Feeling Haiku Through Thin Wood Walls
First published in A Hundred Gourds 4:2, March 2015. First written in August
of 2013. In response, the author wrote to me to say “That’s by far the most analytic,
comprehensive, and thoughtful review of Thin Wood Walls I’ve seen. I really appreciate your
approach to both the language and the story itself and how they interrelate.” At my invitation, David Patneaude was a guest speaker at the national quarterly Haiku Society of America meeting held at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in June 2013. +

The main character in David Patneaude’s young-adult novel, Thin Wood Walls (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), is an eleven-year-old Japanese
American boy named Joe Hanada who writes haiku. The novel begins in the Seattle
area in the early stages of World War II. When Pearl Harbor is attacked in
December of 1941, Joe’s father is arrested and separated from the family for much
of the war. Joe, his older brother Mike, and his mother and grandmother are
forced to leave their home and are sent to the Tule Lake relocation camp in
Northern California. As prisoners in their own country, Joe and his family survive
harsh conditions and many difficulties and injustices behind barbed wire, which
Joe writes about in the journal his father gave him just before he was taken
away. The book is a powerful story about how Joe learns patience while longing
to be reunited with his father and to be released from the relocation camp, and
about his relationship with his older brother, who he also longs to see again
after Mike enlists in the army as a way to assert his American loyalty.
Joe also writes haiku in his
journal, often in ways that summarize what has recently happened to him, or
soon will. Here’s one haiku that begins the first of the book’s three parts,
foreshadowing the tension of war between Japan and America:
December
moonlight
On fallow fields, clouds
blooming,
Lightning in their midst.
(1)
After this poem, when Joe and his family visit the woods to tag a Christmas
tree, the book first introduces haiku as follows:
I looked around at the greens and browns stretching off in every direction. I heard
the call of birds. I smelled the wet, wintry smells of land that God had made.
I closed my eyes and imagined. I liked to write haiku, a kind of Japanese
poetry often linked to nature, and I wanted to remember this place. It was the
kind of setting where haiku could take root. (5)
It’s right after the attack on Pearl Harbor when Joe’s dad gives Joe and his
brother journals to record their wartime experiences. “‘Your mother and I have
taught you to observe what happens around you,’” Joe’s dad says (20). Joe
mentions having “regular haiku lessons with Mom” (20) and says, “I looked
forward to the writing, to the challenge of squeezing life-size images and big
ideas into just a few words” (20–21).
Joe’s poems are all 5-7-5
syllables, and seventeen of them are scattered throughout the narrative. An
additional five haiku by Joe’s brother Mike appear near the end, and serve as a
plot device. After Mike joins the 442nd regimental combat team to escape the
camp and to prove his loyalty to the United States, he seems to find solace in
writing haiku while fighting on the Italian front. The 442nd became the most
decorated infantry regiment in the history of the United States Army.
In addition to the haiku that
appear in the book, the narrative benefits from a sort of haiku sensitivity,
where Joe notices his surroundings with a heightened sensory awareness. For
example, he describes his older brother by saying “The muscles in his thick
neck bulged out like bamboo stalks” (14). While haiku tend to avoid overt
metaphor and simile, here the detail of bamboo stalks helps readers picture the
muscles in Mike’s neck more vividly, using an image associated with Japan.
All good novels demonstrate this
kind of sensitivity to images as part of the goal to show rather than to tell. The
following are more examples of haiku sensitivity from Thin Wood Walls. Many of these examples are similes, thus
comparative rather than being something directly seen or present in the
narrative, but their inclusion in the novel still demonstrates the
effectiveness of the clearly observed image:
- Thimbles on her fingers reflected light from the fire. (41)
- The click of glass [playing marbles] sparked memories of dirt fields after a
spring rain. I could smell them. (73)
- I saw signs of spring: green buds on trees, the sun riding higher in the sky,
the river’s swollen current. (74)
- Up close, she smelled like flowers. (85)
- I rolled down my [car] window for air and stared at the house [just before they
were driven away from their home for the last time, to be relocated]. Its
windows looked dull and empty, like the eyes of a trout. (87)
- Mike was tough [he’d just enrolled in the army]. But did that matter to a
bullet? (188)
- I had been afraid his smile would come only rarely, like new needles on a fir.
(196)
- I spent a lot of time thinking about Mike, wondering where he was [fighting in
Europe] . . . and my guessing always put him in the middle of some terrible
battle where men on both sides fell like ripening cherries in a hailstorm.
(200)
- My feelings rose like a rain-swollen river. (220)
- I got up, empty as a hobo’s pocket. (222)
- I felt as if my heart were going to shatter like that long-ago marble. (222)
Early in the narrative, Joe describes missing his dad, feeling bittersweet at hearing
the snippets of news the family received about him. He says, “knowing what
something meant wasn’t the same as feeling it” (49), a comment that might
easily apply to the haiku technique of showing rather than telling. David
Patneaude uses haiku-like details to heighten reader sensitivity throughout the
book.
Here are some additional haiku
from Thin Wood Walls:
Outside the window,
Strangers—once
friends—scurry past.
Moles in black tunnels.
(44)
Mom pulls the plug on
Glenn Miller’s sweet
moonlight song.
Echoes haunt the room.
(86)
Desert sun beats down,
Kindling thoughts of
home—cool rain,
Falling like teardrops.
(93)
Summer heat, summer
Dreams, trapped between
thin wood walls.
Liberties wither. (122)
Novels that employ haiku as a literary element are few in number. In this case,
the poems are “written” mostly by a preteen boy, and serve to demonstrate an
appreciation for the Japanese culture into which he was born, even while his
interest in baseball, basketball, and marbles shows him to be thoroughly
American. Throughout This Wood Walls,
haiku poems and a haiku sensitivity help readers feel the emotions in the
characters by showing us what they lived as well as what they saw. In this way,
haiku makes the novel more real, more intimate, and ultimately, more
compelling.
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