Haiku. Volume I: Eastern Culture. Volume II: Spring. Volume III: Summer-Autumn. Volume IV: Autumn-Winter
Tokyo, Hokuseido Press, 1970 and 1971 (ranging from the 12th to the 20th impressions)/ 1949 to 1952 (first editions).
Octavo, four volumes, [vi], xviii, 422; [vi], vi, 382; [vi], xvi, 443; and [vi], xlvi, 396 pages plus a total of 60 plates (2 in colour) and endpaper illustrations.
Cloth; edges slightly marked; endpapers lightly offset; a fine set with the very good dustwrappers a little rubbed and chipped, all with slight loss at or near the head of the slightly sunned spines, and the first one with a tear near the head of the rear hinge.
Reginald Horace Blyth (1898-1964) 'was born near London in 1898, the only child of working-class parents. By the start of World War I, he was eighteen and already an eccentric in his contemporaries eyes: he ate no meat, loved George Bernard Shaw, and became a conscientious objector to the war, for which he was jailed. After serving a three-year sentence of hard labor and fed up with the rigidity of Britain's class system, he left his homeland for what he thought would be a life of wandering. But after just a year of traveling, Blyth was smitten by Asia. He settled in Korea in the mid-1920s, and began teaching English at Seoul University. He returned to England briefly to complete a BA in English literature in order to further his Korean teaching career. Back in Seoul, Blyth met a monk from Kyoto's Myoshin-ji temple, the traditional headquarters of the Rinzai Zen sect in Japan. The meeting was auspicious, inspiring Blyth to take up the study of Japanese and to begin Zen practice at the Seoul branch temple; within weeks, he had moved into the temple to become the disciple of the resident Zen master, Kayama Taigi. In 1940, Blyth moved to Japan and remained there for the rest of his life, despite being interned as an enemy alien during World War II. He married a Japanese woman and supported their two daughters working as a teacher (he even tutored the Crown Prince of Japan) and began a prolific writing and translating career. For Blyth, almost anything could be interpreted as an example of Zen, including the Western literary canon. He expounded his theories in "Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics" (1942), "Japanese Humor" (1957), and the four-volume "Haiku" (1949-52), and through those books, spurring a generation of Westerners to investigate Zen and Japanese culture. Blyth died in 1964 of a brain tumor' (Robert Aitken: Remembering Blyth Sensei, "Tricycle", Spring 1998, Volume 7, Number 3, sourced online).
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