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Wisteria Journal
Jim Kacian
These seventeen haibun are intended as a single work, to which there are attached an Introduction and a Dedication. Since you will be reading these only one at a time, however, it seems more appropriate that this apparatus follow the final installment, and this is where you will find them. My thanks to Simply Haiku for offering these in their entirety.
Jim Kacian
all afternoon it takes to move by train from Akita to Niigata down the
Russian coast of Japan a string of modest-sized towns, drenched in the
soporific spring sunlight, drones with some small commerce exchange a
gathering of lunching rotarians from Ugo-Honjo for a gaggle of farmers’
wives going shopping in Sakata, later children on their way home from
school in outlying Amarume all regard us with a pleasant curiosity, but
none willing to sit beside us
pass by dams and alongside highways, under bridges and over ditches, coming
to a first-hand knowledge of the challenges of this terrain, and of the
many strategies by which people here have sought control geography
informs character, and character, Thomas Hardy tells us, is fate the land
here resplendent with personality primal force manifests not in abstractions,
but pure being: the perfect cone of Fuji, the cataract that is
Yonjusanman one of the earliest creation myths of Japan: the periodic
awakenings of a giant koi, whose struggles deep beneath the sea shiver the
land into seismic activity animism, the popular religion for a millennium,
still figures largely in the emotive, if not literal, lives of these folk
in the years following the A-Bomb koi and other creatures buried within
racial memory re-emerged, but in a significantly different fashion Godzilla,
Mothra and others, whose movements once created the lay of this land,
now move directly into the provenance of man, walking his roads, destroying
his cities, completely oblivious to his resistance they are subsumed
only through combat with forces of equal magnitude—each other—and
humans escape destruction only through their purblind indifference to us
a culture fraught with unpredictable and dire events will seek control as a
guiding principal but there are cracks in such reasoning, just as there are
cracks threading the tunnels of the Tokyo subway control is an illusion
we grant ourselves as a basis of a cultural zeitgeist, it subverts the wild and
actual world in favor of a manufactured and manageable one, as all art, all
culture bonsai, ikebana, and the like are not a love of nature as it is but as
it may be shaped by hand while reason may be fooled, we are not so easily
misled at the level of myth there we know we are ever powerless before
the most potent of nature’s forces, that engineering of the environment is
never without incalculable, if not always apparent or immediate, expense,
that in the end we have no other place in which to abide an esthetic
which counsels management of the unmanageable ultimately fails; it can
succeed only as idea, and there atrophies, devoid of primal force
the landscape rolls on, the fields are largely empty just now, only within the
month the cold Siberian wind has ceased to blow across the Northern Sea
however, rape is in bloom, and vast fields of it stretch in all directions
recall Buson’s haiku
the same for us, two hundred fifty years later, as though nothing had changed
here in all that time
this train, passing through city, suburb and field, provides a glimpse into
the back yards and private spaces of peoples’ lives everywhere neatly
tended plots, tools ordered on benches, sculpted pines, characteristic of
the people: apt, artless, sincere occasionally a lawnchair planted in a
garden, a man’s washing hung in the suneverywhere tiny revelations,
some easy to read, some less so, all suggestive of life beyond interior space,
or rather, beyond an interiority mannered and easily translatable to a life
spent out of doors, under the sun
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Jim Kacian is a past editor of Frogpond (the international membership journal of the Haiku Society of America, and the largest haiku magazine outside of Japan), is past president of the Haiku Society of America and was a co-founder of the World Haiku Association. He has had over 1000 haiku published in English-language journals and magazines in more than 20 countries and was winner most recently of the prestigious James Hackett Award (2002). He has published 7 books, all of which have won major awards. He is author of How to Haiku, a primer for English-speaking poets, as well as numerous articles on haiku form and praxis. He owns and operates Red Moon Press, the largest publishing house dedicated to haiku in the world.