59 Fun Facts About Haiku

A traditional Japanese haiku is arranged in which pattern?

5-7-5: though Bashō himself broke it now and then, and his verse about carrying Mount Fuji's wind home on a fan opens with six beats instead of five.

Which older Japanese verse form has 31 on to a haiku's 17?

Tanka: each January the emperor hosts a palace reading of them, and anyone in Japan may send one in on that year's set theme.

What does on, the name of the unit counted in Japanese haiku, literally mean?

Sound: an on is briefer than an English syllable, so translators reckon about twelve English syllables last as long as seventeen on, and many English haiku now run short.

What is a kigo?

A season word: the approved lists keep growing, and Christmas, a foreign festival, now counts as a winter kigo.

What is a kireji in a haiku?

A cutting word: it makes a verse complete in itself, which is why the opening verse of a linked poem had to carry one and could later stand alone.

Which kireji appears in Bashō's famous 'old pond' haiku?

Ya: English has no such word, so translators of 'Furu ike ya' have tried a dash, a semicolon, an exclamation mark or nothing at all.

In Japanese haiku, the word 'moon' with no other clue places a poem in which season?

Autumn: the air is clearest then and the moon at its loveliest, so a poet who means another season has to say so, as with spring's 'hazy moon'.

What is a saijiki?

A list of season words: the name first meant an almanac of the year's festivals and customs, and haiku poets later took it over for their handbooks.

Japanese haiku almanacs sort their season words into the four seasons and which fifth section?

New Year: it used to fall at the start of spring, but when Japan adopted the Western calendar in 1873 it landed in midwinter, so its words were given a section of their own.

Haiku began as the opening stanza of which longer collaborative form?

Renga: it grew from a court pastime in which one poet began a short poem and another finished it, then swelled into chains of a hundred verses.

What was the term for the opening verse of a linked poem, later renamed haiku?

Hokku: at a linked-verse gathering the guest of honour composed it, and was expected to greet the host and nod to the season.

Which staple of English verse did Japanese haiku never use?

Rhyme: the Japanese originals have none, yet mid-century translators such as Harold Henderson and Kenneth Yasuda rhymed the first and third lines of their English versions.

Which satirical cousin of haiku keeps the 17 on but needs no kigo or kireji?

Senryū: it is named after Karai Senryū, an 18th-century contest judge whose pick of the wittiest entries was printed and sold in popular collections.

Haibun combines haiku with what?

Prose: Bashō wrote up his journeys this way, and the pattern stuck, with a paragraph of travel diary rounded off by a single verse.

Which Japanese art form pairs a haiku with a simple painting, often by the poet's own hand?

Haiga: verse and picture came from the same brush and ink, so poets from Bashō onward often added a quick, unshowy sketch to their own haiku.

A kuhi is a monument that preserves a famous haiku in what way?

Carved into natural stone: disciples and later admirers raise them at places tied to the poet, often the very spot where the verse was composed.

Japanese haiku served as a model for which movement in poetry in English, founded in the 1910s?

Imagism: its poets set out to cut every unnecessary word and leave one hard, clear picture, taking haiku as a model for how little a poem needs.

Bashō wrote in the late 1600s under which shoguns?

Tokugawa: they ruled from Edo, the shogun's capital, where Bashō made his name as a poetry teacher before turning his back on city life to travel.

Bashō's pen name comes from which plant, given to him by his disciples?

A banana tree: planted beside his new hut in Fukagawa, it gave the place its name, the Bashō hut, and before long the poet was called Bashō too.

Bashō was born in Iga, a province famous in Japan as a homeland of which fighters?

Ninja: the link fed a popular theory that Bashō spied for the shogun on his travels, but his father was probably a landowning farmer with a few samurai privileges.

Bashō's haiku at the ruins of Hiraizumi calls the summer grasses all that remains of whose dreams?

Warriors: standing where the hero Yoshitsune had died five centuries before, Bashō laid his hat on the ground and wept, by his own account, before writing it.

Bashō's most famous haiku, composed in early 1686, features which creature?

A frog: that spring his circle held a verse contest on nothing but frogs, and the old-pond poem was given first place in the printed collection.

What is the English title of Bashō's masterwork Oku no Hosomichi?

The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Oku was the name of Japan's remote northern provinces and also means 'interior', so some translators prefer The Narrow Road to the Interior.

At a silent mountain temple on his 1689 journey, Bashō wrote that the cry of which creature sinks into the rocks?

The cicada: he doubled back to see Yamadera only because people urged him to, and the temple is now best known for his verse.

Bashō covered most of the five-month journey behind Oku no Hosomichi by what means?

On foot: before setting out at 45, by his own account, he patched his trousers and had moxa burned on his shins to strengthen his legs.

Bashō quotes which Chinese poet's line 'The state is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers remain' in Oku no Hosomichi?

Du Fu: Bashō revered the Tang poet and reached for this line as he looked over the grassed-over ruins of a once-great provincial capital.

Which principle of 'lightness' did Bashō adopt in his last years?

Karumi: he urged his followers to find beauty in plain, everyday things and say it simply, and built his 1694 anthology A Sack of Charcoal on the idea.

In which city did Bashō die in 1694?

Osaka: he had gone there to patch up a quarrel among his followers, fell ill with a stomach complaint and died with his disciples around him.

Besides poetry, Yosa Buson was celebrated in which art?

Painting: it was his main income, and he paid tribute to his idol Bashō by copying out Oku no Hosomichi as illustrated scrolls and screens.

In Chiyo-ni's most famous haiku, which flower has wound itself round her well-bucket?

Morning glory: rather than tear the vine free, she goes to ask a neighbour for water.

The pen name Issa means what?

Cup of tea: he also named his cottage 'Haiku Temple' and signed himself 'Priest Cup-of-Tea' of it.

Roughly how many haiku did Issa write?

20,000: small creatures crowd them, and having lost his mother at three and known years of poverty, he tends to side with the weak against the strong.

In a much-loved Issa haiku, the poet begs someone not to swat which creature?

The fly: it is rubbing its hands and feet, the verse goes on, and in Japan rubbing your hands together is how you beg, so the insect seems to plead for its life.

Issa's 'dewdrop world' haiku was written after the death of whom?

His daughter: she died of smallpox when barely a year old, and the poem grants that life is as fleeting as dew before breaking off with 'and yet, and yet'.

Which school of Buddhism, not Zen, was Issa devoted to?

Pure Land: its trust in Amida Buddha's grace runs through his work, as in a year-end verse that simply leaves everything, good and bad, to the Buddha.

Shiki's pen name refers to which bird?

Lesser cuckoo: in Japanese lore it sings until it coughs blood, and he took the name soon after he began coughing blood himself, from tuberculosis.

Shiki was inducted into which unlikely institution in 2002?

Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame: he caught for a student team until illness stopped him, and coined the Japanese words for batter and runner.

Which future novelist did Shiki befriend as a student in Tokyo?

Natsume Sōseki: years later the sick Shiki moved into Sōseki's lodgings in Matsuyama for some fifty days and ran haiku gatherings from his friend's rooms.

Shiki's shasei method asked poets to do what?

Describe what they saw: shasei means 'sketching from life', and Shiki borrowed the idea from Western-style painters who worked outdoors, turning it from paint to words.

Shiki's disciples founded which haiku magazine, alluding to his pen name, in 1897?

Hototogisu: it soon made room for fiction as well, and the novel I Am a Cat first appeared in its pages in 1905.

The earliest Westerner known to have written haiku was of which nationality?

Dutch: Hendrik Doeff ran the trading post at Dejima for fourteen years, cut off while Napoleon held his homeland, and for a time his was one of the last Dutch flags flying anywhere.

Whose four-volume Haiku, begun in 1949, introduced the form to post-war English readers?

R. H. Blyth: the Englishman wrote parts of his haiku books while interned in Japan as an enemy alien, then stayed on and taught English to the future Emperor Akihito.

Which 1913 Ezra Pound poem is called the first fully realized haiku in English?

In a Station of the Metro: Pound began with thirty lines about faces in the Paris underground, then cut and cut until only two lines and fourteen words were left.

Which American novelist, bedridden in Paris, wrote some 4,000 haiku in 1959-60?

Richard Wright: the author of Native Son chose 817 of them for a book, but a publisher rejected it and it did not appear until 1998, almost four decades after his death.

Which Beat writer said a haiku 'must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery'?

Jack Kerouac: he argued that American haiku need not count syllables at all, and recorded an album, Blues and Haikus, reading his own over two jazz saxophones.

Which James Bond novel takes its title from a haiku that Bond writes in the manner of Bashō?

You Only Live Twice: on a mission in Japan Bond offers the lines 'once when you are born, and once when you look death in the face', which Fleming's epigraph credits as 'after Bashō'.

Which former European Council president is a published haiku poet nicknamed for the form?

Herman Van Rompuy: 'Haiku Herman' had long posted verses on his blog as a Belgian MP, and brought out a book of them in April 2010, during his first year in the EU job.

Many Japanese haiku poets left a jisei, which is what kind of verse?

A death poem: Bashō wrote no formal one, so the verse he dictated in his last illness, about his dreams still roaming a withered field, is read as his farewell.

Which Mexican poet co-translated Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi into Spanish in 1957?

Octavio Paz: he knew no Japanese, by his own account, and took it on when a diplomat friend from Japan proposed they do it together, a generation after José Juan Tablada brought haiku to Mexico.

In Shiki's best-known haiku, a temple bell rings just as he bites into which fruit?

A persimmon: he ate them several at a time, even on his sickbed, and may have had in mind a friend's verse about another temple bell.

A traditional Japanese haiku is printed as one line running which way?

Downward: in Japan the whole poem runs down the page in one unbroken column, and the three-line layout that English readers expect is a habit of translation.

Which five-line form, inspired by Japanese haiku, did the American poet Adelaide Crapsey devise?

The cinquain: Crapsey kept writing in a sanatorium as her tuberculosis worsened, and her first book of verse came out only the year after she died at 36.

Haiku takes the first half of its name from haikai, a word that marked verse as what?

Playful: haikai began as a light, joking offshoot of courtly linked verse, and it was Bashō who made poets take the game seriously.

A travel companion's diary, published in 1943, showed that Bashō had done what in Oku no Hosomichi?

Reshaped events for effect: the companion's plain log differs from the book in its route and timing and leaves out one of its best-known scenes, a night at an inn.

Which Japanese poet led the free-form haiku movement that abandoned the 17-on tradition?

Ogiwara Seisensui: he threw out the season word as well as the count, and his magazine Sōun launched the free-form poets Santōka and Hōsai.

One of Buson's best-known haiku pictures what 'rising and falling, rising and falling, all day long'?

The spring sea: the line has become a dictionary example in Japan, quoted to illustrate both 'hinemosu', all day long, and 'notari notari', moving slow and easy.

Which Argentine writer included haiku in his 1981 collection La cifra?

Jorge Luis Borges: blind for a quarter of a century by then, he put seventeen haiku into the book, one for each syllable of the form.

What is a haijin?

A haiku poet: by custom a haijin signs with a pen name, the haigō, and Bashō went by Sōbō and then Tōsei before the name that stuck.

In 1902 the scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain presented Bashō's haiku to English readers as the Japanese poetical what?

Epigram: he judged it the nearest European parallel, 'using that term in its earlier sense', and called the 17-syllable poem 'ultra-Lilliputian'.