The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki

Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture

by Donald Keene

Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Altogether, his reforms made the haiku Japan's most influential modern cultural export.

Using extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene charts Shiki's revolutionary (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these traditional genres possible in a globalizing world. Keene particularly highlights random incidents and encounters in his impressionistic portrait of this tragically young life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki's work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in Keene's narrative, which also includes sharp observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Soseki. In addition, Keene reflects on his own personal relationship with Shiki's work, further developing the nuanced, deeply felt dimensions of its power.

Genres: Poetry, Japan, Biography, Literary Criticism

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Donald Keene was a renowned American-born Japanese scholar, translator, and historian of Japanese literature. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, he developed a love for foreign cultures early in life. He graduated from Columbia University in 1942 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he studied Japanese at the Navy Language School. After the war, he returned to Columbia for his master’s and later earned a second master’s at Cambridge, followed by a PhD from Columbia in 1949. He studied further at Kyoto University and became a leading authority on Japanese literature.
Keene taught at Columbia University for over fifty years and published extensively in both English and Japanese, introducing countless readers to Japanese classics. His mentors included Ryusaku Tsunoda and Arthur Waley, whose translations deeply influenced him. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Keene retired from Columbia, moved to Japan, and became a Japanese citizen under the name Kīn Donarudo. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 2008, the first non-Japanese recipient. Keene remained active in literary and cultural life in Japan until his death in 2019 at the age of 96.

Reviews

[Davvybrookbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Donald Keene has been at the forefront of my recent entry into turn-of-the-century Japanese modernism, as well as post-war (WWII) literature. He translated Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human, wrote on the wartime diaries of Japanese literary figures to capture just how significant the war brought home impacted people, their beliefs, and literature; one of those voices was Nagai Kafu, a contemporary novelist of Natsume Soseki. Like these two legends of the Japanese literary world, this biography introduces their poetic counterpart, Shiki Masaoka.

Shiki Masaoka was a transformational Meiji-era poet and critic who restored haiku to a worthwhile pursuit and reformed its methods of composition. ‘Shasei’, or sketches from life, is the realist concept adapted to writing haikai. While traditional Japanese aesthetics had and still celebrate the motifs and themes of nature and the seasons, ‘shasei’ was inspired by Western modernist painterly approaches. Thus, like Soseki, also a close friend of Shiki, one of the most crucial roles Shiki completes is to remake and revitalize a dying poetic form through a modern way of seeing the world.

As it spreads over
In the autumn breeze, how red it looks—
My tooth powder

The mundane and even ugly elements of daily like have replaced the nature representations that in becoming cliche and pastiche nearly brought writing haikai to its demise. This Basho haiku is perhaps the most celebrated and successful:

The ancient pond
The fish jumps in
The sound of water

It seems this review could continue in several other directions, and so it seems safe to say that this read will fascinate anyone interested in a brief history of Japanese literature. Many other genres are presented: for poetry (despite having no inclusive world for these genres) there are haiku, tanka, kanshi, shintaishi, renga (extinct); of the types of plays examined only noh is included, which often use haiku structures and the characters often recite tanka. And novels, to which Shiki wrote one with a traditional Japanese motif, ‘snow in winter’ entitled The Silver World.

I learned so much about other Japanese authors and their works from this biography of Makaoka Shiki, the man who despite ill health and hardship, personally reviewed, analyzed and categorized one thousand years of haikus and formed the modern sensibility of the art form known to the world today. His scholarship, daily newspaper publications, and disciples carried on a tradition that today is robust. Likewise, he influenced tanka poets to reflect in the same light more modern sensibilities of colloquial language use, personal/emotional topics from everyday observations. Haiku tend to use stronger, more archaic vocabulary while tanka could be imbued with pronouns, emotions, and lengthier accounts due to the differences in their established forms. Haiku also tend to be fragmentary, not cohesive or comprehensive and should begin (in medias res) in the middle of action (or is this what Ezra Pound says about poems?).

Here a 17-syllable haiku by Shiki Masaoka playfully thanking his friend, tanka poet, Amada Guan, for a gift of persimmons:

Leftover from
An offering to the Buddha—
Fifteen persimmons

…and Guan’s 31-syllable tanka response:

These, I suppose, are leftovers
From the persimmons offered
To the Buddha—
Ten plus five of them
And I ate every one.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading two biographies lately – the hefty Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life and this slim biography of Masaoka Shiki. Compared to the prodigious Benjamin who compels admiration, Shiki's Life struck me as remarkably slight, almost parodic, the story of a poet who never had a love affair and spent the last years of his short life confined to his bedroom by tuberculosis, writing poems about persimmons and wisteria while coughing up blood, a series of newspaper essays (A Six-Foot Sickbed) and a waspish diary (Supine Notes) that registers precise notes on his bowel movements and bitter complaints about his sister/nurse. His passions are as strong as they are comically inconsequential.

And yet by all accounts he was a great man, of sorts. Keene concludes that Shiki "changed the nature of poetry," rescuing the forms of haiku and tanka from oblivion. This book is occasionally surprising, sometimes dull, and finally mysterious.

As is the poetry. I suspect an English reader can only dimly appreciate the art of haiku, but Burton Watson's selection is full of charm and sadness.

[Steve]

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

Rustling softly
over the bamboo -
snow in the night (*)


The quintessentially Japanese poetic form haiku, consisting of a mere three lines of five, seven and five syllables, is a strange and wondrous beast. Originally called hokku because it was the initial verse in a long renga, or linked verse poem, the form could emancipate itself from its original context, I believe, due to the Japanese taste for the evanescent and slight. The primary impetus for this emancipation was Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694), who demonstrated what a master could do with this little poetic form. Just as one has seen in the reception of haiku in the West, it seemed so easy to compose a haiku that poetasters of every description threw themselves upon the form and merrily generated millions of quintessentially ephemeral texts. Needless to say, after a few centuries of that, when the modernizing impulses of the Meiji era arrived in Japan the haiku form appeared to be on its deathbed and destined to be cast aside into the dustbin of history.

Until the young Masaoka Shiki became interested in the form.

Shiki was born in the year before the Meiji Restoration to a family of minor samurai. His father, unable to adapt to the massive reforms of the Restoration (which included the elimination of the role and financial support of the samurai class), drank himself to death by the time Shiki was five years old. His mother supported Shiki and his sister thenceforth by giving needlework lessons and sewing on commission. Shiki was a rather unpromising lad and took a while to find his place in life; then he had his first bout of coughing up blood and it was soon clear that his was going to be the short life of a consumptive. Worse, the tuberculosis entered his spine and he found himself immobilized, bedridden and suffering incredible pain for the last six years of his life.

Not only did Shiki hold out long past the point at which nearly anyone else would have said ade,(**) he became one of the leading literary critics of the Meiji era; founded a new school of haiku style that rescued the form from its doldrums by breaking up the petrified forest of allowed topics essentially going back to the 17th century and admitting the modern world into its refined halls; and generated a vast quantity of poems of such quality that it is now generally accepted by specialists that the big four of the haiku form are Basho, Yosa Buson (1716-1783)(***), Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) and Shiki.

In The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (2013) Donald Keene (b. 1922) writes of Shiki's life, times, work and influence in an informative text that might not be quite as well written as one has come to expect from Keene(4*) but is still a welcome read. He provides translations of extensive passages from Shiki's journals, letters, fiction and other prose texts. He also translates a good number of Shiki's poems, but for those I would recommend that you go first to Burton Watson's Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems. Keene is a master at translating Japanese prose, but compare the following:

As I eat a persimmon
The temple bell tolls at
Horyuji.

(Keene)

I eat a persimmon
and a bell starts booming -
Horyu-ji !

(Watson)

I fear that appreciation for the haiku form is a very personal taste, and I cannot explain why the following enthralls me so:

Autumn leaves flanking it
on either side,
a raft headed downstream

That little bit of text causes me to imagine an entire scene of carefree leisure in beautiful autumnal surroundings. Shiki maintained that it is precisely this trait of suggesting much more than is explicitly stated that constitutes the excellence of the haiku, along with poetic tension and sudden illumination.

As mentioned, the modern world enters Shiki's haiku, and, to me, this one is eloquent of a hot summer night in one of Tokyo's poorer districts:

Tenement house -
mosquito repellent smoldering
in every window down the row

And humor is no stranger to Shiki's haiku:

Sounds of snoring -
a plate and a sake bottle
set outside the mosquito net

You might want to give these a try.


(*) Unless otherwise stated, all translations are by Burton Watson and taken from Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems (1997).

(**) Shiki's mother selflessly cared for him during the long years of decline. In a very fine kanshi - a poem written in Chinese and in one of the more expansive Chinese poetic forms - Shiki gives us a glimpse of her in this excerpt:

My mother lives here too -
fifty years old and never worn silk -
bustling bustling beside the blue lamp,
stitching clothes, eyes fixed on thread and needle.

She long outlived her only son.

(***) It was Shiki who rescued Buson from the near total obscurity his work had fallen into by the end of the 19th century.

(4*) But then how many nonagenarians can write as well as they once did? The wonder is that Keene is still producing good books at all.

[Ad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction to the work of Masaoka Shiki, who in his short life of only 35 years single-handedly modernized the traditional poetic genres of haiku (hokku) and tanka (waka) and made them suitable for the modern world. Unfortunately, it is a rather slight book that remains on the surface while a more in-depth treatment of this crucially important poet and critic is long overdue. It is good that Keene pays attention to some lesser subjects, such as Shiki's kanshi (poetry written in classical Chinese), but I could do without the longish evaluations of the (in Keene's view, lack of) moral character of the poet.

[Megu Togashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked learning about Shiki and I like how Keene wrote the book. The parts about actually explaining poetry was boring but that's just cause of my lack of interest in that stuff hehe

[Jon Holt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short accessible book about a poet whose works were short and accessible (and as Keene argues made haiku accessible for future generations). Given Keene's immense knowledge of Japanese literature, in this condensed biography we get to see what Keene sees are the best and most notable points of Shiki's art. The sections on shasei are quite good. In fact, I think readers should read the 1st and then the last few chapters (except "Last Days") and then read the whole book to get a sense of Shiki's accomplishments. The weakness of the book is that it jumps around the chronology so you don't get a sense of how Shiki developed his ideas (and surely Keene could have done this for us), but that may be my own conservative taste for straightforward timelines when it comes to biography. Otherwise, a good, easily digestible book on an important poet.

[モーリー · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be better, but Keene gets bogged down in details and the important points get lost among them. A deluge of small events makes it a dull read after a while. Shiki is an interesting enough person that it was a bit disappointing.