I began writing haiku in Japan after discovering the master haiku poet Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior), a wonderful book of verse and prose about one of his long journeys.

Basho started his travel journal with this verse (translation by Tim Chilcott), I’ve always liked it.

the spring is passing

the birds all mourn and fishes’

eyes are wet with tears

Some of my haiku follow the traditional form, and some do not, but the majority of them are attempts to capture a single fleeting moment, something I found most Japanese people to have a keen sense of.