Every traditional haiku contains a kigo, a season word. “Frog” means spring. “Moon”, on its own, means autumn. “Cold” is winter and “short night” is summer. A reader who knows the convention knows the season of the poem from one word, and the poem does not have to say it.
There are thousands of these words, and they are collected in books called saijiki, almanacs of the seasons, arranged by time of year: the sky and weather, the land, the plants, the animals, the things people do. A saijiki is not really a poetry book. It is a list of things worth noticing, in the order they happen.
Why one word is enough
A kigo works because it carries a whole scene with it. “Plum blossom” is not just a flower; it is late winter, cold mornings, the first sign that the year is turning. “Cicada” is not just an insect; it is August heat, and the noise of it, and a feeling that summer is already going.
The word does the work of several lines. This is the same economy as yohaku, the empty space in a Japanese painting: what is left out is as much a part of the poem as what is in it.
Four seasons, plus one
A saijiki divides the year into spring, summer, autumn and winter, and adds a fifth section for the New Year, which in Japan is a season of its own, with its own words: first sunrise, first dream, first calligraphy.
Within each season the words are grouped by when they happen, early, middle or late, and by kind. Under autumn you might find, in order, lingering heat, the first cold wind, dew, the harvest moon, persimmons, the cry of deer, fallen leaves, and the first frost.
Read straight through, a saijiki is a year unfolding at the speed of the weather.
Season words outside Japan
The words in a Japanese saijiki belong to the Japanese climate, and some of them do not travel. There is no plum blossom in February in most of the world, and the cicada season is different everywhere. Haiku writers in other countries keep their own lists.
That is the useful part. Anyone can keep a saijiki, for the place they live, in the order things happen there. The first warm day. The evening the heating goes on. The week the light changes. The first mandarin. It does not need to be poetry. It needs to be noticed.
A season word a week
The simplest way to do this is in a planner. At the top of each week, write one season word: the thing that most marked the week where you live. Not the weather forecast. The thing you noticed.
After a year there are fifty-two words, and they are a record of the year that no diary captures. Reading last year’s words in the same week this year is one of the quieter pleasures of keeping a paper planner.
Borrowing from the Japanese list
The Japanese words are still worth knowing, because many of them name things that happen everywhere and that nobody has a word for. The first cold wind of autumn. The particular blue of the sky in October. The smell of the ground after the first autumn rain. Japanese has a word for each, and the word is a way of being ready to notice it.
The seventy-two micro-seasons of the old Japanese calendar are a saijiki in miniature: one observation every five days, in order, for a year. They make a good starting list.
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This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: