Masaoka Tsunenori — the Haiku Master Shiki – Australian Haiku Society https://australianhaikusociety.org/2007/04/25/masaoka-tsunenori-the-...

Australian Haiku Society

haikuoz – the enjoyment of haiku

Masaoka Tsunenori — the Haiku Master Shiki

by Janice M Bostok

A pure black
butter�y frisks keri
Cloud Mountains

Shiki was born on 14th October 1867, in Matsuyama, Japan. His gô, or pen name
Shiki, which means a small cuckoo-like bird, came about after he spat blood for a
week in May 1889. It is said the bird, in order to attain the �ne tone in its voice must
keep singing until it spits blood. For most of his adult life Shiki su�ered from
tuberculosis. He died on the 19th September 1902. His father was a Samurai and his
maternal grandfather a Confucian scholar. He began writing Chinese verse at the
age of eleven. His earliest existing tanka was written at the age of �fteen. He began
studying at university but left without graduating. For a time he was a war
correspondent in China. Shiki is considered to be the last of the traditional haiku
masters and the �rst of the modern ones. Although he advocated reform most of
his poems are written in the traditional form. It is his method and content for which
he is remembered.

Into the ashes

it fell and got smudged;

new calendar kana

He formed a group and had a number of disciples who followed him in his desire for

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reform. Some of those who came after him were the free metre poets, Kyoshi,
Hekigodo, Ippikiro and Meisetsu. The free metre poets tended to lengthen haiku
and dismiss the seventeen Japanese syllable count. Makoto Ueda says if we are to
think of the three lined haiku as a triangle shape, the free metre form of the New
Trend Haiku could be considered as a rectangle.

It is thought that the haiku had been perfected in the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was
thought to have reached its heights. However, when the Emperor Meiji began to
reign the people’s circumstances began to change. Haiku became of interest only to
a smaller and smaller group of educated individuals and were mostly
incomprehensible to the average Japanese person. A failure to adjust the haiku to
the people produced a feeling of disinterest and resentment.

Shiki’s reform was to bring back to the haiku a naturalness which had been lost in
the over-use of classical literary references.

The method Shiki proposed to rejuvenate the haiku was Shasei, or ‘sketch from life’.
This idea was similar to the painting movement which was popular in Europe at the
time. For the �rst time artists went outside and sketched from real life, from
nature, capturing the light and movement as it was at that moment. Previously the
classic painter had only painted within the studio, using models and arti�cial
backdrops. The thought was to move from pure vision to pure painting – the view
from an open window. The result was to return to vision a kind of virginity. It
severed the moorings which tied nature to intellectualisation.

Although Shiki thought haiku should be an experience he also thought it may

become commonplace and trite if merely expressing self. He thought a poem that
was an observation of life was always fresh and while many lives may be the same,

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people who could express themselves individually, would be di�erent in their

approach.

The hokku or starting verse of the haikai-no-renga had previously been

established as a separate poem, standing alone. However, it took someone of
Shiki’s reputation to ‘re-invent’ it, or to complete the process which had begun one
hundred years earlier, by renaming the hokku the ‘haiku’.*
Shiki believed that the language of haiku should be objective. Placing the author’s
subjective feelings in the poem restricted the readers from experiencing the poem
in their own way. He also believed that haiku should be written from real
experiences and not from the imagination.

In the past classic, traditional Japanese haiku contained literary references which
were selected for the purpose, not because the author was experiencing and writing
his poem in that particular moment. In English translation this may not be clearly
seen from the western point of view. But the approach to writing haiku had
changed, had become natural.

It is thought that Shiki single-handedly saved the haiku from oblivion in the
onslaught of western free verse in the nineteenth century. So popular had the
freedom from form, and the western expression of emotional content become in
Japan, it was considered the Japanese forms would become extinct.

Shiki decreed that haikai-no-renga was not literature, and by his time it was in
decline. By declaring it to be dead he actually kept it alive.

Like many reformists, Shiki mellowed in his reform. Whether he simply saw that it
wasn’t as successful as he previously thought it would be, or that as he came closer

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to death he wanted the familiarity and comfort of convention. Whichever it was, he

became less radical in his own writing than some might have wanted him to be.

As the artist Maxime DuChamp says, one must belong to one’s age, no matter what.

*Haiku was a term which could be used for short verse but rarely had been up till that
time. Any stanza of a haikai-no-renga which became an independent poem could be
called haiku.
CUTTING WORDS (written punctuation): KA Indicates a question; RAMU Indicates
probability; SHI Is used to end a clause; TSU Indicates present tense; YA Means a turning
from one subject to another; KERI Is a de�nite break or �nish; KANA Indicates wonder at
the scene or event.

William J. Higginson. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku.
McGraw-Hill, New York. 1985.

Makoto Ueda. Modern Japanese Tanka. Columbia, New York, 1996.

Haiku by the Upasaka Shiki. Peonies Kana, Translated and edited by Harold J.
Isaacson. Allen and Unwin. London. 1973

René Hughe. Impressionism. Réalités Press, Italy, 1977.

First published Yellow Moon 13 2003 pp 33-34 Copyright Janice M Bostok © 2003
sumi-e Shiki’s persimmon copyright Janice M Bostok © 2005 This article is one of a
series of four and was �rst published in Yellow Moon 13 2003 pp. 33-34

April 25, 2007 / Haiku Musings

Australian Haiku Society / Blog at WordPress.com.

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