Rapeseed flowers: the moon in the east, the sun in the west na no hana ya tsuki wa higashi ni hi wa nishi ni 菜の花や 月は東に 日は西に buson 蕪村

Yosa Buson was a poet and a painter. 菜の花 is the flower of the rape plant, grown for its oil, and a word of spring. The verse gives the moon and the sun their places with no verb. So it does not say whether the moon is rising or the sun is setting.

By the date in the diary, the moon on the day of the session was about twenty-two days old and rose near midnight. So no moon stood in the east at sunset, as Yamashita Kazumi noted in 1982.

Kitō wrote the third verse at the session. Twelve years later he set the scene at about four in the afternoon on a long spring day. In his reading, a moon of about the tenth day was already up, and rapeseed was in flower all around.

In 1904 Satō Kōroku granted that the moon in the east while the sun is still in the west is nothing remarkable. He read the verse as the abstract beauty of a spring scene rather than a sketch of a sight. Later readers have given the moon four different ages, and the verse names none.

Shizuo Kasai put the verse into Spanish in a Santiago newspaper in 1928, and Miyamori Asatarō into English in 1932. R. H. Blyth in 1949 and Harold Henderson in 1958 put the sun before the moon in their English verses, against the Japanese order.

Yosa Buson (1716–1784). Composed as the opening verse (hokku) of a linked-verse session with 樗良 and 几董 on the 23rd day of the third month of 安永3, 3 May 1774, as 几董's diary records it; printed in 1776 in 『続明烏』, edited by 几董, and collected in 1784 in 『蕪村句集』 under the heading 春景, spring scene.