Masaoka Shiki — The Greedy Invalid

Under the Spell of the Haiku Demon

"My sickbed of six feet: this is my world. And yet even this six-foot sickbed is too wide for me."

Six feet is about 1.8 meters. The length of one futon, a thin bed laid on the floor.

If he stretched out a hand, he could touch the straw mats. But he could not stretch his legs past the edge of the futon and relax. A man wrote this in the newspaper Nippon in May 1902.

For six years, he wrote, he had been a sick man lying in bed, knowing nothing of the world. Pain, anguish, screaming, painkillers. Still, he said, as long as you are alive, you want to say what you have to say.

The story goes back thirteen years.

One night in May 1889, in a student dormitory in Hongo, Tokyo, a young man of twenty-one coughed up a great deal of blood.

His name was Masaoka Noboru. He had come to Tokyo from Matsuyama, in Iyo province, and this was his sixth year as a student.

That night he wrote a poem about the hototogisu, a little cuckoo, and gave himself a new name. Shiki. That is another word for the same bird. The hototogisu is a bird with a red mouth inside.

But this student was a man who did not go to school.

Natsume Soseki, a friend he met that same year, later told it this way:

"That Masaoka was a man who never showed up at school."

He did not even bother to borrow notes and copy them. When exams drew near, he called Soseki over and had him tell him the outline of his notes. He listened half-heartedly, told himself that was good, he got it, and swallowed it whole, so the story goes.

In the exams of 1891, when he had entered the university, his head began to feel strange partway through. He went back to Matsuyama without taking the rest. The rest he would have to take in September.

His lodgings in Tokyo were noisy, packed with students, and no place to study. So he got his hometown to pay him a special allowance for rest and recovery, and went to an inn called Banshoro in a park in Omiya.

It was a quiet, cool inn among pine trees. Good food came out. The bush clover was just in full bloom. Delightful, so delightful he could hardly stand it, he wrote himself.

By day he wandered the pine woods, and when he got tired he went back to the inn and thought only of haiku. He did not touch his exam preparation.

It seemed a waste to keep this fun to himself. So he called a friend by letter. Soseki was called too.

As Soseki remembered it, the letter said: "Come right away." When he got there, Shiki had settled into the back room of the fine inn and was lording it over everything. He treated Soseki, they say, to quail or something like it, grilled.

Soseki is said to have thought that Masaoka must be a man with money. Only later did he learn that Shiki was eating up his family's property.

He stayed at Omiya about ten days. He got no exam preparation done at all.

"But I got through that exam too, by fooling my way past it."

He wrote this about himself.

That same year, he rented a house of his own in Komagome and began to live there alone. It was very quiet, perfect for studying.

But he could not study for school. All he studied was haiku and novels.

About two days before an exam, he would clear every haiku book from around his desk and leave only the notes he needed. The desk, which had been a mess, was suddenly neat. It felt good. He grew cheerful.

And then haiku came wandering into his head.

Before he had read a single page of the notes, one poem came. He had not taken out a poem notebook or paper, so he wrote it on the shade of his lamp. Then another. And another.

It was so much fun that he threw the exam aside. In the end, the lamp shade was filled with poems.

"Once a haiku demon has you in its spell like this, there is no saving you. I failed the year-end exam of 1892."

This was the exam of 1892. He listed his reasons for failing, too.

He had not gone to the history lectures at all. Even if he had, he could not follow the German teacher's English. On top of that, he knew no history. And the exam, he said, asked about things that were not in his notes.

No wonder he failed, he wrote.

"With that, I quit school."

He was twenty-four.

Nine years later, lying bedridden, he wrote:

"Even now I sometimes dream about school. And it is always a dream where I am tormented by an exam."

You Will Be My Heir

One year in Matsuyama, schoolboys were playing with a bat and ball on the parade ground north of the castle when a few students home from Tokyo came by.

One of them, who seemed to be the center of the group, borrowed a bat and began to send sharp balls flying. One ball went astray and rolled in front of a boy who was watching.

The boy picked it up and threw it back. The man took it with a light "Excuse me," the boy wrote years later. That one word, he said, had a voice that somehow pulled at people's hearts.

The boy was the future haiku poet Takahama Kyoshi. He learned only later that the man with the ball was Shiki.

Shiki began to take Kyoshi and another friend, Kawahigashi Hekigoto, along with him. One evening, though a train was running, he said "Let's walk home," and on a night road of one and a half ri (about 6 kilometers) he taught the two of them how to make linked verse, they say.

In 1892, after he quit the university, it was settled that Shiki would join the newspaper Nippon. On his way home to bring his family to Tokyo, he suddenly called on Kyoshi, who was staying in a boarding house in Kyoto.

In the yard of the boarding house he spread out a handkerchief on a garden stone and pounded the maple leaves he had picked the day before with a pebble to copy their color onto it. At Arashiyama, he had a boat loaded with food and wine, and as they went up the river, they talked about their hopes until the supplies were gone, it is said.

Shiki later said he had never lived in such extravagance beyond his means.

Before long, Kyoshi quit school too and came to Tokyo. But he did not know what to write. When he finally showed Shiki a piece, Shiki cut him off with "This is not writing at all," Kyoshi wrote.

In 1895, Japan and China, then ruled by the Qing, were at war.

Shiki said he would go to the battlefield as a reporter.

Kuga Katsunan, head of the newspaper Nippon, was worried about Shiki's health and would not allow it for a long time. Shiki begged again and again, and in the end the newspaper made a special exception and sent him, wrote his friend Naito Meisetsu.

By the time he arrived, the war was almost over.

And on the ship home, Shiki began to cough blood.

While he could still go out on deck, he spat into the sea. After he was bedridden, he had nowhere to spit and swallowed it all. Shiki later told Kyoshi this, they say.

In May 1895, Shiki was admitted to a hospital in Kobe. Kyoshi rushed there after a telegram from the head of the newspaper.

The room was full of the smell of blood. Shiki's face on the bed was so pale it looked see-through. He moved a finger a little to call Kyoshi over, and when Kyoshi put his ear close, he whispered in a voice hard to hear, it is said:

"I'm coughing blood, so I mustn't talk. I mustn't move either."

Still the blood did not stop. According to Kyoshi, it was Shiki's own idea to keep cooling his chest with an ice bag. He pressed it directly on the skin, with no gauze. In the end he got frostbite.

A young doctor came and said, they say:

"Doing something so foolish, of course you get frostbite. However much you hurry, the blood won't stop until its time comes. Let it all come out, and it will stop when it stops."

On that thin face, Shiki laughed, rarely, with real satisfaction, it is said.

The biggest comfort in the sickbed was food. In Kyoshi's recollection, he and Hekigoto took turns every morning going to the strawberry fields on the hill to pick strawberries and bring them to the bedside.

Before long, Shiki moved to a rest home in Suma. On his way out of the hospital he bought a hat shaped like a helmet, and with his beard grown out, he looked like a different man, Kyoshi wrote.

To Kyoshi's eyes, Shiki at the rest home was overflowing with joy at being alive again. When they ate soba noodles at Sumadera temple, Shiki ate so much that Kyoshi could not keep up.

On the evening before Kyoshi went back to Tokyo, Shiki ordered one or two special dishes and began to speak in a formal way. Kyoshi notes that these were not his exact words, only roughly what he meant.

He would never forget the kindness of the nursing this time. His life had been saved, but he did not know how many more years he had. He had no children.

"In my heart I have decided that you will be my heir."

That is what Shiki said, it is said. But since leaving school, he went on, you have been restless. When you are with Hekigoto you quickly go wrong. From now on, live separately and study quietly.

Kyoshi felt honored. At the same time, he felt cramped, as if a heavy load too big for him had been put on both shoulders. He did not have the courage to refuse outright. He just listened blankly and nodded, he wrote.

That night, even after they went under the mosquito net, Shiki was too excited and seemed unable to sleep.

Kyoshi fell asleep before he had properly heard the talk.