Sake haiku (7th of December 2012)

(Otomo Tabito, translated by Edwin Cranston)

Drunkenness and drinking are common themes of Japanese and Chinese poetry, and although they are not directly mentioned in the tanka (above) of Otomo Tabito (665-731), when Tabito says "enjoy" he in fact means "drink". This can be directly inferred from his 13 chained tankas devoted to sake, one of which was used as the text for the PovRay illustration shown above. Here is another Otomo's tanka, from which one can obviously see that he is indeed glorifying sake and drinking:

(Otomo Tabito, translated by Thomas McAuley)

Tabito was a governor of Daizafu, the administrative center of Kyushu island, thus I made a ceramic sake set (with his name) so to look elegant and expensive, perhaps appropriate for someone of his rank. It is more probable, though, that in late 7th century Tabito drank cloudy sake, and not the one highly refined and transparent I "poured" in the cups.

From Tabito's poetry we might conclude that getting drunk is a glamorous activity. Everyone who did it knows that there is nothing glamorous about it. Tabito hides the most important parts of the truth regarding drunkenness.

But, in this post, I am more interested in another drunkard and poet - Taneda Santoka (1882 - 1940). Santoka wasn't a governor of anything and he spent seemingly unhappy life which was, since his eleventh year, marked by the suicide of his mother, which she apparently committed because of her cheating husband. Santoka was raised by his grandmother, and whole of his life was marked by constant drinking which left him outside of community, irrespectively of his great poetic talent. He couldn't keep a job and all he was able to do was wandering and writing sad haiku poetry marked by his addiction to sake. The addiction probably killed him in the end. One can learn more about it all from the >> article in Wikipedia.

Santoka's haiku has a free form and it doesn't follow 5-7-5 syllable rule. Santoka thus departs from the traditional haiku, but his poetry can be still classified as haiku, although it does not fit there with regards to form. It does fit in there, however, with regards to the spirit, because it remains faithful to revealing the whole world in a moment, in a single experience - in this, Santoka was a sad master.

The image below shows a wooden measure boxes for sake (masu) which were used as cups also. Masu that I coded in Povray has the name of Taneda Santoka engraved in it.

(Santoka, translated by Burton Watson)

And below, I bring some more examples of Santoka's poetry, which, I think rightfully, can be called haiku, although they do not follow the traditional 5-7-5 form.

(Santoka, translated by Burton Watson)

(Santoka, translated by Burton Watson)

(Santoka, translated by Burton Watson)

In the end, I remembered the book I recently read, about Jack Kerouac's drunken wandering in Paris where he attempts to research his French i.e. Breton ancestry. While doing his feat, Kerouac is always on the edge, on the outside of the society he came to see, mostly because he is constantly drunk, so they ignore him in the library, and even his French publisher who made some decent money on Kerouac, does not want to meet him. Kerouac accepts all of this seemingly carelessly, with the attitude of a merry drunkard who, in the end, does not care about it all, as long as he has something to drink.

I read the book with a constant sour-sweet feeling because I knew that Kerouac died from the bleeding in the esophagus which was almost certainly caused by his excessive drinking. That is why I could not laugh at his sillinesses from the bottom of my heart.

The book is called "Satori in Paris" which also links Kerouac to Santoka - satori is the term which is in Zen used for enlightenment, for the recognition of the true nature of reality. Santoka spent a part of his gloomy and drunk life as a Zen disciple.

Last updated on 7th of December 2012.