Santoka :: Grass and Tree Cairn translations :: Hiroaki Sato illustrations :: Stephen Addiss Santoka :: Grass and Tree Cairn Translations by Hiroaki Sato Illustrations by Steven Addiss Back Cover Illustration by Kuniharu Shimizu <http://www.mahoroba.ne.jp/~kuni/haiga_gallery/> RE D ©2002 by Red Moon Press MOON ISBN 1-893959-28-7 PRESS Red Moon Press PO Box 2461 Winchester VA 22604-1661 USA [email protected] Santoka :: Grass and Tree Cairn translations :: Hiroaki Sato illustrations :: Stephen Addiss Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) was born a son of a large landowner in Yamaguchi and named Shoichi; mother committed suicide when he was ten; dropped out of Waseda University, Tokyo, after a nervous breakdown; started a sake brewery at 25; married at 27; acquired the habit of drinking heavily at 28; first haiku appeared in Ogiwara Seisensui’s non-traditional haiku magazine Soun (Cumulus) at age 31; moved to Kumamoto with family and started a secondhand bookstore when 34; legally divorced at 38; while in Tokyo, was arrested and jailed in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, in 1923 (police used the quake as a pretext for rounding up and killing many Socialists); back in Kumamoto, taken to a Zen temple of the Soto sect as a result of drunken behavior at 42; ordained a Zen monk at 43; for the rest of his life was mostly on the road as a mendicant monk (in practical terms, a beggar), traveling throughout Japan; at 53, attempted suicide; his book of haiku Somokuto (Grass and Tree Cairn)—an assemblage of earlier chapbooks—was published several months before he died of a heart attack while asleep drunk; the book’s dedication was “to my mother / who hastened to her death when young”; Santoka, the penname he began to use when he translated Turgenev, means “mountaintop fire”. To Master Cor Acknowledgements The section on Ogiwara Seisensui in the introduction originally appeared in Tundra, and some of the translations of Santoka’s haiku in Cicada many, many years ago. Introduction: Santoka, Seisensui, and Non-traditional Haiku The man known as Santoka was born Taneda Shoichi, in 1882, a son of a land- owner with large holdings in Yamaguchi, at the southwestern tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu. When he was ten years old, his mother, Fusa, committed suicide by throwing herself into a well. The sight of her corpse pulled out of the well apparently reverberated throughout his life. While studying literature at Waseda University, Tokyo, he had a nervous break- down and dropped out. Back in Yamaguchi, he started a sake brewery at 25 and vii married Sato Sakino at 27. A son, Takeshi, was born the following year. About that time, he acquired the habit of drinking heavily, recklessly. When he was 34, the Taneda family went bankrupt, and he moved to Kumamoto, in the middle of the southern island of Kyushu, with his wife and son, and started a secondhand bookstore. In 1918, when he was 36, his younger brother committed suicide by hanging himself in the woods. The following year he went to Tokyo, alone, and worked part-time at a cement laboratory. He was then employed at a library for a while, then as a city clerk. At 38, he was legally divorced. Sakino took custody of their son and the book business. In 1923, in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, he was arrested as a Socialist suspect and jailed. (Police used the disaster, in which 100,000 people perished, as a pretext for rounding up and killing many Socialists, while mobs killed a great number of Koreans). Released, he went back to Kumamoto. In 1924, while drunk, he brought a streetcar to a screeching halt, and was arrested. The incident led him to a Zen temple of the Soto sect, which seeks enlightenment in carrying out daily chores. The following year he was ordained a Zen monk. For the rest of his life he was mostly on the road as a mendicant monk—in practical terms, a beggar—traveling throughout Japan, in an old-fashioned priestly viii getup: a black outer robe, a large hat, a staff, and an alms bowl. When he was 53, he attempted suicide. In April 1940, he assembled seven haiku chapbooks in a single volume and published it under the title of Somokuto (Grass and Tree Cairn). He dedicated it “to my mother / who hastened to her death when young”. He then hit the road again, to hand out the book to his friends. One October night, after a haiku meeting, he went to bed, drunk, and, while asleep, died of a heart attack. He was 58. It is said that one of his two goals was korori oujou, “dropping dead.” He fulfilled that goal. Taneda Shoichi acquired the nom de plume Santoka in 1911, when he joined the local literary magazine Seinen (Youth) and started publishing pieces such as a translation of a passage from Turgenev’s Smoke. Character by character, the name means “mountain-head-fire”1. That year he also became a member of the local haiku group Yayoi Ginsha, March Haiku Society (later Mukudori Kukai, Starling Haiku Meeting), and for the haiku he employed a different nom de plume, Denji-ko, Lord Mud-Snail. Before long, he was using Santoka almost exclusively. Santoka’s haiku surviving from that period largely conform to the traditional requirements of yuuki teikei: the inclusion of a seasonal indicator and the syllabic pattern of 5-7-5. Among them: ix Wagimoko no hada namamekashi natsu no cho My beloved’s skin sensuous a summer butterfly We also find hypersyllabic pieces, such as: Kafé ni dekadan o ronzu natsu no chou toberi In a café we debate decadence a summer butterfly flits which may be scanned as 5-8-8 if the number of syllables of the word kafé, following the original orthography, is pegged at four. Even so, Santoka’s conversion to non-traditional haiku, when it came, was swift. Ogiwara Seisensui (1884-1976), one leader of the movement to reject traditional ap- proaches, accepted the first of his haiku in the March 1913 issue of his magazine Soun (Cumulus). From then on, Santoka never looked back. For a while from the latter half of the 1920s, his was among the most attractive voices in the pages of Soun. Santoka’s conversion, if it was that, has yet to be fully traced, as far as I know, except for the suggestion that the advocacy for freedom in Japanese poetry as a whole— freedom from syllabic patterns and classical language—had begun as early as 1907. x Nonetheless it may help to look at Seisensui and his non-traditional haiku. Seisensui—a nom de plume meaning “well water”—started writing haiku as an elementary schoolboy and was thoroughly versed in traditional haiku by the time he joined the Shin-Keikou Haiku Undo, New Trend Haiku Movement, while studying German at the Imperial University of Tokyo. The movement, which apparently began with an article that Ousuga Otsuji (1881-1920) wrote, in 1908, to emphasize the im- portance of suggestiveness in haiku, lost whatever cohesion it may have had with the advocacy, by one wing of the loose and diverse group, of jiyuritsu (free rhythm) or the abandonment of the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern in the early 1910s. At any rate, it was originally for this movement that in 1911 Seisensui, with the support of Kawahigashi Hekigodo (1873-1937), founded Soun. But in a few years the two men parted company over jiyuritsu, leaving Seisensui as the magazine’s sole editor.2 Seisensui soon renounced the role of seasonal indicators as well, and would go on to publish the two non-traditional haiku poets who would enjoy an immense posthumous popularity from the 1960s onward. One is Ozaki Hosai (1885-1926)3 and the other, Santoka. The magazine survives to this day. xi To see Sensensui’s approach to haiku, we might begin with some of his first two- line haiku, which he published in 1914: Chikara ippai ni naku ko to naku niwatori to no asa The child crying with all his might and the rooster crowing this morning Wazukano hana ga chirinureba ume wa soushin ni meguminu The few blossoms having scattered the plum has budded all over its body Seisensui explained that he wrote these bilinear haiku under the influence of Goethe’s epigrams and Schiller’s couplets. He also believed, at least at the time, that a haiku was a poem conceived with a single caesura in it and that therefore breaking it into two lines was justifiable. But he put them all in one line when he republished xii them in a book—one of the notable developments from the standpoint of haiku lineation. (For those interested in syllabic count, the first piece consists of 12 / 10 and the second one of 12 / 12). The following is a small sampling of his haiku. The figure at the end of each piece shows the number of syllables. Shosai o idete hon o te ni tsutsumi nagashi (18) Out of the study a book in hand the embankment is long Aozora ni tobitaki fuusen o shikato motsu sena no ko yo (24) Clutching a balloon that wants to fly into the blue sky child on my back Tombo suisui yuuyake nagaru mizu nagaru (19) Dragonflies glide glide evening glow flows water flows Runin-ra no haka mugi tsuku usu no hibiku tokoro (20) Exiles’ graves where wheat-pounding mortars resound Fune chikazukeri takaiwa no u-ra no uraraka ya (20) xiii The boat approaches a tall rock with cormorants in the balmy sun Otoko to onna ana samuzamuto idakiau mono ka (22) A man and a woman ah how coldly they hold each other Yunomi hisashiku kowasazuni mochi yonjuu to naru (21) Having had a teacup unbroken for a long time I turn forty The Great Earthquake [1923] Strikes: Two Pieces Sora ni utsuru hi no naka yori futon oute kuru (20) Out of the fire reflected in the sky he comes carrying futon on his back Goka fuketsutu kakeshi tsuki o hakeri (16) In