Major
and Minor Seasons
Ever since the Heian
period the Japanese arts have tended to build a corpus of association
between mood and season. Japanese winters can be long and hard, summers
uncomfortably hot and humid. It is perhaps not surprising then that spring
and autumn have been mined to a greater depth for a wealth of impressions,
imagery and emotional tone.
Spring and autumn
too are the seasons of greatest agricultural significance, of planting
and harvest, of birth and cull. And though high art was the preserve of
noble and metropolitan elites rural themes, albeit frequently idealised,
had remained central at all levels of Japanese poetry, an association
to which Matuso Basho's elevation of the experience of the common man
gave fresh impetus. As a result linked verse throughout the years has
drawn heavily on the seasons in general, and on spring and autumn in particular,
a situation which still obtains despite the overwhelmingly urban nature
of contemporary Japanese society.
All formal types of
renku sequence are therefore composed of approximately equal numbers of
season and non-season verses. Of the season verses a larger proportion
are ascribed to spring and autumn than to summer and winter. The ratio
for the 12 verse Junicho for example is 2:1, and for the Nijuin 3:2, whilst
the Kasen is somewhere in between. It should be noted that within these
proportions the seasons are roughly co-equal; spring will take a similar
number to autumn, summer will take a similar number to winter, though
the season in which a composition is begun may tilt the allotted number
of verses slightly in its favour.
Seriation
and Duration
So what further principles
govern the seriation of the seasons, i.e. the order in which they come,
and the duration of each seasonal appearance: how many verses of so-and-so
arrive at any one time.
The Internal
Chronology of a season run
Whilst the succession
of seasonal clusters rarely follows calendar order the internal
development of any given seasonal cluster does adhere to a more or less
literal chronology. The reason is straightforward. Renku abhors any impediment
to flow. Whilst the reader is unlikely to baulk at the introduction of
winter two clear verses after the end of spring, for the poem has in the
meanwhile moved on, it would seem distinctly odd to harvest apples straight
after leaf-fall, or for deeply drifted snow to immediately precede the
year's first sign of sleet.
So fundamental is
the avoidance of anachronism and regression in this matter that season
topic reference books (saijiki) and season word lists (kiyose) typically
ascribe one of four 'positional' characteristics to any given season word:
'early', 'mid', 'late' and 'all'. Clearly an 'all spring' reference may
appear anywhere in a cluster of spring verses, but 'early' should not
follow 'mid' or 'late', and so on.
Where on Earth
next?
Climatologists refer
to Japan as ‘temperate’. In truth there is a considerable
range from north to south, and in so mountainous an archipelago the eastern
and western seaboards often experience radically differing conditions.
But such is the leveling effect of metropolitan culture that for centuries
Japanese poets have employed a largely uniform seasonal iconography.
A similar dynamic
has been at work during the spread of European culture through the medium
of the English language. Poets in Adelaide or Arizona are able to access
shared ideas of season that more properly belong to the northern temperate
zone. Whether this unusual commonality is desirable, or sustainable, is
another matter. When the desert dweller writes of snow is this art, or
artifice? And just how important are the seasons for renku composition
anyway?
One way to find out
is to do away with them altogether. The noted poet and renku theorist
Meiga Higashi certainly believed that one might do so, and still be writing
renku. Higashi contended that the sine qua non of renku was link and shift
(q.v.). All else is optional. Yet the fact that the seasons have been
central to linked verse for so many centuries is suggestive. Either all
those poets were singularly unimaginative, or the seasons lend something
valuable to the process of composition.
Elsewhere on this
site Renku Reckoner will examine in more detail how season words themselves
may code layers of reference. But here it is sufficient to remark that
a genre which thrives on variety can only benefit from the precision and
differentiation that an acutely conveyed sense of space and time allows.
Put another way, the city dweller knows to his cost that March can too
easily feel like September. We are diminished when our sense of climate
is reduced to ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, ‘wet’
or ‘dry’.
Similarly, a sense
of season is also closely allied to a topographical awareness. It is a
commonplace that the paradox of landscape is one of permanence and change
– a perfect analogy for the core haiaki principle which Basho termed
‘fueki ryuko’ – the ever changing and never changing,
each containing the other.
It has already been
remarked how spring and autumn in particular offer powerful symbols of
emergence and decay, of youth and ageing. It is a given that many arts
in many cultures draw directly on the parallels between the progression
of the seasons and the stages of a human lifetime. It would be strange
indeed if renku poets deliberately eschewed such associations. But why
should these references be organised into segments?
In any form of poetry
a seasonal setting can be the stable background against which the original
moment of the verse is realised. But the seasons are a particular benefit
to renku as they convey aspects of circularity, periodicity and predictability.
These qualities mediate the headlong and tangential power of the progressive
forces unleashed by the requirement to shift.
Longer renku in particular
are enriched by the fact that the seasons reoccur. It is a deficiency
of the very short sequences that they may too readily induce linearity,
seeming to suggest that nothing which has appeared once may reappear again,
even if radically re-cast. Basho, by contrast, demonstrated that the true
art of haikai is less about pure novelty and more about recontextualisation.
The majority of Kasen have two autumn moon verses. All have two spring
blossom verses. It would be an ambitious critic who suggested that the
invitation is to write the same verse twice. The entire point of the genre
is that the verses are not, and cannot be, the same.
A further indication
that the art of renku cannot be reduced to the search for diversity at
any cost is the fact that the seasonal verses appear in groups. Again,
a deficiency of the 12 verse sequence is that it only permits a maximum
of a pair of verses for any given season. This tends to reinforce the
perception of the overarching importance of shift, as a season may always
provide a ready link, but never appears in the all important last-but-one
position (cf: uchikoshi, kannonbiraki).
Longer sequences by
contrast frequently have three, four or even five verses related to a
given season all lined up in a row. How then may one shift from the last
but one position (q.v. link and shift) if both are ‘autumn’?
The point here is that the season is not, or should not be, the topic
of either verse. It is not the leitmotiv. It is the background; it is
a palette of tones, the scale in which the melody of a verse is played.
This is a difficult
line to tread. Poor writing will see the seasonal aspects of a longer
poem collapse into clunking thematic segments, just as the topic of ‘love’
may attract crude narrative extension over a series of verses. But it
is equally bad style, where only a pair of such verses exist, to link
purely via the fact that both share the same season, or, in the case of
‘love’, share the same topic.
