Humor in Bashô's Hokku: II

In the first article in this series, I wrote of Bashô’s childlike humor. Here I’ll present some of his hokku which have a more "sophisticated" humor—playing with the tradition of Japanese poetry in one way or another. However, in many of his poems, the humor is rich and complex.

To start off, here is a relatively simple hokku , or is it?¹

tera ni nete
makoto-gao naru
tsukimi kana

resting at a temple
a sincere face appears
this moon-viewing

The full moon, in a Buddhist context, is often a symbol of enlightenment. In the peaceful temple surroundings, Bashô’s face becomes relaxed as he looks up at that moon’s face. I suppose some religionist will find great depth here. But look again. Can you tell if Bashô is speaking of his own face, or the moon’s? I can’t from the original. (Admittedly, Japanese culture does not emphasize the idea of "the man in the moon", so if I’m right and Bashô is playing with us about whose face this is, the idea is fresher in his hands than in mine.) But even if we stick with the face as Bashô’s, something else is going on. Isn’t there a tone of self-mockery here? Why would Bashô be more "sincere"—more serious, perhaps—looking at the moon at a temple as opposed to anywhere else? He wouldn’t! So says the religionist, because of course Bashô is a realized being, and naturally watches the moon in all sincerity wherever he is, right? But why did he write this poem, then?

Perhaps he wrote it to go with another of his hokku, somewhat better known, on the same subject:

kumo oriori
hito o yasumuru
tsukimi kana

clouds occasionally
make a fellow relax
this moon-viewing

And, of course there are other hokku by Bashô on the subject, such as this famous one:

meigetsu ya
ike o megurite
yomosugara

famous moon—
I am circling the pond
all night long

This "famous moon" is the "harvest moon" of September. It seems that Bashô, like the rest of his countrymen, appreciates the autumn moon, but would also like to moderate the intensity of that appreciation. Almost, it seems, he has an attitude about it. A haikai attitude, I may say.

One could write a whole article on Bashô’s moon humor, but I’ll leave the subject after sharing one of his relatively early poems on the spring moon with you:

hana no kao ni
hareute shite ya
oborozuke

in the face of blossoms
are you feeling shy?
hazy moon

Yes, the personification of the moon dominates the orignal. And the translation "in the face of" is quite literal and idiomatic. Granted, this is a very early poem, published in 1667, when Bashô was still a young poet going under the name of Sôbô. Here he deftly meets the "haikai-twist" criteria of the Danrin poets, from whom he would later break away. As the 20th century scholar Iwata Kurô (1891-1969) says of this poem, "The hokku contains something that suggests the young poet’s talent."² And indeed, of his attitude toward the time-honored tradition in which he wrote. The poems quoted above, starting at the first, date from 1687, 1685, and 1686—the year of the "old pond" poem, on which more later.

Let’s see what Bashô does with one of the stranger seasonal topics in the tradition, the "bagworm" or "straw-coat insect", as the Japanese says:

minomushi no
ne o kiki ni koyo
kusa no io

come and hear
the sound of the bagworm
at my grass hut

Yes, the "sound of the bagworm" is a classical topic in Japanese poetry, though it makes no sound. Apparently, some nighttime insect noises were once thought to come from minomushi, and were thus incorporated into poetry. As Toshiharu Oseko notes in connection with this poem, Sei Shonagon’s famous Pillow Book (ca. 1000 C.E.) claims the cry of minomushi goes "Chichi-yo! Chichi-yo!" ("Daddy! Daddy!").³ But by Bashô’s day it was well known that minomushi make no sound we can hear. So, in a typical haikai-twist, Bashô seems to claim that the sound (the no-sound) of the bagworm is better at his cottage than at other places.

Of course, for Bashô the "tradition" includes the great T’ang Dynasty poets as well. Here’s a poem of his that mystifies until you know what Bashô is alluding to. Even his preface is not very helpful, at first: "Three people living in Reiganjima came in at my grass door late; when I asked their guide for the names, he said they were each called ‘Shichirô-byôi’, and taking my lead from that amusing ‘Drinking Alone’ piece, I could not help a trifling foolishness."⁴ Reiganjima was a place near Bashô’s cottage at Fukagawa; I have not been able to track down the humor in "Shichirô-byôi", though it may contain some reference, possibly to the popular culture of the day. Most of Bashô’s readers then would have recognized the reference to "Drinking Alone", but before explaining that, here’s the poem:

sakazuki ni
mitsu no na o nomu
koyoi kana

with a sake cup
I drink to the three names
this fine evening

Where is the season word?—you ask? In the opening quatrain of Li Po’s poem "Under the Moon, Drinking Alone":

Among the flowers one jug of wine:
drinking alone with no one familiar,
I offer my cup to the bright moon
my shadows and I a party of three.

Bashô, too, drinks alone, but has the companionship of "the three names": Li Po and his two shadows of the same name (one on the ground, one in the wine cup). Oseku points out that we should also note the puns in this hokku: Puns on "moon" (-zuki cup = tsuki moon) and "full" (mitsu three = mitsu to fill).⁵ Rather than provoking humor directly as a pun in English might, these implied words simply capitalize on the profusion of homonyms in Japanese to provide further clues to the poem’s hidden seasonal topic.

This short prose piece, a little longer than the usual "preface" that might introduce a hokku, and its capping verse are typical of a number of very brief haibun that Bashô composed. Without the appreciation of both his light-hearted approach and the depth of the tradition in which he plays, one cannot fully "get" Bashô.

Speaking of playing in the tradition, we have that poem of Bashô’s which seems always to call forth the most sanctimonious response, but which indeed may more likely have caused a bit of a belly laugh among some of his poet friends as they appreciated simultaneously its simple report on an everyday phenomenon and the direct way it flouted the whole tradition of Japanese poetry, particularly the high-brow court poetry of that tradition:

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

old pond . . .
a frog leaps in
water’s sound⁶

To be sure, this poem has depth. But it also is the first of thousands of Japanese poems about the frog that is not focused mainly on its "singing". Bashô’s frog is real, not the classic image of a singing frog stuck in for effect. As such, he surprised the readers of his own day, delighting them in the way that only true haikai verses do. For Bashô and his followers, a good deal of the point of haikai was tweaking the nose of tradition. However, please note that only those who know the tradition well enough to get close to it may tweak its nose. It may be mocking, but at the same time it is a friendly gesture, not like thumbing one’s nose from a distance. (Note that the Zen-inspired story of the poem’s creation as part of a spiritual challenge did not appear until years after Bashô died, told by someone who certainly did not witness the event.)

In this verse, we may note that Bashô not only expresses the freedom to play with the tradition that characterizes haikai, he also frees frogs forever from the burden of merely singing. Had there been no Bashô, it would have been impossible for Issa to have sung so often, and so humorously, of his pals, the frogs.

Bashô richly knew and richly honored the literary tradition of his East Asian culture. He expected that his contemporaries, at least, would know that tradition and appreciate the humor in his light-hearted way of playing with it. May we do the same, and join him as he carries that humor to the cosmic level—as we shall see in the next article in this series.

1 The Japanese texts of Bashô’s writings in this article are based on those in Ohtani Tokuzô and Nakamura Shunjô, Bashô kushû (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962).

2 Makoto Ueda, Bashô and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 27.

3 Notes to poem number 68, in Bashô’s Haiku (Urawa, Saitama, Japan: privately printed, 1990).

4 Ohtani and Nakamura, p. 142. The lines from Li Po are also given here.

5 Bashô’s Haiku, number 40.

6 Translation from William J. Higginson with Penny Harter, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985; Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989), p. 9.