Who was this man who wrote, "When I die I forbid the erection of anything resembling a monument, and if erected I am vehemently opposed to any words being engraved into it, and if people must engrave words into it I absolutely despise when they gush on and on, because I'd rather that someone just rolled a big rock on top of my grave and left it like that.''

Shiki Masaoka was the poet who, on the eve of the 20th century, dragged the Japanese sensibility out from under its thick clumps of dripping moss, denouncing a good portion of Basho's haiku as mawkish hearts-and-flowers not worth the rice paper they were inked on. (In his "Small Talk about Basho," Shiki criticized the body of Basho's work as including "too many expository and prosaic elements" and lacking "genuineness" as poetry.)

Shiki himself, in more than 20,000 haiku and tanka of his own, flung the Japanese perception of reality into a stark light. He raised the threshold of sensitivity in a new way by placing his own psychological state at the center of his observations.

The modernization of the Japanese literary aesthetic in Shiki's personal sense depended on the primary position he awarded the individual in nature, and the absolute importance of filtering the clear light of observation through the grim little holes in the psyche.

Shiki's art put the "I" at its center, and by doing so laid the groundwork for the individual-centered Japanese literature of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, he came precisely at the time that the West was discovering what appeared to be the delicate and exquisite wonders of the traditional Japanese aesthetic. What the West wanted out of Japan was the quaint and the quirky, the smokescreen of a pseudo-Orientalism that might add a whiff of mystery to a tired Western literary tradition.

Yet what Shiki was about to do in his great body of work was to present an ultramodern outlook on reality that, had it been known abroad, could have had great influence around the world. (Unfortunately, Shiki was not translated in any version that foreign writers would have seen until long after World War II; and in any case, such poets as Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, who were influenced by Japan, sought inspiration from the classical rather than the contemporary.)

Shiki's view of the world is, in one degree, as mundane as Monday. Yet it is the very matter-of-factness of his descriptions that intensifies what we see, giving it a fine edge. For his era, he may have been the first "photographic poet" in any country.

An autumn fly is resting
In my sickroom
On my warm window

Shiki was bedridden for eight years with tuberculosis, craning his neck to see out of the window, recording every last detail of his confinement. The fly has survived longer than it was meant to, lucky fly. A simple enough image, and one that speaks softly but clearly about his own inner torment: the photographer able to encompass both himself and the object opposite him in his lens.

Consider this poem about sound and existence.

Shrill cicadas
Shriller than shrill cicadas
Is all there is

The ambiguity of the last line is the blade of Shiki's scalpel. Is the mimetic shrill sound all that he can hear? Or does, in fact, this sound represent all of reality?

It is in this single word "ambiguity" that one clue to the modern Japanese sensibility lies. It is an ambiguity contained tightly within exactness.

The Japanese outlook on reality in the modern era is no wisp of fog, no vague bundle of mystery. It is a cloud chamber, yes, but one in which the smoke, with its ever-changing edges, is trapped inside by the finest steel frame and diamondlike glass.

Look for this very sensibility now, for instance, in the prose of Haruki Murakami: the explicitly banal that is played out in a tight harmony of incongruities. This is what makes Murakami a very Japanese writer.

Shiki's redrawing of the lines of Japanese observation led him into an exploration of the definition of things. Like much superb black-and-white photography, his poems appear to be statements devoid of emotion, yet revealing at the same time. One of his most famous and controversial poems goes to an extreme of the prosaic.

Cockscombs
Fourteen, fifteen
It's hard to tell

Here the cockscomb is a flower, often of flame-red color, that grows in a mass of plumes and combs. Its very shapelessness, when seen from some distance, becomes a definition of its essence. This, too, is the modern Japanese sensibility: not a pseudo-Buddhistic "ah" and a bit of monkish mumbo-jumbo on the side; not your dainty lacquer box with its ancient key and drawer of secrets; rather an observation that does not describe an object but rather pierces its core; a method of highlighting reality by picking out a single detail and isolating the essence of reality from its trappings.

Here are two more of Shiki's poems that present contrasts, not as contradictory juxtapositions, but as part of a whole.

A yellowish greenish spider
Is crawling
Over the red roses

The mountains in summer
With all creation green
And a red bridge

The genius of the Japanese outlook on reality is in the selection and its distillation of substance.

The first of these two poems is painterly, both impressionistic and finely drawn. The second displays that very gift of selection, when a single object throws all that we see into a new light.

The American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) wrote what came to be considered one of his most celebrated poems as a simple statement: so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.

Well, Shiki pulled that red wheelbarrow into the light of day decades before the American. If Shiki had been writing in a European language at the turn of the 20th century, he might have been ranked with Baudelaire and Whitman as one of the world's great literary innovators.

Shiki used the word shasei, meaning "reality sketches," to characterize his approach to what he saw and did with his writing. His poems mix sound and color in a unique way, and this mix reverberates throughout the modern Japanese sensibility.

The sound of clippers cutting
Roses in the air
On a perfect day in May

The light of the scene is intersected by the blades slicing stems in the air.

My hot water bottle spills out
Into the moonlight
Of the old garden

He revisits his illness in terms of a banal symbol (the hot water bottle) and illuminates beauty at the same time.

The ability to muster this combination of harrowingly banal detail and throw it into the arc lights of an unadorned beauty was also a gift of Yukio Mishima (1925-70), perhaps the novelist with the most honed modern Japanese sensibility.

Another feature of the modern Japanese sensibility, and one passionately advocated by Shiki, might be called the decay of the sacred. Shiki, in one wicked swoop, redefines tradition when he begins a poem with furuike ya (old pond), a reference to the famous Basho haiku: The old pond / A frog jumps / Plopping into the water. Beginning a haiku in Japanese with furuike ya is like starting a modern English poem with the hallowed opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet #18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shiki's pond, however, is not Basho's. Shiki goes far beyond parody.

The old pond
And on it floats a cicada's shell
Upside down

Somehow, the West figured that Japanese people revered their traditions simply because they didn't chuck them out as Westerners do. But the modern Japanese sensibility has been to turn tradition on its back, always to keep it close at hand, to take a close look at the underbelly of the old cockroach as it flails its legs under their nose.

Many Westerners have misunderstood this aspect of Japan. Whether in books, articles or documentaries about Japan, whether focusing on mores, architecture, cuisine or what-have-you, the common commentary is that Japan is a land of bizarre contrasts, where the ultra-modern coexists uncomfortably with the traditional.

In fact, the Japanese sensibility has allowed for a very comfortable conglomeration of traditions and contemporary custom. There is nothing bizarre about this, nothing mutually exclusive, as there might be if it existed on the same scale in the West. (Westerners seem to feel obliged to scrap the old before adopting the new. The Japanese live with the two together and see no problem with it. They continually redefine the content of the traditional to suit today, while maintaining its outside form and trappings.)

Shiki Masaoka died in September 1902, age 34. He was good friends with the great Meiji Era novelist Soseki Natsume, as he was with other writers and poets of his day. He was hailed during his short lifetime by no less than novelist Ogai Mori as "the great literary reformer" of Japan.

Indeed, Shiki represents those incisive, unrelenting yet unaffected and profoundly touching qualities that are at the core of the modern Japanese sensibility.

He was able to isolate and proclaim the life of a single creature:

Not a cloud in the sky
Over Tsukuba
For the red dragonflies

And he gave a new definition to the Sun when he wrote:

The sunrise on New Year's Day
Is so blinding
It has brought the sky closer

Had Shiki been writing in a European language, he would have moved heaven and earth. As it was, he only brought them that much closer to each other.