Haiku Travels
Kiyosumi Garden (Tokyo)
Old pond
frog jumps in:
sound of water
furu-ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
Basho
[Kiyosumi Garden]
Basho's
frog haiku is so famous that it has almost become banal. It is the
haiku of haiku. Even the greatest haiku haters have heard the 'plop' of
this jumping frog. It has attracted so many translators that a book has
appeared carrying more than 100 different translations. There is no dearth of haiku stones, either, three of them
alone in the vicinity of the Basho Museum (including the one I visit, in
the Kiyosumi Garden) and many more in various locations in Japan.
There seems to exist some confusion about where this haiku was written.
Basho's birthplace, Iga-Ueno, and a temple in Shiga Prefecture are both
contenders, but there could be as many all over Japan as there are old
ponds.For me, however, there is no doubt about the location. It must have been near Basho's hut on the left bank of the Sumida River. There is clear evidence for it, as we will see below. Moreover, Basho was given the Sumida cottage by his disciple-cum-patron Sugiyama Sanpu, a fish dealer who owned stock ponds in the same area. So Basho's cottage was surrounded by ponds where fish were reared for Edo's hungry markets, and there must have been whole armies of frogs, too. Those fish ponds of course do not exist anymore, but there is a large pond in the Kiyosumi Garden not far from the Basho Museum.
The Kiyosumi Garden is relatively modern as Japanese gardens go. Although the site is formed by a daimyo estate with an older garden (but not old enough to incorporate anything from Basho's time), it was laid out in 1885 by Iwasaki Yataro, the founder of the Mitsubishi conglomerate. The garden is centered on a large pond (in the past fed by the Sumida River), which contains a few islands and a pavilion built for the visit of a high-ranking foreign guest in 1907. One could call it the Meiji period equivalent of the Edo daimyo gardens. In 1932 the garden was donated to the City of Tokyo.
Characteristics of the garden are the big artificial hill ('Fujimiyama') and the stone steps ('isowatari') along part of the pond's shore. These provide strollers with an expansive view of the water. The garden has been planted lavishly with black pines, azaleas, hydrangeas and irises. But Kiyosumi's most striking feature are in the many natural stones of various colors and shapes that the Iwasaki family collected from all over Japan - there are 55 large stones in all. This, too, is a 'daimyo custom:' rare stones were expensive and difficult to move, so it was a sign of sure power to fill a whole garden with them.
[The haiku stone in Kiyosumi Garden]
Basho wrote the frog haiku in 1686. The circumstances under which this
took place were recorded by his disciple Kagami Shiko (1665-1731), in Kuzu no Matsubara ('Pine Forest of Kuzu,' 1692), a book written to elucidate Basho's idea of haikai.
This seems to be a reliable indication that the haiku was indeed
written while Basho lived in his hut on the River Sumida bank, although
it was not Shiko himself who was present, but Kikaku, another disciple.
Basho was sitting in his riverside hut. It was spring ("frog" is a kigo for spring). A soft drizzle fell and the smell of blossoms was in the air. Mountain roses were blooming at the edge of a pond in the garden. Enomoto Kikaku (1661-1707) kept Basho company, but master and disciple were both sitting quietly. Suddenly a frog jumped into the old pond, breaking the stillness with a watery plop. In Basho's mind, two phrases formed, the last part of a hokku:
frog jumps in
sound of water
Kikaku suggested yamabuki ya, 'mountain roses' for the first five syllables. In traditional poetry, this plant was associated with frogs. Basho pondered for a while and then decided to use instead a phrase uncommon in poetry: 'the old pond,' furu ike ya. This was a nice literary twist which added 'newness' and 'lightness' to the poem. It was also the utmost of simplicity.
Basho's frog was an experimental one. It was the first silent frog in Japanese poetry, which so far had been regaled with quaking choruses. Instead of this night music, Basho's frog exits with a soft plop, after which rings of water expand and die out. It is a bit lonely, just like Basho.
frog jumps in
sound of water
Kikaku suggested yamabuki ya, 'mountain roses' for the first five syllables. In traditional poetry, this plant was associated with frogs. Basho pondered for a while and then decided to use instead a phrase uncommon in poetry: 'the old pond,' furu ike ya. This was a nice literary twist which added 'newness' and 'lightness' to the poem. It was also the utmost of simplicity.
Basho's frog was an experimental one. It was the first silent frog in Japanese poetry, which so far had been regaled with quaking choruses. Instead of this night music, Basho's frog exits with a soft plop, after which rings of water expand and die out. It is a bit lonely, just like Basho.
By the way, the frog can also be plural, as the Japanese language normally does not make numerical distinctions. But to have a whole army of frogs jump into the pond seems just too noisy. It does not fit the atmosphere of the poem, which is one of yugen, of stillness, symbolized in the pond that after all is an ancient one. This is something almost all translators agree on.
The "mizo no oto" or 'sound of water' is another matter. Many translators cannot resist the temptation to enliven this phrase by translating it as 'Plop,' 'Splash,' or even 'Kdang.' That is strictly speaking not correct, for Basho himself could also have used an onomatopoeic word. The Japanese language is very rich in them, more so than English, but Basho purposefully selected 'sound of water,' perhaps to emphasize the progression from stillness (no sound) to movement (sound) to stillness again. Zen-master and graphic artist Sengai (1751-1837) wrote a parody of the frog haiku (yes, already in Edo-times it was so popular that it invited parodies!) in which he creates a comic effect by using the onomatopoeic "pon to," resulting in a very different poem:
old pond
something "plop"
jumped in
furuike ya | naniyara pon to | tobikonda
But the real frog lives on in the world's most famous haiku and continues to entice us with its silent leap in that mysterious pond.
Kiyosumi Garden is 5 min. from Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station on the Oedo line or 7 min. from Morishita Station on the Shinjuku Subway line.
The frogs congregate in One Hundred Frogs, From Matsuo Basho to Allen Ginsberg by Hiroaki Sato (Weatherhill, 1995)Kagami Shiko's account about the writing of the frog haiku is cited by Makoto Ueda in Basho and his Interpreters (Stanford University Press, 1992)
Translations and Studies of Basho
Basho's Haiku, 2 vols, by Toshiharu Oseko (1990 & 1996, Maruzen): Basho and his Interpreters, Selected Hokku with Commentary, by Makoto Ueda (1992, Stanford U.P.); Traces of Dreams, Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, by Haruo Shirane (1998, Stanford U.P.); Basho's Narrow Road, by Hiroaki Sato (1996, Stone Bridge Press); Basho's Journey, The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho, by David Landis Bamhill (2005, State University of New York); Basho Yamatoji by Daiyasu Takashi considers Basho's travels in the Nara area and the haiku he wrote there (Izumi Shobo, 1994)
[The photos in this post are my own]