Masaoka
Shiki

Masaoka Shiki,
pseudonym of Masaoka Tsunenori (b. Oct. 14, 1867,
Matsuyama, Japan—d. Sept. 19, 1902, Tokyo), poet,
essayist, and critic who revived the haiku and
tanka, traditional Japanese poetic forms.
Masaoka was born
into a samurai (warrior) family. He went to Tokyo to
study in 1883 and began to write poetry in 1885.
After studying at Tokyo Imperial University from
1890 to 1892, he joined a publishing firm. During
his brief service with the Japanese army as a
correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War, the
tuberculosis he had first contracted in 1889 became
worse, and from that time on he was almost
constantly an invalid. Nevertheless, he maintained a
prominent position in the literary world, and his
views on poetry and aesthetics, as well as his own
poems, appeared regularly.
As early as 1892
Masaoka began to feel that a new literary spirit was
needed to free poetry from centuries-old rules
prescribing topics and vocabulary. In an essay
entitled “Jojibun” (“Narration”), which appeared in
the newspaper Nihon in 1900, Masaoka introduced the
word shasei (“delineation from nature”) to describe
his theory. He believed that a poet should present
things as they really are and should write in the
language of contemporary speech. Through his
articles Masaoka also stimulated renewed interest in
the 8th-century poetry anthology Man’yō-shū
(“Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”) and in the
haiku poet Buson. Masaoka frequently wrote of his
illness, both in his poems and in such essays as
“Byōshō rokushaku” (1902; “The Six-foot Sickbed”),
but his work is remarkably detached and almost
entirely lacking in self-pity.