A Model Essay: Two Mountain-Path Poems

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

26 February 2020

Two Poems Beginning 「山路来て」

Seishu Hamano, President

It was around 2013, I think, when I wrote two haiku on a blackboard for young students at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. It was part of an outward-looking educational programme introducing Japanese culture.

山路来てなにやらゆかしすみれ草　芭蕉

山路来て独りごというてゐた　山頭火

Matsuo Basho was active in the Genroku era of the Edo period and remains famous today as the great master of haiku, so you must have studied him in your high-school Japanese classes. Who knows this poem?

I asked for a show of hands. Almost everyone in the class of twenty-five raised a hand.

Then who knows Santoka? Eight hands went up. What other poems did he write? Can anyone recite one? No hands went up.

Well then, does anyone know even a little more about what kind of person this Santoka was?

A few did. Their knowledge went little beyond what they had memorized from entrance-examination study guides. I therefore explained that Santoka came from Hofu in Yamaguchi Prefecture and was the son of a sake brewer. After leaving Waseda, if the family business had prospered, he should have been able to inherit it and live in comfort. But a failure in the brewing process spoiled the sake and left the family heavily in debt. On top of that, his father's misconduct brought the terrible misfortune of his mother's suicide: she drowned herself in the family well. Santoka subsequently left home and wandered as a mendicant monk, writing haiku like these, which scarcely even fitted the five-seven-five pattern. He was a man who walked the boundary between living and dying.

Now, I asked them, which of these two poems do you prefer? Which moves you more?

I asked them to raise their hands. How did they judge them? About half and half? Seventy to thirty in Basho's favour? Or the other way round?

Which would you, my readers, find more moving?

The result surprised me. Every one of the twenty-five Kyoto University of Foreign Studies students said Santoka's poem moved them far more. Or perhaps it should not be surprising. There are now nearly ninety monuments bearing Santoka's poems in and around his home region, and as many as five hundred throughout Japan. It is said that Santoka, who puts on no airs of authority, is the poet most closely attuned to Japanese sensibility.

Young people are honest. That is what I like about them. They do not say that a work must be excellent because its author is the great master of haiku, or because it is Shakespeare, or because their own teacher wrote it. Careless adults may not understand why Shakespeare is good, but dismiss the matter by supposing that they themselves must lack understanding or sensitivity. That will not do. Let us, the contributors to the Reiwa Online Manyo-shu, live by our sensibility. Santoka has a poem that reads 「風の中おのれを責めつつ歩く」; I have practised it every day since childhood.