Haiku Travels
Suma (Kobe)
Suma, one of the wards of Kobe, is known for its white sandy beach, which attracts people from the Kansai region for sun bathing during the summer season. That same beach (in the distant past also adorned by pine trees) appears in classic literature, from the Genji monogatari, Heike monogatari and Ise monogatari, to waka poetry and No plays. As Prince Genji was sent here in exile, and as it was far from the capital Heiankyo, it had - different from today's bright image - a somewhat lonely and melancholic connotation. That image is reinforced in the No play Matsukaze, in which Ariwara no Yukihira, after a love affair with the fishing girls Matsukaze and Murasame, cruelly abandons them when he is allowed to return to Heiankyo. Even more negative was the image caused by the Battle of Ichi-no-Tani during the civil war between the Minamoto and the Taira clans in 1184, when Suma Beach was littered with dead bodies (mostly of Taira warriors, who lost) and people for many years believed that their ghosts still haunted the area.break of day -
a white sail glides by
outside my mosquito net
akebono ya | shiraho sugiyuku | kaya no soto
暁や白帆過ぎ行く蚊帳の外Shiki
[Suma Rikyu park]
In more recent times the area was also a popular site for villas of the wealthy and powerful, including the Suma Detached palace (Suma Rikyu), established in 1914 by the Imperial Household Agency as a summer resort for the imperial family. The palace was destroyed in 1945, and the park has since been acquired by the City of Kobe. The Rikyu Garden consists now of a Western-style garden of the Versailles type, with cascades and rows of fountains, as well as a large rose garden, an iris garden and a camellia garden. A lookout-point provides a view over Suma and the nearby sea (see my post Plum Blossoms in Suma Rikyu Park for more information). Other destinations in Suma are Suma Temple (a Shingon temple dating back to the 9th c., with many literary associations, and still a popular pilgrim destination), Suma Seaside Park containing an aqua park and Sumaura Park with a rope-way up Mt Hachibuse. Everything is just half an hour from central Kobe.
"Man of letters" Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who was born in Matsuyama just before the Meiji-period dawned, was a major figure in the development of modern haiku poetry (changing the old designation "hokku" to "haiku"), and wrote more than 25,000 haiku during his short life. But he was also an important poet and reformer of tanka poetry, an influential critic, writer of poetic diaries, and so on. It is incredible how much he achieved in his all too short life.
Already in 1889, Shiki had coughed up blood as a sign that his lungs were affected by tuberculosis. In the spring of 1895, on the return journey from a visit to China, he suffered a severe hemorrhage of the lungs. As soon as his ship arrived in Kobe, he was rushed to a hospital. Friends and family gathered around his bed, but Shiki rallied miraculously and soon left the hospital for a rest home in nearby Suma. By late summer he was able to return to his birthplace Matsuyama (where he stayed with Natsume Soseki) but later in the year settled down in Tokyo. There he was mainly confined to his bed again, as the tuberculosis had settled in his spine, making walking almost impossible. He devoted all the time left him to literature, and was often joined by friends and followers in his sickroom.
The present haiku was written by Shiki while staying in the rest house in Suma. It is summer, so his bed has been enclosed by a tent-like mosquito net, as was customary in the past when there were no air conditioners yet and windows had to remain open for coolness. The sanatorium stood at the coast. At dawn, when Shiki wakes up, he looks out of the window and sees the white sail of a boat passing by. That was surely not a modern yacht - yachts came after WWII to Japan - but probably a fishing boat or coastal vessel transporting goods. So we have white upon white: the white sail seen through the white gauze of the mosquito net (and my imagination adds as third whiteness the white walls of the sick room, but that may be too modern, as at this early (Meiji-period) date it may well have been brown, wooden walls).
The Suma Rikyu Park is not connected to Shiki, but I have selected it here as a symbol of Suma. It is a 10-min walk from Suma Station on the JR or Sanyo Dentetsu line. Suma Temple, which will figure in a future one of the Haiku Travels, is also a short walk from this station.
See about Shiki: Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, by Burton Watson (Columbia U.P.); The Winter Sun Shines in: A Life of Masaoka Shiki, by Donald Keene (Columbia U.P.); Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, by Janine Beichman (Kodansha International); If Someone Asks..., Masaoka Shiki's Life and Haiku, Matsuyama Municipal Shiki-Kinen Museum.