Articles Directory | Free Articles | New Articles Daily

108 Breaths began with a box. One of a dozen boxes and two bags used to transport the life of Mark Wollacott back to England from Japan. Even more bags were consigned to the rubbage collection point in Kishiwada. Other items were left behind in the apartment for his successor on the JET Programme in the city. One of those boxes contained a dust covered magazine and a series of notebooks.

Rediscovering those notebooks crammed full of haiku and the issue of Kyoto Journal that started it all, took Mark back to 2005. A year spent teaching, coaching the softball team and learning Japanese from squiggles drawn in the sand. A winter spent sitting in the cold teacher's room reading magazines and books on the sly from behind a big old pile of important looking documents. He was vaguely aware of haiku, but never considered himself much of a poet, save for the occasional and probably cringe-inducing Valentine's effort.

The Kyoto Journal changed all that. It took the JET Programme rookie from Muppet to poet in less than an hour. Haiku were simple, short and accessible. They did not require rhyming structures, complicated metre or gerrymandered alliteration. They were bare, stripped down images like pre-camera photographs or quick sketches.

A haiku is one breath. That is, it should be spoken in one breath with only a minor pause after the first or second line. This is why haiku in Japanese developed a simple 17-On structure. An "On" is a letter, but in Japanese most On are equivalent to an English syllable. That is why English ones, such as most of those found in 108 Breaths, contain 17 syllables. These are usually split into a 5-7-5 format over three lines. English is far more expressive with one and two syllable words than Japanese, so anything from 10 to 17 syllables are fine, with the few syllable poems retaining more of a Japanese feel to them.

This simplicity meant that Mark could immediately get a notebook out and start creating the haiku, which led to 108 Breaths. Over the remaining four and a half years in Japan he documented the highs and lows of life on the other side of the planet. These ranged from experiences on the JET Programme to love and local culture. On occasion these expanded to become tanka or were mixed with stories to become haibun. His haiku were displayed in two culture festivals and became part of his teaching programme at seven schools. The latter taking the form of a class where students learnt to translate their own original haiku into English.

According to strict Japanese rules, a haiku is centred on nature and revolves around the seasons. They should contain a place, an action and a stillness. Like much of modern J-Culture, the form has become fossilized. In English, these rules have become more relaxed. Born outside the culture and having developed his haiku in isolation, Mark's book 108 Breaths mixes nature with the fallibility of humanity as seen in senryu and a pinch of English wit and wordplay.

Living in Japan was never a dull affair. 108 Breaths covers the quiet isolation of Kashiwara with the religious fervour of Kishiwada, the friendliness of Kagawa with culturally distinct Taketomi to the far south. Most of the weirdness came from Mark's attempts to survive in a new culture, to find love, to survive nature and weather he'd never experienced before and to navigate the oddest of school systems. The JET Programme took him to places where individualism was stamped out with electric razors and cans of spray-paint, and where students rush to the window to witness Osaka's five minutes of snow.