An Early Female Haiku Writer

on the ebb tide beach
everything we pick up
is alive

--Chiyo ni

I mentioned earlier that there were four great Japanese haiku masters: Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. Well, I've recently discovered a fifth, Chiyo-ni, the only woman. The long chain group poems, hakai no renga, from which haiku developed had been written only be men. Japanese women--the few during this medieval time period that learned to read and write--wrote in another form, tanka.

Chiyo-ni was a contemporary of Buson; she lived between 1703-1775. According to critic Jane Reichhold, her real name was Kaga-no Chiyo and she was born in Matsuto. She taught herself haiku when she was only fifteen--she had no choice, because she was a woman no haiku master would instruct her. Later in life she met and worked with other haiku writers but by this time she had fully established herself as a great haikuist. In later life she became a Buddhist nun. She was also an accomplished painter, something you might infer from her choice of evocative images.

Here are a few more of her haiku:

the coolness ---
on the bottom of her kimono
in the bamboo grove

waterweed
floating away, despite
the butterfly’s weight on it

again the women
come to the fields
with unkempt hair

leaves like bird shadows
desolate---
the winter moon