Masaoka Shiki

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) was a Japanese poet, literary critic and journalist who worked during the Meiji period, when Japan was opening rapidly to Western modernity. He wrote in Japanese and is now a central figure in the modern revival of haiku, a form he insisted should be judged as serious literature. Some critics count him among the four great masters of the form, alongside Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson and Kobayashi Issa.

He was born in Matsuyama, in Iyo Province, into a modest samurai family. His father, an alcoholic, died when Shiki was five. As a teenager he became interested in liberal politics, and in 1883 he moved to Tokyo, where he studied and played baseball alongside Natsume Sōseki, who would become one of Japan's great novelists. Shiki left university in 1892. By his own account he was too absorbed in haiku; others point to the tuberculosis that would shadow the rest of his life.

From 1892 he worked as haiku editor for the newspaper Nippon, where he published serialized essays calling for reform. He asked poets to observe nature realistically and rejected the wordplay and fantasy of the older schools. He also wrote on reforming tanka, and left a body of prose criticism and autobiography.

Illness shaped his last years. After an unpleasant stint in China as a war correspondent, which worsened his health, he returned to Japan and spent time in Matsuyama. Around 1897 his disciples, including Takahama Kyoshi, launched the magazine Hototogisu. Bedridden, he wrote several sickbed diaries, among them A Sickbed Six Feet Long. He died in 1902, aged 34.

His legacy is twofold: he rescued traditional short poetry from decline in the modern age and established it as a serious literary genre. Many later poets regard him as the starting point of modern haiku.