Why does this haiku have a 5-6-5 pattern? I was amazed to read the following haiku in " " (a book written by /Sō Sakon about the famous poet) : > !enter image description here At first sight, the text given by doesn't seem regular : 5+6+5 morae ?. I knew the following version with a '' after : > {}{} **** {}{} I thought the haiku given by was misprinted but it seems incredible such an error occured at the very beginning of the book, in the first haiku given by the author, page 1 ! There's obviously something I'm missing... Any idea to help me ?

Some haiku do not strictly follow the 5-7-5 pattern. Irregular haiku with one more or less morae than usual are called or , respectively. Some haiku even ignore the 5-7-5 rule completely (See ).

Wikipedia says 's haiku do have many variations:

> 24,000 **** 13

According to , the sources of these three variations are as follows:

* is from
* is from /etc
* is from /etc



I think the third one is best-known, but it seems that the first one is the original version, although being . is his personal diary, which he did not intend to publish.

According to the article of , wanted to publish his poetry book, but he died before he could do that. was compiled and published by another person, 25 years after 's death.

> ****

So I think the well-known third version was the revised version either by himself or by the editor.