![]() I wasn’t going for humor in the conventional sense. Last summer, crossing a bridge over the Hudson River, I remembered a local news story from a few weeks earlier about a woman who had drowned herself just downriver. ![]() Or, if it is, it is a silent laughter of the dark and knowing kind. But then, kokkei sometimes isn’t laughter at all. Think of kokkei as “laughter that vectors off in elusive or unexpected directions” and you wouldn’t be off the mark. It causes you to smile quietly and this is the essence of this poem. ![]() However, this poem does not cause you to laugh out loud. But if he talked about eel’s whiskers in this poem I would start laughing without reservation. For something funnier than carp’s whiskers we could think of eel’s whiskers for example. During his nap I am sure a much wider scenery appeared in his dream, but all other things disappeared into the background-into the dark-and only the whiskers remained on his eyelids as he awoke. In this poem, “carp’s whiskers” probably is the central element, and to me the essence of comic nature or something that causes mirth is living and alive here in this phrase. Here is a poem by modern Japanese haiku master Sumio Mori, who accompanied Yamamoto to New York City in 1978 to offer lectures at Japan Society. How could we? Haiku poets are always reinventing it. We will probably never reach a satisfactory definition of kokkei. Queer in the sense that it breaks down binaries and boundaries, challenges norms, and is willing “to walk backwards” in the Lakota sense of the heyoka -“a person who speaks, moves, and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them.” Lately, I have been wondering if maybe “queer humor” isn’t the better term. Kokkei is sometimes translated as “unconventional humor” or even “strange humor.” But neither of these quite hits the mark. In the 20th century, the Japanese critic Kenkichi Yamamoto advanced the opinion that (1) haiku was a classical form of literature written in 5-7-5 syllables, respectively, with a word indicating the season, and (2) kokkei (humor) was its essence. They found witty or clever ways of describing things-ways that were sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but always memorable. Prior to that, it was simply something that haiku poets did. There is a good reason for that.Īlthough humor was an essential part of haiku from the earliest days, it was only in the 20th century that an attempt was made to address its meaning in terms of literary theory. It’s an amorphous term that seems to mean wildly different things in different contexts. The Japanese word haiku is composed of two characters: HAI (俳), meaning “light or comical,” and KU (句), meaning “verse.” Thus, haiku means literally “humorous verse.” But humor of what kind exactly? The more examples we find of haiku humor, the more puzzling it becomes.
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