Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival (review)

On May 21, 2001, President George W. Bush was given an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree during Yale University’s commencement exercises. In brief remarks to the crowd, he assured the “C” students in the graduating class that they, like him, might aspire to be president and then went on to reminisce about his undergraduate days. He mentioned having taken a course on “Japanese haiku . . . a fifteenth-century [sic] form of poetry, each poem only having seventeen syllables . . . fully understood only by the Zen masters.” He said that one of his advisers had worried about his choice of “such a specialized course: he said I should focus on English.” (There was laughter here.) “I still hear that quite often. My critics don’t realize I don’t make verbal gaffes: I’m speaking in the perfect forms and rhythms of ancient haiku.” (More grim laughter here.¹)

At least the president was right about one thing: haiku, or more properly hokku or haikai, to speak of a genre and practice that rose to prominence from the seventeenth century onward, can appear to be all too deceptively simple. To explain haikai verses duly requires ample insight and knowledge, though not necessarily the training of “Zen masters.” And despite the efforts of many hands, scholarly and otherwise, most hokku (or haikai links or sequences) do not translate well out of Japanese. Verses such as Yosa Buson’s

sararetaru mi wo funkonde taue ka na

translated in the book under review here as

though divorced she stamps down hard planting rice

(p. 78)

run a great risk of looking and sounding like gibberish without fairly elaborate but well-judged contextualization and explication of figural elements, referents, allusions, and the milieu of cultural and social materials and practices in which they are situated—not to mention analysis of their formal aspects (which the author of this book eschews). In the corpus of studies of this poetry published in English, there appears to be some aversion to overburdening hokku with too much exegesis, a tendency perhaps borne of the mistaken notion, also suggested by President Bush, that they are close kin of Zen kōan or some sort of esoteric mantra-like texts that are not really meant to be parsed but, simply, experienced. But unless one is prepared to take them on with an at least moderately sophisticated theory of minimalist rhetoric and structures that incorporate and unleash complex nuances and associations, or unless one is prepared to embed them in a sufficiently detailed but supple historicizing narrative showing them to be products of particular sociocultural moments in which such forms, and the practices, institutions, and fashions that nurtured their production, gained precedence in certain artistic circles, such poetry is likely to resist rescue from the realms of exotic mumbo jumbo.

One might think that the scholarly ground for English-language analysis of the haikai oeuvres and artistry of Yosa Buson (1716–83) had been well prepared by prior publications. In 1984–85, for example, Mark Morris published a lengthy two-part article, “Buson and Shiki,” that ranged widely through questions of form, exegesis, text-image dynamics, and reception history, among other things.² By historicizing the received image of Buson as constructed during the Meiji period by Masaoka Shiki and others, Morris showed that the reading and study of Buson’s oeuvre and consideration of his artistic career should be open to further critical (perhaps one should say skeptical) interrogation from a variety of theoretical and comparative points of view; he de-romanticized both Buson and Shiki, treating neither as an untouchable “great man” nor as an inscrutable genius but considering them as working, struggling, inconsistent, and fallible men devoted to the creative arts. In contrast, Makoto Ueda’s 1998 book, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson (Stanford University Press), reverts to a more conservative position in its adulatory posture (its preface opens with the statement that “Yosa Buson is a towering figure...