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Japanese Haiku 2001: ed Gendai Haiku Kyokai (Modern Haiku Association), Japan; distributed by YOU-Shorin Press, 915-1 Arakoda Saku-shi, Nagano, Japan 385-0007, ISBN 4-89709-336-8, limp cover, 297pp. Price outside Japan US$30 plus US$5 postage.

Every serious student of haiku in the West is likely to feel the need to own a copy of this book. It affords an all-too-rare glimpse of what our counterparts in Japan are doing with haiku. 97 different poets are represented, each by 4 haiku in both the original Japanese and an English version, prepared either by Eric Selland, Philip Zitowitz, or our own Martin Lucas (any more precise attributions are not given). The translations are lean and direct; I cannot say how accurate they are, but they make a good, if sometimes chilling, impression. No anthology until now has displayed the field so widely.

The prospective reader might be taken off-guard by the word ‘modern’: 12 of the 97 poets were born in the nineteenth century, 85 in 1930 or earlier - that is, when Don Bradman was flogging English bowling; so if we can think of him as a ‘modern batsman’... Only one of the contributors, Ban’ya Natsuishi, sometimes styled the enfant terrible on the contemporary Japanese haiku scene, is under fifty. Names that people in the West are likely to recognise include Tohta Kaneko (1919 -), Santoka Taneda (1882 - 1940), Sojo Hino (1901 - 1956), Seishi Yamaguchi (1901 - 1994), Shuson Kato (1905 - 1993), Kan’ichi Abe (1928 -), Akito Arimo (1930 -), and Teiko Inahata (1931 -), granddaughter of Kyoshi Takahama and chair of the Traditional Haiku Association which she founded.

Beyond these dry facts I flounder, ill-equipped because of almost perfect ignorance of the Japanese language and its associations and symbols, and because of incessant nurture on our Western ideas of haiku; but in this I dare to say probably representative of the majority who will read this review. Faced with reminiscences of Pound, imagery juxtaposed in a fantastic or surrealist way, synaesthetic explorations of colour, generalisations of thought, lack of ‘presence’, arch metaphor, similes and projections of human characteristics on to animals and plants (all things we have ingested as almost taboo), one is left like an uneasy spectator of the Emperor’s progress. Above all, as the editors of this anthology admit, the Western reader perceives modern Japanese haiku as ‘difficult’, and most of us have been brought up to feel that was the antithesis of haiku.

What we do find appealing, and at the same time not unfamiliar, is the insistence on ‘contemporary language’ and exploration of poetic truth in landscapes and situations which, in traditional haiku, were either ‘no go’ areas, or ceded to senryu.

Introductory essays by Kan’ichi Abe and Ban’ya Natsuishi help us to see some of the aspirations of Japanese haiku poets in the second half of the last century: ‘to be progressive’, ‘to broaden horizons’, ‘to reflect our existence as humans and recover a sense of humanity’ (this meant, in the depression years, an obsession with ‘sickness and hardship’, some individual poets wishing even to inform haiku ‘with socialist ideology’), ‘to merge thought with sensibility’. From 1945, there were poets ‘influenced by André Breton’s surrealist movement, who composed haiku that drew on depth psychology’, as well as by Sigmund Freud, writing ‘extemporaneously from the unconscious’. ‘Tohta Kaneko designated the creative writer as the “cognitive subject” and confirmed the subject’s sensitive qualities’. Gradually, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, writers became ‘more interested in capturing their inner spirit through the use of vivid, fantastical images, and were less concerned with social issues’. Prosperity had permitted haiku to escape into a fantasy world.

I leave you to test these principles on the following examples of the diverse world of Japanese haiku in the last century, as filtered to us by this anthology.

(Kineo Hayashida)