MURAKAMI Kijyou (村上鬼城, 1865-1938) was a haiku poet in Japan, being a pupil of MASAOKA Shiki (正岡子規, 1867-1902), the pioneer of Modern haiku. He ended his life as a public letter-writer, that is, a judicial scrivener of our age. I read some of his haiku in a Japanese textbook for the first time when I was a high school boy. The one cited below was the most impressive of them. Certainly impressive, because I was physically weak at that time, and I knew the world could be very cruel to the seemingly invalid. I compared myself to this silkworm. I lived to be here luckily enough, but still now respect Kijyou's fairness to the worm's will to survive. By the way, he is perfectly contemporary of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), an Irish poet whom I have read for almost thirty years.


夏草に這上がりたる捨蚕かな
natsukusa ni haiagari-taru sutego kana

Up a weed stalk
a thrown out silkworm crawls
-in summer heat.