Drunken Master: The haiku of Taneda Santoka

“under burning heaven an endless line of ants” - Taneda Santoka

(Image source:https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/taneda.html)

To most people, haiku is either a long-dead Japanese art-form or a gimmick seen in cheesy internet advertisements and memes. Despite the court of public opinion, these Japanese micro-poems have persisted through the ages into a thriving modern community of both Eastern and Western writers. Some writers have attained titles like the rather imperious sounding ‘Haiku Grand-master’ and others toiled away in obscurity until their deaths. And then been resurrected.

A drunk and often a vagrant through his lifetime, Taneda Santoka is now recognized as one of the last mendicant monks of Japan’s modern age. Born in 1882, he was a wanderer, alcoholic and perhaps one of the most brilliant haiku poets of his or any other time.

Wandering from town to town across Japan, Santoka’s sole possessions were a battered begging bowl in which he collected money and rice (as well as ate and drank from) and his notebooks. His goal each day was simple, write and collect enough money for his nightly sake and perhaps a room in a cheap inn. His works reflect this simple lifestyle in their paucity of descriptive words and simple subject matter. Hidden within these apparently dirt-simple pieces is a depth yet unrivalled by most modern masters.

(Image source:https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/taneda.html)

If we return to the opening piece, as an example, there can be several interpretations. Firstly, that Santoka was simply observing a line of ants marching and in keeping with haiku’s spirit of zen selflessness just wrote what he saw. Santoka however was a bit of a rebel from traditional schools of haiku thought (surprise, surprise - he wasn't a particularly good monk either). A deeper reading of the piece suddenly opens up entirely new layers. If the ants are a symbol of humanity, uniformly toiling away, ‘burning heaven’ could easily have been a euphemism for the government of the day (which not that long after Santoka’s time began actively locking away ‘radical’ haiku poets).

He was openly critical of war, writing pieces such as:

“winter rain clouds -
soldiers off to China
to be blown to bits”

Similarly, Santoka was not afraid to explore topics considered vulgar by previous haiku standards in his pieces:

“Sake for the flesh, haiku for the soul:
Sake is the haiku of the flesh
haiku is the sake of the soul”

“no water but that
trickling from the farmer
in the dry rice-field”

Other pieces reveal a deep-seated poets sensitivity and the melancholy of the solitary, wandering life he chose for himself:

“within life and death, snow ceaselessly falls”

“twilight - the sound
of a sad letter
dropping into a postbox”

And somehow, through all of this, still an appreciation for nature, and the beauty of life that has remained central to haiku through the centuries:

“my heart’s exhausted -
the mountains, the sea
are too beautiful”

Taneda Santoka died in 1940, in his sleep, at the age of 57. He had walked thousands of miles around Japan in his lifetime and written equally numerous haiku. An excellent guide to his work for those interested in reading more can be found here: https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/taneda.html

His life story is as fascinating as his work and an excellent account is available here: http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n3/features/stanford_forrester-santoka.html

Well, that wraps up my first foray into the poetry world on Steemit! Hope you've enjoyed and happy Steeming,
The Wise Fox

“well which way should I go?
the wind blows”