The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa edited by Robert Hass

Every now and then the book lover may discover a volume that might invoke a library rather than a book, and as the pages are turned everything seems to be in it. The Essential Haiku, edited and partly translated by Robert Hass, is one of these “libraries” – albeit (and as the title suggests) a specialized one.
Hass’ book offers much more than just haiku poems: there are essays devoted to Basho, Buson, and Issa; there are examples of each poet’s prose; one chapter is dedicated to Basho’s thoughts on poetry; there are notes on different Japanese genres; a note on translation; and an extensive list of further readings – all in all a generous source.

Japan’s poetry tradition is rich and ancient, but outside of the country the knowledge of Japanese verse is usually limited to the seventeen syllable haiku. There are quite a few traits of the haiku poems that make them untranslatable – puns are, as Hass explains, often lost; Syllable count? Don’t bother! The syntax? Well… – but some elements do survive the passage from Japanese to English. For example, the spirit of haiku requires plain language, and this can certainly be a building block of a translation. And then there is matter of nature and seasons, and the presence of Zen Buddhism.

Basho once said that a poet should detach his mind from self, and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and feelings, and this monastic mindset can transcend language barriers and give a sense of the original poem, as in this interpretation of Basho by Hass: The winter sun – / on the horse’s back / my frozen shadow.

Haiku can be understood as purely descriptive (although some poets would shun this notion), but it is also symbolic. The ever-present seasons are what they are, but they also stand for something else. However, a reader doesn’t have to study Japanese culture, history, and mindset in order to embrace haiku – like art in general, haiku can be grasped on many different levels, and (to use Basho’s words once again) perhaps it’s enough if the poem seems as light “as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed,” as in this Basho haiku: Winter garden, / the moon thinned to a thread, / insects singing.

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Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Near the end of his life, Kawabata wrote a short story called “Gleanings from Snow Country.” The tale was a miniaturization of Snow Country, the novel that brought the author his greatest acclaim and contributed to the Nobel Prize he received in 1968. Kawabata had been working on Snow Country for 14 years when it was published in 1948 (it first made its appearance as a short story in January, 1935), and the final result was a quiet and subtle book – it is poetry in the shape of prose, written with sublime sensitivity.

The elements of the novel are fairly typical for Kawabata, so there is love, longing, beauty, a certain emotional coldness, and loss. And a young woman. The author’s protégé Mishima once said that Kawabata worshiped virgins and that this was “the source of his clean lyricism”; there is no virgin in Snow Country, but there is a young woman, Komako, who is a geisha.

But she is not like the geisha (“art person”) of Tokyo or Kyoto. Komako is a hot-spring geisha on the northwestern coast of the island Honshu, and cannot hope for the long-term support of a wealthy patron. Instead she has to make herself agreeable to paying customers week after week. Her social status is low, but at the same time Komako and other geisha like her are the foundation of the economy in the region. When Komako meets Shimamura, a wealthy loner from Tokyo, the geisha falls in love with him. Shimamura, on the other hand, seems incapable of love, although he likes Komako and appreciates the affection the young woman shows him. However, the Tokyoite – who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet – visits Komako repeatedly, and she (perhaps in an attempt to deepen his feelings for her) polishes her technique on the traditional samisen by untraditionally relying on sheet music and radio.

Quietly Snow Country grows deeper, as layer after layer is added to the story: it turns out to be a story about men and women, rich and poor, city and countryside, tradition and change, East and West, and not the least about the fleeting nature of all things.

Snow Country is in many ways intricate and elusive, but it’s also a novel that is instantly supremely rewarding. A main reason for this is Kawabata’s writing in which nature and culture merge. This is perhaps what makes Kawabata so intensely Japanese and, at the same time, what makes him universally compelling.

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