Emiko Miyashita in Calcutta. Picture by Rashbehari Das

Haiku shows but does not tell.” Emiko Miyashita breaks into a bewitching smile as she speaks. On her table in the hotel room are scattered haiku efforts by participants at a workshop she conducted on the second day of her visit to Calcutta — as a guest of Japan Foundation in the last lap of the Indo-Japan Friendship Year.

Miyashita, 53, is one of the eminent names practising the form that is part of Japan ’s cultural heritage. The tiny poems of three lines of traditionally five, seven and five syllables, are intriguing in their simplicity, with readers often treating them as codes to be broken to reach the signification. “Haiku is an incomplete poem. The author hopes to communicate a picture in his mind. The reader has to join the poem with his own experience.” On second thoughts, she concedes: “You need training to read haiku.”

Perhaps that is why as a youngster she herself stayed away from the form. “Haiku runs in my mother’s side. But I used to think it is for elderly folk.” It was only after she raised her children did she pick up the pen. Since then, other than composing haiku, she has played a stellar role in translation. Einstein’s Century and Tsuru, English translations of haiku classics, won the Merit Book Awards for translation from the Haiku Society of America in 2002.

She is a councillor for the Haiku International Association where she has a column on introducing English-language haiku to Japanese readers on its website. She is also the editor of the haiku column in Japan ’s leading magazine Asahi Weekly.

But is haiku possible in English? Miyashita does not side with traditionalists on this. “Haiku is a form. It does not choose its language. If we define it strictly as Japanese traditional poetry, then we are secluding haiku. I consider it a privilege if it is said that haiku was born in Japan and we have preserved it over the centuries.”

Neither is Miyashita worried about the future of the form. There are haiku contests at the school level as well as national championships. “Haiku is in the air.” So what if her own children, both in their 20s, show no interest towards it? She shows a catalogue of a department store that commissioned her to write a haiku for its cover.

Stuck in her hotel room on the day of the bandh, she spent time tracking Kali idols on their immersion journey from the window.

“city dusk —

to a still-lit shop window

a mime’s perpendicular pause,”

she recites.

“I could not follow the cause of the strike from the TV channels (Nandigram), but from the flight I had marvelled at the beauty of the farmlands. In Japan, people do not eat rice any more and the government discourages paddy cultivation. The swaying of the crop here reminded me of my childhood.”