As Japan opened to the rest of the world in the Meiji period (1868–1912), Western art and literature flooded into Japan, and Japanese art and literature inundated the West. Eastern and Western novelists and poets experimented with new ideas and new forms. Even the Japanese haiku poem, which had its glory days in the 17th century, was affected.

Santoka Taneda, the subject of this biography, was a poet and a Buddhist priest. He was one of the first Japanese poets to experiment with new literary forms and break away from the traditional pattern of haiku, with its three lines, 17 syllables, and a seasonal reference.

Born in 1882, Taneda as a child was something of a prodigy. In school he excelled in literature and wrote formal poems. Later, he translated work by Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev. By 1913, he was experimenting with free-verse haiku.

He was influenced by Ogiwara Seisensui, a free-verse haiku poet and his contemporary, who co-founded the avant-garde literary magazine Soun (“Layered Clouds”) in 1911. Santoka was an editor of and contributor to the magazine.

Seisensui also influenced Sumita Oyama. Oyama was Santoka’s friend and benefactor, in addition to being his biographer.

Oyama first met Santoka in 1933. In one of the most evocative scenes in this biography (cum memoir), which was originally published in Japanese in 1988, Oyama reminisces about his first visit to Santoka’s ramshackle hermitage. The impoverished hermit had only one bowl, which he gave to his guest and later washed with the rainwater that he had used to rinse the rice. Afterward, he used the water on his vegetable garden. Having no blankets, Santoka covered his friend with papers and books as Oyama slept on the one mat.

Oyama’s biography covers Santoka’s life from his childhood and the death of his mother, to his failure as a husband and father, to several attempts at suicide, to his being ordained a Buddhist priest, to his years wandering, panhandling, and writing haiku.

Santoka was born Shoichi Taneda. He took the pen name “Santoka,” which means “fire on the mountain top,” when he was in college. His family was well-off, but his father, a womanizer, wasted much of the family estate carousing and eventually went bankrupt.

When Santoka was eleven years old, he saw his mother’s lifeless body drawn from a well in which she had thrown herself. Her suicide was the pivotal moment of his life and that of his younger brother (another suicide), and while it would arguably make him a poet, it would also (arguably) destroy him, as he drank sake to keep his depression from overwhelming him.

Santoka wandered over much of Japan for nearly eight years. Unable to stay in one place or keep a job, and usually homeless, he begged, meditated, prayed, kept a journal, and composed free-verse haiku. When he came to a temple, he would take out his mother’s mortuary tablet, which he always kept with him, and pray for the repose of her soul.

After walking up to 20 miles a day, Santoka polished his haiku as he rested for the night — sometimes in a field, or in a cheap dive, or, when he was lucky, in a hermitage provided by one of his friends.

It’s difficult to imagine making numerous revisions to a poem as short as a haiku. But Santoka wanted to find exactly the right words and images to communicate his point.

Composing verse, he said, was the source of his life and “was his life.” He couldn’t stop writing haiku. Haiku came bubbling up out of him like water from a spring, he wrote.

He understood that haiku are subtle and work by understatement and suggestion. It’s easy to overwrite and lose the spark that lights up the haiku. In addition, Santoka believed that his words didn’t simply record his feelings about his experiences; they were manifestations of himself.

In this belief, he, like several of his contemporaries, was veering away from patterns established in the 17th century by the great masters of Japanese haiku such as Basho, Buson, and Issa, although Santoka was still inspired by their work. He kept a copy of Basho’s travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North with him and referred to the haiku of Basho and other classicists in his diary.

It could be said that Japanese haiku changed the course of Western poetry, which had until the late 19th century tended toward formal verse with deliberate meter and rhyme schemes. Japanese poetry, with its vivid images, helped to inaugurate Ezra Pound’s imagist movement as well as free verse and modern art. Pound wrote one of the earliest Western haiku. Japanese poetry also changed, becoming more colloquial, simpler, and less formal.

As in this haiku by Santoka: “Stretch­ing out my legs / towards the rough sea; / the journey’s beginning and end.”

Or this: “If I walk, a cuckoo; / if I hurry, / a cuckoo.”

One of the pleasures of reading Santoka’s haiku is noticing allusions to poems by Western poets of that era such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E. E. cummings, and others — who all engaged with and brought Asian writing and art to the attention of American readers. (My quibble with Oyama’s biography is that it says little about the cross-influences that were happening at the time in Eastern and Western poetry.)

Santoka reflected on almost everything in his journals, from his extreme loneliness, to his poverty, to eating rice, a stomachache, the aggressive mosquitoes in autumn, his plans to walk to the hot springs. He loved water but disliked rain. Dressed in rags and a ragged bamboo hat, he became wet and chilled when it rained, and sometimes very sick.

He devoted much of his writing to berating himself for his alcoholism, praying and promising to do better, but failing and becoming depressed. It’s a day, he writes in one journal entry, “when it seems as though I may be defeated by the seduction of death.”

He felt intrinsically joined to nature. As he saw it, even the lowly weed should be admired, because it was able to grasp its own essence. Its very existence expressed inner truth. “Those who do not know the meaning of weeds,” he said, “do not know the mind of nature.” (The phrase brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s “mind of winter” in “The Snow Man.”)

Santoka wrote those words in one of his journals about two months before his death at the relatively young age of 57. Excerpted in this edition of Oyama’s biography, the journal, titled “Diary of the One-Grass Hut” and sensitively translated by William Scott Wilson, brims with deeply moving writing.

Wilson adds an engaging and thoughtful 50-page introduction and a 13-page afterword in which he describes his travels to several places that Santoka visited. I wish this afterword were longer — perhaps a book in itself, as it helps to bring alive dates, places, and foreign customs that can sometimes be confusing to the West­ern reader.

One of Santoka’s last journal entries, written on October 6, 1940, seems to suggest his awareness of his coming death: “Dragonflies fly in” to his hut “for just a moment. They fly all around me. Fly while you can. Before long you’ll probably fly no more.” He died alone on October 11, 1940. Whether his was a natural death or one caused by an overdose of alcohol or drugs isn’t made clear.

When he died, he was known to only a small circle of literary friends. Today, Santoka has an international following and is rightfully one of Japan’s most loved poets.

As the book ends, Wilson points out one of Santoka’s poems etched on a monument at the Ho’onji temple, where he first served as a Buddhist monk:

Today, too, my begging bowl,
flowers in full bloom,
here and there.