This will be a little different. The other day I received some spam email. Not a rare thing. But this one immediately jumped out at me because the lead graphic in it started with a haiku.

俺、毎日「仕事辞めたい」って言ってるわ。
ore, mainichi"shigoto yametai" tte itteru wa

every day
"I want to quit my job"
I keep saying
—???

Hmm...no... that's a little too literal. More naturally, we might put it more like this:

every single day
I keep saying, "I really
want to quit my job"

Wow, that second translation I did even falls into 5/7/5. That's a nice happy accident. But actually, traditional structure aside, it might format better as:

every single day
I keep saying, "I really want to
quit my job"

I like ending the second line on more of a cliffhanger. It gives more of an impact, a slight surprise as it were, to the last line. We could even change that middle line to I say, "I really want to if we want to preserve the 7 syllables of that line. Since the first line already implies an ongoing action, we really don't need keep —ing.

Speaking of syllables, in the Japanese that first line is six syllables, and the second line is nine. But we'll forgive them. It's not really trying very hard to be a proper haiku, just taking a similar form to get our attention.

It's a silly little haiku from a job hunting company. Not a very good one, either. They just basically wrote a casual sentence in haiku form, kind of similar to how we do in English sometimes. Does anyone remember that haiku bot we used to have on Hive? That might have been back in the Steemit days... if it spotted any comment that was exactly 17 syllables long, it would reply and reformat the comment into a haiku. That's kind of what they did here.

I only share it here because I thought you guys might be interested in seeing how haiku can pop up in every day life in Japan. This is a junk mail, but it is also from a pretty big job hunting company in Japan, not some small spam group. Seeing haiku on advertisements, using the rhythm of the form to try to get our attention is not an uncommon thing.

❦

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. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.