It used to be quite normal in countries of the West when discussing Japanese literature or art to point out the enormous indebtedness to Chinese predecessors and to imply that the Japanese lacked creativity or imagination. When I first began to teach Japanese literature at Cambridge University, people who discovered my subject would sometimes ask, “Why in the world should you teach the literature of a race of imitators?” I am afraid that this viewpoint was fairly general, although once in a while I met people who had read the marvelous translations of Japanese literature by Arthur Waley. They knew...

Haiku’s popularity is worldwide today, comparable even to the modern Western realistic novel. Indeed, Japanesehaikuverses are now translated into many languages,haikuvariants are being composed in different tongues on all the major continents, and a quick Internet search onhaikuproduces more than three million links on the subject. While the general interest inhaikucontinues to grow, few people outside Japan know abouthaikai, or comic linked verse, which gave birth tohaiku. Even fewer know about the interesting role that Chinese Daoist classics played in its becoming a high art. This book examines an important...

Haikai, a Japanese poetic form that is roughly translated as comic linked verse, evolved fromrenga, or classical linked verse, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fromrengatohaikai no renga(orhaikai), and then to the independence of the opening verse ofhaikai,hokku, orhaiku, as it is known today, Japanese linked verse experienced dramatic changes in its form and nature: a full-length, aristocratic parlor art became an extremely condensed, popular poem with internalized irony as its core.Haikaicreation reached its apogee in the latter half of the seventeenth century. During this period, three successivehaikai...

The Danrin’sgūgenstyle prevailed in the world ofhaikaiin the middle of the Enpō era (1673–1681). By the end of the 1670s, some of the Danrin poets were pushing “the free exaggerations” and “the most deluding falsehoods” to an extreme, promoting a style that some critics described as deviant(itai)and dissipated(hōratsu).¹ While this deviant new phase of Danrinhaikaiinvited more fierce criticism from the Teimon and otherhaikaicircles, poets who were tired of the endless debate over different styles asserted that the genre should be essentially natural and truthful. This new trend, accompanied...

With his move to Fukagawa, Bashō’s thematic emphasis shifted from explicit philosophical truth to poetic truth, or to use his own term,fūga no makoto. Yet the truth of poetry Bashō and his school pursued was infused with Daoist ideas, particularly the spirit of carefree wandering(shōyōyū). Hirota Jirō even goes so far as to call Bashō’s dwelling at Fukagawa “a site ofshōyōyū.”¹ Bashō and his school were interested inshōyōyū, not simply for its philosophical implications, but more out of aspiration to re-create the poetic profundity they saw in Chinese poetry, particularly in the poems that magnified the...

Oku no hosomichi, the best-known piece of Bashō’s travel journal, contains the following passage:

After having arrived at the post station of Sukagawa, I called upon a man named Tōkyū, who insisted that we stay at his house for a few days. He asked me how I had fared at the barrier of Shirakawa. I replied that I was unable to compose any poems. I had been totally exhausted from the long journey, partly because I had been overwhelmed by the scenic landscape and by nostalgic thoughts of the past. It would have been regrettable, however, to cross the barrier...

After Bashō’s journey, which he recorded inThe Narrow Road to the Depths (Oku no hosomichi), the Shōmonhaikaiwitnessed a stylistic change in the 1690s, as Bashō’s disciple Kyorai observed:

When the late Master came back to the capital from his journey to the far North, our school’s style changed drastically. We all carried a knapsack to see the Master at the Unreal Dwelling, or attended his lectures at the Fallen Persimmons Cottage. Most of us learned the essentials of the Master’s teaching during that time.HisagoandSaruminowere the results.¹

Hisago(Gourd, 1690) andSarumino(Monkey’s straw...

Followingzōkaand returning tozōka, Bashō led his school to transform the nature ofhaikaifundamentally. Under his guidance, the Shōmon School produced some of the besthaikaisequences of all time, but the reality ofhaikaicreation in general was still far from what the master had expected. The following verse is commonly read as a revelation of Bashō’s lonely feelings in the world ofhaikaiduring the last year of his life:

This road—

no one goes down

autumn’s end.

kono michi ya/yuku hito nashi ni/aki no kure¹

Bashō’s concern seems to have come from the realization...