Modern Japanese haiku: An anthology

by Makoto Ueda

English, Japanese

Genres: Poetry

265 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Makoto Ueda (上田 真 Ueda Makoto, born 1931) is a professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Stanford University.

He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1961.

In 2004-2005 he served as the honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, California. He was given that honor "in recognition of Ueda’s many decades of academic writing about haiku and related genres and his leading translations of Japanese haiku." The library added that "Ueda has been our most consistently useful source for information on Japanese haiku, as well as our finest source for the poems in translation, from Bashô to the present day." His work on female poets and 20th century poets "had an enormous impact".

He is an author of numerous books about Japanese literature and in particular Haiku, Senryū, Tanka, and Japanese poetics.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

We dream that books are possessions; of course, they are not. How do you really possess a book of any real complexity, when it's something of the slipperiest quintessence? I think we keep our favorite books around precisely because we cannot truly possess them.

This is especially true of a book like this anthology. Makoto Ueda is a celebrated anthologist, but this particular title is a little hard to find. Copies will appear sometimes on ABE or other secondhand retailers. That's where I found it. It dates back to 1976 and was brought out by the University of Toronto Press.

I really love this anthology because many of the poets in here were (past tense: most are long-dead but a few were living at the time of the book's publication) writing experimental or non-traditional haiku.

Some samples:

Masaoko Shiki (1867-1902)

After killing
a spider how lonely I feel
in the cold of night!

For love and for hate
I swat a fly and offer it
to an ant.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916)

Onto a charcoal kiln
a vine keeps climbing, while
being burnt to death.

On New Year's Day
I long to meet my parents
as they were before my birth.

Takahama Kyoshi (1874-1959)

A gold bug--
I hurt it into the darkness
and feel the depth of night.

He says a word,
and I say a word--autumn
is deepening

Kato Shuson (1905-1993)

I kill an ant
and realize my three children
have been watching.

A pheasant, with eyes
defiantly glaring,
is being sold.

Saito Sanki (1900-1962)

On the other shore,
a person: the cold wind
connects me to him.

A rooster:
beneath the fallen leaves
there is not a thing.

And here's one whose closing became the name of a celebrated English language haiku journal that enjoyed a very long run in America.

Tomizawa Kakio (1900-1962)

Within her eyes,
ant ant ant ant ant.

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seminal. Quite possibly the most important collection of translated haiku (and significant history, context, discussion) one could ever read, by a linguist of incredible finesse and capability.

[Ben Rasmussen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In any collection of haiku, some of the haiku resonate and many do not. This is possibly even more true with this collection, where the writers and I do not share a common culture and where the writers were mostly living and writing during the several decades surrounding World War II. Many, if not most, of them were drafted into military service during the war between Japan and China in the 1930s or into WW2 itself. Several of them suffered debilitating diseases--some related to military service and some not--which in most cases shortened their lives.

Overall, I found this collection to be excellent and found many of the haiku to be particularly beautiful, insightful, touching, and/or haunting.

[Ben Gaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice read and one of the few books who's introduction is as interesting as the text therein. This book is proof in the pudding that haiku has a large elastic waistband in its history. The last 100 years have seen many iterations in Japan, much as it is stretching itself now in English. So English language haiku poets rest easy. We will not lose our way, just map out new constellations in the sky to sit along the known ones that will never fade or say goodby.