Santoka
(Tanoda Shoichi)
Another Haiku Master
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
SANTOKA is another great personage in the poetic and artistic world of Haiku, highly admired by some. Kametaro, here, expresses such delight and appreciation when he presents this terse but well developed essay on this Haiku Poet. I am including it and SANTOKA himself here due to the importance it conveys in showing us also the break from the Traditional parameters of Haiku which a few "individualists" have created and accomplished in their own very personal style, while being careful (at the same time) not to deviate from the essence of legitimate Haiku. Seemingly easy to do, it is quite challenging to be able to create personalized or stylized Haiku with the artistic and spiritual success this poet [Santoka] achieved. I am sure you will also enjoy reading the little we have available here. --- meister_z .. (jzr) .. [4-6-2K] .. [End of Comment]
by Kametaro
from Japan
In all likelihood Santoka will be misunderstood by those who are repelled by his way of life. his life and his work were extreme, excessive. He was a confirmed drunkard but he was often cold sober. He was a vagabond, a bum who begged at every door, but he was rich in faith, thought, and sensitivity. His haiku are free in style, free in wording, free of everything traditional, just as his life was free of bondage to society and convention. He owed everyone he knew, but he could offer more than he he owed. He was haunted by misery, but he may have been the happiest man who ever breathed: joy abided in his innermost self -- joy of life and joy of haiku.
He went his way, looking the world in his face, without concern for the future. One of his friends, Oyama Sumita, described his life this way: "Santoka did not think of yesterday or of tomorrow, but lived each today as it came on him. In Zen every single breath is appreciated to the full. Santoka gave full justice to each breath, each moment, each day, as if it was his last. Each step, each movement, each haiku formed a consummate whole in his life."
His legacy includes several collections of haiku and an idiosyncratic diary called Gochuan, all of literary merit. In that diary, on September 21, 1932, he wrote: "A tumble-down man enters a tumble-down hut. Morning and evening, tranquility, insects, the moon, persimmons, the flowers of the manjushage (an amaryllis)." In perfect solitude he cooks his supper.
Hitotsu areba
koto taru nabeno
kome o togu.
One washes rice
in a metal pot;
only one pot, that's enough
(for me).
[or]
I wash rice
in a metal pot;
one pot's enough.
or
Washing rice
in a metal pot;
one pot's enough.
Colloquialisms mark Santoka's haiku. He used plain, easy language at its best, never the literary, poetic diction of more ordinary writers.
Korogi yo,
asu no kome dake wa
aru.
Oh cricket!
there is enough rice, at least
for tomorrow.
The following haiku in not grammatically correct Japanese. Santoka was often careless about grammar. He seemed to want us to read between the lines, and more often than not his grammatical mistakes, a sign of his nonchalance (CAREFREE ATTITUDE), add charm to his work.
Anta to ko-shite kisha ga
itta ri kitari suru
kemuri.
In your company
going this way and that ....
the smoke of train.
Santoka was the pseudonym of Taneda Shoichi. He was born December 3, 1882, in a village called Nishisaware in Yamaguchi Prefecture, westernmost Honshu. His family was old and affluent. They owned a large estate worked by many tenant farmers, and they lived in a huge sprawling house. The neighbors called them the "Great Taneda."
With his four brothers and sisters, Shoichi lived a happy life until he was eleven. Then their mother, distraught by her husband's profligacy (dissipated, alcoholic, and uncaring way of subsisting), committed suicide by throwing herself into a well. The shock scarred Santoka's life forever. Forty years later he wrote in his diary:
"Mother is not to blame. No one is to blame. If one has to blame anybody, one has to blame everybody. It is the human condition that must be blamed... Oh my mother! what a memory. If I write an autobiography I have to began this way: 'The misfortunes of my family commenced with the suicide of mother'."
Shoichi (Santoka) finished secondary school and in 1901 entered Waseda University, but he left without graduating. In 1916 the ruin of his family was completed when it went bankrupt. He had a job but no interest in it; instead, he escaped into drink and literature. Off and on he went to Tokyo to study haiku under the master Ogihaara Seiwensui; that ended when he moved to Kumamoto, on Kyusyu.
In 1924 he came close to suicide himself. Drunk, he stood in front of a speeding streetcar and by only a hair-breadth escaped death. A priest who was witness took him to a temple where he plunged into Zen. After some years he left the temple, still forlorn, and took to wandering aimlessly, making haiku and begging alms, always haunted by longing for the carefree days of his boyhood.
Ame furu
furu-sato wa
hadashi de aruku.
The old home
in the rain ...
I walk barefooted.
At last he came to Matsuyama, where haiku devotees built for him at the foot of a mountain a small cottage named Isso-an, "The Hermitage of the Lonely Blade of Grass." Here he lived until his death in 1940.
He kept his diary until almost the end.
"My life has been a continual waste," he wrote. "I pour sake. Out of it are born my haiku."
[This haiku may be his masterpiece:]
Teppatsu no
naka e mo
arare.
[Roughly:]
Into my begging bowl,
I, too,
hailstones.
A single glance shows that it is defective in form, lacking five syllables. But it is so full of allusion that it makes up for this formal defect. Its significance is strengthened by its brevity. Chills run up my spine when I (Kametaro -- author) read it in Japanese original. The haiku is alive, every word asserts at its maximum. It explains nothing -- it is actual experience in the actual present. It express Eternity in a moment, the Universe in a particle; sound and sight strangely mingle in its impact. This... is the essence of haiku.
A few years ago I (Kametaro -- author) made a tentative translation of this haiku in collaboration with the late Halord G. Henderson, Professor Emeritus of Columbia University, a distinguished "Japanologist" and expert in haiku. I remember clearly the lengthy correspondence between New York and Matsuyama as we tried to clarify our ideas about this haiku and archive a translation that would make it understandable to American readers. It was painstaking work, even though we had before us the passage in Santoka's diary in which he tells how the haiku came to be written and what it means, or what he intended it to mean.
As background, we must know that in Japan and other Buddhist countries, begging for alms in front of homes and businesses is among the religious duties imposed on priests and faithful believers. During the coldest days of winter, mendicants go out on kengyo, "cold weather austerities."
Teppatsu means literally "iron bowl," though usually it is made of brass; it is the kind of begging bowl used exclusively by priests and monks, who hold it in the palms, close to the body, extending it only when alms are offered.
Arare is here the season-word for winter; it refers to the small hailstones of winter, as distinguished from the bigger ones that usually fall in summer.
The monk is Santoka himself. With a linen bag to hold alms hanging from his neck, his robes, tattered, his body partly bared, nearly barefoot, he chants a mantra as he strides along with a composed mind, shivering but resolute. Suddenly, he and his begging bowl are struck by hail.
In his diary he wrote:
"The hailstones as they hit, and the conviction that the hail dashing upon me was a divine whip. These points should have been expressed. This haiku should have contained words to express 'hitting' or 'whipping'."
Perhaps we need not take Santoka's self-criticism too seriously, since he never altered his haiku. But it does suggest that it might be easier for the English-speaking reader to appreciate this haiku if, as Professor Henderson suggested, it is translated something like this;
Striking
my begging bowl too,
hailstones ...
(July 1980)