Review for Early Modern Japan Journal

I'm doing a review of a book called Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson by John M. Rosenfield, published 2003 by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. The review is for Early Modern Japan Journal. This is an important book; Professor Rosenfield is a major scholar of Japanese art history, and of course Buson is a major Japanese artist, so this is a very welcome resource to have. It's a lovely book, with lots of illustrations. It does not try to offer a comprehensive discussion of the full range of Buson's paintings; rather, it chooses two motifs--as the title suggests--and uses them as the basis of an exploration of Buson, his life, and his work as both a poet and a painter. It's not terribly long: the text takes up less than sixty pages, with a few more given to brief appendices and bibliographies. However, it addresses a number of topics that are central to understanding Buson and his work, and while it does not explore them in great depth, it offers a lot of valuable insights.

The topics are:

• Biography (Buson's life and reputation; his interactions with the haikai community, and other cultural groups)
• Poetic pictures (Mynah bird pictures, the Nagasaki school of painting, literati painting, and 'poetic vision')
• Poems and pictures combined (that is, haiga; Bashô and haiga, Buson and haiga, and the haikai imagination)
• Indexical imagery (Rock motifs)

The introduction starts by saying "This small book explores the ways by which the Japanese poet and painter Yosa Buson (1716-1784) portrayed a realm of profound beauty and rich invention...Much of Buson's artistry is accessible to foreigners. His outlook and vocabulary are straightforward ones of shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, and fishermen. His imagery is often that of immediate experience: of stepping barefoot into a freezing stream, of trudging uphill against the wind, of reading by the dim light of an old paper lantern. His paintings and verses express the emotions of sensitive, thoughtful persons everywhere....[b]ut his intellect (and that of his friends) had been shaped by Chinese and Japanese cultural traditions of great antiquity, and he also emplyed complex, highly coded allusions which present-day audiences find arcane and obscure." This seems to me a pretty fair assessment. Rosenfield invokes Haruo Shirane's term "haikai imagination" (see HS's book on Bashô, Traces of Dreams) to sum up what Buson was doing (JR defers explanation of this until a later chapter, so I will too). JR's task is to reconcile contrasting aspects of Buson: his literary sensibility that was informed by Chinese and Japanese traditions at once, the conflict of high and low culture in haikai, and, of course, the competing and complementary media of poetry and painting. This is what's behind talking about both birds and rocks--two kinds of imagery, corresponding to a two-sided artist.

He proposes to explore "three ways in which this artist deployed the expressive resources of picture and verse." He explains that each of these three discussions was originally directed at a different audience, and that they differ in "intelligibility" to people of the present day:

1. Poetic paintings. These are not conventional nanga paintings, but "innovative imagery closely linked to haikai." This seems reasonable. Buson's near contemporaries detected haikai-ness even in his Chinese-style paintings. Presumably this haikai-ness could be more or less dominant. It's something to think about.
2. "Works intended for haikai audiences." Haiga, basically. Pictures+poems.
3. Simple, spare paintings that look a lot like haiga except they don't have inscriptions. JR notes that these are very rare.

JR points out that types 2 and 3 require a lot of commentary before a viewer would understand them, and his book addresses this. Buson's style is extremely "unsystematic " and inconsistent, and thus present especially extreme challenges to the would-be interpreter. "The lack of inner consistencey in style and symbolism in Buson's paintings is yet another symptom of the extreme pluralism that beset Japanese culture nearing the end of its traditional social and political order."

This last sentence is pretty compelling and more or less is the central idea of the book. My first impulse is to be persuaded by it, the first part of the sentence at least. It's very nice to be offered some kind of tidy explanation of Buson's complexity or as the TV interior decorators say of haphazard decor, "eclecticism." I almost agree with it. The second half of the sentence, "Japanese culture nearing the end of its traditional social and political order" makes me a bit less comfortable--it seems to veer a bit close to a theory of intelligent design, if that's the right way to describe it. It's easy to see the symptoms of chaos after the chaos has broken out, and imagine that there's a connection. If things are breaking down, might not artists reflect this in their work by creating more order than less? is one point. But another is, when an artist is living in the twilight of an era, can he or she actually be aware of it? Who can tell the difference between twilight and dawn, if you don't have a clock or a compass?

This is what I'm thinking.

posted by C A Crowley @ 9:46 PM

HNA Conference

I'm back from the Haiku North America conference. It was held last week from Wednesday to Saturday night. It was a very full program that combined lecture-style presentations, workshops, and performances, as well as various kinds of opportunities to compose and talk about writing haiku in English. It was all pretty new to me--I don't really think about "haiku" much, so the weekend was full of surprises, but everyone was really nice and incredibly serious about writing so it was very interesting indeed. It made me aware of many things--particularly about translating haikai--that had never occured to me previously, so I was very glad to have had the chance to take part.

The site of the conference was Fort Worden State Park, miles away from everything on an island "on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula"--it felt every bit as remote as that phrase suggests. Sleeping arrangements were a bit more basic than I'd anticipated--I chose the "dorm" style lodging which turned out to be an unregenerated military barracks, and though I'm rather ascetic by nature (or cheap, I should say) anyway, I found it a bit uncomfortable. I don't think all HNA conferences (I believe they are biannual) are quite so austere in this way. I think many of the other attendees were able to enjoy the scenery and the fresh cool air, and so I imagine it was a good choice of venue overall.

I plan to post some pictures here, and type up the paper I gave and post that. I'm not sure what will become of this paper, but I'll try and turn it into something useful.

posted by C A Crowley @ 6:51 PM

On Authenticity, Again

Some things that come up when thinking about authenticity and haikai:

1) The presence of the past
2) The friction between high culture and low culture
3) Experience viewed/drawn through the filter of literature
4) Appeals to authority

One thing I notice when I read contemporary writing about haiku in English is that there was a single unified view in the past. In fact there was quite a bit of diversity.

I'd like to talk about the ways that Buson differed from Bashô, even though he claimed to be returning to Bashô. And in the process, I'd like to find out about the ways that poets today view the poets of the past, if they see themselves as part of a tradition, if they think it's important to break from a tradition, how important do they think originality is in haiku.

Buson was unlike Bashô in the sense that:

1. He was not a traveler. He did travel a bit, and in some cases did so in conscious awareness that he was retracing Bashô's footsteps, but he did not make a home of travel the way Bashô did.

2. He was a painter. This made him different from Bashô in several ways, the two main ones being that a) he was involved in a commercial enterprise [despite having to pose as an amateur] and b) he was much better at haiga than Bashô was. I think what's important about this, particularly with regard to point a, was that he had a complicated relationship with his identity as a professional.

3. He was not particularly spiritual, or deeply religious. He laced his writings with Zenlike quotations, but these were more like figures of speech than anything really pious.

4. His hokku are a lot different from Bashô's, They're much more dreamy and fantastical as a whole. Bashô was better at creating the impression of transparency in his verse. Maybe they were every bit as fictional and invented as Buson's were, but they leave you with a much different feeling.

This is interesting because Shiki called Bashô subjective and Buson objective. But Buson wasn't so much objective as detached, like a narrator recounting a story at a distance. Not necessarily something he witnessed, but nevertheless something that made for a good story.

I notice that I am doing something here that is more or less a haiku cliche, comparing Bashô to someone and letting the difference be the focus. Of course Buson and Bashô make a good pairing for this sort of exercise. I can't help but feel that both are diminished by the process. However, one of the reasons we know about Bashô now is because Buson helped us think a certain way about his (Bashô's, I mean) role in haikai, so it is worth the effort to explore a bit about how Buson is doing something very unlike the poet he called for everyone to imitate.

posted by C A Crowley @ 10:56 PM

Authenticity in Buson's Haikai

Thinking about the HNA conference, and the topic, which is authenticity.

My talk is about Buson and authenticity.

Authenticity After Bashô: Buson's Ways of Transformation and Transcendence

Authenticity was one of Yosa Buson's central concerns. A leading figure in the 18th century effort to reform haikai, the Bashô Revival, Buson advocated a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashô as a way to recapture authenticity in an age where the genre's popularity threatened to reduce it to the status of a frivolous pastime. However, his own poetry and way of life was very different to that of Bashô. This talk explores the ways that Buson used the legacy of his predecessor in order to invent a new voice that was authentic for his time, and reflects on how his approach might offer an example of ways that modern haiku poets might engage more fully with the work of poets of the past.

I had written something a long time ago about Onitsura's Hitorigoto, which was all about authenticity, or as he called it, makoto. Makoto is pretty much the thing people most remember about Onitsura--he has a lot of good hokku, but the presence of the great star Matsuo Bashô in more or less the same era not only blinds everyone with its brilliance but also acts as this massive gravity sink, pulling everyone's attention into an orbit from which it is virtually impossible to escape. But Onitsura was thinking about authenticity a lot, as was Bashô, and while Bashô came up with lovely formulations like "learn about the pine from the pine" and "seek not after the ancients, seek what they sought" (the last is something that Kûkai came up with--an ancient if there ever was one).

So anyway, authenticity was something that was much on the mind of many haikai poets in the late 17th century. Much of that has to do with what else was going on then--that is to say, the rise of trashy fads like maekuzuke where people didn't have to know much or be very good to do something that was like haikai. People like Onitsura and Bashô really felt this keenly--it was cheapening their genre. And although they struggled against it, for the next few decades, fifty years more or less, the trashy stuff became increasingly popular.

posted by C A Crowley @ 8:53 PM

What I'm Working On These Days

A couple of presentations for the Haiku North America 2005 Conference.

I'm also working on a book review for Early Modern Japan Journal. The book is John Rosenfield's Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson.

posted by C A Crowley @ 11:25 AM