Masaoka Shiki - Literary Career

Literary Career

While Shiki is best known as a haiku poet, he also wrote other genres of poetry, prose criticism of poetry, autobiographical prose, and short prose essays. His earliest surviving work is a school essay, Yōken Setsu ("On Western Dogs"), where he praises the varied utility of western dogs as opposed to Japanese ones, which "only help in hunting and scare away burglars".

Contemporary to Shiki was the idea that traditional Japanese poetic short forms, such as the haiku and tanka, were waning due to their incongruity in the modern Meiji Period. Shiki himself, at times, expressed similar sentiments. There were no great living practitioners although these forms of poetry retained some popularity.

Despite an atmosphere of decline, only a year or so after his 1883 arrival in Tokyo, Shiki began writing haiku. In 1892, the same year he dropped out of university, Shiki published a serialized work advocating haiku reform, Dassai Shooku Haiwa or "Talks on Haiku from the Otter's Den". A month after completion of this work, in November 1892, he was offered a position as haiku editor in the paper that had published it, "Nippon", and maintained a close relationship with this journal throughout his life. In 1895 another serial was published in the same paper, "A Text on Haikai for Beginners", Haikai Taiyō. These were followed by other serials: Meiji Nijūkunen no Haikukai or "The Haiku World of 1896" where he praised works by disciples Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigotō, Haijin Buson or "The Haiku Poet Buson" (1896-1897) expressing Shiki's idea of this 18th-century poet whom he identifies with his school of haiku, and Utayomi ni Atauru Sho or "Letters to a Tanka Poet" (1898) where he urged reform of the tanka poetry form.

The above work, on the tanka, is an example of Shiki's expanded focus during the last few years of life. He would die four years after taking up tanka as a topic. And, bedsore and morphine-addled, little more than a year before his death Shiki began writing sickbed diaries. These three are: Bokujū Itteki or "A Drop of Ink" (1901), Gyōga Manroku or "Stray Notes While Lying On My Back" (1901-1902), and Byōshō Rokushaku or "A Sixfoot Sickbed" (1902).