A hokku appropriate to late autumn, by the woman Sono-jo:
A dog barking
At the sound of the leaves;
The windstorm.
It is an odd fact in hokku that the simplest are often the best, and this is a very good hokku because it has very strong sensation. By sensation we mean that it affects the senses strongly. In this we hear the dog’s frantic barking and the sound of the blowing leaves, and we hear the wind and we feel its force. Everything in this verse is in motion, and that is very much in keeping with the strength of the windstorm.
Structurally, it is a standard hokku, by which we mean it has a setting, a subject, and an action:
Setting: The windstorm
Subject: A dog
Action: Barking at the sound of the leaves
In the original, the verse looks like this:
Ha no oto ni inu hoe-kakaru arashi kana
Leaves ‘ sound at dog barking gale kana
The kana at the end is merely a word used sometimes for emphasis, but far more often in hokku merely to fill out the required number of phonetic units in Japanese, in this case the usual seventeen.
More important is the fact that by reading and pondering such verses and their structure, one will quickly learn how to write hokku in English and other languages today, but of course one must also understand the underlying aesthetics to avoid going astray.
I repeat again and again that the real subject of a hokku is the season in which it is written, that each hokku should express that season through something happening in it that shows the character of the season. This verse of Sono-jo does that superbly.
By the way, I am tending to alternate between late autumn hokku and winter hokku in these few days before the beginning of December, because some readers live where it is already winter, others where autumn still lingers. I am speaking of the Northern Hemisphere. Readers in the Southern Hemisphere will be in quite another season!
David
