.jpg) |
| Kasamatsu Shiro - Misty Evening at Shinobazu Pond (1932) |
Shinobazu Pond 俳句 is a haiku notebook written by Tim Chamberlain, an Englishman from London, now living in Tokyo, Japan.
When I first came to Japan in 2003, and many times thereafter, I stayed in a hotel beside Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno. In the centre of the pond there is an island on which stands a small temple-shrine, dedicated to the Goddess Benten (a Japanese Shintō-Buddhist incarnation of the Hindu Goddess, Saraswati). On a wooded ridge overlooking the pond is Ueno Kōen, a large public park famous in the springtime for its long avenue of cherry blossom trees. The park is home to several major museums and art galleries, as well as a number of Shintō shrines, and Buddhist temples, as well as a large bronze statue commemorating the defiant stance of Saigō Takamori, who led a rebellion of disaffected samurai against the reforms of the Meiji Government in 1877, reforms which effectively made the old samurai class obsolete and began Japan’s rapid modernisation. Ueno Kōen and Shinobazu Pond have some notable literary associations, both locales featuring in the novel, Wild Geese by Mori Ōgai (1911-1913), Kawabata Yasunari’s short story, ‘The Hat Incident’ (Bōshi jiken, 1926), and an especially well-known poem by the great haiku master, Matsuo Bashō (c.1680):
花の雲
鐘は上野か
浅草か
Hana
no kumo Kane wa Ueno ka Asakusa ka
芭蕉
Which can be translated as:
A
cloud of cherry blossoms
The chime of a temple bell
Is it Ueno? Is it Asakusa?
I remember passing by the Benten-dō early on the morning of New Year’s Day in 2004 and lighting incense there, the smoke saturating my clothes leaving a lingering mustiness. Then taking the train out of Tokyo to celebrate my first Oshōgatsu in Japan with a friend’s family. Thereafter, I’ve always made a point of returning to the Benten-dō and lighting incense as a kind of thankful pilgrimage whenever I’ve returned to Tokyo from overseas. I also brought my parents here when I got married some fifteen years later, etching a poignant and treasured personal memory. As such, the place holds many special associations in my heart, hence why – with all its deeply historical, literary, and personal associations for me – I thought I would name this blog, Shinobazu Pond 俳句.
The purpose of this blog is to
serve as a kind of open notebook, an on-line journal in which I chart and share
my interest in reading and writing haiku and short form poems. I’m not sure
when my love of Japanese literature began, but I suspect it grew out of my deep
fascination for a book of Chinese poetry, Poems of the Late T’ang,
published by Penguin Classics (1965), which I first read sometime around
1991-1992. Another Penguin Classic, Sarashina Nikki, or ‘The Diary of a
Heian Court Lady’ (c.1008-c.1059), was probably the first Japanese literary
work which I read at about this time too. But the Japanese writer who fascinated
me the most was Matsuo Bashō, especially his haibun travel diary, Oku no Hosomichi, or
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ (completed 1694, first published 1702). I’ve
since read so much both about and by Bashō, that he almost feels like a close
personal friend.
My early fascination for haiku was
later fanned further by reading Beat Generation writers, particularly Jack Kerouac.
This very likely led on to my discovery of the English language ‘haiku scene’
which was flourishing at this time in the early 1990s. I used to spend a lot of
time in those blissful, pre-internet days perusing small-press poetry magazines,
such as still and Time Haiku, happily ensconced in the warm, cosy
silence of The Poetry Library, hidden high up on the top floor of the Royal
Festival Hall on London’s Southbank. And soon after it started publication in
1997, I began contributing my own short form poems to still and
continued to do so right up until it ceased publication in 2001.
A few years later I began travelling to Japan regularly, where I busily set about raiding as many bookshops as I could find, steadily amassing a sizeable library of books on Japanese poetry and haiku in particular. I even had some of my haiku featured in the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s major daily broadsheet newspapers. Not long after this, somewhat mind-bogglingly, I also came across one of my haiku translated into Russian. The ‘haiku scene’ felt like a genuinely egalitarian and communal affair. I genuinely loved it. But then, for some reason or other, I ceased publishing my haiku and short verse for a considerable period of years. A haiku hibernation? Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why – because I’ve never fully given up writing such poems.
Now that I am settled in Japan though, I have found this old love of short verse has been rekindled. Reading R.H. Blyth’s classic four volume work on Haiku (1949) and finding new connections through my slow but steadily growing knowledge of the Japanese language has spurred me to dig out some of my old, as well as my newer efforts in this field of short form poetics and has prompted me to begin carving out my own space for haiku once again here on this blog. I do so purely for my own amusement and primarily as a means of self-reflection, but – hopefully – if these minor jottings might also prove to be of some companionable passing-interest to like-minded souls, then I’m happy to have shared them with you here.
.jpg) |
| Kasamatsu Shiro - Cherry Blossoms at Ueno's Tōshō-gū (1935) |
