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The Wedge of Modernism
If you were to ask which poet is most closely associated with Hayama, most would probably raise the name of Horiguchi Daigaku (1892–1981). The Hayama Town Library is home to the "Horiguchi Daigaku Collection". Among his early poetry collections, many were designed and illustrated by one of the most famous print artists of the modern era in Japan, Hasegawa Kiyoshi (1891–1980). Early in my career at the museum in Kamakura (1978), both Horiguchi and Hasegawa were still alive, hearing a reference to "Hayama," their faces would immediately come to mind, along with that of the late Nihonga (Japanese-style paintings) painter Yamaguchi Hōshun (1893–1971).
One striking individual of exceptional talent, however, should not be forgotten. He is the haiku poet Saitō Sanki (1900–1962), who spent the last years of his life in Horiuchi, Hayama.
In contrast to the first three artists of the same generation, who awakened as artists at the turn of the century (late Meiji and early Taisho periods) and subsequently established their fame, Saitō Sanki developed his talent in the complex and difficult period between World Wars, in a period where he was at the mercy of history. Free-form. Without haiku’s essential ‘seasonal words’: kigo. Saitō was an avant-garde poet who championed ‘Shinkō haiku (Emerging Haiku)’. Among his works is "水枕ガバリと寒い海がある Mizu-Makura Gabari To Samui Umi Ga Aru” (lit. Water cushion/ Chomp! / it’s a chilly ocean) (1935), considered a masterpiece. The "chilly ocean" is a delusion stirred by the sound of ice moving in a water pillow on a hospital bed, and far exceeds the limitations of what one would expect from formal seasonal words.
In the Third Kyoto University Haiku Incident (August 1940), one of a series of cases of suppression of speech against emerging haiku journals and haiku poets between 1940 and 1943, Saitō was suppressed by the government authorities and was even arrested because of his avant-garde nature. Despite this forced hiatus in his haiku work, he deepened his own style in secret, and continued to create even after he moved to his permanent home in Hayama, Japan, in 1956.
The composition "広島や卵食ふ時口ひらくHiroshima Ya Tamago Kū Toki Kuchi Hiraku" (lit. Hiroshima/ When you eat an egg/ Open your mouth) (1947), which was inspired by the devastation of postwar Hiroshima. Saitō commented that he composed this poem by imagining the scene in which the skin of the atomic bomb survivors "peeled off" from the heat of the bomb (Based off of "The Story of Sounding the Siren" first appearing in "Tenro," December, 1959).
The awakening of Saitō Sanki as a poet occurred in the midst of modernism in the early Showa period. Here lay the spirit of dadaism, and the wedge of modernism. A peeled egg matches the size of one's own mouth. It sends a shiver that pierces the whole body. What kind of art expression might respond to this shiver? Saitō's haiku continues to pose this question even today.
April 2023
MIZUSAWA Tsutomu, Director