SOURCE: An introduction to The Izayoi Nikki, in Translations from Early Japanese Literature, Harvard University Press, 1951, pp. 3-51.

[In the following excerpt, first published in 1947, Reischauer places the Izayoi Nikki in historical context by examining trends in Japanese literature during the late classic and early feudal periods.]

1. THE IZAYOI NIKKI AND ITS PLACE IN JAPANESE LITERATURE

The Izayoi nikki (The Diary of the Waning Moon) is not a truly great piece of literature even in the original Japanese. My literal translation of it most certainly has not added to its literary merit, but neither has it robbed it of any great literary worth, simply because there is not much in the original Japanese to be lost.

Having admitted that the Izayoi nikki is not a masterpiece of world literature, I must now point out that there are many reasons why it is both an interesting and important work worthy of detailed study. One reason is its long popularity among the Japanese. It is usually considered a minor classic suitable for use as a school text, and today it certainly is one of the five or six most widely read works of the Kamakura period (1185-1333). Another reason is its value as an excellent example of some of the literary trends of the time, such as the decline of the archaistic prose style associated with the old court aristocracy and the increasing imitativeness and formalism of poetry. Indeed, the hundred-odd poems of the Izayoi nikki, though not among the best in Japanese literature, afford an excellent insight into the heart, or rather mind, of the medieval Japanese poet and into the nature and some of the weaknesses of Japanese poetry in general. Still another reason why this text is of interest both to the student of literature and the historian is the author herself, “the nun Abutsu” (Abutsu-ni). Despite the largely imitative quality of her writing, she stands out as a great personality. As the last famous woman writer before the late nineteenth century, she marks the end of an epoch in Japanese literature and social history; as the wife of one of Japan's best known poets, Fujiwara Tameie (1198-1275), and as the progenitor of one of the greatest hereditary schools of poets of medieval times, she is a significant figure in the history of Japanese poetry. Lastly, the historical incident around which the Izayoi nikki centers throws much light on the institutions and mores of early feudal Japan.

If the Izayoi nikki is to be regarded not as a timeless masterpiece but merely as an interesting example of broad literary and cultural trends, it is necessary, before undertaking a study of it, to have some understanding of the literature of the late classic and early feudal periods in Japan. Unfortunately, Aston's pioneer work, A History of Japanese Literature, still remains, fifty years after its first publication in 1898, the only serious history of Japanese literature in English.¹ Reflecting the rudimentary level of Japanese literary criticism of that day, it is neither a clear interpretation of the development of Japanese literature nor a repository of accurate information. I am forced, therefore, before proceeding with a study of my text, to sketch briefly the major trends in Japanese literature from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, so that the Izayoi nikki can be properly evaluated and viewed in its true perspective. I hope that my own inadequacy for this task will help spur others on to undertake the writing of a satisfactory history of Japanese literature and thus fill in one of the most serious gaps in our understanding of the civilization of the Far East.

The period from the eighth to the early eleventh century can be called the classic age of Japanese literature. This period saw the first flowering of Japanese civilization, following the heavy cultural borrowings from China during the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries. During this period the prestige of all things Chinese remained so great that more emphasis was placed on writing in Chinese than in Japanese. Despite this primary concern with Chinese, however, the Japanese court aristocrats, both men and women, produced a prodigious number of poems in Japanese. Some members of the nobility, particularly the court ladies, who were less skilled in writing Chinese and less ashamed of writing Japanese than their menfolk, produced Japan's first great prose literature in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.

This classic age saw the compilation of the two greatest collections of Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), completed some time after 759, and the Kokinshū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times), completed in 905. During the first two decades of the eleventh century appeared two of Japan's greatest prose masterpieces, the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu and the Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi) by Lady Sei Shōnagon.

The classic literature of Japan was the undisputed monopoly of a small court aristocracy. It was written by members of this group about themselves, their lives, and their thoughts, and in all probability it was read almost exclusively by the same small educated class. The court aristocracy was a privileged class, living in comparative luxury and indolence, and the literature it produced clearly mirrors the life and interests natural to such a class. Despite a carefully nurtured and savored sense of poetic melancholy, the poets and authors of this age had a strong hedonistic zest for life—a desire to enjoy the experiences and emotions of life to the fullest, to drain the last emotional draught from each scene of nature, each amatory encounter, and all the arts and diversions of court life. There was correspondingly little interest in the more fundamental problems of life, in philosophy or religion, except insofar as religious ceremonies served as diversions or opportunities for display.

Notwithstanding the prestige of the Chinese language at this time and the usual attempt on the part of most courtiers to do their serious writing in that language, Japanese literature of the classic age was largely free from Chinese loan words. In sharp contrast to most prose writing of later ages, it was relatively pure Japanese both in structure and vocabulary.

The classic age of Japanese literature coincides roughly with the period when Japan was controlled by the imperial court at Kyōto, first under the leadership of Emperors, and later under that of Regents (Sesshō) and Chancellors (Kampaku) belonging to the all-powerful Fujiwara family. The eleventh century saw the start of profound political and economic changes, as actual control of the nation began to pass from the weakening grasp of the court aristocracy to the hands of a more vigorous and much larger class of provincial gentry. This group had a double role as stewards of the local estates and manors and as warriors responsible for the preservation of order in each community. Eventually, during the second half of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a dominant clique of provincial warriors created a nation-wide feudal political system, the Kamakura Shōgunate (1185-1333).

As the old order began to crumble and the new took its place, there appeared a growing spirit of pessimism, particularly in court circles, and a rising interest in Buddhism, not merely as an elegant diversion, but as a means of salvation from a corrupt world. This growing interest in religion culminated in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in a great religious awakening and in the founding of new Buddhist sects, which have ever since been the dominant sects of Japanese Buddhism.

With such great social and spiritual upheavals during these centuries, it was inevitable that the classic literature of Japan should undergo great changes. With the political and economic decline of the court nobility, the literature which this class was producing became progressively less creative and increasingly imitative and sterile. At the same time, new literary forms appeared which were more expressive of the growing popular concern with religion and the interest of the rising warrior class. Thus, this period is characterized by the parallel and sometimes mingling flow of two dissimilar currents—one the placid but dwindling flow of the old court literature, the other the fresher, growing current of newer literary forms better able to express the spirit of a new age dominated politically by the warrior class and spiritually by the new Buddhism.

As an indirect result of the political and economic decline of the Kyōto court, the knowledge of Chinese on the part of the court aristocracy gradually declined. As it became increasingly difficult for Japanese to write correct Chinese, they sometimes resorted to a mixed Chinese-Japanese style, which might be described as Chinese written with the aid (or obscuration) of Japanese grammar. Such a style is found in the Konjaku monogatari (Tales of Modern and Ancient Times), a collection of Buddhist and other stories from India, China, and Japan, which is traditionally attributed, somewhat gratuitously, to Minamoto Takakuni (1004-1077). By the thirteenth century a new type of Japanese prose had developed from this style, which, while largely Japanese in grammar and structure, used a vocabulary rich in borrowed Chinese words or Sino-Buddhist terms.

The decline of Chinese learning in Japan also resulted in a lessening of the prejudice on the part of men against writing prose in Japanese. Men gradually came to take the lead in Japanese prose literature in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and by the latter part of the thirteenth century the woman writer had become a rarity. There continued to be women poets, but few attained any great prominence after the thirteenth century, and, as mentioned above, Abutsu, who died not long after completing the Izayoi nikki in 1280, was the last famous woman prose writer before the late nineteenth century.

Another result of the decline of the Kyōto court and the rise of new political institutions was the growing interest in the recent past, which was looked back upon with nostalgia by those who regretted the passing of the old and also with curiosity by those who wished to explain the present. This can be seen, on the one hand, in the increasing imitativeness and traditionalism of the older literary forms and, on the other hand, in the popularity of historical subjects in the newer literary forms. This interest in history ranks with the new emphasis on Buddhism and the warrior class as one of the outstanding features of Japanese literature of early feudal times.

Still another result of the decline of the Kyōto court, the rise of the provincial warrior class, and the appearance of a new interest in Buddhism was the spread of literature to other classes besides the court aristocracy. Gradually members of the warrior class and monks from all classes began to join the court nobles as important figures in the literary world. By the late fourteenth century literary leadership had definitely passed from the courtiers to other groups.

Among the various literary forms popular in the late classic and early feudal period, it was poetry, particularly the thirty-one syllable tanka, which remained truest to the classic pattern. In fact, it was conservative to the point of imitativeness, though the Japanese poets, particularly those of this time, felt no shame in this. On the contrary, they delighted in recalling by allusion or quotation some earlier poem to which they would give a new interpretation or some unexpected twist. Drawing inspiration from the Kokinshū, and later also from the Man'yōshū, the court aristocracy, now joined by monks and warriors, continued century after century to compose their tanka and to collect the best of them in periodic imperial anthologies, based on the pattern of the Kokinshū, which is the first of the anthologies of Japanese poetry compiled on imperial order. In all, twenty-one imperial anthologies were compiled, nine during the century and a half of the Kamakura period alone. The last was completed in 1439.² In addition, there appeared some private anthologies, as well as scores of private collections of individual poets, attesting to the assiduousness if not the genius of the poets of the time.

The poets of the latter part of the twelfth century and early thirteenth century, particularly the monk Saigyō (1118-1190), the courtier Fujiwara Toshinari (or Shunzei) (1114-1204), and the lattera's son Sadaie (or Teika) (1162-1241), are credited with having brought not only new techniques but also new freshness to the old art of composing tanka. The Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times), an imperial anthology compiled by Sadaie and four other courtiers during the first decade of the thirteenth century, contains many poems by these three men and their contemporaries and is usually considered to be the most important of the twenty imperial anthologies which followed the Kokinshū.

As the thirteenth century progressed, however, poetry became even more imitative and artificial than before. One factor in this growing sterility and formality was the development of hereditary lines of poets, claiming to possess the only true tradition. Poetry, like the other arts practiced in feudal Japan, became a sort of feudal right, maintained as far as possible within a single hereditary line by the transmission of a secret tradition. The most important of these hereditary lines sprang from Sadaie's son, Tameie, the husband of Abutsu. The three schools into which his descendants were divided dominated the poetic field during the next two or three centuries and helped to stifle what remaining creative spirit there may have been. At first the transmission was from father to son in these schools, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the leading protagonists of these schools were usually non-related disciples, more often than not, monks.

The ending of the imperial anthologies in the fifteenth century was perhaps as much due to the loss of interest in a sterile poetic form as to the political and economic decline of the imperial court. But the art of tanka writing never did die out in Japan. It is still practiced by thousands of Japanese and is officially recognized in the annual imperial poetry competition. However, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries popular interest began to shift from it to other poetic forms. There were the popular songs and chants which played a part in the development of the great medieval dramatic form, the Nō Drama. There was also the poetic diversion of renga (“chain poems”), in which different poets composed alternating seventeen- and fourteen-syllable strophes, each taking as its point of departure the immediately preceding strophe. The composition of renga gradually developed into something more than a diversion and in time became the most highly regarded of all poetic skills. It flourished particularly under the great renga poet, the monk Sōgi (1421-1502), and it in turn gave birth to the seventeen-syllable haiku,³ which, in the hands of the haiku master, Bashō (1644-1694), was to become the great poetic form of the seventeenth century.

The romantic novel was another decidedly conservative literary form. The long romantic novels of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were usually quite self-consciously archaistic in subject matter and in style. In both these regards, they clearly showed the influence of the Tale of Genji and sometimes of earlier novels of the tenth century. For the most part they adhered closely to the native Japanese vocabulary and grammar of the early eleventh century, although in the novels of the thirteenth century there is sometimes a somewhat greater admixture of newer grammatical forms and words of Chinese and Buddhist origin. Plots frequently were nothing more than new adaptations of old themes and concerned the lives and loves of court nobles of an earlier age. With these markedly archaistic characteristics, it is small wonder that the romantic novels of this period displayed a sharp decline in creative imagination, which in turn no doubt accounted for a rapid loss of popular interest in this type of literature.

Among the better known romantic novels of this time, the one which most closely followed the pattern of the Genji monogatari was perhaps the Sagoromo monogatari, probably dating from the second half of the eleventh century or the early twelfth century. The Hamamatsu chūnagon monogatari, which probably dates from the middle of the eleventh century and may have been the work of a lady known to history simply as “the daughter of Sugawara Takasue” (b. 1008), followed the precedent of the Utsubo monogatari (dating from about 970) in taking its hero to China. The Sumiyoshi monogatari, which dates from some time before the year 1271, following the theme of the Ochikubo monogatari of the second half of the tenth century, centers around the trials and loves of a persecuted step-daugher. The most original and most noteworthy of the late novels is the Tsutsumi chūnagon monogatari, attributed to the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries by different authorities. This work, breaking with the tradition of the long romantic novel, is made up of ten independent chapters which are scenes from life rather than stories. The approach is fresh, and the subject matter in some cases is novel. Some enthusiasts have even called the ten chapters of the Tsutsumi chūnagon monogatari Japan's firts short sotries.

The archaistic romantic novel did not survive the thirteenth century as an important literary form. Long before this, the historical novel, the military novel, and collections of short historical and Buddhist stories had supplanted it in popular appeal. During the later feudal period, a new literary form, usually called the Otogi-zōshi, proved to be the most popular story form among the people at large. The Otogi-zōshi were short and often fantastic adventure stories, sometimes more in the nature of fairy tales than realistic stories. They were an important literary form from the fourteenth until the seventeenth centuries, and, in a closely parallel and often almost identical form called Kōwakamai,⁴ were recited or chanted during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Otogi-zōshi and Kōwakamai in their somewhat archaistic grammar and vocabulary may have harked back to the romantic novel, but in subject matter they derived more closely from the historical and military novels and still more from the collections of historical and Buddhist stories.

The historical novel⁵ first appeared during the eleventh century as an outgrowth of the classic romantic novel. Like the collections of historical and Buddhist stories, it was perhaps a natural literary expression of an age of change which viewed with nostalgia the glories of a departed day. The two earliest and most famous of the historical novels are the Eiga monogatari (Tale of Splendor) and the Ōkagami (The Great Mirror). Both were at least in large part written during the eleventh century, and both, while treating of court history from the latter half of the ninth century until the eleventh, center their attention on Michinaga (966-1027),⁶ the most glorious and renowned of all the heads of the Fujiwara family. The Eiga monogatari, which ends with the year 1092, is arranged chronologically, while the Ōkagami, which goes only as far as 1025, follows the pattern of Chinese histories in its division into imperial annals and biographies of courtiers. In their imaginative detail and their emphasis on court ceremonies, incidents of court life, and poetic exchanges, both works show the strong influence of the old romantic novels, though in vocabulary they diverge from the novels in their use of Chinese and Buddhist terms.

The author of the Ōkagami puts his story into the mouths of two aged men, one 190 years old and the other 180, with occasional comments by a younger man representing the judgment of the contemporary age. This device, as well as the name of the book, was imitated in a series of later historical novels which sought to continue the Ōkagami or supplement it. These were the Imakagami (The Mirror of Nowadays), continuing the story from 1025 to 1170, the Mizu-kagami (The Water Mirror), dating probably from the latter part of the twelfth century and telling the history of Japan from its mythological beginnings through the first half of the ninth century, and the Masu-kagami (The Clear Mirror),⁷ covering the period 1180-1333.

Collections of historical and Buddhist stories⁸ represent another literary form which paralleled the historical novel in its emphasis on the past and in the history of its development. The first collection of this type not written in pure Chinese, and at the same time the largest and most famous, is the Konjaku monogatari, already mentioned as a good example of the mixed Chinese-Japanese style of the eleventh century and, thus, one of the ancestors of the normal written style of the Kamakura period. As was frequently the case in such collections, many of the stories in the Konjaku monogatari are about Buddhist subjects. A distinctive feature of this particular collection is that, of the total number of thirty-one scrolls into which it is divided, five each are devoted to stories from India and China.

There were many later collections of a similar nature, recounting famous stories drawn from the history and the cultural traditions of the Far East. Some centered largely on Buddhist themes, others on literary stories, particularly incidents capped by some courtier's apt Chinese poem or tanka. Two of the later collections might be singled out for specific mention. One is the Uji shūi monogatari (Tales Gleaned at Uji) of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, which added a strong moralistic note to its stories. The other is the Jikkinshō (The Miscellany of the Ten Maxims) of 1252, which fittingly illustrates the spirit of a strongly Buddhist age by grouping its stories under ten moral principles drawn from Buddhism. All of these collections of historical and Buddhist tales are either in a mixed Chinese-Japanese style or else in Japanese loaded with Chinese and Buddhist words.

Perhaps the most distinctive literary form of the Kamakura period was the military novel.⁹ This was clearly an outgrowth of the historical novel. At the same time, in its heavy admixture of Chinese words, it showed the direct influence of contemporary histories and accounts of wars written in Chinese, and, in its organization into a series of incidents, each with its own title, it showed the influence of the collections of historical and Buddhist stories. The military novels of the Kamakura period were vigorous in style. Telling as they did of the life and wars of the newly-risen warrior class, they enjoyed great popularity throughout the feudal period. For the most part they took as their central theme the wars between the Minamoto and Taira clans during the second half of the twelfth century.

The greatest of the military novels, the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Taira Clan), written early in the thirteenth century, covers the years 1132 to 1213 but dwells especially on the collapse of the Taira clan during the years 1177 to 1185. Its great popularity in medieval times is attested to by the fact that it was commonly chanted by traveling minstrels. Two shorter works, the Hōgen monogatari and the Heiji monogatari, tell respectively of the wars of the Hōgen and Heiji periods, which occurred in 1156 and 1159-1160. Very similar in style and organization, these two works may be by a single hand. Scholars are not yet agreed as to the dates of their composition, some placing them before and some after the Heike monogatari. The Gempei seisui ki (Record of the Rise and Fall of the Minamoto and Taira Clans), dating from about the middle of the thirteenth century, covers much the same material as the Heike monogatari, and the Taiheiki (Record of the Great Peace) recounts the political history and battles between the years 1318 and 1367.

There remain for discussion various intimate writings such as diaries,¹⁰ travel accounts,¹¹ and personal miscellanies or jottings.¹² The literary trends within this category were as diverse as the elements of which it was constituted. The court lady's diary, which had been so important a literary form during the classic age, remained essentially conservative and imitative both in content and style. After the Sarashina nikki (Sarashina Diary), written in 1059-1060 by the daughter of Sugawara Takasue, mentioned above as the reputed authoress of the Hamamatsu chūnagon monogatari, there were few diaries of any great literary merit or renown. The Izayoi nikki stands out as the only famous later work of this type, and it might be better classed as a travel account or, as we shall see, as a purely poetical work.

Besides the Izayoi nikki, the only well-known travel accounts of this period are the Kaidōki (Record of the Sea Road) of 1223 and the Tōkan kikō (Eastern Barrier Travel Account) of 1242, which, like Abutsu's more famous work, tell of trips from Kyōto, the old imperial capital, to Kamakura, the new feudal capital. Both, in the usual style of travel accounts, are highly poetic, but they are less archaistic than the Izayoi nikki and make more use of words of Chinese and Buddhist origin.¹³

There are only two famous personal miscellanies or jottings dating from this period, but both are regarded as masterpieces of Japanese literature. One is the Hōki (Record of a Ten Foot Square [Hut]), usually accepted as a work written early in the thirteenth century by Kamo Chōmei (1153-1216). The other is the Tsurezuregusa (Grasses of Ennui) written by Yoshida Kenkō (or Kaneyoshi) (1283-1350), probably some time between 1324 and 1331. The two authors have points of striking similarity with each other. Both were born in priestly Shintō families in Kyōto; both became Buddhist monks and recluses; both were among the greatest poets of their day. Their two works, however, are quite dissimilar. The Hōjōki is a very short philosophic account of Chōmei's retirement from the world. The Tsurezuregusa is a much longer work and a true miscellany in the style of the Pillow Book of Lady Sei Shōnagon. The Hōjōki and Tsurezuregusa are alike in that they show the pervading spirit of Buddhist pessimism of the period and are written in a style which is neither over-archaistic nor too heavily burdened with Chinese and Buddhist terms. The Tsurezuregusa has a unique position in the history of Japanese literature as perhaps the last great work belonging to the classic stream of literature.

This brief outline of the major trends in Japanese literature during the late classic and early feudal periods may help to resolve the apparent inconsistency of my evaluation of the Izayoi nikki as an important text but not a great piece of literature. As the last famous work by a woman, as the best known diary or travel account in Japanese written between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and as one of the five or six most read works of the Kamakura period, the Izayoi nikki has an important place in Japanese literature, though this place is not that of a great example of creative writing. Archaistic in style, imitative in concept, and formalized in expression, it is only the echo of a great literature.

The reader, however, should be reminded that this judgment is contradicted by the long and continued popularity of the Izayoi nikki among Japanese. This is attested to by the early printing of the book and the many modern commentaries upon it. No very early manuscripts are known, but the Izayoi nikki was printed as early as 1659 and again in 1689, and a great commentary on it was published together with the text in 1824. Since 1885 further commentaries have come out in rapid succession, no less than fifteen appearing within the subsequent fifty years, and the text of the Izayoi nikki has been printed again and again in modern collections of Japanese literature.¹⁴

Such intensive study of the Izayoi nikki would seem to indicate much greater literary merit than I have suggested. However, it should be borne in mind that many of the recent commentaries on the Izayoi nikki have been occasioned by its common use in schools and not by any spontaneous demand on the part of readers. More significant perhaps are the views of Japanese students of literature. For the most part they seem reserved in their comments on the literary merit of the Izayoi nikki. Tsugita¹⁵ calls the prose graceful and concise and sometimes vividly beautiful, though he admits that it is poor in artistic effect and that the poems are not particularly distinguished. Fujimura emphasizes the intense mother-love Abutsu displays as the most interesting feature of the Izayoi nikki. Ichimura calls it a beautiful work of high literary merit which combines harmoniously an expository style with an emotional approach, but he finds the poems remarkable only for Abutsu's skill in making plays on words and in giving a new twist to old poems, though he feels that Abutsu was perhaps the most faithful transmitter of Sadaie's poetic heritage. Sano points out that the prose, though only incidental to the poetry, is better than the poems, which he finds too cluttered up with verbal tricks and obscure because of their dependence on earlier poems for understanding. However, he makes clear that Abutsu's poetic weak points were those of her day, and he admits that her prose, too, is sometimes lacking in clarity. Kazamaki, while pointing out that the judgment of time has been that the Izayoi nikki is great literature, states that in parts it is monotonous and even fatiguing, showing how much the diary style of the classic age had decayed by the thirteenth century. He feels that, despite the obvious sincerity and intensity of the emotions Abutsu expresses, the chief literary value of the Izayoi nikki lies in its poems and its chief interest in what it teaches us of the poetry of the time.

The Izayoi nikki, though commonly called a diary or a travel account, is neither, except in a most limited sense. It falls into four distinct parts. The first is a short introduction telling why Abutsu made her trip from Kyōto to Kamakura and of her parting from her children, with the poems she exchanged with them on that occasion. The second part tells of her trip, which lasted from the sixteenth day to the twenty-ninth day of the tenth moon of 1277. It is a day-by-day account in diary style, though it would be safe to conclude from the vagueness of parts of this section that it was not written down in this form until after her trip had been completed. The description of her trip is limited to the briefest of notices concerning the places she lodged each night and some of the chief sights along the way, usually in connection with, or as an introduction to, one of the fifty-five tanka which stud this part of the text. The third section makes no pretense of being a diary. It tells of Abutsu's correspondence, while she was in Kamakura, with her friends and relatives in Kyōto, and quotes many of the poems exchanged in these letters. The last poem in this section was composed presumably in the early autumn of 1278, but the writing of the section was clearly completed some time later, for her final words are, “Later many poems from the capital piled up. I shall write them down another time.”

The fourth and last section has no organic relationship with the rest of the work. It is a chōka (or nagauta), that is, a “long poem” as opposed to a tanka or “short poem.” It consists of 151 alternating five- and seven-syllable verses, with the last two of seven syllables, followed by a tanka, which, as the last element of a chōka, is called a hanka and serves as a sort of summary, supplement, or keynote for the rest of the poem. The chōka recites again the reasons for her presence in Kamakura, thus repeating some of the material of the first section. Her reference in this poem to “the advent of the spring of the fourth year” indicates that it was not written until the spring of 1280, over a year later than any other part of the text. This chōka has not been highly regarded by Japanese critics. Even Ichimura feels that it has no great literary value, and Sano calls it simply tedious. But it is of interest as a rather unusual poetic work for the thirteenth century. The chōka had had its day in the time of the Man'yōshū, and from the tenth century on was a poetic form little esteemed and only infrequently employed.

It is not known when the Izayoi nikki first was given its present title, which can be translated as Diary of the Waning Moon. This title is really applicable only to the second section, which is in diary style and concerns her trip from Kyōto to Kamakura, made in the second half of the tenth moon. The night of the sixteenth day of the moon and that day itself had the poetic name of Izayoi or sometimes Isayoi, which literally means “tardy” or “faltering” and had specific reference to the fact that this was the beginning of the waning of the moon. Not only was the sixteenth the day Abutsu started her trip, but in the introductory section she even indulges in the conceit that she had set forth, “enticed by the waning moon (izayou tsuki).” Later she quotes a poem from one of her correspondents, suggesting, with reference to the day of her departure, that “the waning moon that rose that night” would be for her correspondent “a memento” of Abutsu. To this Abutsu makes the poetic response that she trusts “in the future when it will come around again—the waning moon.” The title was probably inspired by these three references and by the diary style of the second section.

From the brief description of the make-up of the Izayoi nikki given above, it can be seen why it cannot be called a true travel account or diary. Only one of its four parts, constituting slightly over a third of the whole text, bears any resemblance to either, and then only superficially. Actually even this section is more a selection of tanka written during her trip, arranged chronologically and bound together with brief comments describing the circumstances under which each poem was composed. Kazamaki has put forth the thoroughly plausible thesis that this section is in reality a sort of textbook or poetry model book written by Abutsu for the benefit of her sons to show them how poems on the famous sights of the Tōkaidō, the “Eastern Sea Road” between Kyōto and the Kamakura region, should be composed. He points out that forty-nine of the fifty-five poems in this section are on places about which famous poems had been composed in the past and that, of the fifty-one place names mentioned in this part of Abutsu's text, thirty-five figure in her poems and several of the others are indirectly connected with them. This theory is supported by a statement Abutsu makes in the third section where, commenting upon some poems sent her by one of her sons, she says, “They seem to have been composed on the basis of the diary of my trip down here, which I had sent them.” Kazamaki goes on to suggest that the third part, with its twenty-six poems by Abutsu and twenty-four sent her by her correspondents, is likewise simply a poetry model book for her sons, showing how poetic exchanges by letter were to be written. All this seems reasonable enough in view of Abutsu's obvious concern over the poetic education of her sons and of the transmission of the correct tradition to them.

Whether or not one accepts Kazamaki's theory that the Izayoi nikki was written merely as a poetry model book, there can be no doubt that it is entirely dominated by its poetic element. The 116 tanka, eighty-six by Abutsu herself, together with the concluding chōka make up almost half of the total text, and the prose parts are clearly nothing more than introductions, either to the work itself, or to the individual poems. The prose has the merit of being simple and, for the most part, clear, but it tends to be monotonous both because of its restricted archaistic vocabulary and because of its staccato style, which is probably the result of the many simple introductory statements.

One returns inevitably to the poems and to what Abutsu says, or rather implies, about poetry as the heart of the Izayoi nikki. One of its chief values is as a sort of unconscious commentary on poetic trends of the Kamakura period. Abutsu's attitude toward the art of poetry as the exclusive hereditary property of her husband's family and her determination that the correct tradition, and the perquisites which accompanied it, should be passed on to her sons rather than to her stepsons, show how emphasis on tradition and belief in hereditary right were taking the place of genius in the field of poetry. Her tendency to compose poems on themes traditionally accepted as proper poetic subjects and even to compose her poems in imitation of, or at least with reference to, some famous poem of the past shows how far imitativeness and traditionalism had supplanted inspiration. Her reliance on literary allusions, on timeworn clichés, and on verbal tricks in the nature of puns show how far formalism had taken the place of real emotion in the composition of poetry.

The poems of the Izayoi nikki, while not regarded as among the finest of Japanese poetry, have their value for the insight they give into Japanese poetry in general. Japanese poetry in the original is at best not easy for the foreigner to comprehend or appreciate. In translation it is usually even more obscure, and whatever emotions it arouses, whether of appreciation or otherwise, are often more the result of the work of the translator than of the original poet. Japanese poetry is highly elliptical and suggestive. For the most part, understanding depends on the reader's ability to picture to himself a scene only suggested by one of its elements and to sense an emotion merely hinted at by some symbol. Often the context is necessary for this. In the past, compilers of anthologies usually recognized this fact by prefacing each poem with a brief explanatory note.

The interest of a Japanese poem depends as much on the way an idea is expressed as on the idea itself. It depends upon an apt metaphor, a clever figure of speech, or an unusual sequence of ideas. In the more formalistic type of poetry represented by Abutsu's poems, there is far too much reliance on word-plays in the nature of puns; but, good or bad, a full understanding of this type of poetry requires a comprehension of these verbal tricks. Similarly, appreciation of the imitative poetry of the time also depends on the reader's ability to recognize literary allusions and new turns given to old concepts and phrases.

With all this necessary to the understanding and appreciation of a Japanese poem, it is not hard to see why the usual translation falls so far short of expressing all that is in the original. It may suggest the scene and sometimes it may correctly express the mood, but only rarely can it do both and at the same time give an idea of the pun or neat turn of phrase which has made the original something more than the flat, dull statement it appears to be in translation. In this connection, the poems of the Izayoi nikki are particularly illuminating for the student of Japanese poetry, for the prose sections afford the context needed for an understanding of the scene described and the emotion expressed, while Abutsu's concentration on the more obvious sort of verbal tricks makes this aspect of her poetry reasonably apparent. Her pervading mood is made amply clear throughout the Izayoi nikki, and most of the poems are accompanied by short explanations of exactly what she saw or what happened to occasion each specific poetic expression of her feelings. The context, however, usually does not help with either the literary allusions or the plays on words. The former I have pointed out, whenever necessary, in footnotes; the latter I have attempted to indicate by literal and sometimes double translations as well as by footnotes.

What I have called verbal tricks or plays on words fall into three major categories. One is the fixed epithet or “pillow-word” (makura kotoba), originally a descriptive term, often become almost meaningless, which is traditionally prefixed to a name or word or even to the first element in a name or word.¹⁶ These I have translated as literally as possible to preserve the flavor of the original and have explained in footnotes.

The second type of plays on words is the engo or verbal association. An engo is a word used in one part of a poem with one specific meaning, but carrying with it an overtone because of its common association in a different meaning with a word or phrase in another part of the poem. For instance, if one were to say, “The sight of the woodland creature recalled to me the image of one once dear to me,” the word “dear” would be the engo, being associated in a different meaning, “deer,” with the phrase “woodland creature” and suggesting in this second meaning something more about the character or appearance of the loved one. I have pointed out the more obvious engo in notes.

The third type of word-play is the kakekotoba (or), usually translated as “pivot-word.”¹⁷ This consists of a word or phrase which in whole or in part has two distinct meanings in the poem, one in association with the preceding clause or phrase and the other in association with the succeeding clause or phrase. In other words, it serves as a pivot between two clauses or phrases which overlap on this single word or phrase which has two meanings. An example in English would be, “As far as one could see (i.e., sea) and sky were all the eye did meet.”… Our example…would be, “As far as one could {see / sea} and sky were all the eye did meet.”

In addition to these three well-recognized types of plays on words, there are many other less clearly defined puns and double-entendres in the poems of the Izayoi nikki. Where appropriate, I have handled these by double translations, as in the case of the pivot-words, and have pointed others out in notes.

The importance of the sequence of ideas, and therefore of the sequence of words and phrases, poses a particularly difficult problem for the translator. All those who have attempted to render Japanese into English know how the English translation constantly reverses the order of words, phrases, and clauses of the original Japanese. But a Japanese poem in reversed word order is in no way the same poem or even an approximation of it. On the other hand, some reversal of words and phrases is absolutely necessary if the translation is to be comprehensible. Faced with this dilemma, I have divided each tanka into two halves and have given these two halves in their original order while changing the sequence of words and phrases within each half as demanded by English grammar. This division of the tanka is in conformity with its nature. The thirty-one syllables of the tanka are divided into five verses of the following syllabic pattern: 5-7-5-7-7. The five verses normally fall into two groups, the first three verses and the last two, as follows: 5-7-5—7-7. I have followed this method of division both in the two-line English translation and in the transliteration of the Japanese text. For the sake of clarity I have termed the two halves of the translated tanka “lines” and the five sub-divisions of the Japanese original “verses.” In the translation of the chōka I have preserved the original verse divisions and have followed the order of the Japanese text as far as possible, but the long involved sentences of this poem have required frequent reversals in the order of verses. I have indicated the original order by numbering each verse in both the transliterated text and the translation.

Since a strict syllabic pattern of alternating five- and seven-syllable verses is the basis of all Japanese poetry, and since these patterns can in no wise be reproduced in translation, I have included in my translations Romanized texts of the original Japanese for both the tanka and the chōka. In these I have followed modern pronunciation in general. It should be noted that long syllables, that is syllables including a diphthong, a long vowel, or a final n, always count as two syllables. To make this visually clear, I have indicated long vowels not by the traditional long mark but by doubling the vowel.

Few translations of Japanese poetry have much literary merit, and I claim no exception to this rule for mine. But I believe that the attempt at a literal translation and at a presentation of the original order of ideas and the original verbal tricks may make it possible for those not versed in Japanese poetry to gain a better idea of what it is like than they can from many translations of Japanese poems, which so often are nothing more than little English poems based on some of the ideas and some of the wording of the original Japanese.

2. ABUTSU AND HER FAMILY

Not much is known about the life of Abutsu besides what we can learn from the Izayoi nikki itself. We do not even know her original name; all we have is a series of cognomens by which she was known when a lady-in-waiting at court, and Buddhist names she later used as a nun. Ichimura believes she may have been born around 1233. The evidence for this is very shaky, but from what we know of the dates of birth of her children, it would appear to be as good a guess as any.

In the Shokukokinshū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times Continued), which was completed in 1265 as the eleventh of the imperial anthologies and the first to include any of Abutsu's poems, a preface to one of her poems states that it was composed while she was on her way to the Province of Tōtōmi in the company of her father, Taira Norishige.¹⁸ Norishige was a comparatively obscure courtier of the Senior Fifth Rank Lower Grade¹⁹ who was given the title of Governor of Sado²⁰ in 1232. As a descendant in the tenth generation of Takamochi, a great grandson of the Emperor Kammu (reigned 781-806), who was given the family name of Taira in 889, he was a distant relative of the famous Taira clan of warriors. Norishige may only have been Abutsu's foster father. The Utatane no ki²¹ (Record of a Nap), which is usually attributed to Abutsu, describes the person who took her to Tōtōmi as one “to be relied upon as a second father.”²²

There is some doubt as to the reliability of the tradition that the Utatane no ki is an autobiographical work written by Abutsu in her youth. Stylistically it differs from the Izayoi nikki, and the girl it describes is the sort of sensitive, sentimental creature one expects to find in the old romantic novel and not the strong-willed, obstinate personality we see in the Izayoi nikki. However, the time gap between the two works could account for the stylistic as well as the personality differences, and the close correspondence of facts between the two works and the preface to her poem in the Shokukokinshū indicates either very careful study on the part of a later forger or else that the Utatane no ki is indeed by Abutsu. The trip to Tōtōmi figures prominently in the Utatane no ki, which also contains the particular poem given in the Shokukokinshū, though with a different first verse. In the Izayoi nikki Abutsu again makes reference to this trip. While speaking of the Hamamatsu area in Tōtōmi she notes, “It was a place where several people lived who might be called my intimates. The faces of various persons who had gone on living here came to mind, and time and again I was moved by the nature of the fate whereby I again chanced to meet and see them. … I summoned and received the children and grandchildren [of those] I used to see in those days.” A little later in her account she again refers to this trip and quotes the second and third verses of the same poem: “When of old I was taken along by my father, the Ason,²³ and composed the verse, ‘How will {things turn out / Narumi-} beach since it be,’ we saw the land as far as Tōtōmi.”²⁴ This reference in the Izayoi nikki to a poem composed long before shows Abutsu's justifiable pride in a poem included in one of the imperial anthologies, for at this time only three of her poems had been accorded this honor.

If the Utatane no ki is to be accepted as a genuine autobiographical work by Abutsu, we can learn from it considerably more about her early life. It tells of her youth when she was serving at court and describes an unhappy love affair with some noble. It recounts how, in her despair over his neglect of her, she cut her hair late one night and wandered out into the streets. When morning came, she was taken by two women to a nun's retreat in the hills, where she soon fell seriously ill. A few months later her foster father came to the capital and took her back with him to Tōtōmi, but soon word arrived from Kyōto that an old person who had cared for her since her infancy was languishing away, and so she returned again to the capital and was rewarded for her troubles by the rapid recovery of the invalid.

Whether or not one accepts this story as historical fact about Abutsu, there is no doubt that she served for some time at court. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Kuniko (1209-1283), sister of the Emperor Go-Horikawa (reigned 1221-1232; died 1234) and daughter of Prince Morisada (1179-1223), son of the Emperor Takakura (reigned 1168-1180; died 1181). Princess Kuniko was accorded the honorary rank of Empress in 1220. Five years later she adopted the Buddhist temple name of Ankamon'in, by which she has been known ever since, and in 1235 she became a nun.

As was customary for court ladies of this period, Abutsu was known by relatively complicated cognomens based on her place of service and also on some designation peculiar to her, such as the court post of a man to whom she was closely related or a street on which her home or that of some important relative was located. Thus, she was known as Uemon no suke of Ankamon'in and also as Shijō of Ankamon'in. Uemon no suke was a title meaning Vice-Commander of the Gate Guards of the Right, one of the imperial guard groups, while Shijō was and still is the name of an important street in Kyōto. Abutsu is called Uemon no suke of Ankamon'in in the Shokukokinshū of 1265, but she is called Shijō of Ankamon'in in the Shokushūishū (Collection of Gleanings Continued), which followed as the twelfth imperial anthology, probably completed in 1278, and also in the nine later imperial anthologies. This would indicate that some time after 1265 her designation was changed from Uemon no suke to Shijō.

From the Izayoi nikki we learn that Abutsu had an elder and a younger sister with whom she was in correspondence late in the year 1277 while she was in Kamakura. She describes her elder sister as being particularly close to her and “on terms of touching mutual dependence” with her. She goes on to say that she was “the wife of a man who was known as the Nakanoin Vice- Commander²⁵ and now, I believe, as the Lay Monk of the Third Rank.²⁶ Though living in the same world [with his wife], he leads a religious life far away from her.” Her youngest sister Abutsu describes simply as a nun and adds that “she too had served Ankamon'in.” Some scholars have thought that this younger sister was Uemon no suke of Ankamon'in and therefore the author of the Utatane no ki, but the evidence seems to indicate that both Uemon no suke and Shijō were designations for Abutsu herself.

From the Izayoi nikki we also learn about Abutsu's older children, though not who their father or fathers may have been. She tells us that she had in all five children living in 1277, that is to say three in addition to the two sons she is known to have borne to Tameie. The eldest of her sons she calls simply the Azari and describes as a “mountain priest.” Azari, or Ajari in its more common pronunciation, is the Sino-Japanese form of the Sanskrit word ācārya, meaning “teacher,” and was an honorary title for Buddhist monks skilled in ritual prayers and mystic practices. A “mountain priest,” or yamabushi, was a monk who lived an austere life of religious devotion in the mountains. Abutsu tells us near the beginning of the Izayoi nikki that the Azari “had come forth to escort me as guide on this trip,” but there is only one later reference to him in the text. Her second son she describes as a Preceptor,²⁷ one of the higher posts in the Buddhist hierarchy.

We learn something more about Abutsu and one of her older sons from the Waka kuden (Oral Tradition about Japanese Poetry)²⁸ by the monk Genshō, who was one of Tameie's ten known sons. He was born about 1224, long before Abutsu knew Tameie and probably even before she was born. He tells us that she lived for a while in a temple in Nara and that at some time after 1251 she was engaged in making a copy of the Tale of Genji. This may well have been the copy of this work in her hand which is now owned by the Kii branch of the family. Genshō also tells us that shortly thereafter she bore a son who was to become the Preceptor Teikaku, but he says that he does not know who the father was. This Teikaku was presumably one of the two priestly sons mentioned in the Izayoi nikki.²⁹

Abutsu also tells us in the Izayoi nikki of her one and only daughter, whom she describes as being “by temperament sincere and mature” and as serving “the Imperial Lady³⁰ not far from here.” It is usually assumed that this “Imperial Lady” was Takako, better known by her temple name of Shin'yōmeimon'in (1262-1296). She was the daughter of Fujiwaga Motohira (1246-1268), who had been Chancellor in 1267-1268, and she was the consort of the Emperor Kameyama (reigned 1259-1274; died 1305). The Niwa no oshie (Garden Instructions),³¹ a work commonly attributed to Abutsu, is supposed to be instructions regarding service at court given to this daughter by Abutsu one time when she was leaving the capital. In it there is a short description of the early life of the daughter, who is given the cognomen of Ki Naishi.³² However, the Niwa no oshie is stylistically very different from the Izayoi nikki, being written not in an archaistic style but in the idiom and vocabulary of the period, and, lacking any clear evidence that it is by Abutsu, one cannot accept it as definitely her work.³³

Abutsu probably had a certain reputation as a poetess even before she met Tameie, and it may have been this reputation which first brought her to his attention. In any case, her status as a poetess was almost certainly enhanced by her association with him, and he, as one of the compilers of the Shokukokinshū may have been responsible for the inclusion of three of her poems in this collection. In all, forty-eight of Abutsu's poems were included in imperial anthologies, with at least one in each of the last eleven.³⁴ In addition, Abutsu is well represented in the Fubokushō, a huge private anthology dating from about 1308-1310.³⁵ Its compiler, Fujiwara Nagakiyo, was a disciple of Abutsu's son, Tamesuke,³⁶ and so it is not surprising that he included fifty-nine of her poems (fourteen of them from the Izayoi nikki)³⁷ among the over 16,000 poems previously not included in imperial anthologies which he selected for inclusion in the Fubokushō. The largest single collection of Abutsu's poems is to be found in her Ankamon'in Shijō hyakushu (One Hundred Poems by Shijō of Ankamon'in).³⁸ Including this collection and the eighty-six poems by her in the Izayoi nikki, Tamai counts a grand total of 306 poems by Abutsu which still remain to us.

In the Abutsu kana fuju (Abutsu's Recitation in Kana),³⁹ a Buddhist prayer made by Abutsu in behalf of Tameie's soul after his death, she states that he had aided her in poetry for twenty-three years. If we count back from the time of his death in 1275, this would indicate that she had known him since 1253. However, we do not know when their love affair began or when she went to live with him as his wife. He was already well up in his fifties in 1253, and three years later he indicated his retirement from the world by adopting the monkish name of Yūkaku. However, we find Tameie at about this time or at least within the next few years carrying on an ardent romance with her, as attested to by a series of poetic exchanges after all-night visits. These poems are preserved in the Gyokuyōshū (Collection of Jeweled Leaves) and the Fūgashū (Collection of Elegance), two imperial anthologies dating from 1312 and 1346 respectively.

In 1263 Abutsu bore Tameie a son, Tamesuke, and two years later a second son, Tamemori.⁴⁰ These two boys figure prominently in the Izayoi nikki, in which Abutsu refers to them by the court posts and ranks they presumably held. Tamesuke she calls the Chamberlain and once the Chamberlain Consultant, and Tamemori she calls the Taifu. There were eight Chamberlains⁴¹ of the Junior Fifth Rank Lower Grade⁴² in the Ministry of Central Affairs,⁴³ and there were also eight Consultants who were non-voting members of the Supreme Council of State.⁴⁴ Since Consultants were considered to be Ministers of State and held the Senior Fourth Rank Lower Grade,⁴⁵ it seems most improbable that Tamesuke could have held such a post in 1278, when even by Japanese count he was only sixteen years old. Taifu, sometimes pronounced Tayū, was simply an honorary title for all persons holding the Fifth Rank.

We learn something of Abutsu's life during these years from Genshō's Waka kuden and the Saga no kayoi of Asukai Masaari (1241-1301), a well-known courtier poet of the time, whose descendants were to remain important figures in the poetic world right up until the twentieth century. Abutsu no doubt was “the mistress of the household” who, Masaari tells us, read from the Tale of Genji to him and Tameie when he was visiting the famous old poet in 1269 at his estate at Ogurayama, a little west of Kyōto.⁴⁶ A few years later, at Abutsu's instigation, Tameie moved with her to the Hokurin (“the north woods”) of the Jimyōin⁴⁷ in Kyōto, and it was probably there that Tameie died on the first day of the fifth moon of 1275. After his death Abutsu became “the nun Abutsu,” or, as she is sometimes called, “the Zen nun of the Hokurin.”⁴⁸

A bitter argument has raged as to whether or not Abutsu ever was made Tameie's principal wife.⁴⁹ Whatever her official status may have been, there is no doubt that she was the favorite of his old age and exercised great influence over him, winning for her young sons the status of full-fledged heirs to both his worldly possessions and to the poetic tradition. This was a remarkable feat, for her sons were still boys when their father died, while the two elder heirs, Tameuji (1222-1286) and Tamenori (1226-1279),⁵⁰ were around fifty, and Tameuji, either shortly before or after his father's death, became his official successor as the arbiter of poetry at court when he was appointed to compile the next imperial anthology, the Shokushūishū.⁵¹ Tameuji and Tamenori also had the advantage of having a mother of higher social standing than Abutsu, for their mother was the daughter of Utsunomiya Yoritsuna (1172-1259), a prominent military man of Kamakura who had turned poet and studied under Tameie.

When Abutsu became Tameie's consort, she became allied to a family which, though not politically powerful, was one of the most famous in the whole court aristocracy. Tameie was a descendant in the sixth generation of Michinaga (966-1027), the greatest of all the heads of the Fujiwara clan.⁵² One of Michinaga's sons, Nagaie, who had been a well-known poet in his time, took the distinctive family name of Mikosa or Mikohidari, by which this branch of the Fujiwara clan is commonly known. Nagaie's son, Tadaie, and the latter's son, Toshitada (1073-1123), kept alive the family's poetic traditions, and in the fourth generation the family produced one of the truly great figures in all Japanese poetry, Toshinari or Shunzei (1114-1204).

Since the second half of the eleventh century, the poets of the Japanese court had tended to be divided into a conservative school and a reform school, but Toshinari through his poetic greatness and prestige managed to unify the two poetic currents under his own guidance. He was ordered to compile the seventh of the imperial anthologies, the Senzaishū (Collection of a Thousand Years), in 1183 in the middle of the great wars between the Minamoto and Taira clans, and he finally completed the work in 1188, three years after the Minamoto triumph.

Toshinari was succeeded by his son, Sadaie or Teika (1162-1241), who became an even more famous poet than his father. Sadaie participated with his father in the great poetry contests (utaawase) of the time held by the great court leaders, particularly the retired emperor Go-Toba (reigned 1183-1198; died 1239), who was a great patron of poetry. In 1201 Go-Toba restored the Bureau of Japanese Poetry⁵³ and appointed Toshinari and Sadaie as Secretaries⁵⁴ of the Bureau. Later in the same year Sadaie and five other courtiers were ordered to compile the eighth imperial anthology, the famous Shinkokinshū. One of the compilers died the next year, but the others continued the work, completing the anthology in 1206, when a great banquet was held, the first of the traditional banquets held upon the completion of an imperial anthology. However, changes were later made, and the work did not reach its present form until 1210. The Shinkokinshū not only is the most famous of the imperial anthologies after the Kokinshū, but it also was the largest until that time, with about 1975 tanka, of which no less than seventy-three were by Toshinari and forty-seven by Sadaie.

Sadaie subsequently became so much the arbiter of poetic taste that in 1232 he alone was commissioned to compile the ninth imperial anthology, the Shinchokusenshū (New Imperial Collection), which he probably finished in 1234. His own poems are collected in the Shūi gūsō (Gleanings of Stupid Grass),⁵⁵ which, with Toshinari's personal collection, the Chōshū eisō (Seaweed Composed during Long Autumns), is included as one of the Rokkashū, the six great personal collections of this period.⁵⁶ Sadaie also was the author of several works on poetry which have been preserved and the reputed author of many more. His personal diary, the Meigetsuki (Record of the Bright Moon),⁵⁷ a long detailed document in Chinese running from 1180 to 1235, is a valuable historical source for the time.

Sadaie is perhaps best known as the reputed compiler of the Hyakunin isshu (One Poem Each by a Hundred Poets), more properly called after Sadaie's Ogurayama estate the Ogura hyakunin isshu, to distinguish it from the many later Hyakunin isshu collections made in imitation of it. Though variously attributed to Sadaie and also to Tameie's pupil and father-in-law, Utsunomiya Yoritsuna, the authorship and date of this work are not at all certain. As the name implies, it is a collection made up of one outstanding poem from each of a hundred famous poets. Thus it was in theory the quintessence of all Japanese poetry up to Tameie's time. The eighty-third poem is by Toshinari and the ninety-seventh by Tameie himself. The Hyakunin isshu has been the subject of endless studies by Japanese scholars and is unquestionably the Japanese work most often translated into foreign languages.⁵⁸ It also has received the curious honor of being used as the basis of a popular Japanese card game.

For a purely literary figure, Sadaie reached extremely high rank. In 1227 he was promoted to the Senior Second Rank,⁵⁹ and in 1232 he was made Acting Middle Counselor,⁶⁰ the second of the three primary categories of Counselor of the Supreme Council of State, and a title by which he is commonly known. In 1233 he went into Buddhist retirement under the monkish name of Myōjō. He devoted his last years to the completion of the Shinchokusenshū and to his studies of old texts, for which he is also famous. During these late years, he was the unchallenged leader of the poetic art at court, and he was able to pass on to his son, Tameie (1198-1275), his position as the officially recognized arbiter of poetic taste.

Tameie, as a poet, fell far below his father and grandfather. He was over-conservative, as were also most of his descendants, with the result that the art of tanka writing became increasingly imitative and sterile. However, with the growing emphasis at this time on hereditary rights in the various literary and artistic fields, Tameie was able to maintain the position he inherited from his father and to pass it on undiminished to his sons. He, too, received the distinction of appointment to the Senior Second Rank in 1238, and three years later, just before his father's death, he was given an even higher post than any his father had held when he was appointed Acting Great Counselor,⁶¹ the highest category of Counselors of the Supreme Council of State. This was a title by which he has commonly been known. In the Izayoi nikki, Abutsu once refers to him as the Lay Priest Great Counselor, but she usually calls Tameie simply “him of old.”

In 1248 Tameie was ordered by the retired emperor, Go-Saga (reigned 1242-1246; died 1272), to compile the tenth imperial anthology, the Shokugosenshū (Later Collection Continued). He completed it three years later. In this anthology he included forty-three poems by his father, giving him thus first place among the poets represented. In compiling the Shokugosenshū alone, Tameie repeated the feat of Toshinari and Sadaie, who had been individually responsible for the compilation of the Senzaishū and the Shinchokusenshū. These three anthologies are often called the Collections of the Three Generations of the Nijō Family,⁶² for since the time of Toshinari's father, Tadatoshi, the family had been known by the name of Nijō.⁶³

In 1259 Go-Saga gave Tameie the signal honor of again commissioning him to compile an imperial anthology, but this honor was somewhat lessened three years later when four other courtiers were ordered to join him in the task. The anthology, completed in 1265, was the Shokukokinshū. First place in point of poems included in this anthology was given to Prince Munetaka (1242-1274), a son of Go-Toba, who served nominally as Shōgun from 1252 until 1266.

Abutsu was particularly proud of the fact that members of the family for three successive generations had been ordered to compile imperial anthologies and that her husband had twice received this honor. In her introductory remarks in the Izayoi nikki she says, “There have been many who have compiled anthologies, but rare has it been for a man to receive the imperial order twice and present [anthologies] to more than one generation [of emperors]. I, too, participate in this heritage, and … have been entrusted with three⁶⁴ sons and hundreds and thousands of old sheets of poems.” She was quite right in calling it “rare” for any man to participate in the compilation of two imperial anthologies. Sadaie had been the first to do so when he was one of five men who participated in the compilation of the Shinkokinshū and then later compiled the Shinchokusenshū alone, and Tameie was, of course, the second man to achieve this distinction. Abutsu again refers with pride to the poetic heritage of the family in the chōka where she speaks of Tamesuke as “following three generations whose fame remains” among those who have received “the commands of successive rulers” to compile anthologies. She also tells Tamesuke in a poem of his “uncommon heritage,” when, at the time of her departure for Kamakura, she gives him “booklets of poems written and stored away generation after generation.” In his poetic response, Tamesuke quotes her phrase, “uncommon heritage,” and also speaks of the “heritage of three generations,” showing his consciousness, too, of the importance of his poetic inheritance.

Abutsu, in putting stress on the poetic inheritance she wished her sons to receive from Tameie, was not unmindful of the more substantial things to be inherited from him. In fact, her trip to Kamakura, which is the central incident of the Izayoi nikki, was occasioned by a lawsuit over one of Tameie's manors, which she claimed for Tamesuke against the opposition of her stepson, Tameuji. This manor was the Hosokawa estate in Minakigun⁶⁵ in the Province of Harima.

It has often been claimed that this estate, together with another in the Province of Ōmi, came into Toshinari's possession as income for his service in the Bureau of Japanese Poetry and was passed on as such in the family. This theory is based on the writings of Fujiwara Seika (1561-1619), Abutsu's descendant in the ninth generation. Seika was a Buddhist monk who turned Confucianist and became the founder, through his famous disciple, Hayashi Razan⁶⁶ (1583-1657), of the great official school of Confucianism of the Tokugawa period. Seika's interest in the Hosokawa estate was not simply historical. He was born on this estate, though his family was despoiled of it while he was still a youth.⁶⁷

Matsui, in a detailed study of the subject,⁶⁸ comes to the conclusion that Seika's statements regarding the early history of the Hosokawa estate are not strictly accurate. He points out that Sadaie's famous diary, the Meigetsuki, indicates that he inherited the estate from a woman relative who was probably his elder sister, and not from his father.⁶⁹ Furthermore, according to the Reizei zokufu,⁷⁰ Sadaie received the “steward's rights”⁷¹ to the estate from the Kamakura Shōgunate. Thus, he combined in himself the “owner's rights,”⁷² derived from the imperial court at Kyōtō, and the “steward's rights,” derived from the military government at Kamakura. His unusual status as both a court noble and a titular military steward is attested to in the Meigetsuki, in which Sadaie indicates that the Shōgunate called upon him, as its retainer in his capacity of steward of the Hosokawa estate, to help in some palace construction it was undertaking in Kyōto.⁷³

Tameie presumably inherited from his father both the owner's rights and the steward's rights to the Hosokawa estate, and, from the Reizei zokufu, we see that in 1259 he willed it along with some other estates to his eldest son, Tameuji, effective upon Tameie's death. However, that was before Abutsu had borne him two more sons in his old age. That altered the picture, for Abutsu obviously had ambitions for her sons, and she unquestionably had influence over Tameie. In the seventh moon of 1273 and again in the sixth moon of 1274, Tameie issued documents, canceling his bequest of the Hosokawa estate to Tameuji and transferring it to Tamesuke. The next year he died, whereupon Tameuji refused to let his half-brother, Tamesuke, some forty years his junior and still a mere child, have the Hosokawa estate, and the fight was on.

Our texts all say that the will had been altered because of repeated unfilial conduct on the part of Tameuji, but this is open to question, since our sources for the lawsuit all stem from Abutsu's side of the house, and there is no impartial evidence to bear this out. It should be noted that Tameie did not deprive Tameuji of any of the other estates he had willed him, and the earliest statement regarding Tameuji's alleged unfilial conduct during Tameie's life is to be found in a long legal document dating only from 1313, which is included in the Reizei zokufu. It may be safer to assume that, if Tameie ever really charged Tameuji with unfilial conduct, it was more an excuse than the actual reason for an alteration of the will. I am inclined to believe that the whole charge may have been a later one based on a misinterpretation of Abutsu's comments on Tameuji in the Izayoi nikki. She most certainly accuses him of unfilial conduct, but presumably what was in her mind was his refusal to recognize Tameie's revision of his will and not any unfilial acts committed before 1273.

Abutsu commences the Izayoi nikki with a pointed though somewhat obscure reference to the Chinese Classic of Filial Piety,⁷⁴ which according to tradition was lost and later recovered from a hiding place in the wall of the former home of Confucius. She follows this subtle accusation with a reference to the documents in the case. Her opening sentences are, “Children of the modern age do not even dream that the name of the book which, it seems, was discovered of old in a wall has anything to do with them. Most definite is that which he left us written down time after time … But of no avail are a parent's admonitions.” A little later she again refers to the estate, speaking of the revenue from it as a flowing stream, because Hosokawa itself means “narrow stream.” She says, “They have, without reason, dammed even the flow of Hosokawa, which was left us with solemn pledges.” Abutsu repeats all this in slightly different form in the chōka, as follows, “The child [Tamesuke] received a bequest especially from his parent, and, although he even has proofs of this … they have dammed the upper waters … of Mt. Hosokawa which he succeeded to clearly and expressly.”

It takes no great imagination or any special knowledge of the Japanese family in early feudal times to understand how the dispute arose over the Hosokawa estate. A succession dispute was all too natural between an eldest son and a step-mother who appeared on the scene late in the father's life and was probably even younger than the son. On the one hand, Abutsu's desire to have some of the patrimony for her young sons was certainly understandable, and, on the other hand, one cannot be surprised if Tameuji felt it to be an injustice that his own inheritance, already legally assigned to him, had been reduced for the benefit of a half brother born years after it had been assumed that there would be no more heirs to Tameie's estate. In willing various estates to Tameuji in 1259 and in adopting the monkish name of Yūkaku in 1256, Tameie himself had indicated that he did not expect to have further heirs. We have no definite information concerning Tameuji's attitude toward Abutsu, but much can be inferred from the statements of his brother, Genshō, in the Waka kuden. There is no doubt where Genshō's sympathies lay. He describes Abutsu as a scheming woman, able to wrap Tameie around her finger, and he accuses her of attempting to poison Tameie's mind against his eldest son.

Tameuji's attitude toward Abutsu and her sons may have been complicated by other factors. It is possible that he looked down upon her socially, for not only was her family far less illustrious than that of Tameie but it also was not to be compared even with the family of Tameuji's mother, the daughter of Utsunomiya Yoritsuna. Abutsu herself suggests this in the chōka, where she says that her son had been deprived of his estates, “perhaps for the fault that the seed was sown in this womb of the mother … [who], on reflection, is lowly.”

Another aspect of the misunderstanding between Tameuji and Abutsu may have been their fundamental disagreement over poetry. Both were, of course, disciples of Tameie, but Abutsu tended to be less conservative than Tameuji. In this, she sided with the poetic school developed by Tameie's “second”⁷⁵ son, Tamenori, and his descendants, as opposed to the school which was built up by Tameuji and his heirs. The split between these two poetic traditions, both deriving from Tameie, became very marked in the second generation. Tameuji's son, Tameyo (1250-1338), and Tamenori's son, Tamekane (1254-1332), were bitter rivals, and their rivalry was continued by their two lines, known respectively as the Nijō and Kyōgoku⁷⁶ branches of the family. It was perhaps just because of this division of the family into two branches that Abutsu was able to win part of Tameie's heritage for her sons as a third branch of the family set up on a basis of equality with the other two. Without the bitter feud between the two senior branches of the family, there would probably have been small chance for Tamesuke to start an independent branch with its own secondary family name of Reizei⁷⁷ and its independent poetic traditions.

Abutsu's friendship with the members of the Kyōgoku branch of the family is made clear in the Izayoi nikki. Her most faithful correspondent while she was in Kamakura seems to have been Tamekane's younger sister, Tameko, who was a famous poetess in her own name. Abutsu records five separate exchanges of letters and poems with Tameko during the nine months covered by the Kamakura section of her work, and she also mentions a poetic exchange by letter with Tamekane himself. Abutsu describes him simply as his sister's elder brother, Lord Tamekane, but she describes the sister more fully as follows: “The daughter of the former Commander of the Imperial Guards of the Right⁷⁸ was a poetess and from time to time had been included in the imperial anthologies.⁷⁹ She was known as the ‘Acting Middle Counselor’ of the Ōmiyanoin.⁸⁰ Both morning and evening we had been close to each other because of [our mutual love of] poetry.” And again later she says of Tameko, “The ‘Acting Middle Counselor’ was a person who composed poems with undistracted [attention].” Tameko, too, emphasizes the closeness of the relationship between herself and Abutsu in one of her letters, when she writes to Abutsu, “After you went down there, I had no companion with whom to compose poetry, and, with autumn coming on, you have increasingly been in my mind, as alone I have gazed simply at the moon all night through.”⁸¹

The lawsuit had its legal technicalities as well as its family complications. The crucial problem was the legality of Tameie's revocation of his original bequest of the Hosokawa estate to Tameuji. According to both the military and civil law codes of the time, that is to say the law as administered by the Shōgunate at Kamakura on the one hand and the law as administered by the imperial court at Kyōto on the other, a man could select anyone to be his successor as head of the family and could divide his property among his heirs as he saw fit, effective either immediately or upon his death. One significant difference between the two legal systems, however, was that Kamakura recognized a man's right to revise his will any number of times and even to take back property the transfer of which had already been effected, whereas Kyōto did not admit this privilege.⁸²

This divergency in the two legal systems made the issue very complex, for the steward's rights to the estate, which were derived from Kamakura, theoretically came under military law, whereas the owner's rights, particularly in the case of court aristocrats, fell under court law. This would mean that Tameie was, in theory, within the law when he transferred the steward's rights from Tameuji to Tamesuke, but was acting illegally when he attempted to transfer the owner's rights as well. Matsui believes that Tameie's attempt to do the latter shows how the court nobility at this time was coming increasingly under the influence of military law. In any case, the Hosokawa lawsuit fell partly under the jurisdiction of Kyōto and partly under that of Kamakura, and Abutsu was certainly within her rights in bringing the problem, in so far as steward's rights were involved, to the Shōgunal courts. There were obvious advantages in doing so, for under military law she was likely to win the steward's rights for her son, while under court law she was likely to lose the owner's rights to Tameuji. In fact, her only chance of winning the owner's rights for Tamesuke probably lay in winning a decision in Kamakura regarding the steward's rights and letting the prestige of this decision influence a subsequent ruling at Kyōto regarding the owner's rights.

Some have thought that Abutsu first brought her case to a Kyōto court. As evidence for this the following passage from the introduction to the Izayoi nikki is cited: “I realize that humble I alone am overlooked in the benevolent administration of a wise ruler and denied the sympathies of his loyal ministers; and yet things should not continue thus. But, there being nought that I can do about my troubles, I am sad.” However, there is no clear evidence that Abutsu first appealed to Kyōto, and it seems unlikely that she would have done so, in view of the legal situation.

In taking her case to Kamakura, Abutsu showed her tremendous ambition and strength of will. The trip alone was no easy matter for a woman at least in her forties, but, with characteristic determination, she covered the distance from Kyōto to Kamakura, about 280 miles, in fourteen days. This means that she averaged about twenty miles a day, a very good pace when one considers that, though she was on horseback, some members of the party were afoot, and there were many mountains and rivers to be crossed.⁸³

It has been suggested that Abutsu made her trip to Kamakura in 1275, the year her husband died, but the Izayoi nikki itself indicates that it was two years later, in 1277. Writing of the summer following her trip, she says, “In the summer time, word [from the capital] stopped to an alarming extent, and I was exceedingly uneasy, and, when I heard that in the neighborhood of the capital the waves of the beach of Shiga had risen and there were disturbances between the ‘mountain’ and Miidera, I became increasingly uneasy.” This passage is thought to refer to a quarrel which broke out in the fifth moon of 1278 between the monks of the Enryakuji on Mt. Hiei, which stands above the northeastern corner of Kyōto, and the monks of the Onjōji, commonly known as the Miidera, situated below Mt. Hiei in the Shiga district⁸⁴ along the southwestern shores of Lake Biwa. These were the two leading monasteries of the great Tendai Sect of Buddhism, and they were bitter rivals, continuously in conflict with each other.

Abutsu indicates in other passages as well that considerable time must have elapsed between Tameie's death and her trip to Kamakura. In the chōka she says with reference to Tamesuke's financial straits that he is “like a fish which has climbed up on land or like a boat with a broken sculling rope.”⁸⁵ In the introductory section she writes, “And now, the lights lit in prayer for [Tameie's] soul and [the flickering flames of] the lives of the parent and children [he left] to guard the art (poetry) and to preserve the family, vie with each other in their haste to be extinguished. Thus, years and months have passed. Beset by dangers and forlorn, how have I gone on living until today? Were it but my worthless self alone, I should abandon all further thought of it, but the darkness of my heart when I think of my children is hard to bear, and my rancor when I think of the art finds no redress. Now, there came to me the constant and insistent thought that, if [the matter] were to be reflected in the tortoise mirror of the east, a cloudless image would appear, and so at last I decided to forget my countless fears, abandon all thought of myself, and go forth abruptly.” The “tortoise mirror” is a term used in Japan for legal decisions⁸⁶ and during this period was occasionally used with specific reference to the Kamakura Shōgunate in east Japan.

Despite Abutsu's apparent faith in the Kamakura law courts, she was doomed to disappointment. The Shōgunate authorities probably had little time for such a trivial matter at that particular moment in history. In 1274, three years before Abutsu's trip, the Mongols had attempted their first invasion of Japan, and the attention of the Kamakura warriors was directed toward preparations against a second invasion, which came in 1281. This was the most serious threat to their independence the Japanese were to experience before recent times, and the Kamakura authorities cannot be blamed for having shown little interest in a minor inheritance squabble in a court family with no military or political power.

Abutsu, however, was not one to give up easily. The chōka shows her still in Kamakura in the spring of 1280, over three years after she had first gone there, and still hopeful of receiving a favorable decision. She writes, “Since I am of little consequence and the affairs of the world at Kamakura grow thick, the {words/leaves} too with which I make my plea {are caught in the boughs/in the boughs, unopened} plum blossoms [witness] the advent of the spring of the fourth year … On reflection, is this merely a plaint which is private? Rather it is a bitter precedent for the world. If they should think that the traces of the brush written down and left in various forms with the future in mind are indeed deceptions, for a moment let them ask, appealing to … the grove {of Tadasu/which examines} into justice. If they forget not the admonitions left them … someone will straighten that which is now bent.” She concludes the chōka and its final thirty-one-syllable tanka with the prophecy that, if justice is rendered, “the morning sunshine around Tsurugaoka,⁸⁷ with the brightness of eight thousand generations, will shine increasingly, and this brilliant age will be still more glorious. My lord's reign, for which I pray morning and evening that it may be long, {may it be prolonged./I tell of it} today in the language of Yamato.” This section is particularly interesting, for in it Abutsu uses, with reference to the Shōgunate, phrases commonly associated with the emperor and the imperial court.⁸⁸ It shows how obsequious even the court nobles could be in showing deference to all-powerful Kamakura.

Abutsu died before any decision was handed down by Kamakura. Some scholars have said her death occurred in 1280, the year she wrote the chōka, but 1283, the date according to Reizei family traditions, is more generally accepted. There are various records regarding Abutsu's grave in Kamakura, but none appears to be trustworthy. Tamai believes she returned to Kyōto before her death, though his reasoning is not completely convincing. A postscript to the Izayoi nikki says that Tameuji also went to Kamakura and that both he and Abutsu died there.⁸⁹ It seems safest, however, to admit that we do not know for sure when or where Abutsu died.

According to the Reizei zokufu, the “camera government” of the retired emperor decided against Tamesuke in 1286.⁹⁰ Presumably this decision concerned only the owner's rights. In 1291 Kamakura rendered a decision regarding the steward's rights in favor of Tamesuke. Eventually the Reizei branch of the family received the owner's rights as well, but the date of this final legal action is not known, except that it was some time before 1416. It has already been noted that the Reizei family finally lost the estate in the sixteenth century, during the lifetime of Abutsu's illustrious descendant, Fujiwara Seika.

During the first century after Tameie's death, the Kyōgoku branch of the family, descended from his “second” son, Tamenori, contended for leadership in the world of poetry with the Nijō branch, descended from Tameie's eldest son, Tameuji, while the Reizei branch, descended from Abutsu's son, Tamesuke, represented only a minor poetic faction, despite Abutsu's ambition to preserve Tameie's true poetic heritage for her sons. The rivalry between the two senior branches of the family took on a political tinge when the two poetic factions allied themselves with the two rival branches of the imperial family, the Nijō group joining the Daikakuji line, descended from the emperor Kameyama, and the Kyogogu branch allying itself with the Jimyōin line, descended from Go-Fukakusa.

Mention has already been made of Tameuji's compilation of the twelfth imperial anthology, the Shokushūishū, which he probably completed in 1278. This had been ordered by the retired emperor, Kameyama. A generation later, in 1301, Kameyama's son, the retired emperor, Go-Uda (reigned 1274-1287; died 1324), ordered Tameuji's son, Tameyo, to compile the next imperial anthology, the Shingosenshū (New Later Collection), which he completed two years later.

The outstanding poet of Tameyo's time, however, was his cousin and bitter rival, Tamekane, of the Kyōgoku branch. He, together with Tameyo, Asukai Masaari, their grandfather's old friend, and one other poet, had been ordered in 1293 by Fushimi (reigned 1287-1298; died 1317) of the Jimyōin line to compile an imperial anthology, but co-operation within this group had proved to be impossible. In 1298 Tamekane was exiled to the island of Sado. Five years later, the year Tameyo completed the Shingosenshū, Tamekane was recalled, and in 1311 Fushimi, now in control of the “camera government,” commissioned him to compile the fourteenth imperial anthology, the Gyokuyōshū, which he completed about 1312. This collection, which because of its freshness excels the authologies compiled by the more traditionalistic Nijō branch of the family, gives first place in number of poems to Fushimi himself, with seventy-six poems, and includes no less than fifty-nine poems by Tamekane's sister, Tameko, Abutsu's faithful correspondent. The Gyokuyōshū also contains eleven of Abutsu's poems, four of them from the Izayoi nikki.

In 1315 Tamekane was again exiled to Sado, while Tameyo strengthened his position at court through his poetess daughter, also named Tameko, like so many other feminine members of the family, who bore two sons and a daughter to the future emperor, Go-Daigo (reigned 1318-1339) of the Daikakuji line. In 1318 Go-Uda, for a second time in control of the “camera government,” again commissioned Tameyo to compile an imperial anthology, making him thus the third person so honored. The work, probably completed in 1320, was called the Shokusenzaishū (Collection of a Thousand Years Continued).

The ascendancy of the Nijō branch of the family was further emphasized when in 1323 Go-Daigo ordered Tameyo's son, Tamefuji (1275-1324), to compile the next imperial anthology. Tamefuji died the next year, but Go-Daigo then ordered Tamefuji's nephew and adopted son, Tamesada (1288-1360), to continue the work.⁹¹ This anthology, which was probably completed in 1326, was called the Shokugoshūishū (Later Collection of Gleanings Continued).

The Nijō branch of the family had its poetic supremacy threatened when, after the collapse of the Kamakura Shōgunate in 1333, Go-Daigo fell out with the victorious general, Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358), and in 1336 was forced to flee with the whole Daikakuji branch of the imperial family to Yoshino in the mountains south of Kyōto. Meanwhile Takauji set up in Kyōto a rival emperor from the Jimyōin line. The loyalty of the Nijō branch to the Daikakuji line did not go deep enough to induce them to share its exile at Yoshino. Instead they remained in Kyōto and attempted to restore their position by winning the confidence of the emperors of the Jimyōin line.

The responsibility for compiling the seventeenth imperial anthology, however, was not entrusted to the Nijō branch of the family, but was undertaken by the retired emperor, Hanazono (reigned 1308-1318; died 1348), of the Jimyōin line, an adherent of the Kyōgoku school of poetry. This anthology was the Fūgashū, completed in 1346. As was to be expected in a compilation by a member of the Kyōgoku school, Tamekane and his sister, Tameko, as well as the emperors Fushimi and Hanazono were all well represented. The Fūgashū also contains no less than fourteen poems by Abutsu herself, the greatest number to be found in any of the imperial anthologies.

With the Shinsenzaishū (New Collection of a Thousand Years), completed in 1359, the Nijō branch of the family returned to supremacy. This collection was compiled by Tamesada, who thus became the fourth and last poet to compile two imperial anthologies. Tamefuji's son, Tameaki (1295-1364), was ordered to compile the next imperial anthology in 1363, but, like his father, he died before completing it, and the work was finished in 1364 by Ton'a (1289-1372), a priestly disciple of the school and one of the leading poets of the time. This anthology was called the Shinshūishū (New Collection of Gleanings). Tamesada's son, Tametō (1342-1381), was ordered to compile the next imperial anthology in 1375, but he had not yet finished it when he died six years later, and his cousin, Tameshige (1325-1385),⁹² completed the anthology in 1384, calling it the Shingoshūishū (New Later Collection of Gleanings).

The Shinzokukokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times Continued), the twenty-first and last of the imperial anthologies, was compiled between 1433 and 1439, not by a member of the Nijō branch or any other descendant of Tameie, but by Asukai Masayo (1390-1452), a descendant in the fourth generation of Tameie's old friend, Asukai Masaari. Masayo's selection for this task was a clear sign of the decline of the Nijō school. This decline permitted the eventual emergence in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Reizei branch as the leading school of poetry at court.

Abutsu's two sons by Tameie were merely boys of about ten and twelve when their father died in 1275 and were only just reaching manhood when their mother died a few years later. The two brothers lived into their sixties, dying in the same year, 1328. The younger, Tamemori, became a relatively well-known poet, and the elder, Tamesuke, also achieved distinction as a poet, leaving us a collection of some 300 of his poems, known as the Fujigayatsushū.⁹³ He also achieved high court rank and post, becoming Acting Middle Counselor of the Senior Second Rank, but his chief claim to fame is as the progenitor of the Reizei family, which has continued until today as one of the noble families of Japan.

Tamesuke's son, Tamehide (d. 1372), continued the family's poetic traditions and attained the same high post and rank as his father; and Tamehide's son, Tamemasa⁹⁴ (1361-1417), again was a poet and held the post of Acting Great Counselor of the Senior Third Rank. Under Tamemasa's two sons, the family split into two branches. Tameyuki (d. 1439) became the founder of the senior branch, known as Kami-reizei and Mochitame (d. 1454), one of the more important poets the family produced, became the founder of the cadet branch, known as the Shimo-reizei.

The leading proponents of the Reizei school of poetry, however, were not always members of the family. One of the most illustrious products of the school was Imagawa Sadayo commonly known by his monkish name of Ryōshun (1324-1420). He was a leading general of the Ashikaga Shōgunate,⁹⁵ but studied poetry under Tamehide and became one of the greatest poets of his age. Another famous poet of the Reizei school was the monk Shōtetsu (1381-1459),⁹⁶ who studied under Tamemasa and Ryōshun.

The Shimo-reizei branch of the family owned the Hosokawa estate, and there, Seika, the famous Confucian scholar, was born in 1561 as a descendant of Mochitame in the fifth generation. In the nineteenth century, both branches of the family were given titles in the new nobility, the Kami-reizei becoming Viscounts and the Shimo-reizei becoming Counts. Both families have always maintained their poetic traditions. All twenty of the members of the family honored by inclusion in the great Japanese biographic dictionary, the Shinsen daijimmei jiten, are described as poets. The most recent member of the family to have won distinction as a poet is Viscount Reizei Tamemoto (1854-1905), Abutsu's descendant in the twentieth generation.

Notes

1. For further bibliographical information, see Appendix B.

2. For more information on the imperial anthologies (chokusenshū), see Appendix E.

3. Also known as haikai and hokku.

4. Also known as Mai no hon or Mai no sōshi.

5. Known as rekishi monogatari.

6. Michinaga's death date fell on the fourth day of the twelfth moon of the fourth year of Manju (1027), which, according to the Julian calendar, was actually January 3, 1028. In dealing with periods in Far Eastern history in which contacts with the Occident were not important, it would seem best to follow the Far Eastern lunar calendar.

7. In this title, masu, here written with the character, meaning “to increase,” is actually a contraction of masumi, meaning “clear.”

8. Known as setsuwa.

9. Known as gunki monogatari or senki monogatari.

10. Nikki.

11. Kikō.

12. Zuihitsu.

13. For more on the Tōkan kikō, see Appendix B-3.

14. For further information on texts and commentaries see Appendix B-1.

15. See Appendix B-2 and 3 for the works of Tsugita and the other scholars mentioned below.

16. Cf. F. Victor Dickins, “The Makura-kotoba of Primitive Japanese Verse,” TASJ 35 (1908). Pt. 4.1-113.

17. Arthur Waley in Japanese Poetry: The ‘Uta’ (Oxford, 1919) calls them ken'yōgen (presumably, “double use words”), a perfectly understandable term but not a common dictionary word.

18. The poem and its introduction are to be found in Scroll 10 of the Shokukokinshū. They are printed in the Kōchū kokka taikei (hereafter referred to as KKT) 5.526

19. Shōgoige.

20. Sado no kami.

21. Sometimes written.

22. Cf. Scroll 331 of the Gunsho ruiju (edition of 1899, as also in all later references) 11.1031.

23. A hereditary title bestowed on Takamochi and his descendants as well as on the members of the Fujiwara family and many other branches of the court aristocracy.

24. This poem, as it appears in the Shokukokinshū, is in full:

    Sate mo ware
              ika ni Narumi no
                                                                                    ura nareba
    Omou kata ni wa
                                                                                    toozakaruran

    Now, for me, how {will things turn out/Narumi} beach since it be,
    I seem to be going farther from the place I think of.

    The poem centers around the pivot-word found in the name Narumi, the first two syllables of which can be taken as the verb “to become.” Narumi was a famous beach along the road between Kyōto and Tōtōmi. (See also Text, note 153.)

25. Nakanoin no Chūjō. Chūjō, the modern term for Lieutenant General, was the second ranking officer of certain of the imperial guard groups.

26. Sammi nyūdō. A nyūdō was a layman who had retired and taken up a priestly way of life.

27. Rishi, or more commonly Risshi. In the Kujō text, discussed in Appendix B-1, is found the word orishimo, meaning “just then,” instead of the title Rishi. Tamai (see Appendix B-2) is inclined to follow the Kujō text, but I feel it unlikely that Abutsu, with her obvious interest in titles, would have failed to identify this son by any sort of title or descriptive phrase.

28. Not having had access to the Waka kuden, I have been forced to rely on the quotations from it in Tamai's essay in the Iwanami edition of the Izayoi nikki (see Appendix B-2).

29. Tamai suggests that Teikaku may have been the Teikaku Ajari who was a son of Minamoto Akitame and was presumably born some time before Akitame became a monk in 1255. This is possible, but there is no positive evidence in support of this theory besides the name itself. Sano and some other scholars, following the famous commentary of 1824, the Izayoi nikki zangetsushō (see Appendix B-1), suppose that the Azari was Tameie's priestly son Keiyū and that the Preceptor of the Izayoi nikki was Genshō himself, but this is obviously wrong.

30. Nyōin.

31. also known as the Abutsu menoto no fumi (or Abutsu menoto no bun) (Abutsu's Writings of a Wet Nurse). It is to be found in Scroll 477 of the Gunsho ruiju, 17.206-228.

32. Naishi was the title of the female Palace Attendants of the Palace Attendants Office (Naishi no tsukasa), one of the offices of the women's quarters of the imperial palace.

33. Another work attributed to Abutsu which is stylistically like the Niwa no oshie is the Yoru no tsuru (Crane of Night), a phrase which Abutsu uses of herself in the chōka at the end of the Izayoi nikki. (See p. 113, note 320.) It is also known as the Abutsu kuden (Abutsu's Oral Tradition). It is printed in Scroll 292 of the Gunsho ruiju, 10.712-716.

34. According to Tamai. The total figure is often given as 44 on the basis of statements in the Izayoi nikki zangetsushō.

35. To be found in Vols. 21 and 22 of the KKT and also in Vol. 55 of the first series of the Kokusho kankō kai publications (hereafter referred to as KKK). An index to the Fubokushō is printed as Vol. 56 of the KKK.

36. For Tamesuke see below. It was he who suggested the name of Fubokushō for the anthology. This name was made by taking one distinctive graphic element from each of the two characters in the name Fusō, a poetic name for Japan.

37. The figure 59 is from Tamai. Other scholars give different numbers, such as 51 and 53. Nagakiyo obviously had access to the travel section of the Izayoi nikki, for he quotes long passages from it as introductions to each of the 14 poems he has taken from this text. He only occasionally includes introductions for the other poems in his collection.

38. Printed in Scroll 398 of the Zoku gunsho ruiju, 14B.934-939.

39. Also known as the Gon-Dainagon Tameie-kyō goshichinichi no gammon (Supplication for the Acting Great Counselor, Lord Tameie, on the Fifth Seventh Day), that is to say the prayer said for his soul on the thirty-fifth day after his death. It is to be found on pp. 57-60 of the Iwanami edition of the Izayoi nikki. The reading fuju for is given in kana in the original text.

40. In a passage in the Izayoi nikki presumably written in 1278, Abutsu says that Tamemori was then sixteen, which, according to the Japanese way of counting age, would mean that he had been born in 1263 and would suggest that Tamesuke was born at least a year or two earlier, but this is not generally accepted. The Shinsen daijimmei jiten leaves the question open by omitting the birth dates of both Tamesuke and Tamemori.

41. Jijū.

42. Jūgoige.

43. Nakatsukasashō.

44. Consultants (Sangi, called by Abutsu by the alternate name Saishō) were a category of counselors of the Supreme Council of State (Dajōkan), coming in rank between the Middle Counselors (Chūnagon) and the Minor Counselors (Shōnagon).

45. Shōshiige.

46. I have not seen this work in whole and have had to rely on Tamai's quotations from it in his article in the Iwanami edition of the Izayoi nikki and on the abridged text printed on pp. 19-30 of Sasaki Nobutsuna's “Kamakura jidai no nikki bungaku “in Vol. 2 of the Nihon bungaku kōza. This text, which makes very interesting reading, includes the section referred to above and also two of Abutsu's poems.

47. This is the temple palace which gave its name to one of the two branches into which the imperial family was divided in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

48. Hokurin zenni.

49. See the articles by Keigi-an and Hori in Appendix B-2.

50. Tamenori's dates are given as 1240-1280 in the Shinsen daijimmei jiten, but this seems highly unlikely, for he is considered to be Tameie's second son and both he and Tameuji had the same mother.

51. The appointment is given by different sources as 1274 and 1276. The former is probably preferable, because Genshō says that Tameie rejoiced over this appointment before his death in 1275.

52. For the ancestors and descendants of Abutsu and Tameie, see the genealogical chart in Appendix D.

53. Wakadokoro. A poetry office had first been created in 905 in connection with the compilation of the Kokinshū and had been given the name of Bureau of Japanese Poetry in 951, but it disappeared not long after that time.

54. Yoriudo.

55. “Grass” here connotes “sketches,” “drafts,” or “notes.” In these and other similar translations I have preserved the literal meanings of the words.

56. The Rokkashū are printed in Vols. 10 and 11 of the KKT, with the Chōshū eisō on pp. 438-539 of Vol. 10 and the Shūi gūsō on pp. 315-617 of Vol. 11.

57. It has been published as Vols. 45, 46, and 47 of the second series of the KKK.

58. See Appendix B-3.

59. Shōnii

60. Gon-Chūnagon.

61. Gon-Dainagon.

62. Nijō sandaishū.

63. Not to be confused with the far more powerful nijŌ branch of the Fujiwara family descended from Yoshizane (1216-1270), who was Chancellor from 1242 to 1246 and again from 1261 to 1265.

64. From the rest of the text, we must assume that this is an error for “two.” which in Japanese is a very simple error for a copyist to make.

65. Later called Miki-gun and more recently Mino-gun. Hosokawa is also written in some early texts. The Hosokawa estate is in modern Hyōgo-ken, in the hills about fourteen miles northwest of the modern city of Kōbe and about two and a half miles northeast of the modern town of Miki.

66. Also known as Dōshun.

67. Seika's account of the history of the Hosokawa estate is to be found in the Seika bunshū, his writings as compiled by Hayashi Razan. It is quoted in the Motoori Norinaga zenshū (Scroll 10 of Tama katsuma, 1902 ed.) 4.233-235.

68. See Appendix B-2.

69. KKK (second series) 46.175 (eighth day [not seventh as indicated by Matsui] of the eighth moon of 1212).

70. Found in pp. 139-142 of Vol. 1 of the Shiseki zassan (which is printed as Vols. 38-42 of the second series of the KKK) and also in Shimizu Seiken, Shōen shiryō 1.1062-1065. The Reizei zokufu is the chief source for this lawsuit. It quotes in full a series of legal documents about it dating from 1313 to 1458. The first and by far the longest document contains references to the earlier documents in the case.

71. Jitō-shiki.

72. Ryōke-shiki.

73. KKK (second series) 47.227, 230 (23rd day of the seventh moon and first day of the eighth moon of 1230).

74. Hsiao-ching

75. “Second” in that he was the second eldest of his recognized heirs. Genshō and possibly others of his sons were actually older than Tamenori.

76. An appellation used by Sadaie, which Tamekane and his descendants took as a secondary family name.

77. An appellation used by Tameie.

78. Uhyōe no kami. The Uhyōe, or more fully the Uhyōemon, was one of the groups of palace guards. The reference here, of course, is to Tamenori. This represents the highest post he reached (carrying with it normally the Junior Fourth Rank Lower Grade). Abutsu, in using the term “former,” indicates only that he had resigned from this post. He did not die until two years later.

79. Tameko is represented by 115 poems scattered through seven of the imperial anthologies, and she has also left us a small collection of sixty-six of her poems, known as the Gon-Dainagon Tenji shū, printed in Scroll 449 of the Zoku gunsho ruiju, 16B.494-496.

80. The title “Acting Middle Counselor,” of course, properly belonged to some male relative. Note that in the title of her poetic collection she is called the “Acting Great Counselor” (Gon-Dainagon), presumably a later title associated with her, and one by which she is better known. Ōmiyanoin, or simply Ōmiyain, was the temple name of Yoshiko (1225-1292), daughter of Saneuji (1193-1269) of the Saionji branch of the main Fujiwara family, who was briefly the Prime Minister (Dajō daijin) in 1246. She was the first empress chosen from the Saionji branch of the family, having been the consort of Go-Saga and the mother of Go-Fukakusa (reigned 1246-1259; died 1304).

81. Abutsu also tells of a poetic exchange with one of Tameie's sisters, but she describes her as keeping herself “strictly concealed,” for, as the daughter of the great Sadaie, “she would not let others hear the poor poems she composed.” Although one of the lady's poems is included in the Izayoi nikki, she obviously was not considered to be a poetess of any standing, and consequently she may not have been involved in the poetic dispute between her nephews and great nephews.

82. Matsui (quoted in turn by Tamai) bases the legal aspects of his study on Miura Hiroyuki, Zoku hōseishi no kenkyū (Chap. 12, pp. 1061-1136, “Kamakura jidai no kazoku seido”), and on Nakada Kaoru, Hōseishi ronshū (Chap. 7, pp. 167-250, “Chūsei no zaisan sōzokuhō”).

83. For her route and stopping places see Appendix C.

84. The Shiga district has given its name to the modern prefecture of Shiga, which comprises the whole of the former Province of Ōmi.

85. The long Japanese sculling oar is held in place by a guide-rope, without which it is difficult to use.

86. There may be some connection between this term and the ancient Chinese use of the tortoise shell for divination.

87. The great shrine at Kamakura to the war god, Hachiman, here used to mean the Kamakura government as a whole.

88. “My lord's reign” (kimi ga yo) is the opening phrase and also the title of the Japanese National Anthem, which also includes the phrase “eight thousand generations” (ya chi yo).

89. See Appendix A.

90. The decision was in the form of an insen (“dictate of a retired emperor”). The retired emperor in this case presumably was Kameyama. Insei is the term for the “camera government” of a retired emperor.

91. Ishiyama Tetsurō in his Nihon bungaku shoshi, p. 348, describes Tamesada as Tameyo's nephew.

92. Also given as 1334-1385.

93. (Also read Tōkokushū), printed in Scroll 431 of the Zoku gunsho ruiju, 16A.1-16.

94. Also given as Tametada.

95. In 1371 he was appointed Chinzei tandai (or Kyūshū tandai), the Military Governor of Kyūshū.

96. Also given as 1380-1458.