Humor in Bashô's Hokku: I

Bashô is probably one of the best examples we can find of a humorous haikai poet. While most people today call his independent hokku "haiku", most of his brief verses not really intended to begin a linked poem are nonetheless characteristically hokku-like. They include greetings (aisatsu) and deal with phenomena in the immediate environment at the time of writing — or perhaps in the inner environment that prompted the poem, regardless of how much later the poem may have actually been written. For the sake of this brief series, I will speak of Bashô's poems that are "childlike" in their humor, of those which have a more "sophisticated" humor — often playing with the tradition of Japanese poetry in one way or another — and of those which, it seems to me, exhibit a kind of "cosmic" humor that transcends chronological age, sophistication, and tradition. Of course, these elements mix to varying degrees in many of his poems, and perhaps some which I will take up under one heading or another would make equally fine examples under yet another.

Several of Bashô's hokku seem childlike in their innocent spontaneity. For example, one which is quite well known and which I cite in The Haiku Handbook¹ for its "joy or abandon" goes thus:

iza yukamu
yukimi ni korobu
tokoro made

well! let's go
snow-viewing till
we tumble

Another in this class is equally well known; R. H. Blyth says that it "is hardly poetry"², an opinion with which I must certainly disagree:

kimi hi o take
yoki mono misen
yukimaruge

buddy, make a fire
and I'll show you something nice:
a giant snowball

Apparently, Bashô found a special humor in snow and its interactions with humans. I cannot read this poem without reflecting on the effects of that fire on the snowball, but, more important, I can just see Bashô sitting with his friend by the fire, feeling comfortably tired and quite content to sit and gaze at so large a snowball.

Bashô was also quite capable of the sort of poem that would endear later generations to Issa:

hana ni asobu
abu na kurai so
tomo suzume

in the flowers
horseflies at play—don't eat 'em
sparrow-friends!

While Issa wrote many poems like this, such hokku and haiku in direct address to the downtrodden or insignificant appear throughout the tradition. In themselves, they are a kind of "greeting verse".

A quieter grin suffuses the next poem, one which shows both Bashô's humor and his insight. If you've watched birds much, you'll recognize the behavior and, I'm sure, grant the truth of the poet's perspective:

nagaki hi mo
saezuri taranu
hibari kana

even so long
a day not enough for singing —
that skylark

Thus Bashô joins a continuing tradition of poems infused with an amused awe at the antics of skylarks.

Bashô is quite capable of observing himself as chidingly as he observes a sparrow, and of addressing himself as easily as an animal or a friend:

futsuka ni mo
nukari wa seji na
hana no haru

on this second day
not another blunder!
blossoming spring

Note that here "blossoming spring" is not to be taken as referring to blossoms, but to the New Year; in Bashô's time, New Year's Day more or less coincided with the beginning of spring.

Toshiharu Oseko, a professional travel guide who has taken hundreds of groups of both Japanese and foreign tourists through the hills and valleys Bashô travelled, says this verse means "Having overslept on New Year's Day, I missed the sunrise, so on the second day, I do not want to make the same blunder." He goes on to note that it was, "and still is, customary for most Japanese to worship the rising sun on the first day of the year"³, perhaps firming one's resolve to keep a New Year's resolution. Bashô, it seems, recognizes the need for a one-day-at-a-time approach to such resolutions!

Appreciating the humor around and within oneself is as much a part of haiku as a feeling for "nature" — indeed, one might say it is nature, but that is a topic for another time.

1 Translation from William J. Higginson with Penny Harter, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989), p. 11; copyright © 1985 William J. Higginson.

2 Haiku, volume 4 (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1952), p. 243. The translation of the poem is mine.

3 Comments from Toshiharu Oseko, Bashô's Haiku (Urawa, Saitama, Japan: privately printed, 1990), number 84. Haiku translation mine.