In Defense of Rules or Creative Innovation?: On the Essence of the Topic Spring Rain in Japanese Haiku

Abstract

Seasonal topics are important to most modern and premodern Japanese haiku. These are words or short expressions that are related to the season in various ways. One aspect often discussed in theoretical writings on haiku is the hon’i, the “essence” of these topics. It is often seen as a set of specific characteristics associated with a certain topic, which have been established by tradition, and knowledge of these essences are regarded as essential for writing haiku and appreciating haiku as a reader. In this chapter I investigate how the topic “spring rain” has been described in theoretical texts and compare these results with how its essence has been used in a number of poems. I will especially put focus on the works of the eighteenth-century poet Yosa Buson, who wrote an unusually large number of poems on this topic. The discussion will cover earlier interpretations of some of these poems and will show how these both adhere to and turn away from the traditional hon’i. The essence as such is shown to be much richer than what is possible to define with a set of rules. I will argue that the search for essences is not necessarily a process of defining limits and setting up rules, but a search for ever new ways to make a topic come to life. It is a creative search for how to “catch” a certain phenomenon rather than a process of defining what is right and wrong according to tradition.