This article interprets a dictum of Yatsuka Ishihara: "I believe that it is crucial for haiku to tell about the truth as if it were false."
Mr. Ishihara was a great haiku sensei1 in Japan. He was very kind and generous to Claire and me and other American delegates to the Haiku Society of America-Haiku International meeting in Japan in 1997. His friends and admirers were saddened by his death in 1998.
The quotation is from Ishihara’s talk at the HSA-HI Conference in Chicago in 1995. I missed that event, but I heard him provide an explication of the Chicago statement. The occasion of this talk followed a dinner provided by Mr. Ishihara in Ushino, Japan, for delegates to the HSA-HI Conference. Mr. Ishihara and his associates had also treated the delegates to a tour of the Tokagawa shrine at Nikko and a visit to the botanical garden of the University of Tokyo at Nikko. Mr. Ishihara’s speech was in Japanese, and our appreciation is possible because of translation into English by Tadashi Kondo, orally at the banquet then in text in Frogpond 2. In quoting Mr. Ishihara in this article I have elided words and added connectives to Mr. Kondo’s translation.
In responding to the request for explanation put by Lee Gurga, Mr. Ishihara elaborated on his earlier dictum. He spoke in a deliberate style that sounded to me much like chanting. While "Tell about the truth as if it were false" has the appearance, perhaps, of a Zen koan, Ishihara clearly was trying to tell American haiku poets something very meaningful to him, and I hope I have understood it.
He began his explanation, "The common practice in Japan, by more than 60 percent of the poets, is to tell about what is false, as if it were true. I know it is difficult for Americans to understand this, but I believe the basic nature of haiku is humor, that is, expressing the truth as if it were false. Through the expression of truth with humor, a rich space is created to enjoy a wider meaning. I think this is true not only in Japan but in the west."
He continued, "The first line of a poem comes from heaven. Coming from heaven means inspiration, or fiction." He then compared his own theory of "introspective shaping," with the conventional "sketch" theory. In "sketch" theory the haiku is to copy what is in the world; in "introspective shaping" he said, we are with "haiku glasses" to look into our hearts, where "the landscape of truth exists".
To help us understand his aesthetic of humor, Ishihara favorably compared the death poetry of Shiki to that of Basho. One of Shiki’s death poems is "While sponge-gourd was in flower,/through too much phlegm/a Buddha kana (Harold J. Isaacson’s translation). The humor here, according to Isaacson3, is that the Japanese speak of one newly departed as a Buddha, so "the last line – ‘a Buddha kana’ - is a droll way of saying: ‘I died’. The larger joke is in the way the haiku burlesques statements found in Buddhist biographies, that while lotuses were in flower some dying person obtained birth into the Amida paradise, Sukhavata." Another point of humor, approaching irony, is that the sponge gourd which is flowering in the poem will later when ripe, provide a fluid which is useful for clearing phlegm.
Basho’s poem which Ishihara indicated lacks the humor he finds essential in haiku, is "fallen ill on a journey my dream wanders around a withered field" (Tadashi Kondo’s translation). Ishihara commented, "In Basho’s haiku there is the artificial manipulation of fiction, while Shiki’s haiku comes directly out of his intuition." After a digression, Ishihara concluded his discussion by saying, "Getting back to telling the truth as if it were false—it is bad to tell about the false as if it were truth—true humor does not have the artificial manipulation of fiction."
What did Ishihara mean? Is he repeating the conclusion that art, even realism, is necessarily different from reality, and so our poetry will necessarily be untrue to life? Or does he believe, as Oscar Wilde wrote4, that "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art"? Or perhaps he means that in our poems we should use metaphor which, according to a semiologist5, is literally lying?
What I believe Ishihara means is that haiku should be more than inscriptions of natural scenes, that the best haiku will go beyond and in a humorous way exaggerate the literal truth. In his statement the "as if it were false" means to use language in a way that cannot possibly be taken by the reader as literally true. His admonition is not for the use of metaphor, but rather hyperbole, the figure of speech that denotes extravagant exaggeration or depicting the impossible as real.
In indirect support of this interpretation, there is testimony that the use of exaggeration and not being satisfied with the natural scene is a method prominently employed in Japanese aesthetics. Frank Lloyd Wright said about Hokusai, "… he never drew Fujiyama honestly, the way Hiroshige did. He always lied about it, he liked to make it pointed. … He looked at Fujiyama in 57 different ways! But never once did he tell the truth about it."6 It is interesting to note that Ishihara’s book of haiku translated into English is Red Fuji7, after Hokusai’s print, and features the pointed red mountain on the book’s cover. More evidence that the tradition of going beyond the truth is well-grounded in Japanese literature is provided by Ueda writing on "Truth and Falsehood in Fiction". Ueda points out that Lady Murasaki's Prince Genji deals with this issue and in discussing it, says "all novelists are liars."8
An inspection of Mr. Ishihara’s poetry shows the use of hyperbole, supporting the contention that his gnomic phrase is intended to advocate that use. Here in translation are a few his poems, from Red Fuji, that illustrate this use of language.
1 Kristen Deming has written appreciations of Ishihara-sensei appearing in Frogpond XIX: Number 3, December 1996, and in Red Fuji.
2 The translated text of Mr. Ishihara’s remarks was published in Frogpond XX: Supplement 1997.
3 Harold J. Isaacson, translator and editor, Peonies Kana: Haiku by the Upasaka Shiki, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1973, p. XIV.
4 Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying", in Intentions, Boni and Liveright, New York, p. 54.
5 Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1983, p. 89.
6 Kevin Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The role of traditional Japanese art and architecture in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Chapman and Hall, London, 1993, p. 107.
7 Yatsuka Ishihara, translated and edited by Tadashi Kondo and William J. Higginson, Red Fuji: Selected Poetry of Yatsuka Ishihara, From Here Press, Santa Fe, 1997.
8 Makoto Ueda, "Truth and Falsehood in Fiction", in Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Press of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1967, p.32.
9 Frogpond XXII: Supplement 1999.
