Masaoka Shiki: A Diligent and Genius Haiku Poet

The novel Saka no ue no Kumo starts as:
“A really small country is trying to become civilized.
“One of the islands of this country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.”
Matsuyama is a birth place of Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930), Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918), and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Saka no ue no Kumo continues:
“We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people.”
After staying at a hotel in front of JR Matsuyama Station, I followed one of the three: Masaoka Shiki.
I left the hotel, and drove a little bit Southward in the city of Matsuyama following the direction of my car navigation system. I was definitely near Shiki Doh House, his birth place, but could find no sign showing its entrance. I kept driving in despair, this time Eastward, toward the Dogo Hot Spring area. Kono Clan's main castle used to be in this area, and was called Yu-duki Jo, (namely Hot-spring Built Castle). The castle area is now Dogo Park.
Shiki Memorial Museum is built in the north area of Dogo Park. The museum has collections of his original handwritten manuscripts, copies of his publications at the time, and related materials such as his bag and so on. I was impressed with the quantity and quality of their collections, and also overpowered by how productive Shiki had been. Shiki started editing "Shuji-gaku Zairyo" (Rhetoric Materials) as early as in 1889, or at the latest in1891. He made 65 notebooks of 3 categories: seasonal words, things and affairs, and forms. He also made another notebook on tones. Furthermore, with those materials, he edited a tree diagram of the relationship among haiku poets, and a chronological table of haiku. It is also surprising that so many collections have not been scattered and lost. We must pay respect to his surviving family and followers as well as to the good work that was done by the museum.
Shiki was actually struggling to reform haiku, tanka, and novels in Japan. He researched and classified almost all haiku published during the Edo Period, and organized three types of literary salons for haiku, tanka, and Japanese novels. Each of the salons produced distinguished talents of the field. Natsume Sohseki was only an example of many. Shiki also was working as a newspaper reporter, and even tried to report the Sino-Japanese War.

Shiki's "Shuji-gaku Zairyoh" (Rhetoric Materials) was edited and published by Samukwa Sokotsu and et al in 1935 under the name of "Bunrui Haiku Zenshu" (Complete Classification of Haiku Poems) with 12 volumes, a copy of which Sakai City Central Library owns as in-library use only. The volumes were later published as a facsimile edition in 1992 with its renewed name: "General View of Classification Haiku."
Sakai City Central Library's volumes, which were printed in 1958, are 14cm wide and 19cm tall, and has the thickness of 43.5cm in total. The first volume has 514 pages, the second 532, the third 482, the 4th 322, the 5th 501, the 6th 498, the 7th 486, the 8th 516, the 9th 496, the 10th 495, the 11th 536, and the 12th 559. It has 5937 pages in total.
How many haiku poems do these 12 volumes have? How many did Masaoka Shiki collect? Samukawa Sokotsu, who wrote explanatory notes for "Bunrui Haiku Zenshu," gave no statistic. I, of course, have no idea. I can only imagine.
The first page of the first volume has 14 haiku poems, the second page has 20, the third 22, the forth 24, the fifth 20, the sixth 23, the seventh 23, the eighth 24, the ninth 20, the tenth 18, and the eleventh 21. The first page has rather small number of haiku poems. The 10 pages from the second to the eleventh have 215 haiku poems in total, and 21.5 haiku poems on average. The total 5937 pages, with this average used, might have approximately 127645.5 haiku poems.
Sokotsu points out that Shiki sometimes placed one haiku poem on more than 2 pages for the convenience of searching. Shiki obviously collected less than 127645 haiku poems, approximately of course.
The first haiku poem is "Saki iwae hatsu akatsuki no hatsu chozu," which is classified under the category of a seasonal word "hatsu akatsuki" (New Year daybreak). As Sokotsu says in his explanatory notes that he changed the appearing order, the original first one might have been "Kyonen tate hakobishi koe ya haru no kaze," which belongs to the seasonal word "rishun" (beginning of spring). The last one is "Kitsune-bi ni hare-ma mie tari satsuki-ame," which was recognized to have the same meaning as the previous haiku poem "Kawa-beri ni kitsune-bi tatsu ya tsuiri hare."
Masaoka Shiki has generated generations of successing haiku poets, and also generated generations of his studiers. One of them is Shibata Nami. She perfected the general survey of both the 12 volumes of Shiki's classifying and the 18,191 haiku poems that he composed. Shiki had been identified as a realist, and his revolutionary role had been attributed to his achieving the transformation of the conventional haiku community at the time into realism.
Shiki shares the same distinguished feature with other genius; he was very prolific. He started, according to Shibata Naomi, composing haiku poems in 1885, and made 7 of them in the year. He composed only one in 1886; 23 in 1887, when he started learning from Ohara Kiju; 31 in 1888; and 32 in 1889, when Kiju died and Shiki started the idea-rhetoric argument with Natsume Soseki, which continued till the next year, 1890, when he composed 53 haiku poems. In the dispute, Shiki stressed the importance of having good ideas over and above mastering rhetoric. Soseki, on the other hand, regretted that Shiki was wasting his talent by producing second-graded writings. Recognizing the importance of mastering rhetoric, in September, 1891, Shiki wrote Soseki about his attempt to categorize haiku poems for the purpose of mastering rhetoric. Soseki gave him an offhand approval.
Shiki wrote 231 haiku poems in the year 1891; 1665 in 1892, by the end of which he started working for Hihon Newspaper Company; 2998 in 1893; 1965 in 1894; 2836 in 1895, during which he worked as a war correspondent with the Imperial Japanese Army during the First Sino-Japanese War; 2994 in 1896, when he was diagnosed as having tubercular caries, and underwent an operation; 1466 in 1897, when he had another operation on his back; 1409 in 1898; 903 in 1899; 641 in 1900; 524 in 1901; and 418 in 1902, when he died of tuberculosis in September. He made 18,191 haiku poems in total.
Shibata, matching each of the 18,191 haiku poems with the corresponding analogous haiku poems from the 12 volumes, clarified how much Shiki learned from the tradition of haiku poems, including those composed by his great predecessors, Basho and Buson.
Shiki's categorizing process not only helped to admonish himself and other haiku poets against plagiarism, but also enabled himself to write a new haiku with unexpected combination of words. Shibata shows Shiki's famous haiku "Kaki kue ba kane ga naru nari Horyu-ji" as a good of example of a new combination. The combination between Nara and kaki (a persimmon) had never occurred to anyone before, and Shiki knew the combination is new, thanks to his categorizing work.
Shibata also made it clear, comparing Shiki's classification and that of haiku dictionaries and handbooks of his time, that he introduced some scientific categories. That means that he applied his western knowledge acquired through the modern education at school.
Masaoka Shiki clearly shares the same tendency with other Meiji modern intellectuals: succeeding the Japanese tradition and applying the Western academic knowledge.

I was standing in front of a picture in the museum, which showed two piles of Shiki's notebooks, with Ritsu, Shiki's younger sister, sitting beside, and with Samukawa Sokotsu standing on the other side. The notebooks stacked up as tall as Sokotsu. They show that Shiki was hardworking. Shiki is regarded one of the four great masters of haiku, along with Basho, Buson, and Issa. He is definitely a genius and diligent. However, he had been taken good care of by Ritsu from his first operation to his death. His notebooks had been aired annually by Shiki's surviving family and followers, like Ritsu and Sokotsu in the picture. A genius could not be a genius by himself.