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I'm struggling here to read these two haikus on my teacups. One horizontal row
is one cup. All others I have are reading right to left, guess these ones go
same way. All others have also been Matsuo Basho poems. Any tips would be
welcome! A little hint, picture A4 rightmost thingy has been "の" and the
character on A1 (leftmost image) is probably "mu" as in emptiness, is not part
of the haikus usally. Thanks.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rtdp7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rtdp7.jpg)

This is my conclusion from the delightfully detailed answers I got from this
discussion here. Thanks, guys! I have some more puzzles in my teacups set,
I'll drop them in another time.[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cj4cA.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cj4cA.jpg)
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2020-04-16T04:11:45.283
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question
calligraphy haiku hentaigana
Understanding Basho haikus in difficult calligraphy
The problem is that the writing is not only old and cursive, but using a lot
of obsolete variant kana
([hentaigana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana)) that you'd no longer
see in the modern documents.

Using hentaigana supported by Unicode ([a font that can display
them](http://wakufactory.jp/densho/font/hentai/) or
[another](https://mojikiban.ipa.go.jp/1300.html) is recommended), the writing
on the two cups can be displayed as follows.

[![Basho
haiku](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oBsY2.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oBsY2.png)

Cup A reads:

> □/の山/二丁/れ(?)/大悲/閣

or identifiable to this haiku:

> **花の山二町のぼれば大悲閣**

The first character that probably is 花 is too radically stylized as an image
of petals(?) to be recognized as a character on its own.

Cup B:

> ゆく/春()を/近江の/人と/を//る

or

> **ゆく春を近江の人とをしみける** (ゆく春を近江の人と惜しみける)

* * *

Without expertise knowledge, I have totally no idea about last couple of signs
on both cups, sorry. But as I think I slightly see two grass components (艹)
there, I could try guessing that it might be a stylized name of 芭蕉, or might
be something completely different.

References:

  * [Wikisource 芭蕉俳句全集](https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%8A%AD%E8%95%89%E4%BF%B3%E5%8F%A5%E5%85%A8%E9%9B%86)
  * [芭蕉発句全集](http://www2.yamanashi-ken.ac.jp/~itoyo/basho/haikusyu/Default.htm)
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answer
As a complement to answer above, the old Japanese writing has thrown another
monkey wrench into your way to conquering the Japanese literal world:
Kuzushiji. So, you get to make sure aren't any of those symbols kuzushiji.
Basically, kuzushiji are cursive style characters, but they can be so far from
the printed forms that it may take an expert or a well-trained neural network
to recognize them, let alone semantically interpret them.

There is a good article about these two

[ Hentaigana: How Japanese Went from Illegible to Legible in 100 Years
](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/hentaigana-history-of-japanese-writing-
system/)

In fact, to recognize the symbols is not easy. For example, it is estimated
that only 0.01% of modern Japanese natives can read Kuzushiji. So all those
old literature, letters and graphic novels are still waiting to be
interpreted.

Kaggle even launched a machine learning competition to deal with Kuzushiji:

[Kuzushiji Recognition in Kaggle](https://www.kaggle.com/c/kuzushiji-
recognition)
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answer