Who Was Masaoka Shiki? The Poet Who Made Haiku Modern, Took His Name from a Bird and Loved Baseball

Why "Shiki"? A name taken from a bird

In 1888 or 1889 he began coughing up blood, an early sign of tuberculosis. Soon afterwards he adopted the pen name "Shiki", one way of writing the Japanese name of the lesser cuckoo, the hototogisu. In Japanese tradition this bird is said to cough blood as it sings, so the name was a grim joke about his own illness. He used dozens of other pen names over his life, more than fifty by his own count.

From student to haiku reformer

Shiki entered Tokyo Imperial University in 1890 but dropped out in 1892. By his own account he was too absorbed in writing haiku to pass his exams, although others point to his illness. That same year he published a serialized essay calling for haiku reform, Talks on Haiku from the Otter's Den, and in November 1892 he became haiku editor of the newspaper Nippon, which stayed his main platform for the rest of his life.

At the time many people felt that short traditional forms like haiku and tanka were dying out in modern Meiji Japan, and there were no great living masters. Shiki changed that. He argued that haiku should be judged by the same standards as any other literature, which was contrary to the views of earlier poets, and he firmly placed it in the category of literature.

Shasei: haiku as a sketch from life

Shiki's style rejected the puns and fantasies of the old school in favor of realistic observation of nature, a commitment to realism that he, like other Meiji writers, borrowed from Western literature. In Japanese this idea is called shasei, "sketching from life". He criticized the stale conventional haiku of his day, praised the poetry of Bashō, and searched old Edo-period books to rediscover poets who had been forgotten, such as Yosa Buson.

Importantly, his reform did not throw away the rules. He kept the traditional 5–7–5 pattern and the kigo, the season word, which later poets sometimes abandoned. His school became known as the "Nippon school", after the newspaper that published its work, and a magazine named after his pen name, Hototogisu, was founded by his followers in 1897; his disciple Takahama Kyoshi later took it over.

The persimmon haiku: "Kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Hōryūji"

Shiki's most famous poem, which stands beside Bashō's frog poem as a symbol of haiku itself, is kaki kueba / kane ga naru nari / Hōryūji: "I bite into a persimmon, and a bell rings out — Hōryū-ji". The season word is the persimmon, an autumn fruit. The poem carries the note "resting at a teahouse at Hōryū-ji", and it first appeared in a newspaper on 8 November 1895.

The poem has a story behind it. In 1895 Shiki went to China as a war correspondent in the First Sino-Japanese War, but arrived after the peace treaty had been signed. He coughed blood on the voyage home and was hospitalized in Kobe, then recovered in his home town in the house of his old friend Sōseki, who was teaching in Matsuyama. He stayed about fifty days, with Sōseki upstairs and Shiki downstairs, holding haiku meetings almost every day. On his way back to Tokyo in late October he spent a few days in Nara, where the persimmon poem was born.

Shiki loved persimmons and could eat seven or eight at once as a student. Interestingly, it rained on the day he visited Hōryū-ji, so scholars think the scene is not a literal record. Two months earlier, the same newspaper had printed Sōseki's a haiku with almost the same shape about a temple bell and falling ginkgo leaves at Kenchō-ji. In 2005 a national fruit growers' association declared 26 October "Persimmon Day" in Japan, treating it as the day Shiki wrote the poem.

Baseball and the Hall of Fame

Shiki was one of Japan's earliest baseball enthusiasts. He played as a teenager, and in 2002 he was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame; some of his tanka from 1898 are about the sport. He played catcher until he coughed blood in 1889, and in 1890 he even used the pen name Noboru written with the characters for "field" and "ball", four years before the word yakyū became the Japanese term for baseball.

Writing from a "six-foot sickbed"

By 1897 Shiki was bedridden, and around 1901 his illness grew worse; he developed Pott's disease, tuberculosis of the spine, and took morphine for the pain. Even so, he kept writing. His late sickbed diaries — A Drop of Ink (1901), Stray Notes While Lying on My Back (1901–1902) and A Six-Foot Sickbed (1902) — are still read today. He also turned to tanka, urging reform in Letters to a Tanka Poet (1898).

He died of tuberculosis on 19 September 1902, aged 34. His last poems mention the hechima, or sponge gourd, and his death anniversary is still called Hechima-ki, "Sponge Gourd Day".

Learn English with Masaoka Shiki

Expression	Meaning	Example
a breath of fresh air	something new and refreshing	Shiki's realistic haiku were a breath of fresh air.
break the mold	do something in a new way	He broke the mold of old-fashioned haiku.
paint a picture with words	describe something vividly	His poems paint a picture with words.
against all odds	despite great difficulty	Against all odds, he kept writing from his sickbed.
a kindred spirit	someone who shares your interests	Sōseki was a kindred spirit for Shiki.

Practice: Write a three-line poem about a fruit you love, then write two sentences about it using "paint a picture with words" and "a breath of fresh air".