Baseball Haiku

Yamaguchi Seishi () 1901–1994

Yamaguchi Seishi was born November 3, 1901, in Kyoto. He began writing haiku as a boy. In 1926 he graduated from Tokyo University with a law degree and began working for a commercial company in Osaka. He was sickly and had to take off from work quite often, sometimes for long periods. In the 1940s, in order to safeguard his health, he began to lead a retiring life, living in small towns on Honshu’s Pacific coast.

With his first book, Tk (Frozen Harbor), published in 1932, and in the following years, Seishi led the avant-garde by using modern urban images and foreign words (in katakana) in his haiku. He broke with the traditionalist Kyoshi and joined Shshi’s splinter group. He broke with them to form the Tenr (Sirius) group, with Sait Sanki (a progressively minded poet interested in baseball) as the editor of its magazine (1948). In Seishi’s haiku, we find guns, trains, skyscrapers, and other elements of contemporary life. A well-known example is “in the summer grass / the wheels of a locomotive / come to a stop.” Seishi also caught the resonance that can be found in the juxtaposition of simple things: “summer river / the end of a red iron chain / soaks in the water.” He wrote haiku about many sports, including rugby, swimming, golf, and skating. Seishi saw his first night game in 1960 and wrote “watching the night game.” His fascination with the magical world of night games mirrors his interest in modernity, particularly one of its most striking manifestations: bright lights.