Pathway to Japanese Literature

Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

Oozaki Housai Selected Haiku CollectionAuthor: Ozaki Hosai

See Author Details Here：Wiki (Ozaki Hosai)

Original Title	尾崎放哉選句集
Author	尾崎放哉
Genre	Modern Short Fiction
Author Type	Male Author
Summary	This collection unveils the poetic journey of a visionary haiku master whose brief life blazed across early 20th-century Japan. From adolescent verses capturing plum branches snaring kite strings to middle-aged meditations on temple bells and coastal solitude, each poem becomes a prism refracting fleeting moments—dew on clover, a child’s forgotten umbrella, winter waves roaring through paper doors. The poet’s restless spirit migrates through classrooms, corporate offices, Manchurian wastelands, and monastic communities, his free-verse haiku crystallizing raw encounters with impermanence: a crow’s shadow crossing harvested fields, faces glimpsed in well water, fireflies dissolving into darkness. Edited for accessibility yet preserving crystalline strangeness, these selections trace an evolution from traditional lyricism to radical simplicity—snowy Jizo statues observed between insurance paperwork, drunken nights scribbling verses while temple frogs sing. Through financial ruin, failed marriages, and terminal illness, the poems pulse with unflinching clarity—a dying man noting persimmons ripening outside his window, storm winds tearing through cotton floss as autumn departs. Here lies not just poetry but a life etched in seventeen syllables: lonely, luminous, and utterly singular.