The Portrayal of an Epidemic of Cholera in Hasegawa Sosei’s Haiku
Abstract
This paper is a close reading of a haiku sequence composed by the Japanese poet Hasegawa Sosei (1907-1946) in 1938 when he was in China as a member of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The sequence describes an epidemic outbreak of cholera in a Chinese locality. The aim of this paper is to determine, after commenting different theories regarding the description of illness in literature and historically contextualizing Sosei and his work, if haiku is an adequate medium to portray illnesses and inform about them.
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