Definitions of haibun by scholars of Japanese literature are broad enough to incorporate all the directions that English-language haibun has taken.5 Further, although the Haiku Society of America—the largest society devoted to haiku and related forms outside Japan—did not include haibun in its official definitions of Japanese forms at first (1973), by 1994 haibun had become a familiar enough form to warrant an official definition:
A short prose essay in the humorous haikai style, usually including a haiku, often at the end. “Haibun” is sometimes applied to the more serious diary or journal writing typical of Bashō’s and Issa’s longer works, though technically they are part of the diary or journal literature, which is usually more serious than haibun. But it is not unusual for haikai elements to enter into these longer works.6
Notwithstanding this comprehensive definition, the actual practice of modern shorter haibun in English includes, as we shall see, serious as well as lighter treatments of given subjects.
Versions of haibun in English first began to appear in Eric Amann’s journal Haiku (1967-1976).7 By 1993 three of the more prominent American haiku journals, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Brussels Sprout, and one new journal, Point Judith Light, had identified poetry and prose entries as haibun. Patrick Frank, the editor of Point Judith Light, also offered a short definition at the top of his journal’s haibun column: “Haiku embedded within a relatively short prose piece.”8 This definition accurately reflects what is commonly published as haibun in the American haiku journals, with some interesting exceptions, as would be the case given the space limitations of such journals. But American haibun more properly began with published diaries and haibun-like fiction.
The American literary tradition prepared our early haibun writers with major examples of autobiographical and biographical narrative that evoked episodes of spiritual challenge or revelation in relation to the natural world, as well as to social conditions. The more obvious examples include William Bradford’s (1590-1657) historical account History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Jonathan Edwards’s (1703-1758) “Personal Narrative” (c. 1740), Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-1790) The Autobiography (1867), Henry David Thoreau’s (1817-1862) naturalist’s journal Walden (1854), and, though poetry, Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892) response to the Civil War, Drum Taps (1865). Of these only Walden evokes the Eastern tradition of the spiritual recluse, as Thoreau’s travel writing evokes the Eastern tradition of poetic pilgrimage, both of which are exemplified in the poetry and travel journals of the Japanese poets Saigyō (1118-1190) and Sōgi (1421-1502), who had influenced Bashō’s own travel journals. A transitional American writer leading to English-language haibun is the naturalist John Muir (1838-1914), through his prose accounts and diaries of his travels in the American wilderness, such as The Mountains of California (1894) and John of the Mountains (1938).
The so-called Beat Movement of the 1950s reflects the second major influx of Eastern thought and literary conventions, after the Transcendentalists, into American history. This group, under the nominal tutelage of Kenneth Rexroth—naturalist, landscape poet, and translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry—attempted to model their lives on the lives of the Eastern recluse and pilgrimage poets, in spite of their confirmed adherence to seemingly non-Eastern passionately indulgent experience. The seminal, and perhaps earliest, work of this group that approaches the haibun in tone and structure is Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold (1957), a collection of work journals, travel diaries, reviews, translations, biographical accounts, and essays whose central focus is Zen Buddhism. Snyder studied Zen in Japan for a number of years and includes in the collection a journal of his first travel to and religious study in Japan, as well as an account of an intensive meditation retreat at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. But it is his “Lookout’s Journal,” a poetic log of his work as a fire spotter in the mountains of Washington State, that offers a model of what American haibun was to become.
The entry for August 6, 1952, serves as an example of how elements from the classical Japanese haibun, consciously or not, incorporated themselves into the stream of American literary journals:
Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror Shuksan; they blow over the ridge between here and Three-fingered Jack, fill up the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.
What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds—wind, and mountains—repeating
this is what always happens here
and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.
two butterflies
a chilly clump of mountain
flower
zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.
leaning in the doorway whistling
a chipmunk popped out
listening9
This selection manifests the four characteristics that Makoto Ueda attributes to haibun in his discussion of Basho’s prose: (l) “a brevity and conciseness of haiku,” (2) “a deliberately ambiguous use of certain particles and verb forms in places where the conjunction ‘and’ would be used in English,” (3) a “dependence on imagery,” and (4) “the writer’s detachment.”10 The entry, like many of the others in “Lookout’s Journal”—though a bit more radically spaced on the page than the typical prose of Earth House Hold—intersperses short prose passages with haiku-like poems. Although Snyder may not have been intentionally writing haibun, he was clearly writing haiku in the context of classical haiku aesthetics: in one section he notes that he had written “a haiku and painted a haiga for it” and in another he discusses the concept of sabi, which is at the heart of Basho’s mature conception of haiku.11 And, as in this entry, poems that clearly look and sound like haiku appear. Both of the haiku in this entry, like traditional haiku, are made of juxtaposed images succinctly expressed and allude, directly or indirectly, to a given season: in the first, summer butterflies are connected with the stationary mountain flowers they investigate; in the second, Snyder whistling in the doorway is connected to the (summer) chipmunk that listens to him. Further, the deep resonance built up in the first around the word “chilly” and the in-the-moment humor of the second that is underscored by the rhyming of “whistling” and “listening” make these good haiku.
The prose itself maintains the haiku values that Ueda finds in haibun. Except when Snyder directly cites conversation, the prose entries are expressed in a pared-down, often telegraphic, syntax that is dominated by images, often to the point of Zen-like cosmic simplicity, as in this line from the entry under discussion: “zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.” The evident Zennian mood expresses the ego-detachment which is Ueda’s fourth characteristic of haibun. Thus, “Lookout’s Journal” provides a paradigm, however rarefied, for American haibun: a short poetic autobiographical narrative that includes haiku.
Jack Kerouac, the chronicler of the Beat Generation, immortalized Snyder as the character Japhy Ryder in the novel The Dharma Bums (1958), a novelistic account of that generation’s attempts to achieve Buddhist enlightenment through retreats like the one described in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal.” In one episode of Kerouac’s novel Japhy offers a homespun definition of haiku: “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing....”12 Here the Zennian interest in correctly aligning one’s consciousness with reality supports Japhy’s Bashō-like insistence on the objective presentation of images, of the ontologic value of those images, in