SOURCE: "Hail in the Begging Bowl: The Odyssey and Poetry of Santoka," in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol . XXXII , No. 3, Autumn 1977, pp. 269-302.

In the following essay, Abrams provides an overview of Santoka's life and work.

Into my metal bowl too,
 hail.
                                         Santoka

Taneda Santoka, 1882-1940, is one of the most recent and perhaps one of the last of a long and colorful line of priest-poets in Japanese literary history. An alcoholic and business failure who became a Buddhist priest after an attempted suicide at the age of forty-two, Santoka spent the last sixteen years of his life as a raucous itinerant monk who survived through begging and the good graces of his many acquaintances. Throughout this period he was a voracious observer of life, nature and self in his prolific free-verse haiku. When Santoka died in October 1940 he was still a penniless alcoholic whose years of wandering and solitude...