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Basho and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai. By Peipei Qiu. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 248.
The scholarship on Matsuo Basho and his poetics is so vast that any new monograph daring to revisit the subject cannot avoid the problem of rehashing familiar ground, even if it proposes doing so in new ways. It must return to his well-studied ruminations and polemical statements and answer the question "Is there anything more?" Peering through the lens of Daoism, Peipei Qiu, in Basho and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, discovers plenty more. Lack of scholarship on Daoism in the Japanese context is responsible for a long-standing denial of its contributions to Japanese culture, or haikai in this case, and Qiu's book begins to correct this deficiency. Wisely, the volume attempts not to redefine Japanese poetics as a vehicle of Daoist thought but rather to excavate a lost "frame of reference for the understanding of haikai" (p. 4). In most cases this frame is the fourth century B.C.E. Daoist classic the Zhuangzi, which for Qiu becomes an interpretive tool that lends a new perspective on the evolution of seventeenth-century haikai. As a quick example, we learn that Chinese texts like the Zhuangzi were sources of philosophical authenticity for the Teimon and Danrin schools, but that these groups interpreted them differently. Danrin poets in particular looked directly to Zhuangzian parables as a means of opposing ideological orthodoxy, of inverting conventions and acquiring freer forms of expression. Qiu's project, then, offers a new paradigm for differentiating between the two schools and understanding haikai generally.
Basho's objective was to provide the haikai with philosophical depth, expand its lexical possibilities, and elevate it to a high poetic form equivalent to waka and renga. The best available means of doing so was Chinese poetics, to which Daoist principles were so central. Although it was not Basho's intention to Sinicize haikai, he did refer to over thirty Chinese poetic texts imbued with Zhuangzian principles, and it was largely...