At one time, Shiki worked as the editor of a haiku paper. We can imagine he had to read through a lot of bad haiku in his search for good ones to publish.^[1]

Here he is promising himself a reward of persimmons if he can work his way through the pile of submissions in front of him.

Maybe in this day and age, a modern rewriting of this would substitute chocolate for persimmons, but whatever motivates you to do the job, eh?

【Update 2023-12-04: This is an outdated version of this article. For a more up to date version, please see: https://laspina.org/reward-of-persimmons/ 】

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org.

1. Actually we don't have to wonder. He was quite vocal in saying that the majority of haiku, modern (in his time period, 1867-1902) and old alike, were complete crap. He included most of Bashō's haiku in the crap category, by the way. ↩