The Writing of a Haibun

In my previous post, I wrote about the last story I've written, The Land Down the Well. It's a Deep POV rewrite of a very old fairy tale. You can find the links to the different parts of the story at the bottom of this post.

I wrote this story in a bit of a different form than I usually do. My friend @dbooster, a poetry editor on The Writers' Block and a fountain of knowledge about Japanese forms and Japanese culture, told me about a form called haibun. 

It combines haiku with sections of prose. This form can be applied to any number of genres, from autobiographical pieces, diaries or travel journals, essays, short stories and prose poems.

History of the Haibun

As far as I can tell, the term was first used in 1690 when the famous Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō sent a letter to a student of his.

I found an excerpt from a haibun he wrote, called Oku no Hosomichi. It is translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Narrow Road to the Interior and can be found here. 

It's a prose and poetry travel journal he wrote as he journeyed on foot through 17th century Japan. It's considered to be one of the major pieces of classical Japanese literature.

I read the opening and proceeded to pick my jaw up off the floor. Mr Bashō has acquired a new fan. I'd already seen some of his haiku but I'd never read his prose. 

Of course he wrote other haibun as well, but this seems to be the most famous one.

Traditionally, haibun were written as short descriptions of a place, person or object, or alternatively of a journey or series of events in the life of the writer.

Contemporary Haibun

The haibun is no longer confined to its country of origins. We find examples as early as 1988, when James Merrill wrote *Prose of Departure*. I found an excerpt of it here and this is definitely going on my wish list.

The Form

A haibun can encompass a scene or a moment in time in a descriptive and objective style or it can be fictional or have a dream-like feel to it. The connection between the haiku and the prose can be either direct or subtle.

The haibun form in English seems to constantly evolve, as most writing does. Generally speaking, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a rather visual style, accompanied by one or more haiku.

What About My Haibun?

I started out with the storyline and tried to get that right first. As I was writing, I'd come across an image that seemed to fit, I'd include a haiku. I then went over my first draft and tried to order the text so the haiku would appear to be spaced evenly but it didn't work. Some sections were more suited to haiku than others and @dbooster advised me to run with it and let it be as organic as it wanted to be. In the end that is what worked best, I think.

I applied the same philosophy to the haiku themselves. This is another lesson I learned from D. With the help of this article he taught all of us over at The Writers' Block about the structure of the haiku. It seems Japanese as a language has a structure and rhythm so different from English that translating to English and forcing it into that same structure is almost impossible to do.

A haiku should simply be as short as it can while portraying a complete image. We've started calling this the breath style haiku. I personally have really grown to like them.

So let's read this story, shall we?

The Land Down The Well

Part 1

Part 2

As always, thank you for sharing this with me.

Hugs

Jasmine

Sources, other than D's brain:
Wikipedia
Writer's Digest
The Writing Cooperative