Meet Chiyo-ni.

A morning glory has wound itself around her well bucket overnight. Rather than tear it off, she goes next door to borrow water. That single act, and the seventeen sounds she wrote about it, made her one of the most loved poets Japan has ever produced.

Fukuda Chiyo-ni was born in 1703, widowed young, and became a Buddhist nun in her fifties. She wrote right up to her death poem at seventy-three. Her haiku are small, kind, and often funny, and they are written in the real Japanese of three hundred years ago.

This audiobook teaches you twenty-five of them, whole.

Every chapter is built the same way, in eight parts.

1. The poem. Yumi reads the haiku at natural speed, then slowly.
2. Line by line. Each Japanese line, then its English meaning.
3. Translations.
4. Season word. The kigo that anchors the poem in its season.
5. Explanation. Yumi explains the poem in Japanese, sentence by sentence, with Clay's English.
6. A closer look. Why the poem works: the words, the grammar, and what the poet was doing.
7. Vocabulary. Every word inside each line, with its meaning.
8. Now you. Yumi reads the poem one line at a time and leaves you room to say it back. Say it out loud.

You will hear each haiku many times. That is on purpose. A haiku is only seventeen sounds long, and by the end of its chapter you should be able to say it without thinking. Japanese narration is by native speaker Yumi Boutwell, with the English read by Clay Boutwell, from the family behind TheJapanShop.com, helping people learn Japanese since 2002.

You do not need to know any Japanese to enjoy this. Every word is explained as you go. Twenty-five haiku is not many. Learn them whole, and you will own twenty-five pieces of real Japanese, in the original words, by a poet who wrote them three centuries ago.

For learners at any level who want to hear real Japanese poetry in the original, and for anyone who has ever wondered what a haiku sounds like in the language it was written in.