

139, 161, 168

Bokujū itteki; Byōshō rokushaku;

marebito no (Someone from afar), 49

Fudemakase; Shōra gyokueki;

Masago no shirabe (haiku magazine), 34

zuihitsu); fire in family home of,

Index

243

14, 33; haiku by, 2, 4, 8–12, 34, 39, 42,

novels and, 34, 53, 60, 71–74, 129,

48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57–59, 70–71, 75,

159, 209n25 (see also Gin sekai;

77, 81, 86–88, 92–94, 104–5, 115–16,

Tsuki no miyako; Wa ga yamai);

120, 121–22, 130–31, 142, 147, 151, 158,

paintings by, 25, 173–75, 188, 229n10;

180, 182–83, 188, 192; haiku

patriotism, politics, or nationalism

classification of, 3, 57, 71, 82, 140,

and, 28–29, 31, 78–82, 100, 124, 138,

213n33; on haiku, 3–5, 9, 56–58, 77,

156–57, 166; philosophy and, 31,

82, 93, 96–99, 106–7, 110–13, 116,

34–35, 38, 40, 46, 50, 56, 69–70;

128–29, 140, 143–44, 224n5;

physical appearance of, 18–22, 197,

historical writings by, 60, 106,

205n17; prose and, 31, 33, 49, 52, 59,

125–27, 140; importance of, 1–2, 5,

66, 80, 128–30, 161; religion and, 173,

9–10, 12, 100, 155, 199–201 (see also

197; revolutionized poetry, 2, 9, 12,

Masaoka Shiki: revolutionized

90, 116–17, 131–32, 135, 155, 169, 179,

poetry); illness of (see Masaoka

194, 199; shintaishi and, 4–7, 142–50,

Shiki, illness of); influence of

169, 192, 194, 200, 225n18; social

others on, 1–4, 10, 62, 66, 72–74, 77,

class and, 2, 13–15, 17, 21–24, 68–69,

95–97, 111, 138–40, 213n32, 215n26;

73, 84, 87, 126, 150, 174, 183, 204n2;

Japanese language and, 9, 18, 49, 62,

successors to, 91–92, 103–4, 118, 165,

64, 68, 81, 134, 157, 172, 192, 194,

196, 200, 218n1; tanka by, 2–3, 10–12,

209–10n32; Japanese literary genres

23, 34, 39, 49, 52, 54, 123, 130–31,

and, 1–5, 52, 93, 123–29, 139, 143–47,

134–36, 138–39, 151, 192, 194, 201,

192, 200; kanshi by, 24, 34, 49, 142,

223n15, 223n25, 225n18 (see also

150–53, 192, 194, 212n22; literary

Takenosato uta); in Tokyo (see

criticism by, 1, 3–4, 9, 55, 77, 94,

under Tokyo); travel or travel

100–2, 106, 110, 132–37, 141, 155,

writings by, 25–26, 42–43, 48–49,

160–63, 192, 200; love and, 37, 124,

58, 70, 76–77, 105, 181 (see also

144, 161, 190–91; in Matsuyama, 1,

Kakehashi no ki); war

13, 29, 34, 40–42, 45–47, 56, 59, 70,

correspondent work of, 82–88, 152;

86, 92–93, 180; name of, 21, 45, 122,

Western culture and, 8, 24, 28–29,

197–98, 206n29, 206n30, 206n36,

33, 35, 39–40, 54–55, 65, 80–81,

211n2, 211n49, 225n18, 226n19;

96–97, 100, 126, 128–29, 143, 147, 164,

nature and, 2, 10, 37–38, 49, 105,

168, 175–76 (see also Masaoka Shiki:

116, 123–24, 135, 139, 154, 158–59,

English and); zenshū (complete

174–75, 201; Noh play by, 50–52;

works) of, 11, 233

244

Index

Masaoka Shiki, family of, 13–18, 23, 46,

Matsuyama, 1–2, 4, 13–14, 25, 29–31, 34,

49–50, 86, 146, 148–49, 173, 179, 183.

40–42, 45–47, 56, 59–60, 70, 77, 86,

See also Fujino Kohaku (cousin);

89, 92–93, 103, 107, 117, 120, 180, 197,

Katō Tsunetada (uncle); Masaoka

203n1, 220n1

Ritsu (sister); Masaoka Yae

Meiji, Emperor, 23, 28, 135

(mother); Minami Hajime (cousin);

Meiji era, 4–5, 7, 13, 47, 50–51, 60–62,

Ōhara Kanzan (grandfather);

72–73, 93, 108, 117, 144, 153–54, 157,

Ōhara Tsunenori (uncle)

160, 176, 199

Masaoka Shiki, illness of, 10–12, 17, 23, 26, 42–48, 83–84, 106, 118–22, 134–35, 139, 152, 163, 169, 174, 176–80, 184–85, 187–90, 193, 218n35; abdominal pain, 46, 180; affected spine, 10–11, 103, 118–19; confined

mi-hotoke ni sonae (Leftover from), 130 mi-hotoke ni sonaeshi (These, I suppose, are leftovers), 130 Minami Hajime, 24–26, 28, 31–32, 35, 49, 213n30

him to bed, 10–11, 20, 47, 81, 89–90,

Minamoto no Toshiyori, 136

95, 115–16, 118, 121–22, 134–35, 158,

Minamoto Sanetomo, 127, 132, 134–35,

165–67, 171, 177, 189, 190–91, 194,

168

221n19; coughing blood, 43–46,

Mito, 42–43, 46, 96

88–90, 158; morphine taken to

modern-style poetry. See shintaishi

relieve pain of, 171–72, 179, 188–89;

mononofu no fugu (How sad it is to

treatment or operations for, 48, 89–91, 119–20, 177, 179, 221n18; tuberculosis, 48, 103 Masaoka Yae, 14, 17–19, 21–23, 26, 33,

think), 78 mononofu no yanami (As the warrior), 127 Mount Fuji, 8, 96–97, 127

46, 71, 77, 89, 152–53, 172, 177–80,

mountains, 3, 8, 25, 87, 89, 96, 127, 148, 164

184–86, 193, 195, 197, 229n19

mukashi seshi (I who), 138

“Masaoka’s Song,” 152–53

Mukō-jima, 31, 38, 50, 190, 197

masculinity, 20, 85, 100, 132, 134, 168

Murasaki Shikibu, 62, 68

mathematics, 15, 25, 39–40, 126, 204n5,

Murdoch, James, 32, 208n17

225n13 Matsuo Bashō. See Bashō (Matsuo

mushi no ne wo (Trampling through), 34 music, 21, 69, 175–76

Bashō) Matsuyama Middle School, 27, 30, 92

Nagatsuka Takashi, 191, 232n16 Naitō Meisetsu, 110, 220n3, 231n2

Index

Nakamura Fusetsu, 2–4, 19, 94–97, 102,

245

Noh: Hagoromo, 73; language or

163, 168–69, 174, 191–92, 219n8,

conventions of, 52, 73, 129, 216n31;

219n15

performances or popularity of, 21,

nakihito no (Hide the corpses), 87

28; play by Shiki, 50–52, 231n14;

Nanakusa shū (Collection of Seven

music or drums of, 21, 175; poetry of,

Grasses), 48–52, 190 Nara, 8, 103, 135, 169 Natsume Sōseki, 24, 35, 47–48, 52–57,

93, 125; Semimaru, 76; Shiki on, 157 novels, 53, 67, 71–74, 159, 169; Buddhists and, 34; European-language, 33,

92, 120, 157–58, 173, 208n17, 212n26,

209n25, 209n26; Japanese, 1, 34, 60,

213n28

129, 210n36, 215n11 (see also Imo to

nature, 2, 9–10, 37–38, 49, 93, 105, 116,

se kagami; Fūryūbutsu; Natsume

123–24, 127–28, 135, 137, 139, 154,

Sōseki; Takizawa Bakin); Shiki and

158–59, 161, 174–75, 201

(see Gin sekai; Masaoka Shiki:

Negishi, 71, 136, 185, 195

novels and; Tsuki no miyako; Wa ga

Nichiren, 187, 231n2

yamai); shōsetsu, 59, 214n1; Shōyō

ninjōbon, 37, 60, 62, 210n36, 215n11

on, 60–61; poetry and, 34, 59, 71, 74,

Nippon (see also Kuga Katsunan);

93, 129, 133; popularity of, 61

Bokujū itteki in, 166; Byōshō rokushaku in, 187; circulation of,

objectivity, 101–2, 133, 135

76, 94; cultural columns in, 76,

Ōhara Kanzan, 21, 24, 184, 204n6

81–82; employment by or salary

Ōhara Kijū, 34, 56, 213n32

from, 76–78, 94, 217n9; interviews

Ōhara Tsunenori, 45, 69–70, 77, 85, 172,

in, 206n33; nationalism or politics of, 78–79, 96, 100, 124; Shiki’s articles in, 11, 78, 169–70, 177; Shiki’s haiku criticism in, 77, 99–100 (see also Chats on Haiku

184 Oi no kobumi (Manuscript in My Knapsack), 93, 214n36 Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku), 81, 101

from the Otter’s Den; Haijin

Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, 133

Buson); Shiki’s literary output and,

Ōtani Zekū, 69, 190

81, 94; Shiki’s poetry in, 78, 94, 131, 146; Shiki’s travel

pain: endurance of, 42–43, 64–65, 118,

writings in, 76–77, 217n15; Shōra

166, 172, 177, 187; Shiki’s, 10–12, 20,

gyokueki in, 166; war coverage in,

42–43, 46, 89–90, 103, 118–19,

81–82, 83–84, 85–86, 88

121–22, 165–67, 171–73, 176–77,

246

Index

pain (continued)

Sakamoto Shihōta, 184, 191–92, 198

178–80, 183–89, 221n18, 228n36,

samidare ya (Early summer rains), 105

230n24 (see also Masaoka Shiki,

Samukawa Sokotsu, 78, 193, 217n9

illness of)

samurai, 2, 13–15, 17, 20–24, 28, 69, 73,

painting. See art

84, 130, 150, 153, 174, 184

persimmons, 8, 130, 174, 223n15

sararetaru (The divorced woman), 102

philosophy, 31, 33–35, 37–40,

Sarashina kikō (A Journey to Sarashina),

46, 50, 56, 69–70, 79, 157, 164, 191, 210n39 photography, 20, 41, 48–49, 84, 130, 135, 197, 205n20 poetic forms. See chōka; haiku; kanshi; shintaishi; tanka poetry, public recitations of, 5, 143 poets: professional, 1, 10, 71, 97, 99, 141, 201

70, 77 Satō Kōroku, 33, 198 seasons, 2, 45, 50, 57, 93, 101, 132, 139 sedōka, 123 Shakespeare, 72, 92, 225n14 shasei, 2–5, 9, 97, 102–3, 104–6, 114–15, 134–35, 164, 174 Shikoku, 25–27, 47, 78, 108, 117 Shimon (Questions), 116

“Poor Man’s Hut,” 152

Shin Kokinshū, 132, 134, 137

punctuation, 226n23

Shintaishi shō (Selection of Poems in the Modern Style), 4–6, 144–45,

rain, 2, 61, 105, 121–22, 152, 159, 198 realism, 3–5, 97, 98, 112, 134 renga, 93, 141, 200, 224n5, 225n6 renpai, 141 rhetoric, 32, 54–55, 57, 73

225n14 shintaishi, 4–7, 142–50, 169, 192, 194, 200 shiro mukuge (White rose of Sharon), 92

rhyme, 7–8, 147–49, 153

Shishibue (The Deer Hunt Flute), 142

rikutsu. See ingenuity

Shō Nippon (Little Japan), 82, 94–95,

Ritsu (Buddhist sect), 197 Ritsu (sister of Masaoka Shiki). See Masaoka Ritsu

217n17 Shōra gyokueki, 158–61, 165–66, 222n7, 227n9

Romaji Diary, 180

shortness, 6, 56, 114, 127, 142–43, 169,

Saigyō, 93, 114, 168

Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the

200, 222n8 Saikaku style, 66–67, 73, 160–61, 212n21

Novel), 60 shōsetsu. See novels

Index

247

Silver World, The. See Gin sekai

224n26, 224n27, 224n29; haiku

snow, 59, 61–66, 80

and, 128, 135–36; language and

“Sociology, On the Principles of,” 6,

conventions of, 2, 5, 68, 134, 136–37,

226n24

153; length of, 2, 6, 123, 126–27, 143,

soetake no (The bamboo support), 50

200; magazines, 136, 150; pre-Shiki,

sono hen ni (In this neighborhood), 75

1–2, 10, 12, 100, 108, 125–28, 132–33,

sound, 9, 102, 115

134, 199 (see also Kokinshū); Shiki’s

Spencer, Herbert, 6, 33–35, 40, 56, 157

letters on, 132–34, 138; Shiki’s (see

suicide, 88, 150, 162–63, 185–86

Masaoka Shiki: tanka by); sound

Suikoden, 60, 214n3

and, 9

Supine Notes. See Gyōga manroku

tanoshimi wa (It is a pleasure), 138 tatan to su (When I try to stand), 105

ta ichimai (They sowed a whole field), 114 Tachibana Akemi, 136–39, 168, 199, 224n33, 228n30

tea ceremony, 14, 93 Teiketsu shimatsu (“How I Coughed Blood”), 45–47 temples, 8, 23, 31, 38, 50, 62, 146, 149, 197

Tairyū-ji (temple), 197

tetsugaku. See philosophy

Takahama Kyoshi, 3, 42, 70, 71–72, 74,

Tōdai-ji (temple), 8

84, 89–92, 103–6, 109, 115, 118–20,

“Tokonatsu” (Everlasting Summer), 144

165, 183, 193, 196, 218n1

Tokugawa Munetake, 168

Takahashi Korekiyo, 31–32

Tokugawa period, 7, 61, 128, 138, 161, 168

Takakuwa Rankō, 142, 144–45,

Tokyo University Preparatory School,

225n8 Takekurabe (Comparing Heights), 160

35–37, 47 Tokyo, 8, 28, 41, 82–83, 89, 92, 118, 121; as Shiki’s home, 117; places Shiki

Takemura Kitō, 147, 206n40, 227n2

wished to see in, 81, 158; Shiki in,

Takenosato uta (Poems from the Bamboo

40, 45–47, 48–50, 60, 71, 75–77, 81,

Village), 134 Takizawa Bakin, 25, 59–60, 62, 66–67, 129, 167, 169

86, 151 (see also Tokyo University Preparatory School); Shiki’s burial in, 197; Shiki’s houses in, 71, 75, 81,

Tamenaga Shunsui, 37, 66, 210n36

215n21, 216n2, 221n19; Shiki’s move

tanka, 57, 90, 93, 123–39, 143–44, 145,

to, 29–31, 83; Shiki’s 1888 travels in,

147, 149, 155, 178–79, 189, 191–92,

48–49; Shiki’s 1895 return to, 102–4;

209n28, 222n8, 223n15, 223n25,

Yae and Ritsu’s move to, 71, 77

248

Index

Tōsei shosei katagi (The Character of

compared to Japan’s, 3, 33, 96–97,

Modern Students), 60–61, 67

100, 124, 128–29, 163–65, 168–69;

Toyama Chuzan, 6–7, 143, 226n24

influence on Japan, 5–7, 28, 53, 61,

trains, 30, 45, 75, 77, 146–48

78–80, 126, 144, 147, 176 (see also

trees, 51, 62–63, 65, 92, 96–97, 114, 134,

Japanese: translations into;

147–48. See also flowers; leaves Tsubouchi Shōyō, 32, 60–61, 66–67, 92, 215n11 Tsuki no miyako (The Palace of the Moon), 71–73, 217n17 tsuki ya aranu (Is that not the moon?), 50–51

Masaoka Shiki: Western culture and; xenophobia). women, 64, 67, 73, 81, 86, 102, 112, 126, 132, 141–49, 160, 221n10; education of, 177–79; language of, 21; novels for, 61; Shiki and, 37, 190–91 Wordsworth, William, 147, 225n10

tuberculosis, 48, 103 xenophobia, 24, 79, 138 Ueno, 61–62, 119, 151, 197, 221n19 uguisu mo (The nightingale, too), 113

“Yamai” (Sickness), 88–89

u-no-hana no (Does it plan to sing), 44

Yamamoto Kenkichi, 115–16

u-no-hana wo (Has he come

Yamamoto Oroku, 37, 190, 210n37, 212n17

heading), 44

Yanagihara Kyokudō, 21, 29–30, 93, 107, 109–10, 118

vocabulary, 52, 69, 84, 100, 127, 144, 153

“Yōken-setsu” (On Foreign Dogs), 79–80

Wa ga yamai (My Sickness), 82–83

Yokohama, 30, 41, 95

waka, 93, 129, 136, 224n27, 226n23

Yoneyama Yasusaburō, 39–40

Wakao Ransui, 192–96, 232n24

Yosa Buson. See Buson (Yosa Buson)

war, 81–83, 106, 108, 124, 126–27, 152,

yotose nete (Four years spent in bed), 134

153 ware osonakute on ukeshi (The grave marker), 149

Zen Buddhism, 130, 197, 232n27 Zhuangzi, 31, 214n36

Watanabe Kazan, 174

Zola, 33, 209n26

“When a Friend Came to Pay a Visit,” 49

zuihitsu, 11, 17, 155–58, 166, 169, 172, 183,

Western art, literature, or culture, 2, 24, 72, 133; art, 100, 164, 168, 174;

221n19 Zuku (haiku magazine), 194