perfected in Basho’s classic work, allude to Thoreau and his example at Walden Pond more than to any other literary figure. In a variety of stylistic approaches, North American haibun is evolving toward the spiritual depth evoked by both the Japanese master and our own iconoclast naturalist.
Yet there is a presiding disjunction between the aesthetic premises underlying the literary writing, particularly of nature, in the long history of Eastern culture and the fairly short history of American literary writing from the Puritans to the present. One aspect of this disjunction is the manner in which each accounts for the relation of consciousness to external nature.
Broadly speaking, the poetics of the East reflects an ontological union of man’s consciousness with nature in which nature is of equal valence to man while the poetics of the West reflects an allegorical subsuming of nature in which man dominates nature. Eastern and Western concepts of subjectivity thus differ, the East accenting an emotional relation of the self to nature and the West accenting an intellectual relation to nature. In the East nature tends to dominate consciousness. In the West the mind tends to determine consciousness.1
This Eastern impetus toward universal subjectivity, which would elicit our poetic empathies for nature in its myriad identities, is subverted in America at the first by our inheritance of simple Christian allegory and later by the predominating mechanisms of materialism, science, and philosophic naturalism. In this condition American poetry, especially contemporary poetry, would reflect an inability to treat the ontological realities of nature with sympathy,2 However, there have been influential waves of the direct influence of Eastern aesthetics upon such American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. A literary form in which most of these writers could—in the broadest sense—be said to be writing is the Japanese haibun.
A simple definition of the form, taken from a contemporary Japanese-English dictionary, is a “terse prose-poem.”3 Yet this definition does not account for the eliding of the haibun into similar traditional Japanese forms like the kiko (“travel journal”) and the nikki (“diary”). This confluence is addressed in a definition of haibun in a scholarly encyclopedia of Japanese literature: “Haikai (related to renga composition and sometimes the seventeen-syllable opening verse of a renga) writing. Prose composition, usually with haikai stanzas, by a haikai poet. Normally with an autobiographical or theoretical interest, it could treat many kinds of experiences. When it treats a journey, it becomes a species of kiko”4
The important distinctions in the broader definition of the haibun are that it is autobiographical prose, usually accompanied by verse. Basho in fact assigned the phrase michi no nikki (“diary of the road”) to haibun-like travel journals like his Oku-no-hosomichi. The deciding factors in considering a literary diary a haibun are that its prose is poetical and that it contains verse, usually haiku. A more recent example is in the work of the first important modem haiku poet, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who published diaries that included sequences of haiku and tanka. The usual forms of Japanese haibun up to the modern period were a short sketch of a person, place, event, or object; a travel diary like Bashō’s Narrow Path to the Interior; or a diary of events in one’s life like Kobayashi Issa’s (1763-1827) Oraga Haru (My Spring, 1819).
Definitions of haibun by scholars of Japanese literature are broad enough to incorporate all the directions that English-language haibun has taken.5 Further, although the Haiku Society of America—the largest society devoted to haiku and related forms outside Japan—did not include haibun in its official definitions of Japanese forms at first (1973), by 1994 haibun had become a familiar enough form to warrant an official definition:
A short prose essay in the humorous haikai style, usually including a haiku, often at the end. “Haibun” is sometimes applied to the more serious diary or journal writing typical of Bashō’s and Issa’s longer works, though technically they are part of the diary or journal literature, which is usually more serious than haibun. But it is not unusual for haikai elements to enter into these longer works.6
Notwithstanding this comprehensive definition, the actual practice of modern shorter haibun in English includes, as we shall see, serious as well as lighter treatments of given subjects.
Versions of haibun in English first began to appear in Eric Amann’s journal Haiku (1967-1976).7 By 1993 three of the more prominent American haiku journals, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Brussels Sprout, and one new journal, Point Judith Light, had identified poetry and prose entries as haibun. Patrick Frank, the editor of Point Judith Light, also offered a short definition at the top of his journal’s haibun column: “Haiku embedded within a relatively short prose piece.”8 This definition accurately reflects what is commonly published as haibun in the American haiku journals, with some interesting exceptions, as would be the case given the space limitations of such journals. But American haibun more properly began with published diaries and haibun-like fiction.
The American literary tradition prepared our early haibun writers with major examples of autobiographical and biographical narrative that evoked episodes of spiritual challenge or revelation in relation to the natural world, as well as to social conditions. The more obvious examples include William Bradford’s (1590-1657) historical account History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Jonathan Edwards’s (1703-1758) “Personal Narrative” (c. 1740), Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-1790) The Autobiography (1867), Henry David Thoreau’s (1817-1862) naturalist’s journal Walden (1854), and, though poetry, Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892) response to the Civil War, Drum Taps (1865). Of these only Walden evokes the Eastern tradition of the spiritual recluse, as Thoreau’s travel writing evokes the Eastern tradition of poetic pilgrimage, both of which are exemplified in the poetry and travel journals of the Japanese poets Saigyō (1118-1190) and Sōgi (1421-1502), who had influenced Bashō’s own travel journals. A transitional American writer leading to English-language haibun is the naturalist John Muir (1838-1914), through his prose accounts and diaries of his travels in the American wilderness, such as The Mountains of California (1894) and John of the Mountains (1938).
The so-called Beat Movement of the 1950s reflects the second major influx of Eastern thought and literary conventions, after the Transcendentalists, into American history. This group, under the nominal tutelage of Kenneth Rexroth—naturalist, landscape poet, and translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry—attempted to model their lives on the lives of the Eastern recluse and pilgrimage poets, in spite of their confirmed adherence to seemingly non-Eastern passionately indulgent experience. The seminal, and perhaps earliest, work of this group that approaches the haibun in tone and structure is Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold (1957), a collection of work journals, travel diaries, reviews, translations, biographical accounts, and essays whose central focus is Zen Buddhism. Snyder studied Zen in Japan for a number of years and includes in the collection a journal of his first travel to and religious study in Japan, as well as an account of an intensive meditation retreat at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. But it is his “Lookout’s Journal,” a poetic log of his work as a fire spotter in the mountains of Washington State, that offers a model of what American haibun was to become.
The entry for August 6, 1952, serves as an example of how elements from the classical Japanese haibun, consciously or not, incorporated themselves into the stream of American literary journals:
Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror Shuksan; they blow over the ridge between here and Three-fingered Jack, fill up the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.
What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds—wind, and mountains—repeating
this is what always happens here
and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.
two butterflies
