World Haiku Review Spring 2025
One Hundred Haijin after Shiki
Susumu Takiguchi
Part Thirteen
Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) famously predicted that haiku could become extinct by the end of the Meiji Era (1868-1912). How wrong he was! And how delighted we are that he was wrong, without being unkind to him! This is indeed a cause for celebration.
One way of celebrating it could be to choose at random one hundred Japanese haiku poets who have helped to prove him wrong. If we chose one hundred best the case would be strong. But if we chose randomly, and not necessarily the best, one hundred from among, say, about five hundred who have been leading figures in the modern history of haiku in Japan, the case would be even stronger.
With this in mind, I would like to serialise my narratives in World Haiku Review about the one hundred Japanese haijin whom I shall choose at random and talk about. There is no particular reason why the number should be one hundred. It could be two hundred or fifty. Just over one hundred years have passed since the end of the Meiji Era, and a little bit longer since Shiki died. So, the number one hundred would not be bad. To write about more than one hundred haijin could be exhausting. If the number was fifty, the endeavour could be unsatisfactory and frustrating as more would surely be desired to be introduced. One thing which is certain is that it is not really intended to follow the fashion to use the number one hundred in haiku books, originally emanating from the ancient waka anthology Hyaku-Nin-Isshu (one poem each by one hundred poets). Being a heso-magari (contrarian) I would in fact have liked to avoid this cliché.
Part Thirteen
Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Too clever for his own good
Akutagawa (surname) Ryunosuke (given name)
01 March 1892 ~ 24 July 1927
Following the academic convention of Japanese studies, Japanese full names are written in the order of the country’s practice, i.e. surname followed by given name.
水洟や鼻の先だけ暮れ残る
mizubana ya hana no saki dake kure-nokoru
running at the nostrils…
on the tip of the nose, the sun
still has not set
Arguably this is the most famous of all one thousand or so haiku poems written by this genius Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke during his entire life, which was tragically cut short by his suicide at 35. He gave a title to this haiku: Self-mockery. It is said to be one of his early works but because he chose this particular haiku to entrust with someone close to him just before he took his life by overdose it is now regarded as his death poem. (Some say Akutagawa wrote this haiku in calligraphy on the shikishi format soon before his suicide.)
Akutagawa was one of the brainiest writers of modern Japan. He was also one of the most cynical, witty and satirical. He criticised, mocked, joked and teased by satire. One of his short novels is called Hana, or nose.
This little novel was written when the author was still a university student. It received a great accolade from Natsume Soseki, the doyen novelist at the time, which catapulted this amateur writer into a full-time professional. And the rest is history. He got the inspiration to write this story from an ancien Japanese literary anthology. It depicts human folly, neurotic worry about other people’s opinion of one, obsessive concern about one’s defects and inadequacies.
The hero of the novel is a fifty-year old medieval priest but with an elephantine long nose dangling down below his chin. It tormented him from childhood in every way but most intensely by making him worried to death about other people laughing at and talking about him behind his back. He pretended to be totally unconcerned. But inside, he was desperate to find just any measures to shorten his nose as his pride was deeply wounded.
Rescue was there. A doctor recommended boiling his nose and getting his disciple to stamp it well, and boil it again, resulting in massive discharge of blackheads. The priest could not believe his eyes when he saw his long nose having shrunk to above his upper lip just like anybody else’s! He was so overjoyed that he just could not leave his new nose alone, fondling, touching and caressing it to make double-sure that it really was short and normal. He was having a blissfully relaxed time as he was now convinced that nobody would laugh at him any more.
However, several days later it dawned on him that somehow something had gone amiss because people were laughing at him even more loudly now. He thus came to the realisation that people were actually so mean that they resented his nose having become normal and that he was happy for it.
Before long, the priest started to regret having had his nose shortened. And then, one night he felt his nose bloated. The following morning he found the nose back to the good old length. He told himself, “Now no one should and will laugh at me”.
Akutagawa’s running-nose haiku is believed to have something to do with the story of the long-nosed priest, especially because of its title of self-mockery. The fact that Akutagawa entrusted it with someone just before he committed suicide (some exceptionally asserts that it was not suicide but miscalculateddose or even it was a case of him momentarily going insane, as his mother did) gives it a profound meaning and context. It is obvious that he was re-examining his life as it began to look as though all was not necessarily well. Being a deep thinker he might well have been his harshest critic. One cannot help thinking of the play of Cyrano de Bergerac here.
Let us see what is going on in the haiku itself, which I think has many interesting and revelatory hidden meanings. It is said that he had an inferiority complex about his long face. This is odd because most people think he was rather handsome beside looking frightfully intellectual. He certainly did not look like an ordinary person, even if he comes of ordinary stock (His father was a milk merchant.) So, he took great interest in the tale of the long-nosed priest. He might even have empathised with him. The subject common to both is various negative emotions or feelings of humanity: pride, inferiority complex, obsessive concern about the opinions of others about oneself, true or imagined, jealousy etc.. In short, it’s all too human but it’s all in the mind!
What about the tip of Akutagawa’s nose? One assumes that the setting sun is on it while the world is getting dark all around him. I always had an image that the sun is lighting it while the running nose is also lit, perhaps with its tip swelling itself into a tiny ball, hanging in the air delicately balanced between gravity and its pull of stickiness. My own father used to let the running nose run without wiping it with a piece of tissue, which became too tedious for him after a while. That isthe image I had when I first read this haiku. Darkness can be interpreted as the dark mood the author was sinking into when he contemplated his death. The tip of the nose may symbolise that somewhere in him there was still a will to live or the life itself which was just about worth living. However, the nose is running like life running out of him. Without positive intervention he would die. Akutagawa may have been seeing this irony with a detached sense of humour, which was nothing but self-mockery.
Mizubana (watery mucus from the nose) is thin, transparent and watery, unlike the yellowish jelly-like substance discharged when you catch real cold. This may also be a metaphor for something seemingly innocuous but deadly if left unchecked. The conjecture can be extended to such an extent that this was actually nothing but a cry for help, not at the time of writing it long time before but at the very time when he was in a state of mental and emotional distress and his resolve to terminate his life became imminent.
All this makes the haiku witty, humorous and even sardonic as well as profoundly tragic.
Now let us see some more examples o
Akutagawa’s haiku:
木枯らしや目刺しに残る海の色
kogarashi ya mezashi ni nokoru umi no iro
winter wind…
still seen on the dried fish
the colour of the sea
Another famous haiku by Akutagawa. Mezashi is dried fish, usually smallish sardine or small Japanese horse mackerel mildly or fully dried under the sun. If grilled, it regains some moisture and becomes tender. Often, six of them are bound together by a bamboo stick or straw pierced through their eyes as the name (piercing through the eye) indicates. It is preserved food and popular at the Japanese breakfast table. It is a spring kigo but Akutagawa used kogarashi (winter wind) as the main kigo.
Even dried, mezashi still has a blue sheen which he calls the colour of the sea. Thus, the sea, fish, the fisherman who caught it and dried into tasty food and the poet who presumably would be eating it as his favourite food are all encompassed in a little human-nature drama, mundane but an essential part of the whole.
The haiku is held to have been written in Taisho 6 (1917). It is understood that someone in Nagasaki, his friend or a fan, sent the mezashi to Akutagawa as a present. The latter was very pleased with it enough to want to compose a haiku on it. In a way, the haiku is an aisatsu-ku (a greeting haiku) in that the author wanted to express his gratitude by the act of composing it. If this was the case, the sea he referred to would be the water west of Nagasaki area, famed for delicious fresh fish, including sardines, which the author as a Tokyo native would look upon with admiration. The colour of the sea transported by these fish plays the role of a messenger of goodwill to which the author responded with this excellent haiku.
松風をうつつに聞くよ夏帽子
matsu-kaze wo utsutsu ni kiku-yo natsu-bohshi
wind through the pine trees…
I listen to it fully awake wit
my summer hat on
You would not be blamed to think not much of this haiku if you were not told of the background of it. It was written in 1923, the year when the Great Kanto Earthquake occurred, leaving estimated 105,000 dead or missing and devastating better part of Tokyo and surrounding prefectures. Akutagawa was wandering among the rubble soon after the disaster and when he was around the Zojo-ji Temple a keen sense that this was not a dream but real overwhelmed him. The severity of the earthquake must have deprived him of the sense of reality until the changed landscape hit home. It happened on 1 September which means that it was the time of zansho, or the remnant of hot summer heat, hence the summer hat. I would venture to guess that it was a panama hat which was favoured by many men of letters. Akutagawa was quite a dandy with a flair for good taste and distinct style. Whether the pines were burnt or not is a moot point. The sound made by the wind would have been more sad and forlorn if the pine needles were all burnt up.
It was only four years before he committed suicide. By venturing out he chose to expose himself to the results of the catastrophe, death, destruction and sorrow. As a complicated writer, he had different worlds, a real world, his intellectual world, the world he depicted in his novels and fantasy world his mental condition may have been creating. One is tempted to speculate that he wanted to witness, experience and ponder upon the real and woken world by facing up to the huge disaster which struck Japan. This sentiment is expressed in the word utsutsu which means reality and consciousness. Akutagawa wanted to make sure that he was woken, conscious and sane.
花曇り捨てて悔いなき古恋や
hana gumori sute-te kui naki furu-koi ya
cherry-cloudy day
no regret to abandon
an old love affair
Hana-gumori is the season word for spring when you cannot enjoy warm and pleasant day with cherry blossoms to view because it is cloudy. However, the Japanese people’s love for the blossoms is such that they enjoy it nonetheless. The denial of full cherry viewing gives them a special kind of appreciation of the flowers, i.e. a mixture of disappointment with mild melancholy and resignation, and even an unusual sense of quiet sense of delight akin to unrequited or lost love. It is a sense of joy a human being feels over something not because you have it but because you have not. Basho wrote a haiku appreciating not being able to see Mt. Fuji because of rain, a similar sentiment. This may well be outside the western sensibility.
Physically Akutagawa was rather short and slim (lanky, rather), a feature he was not proud of and sometimes a target of mockery like his friend Dazai Osamu, another great literary figure, teasing him for his height, or lack of it. But he had a longish and attractive face with a glint in his eye, and incredibly intellectual-looking aura. Thus it was that his life was not one without love affairs, sometimes controversial. They tended to be negative, tragic even, and affected not only his life but also the stories he wrote. His first love was for the family’s maid, an affair doomed to failure in a still feudalistic society. His illicit love affair with a married woman turned a nightmare for him as the woman became a stalker and harassed him with or without being with him. As if to compensate for it all, his last love was pure and poetic. A tanka writer, the woman he met at Karuizawa through a friend of his became involved with him through correspondence. She confessed her love for him in one of these letters, to which Akutagawa did not reply directly. However, he wrote his feelings in 25 tanka which were published in the Myojo. She appears as a model in his novels. One would not be blamed for assuming that the haiku in question refers to the obsessive woman who tormented Akutagawa and from whom he dearly wished to free himself.
青蛙おのれもペンキぬりたてか
ao-gaeru onore mo penki nuri-tate-ka
green frog…
have you also had yourself
just painted?
A green frog is a frog that lives on a low tree or grass. It is about 7 cm long but unlike its smaller cousin it does not have a distinct black line behind the eyes but just black blotches. When on a leaf it is green but on moving to tree trunks or to the ground it turns brown, using this camouflage to protect itself from predators. When green, the frog blends into the surrounding green leaves and becomes invisible, well almost. It has a shine like gloss paint which is the quality Akutagawa focused on. Unlike old and dull paint it gives a fresh and rich feeling pertaining to summer extravagance. The freshly applied paint is something no one else would or could think of in a haiku, proving the author’s individuality or uniqueness. Ao means blue in modern Japanese but has since ancient times been used when the colour green is described. But then, midori (green) was and still is used to describe the beauty of very black hair! It does not mean that the ancient Japanese people were colour-blind.
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