The Japanese expression 行間を読む gyoukan o yomu can be rendered in English as “read between the lines”. Due to the fact that haiku is such a very minimal genre of poetry, the ability to read between the lines is key to enjoying a particular work. Likewise, the ability to create an alluring but not unfathomable 行間 gyoukan / space between the lines must surely be central to crafting a haiku of note.
Throughout the five years since the founding of the Edinburgh Haiku Circle, members have devoted themselves not only to creating their own haiku in English but also to studying, discussing and effectively “reading between the lines” of a wide range of Japanese haiku. One member, Ken Cockburn, recently suggested that some of the discussions be written up in summaries or essays, so that they may be enjoyed by a wider audience. Ken’s idea will be realized here.
The contents of the summaries represent the various thoughts, opinions and impressions of all members of the circle. Members will take turns at writing the summaries. All haiku featured in the essays were selected, glossed and translated by Catherine Urquhart.
The space between the lines is a stage. Welcome to our performance!
A Lull in the Winter Wind
by Miriam Sulhunt
冬凪に写せし写真五六枚 右城暮石
fuyu nagi ni utsuseshi shashin go roku mai
a lull
in the winter wind
five or six photographs Ushiro Kureishi (1899-1995)
冬 fuyu: winter
凪 nagi: a lull in the wind
に ni: in
写せし utsuseshi: classical form of the verb ‘utsusu’, to take (a photo)
写真 shashin: photograph(s)
五 go: five
六 roku: six
枚 mai: grammatical counter used with flat items
I was unable to find any information on this poet but his lifetime spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. This is a traditional haiku, written without a cutting particle. I’m not sure when it was written but it was definitely before the advent of the iPhone camera. The poet was probably using a noisy, old-fashioned camera and one that may have needed to rest on a flat surface. It might also have been bulky and difficult to use in a strong wind.
The Japanese version of this haiku gives us the word ‘winter’ first and then a ‘lull in the wind’ follows – two contrasting images stimulating the senses and inducing a kind of synesthesia, between wind sounds and ‘seeing’ in the mind’s eye a wintry landscape. The repetition of ‘s’ sounds in ‘utsuseshi shashin’ produces a series of sibilants as though to soften the effect as the wind drops. The sibilants might also simulate the noises the camera makes as the photographs are taken.
There is no hint pertaining to the location or what the poet was photographing. This is not important. The shift in focus from the winter wind to the lull is like the camera lens zooming in to capture some fleeting moment for posterity, regardless of the exact number of pictures being taken. The idea of a numerical counter – click, click, click as each picture is hurriedly taken – evokes the poet trying to keep track of the number of shots before the wind picks up again.
There is an almost filmic quality to this haiku – the wind stilled for a few moments in the midst of some windswept winter landscape. Further details would have been superfluous. As it is, we are able to draw upon our own memories and experiences in our interpretations. A beautiful haiku.
Of interest in relation to this haiku might be Fujin or 風神in Japanese, the god of wind – a terrifying red-haired, green-skinned demon who is the eldest of the Shinto gods and usually depicted carrying a bag of winds in each hand.
One particularly ferocious wind, which might be the one referred to in this haiku is the kogarashi (凩) – a harbinger of bitter cold weather blowing in from the North, possibly Siberia. It is also called a withering wind because it literally strips leaves from the branches of trees.
Between the Lines of a Mask Haiku
by John Wall
[A season word for winter, masks are used in Japan by people of all ages to prevent the spread of colds and flu and to protect the nose and mouth from the cold and dry air. It is often a surprise to visitors from overseas to see so many people wearing masks whether it be at the theatre, in trains or in shops.]
マスクとり死病の山と対面す 岡本眸
masuku tori shibyou no yama to taimen su Okamoto Hitomi (1928-2018)
removing the mask
to meet the mountain
of a deadly disease
マスク masuku: mask
とり tori: classical form of “taking”, “removing”
死病 shibyou: deadly/fatal disease (literally, “death disease”)
の no: of
山 yama: mountain
と to: with
対面 taimen: facing, meeting face to face, meeting face on
す su: classical form of “suru”, to do/make/carry out
Poignant, pertinent and prophetic, could this work have been written in response to a SARS outbreak? The removal of the mask appears to be a deliberate act – in order to meet “face-on” the fatal or deadly disease. By removing the mask, the poet/subject is aware of the possible consequences.
This could be a hospital scene – maybe a relative removing their mask at the bedside of a dying loved one? Could there also be a link to an oxygen mask, the removal of which would indicate the end for the patient? Probably not, since ‘oxygen mask’ is not a seasonal reference, whereas a surgical mask indicates winter.
The mountain is an interesting metaphor, looming over both reader and poet, giving form to the invisible, immovable, always present and ultimately inevitable possibility of death. But the poet is indefatigable, almost devil-may-care – defiant.
While it is easy to let the current COVID-19 pandemic influence our interpretation of this work, the fatal disease may not be contagious by respiration or at all. The removal of the mask may pose no risk, but it does have connotations of going up against the mighty, deadly disease unprotected.
Another reading is that there is a sense of resignation or defeat here. The person has fought (or assisted in the fight) against the disease and now the inevitable has come – death. The mask is no longer required.
Can we also interpret that there is some resolve in the poem? She is preparing to scale the mountain or at least attempt to. It is also worth noting that although the disease is described as fatal it may not be inevitable that she (or the poem’s subject) will die of it.
Removing the mask – is it possible that this is to take medication in preparation for “meeting the mountain”? In fact, the feeling of resignation or acceptance could be of the preparation to fight back rather than acceptance of the disease itself.
We should also consider whether the mask is metaphorical. Is this the point where the pretence, the brave face is dropped and it’s time to face the truth or come to terms with the impact of the fatal disease? This would fit if we also consider the metaphorical mountain looming in the background, always there and now to be ignored no longer. Time to face the music.
Information about the poet is scant in English, although an online search turned up a couple of other haiku she wrote. One of them was written after the death of her husband from a cerebral haemorrhage. How does this affect our reading of the poem? Does it influence the feeling of recklessness or resignation? It may have no relation to this haiku at all – strictly speaking, is a haemorrhage a disease? Indeed, this haiku may have been written before her husband died. In any case, it does add to the enigmatic nature of the poem.
Finally, an interesting aside to this haiku is the poet’s use of the two classical word-forms “tori” and “su”. Classical forms are common in contemporary haiku as they often have fewer syllables than modern ones. Compare this with the English word variants where the modern version tends to be not only more informal but also shorter (e.g. it’s, don’t, can’t, I’m, etc.). Needless to say, a syllabically economic word is the haikuist’s friend!
Between the Lines of a Nightjar Haiku
by Christopher Jupp
口あいて浮世をわたる夜鷹哉 荊口
kuchi aite ukiyo o wataru yotaka kana Keiko
mouth open
crossing this transient world
night falcon
口 kuchi: mouth
あいて aite: open
浮世 ukiyo: the floating world, the transient world
を o: direct object particle
わたる wataru: cross (verb, present tense)
夜鷹 yotaka: night falcon/hawk, nightjar
哉 kana: a poetic particle expressing wonder or awe
Additional information: The author is Miyazaki Keiko, a samurai who was one of Basho’s friends. Basho mentions reuniting with Keiko when he reaches his final destination of Ogaki in the travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Basho’s final haiku in that text is a farewell one to Keiko and the other friends he leaves behind. Basho also honoured Keiko with a haiku praising his appearance with dew from bamboo on his trousers.
篠の露袴に掛けし茂り哉
sasa no tsuyu hakama ni kakeshi shigeri kana
the thicket
leaves on his hakama trousers
dew from the arrow bamboo
Translated by Chris Drake (World Kigo Database website)
Keiko’s most celebrated haiku in his lifetime may have been the one that was published in the Ariso-umi (Wild Rocky Shore) anthology of 1695 as the first hokku in the section devoted to winter. It was once falsely attributed to Issa and expresses a powerful spatial tension between sky and earth with its upward and downward directions combined with an affirmation of home:-
故郷に高ひ杉ありはつしぐれ
furusato ni takai sugi ari hatsu-shigure
tall cedars
in my hometown –
first winter rain
Translated by Chris Drake
World Kigo database entry under Keiko. https://wkdhaikutopics.blogspot.com/2012/08/
The yotaka haiku in question here also has a compelling spatiality of above and below and, this time, across. With its repeated ‘k’ sounds, it is highly alliterative. The call of the yotaka is also notably repetitive: a continuous – to the point of monotony – ‘kyokyokyo…’. The content of the haiku does not describe the call of the bird, but its words clearly embody it, via alliteration, onomatopoeically. It is intriguing that the onomatopoeia is most closely present in the word ‘ukiyo’. Also intriguing, is that the ‘k’ alliteration is repeated in the haikuist’s name ‘Keiko’.
In form, the haiku has the standard 5-7-5 Japanese syllables and a seasonal reference, namely, the yotaka, a bird that summers in Japan and winters in the island group of Borneo, Sumatra and Java. On the face of it, the haiku can be simply read as a description of the bird’s behaviour in flight such that the bird is to the sky as the basking shark is to the sea. However, the use of the term ‘ukiyo’, floating/transient world already indicates that there is much more to it. Is there a sense in which Keiko identifies with the bird? What is the yotaka bird? We might even ask ‘who is this bird?’ And what are we to make of the reference to the floating/transient world? Is the bird perhaps a figure for the haikuist himself in the face of the transience of the world and the multiplicity of experience?
Ornithologically speaking, the bird is Caprimulgida jotaka jotaka (though there is a classificatory debate about whether it is in fact an independent species or a subspecies of another member of the Caprimulgidae family). As such, and either way, the yotaka is a species of the genus and order Caprimulgida (from the Latin meaning goatsucker – therein lies a Greek folk tale..), a genus that also includes Caprimulgida europaensis (the nightjar) and the North American Caprimulgida vociferus (the whippowil or whippoorwill). Ornithologists often refer to the yotaka as the grey nightjar and sometimes to the whole family of these species as the nightjars. This bird, in all these similar incarnations around the world, has remarkable vocal abilities and is crepuscular and nocturnal, hence the reference to night in ‘night falcon’ and hence also, directly and indirectly, in many other names for the nightjar elsewhere in the world:
Nihthræfn Anglo-Saxon (Night Raven)
Fern Owl 19th century English
Nachtswaluz, Nachtschwalbe Dutch, German (Night Swallow)
Despite the fact that these names are misleading in terms of biological classification (the nightjar is not an owl, a falcon, a raven or a swallow – in fact it is closely related to the swift), they nevertheless each have some justification in terms of resemblances to these other birds – agility of flight, feather colourings etc. And their own poetry. For example, in a collection whose title would also be highly apposite for a collection of haiku, Moments of Vision, Thomas Hardy writes in his poem Afterwards
…… like an eyelid’s soundless
blink
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn…
What now is ukiyo, the floating/transient world? In the narrow sense of the term as floating world, ukiyo referred to a city district whose culture was dominated by pleasure seeking and entertainment. See, for example, the depiction of that culture as populated by actors, geisha, samurai and so on in the Edo period ukiyo-e prints that both lampoon and celebrate that culture. In light of this usage are we to understand the haiku as describing the flight of the bird in the skies over such a district? This would be to interpret the haiku on a simple, literal, descriptive level and only in the narrow sense of the term ukiyo. Is the haiku perhaps an indirect cultural and religious commentary on or even critique of ukiyo culture – the life of pleasure and entertainment? In flying above and across that world does the yotaka thereby figure as a symbolic rejection of that culture? That this may be the key to this haiku is indicated by the fact that the narrow use of the term ukiyo was coined with an ironic allusion to the Buddhist doctrine of the impermanence of all things (mujo). In alluding to this wider sense of transience, Keiko is referring to a doctrine that decisively affected the wistful and bittersweet pathos of haiku itself – a pathos referred to as mono no aware. He thereby seems to identify and inscribe himself within this tradition perhaps even identifying with the bird. In other words, the allusion to Buddhist teaching in this haiku is something more than irony in relation to ukiyo in the narrow sense. Rather, it is religious in the sense of committing to a practice of renunciation above and beyond the transience of the ukiyo in the narrow sense and in the broad sense.
Of interest in this context is the significance of two facts. Firstly, that takagari, falconry was an important pastime of the samurai – a feudal order to which Keiko belonged – and falcons had a symbolic charge expressing the nobility of the samurai spirit. There may be a distant allusion to this in Keiko’s haiku but it can only be a distant one – Keiko would surely have known that the yotaka nightjar was a hunter of mosquitoes (hence the open mouthed flight) and was not deployed in falconry hunting.
Secondly, the fact that a crepuscular and nocturnal bird might function as a symbol of enlightenment and transcendence may have a possible explanation: the ultimately illusory nature of the world, illusory because everything is transient and in perpetual metamorphosis, is not best appreciated in daylight. For daylight gives everything an apparently fixed form and provides the illusion of permanence. Buddhistically speaking, daylight is a dreamlight from which we are to awaken. Perhaps our certainty in permanence is broken at dusk, night and dawn – the time of the night falcon, the nightjar, the dewfall hawk. The nineteenth century Scots term for the nightjar, liche fowle or lich bird provides a curious point of contact and contrast with the Buddhist aspect of Keiko’s haiku. In From the Braes of the Carse, 1898, Charles Spence, the bard of Gowrie, writes
When mortals slept, and lichbirds wakit…
The Scots bird name is derived from the German Leiche, meaning corpse. This use may be related to the theologically ingenious folk belief that, on dying, the souls of unbaptised children are incarnated as nightjars until the Day of Judgment.
‘Keiko’ (like ‘Basho’) is the haikuist’s pen name, his haigo or nom de plume. This name features the same character used at the start of his haiku – 口, ko, which means mouth. The other part of his name 荊, kei, means ‘thorn’; thus, ‘Keiko’ means ‘thorny mouth’. Thought to aid the bird’s ability to catch flying insects on the wing, one distinctive feature of the yotaka (and indeed all the nightjars) is the protrusion of long, thorn-like bristles around their beaks. As well as this interesting correspondence with the bird that this haigo provides, one might also wonder about both this haikuist’s shaving habits (in one print though, he is shown as clean-shaven) and whether he had a reputation for speaking sharply.
The last word of Keiko’s haiku, kana, is a Japanese expression of emphasis and sometimes, of open-mouthed wonder. In the haiku, the yotaka not only crosses the fleeting world in flight, it spans it and transcends it. The haiku is therefore part signature haiku, part epiphany of the bird as a flying Buddha transcending both the life of pleasure and the impermanence of things. As a flying Buddha, the yotaka is thus also a symbol of enlightenment, an ideal to which the haikuist shows commitment.
In light of Hardy’s usage of nightjar nomenclature, of Basho’s haiku on Keiko and of the fact that in the Diamond Sutra dew is emblematic of transience, we can venture another translation of Keiko’s haiku.
with mouth open
criss-crossing this fleeting world
the dewfall hawk!
Between the Lines of a Waterfowl Haiku
by Ken Cockburn
水鳥や提灯一つ城を出る 蕪村
mizutori ya chouchin hitotsu shiro o deru Yosa Buson (1716-1784)
waterfowl –
one lantern
leaves the castle
水鳥 mizutori: waterfowl (a season word for winter)
や ya: cutting particle
提灯 chouchin: lantern
一つ hitotsu: one
城 shiro: castle
を o: direct object particle
出る deru: present tense of the verb to leave/go out
Our first impression is of the waterfowl and then the surprise of noticing someone creeping from the castle at night, given the lantern –and a cold one, with mizutori as a winter season-word.
Unusually English ‘waterfowl’ can be read as singular or plural, as Japanese nouns. Let’s assume there’s more than one: the birds are illuminated in passing by the lantern-bearer, just enough to see their shapes on the water, not enough to identify them more precisely. We’re not led to believe they react in any way, but any unusual movement and possible danger would attract their interest, so we can imagine some of them opening one eye to watch the lantern’s progress. Are they alarmed enough to call?
We don’t know who is carrying the lantern, and why they leave the castle at night. One lantern suggests one person, or perhaps two. Are they going on their own behalf, or on someone else’s? Is this love, politics or war, or some mixture of these? If it’s winter, all the less reason to leave the castle at night; perhaps there seems to be some urgency or secrecy to the mission.
Is the lantern on land or on water? If on land it casts light as it passes over a dark stretch of water with the castle looming in the background. Or we could see it bobbing on the water, in a boat, or even set afloat as a message or signal… unless it is a method of hunting waterfowl? (In summer a lantern is released onto water to send back the spirits of ancestors to the afterlife.)
Stillness and movement contrast: the roosting birds and the departing lantern-bearer. There are contrasts too of scale and safety, with the huge castle towering over the small lantern and the birds, its walls protecting those inside, while the birds outside are vulnerable. If we see a group of birds, their settled togetherness contrasts with the departure from a place of communal habitation of the lantern-bearer.
From what vantage point do we view this scene? Where are we in relation to the castle, the lantern, the birds? Not far away, as we see the birds; but outside, rather than inside, the castle.
Buson had a liking for narrative or pseudonarrative verses, evoking scenes from traditional tales; this feels like one scene from a longer story, with the reader invited to imagine the causes, and the consequences, of this nocturnal outing.
Edinburgh Haiku Circle 