The Pheasant ’ s Call and the Sound of Sympathy

Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Japanese Language and Literature Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 56 | Number 1 | April 2022 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.223 ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)


The Pheasant's Call and the Sound of Sympathy Matthew Mewhinney
A poem is a pheasant.
-Wallace Stevens, "Adagia" 1 It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a pheasant.
-Jeremy Over, "A Poem is a Pheasant" (2001) 2 Wallace Stevens and Jeremy Over found something remarkable about the relationship between pheasants and poetry. In 2001, Over made Stevens's aphorism, "A poem is a pheasant," the title of his poem and opened it with a line that makes reference to another Stevens aphorism, substituting the word "poem" with "pheasant." 3 Over continues in this way for twenty-six lines, remixing other Stevens aphorisms into lines on pheasants. In the end he creates a poetic form that requires the reader to see and hear the word "pheasant" in almost every line.
In the late eighteenth century, literati poet-painter Yosa Buson (1716-1783 与謝蕪村) forged a new poetic form, an elegy entitled "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" (1777?; Hokuju Rōsen o itamu 北寿老仙をいたむ), that, like Stevens, draws a connection between the pheasant and poetic expression, and that, like Over, looks to his literary forebears to make that connection resonate with the reader. Buson's elegy alludes to a long tradition in Chinese and Japanese poetry in which the pheasant was used as a conventional trope to represent grief and longing and Confucian moral and social values. In this way Buson represents elegiac feelings through the conventional deployment of the pheasant trope. At the same time, he represents the intellectual currents of the late eighteenth century, including a lyricism that involved the expression of personal feeling and a scientific empiricism that called for the representation of the natural world based on personal observation. Buson's poetry by and large drew from the stock 1820 浦上玉堂) men of letters, such as Ueda Akinari (1734-1809 上田秋 成) and Norinaga, and rangaku scholars, such as Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757-1827 大槻玄沢) and Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818 司馬江漢), and naturalists, such as Ono Ranzan (1729-1810 小野蘭山) and Ōdaka Motoyasu (1758-1830 大高元恭). As Marcon observes, "[Kenkadō's] passion for natural history and other cultural pursuits became the catalyst that brought into existence, put into motion, and maintained through much needed financial lubrication a vast network of intellectual interactions and production." 14 The network of intellectual exchange generated a new zeitgeist that objectified nature in a scientific way, which informed the art and literature of the Late Edo period (1750s-1867), distinguishing it from that which came before. This rise in scientific empiricism also laid the foundation for the further development of realism and subjective expression in the nineteenth century. Maki Fukuoka has examined the emergence of realist representation in nineteenth-century literati culture, tracing the origin of the word shashin 写真, or "representation of the real" (later "photograph") to studies in materia medica before the introduction of photography. 15 In the late nineteenth century, modern haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867Shiki ( -1902 正岡子規) rediscovered Buson's poetry and promoted his hokku as a precursor to his own modern poetics of shasei (写生), or "sketching from life." Shiki extolled Buson's poetry for its "objective beauty" (kyakkanteki bi 客観的美), believing that it represented things as they are. 16 In the following sections, I perform a close reading of "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen," showing how it absorbs the currents of Buson's time and how it draws from the conventional poetic tropes associated with the pheasant in the Chinese and Japanese traditions. My reading fills a gap in scholarship on Buson's elegy by drawing attention to the representation of emotion in time and space, the complex gendering of lyric voice and address, the relationship between painting through ekphrasis, and the relationship between sound and sympathy. after Buson's death. 18 Shinga was a sake brewer and haikai poet who studied under Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707 宝井其角), a disciple of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694 松 尾芭蕉). As H. Mack Horton has observed, this poetic genre of communal composition fostered strong relationships between master and disciple, and "death represented a particular crisis to identity and continuity." 19 This crisis inspired Buson to forge a new poetic form through which he could express his grief and mourn the death of a beloved friend and mentor whom he regarded with the highest esteem.
The verb itamu (いたむ) from the elegy's title means "to grieve or feel sorrow for," "to be pained by," and "to mourn; lament." I choose "mourning" because it is an English verb whose lay usage speaks to all these meanings, and includes the act of longing, which Buson demonstrates by composing a poem for his beloved mentor. I do not use "mourning" to reference a specific ritual or ceremonial rite, but merely the lay and commonplace practice of grieving and longing.
Beth Carter has observed that premodern writers consciously crafted language to express grief and pacify the spirits of the dead. 20 "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" is a poem that represents grief, and the object of consolation is the poet, not the dead. In his elegy Buson mediates his grief and the process of grieving through the diverse imagery and tropes drawn from the haikai and kanshi 漢詩 (Chinese or Sinitic verse) traditions and the rhythm and repetition afforded by the elegy's poetic form. I have included italics in my translation to reflect Muramatsu Tomotsugu's identification of the pheasant's monologue (dokuhaku 独白) in his examination of the poem's entire structure. 21 Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen You departed this morning; my heart this evening, scattered in a thousand pieces, Why are you so far away?
Longing for you, I walked to the hills and roamed; Why are the hills so sad? 5 The dandelions bloomed yellow, the shepherd's purse white; There is no one to share the view. The poem opens with the reality that Shinga is gone, and the speaker's heart is in disarray. The speaker walks to the hills where he finds signs of spring in the dandelions and shepherd's purse blossoms. This is where the speaker would spend time with his friend Shinga, and while thinking of him, he suddenly hears the call of what sounds like a pheasant. The poem shifts voice and enters a monologue (rendered in italics) by a pheasant lamenting the death of a friend. Then the poem shifts back to the human speaker's voice, which is marked by the repetition of the first line. The poem concludes with a scene of silent vigil in darkness.
Buson composed some poetry in the kanshi genre, but his haikai verse vastly outnumbered these poems. He also preferred to combine kanshi and haikai, creating new composite forms like the poem exhibited here. To a certain degree the alternating "five-seven-pulse" (go-shichi-chō 五七調) in many of the lines in "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" resembles the alternating lines of five and seven syllables in the chōka (long poems 長 歌) and banka (laments 挽歌) genres in Man'yōshū, but the meter is irregular and beyond generic distinction.
In Japanese literary history, the poem has been called a "lyric" (抒情 詩 jojōshi) that transcends the popular "pleasure quarter songs" (yūrikayō 遊里歌謡) composed by haikai poets during the early eighteenth century. 26 Sharing the formal and generic irregularity of these songs, Buson's elegy has been categorized under the ad hoc genres haishi (俳詩) or washi (和 詩), which refer to poems that are neither haikai or kanshi, but something in between. 27 Despite this categorization, Buson's elegy is singular for seamlessly blending haikai and kanshi beyond distinction.
In the following sections, I examine how "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" is a new poetic form, falling in between genres and traditions, beyond generic distinction. I begin by showing how the apostrophe, or poetic address, in the elegy alludes to the way other poets have represented poetic voice in haikai, kanshi, Japanese myth, and late imperial Chinese theater.

The Pheasant's Call
The rupture that opens the poem is echoed in images that mediate feelings of grief in temporal and spatial ways. The first line frames the trauma of loss in the span of one day: the poet mourns from the moment in the morning he learns of Shinga's death to the moment around twilight when he realizes that his heart is in a state of disarray, "scattered in a thousand pieces." The adjectival noun chiji (a thousand pieces 千々) describes the heart (and mind) of the poet as "shattered in a thousand pieces," as other translations have suggested. 28 The particle ni makes it an adverb, indicating that these pieces have also moved in myriad directions, hence "scattered." The original term chiji literally means "thousands and thousands," the repetition of which highlights the great number of pieces, as well as the myriad directions to which these pieces have scattered. Chiji also refers to the manifold forms the heart and mind can take in a contemplative state, a spatial metaphor to describe the protean nature of the heart during times of sorrow, and the boundless depths of the poetic imagination.
Although explicit mention of the pheasant does not come until Line 7 of Buson's poem, "Is there a pheasant? I hear it crow and crow," the spatial image of a heart "scattered" or "shattered" into a thousand pieces in the opening lines already evokes the pheasant in haikai. In the hokku below, Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704 向井去来) represents the sound of pheasant's call, figuring it as the spatial and sonic image of a waterfall basin shattering: Breaking the waterfall basin: A pheasant cries Hororo. takitsubo mo / hishige to kiji no / hororo kana 滝壺もひしげと雉のほろろ哉 29 Ebara Taizō observes that in contrast to the plain and simple representations of the pheasant's call in the waka tradition beginning with Man'yōshū, Kyorai's poem "combines multiple layers of subjectivity" (fukuzatsu na shukan ga tomonatte iru 複雑な主観が伴っている). 30 These layers refer to the images of sound the poet uses to represent the feeling of grief. The speaker describes the immeasurable weight and resonance of the cry through the metaphor of a waterfall basin shattering or breaking (takitsubo mo hishige to). The image of water falling evokes the overflow of tears suggested by the assonance between hororo and horohoro (streaming tears). 31 What breaks is not the flow of water, but the basin in which it falls. In other words, the reverberation of the pheasant's call is so powerful and the gravity of loss that it represents is so great that even the space that naturally forms to contain the water loses its containment. Kyorai's poem layers the onomatopoeia hororo, a non-representational medium of sound, with another sound, the metaphor of a waterfall basin breaking. The poem thereby ends with the ineffable yet deeply resonant feeling of loss and longing through the figuration and imagination of sounds.
The second line of Buson's elegy "Why are you so far away?" echoes the spatial meanings of chiji and its resonances with kindred images of shattering in the haikai tradition. The line also gives chiji its meanings of unlimited distance and variation a temporal dimension. The line opens with nanzo, a classical interrogative meaning "why," asking why Shinga is haruka, which means "distant" and "far away," but also "dark and indistinct." 32 Although in my translation, the question "Why are you so far away?" marks the subject as the deceased, which is how many critics have interpreted the line, the subject may continue from the first line in enjambment. 33 This means that Line 2 can be read as "Why [does my heart scatter] so far away [searching for you]?" With both readings in mind, the question refers to the vast distance that separates life and death, but also the distance and time of longing evoked by the chiji in the first line, and the darkness and obscurity of the directions to which the pieces of the poet's mind and heart have scattered in the search for the deceased.
The apostrophes that punctuate "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" question the role of voice and lyric address and show how part of the poem is about voices summoning the dead by incantation. The apostrophe to Shinga "Why are you so far away?" is echoed in the question the speaker asks of the hills: "Why are the hills so sad?" The apostrophes are addresses to Shinga, whom the reader knows is absent, displacing the irreversible structure of time when a person dies by making the absent present again in speech, in discourse. In his writing on the relationship between apostrophe and time in Western lyric poetry, Jonathan Culler argues: "Apostrophes displace this irreversible structure by removing it from linear time and locating it in a discursive time." He argues that apostrophes in elegies allow for more fluid movements in time because the elegy "replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the movement from life to death, with a reversible alternation between mourning and consolation, evocations of presence and absence." 34 By asking "Why are you so far away?" and "Why are the hills so sad?" the speaker summons Shinga back to life to converse with him, a move that contradicts the opening statement that Shinga is gone.
When the speaker reaches the spot on the hills where he and Shinga together once admired the white and yellow blossoms, he thinks he hears the incessant call (hitanaki ni naku) of a pheasant. In my translation, I use the verb "crow," which refers to the loud and passionate cry of a cockerel, often heard during mating season in spring. The passionate crow of a male pheasant, although illusory, answers the apostrophe that opens the elegy, which is the voice of a woman, suggested by the use of the second-person pronoun kimi (you 君). These opening lines have led scholars to read the poem alongside ancient Chinese ballads, including ancient-style poetry (古 詩 gushi) and Yuefu (Music Bureau 樂府) poetry. 35 These genres were popular among Chinese poets since the Six Dynasties (220-589), and were revived in the "New Yuefu" (Ch. Xin yuefu 新樂府) genre by the Tang dynasty (618-907). Poets who practiced in these genres often borrowed the voice of a woman to articulate their inarticulate feelings of love and affection for fellow men-in Buson's case, his beloved mentor and friend Shinga. 36 By opening his elegy with the voice of a woman and later giving voice to a pheasant, Buson also alludes to representations of mourning in ancient Japanese myth and religious practice. As Gary Ebersole writes, "the mourners in early Japanese funeral rituals were often equated with birds, though it is unclear whether they actually dressed as birds and imitated them in some fashion or whether the reference is simply metaphorical." 37 In the myth of Ame-no-waka-hiko (天若日子), the gods send a pheasant named Nakime (哭女), or "weeping woman," from the heavens down to earth. Ame-no-waka-hiko takes his divine bow and shoots the pheasant with an arrow, killing her, while the arrow flies back to heaven. The gods cast the arrow back down to earth, striking Ame-no-waka-hiko in the chest, killing him. The pheasant is the principal weeping mourner in the postdeath scene. 38 These Nakime eventually became a part of Buddhist funerary practices. In his study of death rituals in the Edo period, Nam-lin Hur has shown that in the event of death in the family, mortuary practices largely comprised four rites: "calling back the soul" (shōkon or sosei), "appeasing the soul," "transforming [the deceased] into a Buddha," and "sending off the soul." 39 The purpose of the first rite was to lure the soul back to the body so that the dead could come back to life. When performing this rite, family members, relatives, and neighbors wail for two purposes: to express sorrow and to call back the soul of the departed. "Calling the soul" (tamayobi) was a spirit-beckoning rite in Japan since ancient times, and its performance in Edo Buddhist practice was not uniform: "Most commonly, a family member would climb onto the roof of the house and, facing in the direction of the family gravesite, a mountain, the sea, the west, or the deceased, would shout something like 'please come back [the name of the deceased]." 40 Over time the role of wailing fell to women (female members and female villagers) since it was thought that women were closer to the divine than men. This role was eventually taken over by professional mourning women called nakime. 41 In some ways, the monologue (Lines 8-13 in italics) performed by the pheasant in Buson's elegy alludes to the Buddhist or more ancient and native rite of "calling back the soul." As Hur observes, it was common for the mourner to call out the name of the deceased. But Buson's elegy is not that simple or straightforward. The pheasant monologue is metaphorical, figuring the relationship between Buson and Shinga as akin to that between two pheasants. Considering the Neo-Confucian ideology that defined the Edo period, the translation and popularity of Chinese vernacular literature, and Buson's practice in Chinese poetry and painting, I argue that Buson deploys the pheasant as a trope for the Confucian bond between mentor and disciple and husband and wife, as represented in the tradition of Chinese and Japanese poetry.
As a performance, the pheasant monologue in Buson's poem also parallels the representation of staged ventriloquy of animal voices (including birds) in seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular fiction, especially in the strange tales of Pu Songling (1640-1717 蒲松齢). Ueda Akinari-a member of Buson's haikai circle-wrote works of fiction about ghosts and the supernatural that were informed by this genre of Chinese literature. Yiren Zheng has shown how Chinese works that represent ventriloquy and create disembodied-or what she calls "acousmatic"-voices display an awareness of the material conditions that mediate sound in the narrative. 42 Buson's poem, however, does not reveal the secret of the magic trick, as it were, and allows the reader to stay enchanted by the performance.
The dialogue, through the magic of metaphor, sets into motion a stream of allusions that illustrate how grief and longing as tenor, and how the pheasant's call as vehicle, form a trope in Japanese poetry. In the following sections I explore how "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" alludes to representations of the pheasant in the Chinese and Japanese traditions, both of which informed Buson's haikai poetry. In so doing, I do not claim to offer an exhaustive list of allusions. As Edward Kamens has shown in his study on utamakura (poetic toponyms 歌枕) in the waka tradition, when a poem names a specific place, it also evokes the collective of poems that share that place, linking the one poem to the entire continuum of Japanese poetry. 43 In a similar vein, I will show how the image of the pheasant can transport the reader throughout the Chinese and Japanese traditions.

The Pheasant Trope
Birds appear in the foundational texts of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Shijing (ca. eighth century BCE, Classic of poetry 詩經) opens with a poem that describes the song of an osprey. The Japanese preface to Kokinshū (905, Collection of poems new and old 古今集) argues that the warbler's song is akin to the feelings of the human heart: Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives. The song of the warbler among the blossoms, the voice of the frog dwelling in the water-these teach us that every living creature sings. 44 Pheasants, like other natural images in poetry, were often used as metonyms for human beings and symbols for human values. Since the beginning of the Chinese and Japanese traditions, poets deployed the poetic trope of the pheasant calling for its mate or child to represent the constancy of marital and parental bonds in a Confucian society. Such values were transmitted through poetic tropes (metonyms, metaphors, symbols) using birds and other natural imagery.
In the Chinese tradition, Buson alluded to pheasants (zhi 雉) that appear in poems from the Tang and Song dynasty (960-1279). Tang poetry's influence in Japanese literature can be found as early as the Heian period (795-1185). By the Edo period, Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728 荻生徂徠) saw to its revival as a part of a literary movement to compose poetry using models from antiquity. 45 After his death, Sorai's disciple and Buson's teacher Hattori Nankaku (1683-1759 服部 南郭) published Tōshi sen (Ch. Tangshi xuan; Selections of Tang poetry 唐詩選) in 1724.
Han Yu (768-824 韓愈) was one of the many poets anthologized in Tōshi sen, and his poetry was disseminated in collections imported from China and reprinted in Japan before and during Buson's time. 46 Buson read Chinese poetry and often referenced Tang poets (especially Wang Wei 王 維, 699-759) in his haikai. 47 Buson's deployment of the pheasant trope in his elegy evokes Han Yu's poem "Song of the Pheasants Fly at Dawn" (Zhi chao fei zao 雉朝飛操), which describes the Confucian patriarchy through the figure of male and female pheasants:  The poem's title alludes to a song of the same title in the Yuefu genre, and as a "song" (zao) it is sung to the musical accompaniment of a zither. The poem tells the story of Mu Duzi, a recluse from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), who even in his old age has not married. The bond between the female and male pheasants described in the poem and in other poems from the Yuefu tradition serve as a metaphor for marital fidelity. In Han Yu's poem the group of hens perform their docile obedience toward the cockerel by cooing or murmuring a sound of compliance represented by the onomatopoeia zhou zhou (粥粥). The speaker laments that he cannot compare to the pheasants, who, unlike him, possess vigor and companionship. Such a state evokes the loneliness and melancholy that characterize many songs in the Yuefu tradition.
Scenes featuring pheasants and other birds were also metaphors for life in court officialdom. Charles Hartman has observed that the pheasant represents the "constant and firm" (geng jie 耿介) rectitude of a man who displays fealty to his lord. In other contexts geng jie is associated with aloofness, stubbornness and unconventionality, attributes that describe one of the earliest Chinese lyric poets Qu Yuan (340-278 BCE? 屈原). 49 Qu Yuan was a statesman from the Warring States period who fell out of favor with King Huai of Chu and was subsequently banished from the court to suffer in lonely exile. To demonstrate his undying loyalty to the court, Qu Yuan is said to have composed "Encountering Sorrow" (Li Sao 離騷), a long lament whose free-style form broke poetic conventions. Qu Yuan's lyrical self-expression and innovation in Chinese poetic form may have inspired Buson to demonstrate his devotion to Shinga by breaking the rules of haikai and forging a new poetic form. 50 In ancient Japan, pheasants were used as a trope for the separation between lovers after sexual consummation, as demonstrated by the chōka below, excerpted from Nihon shoki: We are sleeping sweetly when The bird of the yard, The cock is heard crowing; The bird of the moors, The pheasant begins to boom.
Before I can say How dear you are to me, The dawn has come, my love.
umai neshi to ni / niwatsutori / kake wa naku nari / notsutori wa / kigishi wa toyomu / washikeku mo / imada iwazute / akenikeri wagimo 味寝寝し間に庭つ鳥鶏は鳴くなり野つ鳥は鴙は響む愛しけくもいま だ言はずて明けにけり我妹 51 The chōka is a song about a prince courting a princess, forcing her into a sexual union. After describing the events leading to their consummation of love, the speaker describes the call of birds to figure his sexual desire for the princess and the time to take his leave of her. In response, the princess composes a song, expressing her sadness at parting from the prince at dawn. Although it is unknown whether Shinga and Buson were lovers, Buson's allusion to the pheasant in this early Japanese poem shows how the abrupt disappearance of a beloved leaves the one left behind with feelings of yearning and unfulfilled desire.
The weight of this yearning is communicated in part by the verb toyomu (響む), or "to boom" (see bolded text above). While the tone of the boom here suggests the need for more sexual excitement, in other contexts, the timbre or tone of the pheasant's call is thought to be panicked and plaintive, making toyomu a metonym for the verb uzuku (疼く), or "to throb (with dull pain)." In both cases the pheasant's call is one that can be heard across a distance, suggesting that the sound is powerful and emotive-either to express the desire to mate, or to cry in pain about separation (from a mate).
The verb toyomu or its compound verbs, including naki-toyomu (to cry and project its call) and tachi-toyomu (to take flight and project its call) can be found in multiple poems representing bird call in Man'yōshū, the oldest collection of Japanese poetry. 52 In the early 1930s modern poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886Sakutarō ( -1942 observed that the longing in Buson's poetry evoked the love poems in Man'yōshū, speculating that Buson was probably a close reader of the collection. 53 Buson does not use the verb toyomu in his elegy, but the more ubiquitous verb naku, meaning "to cry" or "to call." In the spirit of toyomu, though, he represents a pheasant projecting its call to its mate by including the onomatopoeia hororo, like in the poem below by Taira no Sadafun (872?-923 平貞文) from Kokinshū: My tears overflow, hororo, like the sad call of the lone pheasant, flying up to seek a wife sweet as young grass in spring fields.
haru no no no / shigeki kusaba no / tsumagoi ni / tobidatsu kiji no / hororo to zo naku 春の野のしげき草葉の妻恋ひに飛び立つきじのほろろとぞ鳴く 54 In the Japanese tradition, the pheasant is associated with the season of spring, reflected here in the poem's setting on a spring plain (haru no no). From deep in the grass a cock pheasant takes flight in search of its female mate. The speaker represents the sound of its call with the onomatopoeia hororo, which can also refer to the sound of a bird beating its wings frantically. As suggested by the scene here, hororo is a panicked and plaintive call, and is assonant with the onomatopoeia for streaming tears, horohoro. By using the onomatopoeia hororo for the pheasant's resonant call, the speaker suggests that he too is weeping.
In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" Buson figures his relationship with his mentor as a romance between a hen and a cockerel, alluding to the conventional pheasant tropes that represent the constancy between male and female companions and the relationship between parent and child. Buson's predecessor Matsuo Bashō composed a hokku in which the speaker longs for his parents, a feeling of loss that conjures their voices in the sound of a pheasant's cry: Bashō deploys the pheasant trope to represent the constancy of the bond between parent and child in line with the poetic tradition, and to cope with his own loss and represent the process of grieving. The poem offers an example of a central way language can express the feeling of endless longing (shikiri ni koishi): through metaphor, the pheasant's cry (kiji no koe). The metaphor allows the speaker to contain his grief in the continuum of poetic representation, calling upon all the pheasant cries represented by poets time and again in the tradition.
In the Japanese tradition, pheasants are also used to represent the separation of lovers, as it was believed that the cockerel and hen pheasants sleep in different places. Below is a waka attributed to Man'yōshū poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (660-724 柿本人麻呂) in which the speaker compares himself and his lover to copper pheasants (yamadori 山鳥): Both cockerel and hen pheasants have tail feathers, but the cockerels are much longer. Hitomaro deploys the pheasant trope, using the image of the cockerel's long tail feathers as a metaphor for the long nights the male speaker sleeps alone, away from his mate.
The relationships figured by the pheasant in the poems by Bashō and Hitomaro are straightforward. In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen," however, the figuration of the intimate relationship between the speaker and deceased is not univocal, just like its form. The form of Buson's poem blends multiple poetic genres and combines multiple structures of intimacy: male-female, parent-child, brother-brother, and mentor-disciple (male-male). The word tomo, which means "friend" or "partner," in the pheasant monologue, blurs the conventional relationship between cockerel and hen by blending heterosexual romance with fraternity and filial piety. Many commentators of the elegy have read the relationships between the speaker in the poem and the addressee, and between the present and absent pheasant, as emblematic of a filial relationship. Muramatsu Tomotsugu, for example, argues that Buson's longing for Shinga is overlaid with nostalgia and a longing for his mother. 57 The earlier waka by Taira no Sadafun describes a scene where a cock pheasant calls for his female mate (tsuma). There is a similar crowing and calling (hororo) in Buson's poem, but the hen pheasant laments that she "had a friend" (tomo ariki). In Confucian discourse, a "friend" (Ch. you 友, the same graph used for tomo in the elegy) signifies fraternal and brotherly love, and is related to the Confucian virtue of "filial piety" (xiao 孝). 58 As I will show below, the pheasant trope was not limited to poetry. It also appeared in the visual culture that informed the lyricism of Buson's elegy and haikai practice.

The Pheasant and Ekphrasis
The pheasant monologue in "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" invites the reader to imagine what the two pheasants might look like. Buson's readers, especially those in his circle of literati poet-painters, might have imagined a pheasant from Chinese painting. As literati culture continued to blossom in late imperial China, the pheasant's beautiful feathers were associated with literati talent. 59 By the eighteenth century a wave of art and culture from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) informed haikai practice, giving rise to Sinophilia across intellectual spheres. 60 In the sixteenth century, Japanese artists were already emulating Chinese paintings in which pheasants appear as male and female pairs, especially in the "Bird and Flower" genre, which began as early as the Song dynasty (960-1279) and continued to the late Qing dynasty . Muromachi period painter Kanō Shōei (1519-1592 狩野松栄) represented male and female pheasants in a diptych (Fig. 1). 61 Of the two pheasants represented in the painting, the cockerel has the beautiful and colorful feathers. Through ekphrasis, Buson's elegy alludes to Chinese painting, imagining Shinga, as mentor, as a colorful cockerel, and Buson, in subordinate deference, a drab hen. It appears that Buson did not represent pheasants in "Bird and Flower" paintings as he did with the crow and other birds; but he did represent pheasants in hokku, a genre in which he made explicit references to Chinese poets and painters. 62 Buson's practice as a Chinese-style painter and his encounters with scholars from various disciplines associated with Chinese learning (kangaku 漢学) gave him the opportunity to absorb (either directly or indirectly) Chinese theories of lyricism, including "the blending of feeling and scene" (qing jing jiao rong 情景交融), which describes the merging of a poet's personal state of mind with scenes he beholds in the natural world. Fujita Shin'ichi has made similar observations, remarking that the dominant characteristic of Buson poems that represent a scene (kei 景) is that they "overflow with rhythms of feeling" (jō no shirabe ga afurederu 情の調べがあふれ出る). 63 Chinese literature scholar Ling Hon Lam has discussed "the blending of feeling and scene" as a discourse that grew from the mid-thirteenth century through the end of Chinese imperial history. 64 In the seventeenth century, Chinese philosopher Wang Fuzhi (1619-1692 王夫之) was a major proponent of this discourse. Lam has critiqued the interpretation of "the blending of feeling and scene" as a representation of interior subjectivity. He argues that the structure of emotion in early modern Chinese literature is spatial, mediated by the theatricality of emotions in stage performance. 65 The theatricality of this Chinese lyricism can be seen in the pheasant monologue in Buson's elegy.
While Lam's argument about the spatiality of emotion is limited to vernacular Chinese prose, it is interesting to read alongside Buson's ekphrastic experimentations in hokku. In my view, Buson infused the lyricism of "the blending of feeling and scene" in hokku that appeared as synecdoche for painted landscapes, including those that represented the pheasant. One could argue that these ekphrastic haikai were more visual and empirical than the poems by his predecessors because they were informed by Buson's expertise as a painter, and as a painter he painted in the genres that he also represented in poetry. While composing poems on paintings had long been part of the Chinese and Japanese traditions, Buson's work encourages the reader to think of his poetry as conventional and historically contingent. Considering the rise of scientific empiricism and the performance of eccentricity in Edo literati culture, it is reasonable to assume that Buson's ekphrasis was a representation of his individual tastes. 66 Whether Buson was viewing a painting or a scene in real life, he represented natural objects with a heightened sense of visual perception, drawing attention to form, color, and landscape. These poems, like the hokku below, displayed Buson's eye as a visual poet and his empirical understanding of the natural world through the representational mode of painting: The slow setting sun-A pheasant perched On the bridge. osoki hi ya / kiji no ori-iru / hashi no ue 遅き日や雉の下りゐる橋の上 67 Buson's hokku describes a scene where a pheasant is perched on top of a rustic bridge basking in the glow of twilight. The pheasant (kiji) likely refers to a Japanese green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor), whose plumage contains purplish-blue, green, red, and spotted-grey feathers. 68 As scholars Ogata Tsutomu and Morita Ran observe, the variegated feathers gleam in the glow of sunset, presenting a rare view of beauty during a moment of temporal suspension. As the colors of its plumage change ever so slightly with the slow descent of the sun, the image of the pheasant becomes all the more vibrant and vivid.
Buson displayed his painterly attention to the pheasant in several haiga (俳画), a genre of Japanese painting that paired haikai (often hokku) with a seemingly simple illustration. He produced a haiga that depicted a hunter with a musket in one hand and a dead pheasant slung over his shoulder. 69 Unlike the "Bird and Flower" genre of Chinese painting, the haiga genre allowed for the representation of simple and crude images. Buson inscribed a hokku as an ekphrastic description (jigasan 自画賛) of his illustration (Fig. 2) of a hunter with a pheasant: The pheasant shot, Returning on the road home While the sun is high.
kiji uchite / modoru ieji no / hi wa takashi 雉打てもどる家路の日は高し 70 The hokku supplements the simple illustration with a narrative: after shooting the pheasant, the hunter returns home. The third measure of the hokku aestheticizes the aftermath of his kill: the spring sun is still high in the sky shining upon the dead pheasant, illuminating its beautiful feathers.
The previous hokku about hunting pheasants also demonstrates how the pheasant was not only used as a trope for Confucian values. Such hokku raise the possibility that the haikai genre as a whole was informed by the rise of scientific empiricism in the Edo period, allowing poets to represent personal experience in addition to conventional tropes. In what follows, I show how the pheasant trope is used to represent death and absence.

Death of the Pheasant
In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" the speaker hears the call of what sounds like a pheasant (kigisu no aru ka), whereupon the poem enters a monologue in which a hen pheasant laments the disappearance of a friend. The hen, or the female voice of the poet, then uses metaphor to describe the fugitiveness of life: she imagines a hege, or "Protean," transforming into smoke (keburi). The image of smoke alludes to earlier poems in the tradition that gave the pheasant trope its metaphorical associations with death and transformation. The poem below by Retired Emperor Gotoba (1180-1239 後鳥羽院) deploys the pheasant trope in a metaphor for funerary cremation: On Musashino plain How the pheasant Longs for its child! In the smoky gloom Its calls get lost. musashino no / kigisu ya ika ni / ko o omou / keburi no yami ni / koe madou nari むさし野の雉子やいかに子を思ふけぶりのやみに声まどふなり 71 Unlike the straightforward scenes in the poems by Hitomaro and Taira no Tadafun, the scene here is filled with distress and confusion. As an utamakura, Musashino is a place of historical and cultural remembrance, and here it is likely conjuring memories of the battles fought during the Genpei War (1180-1185), a civil war between the Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genji) clans that ended in the fall of the Taira. Musashino has appeared in literary texts since Man'yōshū. Medieval poets used it as a poetic topos, likely referencing the battles that took place there during the Genpei War. Throughout the tradition Musashino has been represented as a place of nostalgia and remembrance. 72 Reflecting on the gravity of loss associated with this historic site, the speaker observes how the parent pheasant can long (omou) for its child even when the sound of its call is somehow muted or obscured by the smoke (keburi). In the natural world the smoke likely refers to fog or mist that forms at dawn on the Musashino plain; as a metaphor for human affairs, the smoke can be interpreted as the formless remains of a body, the cloud of smoke from its funerary cremation. 73 Synesthesia is characteristic of waka from the medieval period onward, exemplified here by how the image of formless gloom (yami) of smoke somehow envelopes the sound of the pheasant's plaintive call, resulting in it getting lost (madou). It is common for poets to use the word koe, or "voice," to represent the call of a bird; but the position of koe at the end of the poem after the images of the pheasant, its child, and the smoke leaves the source of the call ambiguous. This allows the speaker to make a poignant observation about the gravity of loss, that the calls of the living and the distant cries of the dead are just as incommunicable as a cloud of smoke.
Deploying the same utamakura Musashino, Buson composed a hokku in which the pheasant appears as a figure for absence, conjuring the memories of bygone wars and the ghosts of fallen warriors: The pheasant cries-On the grasses of Musashino The eight Heike houses. kiji naku ya / kusa no musashi no / hachiheiji 雉子鳴や草の武藏の八平氏 74 The "eight Heike houses" (hachiheiji or hachiheishi) refer to the fallen samurai clans from the Kazusa, Chiba, Miura, Toi, Chichibu, Ōba, Kajiwara, and Nagao provinces. 75 The pheasant's cry serves as a metaphor for the heroic cries of the eight clans who fought in the past, and for the mournful cry of the speaker in the present calling out to commemorate fallen warriors.
In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" a supernatural being (the hege, or Protean) disappears into smoke, evoking poems in the tradition in which the pheasant was used in metaphors for corporeal transformation. In Japanese and Chinese mythology, birds are a common form for metamorphosis because it was thought that their ability to fly brought them close to the divine. 76 Ideas of transformation from myth were later blended with related ideas from Buddhism and the metaphysics of Neo-Confucian thought, which entered Japan during the Kamakura period (1192-1333) and became the dominant philosophy of the Edo (Tokugawa) period. In Buddhism transformation is associated with death and rebirth. A poem by Buddhist monk Jakuren (1139-1202 寂蓮 ) brings these ideas of transformation together, describing the pheasant's call as a metaphysical object of transformation in order to escape death: The hunter is poised On the hunting moor where a pheasant Longs for its mate, Wishing it can transform Into the sound of its call. karibito no / iru no no kigisu / tsuma koite / naku ne bakari ni / mi o ya kaeten かり人のいる野の雉子妻こひてなく音ばかりに身をやかへてん 77 Like Gotoba's waka, Jakuren's poem also describes a spring landscape where a pheasant longs for its mate. Here the presence of a hunter (karibito) infuses the scene with suspense, as the pheasant may soon fall victim to the hunter's arrow and be unable to project its plaintive call. Under duress and as a means to escape death, the pheasant wishes that it could transform (kaeten) its body (mi) into the sound of its call (naku ne). The ten (or temu) suffix attached to the verb kaeru (to transform) communicates the pheasant's desire, through the speaker, to be able to make that transformation, and that that transformation will be complete. Should the pheasant's wish come true, its form would be the mere sound of longing, an immortal form without a material body, invulnerable to danger.
Buson's "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" seems to grant Jakuren's pheasant its desperate wish: to transform into the sound of its call. The hege, or Protean, is the creature that changes form and appears in Edo literature on the supernatural. 78 The wind blows strong upon the spring landscape, and before the Protean in smoke form can take shelter, he is blown away. Echoing the cock pheasant's passionate and repetitive call, the hen repeats the line with which she began her recollection. She ends her monologue with the reality that despite what the human speaker thinks he had heard while roaming on the hill, "Today / No pheasant crows hororo." The inability to hear hororo suggests the need of something else to convey that meaning. Similar to Kyorai's hokku in which the meaning of hororo is not self-evident and therefore requires metaphor (the sound of a waterfall basin breaking) in order to be heard and understood, Buson's elegy creates a situation in which its speakers-the human speaker and the hen-require another means, a metaphor, in order to hear and transform hororo: like the sound hororo falling on deaf ears, and the Protean that poofs into smoke and vanishes in the wind. The Protean's mysteriousness as a supernatural being that can change form at will is also a figure for the hororo, which, as I will show below, takes form in the sound of the elegy's poetic form.

Sound and Sympathy
As I have shown above, the representation of the pheasant in "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" in Buson's poetry was informed by a long history of tropes that appear in mythology and in Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. By the eighteenth century, the blossoming of Ming visual culture and the rise of scientific empiricism informed the representation of pheasants, allowing the Edo poet and painter to represent the bird as a natural, disenchanted, and desacralized object.
Since many of Buson's hokku depend on the reader's knowledge of Chinese poetry and painting to make sense, the image of the pheasant is often figural or allegorical. Marcon has documented the paradigm shift that objectified the natural world in the eighteenth century. Although Buson was not a scientist, he was a poet-painter who socialized with intellectuals across disciplines, forming relationships that allowed him to develop an open mind and experiment in his poetry. Under this new Edo episteme, there was new distinction between subject and object, between humanity and nature. Once nature was made an object of empirical observation, it was a "thing" that the subject could "know." For Buson the objectification of nature mediated his thoughts and feelings about nature. To be sure, I am not claiming that one should read all Buson poems in this way; Buson was a poet of his time who experimented with new ideas, inviting the reader to imagine how those ideas might play out in his poetry. I contend that the scientific and painterly gaze afforded by the intellectual and aesthetic trends of his time informed Buson's representation of the pheasant in his elegy, allowing him to represent how a late eighteenthcentury literatus could share feelings for the pheasant, sympathizing with the bird through the mediation of a new poetic form.
Sympathizing with the pheasant was also a way Buson represented the eighteenth-century zeitgeist about the relationship between literature and emotion, especially how literature stirs sympathy and empathy in the reader. Peter Flueckiger has shown how theorizations of empathy brought literary and political discourses together in eighteenth-century Japan. 79 When Buson's contemporary Motoori Norinaga pronounced that the essence of The Tale of Genji was mono no aware (lit. "the pathos of things"), or "sympathy or empathy for the feelings of others," he opened a new discourse that examined the relationship between literature and the representation of human emotion. 80 While Norinaga was mainly in conversation with scholars of Genji and poets of waka, his ideas about mono no aware spread beyond the sphere of waka, into haikai and into Buson's literati circle: What is it to know mono no aware? Aware originally described the cry of emotion [nageki no koe] uttered once the heart is stirred after seeing, hearing, or experiencing something [mono], much like the aa! or the hare! used in vernacular speech today. 81 Norinaga argues that to know (shiru) or feel mono no aware is to be moved by something and expressing that emotion or feeling through communicable sounds like aware, aa, and hare. 82 This idea alludes to the Chinese classic "Record of Music" (Yue ji 樂記) in the Li ji (Book of rites 禮記), which states "when the human mind is moved, some external thing has caused it. Stirred by external things into movement, it takes on form in sound." 83 Echoing the "Record of Music" and Norinaga's description of mono no aware, Buson's elegy represents how the emotions of a poet during a time of mourning take form in sound, in cries of emotion (nageki no koe) mediated by figurations of the pheasant's call.
In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" Buson mourns the death of a friend by transforming the pheasant trope and figuring the pheasant's call in a way that affords the ancient verb toyomu (to reverberate) a poetic form. Buson deploys repetition and rhythm to simulate the call, sympathizing with the pheasant, an external object of the natural world. The reverberation of the call simultaneously creates a lyric event in which the reader is enlisted to sympathize with the grieving poet by hearing and feeling the sound, the reverberation in the poem. This sympathetic attention to the pheasant participates in the empiricism of his time by representing the call with fidelity to a late eighteenth-century observer's personal experience hearing the pheasant's call. 84 It also critiques this new episteme by re-inscribing the enchanted and the sacred back into the natural world as a means to understand, metaphysically or spiritually, the experience of death, grieving, mourning, and longing. Buson does this through the reverberation in poetic form, which affords him a means to represent the grieving process and perform an incantation that summons the dead back to life.
This summoning act, in some ways, speaks to views of death and funerary ritual in ancient and premodern Japan. As Ebersole has argued, "the early Japanese did not consider death to be a permanent or irreversible state." 85 For example, Nihon shoki mentions the custom of "calling the soul" (tama-yobi), revealing the ancient Japanese belief that the dead could be revived. 86 According to Hur there were many accounts in the late eighteenth century of successful resuscitation of the dead: "For the Tokugawa Japanese, it did not matter whether or not these events had actually occurred: what mattered was the possibility, however slight, of bringing their loved ones back to life. Thus, the custom of calling back the soul lingered on." 87 While Buson's elegy may not be a "ritual" in the formal sense, which is the prescribed form or order of a religious or ceremonial rite, it does suggest the premodern belief that calling back the soul was possible. 88 What affords this possibility is the elegy's poetic form.
As a poem, "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" simultaneously sets into motion multiple events, including grieving, mourning, and summoning the dead, and not in any prescribed form or order. This is because the elegy's form is irregular, straddling the haikai and kanshi genres and alluding to an array of poems from the Japanese and Chinese traditions. Its poetic form makes the events of grieving, mourning, and spirit-summoning unique to Buson's moment in the late eighteenth century, using sound in an innovative way to perform an act of sympathy for the poet at a time of mourning and grieving, and for the pheasant as a bird of the natural world.
This sound is hororo, an onomatopoeia that many poets have deployed in their poems to represent the call of a pheasant. Buson did this too in his elegy, but, for the first time, also gave hororo a poetic form of its own: the feelings of passion, excitement, and affection represented by the sound hororo are audible in the repetition of lines, which reverberate, or toyomu, in the poem. In tune with other elegiac poems in the tradition-from poetry in Man'yōshū to the chorus and dialogue in nō plays from the medieval period-Buson's elegy uses repetition to showcase a lyric performance that blends pain and pleasure, as the lyric mind mourns a loss but to a beat. This beat produces a rhythm that mediates feeling without putting a stamp on what those feelings necessarily are.
The repetition of Lines 1-2-"You departed this morning; my heart this evening, scattered in a thousand pieces, / Why are you so far away?"in Lines 14-15 in the poem echoes the repetition of Line 8-"I had a friend. He lived across the river"-in Line 12-"I had a friend. He lived across the river. Today,"-in the hen's monologue. The only difference in the hen's speech is the addition of "Today / No pheasant crows hororo" (kyō wa / hororo tomo nakanu). The tomo is being used as an emphatic adverb for hororo, but it is also homophonous with the tomo (friend) that appears in the hen's monologue. This suggests that the hororo refers to his call, and not hers or any other bird's. This difference highlights the fact that hororo is not audible in the fiction of the poem, but on a meta-formal level resonates in the repetition and rhythm of the entire poem: a pheasant's call that recurs again and again.
This rhythm mediates the relationship between poet and reader, and the connection to divine experience. The incantatory power of repetition in Buson's elegy speaks to Ebersole's argument that repetition in Man'yōshū poems served a sacred and ceremonial purpose in death rituals, and therefore had religious and aesthetic import. Although Buson's elegy is not a ritual lament, nor has it been noted to have religious use, its deployment of rhythm resembles that of an incantatory act to summon the deceased back to life: this plays out in the poet's apostrophes and in the fiction between the hen and cockerel, whose presence manifests in an illusory sound caught by the ear of the human speaker, and in an illusory imaginary image of a Protean conjured in the hen's memory and imagination.
Reading the elegy aloud performs the incantation: the repetition of lines and the repetition of sounds (such as ki and no) create a rhythm, producing a somatic feeling beyond representation in language, a representation possible only in sound, which is non-representational. In the history of lyric in Anglo-European literature, Jonathan Culler observes that free verse forms enabled poets to escape the shackles of classical meter and enter a direct relationship with the divine. 89 He argues that "rhythm is an event without representation" because it suggests something else, an experience beyond the poem itself. 90 In the process of reading, the reader becomes aware of its rhythm, its pulse, and its something-else-ness, which creates sympathy for the poet in communion with the spirit world and the divine.
The conclusion of the elegy contradicts the sound made audible by the repetition and rhythm in the form of the poem; and yet at the same time, the ending echoes the silence that pervades the content of the poem. After the repetitions, the speaker finds himself in his humble hut before an image of (Amida) Buddha. Thereupon he mentions what he does not perform: he lights no candles, and he offers no flowers, the acts of which intensify the gravity of loss because material objects seem to have no use here. He only offers stillness and reverence. The onomatopoeic adverb sugosugo to, translated above as "in silence with heart heavy," speaks to the anxiety, heaviness, and stillness of the moment in crestfallen silence. The sugosugo to describes the manner in which the human speaker stands still (tatazumeru), in the wake of the incantatory charm from the earlier repetition and rhythm. The term also refers to the disappointment one feels immediately after expectations for excitement and pleasure go unfulfilled. If the repetition is the poem's performance, once it stops, the scene grows more silent than before, and the speaker returns home feeling unfulfilled.
The silence and feeling of awe that concludes the poem suggest that something magical is happening (the possibility that the departed has returned), which leaves the reader in a state of suspension, waiting for that something to materialize. The poem ends with a declaration that tonight will be "all the more reverent" (koyoi wa / koto ni tōtoki), which adds a layer of profound admiration and respect to the "in silence with heart heavy" by which the speaker stands still. This stillness in reverence continues the eternal and divine moment, the awesome feeling that earlier resonated in the nerves and tensions between the words that recur and the images that repeat. Like tōtoki, the word "reverence" also means the quality that inspires a profound sense of awe, the feelings that strike a person when confronting the divine or the sublime. The poem thereby ends ambiguously: both in deferential silence and reverential awe, as if the song and dance in the incantation and rhythm had summoned a presence from absence. Tarrying in the moment of the "as if" is the aesthetic experience afforded by Buson's poetic form.
Like in Buson's hokku on pheasants, scenes in the elegy are figured as places of absence: the hill marks the spot where poet and friend once enjoyed each other's company, and the plains of bamboo and sedge mark the spot where the Protean disappears. While the white and yellow blossoms evoke the vivid colors that characterize many of Buson's hokku (though unexamined here), their role here is static and their beauty goes unappreciated, as the speaker laments "there is no one to share the view." Buson deprives the elegy of color to bolster its somber theme, allowing the usual landscape of visual plenitude to be overtaken by a landscape of sound.
The way the elegy represents the pheasant's call in the sound of its poetic form enlists the reader to sympathize with the grieving poet and wailing bird. Even though the poem ends, the pheasant's call, by way of repetition, reverberates in the reader's imagination as a residual echo beyond the containment of poetic form. Should a poet desire to represent immeasurable grief, composing a poem in which grief has no end is a sure way to do it. This is what Norinaga may have meant by "being overwhelmed by mono no aware." In his essay "Isonokami sasamegoto" 石上私淑言 (1763; Personal views on poetry) Norinaga writes: "when mono no aware is so strong that it cannot be contained, it becomes hard to endure it and to control it once it lodges deep in one's heart, despite all efforts to contain it." 91 In Buson's elegy the speaker's efforts to contain grief all fail, as the hororo goes unheard and the Buddhist rituals are not performed.
I contend that Buson's innovative deployment of the pheasant trope is evidence of his empiricism: rather than relying on conventional poetic genres-waka, haikai, kanshi-to mediate his longing and performing rituals (e.g. lighting candles, offering flowers, chanting the Buddha's name, shouting the departed's name) to contain his grief, Buson creates a new poetic form that represents grief as a personal experience tied to the natural world through the figure of the pheasant. This representation of the pheasant is informed by the genres of painting in which Buson practiced and by the scientific empiricism of his time, which encouraged poets to walk into the wild (just like the elegy's human speaker "walked to the hills and roamed") and observe the pheasant as a bird of the natural world.
Buson shows his scientific empiricism by representing the pheasant's call (hororo), metaphorically, as rhythm and repetition in poetic form. At the same time, Buson reveals that a late eighteenth-century literati poet's personal relationship to nature can be imaginative as well: the metamorphosis of the Protean into smoke and into thin air, and the summoning of the dead back to life, all suggest a metaphysical or spiritual philosophy not determined by ancient myth, Buddhism, or Neo-Confucian thought. "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" reaches beyond such ideological frames because it is literature, and more important, a new poetic form that leaves interpretation wide open with possibility.
The mention of Amida Buddha in the poem may suggest that Buson was a follower of Jōdo-shū (浄土宗), or Pure Land Buddhism. Chanting or invoking the name of the Amida Buddha (nenbutsu 念仏) would allow him to achieve enlightenment and enter the Pure Land. At the end of the poem Buson left his Buddhist signature (see note 18), but Japanese scholars have avoided Buddhist interpretation. This may have to do with the fact that the poem is not didactic: it does not quote scripture, nor does it end by entering the Pure Land. Rather, the ending tarries in the moment of mourning in the material world. Buson's elegy shows that a human being, unlike nature, cannot live among the divine in infinite time, but he or she can feel the presence of the divine through sound as an aesthetic experience afforded by poetic form.
Although they wrote at different times and came from different literary traditions, Buson's poetry parallels the work of nineteenth-century American poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The representation of grief in "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" speaks to what Branka Arsíc has described as "perpetual grief" in the writings of Thoreau, who wrote: "Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent." Arsíc shows how Thoreau believed that only nature is capable of pure and perpetual grief because human grief is a loss that eventually gets restored: "Human grief doesn't infinitely abide with the lost but instead figures ways to self-regeneration." 92 Buson's elegy simultaneously engages in the process of mourning and avoids that very self-regeneration through the pheasant's call, which by the end of the poem reverberates indefinitely beyond the containment of form. 93 Pheasants continued to enchant the imagination of haikai poets in the Late Edo period and thereafter. But the way Buson's elegy innovatively represented the sound hororo beyond the mere word, working it into the weave of a new poetic form, may have left some poets wondering about the viability of words like hororo to represent their longing and empirical observation of pheasants. In the early nineteenth century Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828 小林一茶), who is well known for his poems on insects and animals, composed over fifty hokku on pheasants, including the one below: The copper pheasant Does not cry ken or hororo Anymore. yamakiji no / ken mo hororo mo / nakarikeri 山雉のけんもほろろもなかりけり 94 The speaker's poignant affirmation of absence (nakarikeri) suggests that the pheasant is silent or even dead, which leaves the reader to imagine what its call may sound like. As a composer of senryū (the more ironic and cynical cousin of hokku), Issa may be commenting on the failure of language to represent the pheasant's call, that even the onomatopoeias ken and hororo are no longer viable in an age when representation in art and literature was moving towards realism.
After Thomas Edison's (1847-1941) invention of the phonograph in 1877, perhaps there was no longer a need for the poet to represent the pheasant's call using hororo or giving it a new idiom, as Buson had done. The idea that the pheasant's call could truly resonate and break the heart, however, continued to captivate the imagination of poets, even in the modern period: The pheasant's call Peals across The great bamboo plain. kiji no koe / ōtakehara o / nariwataru 雉子の声大竹原を鳴り渡る 95 Modern novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916 夏目漱石) composed the haiku (formerly known as hokku) above in spring of 1896 when he was a high school teacher in the rural town of Kumamoto, Kyūshū. The poem can be read as an empirical account of Sōseki hearing the pheasant's call across a bamboo plain.
Considering Sōseki's later theoretical writings on the relationship between literature and sympathy, the poem can also be read as a metaphor for the way the pheasant trope has resonated throughout the poetic tradition, pealing across (nariwataru) the planes of poetic consciousness, like an acoustic beacon pulsing past memories of loss into form again. In "Mourning for Hokuju Rōsen" this pulse came in the form of the hen pheasant's repeated cries: "I had a friend" (tomo ariki). In his writings, Thoreau represented birds as "immortal beings in perpetual change and capable of hosting what has been," making them "living relics." 96 The pheasants represented in Japanese poetry are also painful reminders of loss in seek of renewal. And by the end of Buson's elegy, that renewal comes in the form of residual reverberation-just read and listen.