Far Beyond the Field

Haiku by Japanese Women

Makoto Ueda

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231502795
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria asiatica

Far Beyond the Field is a first-of-its-kind anthology of haiku by Japanese women, collecting translations of four hundred haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century to the present. By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku.

Listen, for instance, to Chiyojo, who worked in what has been long thought of as the dark age of haiku during the eighteenth century, but who composed exquisitely fine poems tracing the smallest workings of nature. Or Katsuro Nobuko, who wrote powerfully erotic poems when she was widowed after only two years of marriage. And here, too, is a voice from today, Mayuzumi Madoka, whose meditations on romantic love represent a fresh new approach to haiku.

Introduction

R. H. Blyth, although he contributed more than anyone to an international understanding of haiku, once wrote that he doubted whether women could write in the seventeen-syllable form: “Haiku poetesses,” he said, “are only fifth class.”¹ While the magisterial phrasing is characteristic of Blyth, the view itself merely echoes a centuries-old Japanese bias. How old—and prevalent—that bias was can be seen from a precept attributed to Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694): “Never befriend a woman who writes haiku. Don’t take her either as a teacher or as a student…. In general, men should associate with women only for the sake of securing an heir.”² Certainly the attribution is wrong, for Bashō, the most prestigious of the haiku masters, not only associated with female poets but took several of them under his wing. He even had their verses published in the anthologies of his haiku group. Still, that the precept was widely believed to be his is itself clear evidence of a prevailing sexual prejudice in haiku circles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The prejudice lingered well into the twentieth century. For instance, when a certain young woman once visited the eminent haiku poet Katō Shūson (1905–1993) and asked if she could be allowed to join his haiku group, he replied: “Instead of writing haiku or doing anything else, a young lady like you should try to get happily married. Find a husband, struggle with pots and pans in the kitchen, have children. Giving birth to haiku after going through all that—why, those would be true haiku.”³ To be fair to Shūson, he was one of the so-called humanist haiku poets who emphasized the importance of spiritual and moral discipline for anyone interested in writing poetry. Also, his comment does not completely shut the door on women who want to write haiku; as a matter of fact, his wife Chiyoko was a haiku poet. Yet it is undeniable that beneath the comment lay the traditional patriarchal attitude: a woman should first be a good wife and mother, and writing haiku or doing anything else should be subordinate to the performance of that role.

In today’s Japan, where more women than men write haiku, such an attitude is generally considered an anachronism. Indeed, a number of haiku groups, each publishing a magazine, are currently headed by women. For women haiku poets to have come this far, however, they have had to tread a long and rough road over many generations. Given the feudalistic nature of premodern Japanese society, that is true of all the traditional literary genres. But women haiku poets have probably suffered the most because from its very beginning haiku was regarded as a male literary genre.

Women in the Formative Years of Haiku

Historical factors, especially the availability of tanka as an alternative form of poetic expression, account for haiku being considered a male preserve. Long before renku, the parent of haiku, made its appearance on the Japanese poetic scene, tanka had established itself as the central and most revered of all literary genres. Those who had helped to perfect this thirty-one-syllable verse form were the talented noblewomen who served at the imperial court in the ninth and tenth centuries, when male courtiers were writing poetry largely in Chinese. To be sure, noblemen did compose tanka too, but usually they did so when they exchanged poems with court ladies. As a consequence, the aesthetics of tanka came to be deeply feminine, prizing elegance, delicacy, and a high degree of refinement. Those ideals were inherited, with some modifications, by later tanka poets, most of whom were male. Similar ideals became the aims of renga, too, when it arose during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There were hardly any noblewomen who participated in renga, even though their typical sensibilities informed it. Then a reaction came with the rise of renku in the sixteenth century, gradually appealing to a more popular level of society. That segment consisted almost exclusively of male poets, inasmuch as the aesthetic ideals of renku were intended to be antithetical to the feminine sensibilities that permeated tanka. Women, who had been distanced by renga, were even farther away from renku. For renku, and its offspring haiku, were considered too inelegant for a lady to try her hand at; after all, if she wanted to write a poem, she had the graceful, highly respected tanka form readily available.

Another major factor that prevented women from writing haiku was more social. Whereas tanka was usually composed by a poet in solitude, the composition of renku and haiku was part of a group activity. In writing linked poetry in the lighthearted (that is, haikai) style, poets who made up the team were seated in the same room and contributed stanzas in turn. In writing haiku, too, poets would hold what are now known as kukai (haiku-writing parties), where they composed seventeen-syllable verses on the same topic. Given the sexual biases of Japanese society at the time, it was difficult for a woman to join the men on such occasions. Indeed, a Confucian dictum then prevalent taught that boys and girls were not to sit together after reaching the seventh year. Women were expected to serve food and drink to the guests, but not to participate in the poetic activities that went on in the room.

It is no wonder, then, that there were few female poets in the earliest years of haiku. The two oldest anthologies of haiku and renku, Chikuba kyōginshū (Mad verse of youth, 1499) and Inu tsukuba shū (The dog Tsukuba collection, 1514), do not ascribe authorship, but it is highly unlikely that they include any work by women, for they are loaded with coarse, crude, even obscene verses. The earliest documentary evidence for female authorship of haikai is dated more than a century later. Enoko shū (The puppy collection, 1633), which collected verses written by poets of Teimon, the oldest school of haikai, contains works by a person identified only as “Mitsusada’s wife.” Of the 178 poets represented in the anthology, she was the lone woman. That statistic, and her being listed under her husband’s name, suggest the kind of status to which women were confined in haiku circles during this seminal period.

Be that as it may, women had begun writing haiku by the early seventeenth century, and there was a reason for it: compared with the earliest writers of haiku and renku, poets of the Teimon school depended more on wit, classical allusion, and wordplay for humor than on scatological or pornographic references, thereby making it easier for a lady to write in that genre. As the Teimon school came to dominate the haikai scene in the mid-seventeenth century, more women started composing haiku and renku. Yumemigusa (Dreaming grass, 1656) has 3 women among its 511 contributors; Gyokukai shū (The collection from the sea, 1656) numbers 13 among its 658. Zoku yamanoi (A sequel to The mountain well, 1667), one of the largest collections of Teimon verse, includes 15 women among 967 poets. Those figures show that the increase was slow but steady.

By 1684, there had emerged a sufficient number of female haiku poets to enable Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), a renowned writer of fiction as well as haikai, to compile Haikai nyokasen (Thirty-six haikai poetesses), a book comprising thirty-six haiku written by thirty-six women poets, each poem accompanied by a portrait of the author and a brief comment on her. In his preface Saikaku wrote: “Haiku, being part of Japanese poetry, is one of the refined arts suitable for women to learn…. Therefore, even a female stable hand in a remote village would have the heart to avoid cutting blooming boughs for firewood, feel sorry for marring the new snow in her vegetable garden with footprints, be moved by the sunrise and sunset glows seen through the window of her mountain hut, and write a haiku by imagining famous places in poetry like the Sea of Nago.”⁴ Even when allowance is made for Saikaku’s rhetoric, one can detect the popularity of haiku beginning to spread to all classes of women. Among the thirty-six poets selected by Saikaku, eleven lived in rural areas. Of the others, four were courtesans, three were chambermaids, another three were nuns, and one was a concubine.

Saikaku compiled the illustrated anthology more out of his interest in women than out of respect for their poetry. By and large, the haikai masters who were his contemporaries remained inattentive to women’s haiku. If there was one exception, it would be the recognition of Den Sutejo (1633–1698) whose verse is found in several haikai anthologies published in the 1660s. Her haiku do not show much originality, but her wit as well as her command of rhetorical devices are not inferior to those of male poets in the Teimon school. Zoku yamanoi contains thirty-five haiku and five renku verses by her. It appears that she was considered a more accomplished poet than her husband, for the latter had only eleven haiku accepted in the same anthology. Incidentally, the book also includes twenty-eight haiku and three linked verses written by the young Bashō. In this respect, at least, it seems that Sutejo was the better known poet.

Bashō’s Female Students

Bashō, however, soon parted ways with the Teimon school. After a period of experiment, he came, in the late 1680s, to establish his own style of haiku, a style that was to exert immense influence over poets of the succeeding centuries. To put it briefly, he transformed haiku from a mere sportive verse into a mature form of poetry capable of embodying human experience at the deepest level. In the process of transformation he proposed two aesthetic ideals: sabi (loneliness), a forlorn beauty that results from the poet’s absorption in the insentient universe; and karumi (lightness), a humorous poetic effect produced when the poet looks at human reality from a viewpoint that transcends it. Not a theorist by nature, Bashō revealed these ideals by commenting on his students’ verses and by publishing haikai anthologies. His own poems in the anthologies and in his travel journals, such as Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road to the far north, 1689), also displayed what he was aiming at as a poet. Of the anthologies, Sarumino (The monkey’s straw raincoat, 1691) best exemplified the ideal of sabi, and Sumidawara (The sack of charcoal, 1694) presented a number of haiku and renku that produce the effect of karumi.

Although Bashō in his later years had a great many followers all over Japan, female students who enjoyed his personal guidance numbered only a few. Of the 118 poets who contributed verses to Sarumino, just 5 were women; in Sumidawara the ratio was 2 out of 79. No doubt the paucity of women among his students had more to do with the contemporary social situation than with his personal views on gender. His attitude toward women students can be glimpsed, for instance, in a letter he sent from his residence in Edo (the modern Tokyo) to one such student in Kyoto named Nozawa Ukō. Dated 3 March 1693, the letter reads in part: “People here who have read the headnote to your haiku in Sarumino think well of you, speculating what a beautiful and virtuous lady you must be. I tell them that you are not especially beautiful or virtuous but simply have a mind that understands the pathos of things. I hope you will discipline your mind further in this direction.”⁵ The haiku referred to is

Because I am frail and prone to illness, it had not been easy for me even to do my hair. So I became a nun last spring.

combs, hairpins	kōgai mo
such are the things of the past—	kushi mo mukashi ya
a fallen camellia	chiritsubaki

Bashō’s letter reveals that while his students in Edo made much of the fact that Ukō was a woman, he treated her as a poet above all and gave her exactly the same kind of advice he would have given a male student. Unfortunately, Ukō seems to have had to curtail her poetic activities shortly after, since she was in social disgrace when her husband Bonchō (d. 1714) was convicted of some crime (probably smuggling). He spent several years in prison, during which time Bashō passed away.

Aside from Ukō, two other women distinguished themselves among Bashō’s students: Kawai Chigetsu (1634?–1718) and Shiba Sonome (1664–1726). Chigetsu seems to have been very close to Bashō in his later years. Whenever he came to the so...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• Den Sutejo (1633–1698)
• Kawai Chigetsu (1634?–1718)
• Shiba Sonome (1664–1726)
• Chiyojo (1703–1775)
• Enomoto Seifu (1732–1815)
• Tagami Kikusha (1753–1826)
• Takeshita Shizunojo (1887–1951)
• Sugita Hisajo (1890–1946)
• Hashimoto Takako (1899–1963)
• Mitsuhashi Takajo (1899–1972)
• Ishibashi Hideno (1909–1947)
• Katsura Nobuko (b. 1914)
• Yoshino Yoshiko (b. 1915)
• Tsuda Kiyoko (b. 1920)
• Inahata Teiko (b. 1931)
• Uda Kiyoko (b. 1935)
• Kuroda Momoko (b. 1938)
• Tsuji Momoko (b. 1945)
• Katayama Yumiko (b. 1952)
• Mayuzumi Madoka (b. 1965)
• Selected Bibliography
• Series List