Famous Japanese Haiku Narrators
All imaginative literature employs a narrator — the voice, perspective, and cultural role — who is telling the story. Whether implied or explicitly designated by the writer, the narrator is the imagined speaker whose words create focus and imply attitudes toward the situation being discussed. Even in autobiographical accounts and memoirs, the narrator is crafted by the writer as their writing identity. In this essay I want to explore the role of narrators evident in the work of some of the most famous Japanese haiku writers.
On the micro-level of reading one poem, the haiku narrator is usually implied or suggested through associations from images and connotations of language usage. As a concise expression, a single haiku rarely explicitly designates a narrator’s perspective. However, the choice of words, suggested attitudes, grammatical tense, social context, location, perspective, or point-of-view, do provide hints that allow the reader to imagine the narrator. This is how imagined narrators are part of the reading process of each haiku.
However, when reading a collection of haiku or a body of work by one author, this transactional process of imagining the narrator may extend beyond an individual haiku to the congregate of several haiku. Readers form a sense of the haiku writer’s identity and come to expect certain content, themes, language and social perspectives from that author. Over time, readers and literary critics shape the haiku writer’s ethos, reputation, and identity. Let’s consider the ways well-known Japanese haiku writers employ narrators, or perhaps put more simply, a writer’s point of view, in their work.
