The Poetic Achievement of Ban'ya Natsuishi

29

Gendai Haiku and Meaning in

Ban’ya Natsuishi’s Hybrid
Paradise
Adam T. Bogar
This brief essay is about an understanding of the essence of modern (or
rather postmodern) haiku, and it is meant to offer an explanation as to the
reason why such haiku, in particular those by Japanese haiku poet Ban’ya
Natsuishi, are frequently deemed incomprehensible. The term ‘modern’ (or
‘postmodern’) haiku here does not refer to haiku written in recent times, it
is not a chronological descriptor; instead, it refers to a specific subgenre of
haiku poetry usually called gendai haiku. In the following pages I will
consider Ban’ya Natsuishi’s volume of haiku Hybrid Paradise (2010),
focusing specifically (and exclusively) on some meaning-related qualities of
haiku.

I find that the term ‘postmodern haiku’, although necessarily reductive

and also potentially problematic,1 can give as good an idea as to the nature
of gendai haiku as it is possible. Providing an accurate definition for gendai
haiku (which literally translates into English as ‘modern haiku’, certainly
less than useful a definition) can be challenging. Charles Trumbull writes
that “when I was struggling to understand what is meant by the term for
poets today I asked among others Ban’ya Natsuishi, a well-known exponent
of the subgenre. His tautological reply: ‘Gendai haiku?—that’s what I
write[.]’” (113-14). Although it certainly does not bring one closer to a
definition, it at least underlines the fact that it indeed makes sense to consider
Ban’ya Natsuishi’s haiku gendai haiku.

Gendai haiku is a highly experimental subgenre of haiku poetry that

poses many challenges to readers. Gendai haiku poets tend to embrace an
understanding of ‘freedom of expression’ that is liberal even for freedom.
Characteristic features of such haiku are the subversion, and emphasizing
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the arbitrariness of, meaning, and the rejection of reviously accepted

standards of form; the lack of kigo, or season words, in Japanese gendai
haiku is a prime example of the latter. Many of Ban’ya’s haiku can be
classified as gendai haiku, not only based on his “confession” above, but
also by virtue of its approach to ‘meaning’.

In terms of the quality and style of the haiku included in each of its 11
chapters, Hybrid Paradise is not an even volume. In contrast with, for example,
his earlier volume Flying Pope (2008), Hybrid Paradise is nowhere near as
thematically tight. Although each individual chapter purports to be organized
around a single unifying theme, such structure occasionally weakens, and at
certain points even seems to dissolve and disappear altogether. The main reason
for that, to me at least (an important condition, to which I will return momentarily),
has to do with the style and meaning of some of the haiku.

The quality of understatement (simply put, to say more with less) is

usually considered an important and desirable feature in haiku:

For me, the aesthetic quality that stands out above the rest is
understatement, by which I mean to include the related ideals of silence,
restraint, subtlety, and suggestiveness. Understatement feels essential to
haiku, not only to traditional style poems, but even to contemporary and
experimental haiku as well. (Antolin 25-26, italics in original)

From those “related ideals,” “suggestiveness” is the most important

one for this discussion. Due to its brevity, haiku can (and should) never go
into great detail about anything, and therefore the poet’s choice of words
are of utmost importance. The so-called “haiku moment,” that instance of
insight and realization (what Bruce Ross calls “an epiphany” [sec. V]), has
long been widely considered the primary component of haiku poetry. This
idea generally entails certain corollaries, e.g. that “haiku is about direct
observation, haiku eschews metaphor, and haiku is about nature” (Shirane

1
The issues that may arise from such an equation of ‘gendai haiku’ with ‘postmodern
haiku’ cannot form part of this discussion, but the main challenge would be the plausibility
of applying theories of the postmodern ( a very pregnant term indeed) to contemporary
Japanese poetry. For the purposes of this essay, I will tentatively accept that such an
application is possible.
 The Poetic Achievement of Ban'ya Natsuishi
31

121), which are first of all highly debatable,2 and secondly, unnecessarily
restrictive for this discussion. What one should take away from this as true
and relevant is that haiku is a personal form of poetry, where the poet’s role
is to assign meaning to the words in the poem.3

John Stevenson suggests viewing (that is, reading) individual haiku as

“two- or three-dimensional art objects” (61). In that framework, Natsuishi’s
gendai haiku would seem to be two-dimensional objects, “one that is intended
to be viewed from a particular arc of perspectives” (62). Still, when reading
Hybrid Paradise (or most of Natsuishi’s recent works, for that matter), it
is easy to feel completely, utterly, and irrevocably lost: one may feel that the
“particular arc of perspectives” needed for making sense of the haiku is the
poet’s own.

I think it is fair to say that a reader should be allowed to expect

independent meaning […] of some sort from a haiku that is published with
the intent to be read. […] Poets are needed to convey some sense of purpose
to the chosen images, and in doing so they need to be conscious of the
readers. […] Unless each haiku comes with an explanatory footnote, they
cannot possibly know the mindset that spawned them. (Miller n.p.)

Paul Miller’s point above is one that is often made by Western readers
of modernist and postmodernist Japanes poetry, haiku included. Max Verhart,
for example, mentions one of Natsuishi’s haiku from his volume A Future
Waterfall (2004):
Going under the sea
yellow light
and purple music
At first sight, the poem seems undecipherable, at least without having
access to the circumstances under which it was written. The reader seems
to require access to “an individual’s culture, language, and experiences”
what Jim Kacian calls one’s “mindspace” (59). Rearding that particular
haiku, Verhart was luckier than most:
See Haruo Shirane’s essay “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashô, Buson, and Modern
2

Haiku Myths” for a more thorough discussion of the topic.

It may sound all too obvious, but it is important to set the basics straight, especially
3

when discussing a form of poetry as brief as haiku.

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As it happens I happen to have a copy of this haiku in the author’s

own calligraphy on a cardboard panel, the Japanese original on one
side and the English translation on the other. […] I gather it was
written during or after […] a trip by an international group of haiku
poets going by shuttle train through the tunnel under the Channel
from France to England and back, autumn 1997. So they were going
under the sea, discussing haiku! And as I know from a short report
[…,] Ban’ya Natsuishi was among them. (Verhart 43)

Verhart also adds that “Interpreted that way, the haiku is quite realistic,
if one can take ‘purple music’ as a poetic description of whatever the author
was hearing” (43). However, the obvious question remains (and is asked by
Miller as well): “how is the reader to know that[?]” (Miller n.p.)?

And the haiku above is certainly not the only one in Natsuishi’s oeuvre
with surrealistic overtones and leanings and/or overly subjective perspectives.
Let stand here a few such examples from Hybrid Paradise:
Violent wind-
a thousand mice
pushing a car of fire

Buildings and tents

in Ulan Bator
night lightning

Carrying a poetess Mary

and her chronic illnesses
the airplane is heavy

A haiku reading of the rainy season

can it bring us
a Slovenian transparency?
Many of these haiku were no doubt written on particular occasions,
with specific people and things in mind, which is certainly not a problem.
What is often cited as an actual problem with Natsuishi’s (with and other
contemporary gendai haikuists’) poems is that the “particular arc of
 The Poetic Achievement of Ban'ya Natsuishi
33

perspectives” from which such haiku make sense appears to be reduced to

a single one, and that such haiku “are too personal for [readers] to understand
fully, and that the writer is not taking readers’ involvement into consideration”
(Miller par. 20).

It may thus seem that Natsuishi and gendai haiku poets in general
disregard their audiences, their readers when they don’t provide all the
information necessary to decipher the meaning of their haiku. Even if it may
be true in certain cases, in my view the reader’s role in constructing the
meaning of haiku can be different based on the aim of the reading. If one is
reading for aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, then it indeed is reasonable
to expect haiku to be meaningful and to provide some sort of grounding that
enables comprehension. After all, the Western way of looking at modern
haiku is to consider them “small collections of words intended to manipulate
mindspace […,] supplying opportunity to explore our own and each others’
resources” (Kacian 59). However, if one’s reading haiku for a purely
emotional experience, then it necessarily requires a different type of
engagement on the reader’s part. As I see it, many of Ban’ya Natsuishi’s
haiku work in a Dadaist fashion: they do not “make sense” according to
commonly accepted frameworks, but instead they reflect on the inadequacy
of such frameworks to express emotions and experiences not otherwise
expressible.

In her discussion of Natsuishi’s haiku volumes Endless Helix, Hybrid

Paradise, and Black Card, Anna Cates concludes that the often tragic,
disastrous, or unsettling events about which Natsuishi writes his haiku “seem
to take on dimensions beyond the physical or natural. A supernatural,
metaphysical aspect is embedded in the tragedies, leaving the poet grappling
on multiple levels” (82). Natsuishi’s haiku in general, and those in Hybrid
Paradise in particular as well, are poems written from a highly subjective
point of view, and the uncertainty of language and the inexpressibility of
trauma are central to his poetic style. Natsuishi received his Master’s degree
in comparative literature from Tokyo University, and during his studies he
familiarized himself particularly with the European avant-garde of the first
half of the 20th century. Such studies evidently influenced his haiku along
with earlier Japanese haiku poets such as Nagata Koi. Eric Selland, poet
and translator living in Tokyo, in his sweeping overview of Japanese modernist
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poetry references Natsuishi, saying he “writes wildly avant-garde haiku

influenced by European Dadaism” (202). Dadaism was an art movement
that emerged as a reaction to the all-consuming madness of World War I
and as a reflection on the collective loss of a sense of reality caused not
only by the war but also by Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics,
psychoanalysis, and Communism. In short, reality wasn’t what it used to be,
which applies very well to the recent decades of Japanese history marked
by natural and also nuclear disasters. A quasi-Dadaist all-emotional response
to a reality that seems to be breaking up around the poet, although definitely
difficult to make sense of, is an adequate way of addressing traumatic
experience.
The above may not be true to all gendai haiku. But given
Natsuishi’s education, experiences, and interest in and care for tragic and
traumatic events (not only in Japan but all over the world), it is reasonable
to attempt a reading of his haiku through the lens of Dadaism and other
avant-garde approaches to poetry and art.

Works Cited

Antolin, Susan. “Haiku Aesthetics: a Look at Understatement.” Modern

Haiku, vol. 47, no. 3, 2016, pp. 23-35. Available online at
www.modernhaiku.org/issue47-3/Antolin-HaikuAesthetics-MH47-
3.pdf.
Cates, Anna. “Red Tears: Emotional Depth in the Haiku of Ban’ya
Natsuishi.”Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research and
Scholarship, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, pp. 69-83. Available online at
www.thehaikufoundation.org/juxta/juxta-3-1/red-tears-emotional-
depth-in-the-haiku-of-banya-natsuishi.
Kacian, Jim. “Realism Is Dead (And Always Was).” Modern Haiku, vol.
47, no. 2, 2016, pp. 57-66. Available online at
www.modernhaiku.org/issue47-2/Kacian-RealismIsDead-MH-47-
2.pdf.
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Miller, Paul. “Ground Control to the Flying Pope.” Modern Haiku, vol. 41,
no. 3, 2010, n.p. Available online at www.modernhaiku.org/essays/
Miller-BanyaNatsuishi’sFlyingPope.html.
Natsuishi, Ban’ya. Hybrid Paradise, translated by Ban’ya Natsuishi and
Jim Kacian. Cyberwit.net, 2010.
———. A Future Waterfall, translated and edited by Jim Kacian. Red
Moon Press, 2004.
Ross, Bruce. “The Essence of Haiku.” Modern Haiku, vol. 38, no. 3,
2007, n.p. Available online at www.modernhaiku.org/essays/
RossEssenceHaiku.html.
Selland, Eric. “The Modernist Tradition in Japan: Some Introductory
Comments.” Chicago Review, vol. 39, nos. 3-4, 1993, pp. 196-
202. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/25305746.
Shirane, Haruo. “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashô, Buson, and Modern
Haiku Myths.” Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research
and Scholarship, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 121-41. Available online
at www.thehaikufoundation.org/juxta/juxta-1-1/beyond-the-haiku-
moment-basho-buson-and-modern-haiku-myths.
Stevenson, John. “Haiku as Dimensional Object.” Frogpond, vol. 36, no.
3, 2013, pp. 61-63. Available online at www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/
2013-issue36-3/Stevenson-Dimensions-Fp36-3.pdf.
Trumbull, Charles. “Meaning in Haiku.” Frogpond, vol. 35, no. 3, 2012, pp.
92-118. Available online at www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2012-
issue35-3/Trumbull-Meaning-In-Haiku-Frogpond-2012.pdf
Verhart, Max. “A Pebble Skimming the Surface of a Lake.” The Poetic
Achievement of Ban’ya Natsuishi, edited by Santosh Kumar.
Cyberwit.net, 2009, pp. 41-46.