A single spot of dark, clear persimmon flesh - Naoki Kishimoto, 'Clouds are Friends'

When you cut open a persimmon, there is a spot within the orange flesh that looks dark and translucent. This haiku captures nothing more than that simple fact. Yet, that 'nothing more' remains vividly in the reader's eyes after finishing the poem.

First, the opening phrase 'a single spot' draws the reader into the poem while keeping the subject hidden. Even as you read on to 'dark,' you still do not know what it is a spot of. By the time you reach 'clear,' the image becomes even more unstable. In terms of vision, 'dark' and 'clear' are qualities that, at first glance, are difficult to reconcile. Black suggests opacity, while 'clear' brings to mind clarity, free of turbidity or cloudiness. However, in actual persimmon flesh, there are parts that look as if they have increased in transparency while darkening. This slight oxymoron of 'darkly clear' describes that texture with perfect precision.

Finally, 'persimmon flesh' is placed at the end, and the subject is revealed. Here, the information that had been floating in mid-air—'a single spot,' 'dark,' 'clear'—all at once lands inside the persimmon. Only at the end of the poem does the reader complete the scene, and at the same time, they return to the beginning to reread the entire poem.

There is a trick to this delay. If 'persimmon' had been placed first, the reader would have immediately thought of the image of a 'persimmon' they already possessed—a round, yellowish-red fruit. That image would have functioned as a container to receive the subsequent descriptions.

The poem does not provide this container. Before the known concept of 'persimmon,' it hands over the local 'a single spot' and the unknown perception of 'darkly clear.' Therefore, the reader does not confirm a persimmon they already know, but rather, through the 'persimmon flesh' that appears at the end, they construct the perception that had been floating until then for the first time. It is not confirmation, but construction.

The word 'flesh' also works to complete this construction. If it were 'fruit pulp,' it would be an explanatory term, fitting into the existing vocabulary about plants. By asserting 'flesh,' tactile information—dampness, softness, thickness—is layered onto the visual grasp of 'darkly clear.' The image that is completed within the reader becomes something that not only can be seen but also leaves a sensation on the fingertips. Through this overlap of vision and touch, the known 'persimmon' is re-examined from the 'single spot' at the beginning.

It is often thought that sketching (shasei) is a faithful report of the order in which things were seen, but the word order of this poem is conversely artificial. When actually looking at a persimmon, one would first have the subject of the persimmon and then notice that a part of its flesh is dark and clear.

The poem reverses that order, starting from 'a single spot' and delaying 'persimmon flesh' until the end of the poem. Through this reversal, perception precedes the concept within the reader. A new order is created within the poem—not the order in which the author experienced it, but the order in which the reader rediscovers it.

The skill of 'sketching' likely lies not in tracing the order of what was seen, but in choosing and rearranging words so that the recognition born from the encounter with the subject is re-enacted within the reader. What this poem establishes is not just the author's eye that discovered the 'single spot' of the persimmon. It is the word order itself that reconstructs that 'single spot' as our own discovery.

It is not that anything profound is being said about the persimmon. It is just one small spot of the persimmon's flesh. However, to write about that one spot, the poem does not say 'persimmon' until the very end.

Unless the known 'persimmon' is momentarily taken away from the reader, this one spot would not appear. Perhaps what 'sketching' 'transfers' is not an already known subject, but the moment when a subject one thought they knew becomes unknown once again.