The classic Japanese novel The Tale of Genji (c. 1000), by Marasaki Shikibu, provides a model for including poetry (here tanka) in a fictional narrative. The direction culminates in the fiction of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), such as in his Kasamakura (The Three-Cornered World, 1906), which intersperses haiku and discussions about haiku in its first-person poetic narrative fiction. The published diaries of Masaoka Shiki, with their inclusion of haiku and tanka sequences, offer a bridge between the autobiographical poetic journals of Snyder and the fictionalized autobiography of Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac’s long novel Desolation Angels (1965) again narrates the search for spiritual awakening. Perhaps because haiku are testimonies to moments of such awakening, the chapters of “Book One” of the novel often culminate in one or two haiku. But whereas the haiku in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal” convey the lucidity of a consciousness perceiving reality calmly from an awakened state, so that these images have a Bashō-like objective depth, as in his haiku on a drowned mouse found in his morning water bucket,13 making such haiku one more account in a day’s events, the haiku in Desolation Angels crystallize in an almost discursive way a moment of personal realization precipitated by the given prose narrative. In such narrative, expressed by Kerouac in poetically compressed, rhythmic prose chapters of about one to three paragraphs, we find represented, more than in Snyder, albeit in a more comprehensively subjective way, the stylistic mode of typical American haibun in which haiku more or less complete given straightforward narrative development.
For example, in chapter forty-one of Desolation Angels, the novel’s narrator and main character sleeps on Desolation Peak, the site of his fire-watching job, as the rainy season begins. This one-paragraph chapter is introduced by a short comment on the rain, but for most of its length describes a dream of the narrator and his thoughts and memories in response to that dream. The chapter’s narration concludes with a quotation from the Buddha on dreams and the true nature of reality. The two haiku appended to this chapter recapitulate all of the elements of the narrative, but, further, offer a moment of revelation derived from it.14 The first haiku leads from an image of the rain (“mist boiling”) to an insight into the true nature of the surrounding mountains (they are “clean” in the rain) in the Buddhist context of the universality of subjectivity in which all things have their own consciousness and exist “just as they are.” The second haiku leads from another image of the rain (“mist”), through the narrator’s dream (which “goes on”), to the implicative contradictory Buddhist ideas of the illusory nature of reality (sam-sara) and the cosmic nature of this same reality when perceived in an awakened state (nirvana).
Another chapter from the novel is a character study of a colorful old Glacier District ranger who is described to the narrator by a character named Jarry Wagner, another stand-in for Gary Snyder. The ranger comments on Jarry: “‘And all dem books he reads... about Buddha and all dat, he’s the smart one all right dat Jarry”’15 This affectionate account by the old ranger is ironically juxtaposed by the narrator to jarry’s actual Buddhist practice. And at the thought of Jarry meditating across the ocean in Japan, the narrator is provoked to the realization that “Buddha’s just as old and true anywhere you go....”16 This opposition leads to the chapter’s concluding melding of the old ranger with Buddhism and, in the light of the ranger’s weather-beaten, unmarried, isolated state, with the mountain and its buddha-nature in a haiku that asks the mountain, Desolation Peak, how it “earned” its name.17
In a final example, another chapter recounts the narrator’s departure from the mountain at the end of his tour of duty. After offering a prayer to his cabin, he meditates upon the beauty and cosmic mystery of a lake in the far distance. He then acknowledges his love of God for creating such beauty and mystery as evoked by the lake. This testament precipitates a final awareness which will prepare the narrator for his reentry into the world of men: “Whatever happens to me down that trail to the world is all right with me because I am God and I’m doing it all myself, who else?”18 He realizes that, in Buddhist terms, there is no theistic God, there is no ordinary self, only buddha-nature, which is a correct orientation of consciousness, and that he is responsible for achieving that consciousness. The concluding haiku, which explains the narrator’s ability to accomplish this state through meditation, such as in his contemplation of the lake, declares, “I am Buddha,” and thus becomes a recorded moment of such a state.19
Experiments with longer versions of haibun in the seventies and early eighties include Geraldine Little’s Separation: Seasons in Space: A Western Haibun (1979) and Hal Roth’s Behind the Fireflies (1982). The latter offers prose accounts of an American Civil War battle by Roth as well as by eye-witnesses, whose writings are juxtaposed to Roth’s contemporary haiku.
An ambitious work that unites the narrative drive of traditional modern fiction and the emotional power of haiku appended to poetic prose in haibun is Rod Willmot’s Ribs of Dragonfly (1984). Each of the work’s nine sections begins with a short prose “Prelude” on the narrator’s stormy year-long relationship with a woman named Leila. Each “Prelude” is then followed by a number of impressionistic narrative prose sketches that evoke either the narrator’s experiences while canoeing in nature over the course of three seasons or his problematic relationship with Leila. Finally, each section closes with a group of haiku, from eight to nineteen in number, some relating directly to the prose sketches.
Canadian haiku poet Willmot edited the anthology Erotic Haiku (1983), and Ribs of Dragonfly propels itself in part from the erotic drive of the narrator’s relation with Leila, whose name links her to Eastern concepts of illusion. That drive is manifested in the longing of this haiku:
bathing, I think of you
and lift the straw blind
to the rain20
The narrative theme of adultery that supports this drive is evoked compellingly in the following:
lying beside you
thinking of her hair
all night the cries of gulls21
Though the narrative of the relationship is at times overdrawn and melodramatic, the power of these and similarly erotic haiku carry half the haibun, beginning with the first of such haiku, which occurs in the group appended to the work’s first section:
she hugs me from behind
my face in the steam
of the potatoes22
The other half of the haibun is carried by the impressionistic prose sketches of nature, which will prompt the narrator to an exploration of the nature of consciousness, such as this from the first section:
Silence.
On the horizon, drab sketches in olive and sepia of conifers and cottage woodlots. Ice-huts here and there, too distant for motion to be discerned among them or in their tiny plumes of smoke. The ice impassive now, no longer apprenticed to the rhythms of cold as when it boomed and sang responsively. Master of silence in its death. The water, at times wholly reflection, at times pure darkness, at times more silvery than ice. And over everything, the shroud.
Stillness, even in me: a void between each breath where I linger heedlessly, accepting. Yet movement. A fragrance melting. Movement I could smell.23
The perceptual silence and stillness of the passage, a prologue to an engagement with a Zen-like consciousness in the work, is echoed in this haiku from the same section:
mail on the counter
sits unopened
afternoon sun through birches24
This consciousness, which in Willmot is usually linked with sensuousness, reaches a synthesis of sorts through the psychological dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity described in a late section of the work:
I have felt foreign to the world, honoring its mask of oneness and certitude. But now I see that it is me, or my portrait, endlessly shifting as I do. My infinite anatomy. Then am I so miserable as I seem? Everything I’ve seen or touched