大根引き大根で道を教へけり
Daikohiki daiko de michi o oshiekeri
The daikon farmer points the way, with a daikon.
Haiku are image poems; they don’t tell a narrative but instead tell of a single event. Despite being singular, the event gestures toward a larger world.
A seasonal reference (in this case daikon, signifying winter) provides a time. The presence of a daikon farmer and a person asking for directions implies a rural environment. It is a quaint image, of a person busy at work but still willing to lend a helping hand to a stranger.
The daikon farmer giving directions by pointing with his daikon is a situation that is whole in and of itself. It is an image that is self-containing and that creates its own context: everything you need to know about the scene is communicated in less than ten English words.
This haiku was first explained to me by a remarkably enthusiastic teacher at Tokiwa University in Mito, Japan. When he read the poem, he extended his arm with his fist clenched, as if he himself was holding a daikon. The theatrical component of his reading contributed greatly to the poem’s impact. It was in this moment that I understood for the first time the essence of haiku.
Later, I wrote a haiku for this class. It was also about daikon radishes. It went like this:
君のそば足は大根になっちゃう
Kimi no soba ashi wa daikon ni nacchau
When I’m near you, my legs turn into Daikon radishes
The image was based on the novel Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe, in which a man wakes up to find his legs turning into daikon radishes. In his story, the transformation of the character’s legs is evoking Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis in Franz Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis.” In my haiku, the transformation of the narrator’s legs is evoking the wobbliness that comes from infatuation.
I wrote this haiku because I was in love with someone, and because I liked Kobayashi Issa’s haiku about daikon radishes, and because I liked the image from the novel Kangaroo Notebook. Even these three reasons stacked atop each other do not justify my haiku.
My haiku betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the form. For one, I tore the seasonal keyword “daikon” from its seasonal context, meaning that my haiku has no temporal reference. Secondly, my haiku is not an image poem. The transformation of my legs into daikon radishes is inherently metaphorical; thus, there is no true visual component. The essence of haiku is to express an internal feeling externally through natural imagery; in my youth and folly, I was both too literal and too abstract. I was too caught up in my own internal world to establish sympathies with the world around me.
Writing haiku requires temporarily setting aside one’s ego, an action fundamentally impossible for a twenty year-old boy. This is not to say that haiku-writers are ego-less, but that they consciously allow their ego to be subsumed by the natural image they are portraying. Issa’s poem is not about Kobayashi Issa meeting a daikon farmer who points out the way that he, Kobayashi Issa, needs to go. Kobayashi Issa is not involved in the interaction at all. The only subject in the poem is the daikon farmer, who is similarly ego-less; he is not an individual, but a part of nature. His role in nature, at the particular moment of the poem, is to pick daikon radishes. This role as daikon picker is so essentialized that the daikon he picks become an extension of his body: an oversized white finger that he uses to point the way.
This last image is inherently comical. The daikon farmer has no concern for etiquette; he does not put his daikon down when engaged in conversation with a passerby. He does not put on any airs. He has a daikon in his hand; thus, he uses it to point the way. Also important is the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, a daikon is finger-shaped, making it an ideal vegetable to use for pointing. The image would not be as funny if he was holding a kabocha squash or a head of bok choy. The image is funny because it’s so easy to imagine, because the phenomenon depicted is so common and yet so rarely commented upon.
This poem could only have been written by someone with experience looking at the world from a dispassionate perspective. Issa is clearly a person who observes, and observes without preconceived notions of which aspects of the world are important and which are not. Each action and each actor are equally deserving of his attention, and thus he is able to notice and point out phenomena that tend to be overlooked. He is not preoccupied with his own concerns. If we suppose that he was the one who asked the daikon farmer for directions, we see he was not so distracted by where he needed to go to fail to notice the daikon farmer’s method of pointing. He is not oriented toward the future, but the present moment. The daikon farmer is pointing toward something, but the poem does not look where he is pointing; instead, it looks at the pointing itself.
This aspect of haiku is emphasized by the convention of including seasonal keywords that place the poem in time. The use of seasonal imagery means that the phenomenon being depicted could only happen at a particular time of year. Thus, a haiku is firmly placed in a certain “present.” At the same time, this “present” is eternally recurrent, because of course, seasons come back every year. 繰り返される永久の季節. Matsuo Basho, in what was probably an entirely different context, used the expression “不易流行” (fueki ryuukou) to describe haiku: both transient and eternal. A fleeting image captured in an eternal form; or conversely, an eternal image captured in a fleeting form.
Until there are no daikon left in our world, the daikon farmer pointing the way with a daikon will continue to resonate with us as both a symbolic and literal gesture. Through this haiku, through this method of observing without observing, the image takes on a new form that preserves its essential nature: combining the transient and the eternal; the specific and the universal.
For me, it’s a daikon farmer pointing the way with a daikon, but the specific image that speaks to you may be different. A doctor does not prescribe the same medicine to all patients, and while a daikon is the remedy for what ails me, it might do little but upset your stomach. Perhaps there is room to wonder why this or that haiku strikes this or that individual, but as a wise frog once said, “Why wonder? Why wonder?”
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