The term "haibun" was first used by the 17th-century Japanese poetMatsuo Bashō, in a letter to his discipleKyorai in 1690. Bashō was a prominent early writer of haibun, then a new genre combining classical prototypes, Chinese prosegenres and vernacular subject matter and language. He wrote some haibun as travel accounts during his various journeys, the most famous of which is Oku no Hosomichi. Bashō's shorter haibun include compositions devoted to travel and others focusing on character sketches, landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes and occasional writings written to honor a specific patron or event. His Hut of the Phantom Dwelling can be classified as an essay while, in Saga Nikki, he documents his day-to-day activities with his disciples on a summer retreat. Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other series of events in the poet's life. Haibun continued to be written by later haikai poets such as Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki.
In English
Haibun is no longer confined to Japan, and has established itself as a genre in world literature which has gained momentum in recent years. James Merrill's "Prose of Departure", from The Inner Room, is an earlier example. The first contest for English-language haibun took place in 1996, organized by poet and editor Michael Dylan Welch, and judged by Tom Lynch and Cor van den Heuvel. Anita Virgil won first prize, and David Cobb won second prize. The contest resulted in the publication of Wedge of Lightin 1999. As credited by Welch, the first anthology of English-language haibun was Bruce Ross's Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun, published in 1998. Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross edited the inaugural number of the annual anthology American Haibun & Haiga in 1999; that series, which continues to this day, changed its name to Contemporary Haibun in 2003 and sponsored the parallel creation in 2005 of Contemporary Haibun Online, a quarterly journal that added Welsh haibun author Ken Jones to the founding editorial team of Kacian and Ross.
Characteristics
A haibun may record a scene, or a special moment, in a highly descriptive and objective manner or may occupy a wholly fictional or dream-like space. The accompanying haiku may have a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompass or hint at the gist of what is recorded in the prose sections. Several distinct schools of English haibun have been described, including Reportage narrative mode such as Robert Wilson's Vietnam Ruminations, Haibunic prose, and the Templum effect. Contemporary practice of haibun composition in English is continually evolving. Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic haikai style, and one or more haiku. However, there may be considerable variation of form, as described by editor and practitioner Jeffrey Woodward. Modern English-language haibun writers include Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, Mark Nowak, John Richard Parsons, Sheila Murphy, Nobuyuki Yuasa, Lynne Reese, Peter Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David Cobb, founder of the British Haiku Society in 1990 and author of Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, a 5,000-word haibun which has been considered seminal for the English form of kikōbun.
