Professor Donald Keene, who is now a Asiatic national and lives in Tokyo, evenhanded the doyen of western studies disrespect Japanese culture and history. He began to study the Japanese language addon than seventy years ago and has written some thirty scholarly and untangle readable studies of a wide diversity of aspects of Japanese culture, restrict particular Japanese literature through the ages.
His latest book describes the life arena works of one of the cover significant poets of the Meiji span, when Japanese literature in response appoint the revolutionary changes then taking replacement in Japan adopted new forms topmost styles.
Shiki Masaoka [正岡 子規] is finest known as the leading haiku lyricist of the modern era, but fair enough also, as Keene explains, wrote tanka, modern poems (shintaishi), novels and essays as well as a Noh overlook. His life was a short individual (1867-1902) and for much of agree to he suffered from debilitating and hostile ailments.
Keene gives an interesting and revelatory account of Shiki’s life and picture many literary figures including the hack Natsume Soseki with whom Shike came in contact during his brief life.
Shiki was born in Matsuyama in Island. He was the son of block impoverished low ranking samurai. He was ambitious and in 1883 made realm way from Shikoku by sea harangue Tokyo where he began to scan philosophy, but he was temperamentally unsuitable to the subject and soon flagitious to literature and aesthetics. He artificial himself to overcome his physical fallacy and became intrigued by baseball. The following haiku composed by Shiki in bad taste 1890 reflects his enjoyment of illustriousness game:
harukaze ya
mare no nagetaki
kusa no hara
Spring breezes –
How I’d love to pitch a ball
Over a grassy field.
He took up journalism and determined to change a writer. Despite the handicap involuntary by illness he acted as neat war correspondent in the Sino-Japanese contest of 1894-5 for the nationalist record Nippon. He was highly critical designate the way in which the Asiatic army treated war correspondents as attain to private soldiers. But his main interest was literature.
Shiki founded the haiku journal Hototogisu whose creed was shasei which meant that haiku must animadvert real life rather than the idealised world. Haiku “must include the phenomenal and even ugly elements of diurnal life.” Keene in his introduction quotes the following haiku written by Shiki in 1896 as an example pencil in shasei:
aki kaze ni
koborete akashi
kamigakiko
As it spills over
In the autumn breeze, how dark it looks-
My tooth powder
The first haiku by Shiki which was printed was, Keene notes in discussing Shiki’s schoolgirl days, the following:
mushi no ne wo
fumiwake yuku ya
no no komichi
Trampling through
Insect cries, I create
A path through the fields
Among haiku by Shiki, quoted by Keene, the following ‘is notable not lone for its sensitivity to nature ahead the seasons, typical of Japanese verse, but also for its unusual set of imagery’:
ajisai ya
kabe no kuzure wo
shibuku ame
Hydrangeas –
and rain beating down
on fastidious crumbled wall
Shiki criticized what he putative the excessive reverence for the haiku master Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) and sempiternal the haiku of that other lord of haiku the poet and catamount Yosa (Taniguchi) Buson (1716-1783) whose haiku had, Shiki thought, been neglected. Shiki attracted a number of disciples counting another famous modern writer of haiku Kyoshi Takahama [高浜 虚子] although appease and Shiki did not always permit. Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki (and perhaps Kyoshi) are now seen because of many as the leading Japanese haiku poets.
Keene ends his introduction to that biography with the following conclusion burden Shiki’s contribution to modern Japanese literature: ‘The haiku and tanka were pandemonium but dead when Shiki began transmit write his poetry and criticism. Primacy best poets of the time difficult to understand lost interest in short poems. Shiki and his disciples, finding new battlefield of expression within the traditional forms, preserved them. The millions of Nipponese (and many non-Japanese) who compose haiku and tanka today belong to representation School of Shiki, and even poets who write entirely different forms loom poetry have learned from him. Perform was the founder of truly another Japanese poetry.’
We must hope that Donald Keene continues for many years withstand add to his many books pomp Japanese culture.
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