Masaoka Shiki

This is a well-translated, well-produced book. The poet is one of the 4 pillars of Haiku, and the book shows why, but it also shows the excellence of his Tanka and Kanshi. Honesty is what makes the poem work. Now, I wish they would sell this on Kindle.

Fine anthology, PAC

Masaoka Shiki is recognized broadly as the most recent of Japan's haiku masters, and the last of the "big four" -- Basho, Issa, Buson, and Shiki. He pioneered the influential realist technique in haiku known as "shasei", commonly translated as "sketch from life." He had a life tragically shortened by an excruciating tuberculosis that left him bedfast most of the latter half of his life -- a fact that makes his poetic achievement all the more remarkable. Shiki lived at a time when haiku and other traditional Japanese forms were being discarded by writers newly introduced to western poetry, who were eager to embrace the new and leave the old behind. "Shasei" was Shiki's attempt to breathe life into the older forms. Many of Shiki's haiku have the feel of photography when it captures life and time in moments of particular energy:washing green onions --where the meadow creekcomes into towncountry road --boys whacking at a snake,barley-harvest timeMy summer jacketwants to get rid of meand fly awaysudden downpour --and all these maidshauling out storm shuttersTranslated by the renowned Asian scholar Burton Watson, this collection is a masterful grouping both of Shiki's haiku and his five-line tanka. For haiku readers and devotees, this is essential reading.

Masaoka Shiki's poemstranslated by Watson, good!but Why 50 bucks?! Why?!

A beautiful selection of poems by a great poet.

Masaoka Shiki (1867 - 1902) was the last recognised haiku master. With this selection of poems and 13-page biographical introduction Burton Watson tries to present a picture of why Shiki is so important to the history of haiku.Watson introduces Shiki as a man who approached Western literary practices with “excitement and zeal”, but who still saw that with haiku “its very brevity is its strength.” Shiki applied the contemporary Western painting technique of “sketch from life”, which he called “shasei”, to develop his own realist school of haiku writing. The effect was to stop haiku from degenerating into “a little story”, and instead create examples “as starkly noncommittal as a Cubist painting”.Shiki wrote over 25,000 haiku in his life, and Watson has boiled these down to a selection of 144 (plus 34 tanka and 4 kanshi). But that reduction doesn’t necessarily mean we are missing out. Watson is keen to emphasise that Shiki’s importance was his schooling of haiku into the modern world. He even states that many of Shiki’s haiku would have “little meaning for general reader”, due to their “strongly occasional nature.” What we have here are the haiku that have consistently been considered outstanding by Japanese editors over the course of the last 100 years.The haiku themselves are printed two to a page in chronological order from 1891 - 1902. Quite often a two-page spread will cover a season for each year, nicely referencing the importance of seasonal context to haiku composition. Whilst the haiku are rich in flowers and fruits, there is also a definite sense of how the modern world was seeping its way into Japan. There are references to baseball and railways, and for some reason (as so often with haiku) this one stuck in my mind:Spilling its pinkin the spring breeze -tooth powderAnyone looking to write haiku today should be familiar with the work of the four masters; Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. If you’re after a quick introduction to Shiki and his haiku, you can’t get better than this volume. It’s a well-presented, good quality publication. Well worth the £15.

I don't know Japanese, so can't comment on the accuracy of the translations. However, I really enjoyed the translated poems; they work well in English, and have a simple elegance. The introduction was useful and interesting, and I felt that I gained a good overview of the poet, that helped me to appreciate the context in which the poems was written.

Too expensive for the number of poems included, but I am very pleased that they included the years