Breeze-lubbers
Haiku by Shōa
In studying representations of the Suwa area of Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, I frequently encounter poems about or inspired by the area. I thought I’d start collecting these here and try my hand at translation. Feel free to offer critiques as to style, interpretation, or suggestions about other sources.
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In honour of the lake in summer, a poem by Shōa 正阿 (also known as Bairyō 梅寮), these being the pen names of Kawai Ryōsaku 河合良作 (1779-1838), a poet and physician from the village of Yagasaki, in what is now the Suwa District city of Chino.
李尻の 蝶や浮藻の 花の上
momojiri no / tefu ya ukimo no / hana no ue
Blundering butterflies—
No sea legs
on the flowering lake weeds
Thoughts
Would that I could hope for the luck of that Chinese scholar known to Japanese literature as Rōsan! For he was beloved by two spirit-maidens, celestial sisters, who every ten days came to visit him and to tell him stories about butterflies.
—Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (1904)
I like this poem for what I take to be its playful juxtaposition of butterflies—symbols of otherworldly transcendence and delicate transformation—with the mundane ineptitude of being out of one’s element, epitomized here by the inability to find purchase on blossoming lake weeds. In the original Japanese, this is conveyed in the term momojiri, which, translated literally, might be read “peach-assed” (or, with the characters used here, “plum-bummed”). Despite the obvious risqué associations (for shame!), the term is in fact an old metaphorical usage that describes, as the No-Sword puts it, “not ‘two shapely rounded halves, like a peach’, but rather, ‘unstable when placed on a flat surface, like a peach.’” In this case, the poet has doubled down on the similitude, making the metaphor that much more difficult to unpack in translation. Given the lakeside theme, I’ve replaced the equestrian idiom with a nautical one to convey the spirit of the poem as I read it, for all this means I stray from the literal text.
As a seasonal term (kigo), butterflies in haiku poetics have the symbolic function of connoting spring (with the specific exception of the swallowtail butterfly, which represents summer). I can’t argue with centuries of tradition, but the greening of Lake Suwa these days is definitely a summer phenomenon. The poet’s use of ukimo doesn’t necessarily seem to denote any particular species of plant, but Lake Suwa in summer is notorious for the rampant growth of hishi 菱 (Trapa japonica, aka “water caltrops”) that has metastatized throughout the lake and which flowers primarily between June and early autumn. (As an aside, even those unfamiliar with Japanese are likely to have encountered hishi by virtue of its use in “Mitsubishi”—often translated as “three diamonds” but literally meaning “three diamond[-shaped water caltrops]”). Ecosystems change, of course; a recent study of the lake’s ongoing recovery from nutrient over-saturation in the postwar period of rapid growth notes that water caltrops emerged as the dominant lake weed only as recently as 1999 (Hanazato et al. 2009). As we cannot therefore easily ascertain the vegetation that proved so treacherous to Shōa’s butterflies, and as “water caltrops” lacks a certain poetic euphony, I thought it best to stick to the generalities of the original wording.
Unlike the other poets I've discussed so far, Shōa is not very well-known outside his local context. The following biographical sketch is based on the one included in the municipal history of Chino City (Chino-shi vol. 2: 977‒8). Shōa was a pioneer of Western medicine in the Chino area. Born in the old village of Yagasaki to a peasant farmer (hyakushō) named Kaemon 嘉右衛門, his name as a child was Kametarō 亀太郎 (or Kamekichi 亀吉 by some counts) and in adulthood he was called Ryōsaku 良作. He is said to have been an intelligent boy, and was brought up on the Taoist classics of Laozi and Zhuangzi before setting out for Edo in 1802 as a young man at the age of twenty-four. He made his way to Nagoya the following year, then to Kyoto, and finally to the port of Nagasaki in 1805 where he studied medicine with a surgeon named Musculus. Although this connection is not elaborated in the city history, this seems to be a reference to Philip Pieter Musculus, a German who was actually in Japan in the 1730s and 40s. Conceivably, it could be a descendant of this man, who is said to have had at least one child by Nagasaki prostitute named Michishio (Leupp 2003: 124). Kawai returned to Yagasaki in 1811 or 1812, where he took on apprentices and opened a clinic. However, no mention is made of Shōa’s poetry here, as he is discussed primarily in the context of medical practice during the hard years of famine around the Tenpo era.
As a practising rural physician, Shōa’s literary legacy is not on the same scale as those of his full-time peripatetic contemporaries. Nonetheless, he appears to have been well connected in the aesthetic circles of his day, and is known to have been closely associated with the author Ishikawa Masamochi 石川雅望 (1754-1830). Ishikawa contributed a foreword to the Shirazu shū 不知集 [Selected Follies] (Shinano Bairyōjuku 信濃梅寮塾, 1818), an anthology of Shōa’s poems that is padded out with butterfly-themed poems by other lights of the contemporary haiku world, including Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶 (Shinano, 1763-1828), Suzuki Michihiko 鈴木道彦 (Sendai, 1757-1819), and Takebe Sōchō 建部巣兆 (Edo, 1761-1814).
Many of Shōa’s original papers are available through Waseda University’s database of Japanese and Chinese Classics. Finally, it’s interesting to note that there also appears to have been another Shōa active in the area around the same period, a Buddhist priest from the town of Hiraide in what is now Tatsuno, down the Ina Valley from Lake Suwa (d. 1844). Given that our poem appears in the aforementioned anthology, however, we can be sure that it belongs to Shōa the doctor rather than Shōa the monk.
References
Chino-shi
1987 Chino shishi 茅野市史 [Chino City History]. Volume 2. Chūsei & Kinsei 中世・近世 [The Medieval and Early Modern Periods]. Chino, Nagano Prefecture: Chino-shi.
Hanazato, Takayuki, et al.
2009 Changes in ecosystem structure associated with the restoration of water quality in the shallow eutrophic Lake Suwa, Japan. Verhandlungen des Internationalen Verein Limnologie [Proceedings of the International Society of Limnology] 30(7):1085‒1087.
Hearn, Lafcadio
1904 Kwaidan: Stories and studies of strange things. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner.
Kawai, Ryōsaku 河合良作, ed.
1818 Shirazu-shū 不知集 [Selected Follies] Shinano Bairyōjuku.
Leupp, Gary P.
2003 Interracial intimacy in Japan: Western men and Japanese women, 1543-1900. London: Continuum.
