The treatment of Japanese commentaries in “Western” writing gives us an example of how a respectful stance in fact makes the Japanese scholarship invisible. On the one hand it is regarded as giving us the truth about the works discussed by it, on the other, it is not regarded as real scholarship at all. Sometimes it is treated more as a part of the literary work, or just reading help for the foreign scholar, rather than an interpretation of this work. It is not uncommon that any single commentary is regarded as enough for studying a work, implying that any Japanese will make the same reading. As a result, the interpretations made in these commentaries are never discussed critically. Classical haikai poetry is usually extremely hard to understand, both due to its lack of completeness and its incoherence. The foreign scholar usually has great difficulties in reading this poetry without help and it is only then that the commentary is accepted as a basis upon which some loftier theoretical discussion may be carried out. My aim here is to do the opposite procedure, to focus precisely on the minute readings of the poem that has been made in commentaries, and compare the different ways scholars have tried to reach understanding when reading a couple of eighteenthcentury haikai poems. By challenging the different interpretations, I will show that there is nothing like a “Japanese reading” but just different individual understandings which are all a result of an individual mix.