Preface -- Note and Acknowledgments -- Haiku Talk: From Bash? to J.D. Salinger -- What Is Haiku? Serious and Playful Aspects -- Haiku and Zen: Association and Dissociation -- Hearn, Bickerton, Hubbell: Translation and Definition -- White Quacks and Whale Meat: Bash?'s Kasen, "The Sea Darkens" -- Renga and Assassination: The Cultured Warlord Akechi Mitsuhide -- Mitsuhashi Takajo: Some Further Explication -- Issa and Hokusai -- From Wooden Clogs to the Swimsuit: Women in Haikai and Haiku -- The Haiku Reformer Shiki: How Important Is His Haiku? -- The "Gun-Smoke" Haiku Poet Hasegawa Sosei -- From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia-Pacific War -- "Haiku Poet Called a Hooker": Suzuki Shizuko -- "Gendai Haiku": What Is It? -- Mishima Yukio and Hatano S?ha -- Outr? Haiku of KatΕ Ikuya -- In the Cancer Ward: Tada Chimako -- Receiving a Falconer's Haibun -- Through the Looking Glass -- Glossary of Terms -- Glossary of Names.;"Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, and loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as for its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere--Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form come from? Who were the Japanese poets who originated them? And how has their work been translated into English over the years? The haiku form comes down to us today as a clichΓ©: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. And yet its story is actually much more colorful and multifaceted. And of course to write a good one can be as difficult as writing a Homeric epic--or it can materialize in an instant of epic inspiration. In On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato explores the many styles and genres of haiku on both sides of the Pacific, from the classical haiku of Basho, Issa, and Zen monks, to modern haiku about swimsuits and atomic bombs, and to the haiku of famous American writers such as J.D. Salinger and Allen Ginsburg. As if conversing over beers in a favorite pub, Sato explains everything you want to know about the haiku in this endearing and pleasurable book, destined to be a classic"--