Haikus Between Tradition and Modernity
Santoka Taneda (1882-1940)[1] lived a rather messy life, but he made a deep impression on many haiku writers in Japan in the early half of the twentieth century and on many of the people he met. A poetic tradition of several hundred years preceded him, beginning with the early development of haiku, a 17-syllable poetic form, in the premodern Tokugawa era (1614-1868), and extending into the twentieth century. Haiku itself derived from older forms, from the tanka (short poem), of 31-syllables, from ancient times, to the renga, or linked verse, from the medieval period. What these forms all had in common was standard line lengths, of five or seven parts equivalent to our syllables, in a form of 5-7-5-7-7 or 5-7-5. The earliest known poems, from around 1,500 years ago, were often composed of many more lines, but usually in the 5-7-5 rhythm. Santoka broke away from the haiku’s traditional rhythmic scheme and abandoned other rules of writing a haiku as well—using a season word, for example, or an exclamatory word.
A haiku by Santoka
Santoka broke other traditions as well. He dropped out of Waseda University, apparently for emotional reasons. As the eldest son, he should have managed the family business, but he ran it into the ground. His marriage didn’t last long; his father-in-law demanded a divorce (although Santoka kept ties to his wife and son). He suffered hardships: his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he saw her body recovered from the well she had jumped into; his younger brother later hung himself. Santoka also tried to kill himself by standing on trolley tracks. He was rescued at the last minute and brought to a nearby temple. And so began his life as a monk.
At the same time, he followed certain traditions. Some of his poems refer to poets/priests before him. He walked around Japan following in the footsteps of earlier itinerant poet-monks, reciting sutras for alms. He looked to the lives and work of tanka poets Saigyo and Ryokan and haiku master Basho, among others. He compared his attempts at a true Zen austerity to that of Ryokan, feeling himself falling short, and he visited Ryokan’s grave:
Walking through green leaves;
did Master Ryokan
do the same?
And he was moved to express his sense of Basho as a teacher by echoing one of his poems, changing to fireflies Basho’s earlier use of cicadas in the following:
Nothing suggests
they will die before long;
evening fireflies.
Santoka slept on the road or in cheap inns, or stayed with friends, and he lived for a time alone in little huts, surviving on what he received from begging or as gifts from his wide circle of friends, his “friends-in-poetry.”
The author of the book translated here, Oyama Sumita, was a close friend and admirer of Santoka. The translator of Sumita’s book, William Scott Wilson, also was enthralled by Santoka’s life and poetry. Sumita’s translated book, along with Santoka’s “Diary of the One-Grass Hut,” are framed by Wilson’s Prologue, Preface, Introduction, and Afterward. The work as a whole is illustrated with Gary Miller Haskin’s brush and ink drawings. Different parts of the book are designated using different typefaces: italics for the translated poems, which are accompanied by the vertical Japanese original texts, and bold non-serif italics for quoted prose passages from Santoka’s diaries, as well as Japanese for the poems themselves.
Once the reader reaches the book inside the book, there are many good translations of Santoka’s poems, more than have been previously available in English.
Beyond the ken of sutras,
the cacophony
of jazz.
Having nothing to put it in,
I receive it
with my two hands.
Raining off and on;
mountain after mountain
after unknown mountain.
No money,
no possessions, no teeth,
alone.
Through Santoka’s diaries, the reader learns that Santoka loved sake and hot baths and felt the need to travel, mostly on foot but also sometimes by train. His love of sake meant that he rarely could have a single drink; once he got started, he would drink himself drunk. He often vowed to stop—not to stop drinking, but to stop drinking to excess. He was not successful in that attempt.
We also learn that he published a great deal, in poetry journals such as So’un and in seven single volumes of haiku. He was successful with his poetry. He wrote prolifically, often about scenes he passed on the road. His biographer Oyama believed that “These verses occurred to him spontaneously on the street, and delineate his true feelings . . . Each verse, one verse at a time: the falling off of body and mind.” This description sounds appropriately meditative, the “falling off of body and mind” referring to a phrase of the thirteenth-century priest Dogen Zenji on the practice of zazen. But it did not bring him to the serenity he was looking for in his haiku, his travels, and his sake: “. . . . to Santoka, both drinking sake and writing haiku were part of his karma, and he was rather unable to enter an environment where both body and mind were as light as water.”
A painting of Santoka Taneda by Yasuo Tadami
Santoka’s goal, however, was not only to delineate his true feelings; it was also to make his best possible poems, and he was rigorous in editing and culling his own work. The conflicts among the various parts of his life—his commitment to being a monk, where he often felt he fell short; his entrapment by sake, which he could not control; his devotion to haiku, where he strove for the best he could do—are distressing to read about, but he succeeded in his haiku, which was most important to him. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any discussion recorded in his haiku meetings or in his journals about his editorial process.
A sequence Oyama records in Santoka’s life, however, is revealing of how he lived. After a long journey, which ended on the Kiso Road caught in a spring snow, he was hospitalized with acute pneumonia. Friends telegraphed Oyama but before he decided what he should do, Santoka appeared at his house, “terribly gaunt and dispirited.” Because he could get no sake in the hospital, he slipped out. Two cups of sake made him feel cured, and rather than returning to the hospital, he made his way to Oyama’s house.
Over the summer that followed, he stayed in his little hermitage, where he completed the manuscript for his second collection of poems. On that journey, he had written two thousand poems. He first culled them down to three hundred, then chose one hundred and forty-one from those, and published them in his second book, Sangyo suigyo (Traveling the Mountains, Traveling the Rivers), and discarded the rest. He wrote of them, “The pleasure of the person who writes them is that of singing his own truth.”
That winter, he sent a telegram in Oyama’s name to his son, Ken, who was at work in Fukuoka. It said: “Your father is dangerously ill. Come soon. Oyama.” Ken rushed to Oyama’s house in Hiroshima, where he found Santoka well and cared for. Santoka said he wanted to see Ken before he died. The three men had a cup of tea together and Ken returned to work.
The only area of his life Santoka seemed to have any control over was his poetry. He often drank himself silly at meetings with his “friends-in-poetry,” but he wrote and edited his work apparently with great concentration and devotion. It would have been enlightening to see some of the poems he rejected, or even better, some he edited, to better understand how he viewed his own work. But the work itself remains as a testament to his achievement:
Swallows in flight:
from journey to journey,
tying on straw sandals.
Amy Vladeck Heinrich earned her PhD in Japanese literature at Columbia University in 1980. Her dissertation was published in 1983 as Fragments of Rainbows: The Life and Poetry of Saitō Mokichi (1882-1953). She served as the Director of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University, from 1989 through 2009.
[1] The author and publisher have chosen to put Japanese names, usually family name followed by personal name, or literary name, in Western order, with the family name last. I have followed their choice to avoid reader confusion. I have also followed their lead in omitting long marks, guides to pronunciation, on Santōka, Bashō, and Ryōkan, for example, and others.