Senryū

Senryū and Haiku are related Japanese poetic genres. Although whimsy, even humor, were original elements of Haiku, by the last decades of the 20th century, Haiku had become well known outside Japan as a serious form of poetry that can also be written in English and other languages. Its genius is to capture, in a poem consisting of three lines of 5–7–5 syllables, a moment frozen in time. The classic and widely known Haiku poem is one by Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694; translations by Marguerite Wells unless otherwise stated):

Senryū developed out of Renga, an ancient verse-capping game where players were given a verse and had to add another three lines to the original. In 1757, for the first time, the winning verses from a competition were printed in broadsheet form and the poems took off as an independent verse form, becoming wildly popular. Thus, the appearance of Senryū can be dated exactly; and although Senryū and Haiku have the same 5–7–5 verse structure and Senryū appeared 2½ centuries later than Haiku, Senryū clearly did not develop from Haiku. Rather, both developed from the same ancient Renga poetic tradition. This entry discusses the genre and give some examples from both the Edo period and the modern period.

From its inception, Senryū has been associated with competitions in which ordinary people could participate and record their perceptions of a perverse world. It is written with characters meaning river willow, and is named after Karai Senryū (1718–1790), who edited a competition anthology, Yanagidaru (A Barrel of Willow) that appeared regularly from 1765 until 1838, long after his death.

Senryū are often referred to as satirical (two of R. H. Blyth’s well-known collected English translations of Senryū include “satirical” in their titles). But wry observations of the foibles of people or society, or even sarcasm or bitterness, do not by themselves constitute satire. Asō Jirō’s book, What Is Senryū? (1955), which sets out the rules of the genre, begins, “There are people who say Senryū is satire but that is not so.” While it is possible to find satirical Senryū, in general they are humorous social comment. They are aphorisms that scan as poetry.