I had been reading Haiku for five years before moving to Japan. Bashō, Issa, Buson…their work hovered in my margins like birds outside a window: elegant, distant, beautiful. I read their poems with reverence, but from a certain remove, as one might admire a bonsai in a museum case.
Probably the first one I read was from Bashō:
the moon a sign / this way, sir, to enter / a traveler’s inn
I have always liked poetry but had never before encountered something so small and perfect. I read them with a tremendous appetite yet handled them carefully, almost like they were small sparrows…liable to break if gripped too tightly. I doled them out, one a day, making sure they could last me an entire year of mornings.
But the scale of my life did not yet match their size. And then I moved to Tokyo.
It was not the city I expected to teach me anything about Haiku. Tokyo is velocity: trains threading through morning fog, vending machines blinking awake at midnight, entire neighborhoods assembled vertically. Even the silence hums here. But somewhere between the Keiyo Line and the first time I mispronounced shizen (nature) in language class, something in me began to slow.
I began walking to the bay in the mornings, not for exercise, but because the wind off the water felt like something to pay attention to. I started noticing the way small birds hop sideways across bicycle paths. The pause between train chimes. The curve of plastic umbrellas hung like lanterns outside konbini. I was, in the truest sense, beginning again. And Haiku…those poems I once read as distant objects…now felt strangely near. They felt like instructions. Or invitations.
In the early mornings, I read Bashō again:
On a withered branch / a crow has alighted / nightfall in autumn.
I had read that poem many times. But now, living in a foreign place where I understood less than half of what was said to me on a given day, that poem no longer felt picturesque. It felt like truth. A crow. A branch. The sudden hush of dusk. These were not images to be admired. They were the world, seen clearly. Briefly. With reverence.
This, I’ve come to realize, is the work of Haiku…not to decorate experience, but to attend to it.
Keats once wrote that a poet must have “negative capability,” the ability to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” without reaching for resolution. I think the Haiku masters practiced a kindred posture. Their poems resist the need to explain. They do not moralize or conclude. They observe. They allow. They dwell in the moment before meaning hardens. That kind of perception requires both humility and attention; two traits I’ve been reacquainted with while fumbling through daily life in a country that does not bend to my rhythms.
Language learning itself has become a kind of Haiku practice. In English, I live among paragraphs. In Japanese, I dwell in syllables. Each sound feels deliberate. Each phrase hard-won. In the classroom, our teacher writes the same simple sentence on the board and we repeat it slowly:
これは日本の花です。
This is a Japanese flower.
I read that sentence and think of Buson:
The pear tree flowers / white petals slowly / float down and down.
Suddenly, grammar dissolves. I am simply watching petals.
The more I read Haiku here, the more I notice how often they begin with something overlooked: a mosquito, a plum pit, a patch of melting snow. Nothing is too small. Nothing is beneath attention. In a world so often dominated by spectacle, Haiku returns the eye to what is quietly unfolding. What is already here. My first few months in Japan have done the same.
In this new slowness, I’ve begun to understand that Haiku is not merely a literary form. It is a spiritual discipline. A practice of looking and not turning away. Of naming without grasping. Of trusting that the briefest glance, if truly attended to, can hold an entire world.
So I keep reading. One poem each day. I read them aloud in my kitchen, where the kettle boils. On the platform at Shin-Urayasu, where schoolchildren carry tiny trombone cases. At night, on the walk home, where vending machines blink like quiet lighthouses.
And slowly, syllable by syllable, the poems settle. Not as wisdom from a foreign land. But as reminders. That stillness has a language. That even a passing crow, if truly seen, can teach us how to live.
*****
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (The Written Path: A Journey Through Sobriety and Scripture) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social