Late Edo-period illustrated kyōka anthology Kyōka roku roku shū, with illustrations by Utagawa Hiroshige.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art and Mary and James G. Wallach Foundation Gift, 2013.

 

Chapter 6

COMIC POEMS

CHIUN 智蘊 and IKKYŪ SŌJUN 一休宗純, Kokon ikyokushū 1036–1037: “Sent by Chiun to Ikkyū when he wanted to ask about the concept of ‘original mind’ ”

A river may be straight	sugu naru mo
or it may be crooked, still—	yugameru kawa mo
a river’s a river.	kawa wa kawa
A Buddha statue, a chapel:	hotoke mo dō mo
they’re both the same scraps of wood.	onaji ki no kire

Reply

A river may be straight	sugu naru mo
or it may be crooked, still—	yugameru kawa mo
a river’s a river.	kawa wa kawa
A Buddha statue, clogs:	hotoke mo geta mo
they’re both the same scraps of wood.	onaji ki no kire
Ikkyū

CONTEXT: Chiun’s formal name was Ninagawa Chikamasa; he was a shogunal official. Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481) was a priest of the Rinzai sect of Zen. Chiun is remembered now mainly as a renga poet, Ikkyū as the most audacious of Zen monks.

COMMENT: Why should we call these kyōka rather than just Buddhist poems? The men who wrote them might not have seen any generic distinction. But for Edo poets making up anthologies of kyōka from earlier times such as Kokon ikyokushū (Barbaric poems of ancient and modern times, 1666), the poems would qualify as kyōka in two ways. First, they present a level of repetition and parallelism that would not generally be found in formal waka. Perhaps more importantly, there is enough humor in the poems to justify calling them comic. Still, there is no denying the serious, didactic message: that the original mind encompasses all things, eradicating all distinctions, a point that is endlessly repeated in Zen poems and anecdotes. A Buddhist statue and the building it sits in are both made of wood, as are lowly clogs, Ikkyū says, literally dragging Buddha down into the mud to make his point, and going one step beyond Chiun.

In any form, Ikkyū can be depended upon to be outrageously pedantic.

In this world of ours,	yo no naka wa
we eat and we defecate,	kūte wa koshite
we sleep and get up,	nete okite
and after all of this, well—	sate sono nochi wa
all that’s left is to die.	shinuru bakari yo

Whether the historical Ikkyū actually wrote this poem (Kyōka kanshō jiten, p. 498) is a moot point. Kyōka poets claimed it and were probably not averse to its Zen message.

YAMAZAKI SŌKAN 山崎宗鑑, Shinsen kyōkashū 123: “Written when he had a tumor on his back and he was dying”

If someone asks	sōkan wa
where Sōkan has gone to,	dochi e to hito no
just tell them this:	tou naraba
a little something came up	chito yō arite
and he’s off to the next world.	ano yo e to ie

CONTEXT: The family name attributed to Sōkan is Yamazaki, perhaps because he lived in a place by that name west of Kyoto for a time. He seems to have died sometime between 1539 and 1541. His name is always listed among the pioneers of humorous poetry, both kyōka and haikai. Although information about his life is limited, we know that as a young man he was in service to the shogun Ashikaga Yoshihisa, after whose death (in 1489) he took the tonsure and became a renga master. For a time Sōkan lived in the Yamashina area, near Kyoto, and later moved to Sanuki Province (modern Kagawa Prefecture) on the island of Shikoku. Records indicate that he had contact with Sōgi and Sōchō, but he is remembered mostly as the compiler of Inu Tsukubashū (The mongrel Tsukuba collection, early sixteenth century), an anthology of haikai links and hokku mostly by himself and other poets of his time, all included without attribution.

COMMENT: This poem from Shinsen kyōkashu (New kyōka collection, 1633) claims to be Sōkan’s death poem (jisei no uta), and in this case one wonders if the claim may be correct. A tumor usually meant a slow death, leaving one plenty of time to put things in order. The word yō is a double entendre, meaning both “errand” or “business to do” and “tumor.” The poem appears in a number of early Edo collections with only slight variations.

Kyōka do not always involve the sort of wordplay showcased in Sōkan’s death poem. Another poem attributed to him but of more questionable provenance offers a comic complaint about houseguests that could not be more straightforward:

The best don’t come,	jō wa kozu
the next best come but don’t stay,	chū wa kite inu
the worst stay over.	ge wa tomaru
And the ones who stay two nights—	futayo tomaru wa
they’re the worst guests of all!	gege no ge kyaku

In a 1690 essay (Sharakudō no ki [A record of Sharakudō], p. 497) Matsuo Bashō alludes to this poem as by Sōkan, but one has to wonder whether the attribution is reliable. A similar poem is persistently associated with the Ichiya-an (One-Night Hut), a small cottage preserved at Kannonji Temple in Kagawa Prefecture, where Sōkan spent his last days. Furthermore, legend says that Sōkan himself never stayed for more than a single night anywhere, although it is impossible to know whether the poem resulted from that story or was partially the source for it. Such doubts aside, the poem represents a common strain of wry commentary that would remain important in kyōka on into the Edo period.

SEIHAKUDŌ KŌFŪ 生白堂行風, Kokon ikyokushū 421: “Pent-up feelings of love”

Here I am, then:	ima wa tada
my poor heart in a daze,	kokoro mo horetsu
my body drooping.	mi mo naetsu
It seems a lot like palsy—	chūbu ni nitari
this disease called love!	koi no yamai wa

CONTEXT: Seihakudō Kōfū (d. before 1688) was born in Osaka. At first he studied waka and haikai, but by the 1660s he was specializing in kyōka. He compiled Kokon ikyoku shū, an important early kyōka collection.

COMMENT: In Buddhist dogma, eros is illusion, and it is not surprising that already in the haikai section of Kokinshū we encounter humorous treatments of the subject. One of the most famous (no. 1023) is an anonymous poem that emphasizes its debilitating effects:

From my pillow	makura yori
and from the foot of my bed,	ato yori koi no
love assails me.	semekureba
With nowhere to retreat,	semu kata nami zo
I sit smack in the middle.	tokonaka ni oru

This image is bound to evoke laughter, but, as is also often true in kyōka, the situation is sobering. Scholars disagree on whether “love assails me” refers to the speaker’s own feelings of love toward someone else or the entreaties of a suitor. Kōfū’s kyōka also offers us a tragicomic scene. There is nothing funny about chūbu, “palsy” or “paralysis”; in most cases it probably refers to the effects of a stroke. The image Kōfū creates, then, is a variation on the state of the speaker in the Kokinshū poem, not hemmed in but paralyzed. The word horu is a kakekotoba meaning both falling in love and to feel vacant or listless, and the verb nayu is also used in reference to both physical and emotional enervation.

Some kyōka offer even starker descriptions of love’s effects. The following (Kyōka kanshō jiten, p. 161) was written by a Kyoto katsurame, or “maiden of Katsura,” referring to women affiliated with shrines in ancient times who in Edo times hawked fish and sake on the streets.

Exhausted by love,	koiwabite
a trout lies low in the stream,	se ni fusu ayu no
wasting away—	uchisabire
reduced to near nothing now,	hone to kawa to ni
nothing but skin and bones.	yasenarinikeri

The metaphor is one that must have come naturally for someone who knew the grind of hauling fish and sake through the streets. Captivity, paralysis, privation: such are the wages of love.

IPPONTEI FUYŌKA 一本亭芙蓉花, Kyōka godaishū (p. 251): “Maiden flower”

This flowery maiden—	jorōka ya
every night she is left damp	yogoto ni kawaru
by different dews;	tsuyu ni nure
and what wind will show up next	dotchikaze ni mo
to bend her to its will?	nabiku naruran

CONTEXT: Ippontei Fuyōka (1721–1783; also known as Hiranoya Seibei) was born into the Matsunami family in Osaka and began his career there but later moved to Edo. He wrote both haikai and kyōka and was the compiler of Kyōka godaishū (Kyōka on five topics, 1781). The setting of his poem is the pleasure quarters. In the 1700s, there were large and prosperous quarters in major cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, full of teahouses, theaters, shops, and, preeminently, houses of prostitution licensed by the government in an attempt to police the industry. In the quarters, the usual social hierarchies were relaxed to an extent, creating a subculture in which ready cash could mean more than station. However, most women working in brothels were not doing so by choice; often they had been sold into servitude by poor parents. Some managed to find a wealthy patron to buy out their contract, being set up as a mistress but at least escaping the quarters. Many others died of sexually transmitted diseases or childbirth at a young age, leaving only a few to complete their contracts and return to their families or have families of their own.

COMMENT: The dai of this poem is ominaeshi, “maiden flower.” However, the word jorōka—which immediately calls to mind the courtesans (jorō) of the pleasure quarters—tells us we are reading about more than flowers. And the rest of the poem is similar in the way it offers a series of double entendres: “dampened by dews” implying sexual intercourse; dotchikaze meaning both “wind blowing in from who knows where” and men “showing up, out of the blue”; and nabiku, meaning both “to bend” in the wind and to submit to someone’s will and, literally, “bend over.” A more literal translation of the poem that does not interpret the ambiguities might read like this:

Maiden flowers—

every night they are dampened

by different dews,

and swayed by passing winds

coming from who knows where.

Obviously, the various situations arising from life in the quarters made for excellent literary material for writers of dramas, fictions, haikai, and kyōka. The wordplay of Fuyōka’s poem is ingenious, but at bottom the poem seems more a graphic comment on the fate of prostitutes than outright humor.

KARAGOROMO KISSHŪ 唐衣橘洲, Kyōgen ōashū (p. 264): “Enjoying the cool”

Ah, the coolness—	suzushisa wa
of brand-new tatami mats,	atarashi tatami
of fresh bamboo blinds,	aosudare
of gazing at the new moon—	tsumako no rusu ni
while the wife and kids are out.	hitori mikazuki

CONTEXT: Karagoromo Kisshū (1744–1802; also known as Kojima Kaneyuki) was a vassal of the Tayasu house (a branch of the Tokugawa) who lived in the Yotsuya area of Edo and sponsored a kyōka salon. Many kyōka were written on dai from the waka tradition. “Enjoying the cool” (more literally, “securing a place to cool down”), from a collection titled Kyōgen ōashū (Crazy poems on warblers and frogs, 1784), is one such example. Interestingly, most summer dai involve images of escape from the heat: a fan, a stream or a spring, a stroll after dark, and so on. Perhaps the most striking summer dai are in fact fireflies and lightning, both nocturnal images. Poetry was supposed to elevate and offer comfort, and inspire, after all; there was nothing inspiring about midday in the Japanese summer.

COMMENT: Kisshū’s poem involves wordplay only in the last line, where mikazuki functions as a kakekotoba containing both the verb mi(ru) “to see,” and mikazuki, the moon of the third night in the lunar cycle. And it contains no allusion to a famous poem of the past, although it does perhaps toy with an old saying, “When it comes to wives and tatami, new is best.” Otherwise, however, the author uses situational humor. The speaker states his purpose directly, in the first line: suzushisa wa, “coolness is …” or “this is coolness.” Since we know the poem was a kyōka, this obviously reads like a straight line. In serious poetry, something like the cool breeze along a riverbank might follow, but here we expect something else. Two of the things Kisshū offers as sources of relief are images one might encounter in serious poetry: the blinds and the new moon. The other things in his poem are plebian images encountered only in haikai and kyōka. New tatami mats, their core being made of rice straw, have a fresh smell and are covered in soft rush straw that retains a green tinge for some time—as do aosudare, hanging blinds made of bamboo strips. The latter also inevitably call to mind the wind, whether we imagine it blowing through the bamboo—another summer image—or actually swaying the blinds themselves.

Thus the first lines of the poem already articulate the theme of “enjoying coolness.” But it is the domestic scene of the last two lines that truly makes the poem, and makes it indubitably a kyōka. For the humor—light humor, in this case—in the scene comes from the idea of a family man taking advantage of the absence of his wife and children to relax completely and enjoy the cool in a way that normal circumstances would not always permit. Ultimately, enjoying the cool thus comes to mean not just finding a place that is cool but also having the leisure time to sit and experience it. After seeing the tatami and feeling the wind in the blinds under a crescent moon, we see a husband and father with a little time to himself to enjoy it all.

YOMO NO AKARA 四方赤良, Shokusan hyakushu 54

I bag one bird	hitotsu tori
and then I bag two birds,	futatsu torite wa
cook ’em, and eat ’em!	yaite kuu
Then no quail cries from the grass	uzura naku naru
at Fukakusa Village.	fukakusa no sato

CONTEXT: Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823; also known as Shokusan) was one of the premier literati the late Edo period. Of samurai background, he gave up kyōka in middle age in order to become more respectable.

COMMENT: Fukakusa (Deep Grasses) is an area south of Kyoto associated with a famous story about how the poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), who, tired of a woman he had been seeing there, asked her in a rather cruel poem whether her garden would become a “wild field” if he were to leave. Her reply (Kokinshū, no. 972) coyly (and disarmingly) said,

If it become a field,	no to naraba
I will cry out as a quail	uzura to nakite
as the years go by.	toshi wa hemu
Surely for hunting, at least,	kari ni dani ya wa
you will come this way again.	kimi wa kozaramu

The story ends by saying that Narihira was so impressed that he decided not to leave. Forever after, Fukakusa was associated with that romantic vignette, becoming one of the “famous places” of the classical canon.

Ōta Nanpo knew that most readers would know the story of Narihira and Fukakusa. But the poem he parodies is not the one from the ancient classic but an allusive variation on the story by Fujiwara no Shunzei (Senzaishū, no. 259):

“Written as an ‘autumn’ poem for a hundred-poem sequence”

Daylight fades away,	yū sareba
and the autumn wind on the fields	nobe no akikaze
pierces to the core:	mi ni shimite
a quail cries from the deep grass	uzura naku nari
of Fukakusa Village.	fukakusa no sato

Nanpo’s poem, from his Shokusan hyakushu (One hundred poems by Shokusan, 1818), is a typical kyōka in the way it relies on double entendres (tori meaning both “bird” and “take” and naku naru meaning both “cry” and “cease to exist”). But it also involves allusion, one of the most fundamental techniques of kyōka poets, and less for purposes of creating a mood of mystery and depth (yūgen) than for repartee and parody. Akara’s poem neatly dispels any romantic expectations readers might have about the romantic past of Fukakusa by catching the quail and serving them up for dinner.

FUSHIMATSU NO KAKA 節松嫁々, Tokuwaka gomanzaishū (p. 307): “Forgetting to return home from beneath the blossoms”

It’s all right, I say:	yoshi ya mata
so the house does go to ruin	uchi wa no to nare
and become a field.	yamazakura
Still I won’t expect you home	chirazu wa ne ni mo
till those mountain blossoms fall.	kaerazaranan

CONTEXT: The given name of Kaka (1745–1810) was Matsuko. She was the daughter of a samurai in service to the shogunate and wife of Akera Kankō (1740–1800), a prominent dramatist and kyōka poet. Since ancient times, cherry blossom season was a time of celebration, when people would party beneath the blossoms, sometimes for days. The dai of this poem is a line by the Chinese poet Bai Juyi, appearing in Wakan rōeishū (no. 18), a mid-Heian-era collection containing waka and couplets from famous Chinese poems arranged by subject matter.

Beneath the blossoms, I forget to go home—taken by beauty;

Before the sake barrel, I get tipsy—urged on by spring wind.

COMMENT: On the surface, Kaka’s poem (which comes from a 1785 collection whose title means something like “a second collection of fine waka of ten thousand years,” alluding to a book that had appeared just two years before) seems to describe its subject as someone who is so entranced by beauty that he forgets about the demands of normal life. A comment penned in next to the poem in one text, however, explains that the situation was more complicated: “This poem,” it says, “was written when her husband, Akera Kankō, had spent a number of days in the Yoshiwara quarter without coming home.” Once again, as so often in kyōka, we encounter allegory: her husband is enjoying a different kind of flower, and not in the mountains but in some brothel in the pleasure quarters. And once again, a hint of this comes in the form of an allusion to a poem already referred to in relation to Yomo no Akara’s poem about eating the quail at Fukakusa (where anciently a woman had lamented her abandonment by a man with the image of her house “becoming a field”). Obviously, Matsuko shows a more forgiving attitude, or perhaps resignation and maturity. Rather than berating her man, she archly reassures him, implying that she will be waiting when he does decide to return home. Her poem in fact reflects the attitude toward the pleasure quarters displayed by society as a whole, which stressed the role of such places in keeping the passions in their place and out of the home, where Confucian ideals were supposed to prevail. Indeed, one might say that she is telling him that he really must get his appetites in check before resuming his place as the head of a proper household.

The broad appeal of kyōka as a genre is attested by the fact that many were written by women. As in haikai, these women were often related to men (as wives, daughters, etc.) active in literary affairs, but the place of poetic expression in social correspondence meant that being able to display one’s wit in poetic form was a valuable asset.

ANONYMOUS, Kamuri sen (p. 315)

What a racket!	yakamashii
There’s lots of treasures	takara no ōi
on this poor street.	binbōmachi

CONTEXT: In the late 1600s, humor was invading conventional haikai as surely as it was waka, in the form of kamurizuke, a subgenre in which students were given the first line of a hokku (five syllables) and asked to finish it (adding seven- and five-syllable lines). Often these exercises read like riddles, and the responses were lightly humorous in tone.

COMMENT: The key to this poem is a saying from medieval times, “Children are a treasure.” The examples below need no such elucidation, except perhaps to note that they draw materials and themes from common life. As is often the case with comic poetry, the poems (Kamuri sen, pp. 285, 288, 298, 323, 327) are presented anonymously.

Before your eyes	me no mae ni
the wonder of a painter	fude ga bijo umu
birthing a beauty.	eshi no myō
Shakily	burabura to
he balances the load	taranu katani ni
with one rock.	ishi hitotsu
In fine weather	yoi hiyori
old folks on a walk go far	zashiki o oi no
from the house.	tōaruki
From time to time	tokidoki ni
her hands stop their sewing,	nuu te no yodomu
thinking of home.	kuni no koto
he shakes off the snow	miburui o suru
from his straw cloak.	yuki no mino
All smiles	nikoniko to
watching bridal preparations—	yomeirigoshirae
an invalid.	miru chūbu

ANONYMOUS, Yanagidaru (p. 132)

A single ant:	ari hitotsu
and the young miss is down	teijo shitaobi
to her underclothes.	made hodoki

CONTEXT: Alongside kyōka and kamurizuke, another humorous version of haikai also emerged in the mid-Edo period, called kyōku or, more commonly, zappai (miscellaneous haikai). Originally, these 5-7-5 poems were written in response to maeku, but by the time Karai Senryū (1718–1790) published his landmark collection, Yanagidaru, in 1765, the maeku were no longer being recorded. The more common word for the genre, senryū, derives from Karai Senryū’s name. Yanagidaru (Willow keg) is the name given to series of collections (167 in all) published between 1765 and 1848. The poem here appeared in an edition of the anthology in the early 1800s.

COMMENT: We do not know what elicited this poem, the point of which is to show a young woman who, though physically mature, has not yet truly grown up. We also do not know the author of the poem; in Yanagidaru poems are anonymous. Like the majority of senryū, the poem shows us a scene from the human comedy; indeed, the collection gives us a cross section of plebian life in the Edo period: husbands, wives, children, widows, brides, priests, merchants, physicians, farmers. But it is a mistake to think that senryū poets were somehow entirely cut off from poetic traditions. Icons like cherry blossoms and the moon appear often, although often in parodies of one sort or another. And sometimes a senryū, like the following from a collection titled Mutamagawa (Mutama River, p. 212) compiled by Kei Kiitsu (1695–1762), alludes directly to a famous poem from the past.

The man next door—	tonari o ba
he’s no one at all to me,	hito to omowazu
as I forget the year.	toshi wasure

In terms that are unmistakable, this poem makes sense only as a response to a hokku (Oi nikki, p. 268) written by Bashō at the end of 1694, when he was ill and dying.

Autumn deepens.	aki fukaki
The man just next door—	tonari wa nani o
what does he do?	suru hito zo

Critics argue about whether Bashō’s poem is meant as a bleak commentary on the human condition or something more whimsical. (Probably it is both.) But it cannot help but to lead readers to profound questions. Do we ever know people, or do we just pass them by? Are we trapped in our own realities? On the surface the senryū dismisses such issues. Its last line, toshi wasure (literally, “to forget the year just past”) refers to a year-end party at which people get drunk and put the old year and its troubles behind them. But it clearly engages with Bashō and protests too much. If it is meant as humor, it is humor of a dark sort.

ASŌ JIRŌ 麻生路郎 and UCHIDA HYAKKEN 内田百間

The color of rain,	ame no iro
the color of the dusk sky.	tasogare no iro
Dismal day.	kanashiki hi

CONTEXT: Asō Jirō (1888–1965) was involved in the so-called progressive movement (shinkeikō) in senryū. He was born near Hiroshima but lived mostly in Osaka.

COMMENT: In the late Meiji period, the senryū poet Nakajima Shichirō (1882–1968) said, “I want to make senryū into poetry. Poetry is what our age demands” (Senryū nyūmon, p. 82). Around this time, new currents were creating a discourse less invested in wordplay and more centered on realism and subjectivity, as clearly illustrated in the poem here (Senryū nyūmon, p. 132).

Still, humor has remained a major feature of senryū, and often it is earthy humor of the sort found in a famous example by literary jack-of-all-trades Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971). It appears in his essay “Nagai hei” (The long fence, 1938) and centers on a subject that comes up frequently in comic poetry—tachi shōben, peeing at the roadside. The passage below (p. 400) begins the essay:

It’s still cold out, so the time for peeing on the roadside hasn’t even come around yet; and probably I shouldn’t be talking about doing such a thing in the city no matter how balmy the weather. But even if I myself don’t indulge, the fact is that on occasion I do catch sight of other men doing so. Which must be why on every fence of any length you see a sign carrying some message enjoining people not to pee there.

I have read a senryū that goes,

A long fence:	nagai hei
suddenly I feel the urge	tsui shōben ga
to take a pee.	shitaku nari

Very insightful, I find myself thinking—though I must admit that if I happen to remember the poem when I am walking by a long fence, the memory in itself awakens that certain urge.

Needless to say, part of the joke here is pretending that someone else wrote the senryū, because it was something the author would know nothing about. The essay goes on to describe various funny signs found here and there instructing men to “Respect public morals—do your peeing in the privy,” and so on, and then relates comical incidents involving the practice. Some of these, as one might expect, involve drunks, but Hyakken is quick to add that he is speaking from the experience of being out with drunks and “not because I have ever done such a thing myself” (p. 407).