ABSTRACT
The travel journals of writer and visual artist Roy Kiyooka reveal complexities of how haiku and haibun traditions live in translation. Kiyooka’s 1969 travel journal Wheels records a trip Kiyooka makes with his father from Canada to parts of Japan. An examination of Bashō’s Narrow Road alongside Wheels highlights ways that the haiku tradition has been changed in English-language interpretations of the form. Kiyooka’s work draws broadly from multiple aspects of haiku practice as well as North American poetic sensibilities to voice his othered cultural location. By bringing together North American English-language and Japanese haiku traditions in her analysis, Halebsky’s work suggests that Kiyooka’s border-crossing and hybrid identity belie easy distinctions often made between Japan and the rest of the world.
