Snow falls from the trees
White roofs of the town below
This winter temple
— Takayama, December 2024
• • • • •
Our guide on this, our first visit to Japan, was Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970), which I had first read many years before, but had left little impression on me at the time. Now it acquired gnomic significance, its every chapter corroborated by every walk, and none more so than the passages on the haiku. For Barthes, the measure of the haiku, which he calls the ‘literary branch’ of Zen Buddhism, is the ‘adequacy’ between signifier and signified, which he distinguishes from the silence of mysticism or the profundity of the aphorism. What is posited by the haiku is ‘matt’, a poetry that is neither descriptive nor symbolic, narrative or discursive, suggesting nothing beyond itself, not even the referent.
The Higashiyama Walking Trail (東山遊歩道) in Takayama was named after the ward in Kyoto, and like it is an area of high ground to the east of the city where Kanamori Nagachika (1524-1608), the first ruler of the Kanamori clan, established and transferred numerous temples and shrines. We followed its path through a day of heavy snowfall at the end of 2024. Our inability to describe its beauty other than with repeated exclamations of ‘How beautiful!’ suggested, to me, the suitability of the haiku form.
A Communist in Hong Kong 