Tsuku tsuku boshi

ツクツクボーシ/ツクツクボーシ/バカリナリ
(正岡子規 1867-1902)

tsuku tsuku boshi / tsuku tsuku boshi / bakari nari
(Masaoka Shiki 1867-1902)

nothing but
cic-cic-cicada
cic-cic-cicada


Well, I did my best on the translation. The tsuku tsuku boshi is a kind of cicada that appears between late summer and early autumn, and its name comes from the sound it makes. Natsume Soseki and Lafcadio Hearn both write about this particular cicada, Soseki referencing them in Kokoro, with the narrator noting how they put him in a 'strangely sorrowful mood', and Hearn writes that their music is 'exactly like the song of a bird'. If you're curious to hear the tsuku tsuku boshi, you can head over to the relevant page in Wikipedia (ja), scroll down and press the play button. I wasn't too impressed with that, so I followed the external link to find something that sounded more like 'tsuku tsuku boshi'. This is better, though it's a Quicktime file which always takes a moment to load for me (maybe you too).

Back to the haiku, which is rather minimalist, and I imagine might have caused some controversy back in the day. I'm not a huge fan of turning everything into katakana, though I'm a little embarrassed to say that because it sounds rather snobbish. It seems a little like someone writing in ALL CAPS, if not so extreme. But there is something I like about this poem, which is perhaps the aptness of the subject matter to the idea. Those cicadae just go on and on, without getting bored, and this particular kind are endlessly enacting themselves through saying their names.

Alternate searches:

'tsuku tsuku boushi'