kura yakete
sawaru mono naki
tsukimi kana (1)

Storehouse burned­—
now nothing hides
the moon!

It seems that Basho's endorsement of this haiku, written by a samurai named Mizuta Masahide (1657-1723), (2) wasn't enough to commend it to literary attention. Thus, it's not very often that we find it in an anthology of the genre. Some commentators, without ignoring it, overtly dismiss it. Thus does Makoto Ueda, in his otherwise splendid book Literary and Art Theories in Japan, where he condemns it, even without mentioning the author, as being "ludicrously pretentious" (165). His statement echoes Blyth's: "Masahide is famous for a very pretentious verse approved by Basho'" (200).

The haiku, quite concrete, refers to an episode in Masahide's life, happened sometime around 1688: a fire destroys his storehouse. The fact must have been one mishap in a long series, because in l703, a friend of his, by the name of Jozen, bares witness that Masahide became so poor that he couldn't afford even a blanket for his children. It is difficult to imagine a samurai living in such misery unless he abandoned a more comfortable life for something else, maybe for the intransigencies of literature or Buddhist spirituality. Butlet's read the poem again, trying to elucidate what lies behind the words:

Storehouse burned—
now nothing hides
the moon!

The haiku states simply: my storehouse caught fire, it all burned down and now I can see, unconcealed, the moon.

The haiku reminds me of the encounter between Dio genes and Alexander the Great, as recounted by Plutarch: While he stayed here, many public ministers and philosophers  came from all parts to visit him, and congratulated him on his election, but contrary to his expectation, Diogenes of Sinope, who then was living at Corinth, thought so little of him, that instead of coming to compliment him, he never so much as stirred out of the suburb called the Cranium where Alexander ran across him lying at full length in the sun. When he saw so much company near him, he raised himself a little, and vouchsafed to look upon Alexander: and when he kindly asked him whether he wanted anything, 'Yes,' said he, 'I would have you stand from between me and the sun." (428).

Returning to our haiku, we could ask ourselves, somehow simplistically: all right, but with or without a storehouse, what's the difference? Couldn't he just go around and see the moon? Here the parallel to Diogenes is illuminating: both Masahide and Diogenes have a certain stubbornness to see something from their chosen place. A stubbornness, a radicalism which states that if I'm not able to see from anywhere I choose, then I will see from nowhere. That's what Diagones' quirkiness implies. After all, we shouldn't forget that he resists the temptation to have a wish fulfilled. But his refusal to have a wish satisfied, any wish, has the significance of refusing the wish pure-and-simple, the wish anytime-and-anywhere. It's not a moment of ennui or of placid nonconformance, but a question of principle, of ethics. Diogenes' subtext is that one cannot be sage (the metaphor is to see) with intermittence or conditionally and that in order to attain wisdom one has to abolish desire altogether. The same with Masahide, whom we can imagine having abandoned a more secure social position exactly for being able to "see". Indirectly, he affirms that his own storehouse was bothering him, staying in his way to the moon. The haiku assumes that, before the accident, Masahide was suffering spiritual cataracts. Otherwise, he wouldn't exclaim that it's (only) now that he can see (the moon). In spite of the sacrifices he must have endured all his life, he feels he was still far from the condition of seer. It's only now that his eyes open, when a last obstacle disappears, when a last connection with the downward, with the mundane, is lost. The proximal materiality is exchanged for the remote moon. Only now, that he doesn't have any thing left, not even the wish of possessing, he has everything, he has the moon.

The haiku is not pretentious because it doesn't pretend anything. It simply describes an actual fact of Masahide's life, transfigured into a spiritual experience. As for the other sense of the word pretentious intended to attract notice and impress others-we have no evidence whatsoever that this was his intention. On the contrary, the haiku is stern, somehow unadorned, and, more importantly, strikes a common vital chord. This explains why in the same period, Tachibana Hokushi (d. 1718) writes a comparable poem:

Onto the ashes where my cottage burned,
The cherry-blossoms scatter, unconcerned. (Stewart 35)

and that, more than a century later, Issa Kobayashi (1763 1828) composes, in similar circumstances, a similar haiku. When his house is destroyed in Kashiwabara's great fire in 1827, he writes on a playful tone:

House burnt down-
fleas
dance in embers. (Stryk 12)

and, in 1809 (he was then 46), after he loses his lodging, he writes:

Now without house—
I see spring
blossoming

These all are texts that transform a material loss into a spiritual rebirth.

Finally, we could ask ourselves: what was the moon to Masahide? The answer comes by itself: it's what the sun was to Diogenes. Masahide would bond the rest of his life to it and, beyond, all his death, as one can see from his jisei (3):

yuku toki wa
tsuki ni narabite
mizu no tomo

It's time to go—
with the moon by my side
friend in the water. (4)

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Works Cited

Blyth, RH. A History of Haiku. 1963. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1984.
Hoffman, Yoel. Japanese Death Poems. Rutland: Tuttle, 1986.
John S. White, ed., Plutarch’s "Lives". New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1966.
Stewart, Harold. A Net of Fireflies: Japanese Haiku and Haiku Paintings, 1960. Rutland. 35.
Stryk, Lucien. The Dumpling Field. Athens. Swallow-Ohio UP, 1991.
Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Cleveland: Western Reserve UP, 1967

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Notes:

(1)    Translated word by word, the poem goes:

kura (storehouse) yakate (to burn)
sawaru (to hide) mono (thing) naki (no)
tsukimi (moon's view) kana (particle used as exclamation)

To a Western mind, the word storehouse can be misleading, in the sense that it gives an erroneous idea about Masahide's wellbeing. To own a storehouse was not by itself a proof of wealth.

(2) Some commentators mention that, by training, Masahide was a doctor. We have records that Basho, who at some point was his teacher, appreciated Masahide's haiku (Hoffman 240)

(3) Jisei or death poem is a farewell poem to life, a last impression in which the author wraps his whole existence.

(4) As the English to go, the Japanese yuku has a double significance: to leave and to die. Inevitably, the last line (nizu no tomo) reminds us Basho's line, the one from the "frog-haiku":

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

the old pond
a frog jumps in—
the sound of water

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Frogpond XXVI:2, 2003 and Edge of light, The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2003