Often overlooked by beginners is the fact that hokku have styles. Perhaps most obvious is how the style of Issa stands out from other writers — stands out not because it is better (it often is not, and I do not use him much as a model), but because it is so different.
Less immediately visible but still apparent are the differences in style among other writers. It is one of the oddities of history that when thinking of the beginnings of hokku, people often look to Bashô. It is a shame they do think more often of Onitsura.
The style of Onitsura is spare and austerely elegant:
In the broken pot,
A water plantain –
Slenderly blooming.
The setting is “in the broken pot”; the subject is “a water plantain”; the action is “slenderly blooming.” That is the pattern for a standard hokku, and Onitsura uses it well. In English, notice how the first line ends with a separating comma because it begins with a preposition. That is the “formal” cut of the hokku. Hokku have two parts, one brief, one longer. They are “cut,” that is, there is a separation, by an appropriate punctuation mark in English.
Onitsura could, in few words, evoke the spirit of place and season:
With blossoms fallen,
Once more it is quiet –
Onjô Temple.
The setting is “with blossoms fallen.” Notice again how it is separated, “cut” from the rest of the hokku, by a comma, used because the line begins with the preposition “with.” The subject, which does not come until the final line, is “Onjô Temple,” and the action is “once more it is quiet.”
And here is another such verse:
Flowing water;
A cicada cries in the bamboos –
Shôkô Temple.
The pattern is more unconventional and unusual, but the result – the evocation of a time and place, is quite effective.
Similarly, we find:
Rustling
And shaking the lotus leaves –
A pond tortoise.
In this the unseparated setting is the “pond.” The subject is the tortoise, and the action is “rustling and shaking the lotus leaves.”
A particularly striking hokku by Onitsura:
Beneath
The the leaping trout,
Clouds flowing.
The trout having leaped high from the water, we see the clouds of the sky reflected and moving in the water beneath. The rather long setting is “beneath the leaping trout,” the subject is “clouds,’ and the action “flowing.”
We see how delicately Onitsura deals with the death of a child here:
This autumn,
With no child on my knee –
Moon viewing.
Donald Keene, the noted scholar of Japanese literature, calls it a “sincere but sentimental” verse, and seems to prefer what to me is a crudely overstated expression of loss of a child found in Raizan’s:
A spring dream:
I am not crazy –
Though bitter.
Raizan’s more personal, openly emotional bluntness does not have the spirit of hokku, but seems akin to modern verse like that of Dylan Thomas, and it is odd to note that both Raizan and Thomas suffered from alcoholism:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In another opinion I do not share, Keene finds Onitsura lacking in this verse:
No place
To throw the wash water –
Insect cries.
While I find this simply an honest manifestation of Onitsura’s rather noble nature and sensitivities, Keene compares it, unfairly in my view, with the excessively obvious aestheticism of Chiyo-ni’s
Morning glories
Having captured the well bucket,
I borrow water.
“Borrow” as used in translation here means, “I ask the neighbors for water.” This kind of thing is unfortunately in keeping with Chiyo-ni’s verse on the whole, but it is not in keeping with Onitsura.
Onitsura gives us an interesting contrast of light and dark in:
Evening;
The bellies of trout visible
In the river shallows.
And one of the best spring verses in:
Daybreak;
On the tips of the barley,
Spring frost.
He offers us an excellent model in:
A cool wind;
Filling the sky –
The sound of pines.
Note how important punctuation is to the correct understanding of that verse. The setting is “A cool wind.” The subject is “the sound of pines” and the action “filling the sky.”
The fundamental principle of Onitsura’s hokku is an honest and simple sincerity. It is said that a Zen priest once asked him how he would define his principle, and he responded,
In the garden,
Blooming whitely –
The camellia.
Onitsura’s simple and pure honesty in verse is as refreshing as a drink of clear water. To Blyth, it had something akin to that of Robert Frost, who wrote:
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
One could do worse than learn from the simplicity and clarity so often found in the hokku of Onitsura.
David
