Collected Haiku

About

A thousand haiku by the author of Kokoro and I Am a Cat — composed over decades, from his early friendship with Masaoka Shiki, who reformed the form into modern literature, to the final years of his life. Soseki learned haiku before he wrote novels, and the discipline shows: each poem is an exercise in seeing one thing clearly and saying nothing more than what the seeing requires. Arranged by the five traditional Japanese seasons — New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — the collection moves at the pace of a year lived attentively. This bilingual edition presents each poem in Japanese, romanized form, and English. Soseki’s haiku are not decoration on the margins of his fiction — they are the foundation beneath it. A novelist who could say everything in seventeen syllables, and sometimes chose to.