Haiku and the Cutting Word

In the spring of 1689 Bashō set out on foot for the far north of Honshu, and the book he made of the journey, Oku no Hosomichi, keeps doing the same thing. It walks for a paragraph, it stops, and a poem stands where the walking was. The prose carries you to the edge; the haiku does not explain the view. The form is called haibun, and it is a good way to learn what a haiku is, because it shows the haiku as a place where prose has to stop.

So this note walks, and stops.

Start with the poem everyone knows. A garden, an old pond with a skin of green on it, nothing moving. Then something small happens and is over before the reader has quite looked up.

古池や　蛙飛び込む　水の音

furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

The old pond: a frog jumps in, the sound of water.

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Say it aloud, and tap the table once for each beat.

Japanese does not count syllables. It counts on (音), what linguists call morae: small, even units of time, each roughly the length of a short consonant-and-vowel. Tap them out and the old pond falls into a stepped shape on the table, 5, then 7, then 5.

Each cell is one kana, and in this poem each kana is one tap. Bashō's own spelling of the frog was かはづ, historical kana for a word said kawazu; は is read wa and is still one beat. The kanji vary across printings, 飛込む, 飛びこむ, 飛び込む. The taps do not.

Three things sit inside those seventeen cells. 蛙, the frog, is a season word (kigo) for spring, and so the poem is dated without a date. や, at the end of the first line, is a cutting word (kireji). And after the cut there are two things, a still pond and a brief sound, with nothing written between them.

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English usually teaches the form as "five syllables, seven, five", and on the old pond that rule happens to work, because every beat in it is a short open syllable. Pick almost any other word and the two units come apart.

Tōkyō is two syllables in English and four taps in Japanese: と・う・きょ・う, to-o-kyo-o. The small ょ leans on the き before it and makes one beat with it. The う after each one stretches the vowel and takes a beat of its own.

Nippon is two syllables and four taps: に・っ・ぽ・ん. The little っ is a held breath before the p, a beat of silence, and the ん at the end is a beat of humming.

Kōhī, coffee, is written コーヒー, and each long bar ー is one more tap.

Kana are almost a written list of beats. Each full-size kana is one, the small ゃ ゅ ょ fold into the kana before them, and っ, ん and ー each count as one though none of them is a syllable at all. A reader who counts the letters on the page, not the vowels in the romanization, is counting the right thing.

The difference matters on the Japan Sea coast, where Bashō, looking out at night toward the island of Sado, wrote this:

荒海や　佐渡によこたふ　天河

araumi ya / sado ni yokotō / ama no gawa

The rough sea: stretching over to Sado, the River of Heaven.

Count vowels in sado ni yokotō and you find six. Tap it and you find seven, because the long ō takes two beats, た・う. The middle line is regular. Only the wrong unit made it look short.

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The cutting word.

Classical lists name eighteen. English has none. Translators use a dash, a colon, a line break: punctuation doing the work of a word.

That is all it does. It stops the sentence, and leaves a gap the reader has to cross alone.

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Buson, eighty-odd years after the frog, stands in a field of rapeseed in flower. It is late spring and late in the day. The field runs to the horizon in both directions, and in both directions there is a light in the sky.

菜の花や　月は東に　日は西に

na no hana ya / tsuki wa higashi ni / hi wa nishi ni

Rapeseed flowers: the moon in the east, the sun in the west.

Again や, and again the cut falls after line one. But what follows the cut is a mirror: moon and sun, east and west, the same grammar in each slot, as in the couplets set face to face in Mirrors and the Couplet. The poem never says how wide the field is. It only puts the rising moon and the setting sun in it at once, and lets that do the measuring.

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Seventeen beats are not seventeen English syllables. An English syllable is heavy: sound is a cluster, a diphthong and another cluster, several Japanese beats' worth of mouth-work in one. Put the old pond into plain English, the old pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water, and it comes to twelve syllables with nothing missing. Pad it to seventeen and there are five syllables the poem never had: an adjective for the pond, a verb for the splash, a hint of what it all means.

This is why many poets writing haiku in English settle near ten to fourteen syllables, short-long-short, and spend their care elsewhere: on a season, on a cut, on two things set side by side with nothing to join them. Those carry across. The count does not.

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Issa, in 1819, after the death of his small daughter Sato. Dew is an autumn word, and an old Buddhist figure for how little anything lasts. He had been taught that. He knew it was true.

露の世は　露の世ながら　さりながら

tsuyu no yo wa / tsuyu no yo nagara / sarinagara

This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet.

There is no や here, no かな, no けり. The poem cuts with nagara, "although", and then says it again, sarinagara, "and yet", and stops with the clause still open. The doctrine is granted in full. The last line declines to finish the sentence.