For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santoka

The brief poetic form known today as haiku enjoyed immense popularity in Japan during the Edo period (1600–1867), when poets such as Bashō and Buson produced superlative works in the genre and a craze for haiku writing spread through many sectors of the population. But by the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the beginning of Japan’s modern era, the form had sunk to a very low level of literary worth, being marked mainly by stale imitations of the past or facile wordplay or satire, often of a vulgar nature.

In the early years of the Meiji period, the poet and critic Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) succeeded in injecting new life into the form and restoring it as a vehicle for serious artistic expression. Since his time, the writing of haiku has constituted an integral part of the Japanese literary scene, and in recent years the form has been taken up by poets in many other countries and languages as well.

Although Shiki greatly broadened the subject matter of the haiku and employed a more colloquial diction, he continued to write in the traditional form, which uses seventeen syllables or sound symbols arranged in a 5–7–5 pattern and invariably includes a kigo (season word) that indicates the particular season in which the poem is set.

Shiki had two outstanding disciples in the art of haiku composition: Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) and Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937). Kyoshi, writing in the traditional haiku form as Shiki had, produced during his long life a large body of works that has been highly esteemed by Japanese critics. Hekigotō, on the contrary, in time grew dissatisfied with the formal requirements of the traditional haiku and began experimenting with the writing of what are now known as free-verse or free-style haiku, brief poems that do not adhere to the 5–7–5 sound pattern and do not regularly include a season word.

This new free-style haiku form was originated by one of Hekigotō’s disciples, Ogiwara Seisensui (1884–1976). And Taneda Santōka, whose free-style haiku are the subject of this volume, was a disciple of Seisensui. Thus, in the kinship terms so beloved by Japanese critics, Taneda Santōka was a literary grandson of Kawahigashi Hekigotō and a great-grandson of Masaoka Shiki.

Although Santōka wrote conventional-style haiku in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently records the circumstances that led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. His poetry attracted only limited notice during his lifetime, but in recent years in Japan there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in his life and writings. His complete works were published in seven large volumes in 1972 and 1973,¹ and Japanese bookstores now customarily display an impressive array of Santōka’s poems, letters, and diaries, as well as critical studies and memoirs by persons who knew him.

As Ivan Morris noted some years ago in The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan, the Japanese have a marked fondness for people who in one way or another have made a mess of their lives. And, as we will see when we come to a discussion of Santōka’s biography, he was a prime example of the “messy” type. Much of the popularity that his works now enjoy is due to their undoubted literary worth, but much of it is also attributable to the highly unconventional and in some ways tragic life he led. His poetry and his life demand to be taken together.

Taneda Santōka, whose childhood name was Shōichi, was born on December 3, 1882, the elder son of a well-to-do landowner in Nishisabaryō, in what is now part of Hōfu City in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He had two sisters and a younger brother. His father seems to have been a rather weak-willed man who spent his time dabbling in local politics, chasing after women, and in general dissipating the family fortune, which had been of considerable size at the time he fell heir to it.

When Santōka was eleven by Japanese reckoning, his mother committed suicide by throwing herself down the family well. Santōka, who was playing with companions in a nearby outbuilding, heard the ensuing commotion. Although efforts were made to bar him from the scene, he managed to squeeze through the legs of the bystanders and reach the well just as his mother’s lifeless body was lifted out of it. The trauma inflicted by what he saw haunted him to the end of his life.

Just what drove his mother to such action is unknown, though presumably it was despair at her husband’s dissipation; at least that appears to have been Santōka’s view of the matter. Thereafter, he was raised by his grandmother.

After completing the equivalent of a high-school education in Yamaguchi, he entered the Department of Literature at Waseda University in Tokyo in the fall of 1902. He had already shown a marked interest in literature and had begun writing conventional-style haiku. It was at this time that he adopted the literary name Santōka, which means “Mountaintop Fire.” The name has no literary connotations, but derives from a Chinese system of divination known in Japanese as natchin.

Having failed to fulfill the first-year requirements, Santōka withdrew from the university in early 1904. Nervous breakdown was given as the reason for his departure, though this may have been largely a euphemism for the alcoholism that was to plague him throughout his life. In any event, his father by this time was in such financial straits that he could no longer afford to pay for his son’s schooling, and Santōka returned to Nishisabaryō.

With little experience and profoundly poor judgment, Santōka’s father decided to sell some of the family property and buy a brewery devoted to the making of sake, or Japanese rice wine. Santōka was to assist him in managing the business. In hopes that marriage would help settle him down, a match was arranged between Santōka and a young woman from a nearby village. The couple were married in 1909, and the following year a son, Ken, was born. But it soon became apparent that Santōka was not fit for married life, or for the running of a sake brewery, for that matter. In 1916, because of inept management and the failure of the sake, for two years in a row, to be of marketable quality, the brewery went bankrupt. Santōka’s father fled into hiding, and Santōka and his wife and child moved to Kumamoto in Kyushu, where the wife opened a small store that sold picture frames.

Santōka’s younger brother, Jirō, had been adopted into another family, but the adoption was annulled at the time of the Taneda family’s business failure. Left in Yamaguchi to face the debts from the bankruptcy, with no help coming from Santōka, he hanged himself in 1918. The same year, Santōka’s grandmother, who had raised him after his mother’s death, died in Yamaguchi in highly straightened circumstances. These two deaths were to weigh heavily on Santōka’s already troubled mind.

In 1919 Santōka left his wife and son and went to Tokyo. There he worked briefly for a cement company, quit that job, took another job with a library, but eventually quit that as well. His failure to stick to anything was once again attributed to “nervous disability.” Meanwhile, his wife’s family pressed him to agree to a divorce, which he did in 1920. The following year, his father died. On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed the building in Tokyo where he had been lodging, and he returned to Kumamoto penniless. His former wife obligingly let him assist her in the picture-frame store.

In December 1924, Santōka, drunk, one night stationed himself in front of an oncoming trolley, his arms raised in an attitude of defiance. Whether this was a serious attempt at suicide or merely a drunken stunt, no one knows. In any event, the trolley screeched to a halt, and Santōka was saved. Instead of being handed over to the police, he was taken to Hōon-ji, a temple of the Sōtō Zen sect in Kumamoto, where the head priest, Mochizuki Gian, in a signal display of Buddhist compassion, agreed to take him in and see what could be done with him.

This event marks the end of what might be termed act 1 in the Santōka drama. In act 2, things in some ways take a very different turn. Few of the poems in the selection that follows date from this initial period, though some refer to the persons or events of that time. As early as 1913, Santōka had begun writing free-style haiku and sending them to Soūn (Layered Clouds), the haiku magazine published by Ogiwara Seisensui. But the poems for which he is now admired and on which his reputation rests were written in the period that followed.

Under Mochizuki Gian’s direction, Santōka took up the study of Buddhism and began practicing Zen meditation. In 1925, when he was forty-four by Japanese reckoning, he was ordained a priest of the Sōtō Zen sect. His first assignment was as caretaker of the Mitori Kannon-dō, a small Buddhist hall situated near Kumamoto that enshrined a figure of the bodhisattva Kannon. In addition to looking after the hall and ringing the bell morning and evening, he went on begging trips in the neighborhood.

In April 1926, he left this assignment and set off on the first of his many walking trips, journeys in which he tramped literally thousands of miles through the Japanese countryside. It is uncertain just what impelled him to embark on these wanderings. Such journeys were often part of the religious training of Buddhist monks, particularly those of the Zen school, and Santōka may have felt that this was the type of religious practice that suited him best. At the same time, walking trips had helped provide literary inspiration to such eminent poets of the past as Saigyō and Bashō, and Santōka clearly found that the constant change of scene greatly aided his poetic powers. The two activities of walking and composing haiku seemed to complement each other, and his many journeys, lonely and wearisome as they were, gave him a sense of fulfillment that he could gain in no other way.

On such trips, Santōka wore the traditional garb of a mendicant monk—a black robe and a broad coolie-type hat to keep off the sun and rain—and carried a wooden staff. Begging for alms was, of course, a traditional part of the monastic life in many branches of Buddhism in the past, and it continues to be widely practiced. It has two purposes. One is to provide material support for the monastic community, thus allowing the monks to devote greater time to religious activities. The other is to give members of the lay community an opportunity to gain religious merit by donating food, clothing, or money to the monastic order.

Zen monks in Japan customarily conduct such takuhatsu (begging expeditions) in a group, with the name of the temple with which they are affiliated or where they are undergoing training plainly written on their alms bag so that donors will know where their contributions are going. Santōka, it should be noted, carried out his begging trips strictly on his own and had no temple name on his alms bag, which put him at a distinct disadvantage. He refers to his activities by the term gyōkotsu (itinerant begging), and it is clear from his diaries that he was at times stopped by the police for questioning and regarded as little more than a common beggar.

When begging for alms, monks customarily station themselves in front of a house or store and chant a religious text. If they are lucky, someone then comes out of the building and deposits rice, vegetables, or money in their alms bag or begging bowl. Often, however, there is no response, or only a brusque word of refusal, in which case the mendicants move on to the next building.

On any given day, Santōka usually continued to beg until he had enough in the way of donations to cover the day’s expenses. These included the price of a night’s lodging at an inexpensive flophouse-type inn and enough sake or shōchū, a cheap liquor usually made from sweet potatoes, to ensure a good night’s rest.

On the first of his walking trips, Santōka was away from Kumamoto for a total of three years. He spent part of the time visiting temples in the island of Shikoku to pray for the repose of his mother’s spirit. He also visited the smaller island of Shodōjima, where he paid his respects at the grave of Ozaki Hōsai (1885–1926). Hōsai, like Santōka, had been a writer of free-style haiku and a leading contributor to Ogiwara Seisensui’s poetry magazine. He had died in poverty in Shodōjima in 1926.² Santōka returned to Kumamoto in 1929, but soon set off again on further wanderings.

In 1932, weary of the hardships of itinerant life, he attempted to acquire a small an (hermitage) in Kawatana, a hot-springs town in northern Kyushu that had greatly taken his fancy. But he was apparently too much of an oddity for the local inhabitants to stomach, and his plans got nowhere. Instead, through the help of friends, in late September he settled in a small cottage in Ogōri, near his birthplace in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He named it the Gochū-an, from a passage in chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra that praises the saving power of the bodhisattva Kannon.

During the years when Santōka was living in the Gochū-an, and later in Yuda and Matsuyama, he went on few begging expeditions and was almost wholly dependent for his daily needs on contributions from friends in the neighborhood and more distant patrons or on money sent to him by his son, Ken. For his meals, he relied mainly on vegetables from his garden or edible wild plants, but because of lack of funds he often ran out of such staples as rice, soy sauce, and bean paste, to say nothing of sake and tobacco. He endured these periods of privation as best he could, going with little or no food for days at a time, but they hardly contributed to his emotional stability or peace of mind. As is evident from his diaries, he was ashamed to be so reliant on others, but at the same time determined that, whatever the conventional judgment of his way of life might be, he would continue to concentrate on his haiku writing.

Santōka remained in the Gochū-an until 1938, when the building, already in a dilapidated state, became totally unfit for habitation. He moved to temporary quarters in nearby Yuda Hot Springs, and at the end of the following year settled in a cottage in Matsuyama City in Shikoku.

By the time he moved to Matsuyama, he had published a number of collections of his poems and had many friends in poetry circles. On October 10, 1940, a group of friends gathered at his cottage in Matsuyama for the type of poetry meeting they often held there, but, finding Santōka too drunk to participate in the proceedings, they moved to another location. When they looked in on him the following day, they discovered that he had died in his sleep. He was fifty-eight at the time, or fifty-nine by Japanese reckoning.

Writing of himself in later life, Santōka said: “Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, with my own two feet; compose, composing my poems.”³ Sometimes on his walking trips, he visited famous shrines or temples or passed through the larger cities, but much of the time he was traveling over country roads, often in quite remote areas. In his younger days, if he was tired and drunk enough when night fell, he would simply bed down in a nearby field—he called it “sleeping with the crickets”—though usually he put up at a cheap inn. On his last begging trip in 1939, however, when Japan was already at war and few people were in the mood to give alms to a dubious beggar-monk, he often had to spend the night in whatever makeshift shelter he could find along the road. One of the few real pleasures of such walking trips, referred to frequently in his poems, were the hot baths he took in inns, public baths, or hot springs. They not only eased the pain and fatigue of day-after-day tramping, but helped greatly to raise his spirits.

Over the years, he made a number of friends through his literary activities, and he often visited them in the course of his travels and took part in meetings on haiku writing. His friends seem to have welcomed such visits, no doubt because they admired his poetry and found him congenial company, though at times he rather abused their hospitality. When he was on the road, he sent them postcards and arranged to get mail from them at towns along his route.

As is evident from his diaries, Santōka was subject to widely fluctuating moods. Often he records his delight with the mountain and seaside scenery he encountered on his journeys, or mentions his pleasure at happening on an inn with good food and clean bedding, particularly if he was lucky enough to have a room to himself. On most occasions, he had to share a room with various other travelers—pilgrims or pseudo-pilgrims, craftsmen, itinerant peddlers (the last often from Korea or Taiwan, areas that were at this time under Japanese control). In his diaries, he customarily notes the name of the inn where he stayed and the price of a night’s lodging and assigns it a rating—good, middling, or poor—depending on the accommodations and atmosphere of the place.

At times he applauds the kindness of the keepers of the cheap inns he stayed in, the worldly wise ramblings of his fellow travelers, and the enjoyment he derived from drinking with them. But at other times he finds his companions merely irritating, complains of the innkeeper’s noisy children, or rails at the dirt and squalor of his surroundings. And at times he seems incapable of anything but endless harping on his loneliness, his immoderate drinking and the injury it does to his health, and the failure and hypocrisy of his attempts to live the life of a Buddhist monk. From a mood of elation he sinks into an all-but-suicidal despair.

And out of this emotional turmoil, these recurrent binges and periods of self-reproof, come the poems, many thousands of them, preserved in his published collections and in his diaries and other writings. Their imagery is often that of the scenes he encountered on his trips, particularly those in the countryside. But these are not shasei (sketches from life), such as Masaoka Shiki wrote and recommended to other poets. Like Bashō, Santōka believed that the poet and the scene he or she observes should fuse with each other until they become a single entity. The primary purpose of the poem is not to describe the scene, but to convey the inner feelings of the writer. As Santōka himself noted, “Through nature I sing of myself.”⁴ His poems, for all their naturalistic imagery, are first of all portrayals of the poet’s constantly shifting moods and emotional states.

Santōka’s free-style haiku employ a variety of syntactic patterns, and their language is almost always the colloquial speech of modern Japan, with occasional touches of local dialect. Unlike most traditional Japanese poetry, they make no use of allusion, wordplay, or literary embellishment. Nor should readers look in them for any clever displays of wit or arresting imagery; in most cases, it is the very everyday-ness of the scenes or feelings depicted that is the point.

Since free-style haiku do not observe the conventional seventeen-syllable pattern, they may vary considerably in length. Ogiwara Seisensui, Santōka’s mentor, stated that the free-style haiku should be of “a length that can be read out in one breath.” Judging from his own poems in the form and his critical remarks, this for him meant a length of between six and around twenty-eight syllables. He also said that the poem should include a caesura, or “major break” in the rhythm.⁵ Santōka’s free-style haiku in general conform to these specifications, though many of them have no marked caesura.

Santōka frequently concludes a poem with an image drawn from the natural world, appending it to the end of the poem without any indication of just how it is meant to relate to what has gone before. We see this pattern in one of his most famous works, composed in 1926, when he set off on the first of his walking trips:

Here it is clear that what he is venturing deeper and deeper into, at least on the literal level of the poem, are the green mountains of the Japanese countryside. The verb he employs, wakeiru, however, suggests someone pushing or forcing his way through a dense and resisting mass: the green mountains, the poem implies, are perhaps not as pleasant or as passable as they seemed from a distance, and there is a hint that the traveler may in fact never come out on the other side.

Moreover, we sense that, as so often in Buddhist-oriented literature, the journey through the physical landscape is at the same time a mental and spiritual probing into the inner self. As the Zen Master Jakushitsu Genkō (1290–1367) said to one of his students, “You are the green mountain, the green mountain is you.” Incidentally, although the poem undoubtedly refers to Santōka’s own experience, because of the absence of an expressed subject in the original, the opening lines could as well be translated as “the deeper you go” or “the deeper one goes.”

The poem is, of course, also noteworthy because of its use of repetition. In a form as brief as the haiku, it might seem foolish to take up space by merely repeating what has been said, yet here the repetition works splendidly.

Here the relationship between the first part of the poem and the image that concludes it is less obvious. Fireflies in Japan are associated with damp spots overgrown with weeds or other vegetation, and in this poem they most likely are intended to indicate the neglect and desolation of the site where Santōka’s once prosperous home stood. At the same time, the darting, wavering lights of the fireflies may be meant to suggest the disembodied spirits of Santōka’s departed parents and kin, who—like the hitodama (will-o’-the-wisps) of Japanese folklore—continue to hover about the spot. Hotaru, it may be noted, is a variant pronunciation of the standard Japanese word hotaru.

In 1937 war broke out between Japan and China, and the poem is one of several written the following year, when Santōka was viewing the cremated remains of Japanese soldiers killed in action in China as they were brought home to grieving relatives in small boxes wrapped in white cloth.⁶ The poem’s ambiguity lies not in the image of the white boxes but in the adverbs that precede it, here shorn of the verb or verbs that they were presumably intended to modify. Do they refer to the actions of the soldiers who met death in a foreign land? Or to the solemn return of the boxes to Japan, perhaps to the accompaniment of martial music or a patriotic speech or two? Or are they meant to sum up the whole series of actions in which the dead men and their families, obeying the command of the leaders of wartime Japan, attempted to do what they knew was expected of them?

Ellipsis of this kind is, of course, a common enough technique in haiku, one whose use would seem almost inevitable, given the brevity of the form. But in poems such as the one just quoted, Santōka employs it in novel ways, fragmenting the syntax and creating gaps in meaning in a manner that challenges the ingenuity of the reader. In such poems, what is said is often of less importance than what is not said.

In the last example to be presented here, written in 1939 when Santōka was in Shikoku on his last extended walking trip, the image—the autumn wind—appears at the beginning rather than the end of the poem, setting the somber mood for what follows:

In Santōka’s writings, “walking” designates not only the mere fact of journeying on foot, but a kind of religious practice aimed at achieving a higher degree of understanding and acceptance. For all his endless walking, the poem suggests, that goal continues to elude the poet.

Because Santōka writes in free-verse form, he can employ a much wider variety of poem lengths, rhythms, and syntactic patterns than someone working in the traditional haiku form, and can perhaps achieve a greater range of poetic effects. But because of the very formlessness of the free style, it is at times difficult to say whether what he has produced is in fact a real poem or merely snippets of language strung out on the page.

Perhaps this does not really matter. Santōka had a certain conception of what his haiku, whether long or short, should sound like, what kind of mood they should evoke. Readers will note, for example, how often certain images recur: the dragonfly, the crow, the bad tooth, the persimmon tree, the drizzly autumn rain—this last perhaps because he was obliged to tramp through it rather than merely contemplate it from a comfortably sheltered spot, as so many other poets have done.

Santōka made little effort to broaden his haiku style; did not, like so many of his contemporaries, engage in controversy over the proper nature of haiku; and did not comment at length on the haiku of other writers. Instead, he worked to create poems that were distinctively his own—spare, stark, simple in expression—tirelessly revising earlier works and experimenting with different ways of handling the themes and images that most interested him.

Aware of his abundant shortcomings, he stated, as we have seen, that there were only two things he could do well: walk and write poems. About his walking, no more need be said. But that in his difficult later years he continued to labor away at his poems seems to me deserving of great respect. From a life marked otherwise largely by failure, he managed to salvage something of real value. Giving the last poem quoted a more positive interpretation, we might say that for all his walking he has in fact something very solid to show—the poems

In 1980 John Stevens published Mountain Tasting: Zen Haiku by Santōka Taneda, which contains translations of 372 of Santōka’s haiku, along with a lengthy introduction on his life and poetry. Stevens, who teaches at a Japanese university and is an ordained priest of the Sōtō Zen sect, pays special attention to Santōka’s life as a Zen monk and the poems that reflect what Stevens regards as the Zen aspects of his work. In my own selection of 245 haiku, I have tried as much as possible to avoid duplicating Stevens’s work, though this has not always proved possible with Santōka’s most famous poems.

My own interest in Santōka’s work centers more on the poetry itself, particularly the manner in which it experiments with different poem lengths and syntactic patterns, and the challenge that these present to the translator. Since free-style haiku do not adhere to the conventional 5–7–5 sound pattern, the translator is free to break them more or less wherever he or she wants or, like Hiroaki Sato in his translations of Ozaki Hōsai’s free-style haiku, to translate them as a single line in English. I have regularly broken my own translations into two or three lines in the hope that this division will help readers grasp the syntax of the poem and slow down the reading.

Modern Japanese in nearly all cases requires more syllables or sound symbols to express a given idea or image than does modern English, and so English translations of Japanese haiku, if not deliberately padded, will almost inevitably turn out to be briefer in wording than the originals. And when confronted with a poem such as Santōka’s haiku “oto wa shigure ka,” one comes out with something looking like this:

Can an utterance as brief as this be called a poem? I leave it to readers to decide.

In April 1940, six months before his death, Santōka compiled and published a selection of his haiku written over the preceding fifteen years. Titled Sōmokutō (Grass and Tree Stupa), it contains 701 haiku that he felt represented his best work. In my translations, I have indicated poems drawn from this collection by adding the letters SMT at the end of the transliterated versions of the poems. I have arranged the poems by year of composition, in nearly all cases following the dating indicated in the seven volumes of Santōka’s collected works (Teihon Santōka Zenshū), though there is controversy regarding the exact dating of certain poems.

After Santōka set out on his first walking trip in 1926, he kept diaries of his daily activities. He burned the diaries from this first trip, but those from his later years, beginning in September 1930 and continuing, with only minor gaps, to the time of his death, are extant and have been published in Teihon Santōka Zenshū. Customarily he noted the weather; his activities, including what he ate and drank; the friends he visited or who visited him; and the flowers and birds he saw around him. In addition, he often commented on his state of mind and the progress of his work. After these observations, he usually recorded the haiku he had composed that day or the revisions he had made in earlier poems. When he was on a walking trip, he usually noted the distance he had covered during the day, the amount of rice and money he had received from his begging, and his daily expenses.

I have included fairly lengthy excerpts from his early diaries to indicate their nature and the type of life Santōka experienced on his begging expeditions. From the later diaries, which tend to be gloomy and repetitious, I have selected a few passages that throw light on his poems and his outlook in general.

The originals of the poems are given in romanized form so that readers may observe the subtle variations in syntax and the pleasing sound effects that characterize many of them—for example, the original of poem 201 in my selection:

Since such sound effects and subtleties of syntax can seldom be reproduced adequately in English, I have in my translations concentrated on bringing across as accurately as possible the imagery and emotional impact of the poems.

1.Teihon Santōka Zenshū (hereafter cited as ZS) (Tokyo: Shun’yūdō, 1972–1973).

2. For translations of a number of Ozaki Hōsai’s haiku, along with an introductory essay on his life and poetry, see Right Under the Big Sky, I Don’t Wear a Hat: The Haiku and Prose of Hōsai Ozaki, trans. Hiroaki Sato (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1993).

the deeper I go	wakeitte mo
the deeper I go	wakeitte mo
green mountains	aoi yama

nothing left of the house	umareta ie wa
I was born in	atokata mo nai
fireflies	hōtaru

valiantly—that too	isamashiku mo
pitifully—that too	kanashiku mo
white boxes	shiroi hako

autumn wind	aki kaze
for all my walking—	aruite mo
for all my walking—	aruite mo