TOMISAWA Kakio (富沢赤黄男; 1903-62) also took up surrealistic imagery, but successfully did so in a distinctive way:
蝶墜ちて大音響の結氷期
Chô ochite / daionkyô no / keppyôki
A butterfly falls
with great reverberations –
the Ice-forming Ageくらやみへ くらやみへ 卵ころがりぬ
Kurayami e / kurayami e / tamago korogarinu
Into the dark
into the dark
an egg rolls
草二本だけ生えている 時間 （間＝門に月）
Kusa nihon dake haeteiru / jikan
The time when
only two leaves of grass are grown
These can be called “pure haiku” (“pure” as in “pure poetry”). The “butterfly” verse belongs to his early works, and shows a stunning image with a purely linguistic construction apart from the real world. The second and third are from his later works. In them Tomisawa shaves off not only words (that’s what all haijin do) but images (to make them clear-cut Tomisawa uses spaces to separate the parts), and at the same time breaks away from the fixed form of the 5-7-5 morae. Many condemn these extreme examples for being nonsensical failures, but it is an undeniable feat to reduce the world to just “two leaves of grass.”
The Shinkô Haiku Movement came to a sudden halt when its chief members were arrested as allegedly communist sympathizers in 1937 (although none of them were politically active). New Wave haijin were forced to be silent until the war ended, and by then their new wave momentum had dissipated.
Other contemporary haiku writers took a seemingly conservative path. NAKAMURA Kusatao (中村草田男; 1901-1983) is a representative figure of the movement called Ningen-Tankyu-Ha (人間探求派; roughly meaning “the School of Inquirers of Humanity”). Based on conservative views dictated by TAKAHAMA Kyoshi (1874-1959) the school strove for haiku that would also be moral human achievements. Nakamura’s works, however, largely step over the lines drawn by his master Takahama, being too subjective and verbose to the degree they have distorted rhythms:
手の薔薇に蜂来れば我王の如し
Te no bara ni / hachi kureba ware / ou no gotoshi
When a bee comes
to the rose in my hand
I am like a king万緑の中や吾子の歯生え初むる
Banryoku no / naka ya Ako no ha / hae somuru
Everywhere is green –
my child has begunto grow teeth
木の葉髪文藝ながく欺きぬ
Konohagami / Bungei nagaku / azamukinu
Hair shed in winter –
I have been so long
deceived by literature
These verses are extremely subjective, shortcutting the distance between nature and human elements. This makes his work highly readable and at the same time it leaves no space for social dimensions. Through them Nakamura succeeds in creating a persuasive vision of a modern man, even if the man remains in his private life through and through.
Another Ningen-Tankyu-Ha haijin, KATÔ Shûson (1905-1993; 加藤楸邨) raised ethical issues in a much more introvert direction:
鮟鱇の骨まで凍ててぶちきらる
Ankô no / hone made itete / buchikiraru
An anlger fish
frozen to the bones is
chopped down蟻の顔に口ありて声充満す
Ari no kao ni / kuchi arite koe / jûman su
The ant’s face
has a mouth filled up
with its voice鰯雲人に告ぐべきことならず
Iwashigumo / Hito ni tsugu beki / koto narazu
Mackerel sky –
this is not something
to tell others
In these haiku seasonal words are only metaphors or just provide stages for subjective confessions. Or you can say the images of the seasonal words here are distorted by the speaker’s subjectivity to be something ominous, signs for social pressures that remain unnamed. Again any ethicality raised is purely personal, even if we recognise the difficulties caused by the war behind it.
