Makoto Ueda

Far Beyond the Field is a first-of-its-kind anthology of haiku by Japanese women, collecting translations of four hundred haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century to the present. By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku. Listen, for instance, to Chiyojo, who worked in what has been long thought of as the dark age of haiku during the eighteenth century, but who composed exquisitely fine poems tracing the smallest workings of nature. Or Katsuro Nobuko, who wrote powerfully erotic poems when she was widowed after only two years of marriage. And here, too, is a voice from today, Mayuzumi Madoka, whose meditations on romantic love represent a fresh new approach to haiku.

Haiku by Japanese Women

Far Beyond the Field

people have always been people and it’s Getting To Me. again.

lianna

Little is known about Chigetsu’s early years. It is believed that she was born at Usa, near Kyoto, and served at the imperial court when she was young. Bashō was some ten years her junior. Later, she married Kawai Saemon, a merchant who operated a large carting business in Otsu, a city on the southwest shore of Lake Biwa. Because they had no children when her husband died in or around 1686, she adopted her younger brother Otokuni (1657–1720) as the heir to the family business. Apparently, she became serious about writing haiku under the influence of Otokuni, who had been a student of Bashō’s. She and Otokuni often invited the great poet to their house and composed haiku and renku with him. It was Chigetsu and Otokuni’s wife who made the garment for Bashō to wear on his journey to the world beyond. She seems to have been an outgoing, vivacious, rather carefree person. Once, when Otokuni was on a trip, he thought fondly of his home and wondered what his elder sister might be doing in her kitchen:

Far Beyond the Field quotes

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