FINAL WORDS: a Japanese tradition

The Japanese, who have traditionally looked at death very differently than we do here in the West, have a very old poetic form called jisei: the death poem. Usually written right on the verge of dying, jisei are in some sense a farewell to life and consciousness: the spiritual counterparts of the making of a last will, an important tradition in Japanese culture. Samurai wrote jisei, as did lovers who committed double suicide and people in a variety of other fields. But many of the surviving jisei we have today were written by Japanese monks, and their names, ages, and dates of death are recorded along with their poems. In the process the poems become the monks' legacies, lasting long after their lives, always quietly lived, have ended and passed into history.


The practice of writing a poem right during the act of dying sounds morbid, doesn't it, and also pretty strange? I can't imagine anyone here in the West consciously trying to time their death simultaneously with a poem, though perhaps we should try it. One jisei story tells of a man so preoccupied with making sure that his death poem was appropriate that he began writing examples when he was fifty, a full thirty years or more before he actually died. Maybe the challenge inherent in the project gave him what we would call a longer lease on life.

There is something moving about many jisei pieces, which are mostly in the haiku or tanka form. Some are haunting: A journey of no return:/ the wanderer's sack is/bottomless, wrote a monk named Kyoshu just before his death in 1769. The surface/ of the water mirrors/ many things, another monk wrote in 1825; still another, Boarding the boat/ I slip off my shoes:/moon in the water. Even in the awkwardness of translation, which can never hope to capture either the rhythm of the originals or their complexity of their imagery, they are hauntingly lovely.

But some jisei are wry and earthy. My only hope against/ the cold/one hot-water bottle, wrote Meisetsu; monk Raishi writes, You've done your duty/ till today,/ old scarecrow. A brother named Shiyo, who died at only 32, was downright sardonic--forgiveable, perhaps, in such a young man: Surely there's a teahouse/ with a view of plum trees/ on Death Mountain, too. Utsu, who died in cherry-blossom season, used it for inspiration. The owner of the cherry blossoms/ turns to compost/ for the trees, he wrote.

Whether they are sad or sardonic, jisei always seem to accept—or even embrace—death as a natural part of life rather than just an abrupt or unfair ending to it. That's a hard place for most of us to reach, but jisei let us spend a small, resonant moment there.

The poems quoted above, and many more, can be found in Yoel Hoffmann's lovely collection Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death.