Death poem waka. Sometimes they are written in the three-line, seventeen-syllable haiku form, although the most common type of death poem (called a "jisei" 辞世) is in the waka form called the tanka (also called a "jisei-ei" 辞世詠) which consists of five lines totaling 31 syllables (5-7-5-7-7)—a form that constitutes over half of surviving death poems.(Ogiu, 317-318). Poetry has long been a core part of Japanese tradition. Death poems are typically graceful, natural, and emotionally neutral, in accordance with the teachings of Buddhism and Shinto. Excepting the earliest works of this tradition, it has been considered inappropriate to mention death explicitly; rather,
Murō Saisei his life. In 1902, he left Kanazawa High Elementary school (equivalent to junior high school today) and started working as a clerk at the Kanazawa Regional Court. His bosses included Haiku-readers such as Kawagoe Bukotsu (河越風骨) and Akakura Kinpu (赤倉錦風) who taught him how to read/compose haiku. After numerous applications to local newspapers, his haiku was first published on October 8, 1904 in Hokkoku Shimbun. Then he used pseudonym of "Terifumi" (照文). Eventually, he also started writing poems and tanka (a Japanese poem of thirty‐one syllables). He started to use his pen name - Saisei - in 1906. The name