R. H. Blyth, although he contributed more than anyone to an international understanding of haiku, once wrote that he doubted whether women could write in the seventeen-syllable form: “Haiku poetesses,” he said, “are only fifth class.”¹ While the magisterial phrasing is characteristic of Blyth, the view itself merely echoes a centuries-old Japanese bias. How old—and prevalent—that bias was can be seen from a precept attributed to Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694): “Never befriend a woman who writes haiku. Don’t take her either as a teacher or as a student.… In general, men should associate with women only for the...

Den Sutejo lived in the same period as Bashō and belonged to the same school of haikai, the Teimon; she also shared the same mentor in her youth, Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705). It is tempting to speculate that the two poets had a chance to meet in Kyoto, where Kigin resided. But such a meeting is unlikely to have taken place, since Sutejo was a married woman whose family considerably outranked Bashō’s in social status.

Sutejo was born in 1633, the eldest daughter of an old, illustrious samurai family that lived in a small town in the mountainous area northwest...

If Bashō, a lifelong bachelor, knew one woman with whom he could joke and relax, that woman was Kawai Chigetsu. They were not only teacher and student in haikai but very close friends outside that relationship. Their closeness is suggested, for instance, by a little incident that took place one day in 1690, when Chigetsu begged for a keepsake from her teacher, who was soon to conclude his stay at her house. Bashō reportedly replied, “Someone who is nearing her sixtieth year asks me for a keepsake. How very depressing! She must want me to die before her!” Laughing, he...

Shiba Sonome is at once famous and notorious in the history of haiku. She is famous because, as mentioned in the Introduction, Bashō visited her home in 1694 and wrote a haiku comparing her to a pure white chrysanthemum. But she gained notoriety when Bashō died two weeks later, giving rise to a rumor that the cause of his last ailment was the mushrooms she had served him at her house. The rumor had no solid basis, for Bashō had been in frail health for quite some time. Nevertheless, the innuendoes seemed to alienate her from Bashō while he yet...

Critical opinion of Chiyojo’s poetry has ranged from one extreme to another. In premodern Japan, her literary fame almost equalled Bashō’s. During her lifetime, her verses appeared in more than one hundred books of haikai; few anthologists of the time would have dared to exclude her work. So high was her reputation nationally that the lord of Kaga (Ishikawa Prefecture), her province, commissioned her in 1763 to make fifteen fans and six hanging scrolls with her poems written on them; they were to be included among the shogun’s gifts to envoys from Korea. In the twentieth century, however, Chiyojo’s haiku...

Whereas Chiyojo’s reputation has plummeted, Enomoto Seifu’s haiku have been accorded ever higher critical acclaim in the twentieth century. The reappraisal of her work started indirectly with Shiki, who gave profuse praise to Buson’s poetry for its objective, colorful, and dramatic qualities, the same qualities that characterize Seifu’s. Although Shiki himself made no reference to her, his followers were motivated to pay attention to Buson’s contemporaries and eventually discovered, or rediscovered, her haiku. Especially since the poet Nishitani Seinosuke (1897–1932) praised her in 1929, her stature as a poet has steadily grown. In 1953 Yamamoto Kenkichi went so far...

Tagami Kikusha once wrote, “My guiding principle has always been to enjoy life.”¹ The better to observe this principle, she mastered the arts of painting, calligraphy, koto music, tanka, Chinese poetry, and, of course, haiku. With the same principle in mind she spent most of her adult life traveling all over Japan, visiting distant places, and meeting all kinds of people. Considering the feudal restrictions placed on women’s conduct in those days, Kikusha was a carefree spirit who lived life on her own terms. She was able to do so, however, only after she renounced her femininity at the young...

Takeshita Shizunojo was one of the few women haiku poets to appear in the early years of modern Japan. Wives, at that time, were responsible for nearly all domestic matters. With a husband and five children, home life was extremely busy and oppressive for her. In 1920 she wrote

She included the comment: “This expresses a middleclass woman’s heartfelt cry at a certain moment, when she was at a loss spiritually, physically, and materially as she was caught half by herself and half by the old customs in this transitional period.”¹

Shizunojo was born Takeshita Shizuno on 19 March 1887...

“Devoted to art, I have not taken good care of my home,” Sugita Hisajo wrote. “I am nothing as a woman. A vampire. A heretic. I have always been accused, pressured, and spat upon this way by people around me, so that I thought of suicide several times.”¹ These words, from the preface to her own magazine Hanagoromo (Clothes for flower viewing), well suggest her attitude toward writing haiku. Passionate and idealistic, she worked hard to compose haiku while neglecting domestic chores. Such conflict between ideals and reality was to plague her throughout her adult life.

Hisajo was born Akabori...

As a young woman, Hashimoto Takako had beauty, talent, and affluence. Yet her husband died when she was still in her prime, and the social reorganization resulting from the Second World War took away most of the advantages she had enjoyed. “Between one person and another, there is no bridge,”¹ she is reported to have said. Through haiku, she tried hard to build these bridges until the end of her life. Whether she succeeded in that attempt remains a question, but her haiku grew progressively richer.

Born as Yamatani Tama in Tokyo on 15 January 1899, Takako majored in painting...

Mitsuhashi Takajo said: “To write a haiku is to remove a scale. Doing so is proof that we are alive.”¹ She herself was covered with “scales”: that is, by fragments of the complex self she had constructed to protect herself. From her youth onwards, her haiku embraced a wide variety of topics and styles, until the grief of old age, the wish for transfiguration, and forebodings of death came largely to occupy her work. The unevenness of her work indicates a determination for self-improvement whatever the poetic cost.

Takajo was born Mitsuhashi Takako on 24 December 1899 in Nara, the...

Sakura koku (Cherry blossoms deep), published in 1949 by her husband Yamamoto Kenkichi, is the only book authored by Ishibashi Hideno. The contents were originally selected by Hideno and were edited by her husband after her death. The book includes twelve essays and some 260 haiku. “I actually feel,” said Yamamoto, “that haiku began with Bashō and ended with Hideno.”¹ Certainly, her death was a devastating blow to Yamamoto, but there is more than a little truth in his judgment. Sakura koku was the first recipient of the Kawabata Bōsha Prize, which became one of the highest honors in haiku....

Katsura Nobuko was born Niwa Nobuko in Osaka on 1 November 1914 and almost died of acute pneumonia when she was five. After graduating from Ōtemae Girls’ High School, she began writing haiku when the poems in Kikan (The flagship) magazine impressed her with their nontraditional style. She subsequently met the magazine’s editor, Hino Sōjō, and became his protégé. Her marriage in 1939 changed her family name to Katsura, but her husband died two years later. Childless, she returned to her mother’s home. On 13 March 1945, American planes bombed Osaka. Nobuko’s house caught fire. She struggled in vain to...

Yoshino Yoshiko lives in Matsuyama, a city well known in Japan for haiku. Masaoka Shiki, Takahama Kyoshi, and Nakamura Kusatao all wrote haiku there when they were young. The Shiki Memorial Museum, which honors the poet and his circle, is one of the finest devoted to him. In 2000, the International Haiku Convention was held in Matsuyama, and awards named after Shiki were presented. Activities like this are common in Matsuyama, and Yoshiko has long been part of that tradition.

She was born in Taiwan on 13 July 1915, the daughter of Ogawa Naoyoshi, who was a friend of Shiki’s,...

When young, Tsuda Kiyoko wrote nothing but tanka. But one day she happened to attend one of Hashimoto Takako’s haiku meetings, at which most of the participants were men who seemed to pay little attention to their appearance. Asked to present a haiku, Kiyoko had no seventeen-syllable verse ready; instead she offered the first half of a tanka. It was a novel “haiku,” so novel that it was accepted by Takako. The experience opened Kiyoko’s eyes to this new verse form, and she began experimenting with it. Takako became her teacher.

Tsuda Kiyoko was born on 25 June 1920 in...

“To sing of flowers and birds and copy things objectively is the way of traditional haiku. I have assiduously tried not to stray from that path.”¹ Inahata Teiko wrote these words in her third book of haiku; she might have said she was following what Takahama Kyoshi taught. Teiko, a granddaughter of Kyoshi, has never wavered in her devotion to his legacy. In 2000 she opened the Kyoshi Memorial Museum near her home in Ashiya, a suburb of Kobe.

Teiko was born in Yokohama on 8 January 1931. Her father, Takahama Toshio (1900–1979), was Kyoshi’s eldest son and successor...

Uda Kiyoko, when still a beginner in haiku, asked at a haiku meeting why the first line of Hara Sekitei’s (1886–1951) famous haiku should be “autumn wind” rather than, say, “spring wind.” An older haiku poet replied that if the haiku had begun with “spring wind,” the plates would have had the same pattern. The answer was convincing to Kiyoko, though she did not know how to explain it. The older poet was just an ordinery citizen, but he knew his haiku.¹ Since then, she has learned much from similar comments by a number of such people.

Born in...

“Compose many haiku and throw away many” is Kuroda Momoko’s advice to beginners. “In the process, you will discover the true state of your mind. If you start writing haiku, compose a lot of them”—as many as five a day.¹ Make your first haiku the starting point for the others. Then you can be the first to choose which one comes closest to what you want to express. The rest can be thrown away without reluctance.

This attitude partly reflects Kuroda Momoko’s busy career. Born in Tokyo on 10 August 1938, she was evacuated in middle school to northern...

Walking one day in winter, Tsuji Momoko noticed a house with a rattan blind. Why a sun blind in winter? She looked at it—then realized someone in the house was looking at her. All of a sudden a haiku came to her:

This episode, from the beginning of one of her books, shows how easy it is to create a haiku. And that is characteristic of her: she uses haiku for recording the moment even as it disappears.

Tsuji Momoko, whose family name is Shimizu, was born in Yokohama on 4 February 1945. Educated at Waseda University, she first...

“Not many young people think of haiku as a means of self-expression. Yet some of my contemporaries always choose it for themselves. I feel haiku may quietly live on with these people.” Such is the conclusion of Katayama Yumiko in her article, “Josei haiku no mirai” (The future of women’s haiku). She has no excessive expectations of haiku, but she does not minimize its value, either. “By looking at things that are not noticed except by haiku poets,” she says, “women may feel a bit happier and better to be alive. I want haiku to give them this opportunity.”¹

Born...

“For me, composing haiku means ‘gathering treasures,’” says Mayuzumi Madoka. “The moment I feel is more clearly printed in my heart than on any beautiful picture postcard.”¹ The moments she speaks of include many things that come from the West—a Porsche, a McDonald’s hamburger, a polo shirt, a German shepherd, sunglasses. Madoka is a modern woman who lives in a large city and is familiar with all these things. She is smart, sophisticated, and contemporary.

Madoka’s father is Mayuzumi Shū (b. 1930), a haiku poet who edits the magazine Haruno (The spring field). Born in Kanagawa Prefecture on 31...