Hakusen Watanabe tr. Ban’ya Natsuishi

Comments (2)

1. A chilling haiku born out of the repercussions of the 1914-1945 World Wars that never really went away, we can still smell it and hear it rumbling along corridors.

   I rather like the enjambment after ‘end’ where we think a war has ended, but it’s only at the end of one corridor, there’s always another one, both war and corridor:

   War stood at the end
   of the corridor

   Though every variation is reverberation catching the stench, which haiku has been as astute as any other kind of writing.

2. 戦争が廊下の奥に立つてゐた
   sensō ga rōka no oku ni tatte iwata
   —Hakusen Watanabe (1913-1969)

   戦 (sen) – war
   争 (sō) – conflict/struggle
   が (ga) – subject particle
   廊 (rō) – corridor
   下 (ka) – under/below
   の (no) – possessive particle
   奥 (oku) – inner part/depth
   に (ni) – locative particle (at/in)
   立 (ta) – stood
   つ (tsu) – perfective aspect marker
   て (te) – conjunctive form
   ゐ (wi) – old form of “i” (to exist/be)
   た (ta) – past tense marker

   war / in the innermost corridor / it stood
   or:
   War stood / at the end of the corridor
   —tr Ban’ya Natsuishi
   or:
   The War / in the dark at the end of the hall / it stood
   —tr. Dhugal Lindsay
   or:
   war was standing / at the end / of the hallway
   —tr. Alex Fyffe
   and:
   War was standing at the end of the hallway
   —tr DeepL

   “Senso” is a combination of war and conflict/struggle. “Oku” is inner part or depth. There’s no disputing the completed past tense, determined by the perfective aspect marker つ (tsu) and た (ta), the past tense ending. The past perfect, as Natsuishi and Lindsay have rendered it.

   It is a very well-known haiku in Japan and beyond. From my own career in foreign affairs, this verse speaks to me. Wars in our times are begun in offices. That war, World War 2, began at home for Japanese poets. Hakusen Watanabe (the pen-name of Takenori Watanabe) was among those poets arrested in 1940 for “home front” and anti-war poetry.

   This verse is definitely all in the historic past. The question is whether it is sealed off from the present, or does anything “leak through” to now? There is no marker nor cutting word for “sudden awareness ,” scarcely anything, except that the verse ends, to invite the reader to meditate. Watanabe is revisiting a whole period rather than a moment. Yet the experience is still fresh in his memory, he is telling us about it as he writes, we imagine the knock of the state police at his door, we meditate in the present moment, and arrive at Watanabe’s awareness and insight when he penned it. We tend to think of war as being in the battlefield. Yet indeed it stands in the depths of the corridor, where it was and is initiated. It stands close to us at home, wherever you are. As it stands today in the offices of power and in the committees of terror and violence. Theirs to initiate and command death and destruction. Theirs to end it. And so, I feel, we can get to the ‘present moment’ from this haiku in the past, not limited to an historical record, but of lasting meaning:

   Watanabe: “war stood in the innermost corridor”…
   Reader: “…as it stands there now.”

   For the rest of his life Watanabe wrote in private and refused to publish. His former students rectified that on his death in 1969.

   ——-

   Tetsuo Shimizu in his “The Expanding Haiku Almanac” commented on this haiku on August 14, 2011:

   　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
   “War stood at the end of the corridor.
   Watanabe Hakusen

   By the way, tomorrow’s “Anniversary of the End of the War” is an autumn seasonal word, but what about “war”? Just as “the passage of time” cannot be limited to any season, “war” may similarly be immune to seasons. That’s why, even when faced with this famous haiku, I don’t particularly feel the wind of the season. Nor do I feel the intimate warmth of the breath of those who are alive. I simply read it as it is written, seeing only a corridor, beyond which war stands. Yet why is it that this expressionless war lingers in my mind? No matter how skillfully the emotion is conveyed, no matter how loud the cry, it is no match for it. If one tries to express something that cannot possibly be contained within the vessel of literature, then perhaps the only way was to simply let it stand there. It is a magnificent haiku. Included in “The World of Modern Haiku” (1998, Shueisha). (Ikuo Matsushita)”

   Note: Tetsuo Shimizu (1938–2021) was an esteemed Japanese poet, literary critic, and pioneer in digital literary archives. Rather than an academic traditionalist, his critical weight stems from his role as a modernizer who bridged contemporary haiku poetry with classic haiku appreciation. His platform, Zoshoku suru Haiku Saijiki (The Expanding Haiku Almanac), is respected as a landmark digital resource.

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