Yoel Hoffmann

we except renga, a special form of “collective poetry,” and the Chinese poem, which is ultimately a grafted branch of Japanese culture, we find two major forms of poetry in Japan at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the thirty-one-syllable tanka and the seventeen-syllable haiku.*

Because most Japanese words end in one of five vowels, rhymed poetry would be very bland. Japanese poems are not in fact rhymed, but another device, the alternation of five-and seven-syllable lines, creates a rhythm peculiar to Japanese poetry.

The tanka poet may be likened to a person holding two mirrors in his hands, one reflecting a scene from nature, the other reflecting himself as he holds the first mirror. The tanka thus provides a look at nature, but it regards the observer of nature as well. The haiku is not merely a compact tanka: the fourteen syllables dropped from the tanka, so to speak, in order to produce a haiku, are in effect the mirror that reflects the poet. Haiku shattered the self-reflecting mirror, leaving in the hands of the poet only the mirror that reflects nature.

Since about the sixteenth century, three conventions have become universally accepted: (1) the haiku describes a single state or event; (2) the time of the haiku is the present; and (3) the haiku refers to images connected to one of the four seasons.

In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, it has become customary to write a will in preparation for one’s death. But Japanese culture is probably the only one in the world in which, in addition to leaving a will, a tradition of writing a “farewell poem to life” (jisei) took root and became widespread.