Enquiring Mind and the Collapsing Body
Shiki’s Poem on the Snow
Susumu Takiguchi
byochu-yuki (maegaki=foreword, snow seen while sick)
ikutabi mo yuki no fukasa wo tazune keri
Masaoka Shiki (estimated January or February 1896)
ikutabi=many times/ mo=emphasis or exclamatory particle/ yuki=snow/
no=possessive particle/ fukasa=depth, thickness/ wo=object particle/ tazune=verb
stem, inquire, ask/ keri=past or exclamation adverb
The First Version
time and again,
about the thickness of the snow
have I inquired!
(Version by ST)
The Second Version
Oh, how many times
I have asked how thick
the snow is!
(Version by ST)
The Third Version
again and again
I ask how high
the snow is
(tr. by Janine Beichman)
*pp. 65-68, Masaoka Shiki, Janine Beichman, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1982. If
you haven't got this book, copies are available from The World Haiku Club
Snow is rare in Matsuyama where Shiki was born. It doesn’t snow often in Tokyo
either but when it does it gives some excitement to people living there. So much
more so it must have been for Shiki. Uncommonly curious, Shiki wanted to see how
the snow started falling, how it settled and how it melted.
Shiki came to live in Tokyo on 31 October 1895
(Meiji 28) and because of his illness never left the capital after that. On his
way from Matsuyama, he suffered from serious backache in Osaka, which made it
temporarily impossible for him to walk. It was assumed that he had severe
rheumatism, which was to prove to be a false diagnosis the following March, when
it transpired that he was in fact suffering from severe caries. This disease
crippled him and made him bed-ridden for seven years until his death.
In February (1896) his condition deteriorated.
There is a good chance that the haiku under review was written then. It is
recorded in "Kanzan Rakuboku" Volume 5 ("Cold Mountain, Withered
Trees", for 1896, Meiji 29). There is nothing ambiguous about what the poem
says. He was bed-ridden, unable to walk to open the shoji sliding door himself
to see the snow. He loved snow and was so keen to know what it looked like all
the time. He therefore asked his mother and Ritsu, his sister, repeatedly to
tell him how deep the snow had got to until he himself realised what a lot of
times he had been asking that question. Yae, the mother, and Ritsu obliged and
went to see the snow and reported how it was to Shiki, even if they were busy
enough looking after him and doing all other household chores.
There are three more snow haiku Shiki wrote in
the same situation around the same time.
yuki no ie ni nete iru to omou bakari nite
thinking nothing else
but being bed-ridden
in a house of snow
(version by ST)
yuki furu yo shoji no ana wo mite areba
snow’s falling!
I see it through a hole
in the shutter…
(tr. Janine Beichman)
shoji akeyo ueno no yuki wo hitome min
open the shoji sliding door
and let me glimpse at the snow
at Ueno
(version by ST)
Beichman refers to "one of the central
themes of Shiki’s later poetry as being the contrast between his own mortality
and the continuity of the natural world around him."(1) This theme was
exploited fully in these four poems with the mixture of Shiki rejoicing at the
beauty of nature and the sadness and irritation he felt of being unable to reach
it. To quote Beichman again from the same pages, "One feels the poignance[-cy]
of the distance between the poem’s speaker and the snow, a distance that can
be bridged only by the repeated questioning."
These four poems represent the dichotomy Shiki
had begun to learn to live with between the world around him and his mind
trapped in the immobile body, between life and death, which would be eventually
transformed into the sense of resignation with which he probably succeeded in
overcoming it and accepted death.
(1) pp. 65-68, Janine Beichman, Masaoka Shiki,
Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1982
Read
Member Project:
Awe
and Anxiety (snow haiku)
