A
Dream Like This World is an elegantly published dual
language (Japanese and English) collection of 100 philosophical
haiku by Nagata Koi. Nagata Koi, was born in 1900 and died
in 1997, and he wrote haiku for eighty years, beginning
with a descriptive haiku dealing mainly with the beauty
of nature which he rejected following World War II.
After the war, he pursued a more philosophical and religious
haiku based on Zen Buddhism. He wrote haiku like:
loneliness
growing leeks
in a dream like this world |
In
the preface to the book, Nagata Koi conveys his approach
as a writers question about the capabilities of haiku.
He writes, I have long wondered, in my own way, whether
haiku might not be philosophy. . . . At the same time, I
continue to think that haiku is also religion. If the contemplation
of life and death is the basis of literature, then we can
call haiku religious in the sense that it is always a means
of seeking for a way to live, and to discover and express
truth, goodness and beauty (131).
This
might seem to be a tall order for haikupushing haiku
beyond the concrete images of perception into expressions
of truth, goodness, beauty, philosophy and religion. In
fact, with a rejection of haiku based on nature or perceptions
of the natural world, one might expect Kois haiku
to be abstractor worseto become proverbs, intellectual
epigrams or abstract miniature sermons. But in practice,
his haiku do not preach as much as they mystify. Sometimes
Kois haiku ask questions:
what
to do with
this profusion of red plum blossoms |
And
sometimes they declare a metaphysical dilemma:
a
winter crow
steps forward
the scene steps with him |
Other
times they just declare a truism:
a cat in heat dedicates himself to love |
And
sometimes they appear to be little more than statements:
I
mistook
B mound of straw
for A |
These
haiku may express deep religious insights or philosophically
significant positions in the original Japanese, but they
seem merely inscrutable in translation. Notes on context
and allusions to other works would help us appreciate these
haiku more.
The
notes, for example, that accompany Kois haiku about
an old cat and his mothers death help us to appreciate
the poetic goals of his work:
an
old cat straining, shits
in such a pose
my mother dies in winter |
The
notes explain that through metaphysical intuition
the poet connects that which is separated in actual space
and time. The haiku is not about a moment, but about the
artistic eyes of eternity witnessing an
eternal truth. With the difficulty of imagining the
connection between the cat and the mother, we ourselves
are strained to bring these together. However in another
haiku, Koi expresses a more conventional image in the following
death haiku:
last
years
soul flying through cherry
blossom clouds |
Liberated
from the physical perceptions or haiku on beauty and nature,
and not tied to imagistic language, Koi writes from the
spiritualistic souls perspective. My favorites are
also somewhat inscrutable, but fun haiku based on a laughing
catfish:
the
catfish in the pond laughs
someone on the shore laughs, too |
Could
it be? Perhaps that laughing catfish is none other than
Koi himself, laughing at how serious we become over our
haiku and haiku poetics. Get a copy of this collection and
be mystified, puzzled, surprised. Theres a clever
catfish waiting in the pond for you to join him.
|