Jan 28 Reading Response - Meredith

The portion of the reading that most interested me this week was learning more about haiku's roots as a "commoner's" artform. While I had previously heard of the more classical renga, my knowledge of haiku came from a more contemporary place, where it has been canonized as one of Japan's most widely acknowledged and respected cultural achievements. It is also colloquially known as a serious and meditative poetic form. When reading the excerpts from Shirane on haiku, I was fascinated to learn that this was not always the case. Having only read translated haiku in the past, I was unaware of their focus on what I might describe as “puns” that blended the common and aristocratic languages. Now knowing this, it is less surprising to me that haiku became such a widely loved form. 

A similar effect occurred in the explosive popularity of Tawara’s Salad Anniversary. She took a traditional Japanese poetic form, widely unpopular due to its tight focus on conventional themes and literary language and turned it into something deeply relevant and impactful for the average reader through skilled blending of high-brow literary language with more modern, common phrases. This trend is not only found in Japan—Shakespeare was widely considered to be a populist playwright due to his works’ vulgar humor and accessible themes. Now, he is one of the most notable writers in human history.

There is an intrinsic, cyclical element of class in the study of literature and language. The tendency for the written word to be seen as old-fashioned or stuck in its ways lasts until an experimental writer attempts to reach out to the common person—as Basho did in his haiku about farmers and fishermen, or as Yosano Akiko did in her works which included feminist sexuality in tanka for the first time. The popularity of those works then prompts further study from critics, and in some (but not all) cases, those writings which had previously been considered revolutionary join the ranks of the studied, traditional literature that is espoused by the academic elite, removing the element of the personal and relatable that drew non-academics in at the start.