Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) is a free style haikuist, which means he shed the various rules governing traditional or mainstream haiku composition. He is from Houfu in Yamaguchi Prefecture and is also connected with Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku, which is where he died. Santoka spent much of his adult life living in humble cottages or wandering the land as a mendicant Zen priest, composing haiku poems through each, as each, instance. Matsuyama is where he settled in a cottage he called Isso-an (A Blade of Grass Hermitage), dying there not long after. Scott Watson's versions seek to produce the sense that Santoka intended but not word for word translation.
