Former High Prelate Jien (1155–1225) was the son of Grand Chancellor Fujiwara no Tadamichi (poem 76), brother of Kanezane and uncle of Ryokei (poem 91). He entered religion in 1165, at the age of ten, and eventually became Superior General of the Tendai sect in 1192, after serving as Grand Almoner to Emperor Gotoba (poem 99) since 1184. Jien is famous as the author of the Gukanshō (A Modest Look at History; 1219), an important work in which he sets out to find the meaning of history from a Buddhist perspective. A member of the Bureau of Poetry, he was also in the circle of Shunzei and of his nephew Ryokei. He penned a private collection of verse and has some 270 poems in the imperial waka anthologies. He was one of the Thirty-Six Poetic Geniuses of the Late Classical Period.
96
While hinting at the ‘elegant confusion’ (mitate) between blossoms and snow so often used by earlier poets, the first part of this poem has the imagistic richness typical of the yōjō (overflowing emotion) style in vogue in the late-Heian and early-Kamakura periods. The verb furiyuku in line 4 is a pun (kakekotoba) meaning both ‘to fall’ and ‘to age’ and marks the transition from the seasonal sketch in the first section of the poem to personal meditation in the second part. At the age of sixty, Kintsune took the tonsure to study under the famous priest Myoe (1173–1232). In doing so, he left behind the spectacle and glamour of court life. Although the exact date of composition of this poem is unknown, it is likely that it was composed soon after this event as a look back on a lifetime of frantic activity from the perspective of someone who has renounced the world to enter monastic life.
Teika wrote a poem based on this motif in his private collection of poems, the Shūigūsō (no. 59):
I have passed the years
longing for the blossoms,
lamenting the parting of the moon
but, gazing at deep snow, I realize
how my age has piled up too.
(Hana o machi / tsuki o oshimu to /sugushite kite / yuki ni zo tsumoru / toshi wa shirareru)
Fujiwara no Kintsune (1171–1244) was appointed Chancellor of the Realm in 1222 and then entered religion in 1231. He founded the illustrious Saionji sub-clan of the Fujiwara. His elder sister was Teika’s wife. Regarded as one of the best poets of his time, he has a total of 114 poems in the imperial waka anthologies.
97
As his only contribution to the One Hundred Poets, Teika chose this poem of passionate longing for a lover who never comes. Much of the imagery and wording of the poem comes from a chōka in the Man’yōshū (no. 935), reflecting Teika’s practice of using old diction in new compositions. But whereas the original poem focuses on the hesitations of a traveller who does not have the courage to reach the shore where lovely fisherwomen are at work, here the poem is written from the point of view of a woman (see matsu onna), whose smouldering passion is compared to the salt-making fires lighting up the shore at Matsuho Bay (translated here as ‘the Bay of Waiting’), a well-known poetic location (see utamakura). At the time, brine and seaweed were brought up from the sea in carts and boiled down on the shore to make salt.
Many of Teika’s best love poems allude to old romances, both real and literary, but not out of mere admiration for the past. He believed that the timeless, ever-renewing sentiments of love acquired new depth and resonance when superimposed on or paired with the memory of past loves. The poem was composed in 1216 at a palace poetry contest hosted by Emperor Juntoku (r. 1210–21).
Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), aka Sadaie, the son of Shunzei (poem 83) served as Acting Middle Counsellor. One of the compilers of the Shin-kokinshū and the sole editor of the Shin-chokusenshū, for which he also wrote the preface. A poet, scholar, critic and philologist, he collated and produced faithful copies of many important Heian works, ensuring their survival. He is the author of several treatises and collections and kept a diary in Chinese, the Meigetsuki (Chronicle of the Bright Moon). As a person, he is said to have been conspicuously ugly and irascible, but was recognized as a great poet and authority on, and judge of, poetry. The compiler of the One Hundred Poets (see the Introduction, here), he published 465 poems in the imperial waka anthologies and has a private collection of his verse, the Shūigūsō.
98
This poem alludes to one in the Goshūishū (no. 231), which reads:
In the summer mountains
oak leaves rustling
in the summer dusk –
this year, too –
feel like autumn.
(Natsu yama no / nara no ha soyogu / yūgure wa / kotoshi mo aki no / kokochi koso sure)
According to the headnote (kotobagaki) to this poem in the Shin-chokusenshū (no. 192), it was composed for an ornamental screen (see the Introduction, here) made in celebration of the entrance to court of Shunshi (1209–33), consort of Emperor Go-Shirakawa (r. 1210–21). Monthly rituals and festivals (known as ‘annual observances’ or nenjū gyōji) were a common motif for these screens. A different observance was painted on each panel of the screen, one for each of the twelve months. The particular scene for which this poem was composed is the purification ablution (misogi) of the sixth month (late summer in the lunisolar calendar); the poet amusingly remarks on the contrast between the time of the poem he cites (autumn) and the time of the painting (summer). The Oak Brook, or Nara no ogawa (literally, ‘Nara River’, but with no connection to the city of Nara in Yamato Province), is a little stream that runs through the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto. The word ‘Nara’ is traditonally written in kana rather than kanji because it has two meanings, one being the name of a tiny shrine within the grounds of the Kamo Shrine itself and the other being ‘oak’, as used in the translation. It is a good example of how kana allow for the possibility of linguistic play, which the translation, ‘Oak Brook’, endeavours to convey. The stream was also known as Mitarashigawa (literally, ‘Water-Pouring River’) because of its role in Shinto purification rituals.
Fujiwara no Ietaka (1158–1237), of the junior second rank, served as Director of the Ministry of Palace Affairs. He was son-in-law to Jakuren (poem 87) and studied under Shunzei (poem 83). One of the compilers of Shin-kokinshū, he was an intimate of Emperor Gotoba (poem 99) and continued to correspond with him, even after Gotoba’s banishment. He left a private collection of verse and 280 poems in the imperial waka anthologies.
99
This is a poem in the jukkai (lament) subgenre, which poets used to voice their despair at misfortunes ranging from ageing to the death of a dear one. There are an endless number of interpretations for the last two lines of the poem, which are described in the Note on the Translation, here.
Although highly lyrical and almost certainly at least partly autobiographical, the poem was composed for a one-hundred-poem sequence (hyakushū) to which Gotoba contributed in 1201 with Teika, Ietaka (poem 98), Fujiwara no Hideto (1184–1240) and an unknown fifth poet. Hyakushū poems were composed on set topics (dai), but this does not necessarily mean that they lacked spontaneity or depth; indeed, the challenge was precisely to be able to infuse real emotion and pathos in poems on a set theme.
Mono-omou in the last line usually refers to musings of an amorous nature, but here it means dejected thoughts in a more general sense.
Retired Emperor Gotoba (1180–1239; r. 1184–98), the eighty-second emperor, was the son of Emperor Takakura (r. 1168–80). He was also the younger brother of the child emperor Antoku (r. 1180–85), whom he succeeded at the age of four when the Taira clan took Antoku to the western provinces and drowned him rather than allowing him to be captured by a rival clan. Gotoba abdicated in 1198 but remained de facto sovereign in the names of his sons Tsuchimikado and Juntoku (poem 100). In 1221, he moved against the Kamakura shogunate, but the revolt failed and he was exiled to the Oki Islands (see commentary to poem 11 and utamakura), where he spent his last eighteen years. He was deeply interested in poetry, and personally took part in the compilation of the Shin-kokinshū. He also started a vogue for renga. He left a private collection of verse and a treatise on poetry, the Go
toba no in gokuden (The Retired Emperor Gotoba’s Secret Teachings). Completed after 1212, Teika and he were at loggerheads frequently but had mutual respect for each other (see the Introduction, here).
100
The last poem in the One Hundred Poets returns to the theme of imperial power – in this case the loss of it – with which the collection opens but looked at from a decidedly different angle. Whereas Tenji’s opening poem implies a benevolent emperor ruling over a people, this one is filled with nostalgia for the past glories of the imperial house. The main rhetorical device is a pivot phrase that also functions as a pun (kakekotoba), nokiba no shinobu (rendered noki-ba no shinobu in the poem) – which means both the ‘memory ferns growing on the eaves’ and ‘to remember nostalgically/to long for the past’.
The last lines are the key to the poem: no matter how much we may long for it, the past is always more glorious than even our fondest recollections. I have translated the last lines as a personal lyric, but as the poem is by an emperor, these could also be translated as ‘that glorious reign of old / cannot be brought back’. A more literal translation would read:
No matter how I yearn for it,
my yearning never ends
for the glorious reign of old.
We know from the headnote (kotobagaki) in Juntoku’s private collection of verse that the poem was composed in the autumn of 1216, when the author was only nineteen years of age. Five years later, in 1221, Juntoku took part in his father Gotoba’s unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the military regime and restore direct imperial rule, and he was deposed and exiled to Sado Island (a well-known poetic location – see utamakura) as a result. Although the poem was composed several years before these traumatic events, our knowledge of them seems to lend a strangely prophetic poignancy to the poem.
Retired Emperor Juntoku (1197–1242; r. 1211–21), the eighty-fourth emperor, was the third son of Emperor Gotoba (poem 99). After the failed rebellion of 1221, he lived in exile on Sado Island, where he died twenty-one years later. He studied poetry under Teika (poem 97) and left a large corpus of writings, notably the Yakumo mishō (August Notes on the Eight Clouds; c.1219), which, though mostly devoted to waka, is also one of the first treatises to deal seriously with renga. He left a private collection of verse and 159 of his poems are included in the imperial waka anthologies.
Romanized Transliterations of the Poems
In the transliterations below, romanization follows the Hepburn system. Only proper nouns are capitalized and the word at the beginning of each poem. Any inconsistencies in spelling between a word as it is glossed in the Commentary and as it appears in a transliteration are due to a different form of the word being used. The words miotsukushi and mi o tsukusu appear in the annotation to poem 20, for instance, while mi-o-tsukushite features in the transliteration of the poem. This is because miotsukushi is a noun while mi o tsukusu and mi-o-tsukushite are differing forms of the same verb, the infinitive and an inflected form. In the Commentary, the infinitive form of a verb is usually given. Differences are generally noted in the Commentary to make it easier for the reader to find the relevant word in the transliteration.
1
Aki no ta no
kari-o no io no
toma o arami
waga koromode wa
tsuyu ni nuretsutsu
2
Haru sugite
natsu kinikerashi
shirotae no
koromo hosu chō
ama no Kaguyama
3
Ashibiki no
yamadori no o no
shidario no
naganagashi yo o
hitori kamo nen
4
Tago no ura ni
uchiidete mireba
shirotae no
fuji no takane ni
yuki wa furitsutsu
5
Okuyama ni
momiji fumiwake
naku shika no
koe kiku toki zo
aki wa kanashiki
6
Kasasagi no
wataseru hashi ni
oku shimo no
shiroki o mireba
yo zo fukenikeru
7
Ama no hara
furisake mireba
Kasuga naru
Mikasa no yama ni
ideshi tsuki kamo
8
Waga io wa
miyako no tatsumi
shika zo sumu
yo o Ujiyama to
hito wa iu nari
9
Hana no iro wa
utsurinikerina
itazurani
waga mi yo ni furu
nagame seshi ma ni
10
Kore ya kono
yuku mo kaeru mo
wakarete wa
shiru mo shiranu mo
Ōsaka no seki
11
Wata no hara
yaso shima kakete
kogiidenu to
hito ni wa tsugeyo
ama no tsuribune
12
Ama tsu kaze
kumo no kayoiji
fukitojiyo
otome no sugata
shibashi todomen
13
Tsukubane no
mine yori otsuru
Minanogawa
koi zo tsumorite
fuchi to narinuru
14
Michinoku no
shinobu mojizuri
tare yue ni
midaresomenishi
ware naranakuni
15
Kimi ga tame
haru no no ni idete
wakana tsumu
waga koromode ni
yuki wa furitsutsu
16
Tachiwakare
Inaba no yama no
mine ni ouru
matsu to shi kikaba
ima kaerikon
17
Chihayaburu
kamiyo mo kikazu
Tatsutagawa
karakurenai ni
mizu kukuru to wa
18
Suminoe no
kishi ni yoru nami
yoru sae ya
yume no kayoiji
hitome yokuran
19
Naniwagata
mijikaki ashi no
fushi no ma mo
awade kono yo o
sugushiteyo to ya
20
Wabinureba
ima hata onaji
Naniwa naru
mi-o-tsukushite mo
awan to zo omou
21
Ima kon to
iishi bakari ni
nagatsuki no
ariake no tsuki o
machiidetsurukana
22
Fukukarani
aki no kusaki no
shiorureba
mube yamakaze o
arashi to iuran
23
Tsuki mireba
chiji ni mono koso
kanashikere
waga mi hitotsu no
aki ni wa aranedo
24
Kono tabi wa
nusa mo toriaezu
Tamukeyama
momiji no nishiki
kami no manimani
25
Na ni shi owaba
Ōsakayama no
sanekazura
hito ni shirarede
kuru yoshi mogana
26
Ogurayama
mine no momijiba
kokoro araba
ima hitotabi no
miyuki matanan
27
Mika no hara
wakite nagaruru
Izumigawa
itsu miki tote ka
koishikaruran
28
Yamazato wa
fuyu zo sabishisa
masarikeru
hitome mo kusa mo
karenu to omoeba
29
Kokoroate ni
&n
bsp; oraba ya oran
hatsushimo no
okimadowaseru
shiragiku no hana
30
Ariake no
tsurenaku mieshi
wakare yori
akatsuki bakari
uki mono wa nashi
31
Asaborake
ariake no tsuki to
miru made ni
Yoshino no sato ni
fureru shirayuki
32
Yamagawa ni
kaze no kaketaru
shigarami wa
nagare mo aenu
momiji narikeri
33
Hisakata no
hikari nodokeki
haru no hi ni
shizukokoro naku
hana no chiruran
34
Tare o ka mo
shiru hito ni sen
takasago no
matsu mo mukashi no
tomo naranakuni
35
Hito wa isa
kokoro mo shirazu
furusato wa
hana zo mukashi no
ka ni nioikeru
36
Natsu no yo wa
mada yoi nagara
akenuru o
kumo no izuko ni
tsuki yadoruran
37
Shiratsuyu ni
kaze no fukishiku
aki no no wa
tsuranukitomenu
tama zo chirikeru
38
Wasuraruru
mi o ba omowazu
chikaiteshi
hito no inochi no
oshiku mo aru kana
39
Asajiu no
Ono no shinohara
shinoburedo
amarite nado ka
hito no koishiki
40
Shinoburedo
iro ni idenikeri