Mermaid Guitar

5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. That's what they teach you when you're 10 years old and they've got you writing haiku for English composition. A nice, inoffensive way to ease kids into the dark arts of poetry, I guess. I always thought of haiku in this light: kind of simplistic and suitable for kids but there's actually a bit more to haiku, as I learned in writing this song and incorporating the 5/7/5 structure into both the time signature of the acoustic sections (i.e. 5/4, 7/4, 5/4) and the lyrics.

Leaves catch midday sun
Burning red, beautiful death
Season's turn: Autumn

One characteristic of the traditional Japanese haiku: a seasonal reference. Check. I couldn't really do a concept album with 12 months without red leaf hunting featuring (link is to the first post on this song).

shizutani #3 by gacha223 (CC BY via Flickr)

Then there's the 17 sounds across three phrases. Anyone who studies any Japanese language learns that it doesn't have syllables as we do in English but rather 'sounds.' While an English speaker pronounces the name Japan's capital city as three syllables (To-ki-yo), it's actually four in Japanese because both of the 'vowel' sounds are long: to-u-kyo-u, where the kyo is a single sound, not the two we make it in English. One of the beauties of learning Japanese is that the sounds are always the same for each character, not something that can be said of English, as anyone who's ever taught it as a language can tell you. The haiku is quintessentially Japanese in its economy of expression packed into a few sounds.

Finally, there's the concept of a juxtaposition. I tried to capture this in 'beautiful death,' though this isn't exactly what a traditional Japanese haiku would do, where the two words juxtaposed are split but a 'cutting word.' Perhaps I was more influenced by Shakespeare here. Anyway, that sense of paradox to me is also something in which the Japanese take a kind of sorrowful joy (see how I did it again there :) ). It's something I incorporate into the tune about the 'opposite' season, to drop in a little teaser here, as people gather under the cherry trees:

Once a year friends and family meeting
Like the blossoms on the trees, more beautiful because they're fleeting