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”.