LONGER RENKU
The Hyakuin of 100 Stanzas

Introduction

Readers unfamiliar with Japanese-style linked poems should first read "Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku Composition", which takes up many larger issues in renku composition as well as explaining the details of form and format in a kasen of 36 stanzas, the favored length for linked-poem composition since Bashô concentrated on it in the 17th century. The article "Shorter Renku" may also provide further insight into such matters as seasons and variety of topics. (This article does not take up linking and shifting or the variety of topics in linked poetry. Also note that a glossary of most of the more common Japanese renku terms, with links to their meanings, can be found at the end of the article "Link and Shift".)

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Initial Preparations

In fact, it doesn't make a great deal of difference how we set the seasons, so long as we have a really accurate and long list of seasonal phenomena in whatever seasons the group decrees. But in a 100-stanza renku, the season-word list must include several times that number of phenomena to avoid feeling horribly constrained as the poets try for the necessary variety. So we need some really comprehensive list. Unfortunately, no such list exists that handles the wide range of seasonal phenomena, from weather and geography through human institutions, animal behavior, and plant cycles, outside of a Japanese saijiki, which is set to that traditional Japanese view of the seasonal cycle. My book Haiku World is only a beginning, but at least has an international focus. Another list, with a distinctly Japanese focus, is the 500 Essential Season Words on this Web site. The kiyose on the Shiki list's Web site also contains a translation of a Japanese season-word guide. (To use it, go to the page, scroll down one screen or so to "Kiyose - Collection of season words in Japan" and click on appropriate links.) Finally, there is the list of some 800 basic seasonal topics, each with several alternative expressions, on the Japanese Text Initiative web site at the University of Virginia, called the Japanese Haiku: A Topical Dictionary, which has excellent navigational aids. All of these, naturally, reflect the traditional Japanese seasons with spring beginning in February (in the northern hemisphere), etc. One other wrinkle, expanded on below: Participants need to know not only what season something happens in, but if it is characteristic of a particular month or "part of season".

Seasonal Verses

In general, the rule is that spring and autumn, once entered, must persist for at least three verses, and may continue for up to five before the season must change or go to nonseasonal verses. In a hyakuin, it would not be unreasonable to have two or three instances of four- or five-verse sequences in spring or autumn, but generally three is enough. For summer and winter, one verse is ok, and they can persist up to three consecutive verses before a changing or seasonless verse; most common is one or two verses. On average, roughly half of all verses will be seasonal, the other half not.

The overall layout of a Japanese 100-verse linked poem involves four writing sheets, two sides each, for a total of eight "sides" or pages. Note that each side has its verses separately numbered; one may number 1-100, but must keep track of what verse is under composition by position in each side; otherwise, the participants will lose track of moon and blossom stanzas. There is some confusion about this because scholarly editions of classical renga and haikai are usually numbered straight through from #1 to the end. However, during composition, poets number the verses of each side independently.
 
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Blossom and Moon Stanzas

On the matter of diction, I suggest that the words "blossom(s)" be restricted to meaning cherry blossoms, unless modified by the name of another spring-flowering tree, such as "apricot blossoms". And that all other flowers—for example garden and wild flowers—be called "flowers", not "blossoms". This is my personal attempt to keep track of things so that one will know what one is speaking of. Thus, there is no problem in having other kinds of flowers mentioned, but if "blossoms" is used, we know that we're dealing with one of those special verses. (The diversity of English vocabulary allows us this little extra flexibility.)

Note that each of the blossom stanzas indicated must be situated in a run of spring verses. So the group wants to be a little careful where the poem launches into spring, so as to allow for a spring blossom verse to come in or near its appropriate seat. On the other hand, the group needs caution approaching the seat of a moon stanza in order to avoid making all such verses autumnal. At least a couple of moon stanzas should be in other seasons.

These four blossom stanzas and seven moon verses require special attention so that they are each very different from one another. The varying seasons of the moon verses—at least half of which should be autumnal, the others in other seasons—allow some flexibility. But getting four "different" blossom stanzas, each referring to flowering fruit trees in spring, is a bit of a challenge. Buds, open, full-blown, falling, fallen—not necessarily in that order—provides some range of possibilities.

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Seasonal Progression: From Season to Season and Within Each Season

Within the seasonal runs, a section of three-to-five successive spring or autumn verses, for example, one must also not "back up" by mentioning things appropriate to the beginning of the season after something else in the middle or end of the season has been mentioned within that run. This restriction applies to shorter renku as well, but when seasonal runs get longer than three stanzas, the "part of season" requires even more vigilance.

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Love Verses

The tone of "love verses" in Japanese-style linked poems may take a bit of getting used to. To prepare for the necessary variety and typical tone of these, I would re-read all the indexed mentions of "love" as a topic in Steven D. Carter's The Road to Komatsubara, which includes a complete translation of a medieval Japanese renga rulebook and a 100-stanza solo renga by Sôgi. This book may not be available outside of academic libraries, however, so a summary here may help those without access to it. (Another possibility would be to read through the waka in the love books of the Kokin Wakashû [or Kokinshû], Books 11-15, available in one translation by Helen Craig McCullough and another by Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius—the latter currently in print in a reasonably priced paperback edition. There is also the collection Love Songs from the Man'yôshû, with translations by Ian Hideo Levy, which perhaps overall more closely matches the tone of love in haikai, while the other books mentioned here maintain a fairly strict courtly decorum.)

The classical Japanese poets viewed love relationships as going through a cycle that begins with an attraction to the unknown, continues through flirtation and infatuation (often at a distance), might briefly bask in the pleasures of requited love (with a good deal of attention to a woman waiting for her lover), then slips into failed attention and disappointment, finally fading into remorse and sometimes bitterness, only to pop up much later as a tender or jaded memory. Thus, the love books of the Kokinshû and the other imperial waka anthologies go through a natural cycle not unlike that of the seasons. And, just as spring and autumn receive most aesthetic attention among the seasons, so also the yearnings of early love and the disappointments of waning relationships receive most attention when the topic is love, in any classical writings. This schema also pervades love verses in linked poetry. While the tone of haikai or renku may be a bit more common and possibly even bawdy compared to that of classical renga, the focus rarely shifts to physical love-making. More often, we see one lover agonizing over the other's absence, at any stage in the relationship. (Hence the frequent appearance of the "pine tree" (matsu) and someone "pining" (matsu, literally "to wait [for]") for the absent lover, a pun common in Japanese poetry that happens to have a very close parallel in English—purely by accident!

In sum, we might almost say that a sequence of love verses in linked poems typically deals with a range from waiting for absent lovers to the laments of rejected lovers, though other themes may come into it. And, just as the parts of the season in a seasonal run should be consistent with the actual progression of events within the natural season, so one might consider maintaining the order of a logical/emotional progression through the phases of a love affair for any particular sequence of consecutive love verses. (This should not be taken to mean that every phase of an affair should show up in two-to-four verses, but that they might best reflect a few of the sequential vignettes along such a course.)

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"Final" Preparations Before Writing

For the seasonal work, I'd reread my own Haiku World, all the way through, again. An alternative, the only other one available in English, really, would be to reread the latter three volumes of R. H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku, recognizing that these focus only on hokku and haiku, not including any verses which would themselves be appropriate to the interior of a linked poem. Also, while the poems in Blyth's books are organized by season, he does not focus on their seasonality, nor specify which occur earlier or later in each season, as do better Japanese saijiki, my book Haiku World, and two of the three season-word web pages mentioned above.

Only years of practice can instill into one's mind the incredible diversity of seasonal phenomena and their proper loci in the seasonal schema. (This is the main reason that Japanese often call linked poetry "old people's poetry", though I've certainly met plenty of young people interested in and practicing it.)

The great pleasure of the incredible variety in a well-written linked poem is hard to discover in most translations of same. Two works that present such material in well-wrought English, and which may be found in better academic libraries (and hence possibly available through inter-library loan), are the aforementioned The Road to Komatsubara, by Steven D. Carter, and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen's Heart's Flower, which contains two full hyakuin by one of the greatest masters of the form, Bishop Shinkei. One of these is a solo work by Shinkei, the other a collaboration under his direction. The two books are heavy duty academic works, though both highly readable. See the bibliography on this Web site for other books of possible use.

Another possible aid would be to read through four successive Basho-school kasen, pretending for a bit that they are all one poem, to see the incredible variety one wants to achieve in a hyakuin. One good place to do that is the four renku translated in Lenore Mayhew's The Monkey's Raincoat, read through at one sitting. In fact, I'd probably make that my last stop before jumping off into a hyakuin, just to get the mind adjusted to haikai, after reading through classical renga.

As a direct aid to composition, I would review the Variety of Topics and Materials in the article "Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku Composition" on this Web site, and print out or create my own version of the "Checklists of Topics and Materials" found there. (Note that the article also has an extensive index of renku terms, which functions as a glossary, as each term is linked to explanations of its meaning in the body of that article.)

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Longer Still

The phenomenal poet and novelist, Bashô's contemporary Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), at one point reportedly composed some 4,000 verses during the daylight hours of a single day, and responded to further challengers by composing 23,500 verses in one day and night. He spewed them out so rapidly that no one could write fast enough to do more than tally them, so there is no record of the verses themselves. Assumptions that they were of little value and that some of the "rules" of renku composition were broken may be right or wrong or mixed, but anyone who can spout syllables at the rate of 15,000 per hour—even short Japanese syllables—certainly deserves a place near the front of the Guinness Book of Records! (Perhaps he's already there, I wouldn't know. The math: Assume 24 hours. They say there were 23,500 haikai verses; alternating 5-7-5 and 7-7 yields 11,750 [half the number of verses] units of tanka-length, or 31 "syllables". Multiply 11,750 x 31 for the total number of those syllables, 364,250. Divide that by 24 hours, and the result is 15,177 Japanese syllables per hour. And we think rappers talk fast!)

Lest we think Saikaku was merely a show-off, he wrote a number of quite wonderful verses that do survive, and was the inventor of the modern Japanese novel. His novels still please today, and most if not all have been translated into English.

But back to longer linked poems. The poets of early medieval Japan often composed formal linked poems, renga, as offerings. The best-known example of the genre, "Three Poets at Minase" (Minase Sangin Hyakuin, 1488), was one such poem, in the typical hundred-stanza (hyakuin) format of the day, much as described above. In times of national crisis, substantial numbers of renga were composed, written out by calligraphers on formal writing sheets (kaishi), and presented as offerings at temples and shrines. A typical large-scale renga event involved a few dozen poets working in ten groups, each group composing one hyakuin. The hokku of the ten hyakuin would be composed by prominent persons—often ranking noblemen or high government officials—and the leading poet, who would be in charge of managing the event, might contribute to several of the hyakuin, as well as overseeing the masters of each hundred-verse poem. Thus, the ten groups, working on the same day under the direction of the same senior master, would produce ten hyakuin, which were then assembled into one large work of a thousand stanzas, a senku, and dedicated to the prospect of peace or some other worthy public goal. (Yes, that's not a typo: This was all typically accomplished in one day. A single, smaller group of a few poets normally completed a senku in five days.)

As far as I know, the popularity of constructing thousand-verse linked poems out of ten separately composed hundred-verse linked poems faded away by the time Bashô was popularizing the already extant thirty-six-stanza kasen. I don't know if Bashô participated in any senku, but he certainly did participate in a few hyakuin, some of which survive.

Beginning during Bashô's lifetime, and increasing in popularity throughout the eighteenth century, a linking game called maekuzuke, very different from renku-writing but loosely based on linking verses in renku, had gained the dominant position in Japanese popular culture by 1800. Haikai masters distributed "challenge verses" (maeku), usually in the form of two phrases (7-7), and the denizens of the pleasure quarters in Edo (now Tokyo) responded with "added verses" (tsukeku in 5-7-5) and a small fee, hoping to gain valuable prizes and modest fame by having their verses selected for publication. This was the birth of what we now call senryû, after the pen name of the most popular selector and publisher of such verses, Karai Senryû (1718-1790). The published results of these contests were called manku awase, or "myriad-verse contests", perhaps because one such contest in 1693 was said to have produced more than 10,000 entries in a few days. Not quite the rate Saikaku achieved, but getting there. The main difference between their works and Saikaku's tour de force, however, is that the maekuzuke contestants were not writing a continuous poem, but individual verses in response to a few challenge verses. Thus, the names "maekuzuke" and "manku awase" refer to senryû, and not to linked poems in the sense that concerns us here. And they certainly have little to do with longer linked poems.

Conclusion

The bottom line with regard to Japanese-style linked poems: The hyakuin (100-stanza) format forms the basis of serious composition in even longer forms, though by the height of haikai (as practiced by Bashô and his contemporaries) the longer forms were no longer as widely practiced as they were in previous centuries. The composition of hyakuin is still the gateway to longer renku. In the meantime, the length of a hyakuin itself provides room for the maximum variety in subject matter, tone, rhythm, linking, and every other aspect of poetic art. After contributing to several kasen, renku poets will want to experience the broader world of 100 stanzas.

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Copyright © 2003, 2006 William J. Higginson. All rights reserved except as specified above.

Page posted 29 October 2003, last updated 30 May 2006.