Moon and Finger 15 – Shiki and Subjectivity

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is guest editor Adam Graham. Please show him a warm welcome!

Meta-Modern Subjectivity and the Fulfillment of Shasei 

Shasei to Makoto

Masaoka Shiki’s aesthetic of shasei marks, for better or for worse, one of the most influential shifts in modern haiku poetics. Within the English-language Haiku tradition, a simplified misunderstanding of shasei has been a veritable obsession with poets, as both a normative and prescriptive pest for much of the twentieth-century and continuing to linger into the twenty-first. What is misunderstood by countless ELH poets is that shasei was not an end in itself, it was merely the first step in a three-tiered writing theory envisioned by Shiki.

To proceed rather briskly: the first stage was shasei, of which much has been written. The second stage was a mode of selective realism. This stage allowed writers to introduce a measure of subjectivity, to reconfigure a scene according to the writer’s “wishes and ideals.” Makoto Ueda, in his book Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, gives us Shiki’s own description of this liberty,

“At times, the poet may even change the relative positions of things in an actual scene or subjectively replace a part of the scene by something that is not there. An actual scene is like a beautiful woman without makeup. She will not be free from imperfections, so that the artist must correct her eye brows, put on rouge and powder, and dress her up in beautiful clothes.”

The third stage of Shiki’s writing theory is an even more advanced step, calling for the inclusion of a greater degree of subjective freedom, producing completely subjective poems, poems that, as Ueda tells us, “concentrate on internal, psychological reality…an internal, rather than external, reality.” The term Shiki used to denote the principle grounding these subjective haiku was makoto, which refers to a sort of poetic truth rather than factual truth. This poetic truth, a component of hon’i, is what Ban’ya Natsuishi may be referring to when he writes in his work A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese, that “Western poets perhaps confuse reality with fact. Reality might easily include the imaginative and the unreal. What interests me is the totality of human reality.”

In an essay titled “My Moon Poem for a Contest“ Shiki traces the progression from a shasei draft, through “selective realism,” to a makoto-based final haiku, moving from an initial sketch-from-life poem,

Somewhere in the leaves
moonlight breaks and falls
in myriad pieces

To, eventually, a wholly subjective piece,

They bid farewell—
no one is drunk any more
on the moonlit boat.

The essay follows Shiki progressing from a haiku describing the moonlight witnessed in his garden, a familiar scene to the poet, through several versions, each rearranging components, adding an item, changing the setting, introducing various group of persons, until his final makoto-infused haiku, a subjectively fabricated farewell scene.

The shift between the first shasei haiku and the final makoto haiku is evident. This shasei-makoto shift is not only a movement from objective-to-subjective, but can also include shifts in style, mood, symbolism, etc. The shasei-makoto shift is intriguing and will be returned to a later section of this essay. For the present it will suffice to understand that Shiki’s haiku theory is developmental; shasei was only a starting point. The endpoint is the crafting of highly subjective, conceptually formed haiku.

One assumption worth a quick ponder here: In his essay “Haiku in America”, Lee Gurga argues that poets must dwell within the first and second stages for years if not decades. He writes,

“Sometimes young poets try to start off by experimenting with the limits of haiku before they have fully absorbed the essential elements of the world around them and developed a complete understanding of what makes haiku haiku. As I mentioned earlier, it is difficult to stay in the first, or “boring,” stage, long enough to sufficiently develop one’s powers of perception and expression.”

Yet, one wonders if this arrested development is necessary, for it may be the case that Eurocentric aesthetics and thus the subjectivities involved with these aesthetics are more primed for shasei observation and thus more operational within its perceptuals than Gurga would suggest, after all Shiki adopted Western aesthetics as the foundation of his shasei. That is to say, the millennial-long trend of realism in Western Art, a trend not seen in the traditional art of Japan, has produced artifacts that generated a Western subjectivity more attuned to the experience of represented objectivity. Western objective aesthetics were something new to Shiki, while Westerners have been immersed in such aesthetics for thousands of years.

Conceptual, Historically Situated

To delve a bit more into the second and third stages of Shiki’s haiku theory, one notices the deliberate exercising of imagination, that is, the deliberate action of curating and crafting utterly fictious images, scenes, and subject matter. If imagination is to be understood to be the application and free-range play and configuration of concepts, and why would it not, it can then be understood that Shiki is suggesting haiku are conceptual and cognitive at their most highly-evolved manifestation (i.e. makoto-based haiku).

Concepts are not timeless, they are historically situated, and the ability to construct a concept is historically situated. Which is to say, the ability to construct a haiku, a conceptually constructed linguistic architecture, is historically situated. The French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their work What is Philosophy? write,

“Of course new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings…What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is “better” than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations, and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out…What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?”

Shiki’s imagination, the field of concepts available to him, is not the same available to contemporary writers of haiku. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen profound developments across a wide range of conceptual fields, including art, linguistics, science, politics, psychology, social class, consumerism, production, technology, quantum mechanics, civil rights, post-modernism, pharmaceutical ontology, the internet, AI and CGI media, and nuclear power.

The material and conceptual differences between historical moments result not only in a difference of imaginative action, but also of subjectivity itself, a phenomenon explored across various works of French philosopher Michel Foucault who argues that the subjectivity, or an “internal, psychological reality,” is not a stable, universal, ahistorical psychological experience, but rather an effect produced by the discourses, institutions, and power relations of a given historical moment. What emerges and is sensed as a coherent, intelligible “self” at any point in history is never simply given. Rather, it is assembled, new to every historic moment, out of the specific institutions and practices that the particular historic moment makes available for experiencing.

All of this is to drive home a vital point: the subjectivity of a contemporary person, or to employ a phrase from earlier the “internal, psychological reality” of a contemporary person is vastly different from one living in the late nineteenth-century. In that by-gone world one lived in a realm of stable objects, continuous perception, and limited technological mediation; one’s experience was embodied, local, and oriented toward discrete events. However, a contemporary subjectivity is immersed in global networks, virtuality, instantaneous communication, and scientific paradigms (quantum, information, cybernetics) that collapse classical boundaries of self and other, subject and object. The quaint subjectivity of the 19th-century cannot be equated with the technologically extended, quantum-informed, media-saturated subjectivities of today.

It’s not simply that different historic moments describe subjective experience differently, rather the subjectivity itself is different. As such, when Shiki discusses shifting the composition of haiku toward the “internal, psychological reality” of the writer, it is understood that his psychological reality is involved with a particular historically delineated set of concepts which generated a particular subjectivity. Further, had Shiki lived in a different historical moment his psychological reality would obviously be composed of a different set of concepts, and thus a vastly different subjectivity.

Reconsidering Shasei in the Contemporary World

The idea of a 21st-century Shiki crafting haiku involved with the “internal, psychological reality” of a contemporary subjectivity has profound implications for ELH, for what would 21st-century makoto haiku look and feel like?

To return to the pair of Shiki haiku above, the distance of the shasei-makoto shift is relatively narrow. Somewhere in the leaves and they bid farewell present in a similar fashion. The ontological grounding of both the initial shasei draft and the final makoto haiku are rooted in a sense of objectivity (or rather, a sense of how late 19th-century objectivity was conceived), even if that sense is completely fabricated in the final makoto version. Both seem to be describing an “objective” scene. This is what is meant by a narrow shasei-makoto shift.

If Shiki’s theory asks writers to progress through shasei into “subjective realism” finalizing in a makoto haiku revealing an “internal, psychological reality,” then a fundamental question is being raised: how would a contemporary makoto haiku seem contrasted against a makoto haiku from the late 19th century? Or, stated another way, how much greater would the distance be in the shasei-makoto shift?

The distance would be vastly greater due to the incalculable shifts in the conceptual constructs that generate subjectivity. A 21st-century Shiki, advocating for a haiku aesthetic revealing an “internal, psychological reality,” would produce haiku that look and feel very much like the sort of non-normative, contemporary gendai haiku that traditionalists lament over. For example,

bite of the apple. And we never spoke again. Though, in the film

(David Boyer, Bones: Journal for the Short Verse #25, April 2023)

or,

out of the wormhole tangled up in blue Alices

(Lorin Ford, Presence, no. 76, July 2023)

What follows is a hypothetical 21st –century progression from shasei to makoto. It is presented to show the distance involved in the shasei-makoto shift of contemporary haiku. The final version is an actual haiku crafted by Ban’ya Natsuishi. The first and second versions are drafted by this essay‘s author and present. It should be understood that I have no knowledge of the process by which Natsuishi’s haiku actually arose. Again, this is a hypothetical shasei and “selective realism” versions of the final poem:

The first stage, a shasei haiku crafted from observation of an objective reality,

summer afternoon
porch plants
topple in the wind

A second stage, one developing a “selective realism,” in which a measure of subjectivity enters the haiku,

plants huddle
together by whispers
of a summer breeze

This version introduces a measure of subjectivity in the term “huddle,” which grants a degree of agency to the plants, and the transformation of the sound of the “wind” into a “whisper,” which “whispering wind” is common enough literary trope. Using Shiki’s advice to “subjectively replace a part of the scene,” the toppled plants are replaced by a grouping of plants that huddle together.
The third stage, a makoto haiku, again, an actual haiku published by Ban’ya Natsuishi,

the embrace of plants
depends often on
rumors

Here, the agency of “huddle” is enhanced to “embrace,” while “whispers” become the hushed undertones of gossip or “rumors.”

In this hypothetical, the distance within the shasei-makoto shift is great. The objectivity of the shasei version disappears completely into the “internal, psychological reality,” of the final makoto version.

Implications

Contemporary makoto haiku make new demands on both readers and writers of ELH. On the reader’s side it asks for an ingenious reading, thus a particularly new kind of haiku reader. Because contemporary makoto haiku are less objective-seeming ontologically, thus not as semantically obvious as the makoto haiku of Shiki’s time, they require a reader’s ability to employ the full scope of a contemporary subjectivity.

When it comes to the crafting of contemporary ELH, writers must, first, progress beyond the initial stage of shasei. But more importantly contemporary ELH writers must acknowledge that 21st-century makoto haiku will be non-normative.

It needs be acknowledged that, more than likely, a vast majority of shasei-seeming haiku published in haiku journals are actually makoto haiku. These haiku have been drafted multiple times in different manifestations ending in a finalized version that is distant from the original jotting of lines in a notebook. However, readers of the finalized version are unable to tell if they are reading a shasei draft or a makoto final haiku. Because many contemporary haiku often imitate the surface of shasei in their final makoto version, readers cannot distinguish whether it is the initial stage of a haiku or the final makoto stage. Such haiku are not actually contemporary at all. Rather, they’re shackled in the imaginative mandates of a past historical moment (Shiki‘s) of how haiku ought to appear.

As such, it may be argued that shasei-appearing finalized haiku being written today, as if over a century’s worth of conceptual and subjective development has not occurred, are anachronistic, contrived haiku, haiku that fail to understand Shiki’s full theory, haiku rooted in a faux nostalgia with all of the reactionary desire of psychological repression associated with that psychological maneuver; a desire to repress the complexities of the contemporary world, the desire to create a false, idealized past and then to write haiku from that false, idealized past. Contemporary haiku that appear as shasei in their final makoto manifestation are haiku that are simply performing the gestures of authenticity in a world to which they no longer correspond.

— Adam Graham

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Gurga, Lee. “Haiku in America.” Blithe Spirit 9.1 (1999): 25–29. Reprinted in A Silver Tapestry: The Best of 25 Years of Critical Writing from the British Haiku Society, 86–91. Kent, UK: British Haiku Society, 2015.

Natsuishi, Ban’ya. A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese. Red Moon Press, 1999.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature. Stanford University Press, 1983.

Continue the conversation:

What do you think a contemporary makoto haiku should look like?

Do you have a haiku of your own that moved through a shasei-to-makoto progression — from an early observational draft to a more subjective final version?

Is there a poet, past or contemporary, whose work you’d call genuinely makoto in Shiki’s sense — psychologically internal rather than observational?

And does labeling a haiku “shasei” when it’s actually a revised, subjective makoto poem feel like a meaningful distinction to you — or does it not matter once the poem is finished?

Reactions are welcome in the comments. And don’t forget to take the poll!

Adam Graham is a professional artist based in Asheville’s River Arts District. A former educator, Adam brought his love of haiku into the classroom, using the form to sharpen his students’ attention to language and the living moment. His love of haiku reflects the same spirit of adventure and exploration that draws him to the mountains and trails of Western North Carolina. When he’s not in the studio or writing, you’ll likely find him somewhere outdoors.

At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 to 6 questions).

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.

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Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.

Introducing the hosts:

Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.

Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).

A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group.   Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.

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