Hana no chiru ran
That the cherry flowers fall?4
Japanese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of Japanese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known as choka. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five-line waka concerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals of aware, miyabi, and yugen.
As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from the waka, came into being: renga. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line—in reality a related series of waka but with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for the waka. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long the renga was saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincial samurai and peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep their renga in the spirit of the classical waka, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threw renga parties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the Ashikaga age, renga and sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, but renga's only genuine contribution to Japanese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics.
By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse had
run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga. The waka had been aristocratic, and the best renga provincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant class. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first called haikai, after the first verse of the renga, which was called the hokku. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant class, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older classical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in Japanese verse. This was the man now considered Japan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to Japanese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).
Basho was born a samurai in an age when it was little more than an empty title, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperous daimyo who transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest at renga gatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:
Red pepper pods!
Add wings to them,
and they are dragonflies!5