A reader writes: Recently, I noticed some haiku receiving awards in a competition that contained two similar kigo. I almost didn’t notice because the haiku flowed well and the images were vivid. Should it matter, or is redundancy an acceptable matter of choice?

I think my personal opinion on this, for haiku poets writing in English, is that like any word, space, or punctuation mark in haiku, everything should carry weight. If removed, would that significantly detract from the verse? The difference might not be limited to meaning, but include rhythm or musicality. In some verses, repetition is deliberate and accumulates meaning. So, if you almost didn’t notice two kigo because the haiku flowed well and the images were vivid, that seems fine, at least to me, and evidently the judges thought likewise. Real redundancy is usually a flaw. But was there really redundancy in the verse that won an award, apart from using two words that happen to be formal kigo? Were they charged with different loads that made sense together?

Here’s a neat pedigree example from the hokku (opening verse) in a renga:

蚤飛べよ おなじ事なら蓮の上
nomi tobe yo / onaji koto nara / hasu no ue

jump flea!
might as well be
on to a lotus

Issa, tr. David Lanoue

Both flea (nomi) and lotus (hasu) are summer kigo. Both carry weight, as David Lanoue comments in the journal Presence: “For a Pure Land Buddhist like Issa, a flea jumping onto a lotus blossom is symbolically realising his own most deeply desired, most devout aspiration: to be reborn in Amida’s Pure Land and, once there, to achieve enlightenment. Even a flea, Issa suggests, can become a Buddha.”

In a renga, the second verse, the wakiku, without a semantic break in it, should complement and buttress the first while moving the subject on a little. It should stay in the same season and tone as the hokku:

すずみ筵に入相の月
susumi mushiro ni / iriai no tsuki

so cool on a straw mat
watching the sunset moon

Kibō, tr. David Lanoue

The straw mat suggests Buddhist meditation or zazen, often in the lotus position, consistent with the hokku but not repeating anything in it. There are two kigo here too, cooling off (susumi or suzumi) and moon, which without further specific qualification would default to autumn (ruled out at this point in the renga). Cooling off is the dominant kigo, and so the moon at sunset becomes just the ordinary moon that can be seen at many times of the year. Sunset is not of itself a kigo, although “sunset glow” (yūyake) is a summer kigo, so the inclusion of sunset modifies the default season of “moon” and slightly reinforces the essential summer season here. Kibō is showing his haikai smarts.

Nothing in the above two verses seems redundant.

There is also the inescapable fact that while some teachers of English-language haiku decree that you can’t have more than one kigo in a haiku, this ignores many famous hokku or haiku in Japanese, and some celebrated infamous ones, that do just that.  For example, we have:

柿もぎの　きん玉寒し　秋の風
akimogi no / kintama samushi / aki no kaze

picking persimmons
my balls are cold
autumn wind

or:

Picking persimmons —
My testicles are frozen
By the autumn wind.

Ryokan Taigu, tr. John Stevens

Persimmon is an autumn kigo, so is autumn wind, and so is “cold” —all consistent with autumn. (Stevens’ “frozen” would be winter, on its own). Three kigo in one verse.

Lost in translation is that “kintama” is literally “golden balls” — like the persimmons—and jocular slang for testicles. The Zen monk Ryokan had a mischievous sense of humour.

Not to mention Bashō’s “Ah spring, spring / great spring! / And so forth“,  a famous haiku in Japan with multiple kigo is:

目には青葉 山ほとゝぎす はつ松魚
me ni wa aoba / yama hototogisu / hatsu-gatsuo

the sight of green leaves
a mountain cuckoo
the first bonito

Yamaguchi Sōdō

Three kigo for early summer. None redundant. Three parts, no kireji, two semantic cuts. Every word counts. This one appeared with a commentary in a Haiku of the Day here.

Bashō had no compunctions about double kigo when it suited:

uguisu no / kasa otoshitaru / tsubaki kana
bush warbler’s / hat to drop / camellia!

or:

bush warbler
has dropped his hat
camellia

Bashō , tr. Jane Reichhold

The bush warbler and the camellia are both early spring kigo. This is one of his later works (1689). Reichhold comments: In earlier poetry, a favourite cliché was that the bush warbler was stitching a hat of plum blossoms. Camellia plants drop whole flowers rather than petals. The fallen flower seems as if it has been stitched together and therefore must be the hat of a bush warbler.

One of Chiyo-ni‘s:

春雨や蓬を摘みに出たりけり
harusame ya / yomogi o tsumi ni / detari keri

Spring rain—
I had gone out
to pick mugwort.

Chiyo-ni, tr. Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi

There are two kigo here: Spring rain and yomogi (mugwort, one of the Artemisia genus), an aromatic herb used in traditional Japanese sweets, soups and tempura, and in herbal treatments, aromatherapy, and moxibustion. Its green shoots symbolise the renewal of spring, warming, sweet and arousing scents. This reads as a line from a notebook or diary about an actual event: There was spring rain, and she’d gone out to pick mugwort. I suggest that it would be somewhat daft to argue that she “can’t have” the two things in the same verse “because they’re both kigo and there’s seasonal redundancy”. Whereas indeed the two things complement each other beautifully: The gentle rain of spring, the green shoots of yomogi, its emerging fragrance, its sweetness and healing properties. The verse is about more than getting wet.

Buson has quite a few with more than one kigo, sometimes in different seasons; but one season is clearly the key one. His famous “rape blossom / the moon towards the east / the sun towards the west” is keyed to a late spring kigo, the canola blossoms. The sun would normally be symbolic of summer, the unqualified moon of autumn. Yet here they are planets, ostensibly observed at the same time.

You can find others by Buson with two harmonious, or with mixed, kigo:

山蟻のあからさま也白牡丹
Yama-ari no akarasama nari hakubotan

a mountain ant stark on the white peony

or:

mountain ant — seen so clearly on the white peony

Buson, tr. Stephen Addis, Fumiko Yamamoto and Akira Yamamoto

Ant is an all-summer kigo; the peony is early summer. Addis and the Yamamotos have inserted an em֫-dash, but there is no kireji and only the slightest of semantic cuts in this verse, changing the perspective. One sentence fragment, two images (nikku ichishō pattern). Any gardener knows how attracted are ants to peonies! They go together. I suggest that neither kigo is redundant; they complement each other. 

Also by Buson, the very interesting:

菜の花や　鯨もよらず　海暮ぬ
nanohana ya / kujira mo yorazu / umi kurenu

rapeseed blossom — not even a whale comes near, dusk has darkened the sea.

or:

A field of mustard flowers
no whales passed today
night falls on the sea

Buson, tr. W S Merwin and Takako Lento

A glowing foreground of yellow blooms is cut with the kireji ‘ya’ to the great sea beyond. The absence of the world’s largest creature accentuates the vastness of the ocean, undisturbed. The mood changes from light (accentuated by the yellow) to dark: dusk is falling or has fallen.

Essentially, there are three separate elements arranged here, with one formal kireji and another semantic cut between yorazu (does not approach/come near) and umi (the sea). The phrase kujira mo yorazu is complete in itself — even the whale does not come near. Umi kurenu remains within the absent whale’s domain but is also a self-sufficient statement — the (empty) sea has grown dark; dusk has fallen. The three parts operate on different planes: Bright, living foreground, vast unpopulated space, time of day passing to a night that has darkened all (ending in a past / perfective tense). Brimming with yūgen — that sense of mystery. Trying consciously or unconsciously to hold these three elements in the mind and relate them paints a picture and yields poetic effect.

Nanohana, the canola blossom, is a late spring kigo; the whale a winter one. It doesn’t look like some direct observation from the notebook (any number of kigo from any season might be “absent”). The absent whale looks entirely like an imaginative compositional choice. Buson often composed imaginative verses at leisure away from the field. Now, it could be argued that the ‘absence of whale’ is not a kigo at all, and therefore there’s no double kigo and so no clash of seasons. However, we have no less an authority than Shiki, commenting on a different haiku:

It is also acceptable to treat the topic as a purely imaginary concept that does not exist in reality. For example, when given the autumn topic “covered in ivy”…as in

At the torii gate of the shrine in the fields, there was not even a trace of ivy　

Ryōto

... it is acceptable not to include the actual object — in this case, ivy — in the haiku itself. This still qualifies as an autumn haiku.

So, this is a verse where Buson deploys two kigo ordinarily from mixed seasons, expanding the boundaries of their use, using the blossom to fix the season and the poetic essence of the huge and absent whale in a non-seasonal way. Again, not redundant: each part adding to this complex verse, which would be diminished were any part taken away. 

Editor’s note: This essay first appeared as part of the series Moon & Finger on The Haiku Foundation website and appears here with the author’s kind permission. It has been slightly modified from its original form.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey, England, and is a Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for 60 years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of The Haiku Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature, one of the 10 editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five grown children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His most recent publication is the bilingual Year in year out / D’une année à l’autre, Françoise Maurice, Keith Evetts & Sébastien Revon, Amazon KDP 2024 (ISBN 979-8-332-22768-4).