Since his retirement at the Kôfukuji Temple in Nagasaki, Vicente Haya -already considered the greatest expert in haikus of the Spanish language- undertakes in Aware the prodigious task of explaining in a single book everything there is to know haiku.

The author establishes 88 fundamental points in order to understand haiku, and to illustrate them he translates 262 haikus directly from Japanese. Many of them -and not a few of famous authors- contain errors that, with masterful clarity, Vicente Haya dissects so that we can grasp and understand what a good haiku consists of. His reading is as enjoyable as it is exciting, since it goes from the scathing criticism to a poetic tone that enters the realm of the mystical. That is why I have titled this book Aware: the term that summarizes the notion of aesthetic-religious emotion that in the Japanese awakens Nature.