In 1959 Richard Wright, exiled in Paris and bedridden with amoebic dysentery, stopped writing political novels and composed thousands of haiku instead. That unexpected pivot opens this episode, which traces the life story of an art form rather than a person. We begin by dismantling the 5-7-5 syllable rule taught in Western grade schools: Japanese haiku count sound units called on, not syllables, and a word like haibun that is two English syllables counts as four on. Experts suggest English writers aim for about 12 syllables to match the true brevity of the form.

From there we cover the other structural pillars, the seasonal kigo drawn from a saijiki almanac and the cutting word kireji that English can only mimic with a dash or colon. We follow the form from its origin as the opening stanza of collaborative renga poems through Matsuo Basho, who elevated the hokku to standalone art and was later deified, to the painterly Yosa Buson, the humane and impoverished Kobayashi Issa, and the 19th-century reformer Masaoka Shiki, who applied the scientific method to poetry and coined the word haiku itself. The journey ends with Ezra Pound and the Imagists, translators R.H. Blyth and Harold Henderson, adaptations in Italian, Spanish, and Bengali, and Kenneth Yasuda’s concept of the haiku moment.

• Why counting 17 English syllables produces a poem far longer than a classical Japanese haiku
• The three structural elements: on, kigo, and kireji, and why translation struggles with all of them
• How Basho turned the opening stanza of a parlor game into revered high art
• Masaoka Shiki, the Meiji-era rebel who rebranded hokku as haiku and demanded sketching from life
• How the form spread worldwide and why Richard Wright found psychological refuge in it