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. Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶 in Edo .
出代や山越て見る京の空
degawari ya yama koshite miru Kyoo no sora
初夢の不二の山売る都哉
hatsu yume no fuji no yama uru miyako kana
時鳥花のお江戸を一呑に
hototogisu hana no o-edo o hito nomi ni
蚊柱の穴から見ゆる都哉
ka-bashira no ana kara miyuru miyako kana
から人と雑魚寝もすらん女かな
karabito to zakone mo suran onna kana
京辺や冬篭さへいそがしき
miyakobe ya fuyugomori sae isogashiki
のらくらや花の都も秋の風
norakura ya hana no miyako mo aki no kaze
下京の窓かぞへけり春の暮
shimogyoo no mado kazoe keri haru no kure
行秋やすでに御釈迦は京の空
yuku aki ya sude ni o-shaka wa kyoo no sora
- - - - -Read the discussions here :
. Kyoto - Hana no Miyako 花の都 .
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夜々は本ンの都ぞ門涼
yoru-yoru wa hon no miyako zo kado suzumi
night after night
people cool off outside --
it is truly the capital
Tr. Chris Drake
This hokku is from the sixth month (July) of 1813, about five months after Issa finally reached an agreement with his brother and returned to live in his half of his father's house in his hometown. It is also the last hokku in a series of four (or perhaps five) in Issa's diary about the Gion Festival in faraway Kyoto, a festival that is taking place as he writes his hokku. Apparently just imagining the Gion Festival makes Issa feel cooler. When he traveled in western Honshu many years earlier, Issa probably saw at least part of the long Gion Festival, which lasts for a month and is one of the three most famous festivals in Japan. Night after night and day after day different groups of dancers, musicians, actors, Shinto priests, and ordinary citizens from different parts of Kyoto carry out ceremonies and performances in various neighborhoods and parade through the streets at various times. When they do, people go outside to wave or urge on those in the processions as they pass by. On 6/7 and 6/14, very tall floats on large wagons were pulled through the streets of the main parts of the city, and Issa's other Kyoto hokku in this part of his diary for the sixth month evoke those large floats. During the month-long festival, benches were set up in the streets, stalls selling food or charms proliferated, and low platforms were placed in the almost dry riverbed of the Kamo River near the route of the processions, allowing people to cool off in the night air as they watched from the riverbed. It is this festival which Issa evokes in four consecutive hokku, and the only emperor he mentions is Gozu Tennou, the Ox Head Emperor, a syncretic Buddhist and Shinto deity who is the main god at the Gion Shrine.
In Issa's time the nominal capital of Japan was Kyoto, but the emperor was close to being a mere figurehead, and the actual administrative capital was Edo, where the shogunate held real power and acted as the nation's government, although much power was also held by feudal samurai lords in their rural domains. To Issa, however, in the sixth month Kyoto stops being the nominal capital of Japan and actually becomes the real capital. This change is not due to the old aristocracy but to the economic power of Kyoto's merchants and craftspeople, who support the Gion Festival and keep alive the communal commoner networks, guilds, and self-help organizations that developed through the centuries after the aristocracy lost most of its power. The Gion Festival takes place throughout the city, and each local neighborhood joins in. Much of the commoner population of Kyoto participates in this festival, and those who don't pull floats around or perform in the streets stand beside the streets near their homes, enjoying the cool air, conversation, and the festival. When Issa says people "cool off by/near their doors and gates," he seems to be referring mainly to the commoners in Kyoto.
This kind of great outdoor urban festival could take place in Kyoto because of its traditions of commoner independence and pride and because commoners made up the majority of the population of the city. By contrast, in Edo, where Issa came of age after being sent there as a boy, warriors owned about two-thirds of the land, with only about 15% being owned by commoners. Edo began as a castle town and administrative center, and most of the early commoners who came to live there did jobs that were in some way related to supporting the warrior population. By Issa's time commoners had developed their own unique culture, but in Edo there was never any doubt about which class ruled and which classes had to obey. In Kyoto, however, warriors had to keep a very low profile and hesitated to interfere in daily city affairs, while the aristocrats were weak and ineffectual. During the Gion Festival, at least, Kyoto people enjoyed living outside together, and it must have almost seemed as if commoners temporarily ran the city. To Issa, Kyoto during the Gion Festival truly deserved the name of capital of Japan.
After leaving Edo and returning to live in his hometown in 1813, Issa, happy at being home, seems to have partially overlapped in his mind his native area of Shinano with Kyoto. In another hokku in Issa's diary placed soon before the four about the Gion Festival is a hokku about the "mountain people" in his area having "Kyoto-sized" rooms in their houses. In Kyoto, tatami floor mat sizes were slightly bigger than in Edo, where people had to squeeze together. An eight-mat room was thus perceptibly larger in Kyoto and Shinano than in Edo. And more generally, Issa feels Shinano is a much better place than it's said to be by outsiders. In fact, when it comes to summer coolness Shinano is the capital of cool in Japan, as Issa suggests in this hokku, which is also placed near the four hokku about Kyoto:
bathing at a hot springs in the depths of Shinano --
gege mo gege gege mo gekoku no suzushisa yo
ah, how cool
the lowest of the lowest
of the low provinces
In ancient Japan Shinano was officially ranked among the "low provinces" in terms of value, and in Issa's time city people in Edo continued to look down on the province. However, Issa knows from experience that those who underestimate Shinano are forgetting something, and the repetition of ge suggests their inability to think and speak clearly. In Shinano the cool summer air is surely, he believes, as refreshing as it gets in Japan. The coolness in Shinano comes from nature, while the coolness in Kyoto comes from its convivial outdoor street culture, especially during the colorful and dramatic Gion Festival, but Issa seems to feel that both Shinano and Kyoto must be equal in terms of sheer coolness. His hometown has no great annual midsummer festival to transform and cool daily life, but it does have magic melons. In Issa's diary, placed between the "lowest of the low" hokku and the "night after night" hokku are these:
hito kitara kaeru to nare yo hiyashi-uri
hey, melons cooling
in the creek, if someone comes
turn into frogs!
ishikawa ya ariake-zuki to hiyashi-uri
rocky stream --
dawn moon,
cooling melons
In the first hokku, Issa plays the part of magician, while in the second it is the moon's cool light and its shape reflected on the surface of the rippling stream that urge the melons to think big and to cool people's minds and imaginations as well as their mouths, just as the moon does. Also, as Issa surely knows, Rocky Stream is also one of the alternate names of the Kamo River in Kyoto, and the next two hokku in his diary evoke the representation of a cool crescent moon at the top of a pole high above the moon float at the Gion Festival, a float dedicated to the main god of the Gion Shrine, so the hokku about the rocky stream may be overlapping a stream in Issa's hometown with the Kamo River in Kyoto, where large numbers of people go at night to catch some cool air and eat cool food after enjoying the festival. Issa seems to have actually witnessed people immersing melons in the Kamo River for cooling, since several years earlier he wrote a hokku about it, so it seems possible that, in Issa's imagination, the melons in the rocky stream hokku are cooling both in Issa's hometown and in the Kamo River in faraway Kyoto.
During his first summer back in his hometown, Issa seems to have had utopian visions of his native region. After leaving behind the cramped rooms of warrior-ruled Edo, he may have felt that in some ways his hometown was the equal of Kyoto, at least if he could use his imagination to make it into something equaling Kyoto. Surely he was beginning to understand the type of haikai he wanted to write from now on in his new life environment.
Issa's mental overlapping of his hometown with Kyoto is a bit complex.
Chris Drake
. Gion matsuri 祇園祭り Gion Festival in Kyoto .
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時鳥京にして見る月よ哉
hototogisu kyoo ni shite miru tsukiyo kana
nightingale,
go see this moon
in the old capital
This hokku is from lunar 4/19 (May 26) of 1807, when Issa was in Edo. On the nineteenth the moon is slightly past full and is still fairly bright though waning. In the hokku Issa seems to be especially impressed by the singing of one nightingale, and he tries to persuade the bird to visit the old capital, Kyoto, if it really wants to see tonight's moon as it should be seen, with the moonlit city spread out below in its full beauty. Since Edo was a city on the move twenty-four hours a day, city lights presumably made the moon harder to see and enjoy, and in Kyoto, where waka poems about nightingales have been written for centuries, people will appreciate the bird's voice more deeply than they do in Edo. And Kyoto, still the nominal capital, is simply a more elegant city than utilitarian Edo, the actual administrative capital. In the previous hokku in his diary Issa urges a nightingale not to dawdle or it will never get to Kyoto, and in the present hokku he may be hoping the bird can fly all the way to Kyoto in a single night.
In another hokku written on the same day, Issa tells a nightingale that has just returned from the south to get ready to look at creepers and other high-growing weeds on and around the humble houses of commoners in Edo. However, that hokku is followed by:
nightingale,
at night even weeds
are beautiful
hototogisu yoru wa mugura mo utsukushiki
Still, nothing in Edo compares with moonlit Kyoto, so Issa urges the bird to gaze at the moon there. By implication, he may be suggesting the bird will be recognized in Kyoto for its outstanding voice.
There is no perfect English translation for the bird hototogisu. It is literally the "lesser" cuckoo, since it is smaller than the larger common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus - kakkou, kankodori), which is commonly found in Europe and sings with cuckoo-clock-like cries. The lesser cuckoo is found only in Africa and Asia, so its cry and its habits are not part of common bird folklore or experience in English. The song of the lesser cuckoo is rather different from that of the common cuckoo and is closer to the song of the uguisu (bush warbler). In fact, the songs of the lesser cuckoo and bush warbler were and to some extent still remain the two most prized bird songs in Japan, and people wrote many waka and hokku about hearing the first song of the year of both birds. Since the lesser cuckoo, unlike the common cuckoo, is fond of singing at night as well as in the day, the sound of its voice in the darkness is said to be especially moving, and people often stayed up all night in early summer waiting to hear its soulful, emotional-sounding song. The bird is therefore often associated with night and the moon as well as with souls in the other world and with mountain gods, for whom it acts as a messenger.
It is also thought to be a messenger for Buddhas, and its song is said to make the sound of Japanese words meaning, "Have you hung up your Buddha image?" The inside of its mouth is red, and the lesser cuckoo is also called the bird that coughs blood, a reference to legendary king Duyu in China who died in exile and whose soul became a lesser cuckoo that sang so sadly about wanting to return home that it coughed up blood. This legend influenced Masaoka Shiki when he chose his writing name (Shiki, in Sino-Japanese, means Lesser Cuckoo), since he, too, was a singer in spite of coughing up blood from his tubercular lungs, and the literary magazine he founded, Hototogisu, bears the name Lesser Cuckoo. Many other legends and images are associated with the bird.
Unfortunately, to most English speakers, the word cuckoo suggests the common cuckoo and not the mysterious, otherworldly lesser cuckoo with its sad, emotional voice. There is no consensus on what English name might suggest the beauty and suggestiveness of the bird's song, which is quite different from that of the common cuckoo, but I use "nightingale" in order to suggest some of the spiritual and cultural ambiance of the hototogisu. In Greek myth the nightingale sings the mournful song of the soul of a woman who has been wronged, and in English poetry the nightingale has often been evoked as the spirit of song or poetry or the imagination. However, nightingales are not found in Japan, so my translation is based on cultural similarities and the nocturnal singing habits of both the nightingale and the lesser cuckoo.
Chris Drake
. hototogisu ホトトギス, 時鳥 Little Cuckoo, Cuculus poliocephalis .
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