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60 free Haiku trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This haiku trivia quiz covers the world's shortest famous poetic form from its structure to its history. The easy end asks what most people half-remember from school: the 5-7-5 pattern, the country it comes from, the season word and the great name Bashō. From there it digs into what the form actually is: why Japanese on are not quite syllables, what a cutting word does, how a hokku that opened a linked-verse renga became a stand-alone poem, and which reformer coined the name haiku barely a century ago. The four masters get their due. Bashō's ninja-family origins, his banana-tree pen name and the 2,400-kilometre journey behind The Narrow Road to the Deep North; Buson the painter; Issa the farmer's son who wrote 20,000 poems, hundreds of them about flies, fleas and frogs; and Shiki, the tuberculosis patient who took his pen name from a bird said to cough blood and who is also in Japan's baseball hall of fame. The last stretch follows haiku out of Japan: the Dutchman who wrote the first Western haiku, Ezra Pound's Metro poem, Richard Wright's thousands of late haiku, the Beats and the societies and journals that made English-language haiku a movement. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on haiku, its related forms and its major poets, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty-two questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
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Q 01A traditional Japanese haiku is arranged in which sound pattern?
5-7-5
The 17 sound units are called on, and even classical masters such as Bashō sometimes broke the pattern.
Q 02How many sound units, or on, does a traditional haiku contain in total?
17
The Haiku Society of America reckons that about 12 English syllables approximate the duration of 17 Japanese on.
Q 03The word haibun has two English syllables but how many Japanese on?
4
It is counted ha-i-bu-n, because the elongated vowel and the final n each take a unit of their own.
Q 04What is a kigo?
A season word
Common examples are plum blossoms for spring, cicadas for summer and autumn wind for fall.
Q 05What is a kireji in a haiku?
A cutting word
It plays a role like a caesura in Western verse or the volta in a sonnet, and English poets often substitute a dash.
Q 06Which kireji appears in Bashō's famous 'old pond' haiku?
ya
The same kireji appears in his poem on the wind of Mount Fuji; it emphasises the words that precede it.
Q 07Classical linked verse developed a tradition of how many kireji?
18
Among the most common are ka, kana, keri and ya; there is no exact English equivalent for any of them.
Q 08What is a saijiki?
A list of season words
Entries describe each kigo and give example poems; a similar list without sample poems is called a kiyose.
Q 09Modern saijiki are divided into the four seasons plus which extra section?
New Year
Some also add a section for seasonless topics, and each season is split into early, middle and late periods.
Q 10Haiku began as the opening stanza of which longer collaborative form?
Renga
Its opening verse set the tone for the whole linked poem, and Bashō prized his linking verses above his stand-alone ones.
Q 11What was the term for the opening verse of a linked poem, later renamed haiku?
Hokku
Today the word is used chiefly in its original sense, for the first verse of a renku.
Q 12Which writer gave haiku its current name at the end of the 19th century?
Masaoka Shiki
He proposed haiku as an abbreviation of haikai no ku, though the word itself had existed for two centuries.
Q 1317-on poems that ignore the kigo and kireji rules are usually classed as what?
Senryū
The form is named after the Edo-period poet Karai Senryū and tends to be about human foibles rather than nature.
Q 21In which province, in modern Mie prefecture, was Bashō born?
Iga
The Haiseiden building was erected there in 1942 to mark the 300th anniversary of his birth.
Q 22Bashō's most famous haiku, composed in early 1686, features which creature?
A frog
It became instantly famous, and that April the poets of Edo held a linked-verse contest on the subject of frogs.
Q 23What is the English title of Bashō's masterwork Oku no Hosomichi?
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
It is also translated as The Narrow Road to the Interior; the other titles are earlier Bashō works.
Q 14Haibun combines haiku with what?
Prose
Bashō first used the term in a 1690 letter to his disciple Kyorai, and his travel diaries are the great examples.
Q 15Haiga is a style of Japanese art that pairs a haiku with what?
A painting
Buson is regarded as one of the greatest masters of the form; modern haiga artists also use photographs.
Q 16What is a kuhi?
A haiku carved on natural stone
Shiki's home city alone has more than two hundred of these poem monuments.
Q 17Which city has more than two hundred kuhi poem monuments?
Matsuyama
It was Shiki's hometown, and its middle school once banned him from public speaking for his teenage radicalism.
Q 18In which century did Matsuo Bashō live?
17th
He was born in 1644 and died in 1694, the most famous poet of the Edo period.
Q 19Bashō's pen name comes from which plant, given to him by his disciples?
A banana tree
They planted it beside his rustic hut in Fukagawa in 1680, giving him both a new name and his first permanent home.
Q 20Bashō was born into a family trained in which secretive martial tradition?
Ninjutsu
The Matsuo were a major ninja family of Iga Province, and he served a young lord as a servant in his late teens.
Q 24Who accompanied Bashō on the 1689 journey behind Oku no Hosomichi?
Kawai Sora
Sora's own diary later showed how many artistic liberties Bashō took with the account.
Q 25Roughly how far did Bashō travel on the journey described in Oku no Hosomichi?
2,400 km
That is 600 ri, covered mostly on foot over about 150 days through the northeast of Honshū.
Q 26When was the first edition of Oku no Hosomichi published?
1702, after his death
Bashō spent years reworking it and finished the final version in 1694; it was an immediate commercial success.
Q 27Which Chinese poet, revered by Bashō, influenced Oku no Hosomichi?
Du Fu
The work also references Confucius, the waka poet Saigyō and The Tale of the Heike.
Q 28Which principle of 'lightness' did Bashō adopt in his last years?
Karumi
He embraced it after shutting his gate to visitors for a month in 1693, choosing to greet the mundane world rather than shun it.
Q 29In which city did Bashō die in 1694?
Osaka
He fell ill with a stomach complaint on his last journey and died surrounded by his disciples.
Q 30Besides poetry, Yosa Buson was celebrated in which art?
Painting
His painterly eye shows in his haiku, and Shiki later held him up as the model for haiku as a sketch from life.