SOURCE: Bundy, Roselee. “Poetic Apprenticeship: Fujiwara Teika's Shogaku Hyakushu.” Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 2 (summer 1990): 157-88.

[In the following essay, Bundy evaluates the poetry of Teika's early collection Shogaku hyakushu, contrasting it with the verse of his father, Fujiwara no Shunzei, and pointing out the significance of Teika's manipulation of imagery rather than his cultivation of an emotionally compelling lyrical voice in this work.]

In the Fourth Month of 1181 Fujiwara Teika, 1162-1241, then aged twenty, composed his first hundred-poem sequence, Shogaku Hyakushu. Teika had made his public debut as a poet in Wakeikazuchi-sha Uta-awase in the Third Month of 1178, and Shogaku Hyakushu signaled his mastery of that other vehicle of formal poetry, the writing of poem sequences. Both the poetry contest and the poem sequence required the poet to contend with the complexities of composition on topics and issues of decorum and poetic precedents, without a knowledge of which no court poet could practice. With the exception of a figure such as Saigyō, 1118-1190, who worked outside of court circles, to be a poet in the twelfth century was to compose the formal poetry of uta-awase and poem sequences. In Wakeikazuchi-sha Uta-awase, judged by his father Fujiwara Shunzei, 1114-1204, Teika had been called upon to submit only three poems, one on each of three topics. Three years later he was prepared to take on the more difficult challenge of a hundred-poem sequence. Many years later when Teika compiled his personal collection, Shūi Gusō, he placed Shogaku Hyakushu at the head of the volumes devoted to what he seems to have regarded as his most important formal compositions. (In contrast, his second hundred-poem sequence, Horikawa Dai Hyakushu, 1182, is relegated to an appendix.) Shunzei, too, found two poems from Shogaku Hyakushu to be of sufficient merit to be included in the seventh imperial anthology, Senzaishū, 1188, and half a century later Teika himself commemorated the beginning of his career by including one poem in Shinchokusenshū.

In his late twenties and thirties, Teika would become the originator and most daring practitioner of what his contemporary detractors called the poetry of the daruma sect (daruma uta) and what we know as the Shinkokin style, characterized by fragmented syntax, abrupt juxtapositions of image against image, and complex allusions and wordplays. In 1201 he was to be appointed one of the five compilers of Shinkokinshū and in 1232 the sole compiler of Shinchokusenshū. Likewise, as the author of poetic treatises such as Kindai Shūka and Maigetsushō, he would come to influence much of medieval practice.

As the title of Shogaku Hyakushu indicates (shogaku means the first stage or step of learning), the sequence is the work of an inexperienced poet. No one would argue that the poems of Shogaku Hyakushu belong to the category of verse that a decade later would usher in a new period of poetry.¹ Indeed, many of the poems are little more than competent, and there are several reasons for regarding the sequence as an apprentice work occupying a minor place in Teika's long and illustrious poetic career. Shogaku Hyakushu was designed most likely by Shunzei not so much to display a new poetic voice but to testify far more conservatively to the young Teika's mastery of the conventional requirements for composing poems on assigned topics.

First, the format of this hundred-poem sequence is such that it could be used by a beginner with relative ease. Teika's Shogaku Hyakushu is closely modeled on the pattern of the so-called Kyūan Hyakushu, completed in 1150. Several years prior to that, Retired Emperor Sutoku had invited thirteen poets to join him in composing individual hundred-poem sequences. This sequence comprised twenty poems on spring; ten, summer; twenty, autumn; ten, winter; twenty, love; two shrine poems; two encomia; five Buddhist poems; two poems on ephemerality; one on parting; five on travel; two acrostic poems; and one long poem. Teika's Shogaku Hyakushu is identical in format except that the long poem is replaced by one on the topic of personal lament. Unlike Horikawa Hyakushu that sets a discrete topic for each of its hundred poems, Kyūan Hyakushu demands only that a poet be able to compose a number of poems on fairly broad subjects.² Although the poet must be attentive to such matters as seasonal progression, he or she is relatively free to select the individual topics for each subject area. At least partly for this reason, Teika or his father Shunzei probably chose the Kyūan Hyakushu format for Teika's first effort, saving the more difficult Horikawa for the following year.³

Second, Shogaku Hyakushu may also have been intended to confirm Teika's promise as a poet and his position as Shunzei's likely poetic heir in the Mikohidari family, one who would succeed to his father's poetic principles.⁴ In fact, the choice of the Kyūan Hyakushu sequence itself may have been symbolic of these hopes. Shunzei, at the age of thirty-seven, had not only been a participant in the original Kyūan Hyakushu but later had been appointed by Sutoku to edit the sequence as a whole. Although this sequence was not Shunzei's debut work, it marked the beginning of a period of enhanced activity and recognition in the court.⁵ Shunzei places this sequence, out of chronological order, as the opening work of his personal collection, Chōshū Eisō. Further, Shunzei and his fellow poets recognized the high caliber of the verses in his Kyūan Hyakushu. Sixty-five of its poems are included in one or another imperial anthology, including nine in Shunzei's Senzaishū.

By 1180, Shunzei had become the leading figure in the poetic circles of the court. His chief rival Fujiwara (Rokujō) Kiyosuke had died in 1177, and Shunzei had quickly taken his place in the household of the then Minister of the Right Fujiwara Kanezane, becoming his new tutor and judge at many of the uta-awase he sponsored. In 1181, Shunzei was summoned for the first time by Go-Shirakawa to discuss poetry. Other visits followed, and in 1183 the retired emperor commanded Shunzei to begin compiling an imperial anthology. Shunzei could achieve no greater public recognition and his thoughts must have turned to insuring the continuity of his Mikohidari house. Disappointed by his untalented elder son Nariie, Shunzei focused his hopes on the youthful Teika to carry on their family tradition.⁶ And Teika would surely have agreed that there was no better way to begin than by employing the format of the poem sequence that had been so important in his father's career.

If Shunzei recognized Teika as the most poetically gifted of his children, then there is little doubt that he would have urged Teika to approach the composition of his first hundred-poem sequence cautiously and conservatively. For years Shunzei had been attacked by the Rokujō poets for his ‘lack of learning’, his relative disinterest in their antiquarian approach to poetry. Further, Shunzei himself was a conservative figure who carefully limited the scope of the vocabulary and sensibilities permissible in waka. For both these reasons, it is likely that he would have discouraged any radical tendencies that Teika might have displayed. Years later when Teika himself describes in Maigetsushō the training of a poet, he demands that a beginner master the basics, putting aside his or her desire for idiosyncrasy. There is no reason to believe that Shunzei counseled otherwise.

As important probably from Teika's point of view, however, would have been the weight of Shunzei's accomplishments as a poet and thinker. How likely would an inexperienced poet of twenty have felt prepared to challenge his illustrious father? Shunzei encountered in his youth a poetic practice troubled by an awareness that its language and stylistic devices were overused and no longer answered to the expressive needs of the contemporaneous generation of poets. Many of his fellow poets, nonetheless, seemed to favor the safe route of an innocuous repetition of the past; others sought novelty in ever more tortuous conceits in unfamiliar vocabulary, drawn either from the colloquial language or from the ancient Man'yōshū. Shunzei, in contrast, demonstrated in his poetry and critical writings that emotional conviction could be restored to waka while still honoring the vocabulary and sensibilities of the past. Like the more conservative of his predecessors, he argued that court poetry continue to use the vocabulary of the sandaishū, or first three imperial anthologies, Kokinshū, Gosenshū, and Shūishū. But he went on to suggest that these collections, as well as such prose works as Genji Monogatari, were the repositories of immutable truths of human experiences and emotions, or, as he termed it, hon'i. It was the task of poets, no matter the age in which they lived, to study these canonical texts, discover their truths in their own heart, and disclose hon'i in their poetry.⁷

Further, Shunzei was not merely concerned with the poet's state of mind. Instead, he redefined the function of poetic diction. Its primary role was not the linear transmission of a conceit but the evocation of a mood or atmosphere through its aural qualities and through myriad resonances between word and word and between the present poem and one or more earlier verses. These ideals of emotional conviction and rich resonances are nowhere better displayed than in Shunzei's own work. Perhaps no other poet equaled his sensitivity to the emotional tonalities created by the sound and rhythm of diction and to the moods summoned up by images. His sensibilities and diction are thoroughly those of the poetic canon; there is no glimmer of the merely idiosyncratic. And yet his poems in which the genius of poetic tradition seems at times to speak in its most polished form, also give the impression of being grounded in concrete emotions. Shunzei's words are always tethered to those feelings and experiences he believed to be beyond change and loss.

All of the above conditions related to the composition of Shogaku Hyakushu argue that this sequence is the least likely place to seek for signs of some quality that is distinctively Teika's. Nevertheless, there are also several reasons for not dismissing the work. First, Teika's career subsequent to Shogaku Hyakushu of 1181 can hardly be described as that of a docile adherent to even Shunzei's poetic style and precepts. True, Teika's later, innovative style is founded on such notions of Shunzei's as hon'i, omokage, and yūgen. Or more precisely, there was a dialectical relationship between Shunzei's principles, explicitly stated for the first time in the late 1180s and the 1190s, and the poetry of the younger generation of Mikohidari poets. Likewise, Shunzei used his prestige and influence to support Teika's efforts through those years when his son's poems were castigated as the nonsensical works of the Daruma sect. Thus, for example, Shunzei petitioned Go-Toba that Teika be included among the poets of Shōji Hyakushu, 1201, arguing that in contrast to the Rokujō poets whose verses were unpoetic, old-fashioned, or error-ridden, his son had ‘altered the forms of poetry, had devised new diction, and sought new, interesting effects that could not be found in the poetry of the past.’⁸ Shunzei was well aware that Teika had brought something new to waka. But Shunzei also remained clearly ambivalent, questioning some of the younger poets' experiments with diction or diplomatically allowing that some of their compositions were beyond his capacity for understanding.⁹

What is more important, Shunzei and Teika differ fundamentally as poets. Those poems most characteristic of Teika's innovative style display little of the rich emotional resonances summoned up by the mellifluous cadences of Shunzei's verse. Instead, their effects arise from the sharp juxtaposition of image against image and phrase against phrase, breaking the conventional connections of diction and referential sense. For Teika, further, hon'i is not to be recovered through the delineation of the impulses of the human heart but through images, contingent on neither a specific poetic speaker nor context of composition. Shunzei is a poet of emotional conviction, still contriving, despite the fact that as verses on set topics much of his poetry was fictional, a voice of personal feelings. Not so Teika, for whom it seems only the words of poetry exist, to be manipulated by the poet.¹⁰

It is in Shogaku Hyakushu that Teika was compelled to seriously position himself in relation to his father and the rest of his poetic past. It is unlikely that even at the time of Shogaku Hyakushu he would have been content to produce merely pale shadows of earlier poems. Both the creativity he displayed so soon after as well as what we know of his arrogant and prickly temperament argue against that possibility.¹¹ The very greatness of his father, both as poet and thinker, would have made it imperative that Teika claim a distinct identity. It is true that originality had been generally little valued in the history of waka and that Teika, in keeping with his father's principles, continued to use the canonical poetic vocabulary. The notion of ‘old words, new conceptions’ was fundamental to his poetry. Nonetheless, all the leading poets from the late eleventh century onward had struggled to find a place for personal expressiveness in a period when, in the words of one poet, ‘there were no sentiments or conceits left to use, nor any words that had been neglected.’¹² Teika's time was not one of comfortable continuities. Since Shunzei had succeeded in fashioning a poetic voice of ‘self’ that seemed a crystallization of the emotional sensibilities of the poetic canon, Teika's place could not but be elsewhere.

The present article, therefore, aims to discover how and where Teika starts out as a poet in Shogaku Hyakushu. Given the circumscribed nature of poetic practice and the nature of this sequence as a debut work, his distinctiveness will not be displayed in extraordinary flourishes but in subtle shifts of emphasis and in the direction of the choices he makes in vocabulary and references. Although allusive variation, or honkadori, had not yet been fully defined as a technique, the poems of Teika's predecessors are everywhere evidenced in this sequence, and Shunzei's are a particularly strong presence. It is within Teika's dialogue with these earlier poems that his distinctiveness slowly reveals itself. Before innovation comes mastery of the canon of the past, and Shogaku Hyakushu reveals this above all. It also displays some fundamental features of Teika's poetry: a fascination with poetic language for its own sake; an absence, even at times a dismissal, of the lyrical voice that characterizes his father's work; and in its place a reliance on images that emblematize feelings. In the pages that follow will be examined poems that reveal both Teika's retracing of the past and his recoiling from it. First, however, let us look at his point of entry into the sequence and thus into dialogue with his predecessors, and his subtle maneuvering for a place to stand.¹³

Shogaku Hyakushu opens with this poem on the arrival of spring:

          Izuru hi no
onaji hikari ni
          yomo no umi no
nami ni mo kyō ya
haru wa tatsuramu(14)
          As the sun rises,
Its same light shines unchanged,
          Above the boundless seas,
Do even these waves give signs
That today spring has come?

Teika's poem fulfills well its requirements. First, spring was commonly believed to arrive from the east, and Teika brings that notion to life by speaking of the sun rising at dawn on the first day of spring. Second, as appropriate to spring and to the opening of a sequence, this poem sets up a broad vista, sketchy in its details but with an overall sense of luminous whiteness. The best-known poem of this sort is perhaps that of Mibu no Tadamine with which Shūishū opens:

          Haru tatsu to
iu bakari ni ya
          miyoshino no
yama mo kasumite
kesa wa miyuran(15)
          Spring comes today,
And is it for that reason
          In lovely Yoshino
This morning I can see
The mountains veiled in haze?

Similarly, the decorum of a poem on the arrival of spring demanded something of a celebratory air. In Teika's poem this tone is enhanced by the fact that the line izuru hi … is found in several earlier encomia and nowhere much else. Thus, for example, we find this poem in Kokinshū:

“COMPOSED AT THE TIME OF THE BIRTH OF THE CROWN PRINCE”

          Mine takaki
kasuga no yama ni
          izuru hi wa
kumoru toki naki
terasu beranari(16)
          From beyond the high peak
Of sacred Kasuga mountain
          Emerges the sun,
And never will clouds obscure
The shining glory of my prince.

Finally, Teika may have had in mind the following poem in Kyūan Hyakushu when he wrote particularly the second line of his poem:

          Akekururu
onaji misora no
          ikanareba
kesa wa kotoshi no
hajime naruran(17)
          Though the days come and go
The sky is ever constant.
          So how can I tell
That with this morning has come
The new year?

Takasue here speaks of the unchanging quality of the sky even on this first day of spring (he seems to make reference to the old conceit that the cycles of nature do not necessarily accord with the calendar). Commentators agree that Teika's onaji hikari means a light no different from any other day, and Takasue's poem supports such a reading.

There are places, however, where Teika also appears to make a point of shifting away from the works of his predecessors. Poets generally speak of the arrival of spring in relation to mountains and fields, with haze or melting ice and snow, and more rarely the sky. One of the few poems that invoke the sea is the following, again from Kyūan Hyakushu:¹⁸

          Itsu shika to
futami no ura no
          kasumeru wa
akekuru mama ni
haru ya kinuramu(19)
          Suddenly it is here,
The haze that covers the waters
          Of Futami Bay,
All because with the break of day
Springtime has arrived.

In comparison to this poem, Teika has vastly enlarged his seascape to encompass all oceans. His is a grander vision. More important, Teika strongly implies in the third and fourth lines, yomo no umi no nami ni mo, that his sea and waves stand in contrast to the more common mountains and fields. Spring arrives not only in those mountains mentioned by so many poets, but also here among the waves of the sea. Tadamine's poem, quoted above, exemplifies the established treatment of the topic ‘arrival of spring’, and Teika may well have had that poem in mind. But Teika also seems to respond more directly to his father Shunzei's poem in Kyūan Hyakushu:

          Haru kinu to
sora ni shiruki wa
          kasuga yama
mine no asahi no
keshiki narikeri(20)
          That spring is here
I know from the sky,
          For above Kasuga mountain
I see it in the morning light
Of the sun rising on its peak.

In this poem, which may also be related to Yoruka's Kokinshū poem above, Shunzei speaks of the morning sunlight on Kasuga mountain. Teika invokes perhaps the same light over the sea. If such a reading is possible, then Teika pays homage to, but also distinguishes himself from, his father and moves to stand beside him. Interestingly, the scene of Teika's poem would precede in time that of his father. Further, it is tempting to treat the spring light in both poems as a metaphor for the dawning of a new age of poetic greatness.²¹ Teika then claims for himself the same potential for rebirth as his father did before him; with him things are to start anew once more.

Teika does not here repudiate his father or the other poets whose works may have in one way or another influenced him. Likewise, there is nothing strikingly innovative about his poem. Conversely, though, it is as accomplished as Takasue's or Chikataka's and perhaps even Shunzei's in this case. He displays not only his mastery of the requirements of the topic but a self-assured skill that permits him to address so directly his predecessors' poems. To an extraordinary degree, Teika's poem confronts these earlier verses. It was impossible in the twelfth century to write a poem that did not in some way refer to another poem, but Teika rushes into the midst of his predecessors' works and there insists on doing more than they. In this poem, he was not content with the conventional mountains and fields, but moved to the sea, and not this or that sea but all the oceans. Here the image enriches our perception of the coming of spring to all places, but, as will be seen later, his attitude at times leads to a kind of stridency and bluntness in his poems.

Timidity certainly does not describe Teika's approach to poetry. It is this confidence, in fact, that distinguishes his mining of the past. Throughout Shogaku Hyakushu, he seeks to display his mastery of the characteristic vocabulary and voices of the poetry of the past, trying out different ones in turn. These efforts should not be dismissed as mere imitation. One senses, rather, a calculated dissection of the accomplishments of the past, before the poet moves forward to something new. The relationship between Teika's poetry and Shunzei's is particularly telling and will be addressed in detail below. I will start instead with Teika's choices among the canonical vocabulary of waka, his aggressive seeking for expressions that are characteristic of one or another text, but which have been little used subsequently in waka. There is little resonance of meaning or mood between Teika's poems and those earlier ones from which he culls these expressions. His interest is clearly in re-appropriating the ‘old words’ themselves, broken off from their original contexts. Teika's penchant for the unusual expression is shown in the following love poem, based on two Kokinshū verses. Teika's poem reads:

          Morokoshi no
yoshino no yama no
          yume ni dani
mada minu koi ni
madoinuru kana(22)
          In the land of China
Rise other Yoshino mountains
          Where I might go in dreams,
But of her not a glimpse am I granted,
As I wander lost on the path of love.

The conception of Teika's poem resembles that of a Kokinshū love poem by Sosei:

          Morokoshi mo
yume ni mishikaba
          chikakariki
omowanu naka zo
harukekarikeri(23)
          Even the land of China,
When we see it in dreams,
          Is quite nearby.
Yet unbridgeable is the distance
Between me and one who loves me not.

More importantly, before Teika, the phrase morokoshi no yoshino no yama was unique to a miscellaneous verse composed by Fujiwara Tokihira and included in Kokinshū among the haikai poems, those that the compiler considered somewhat comical or otherwise not in keeping with the proper sensibilities of waka. The poem, further, drew comments from Shunzei and Kenshō, who tried to explain which mountains the poet was referring to. It reads as follows:

          Morokoshi no
yoshino no yama ni
          komoru tomo
okuren to omou
ware naranaku ni(24)
          Though you would hide yourself,
In those other Yoshino mountains
          In the land of China,
Without an instant's thought
I would have followed you there.

Teika appears to have purposely sought out this phrase, problematic not only in its reference but its source. Haikai poems, with their exaggerated expressions, were not generally considered to be acceptable models for composition.

Teika also selects from Ise Monogatari a striking set of images that serve as a preface.

          Azusayumi
mayumi tsukiyumi
          tsuki mo sezu
omoi iredomo
nabiku yo mo nashi(25)
          Catalpa-wood bow,
Spindle-tree and zelkova-tree bows—
          Numberless they are,
Like my thoughts shot through with longing
For never will she draw near to me.

Teika's poem makes references to the following exchange in Ise Monogatari:

          Azusayumi
mayumi tsukiyumi
          toshi wo hete
waga seshi ga goto
uruwashimi se yo(26)
          Catalpa-wood bow,
Spindle-tree and zelkova-tree bows—
          May you love him
As abundantly as I have loved you
For these many months and years.

[Woman's response]

          Azusayumi
hikedo hikanedo
          mukashi yori
kokoro wa kimi ni
yoriteshi mono wo(27)
          Catalpa-wood bow—
Whichever way I was pulled,
          From long ago,
It was always only toward you
That my heart was drawn.

This exchange is between a man, who had been absent for three years, and his wife, who, tired of waiting, had decided to remarry. In the first poem, the tsuki of tsukiyumi pivots to mean ‘month’; in the second, hiku, ‘to pull’, is associated with bows. Teika takes the list of bows from the first of the poems and provides a new pivot, (omoi)iru, ‘to yearn deeply for’, and iru, ‘to shoot an arrow’. As was the case in the poem above, Teika re-introduces diction that had been unused for several centuries.²⁸ Not only is the phrase highly distinctive but from the point of view of Teika's own later rules of honkadori he had taken the dangerous step of basing his love poem on an earlier one on the same subject. One might argue that there is no resonance between the Ise story and his poem, in which the speaker laments that he has not yet been granted a single meeting with his love. At the same time, Teika's use of the preface and its attendant wordplays are most skillful and his poem quite self-sufficient.

The building blocks of Teika's verses are clearly other poems. There are other verses in Shogaku Hyakushu that extract distinctive vocabulary from Man'yōshū and such fictional monogatari as the Genji. Teika's consciousness of these earlier texts seems to precede his concern with what he wishes to express in his poems. Or perhaps more precisely, the two cannot be separated. It is possible that in Shogaku Hyakushu he betrays his inexperience as a poet, and it is also true, as mentioned above, that poems of the late twelfth century perforce were written in the context of other poems. But the manifestness of Teika's fascination with the words of poetry distinguishes his approach to composition in this sequence; nowhere is this more clear than in his citation, as in the poems above, of those items of poetic vocabulary used in only one or several earlier verses and thus strongly associated with those contexts. These, Teika will make function in a new context. A decade later this focus on language would lead to the experiments with diction of the ‘daruma’ poems. In Shogaku Hyakushu, the presence of earlier poetry is not limited to selected expressions; more often Teika is engaged with the conceptions or images of one or more poems as a whole. One is little moved by many of these poems by Teika, so much do they seem to be about other poems rather than revealing some emotional truth. What he does often achieve, however, is a kind of parity with the earlier poem. For example:

          Yuki no uchi ni
ikade oramashi
          uguisu no
koe koso ume no
shirube narikere(29)
          While the snow still falls,
How shall I find and gather
          Sprigs of white plum blossoms?
I must rely on the warbler's song
To show me where they are.

In this poem, which could easily belong to Kokinshū, Teika invokes two poetic commonplaces. First, white plum blossoms cannot be distinguished from snowflakes:

          Furu yuki ni
iro wa magainu
          ume no hana
ka ni koso nitaru
mono nakarikere(30)
          The snowflakes fall,
And lost amid the whiteness
          Are the plum blossoms.
But there is nothing that compares
With the beauty of their perfume.

Second, the warbler, another harbinger of spring, sings among the boughs of plum blossoms:

          Hana no ka wo
kaze no tayori ni
          taguete zo
uguisu sasou
shirube ni wa yaru(31)
          Let me send forth
The perfume of the blossoms
          Upon the spring breeze,
To summon the warbler
And guide it on its way.

Teika's poem gives an interesting twist to Tomonori's proposition. In the earlier verse, the speaker will use the scent of the blossoms to summon the warbler; in Teika's poem, the speaker, who cannot distinguish the blossoms from the snow, will follow the warbler's song. Likewise it is not the scent of the blossoms themselves, as in Mitsune's poem, but the sound of the warbler's song that will reveal the blossoms. Teika has successfully met the requirements of a Kokinshū-style poem, and he holds his own against his predecessors.

Teika's interest also extends to the works of poets close to his own time. The following spring poem, modeled on verses by Minamoto Toshiyori and perhaps Saigyō, illustrates a successful attempt to introduce newness of perceptions:

          Shiogama no
ura no namikaze
          tsuki saete
matsu koso yuki no
taema narikere(32)
          In Shiogama Bay,
The moonlight gleams coldly
          Among wind-tossed waves,
And only pines disrupt the whiteness,
Dark patches in a snowscape.

Toshiyori's and Saigyō's poems:

          Shirakawa no
haru no kozue wo
          miwataseba
matsu koso hana no
taema narikere(33)
          Kumori naki
yama nite umi no
          tsuki mireba
shima zo kōri no
taema narikeru(34)
          At Shirakawa
Across the treetops of spring,
          When I gaze about,
Only the pines disrupt the whiteness
Of the cherry blossoms spread before me.
          From atop this mountain,
When I gaze at the moon over the sea,
          No cloud in sight,
The islands indeed disrupt the whiteness
Of the ice spread before me.

A decade after Shogaku Hyakushu, Shunzei would include Toshiyori's poem in Korai Fūteishō among the representative poems of Shikashū, and Teika must surely have been aware of its distinctive imagery. Saigyō's verse dates from his trip to Shikoku between 1168 and sometime in the 1170s, and most likely was also known to Teika. Although the line taema narikeri occurs in several other poems, the notion of reducing the natural scene to a stark contrast of light and dark is unusual in these compositions.

Teika brings motion and instability to the scene, replacing, for one, Saigyō's metaphor of ice with that of snow. The wind in Shiogama Bay whips up the waves against the many islands and, in the spray that rises skyward and down again through the night, the moonlight gleams. In the midst of this swirling whiteness like snow, the pine trees, the only stationary objects, are reduced to an absence. Compared to those of his predecessors, Teika's poem comprises multiple images and perhaps lacks their lucidity, but he discovers a beauty of a different sort in the ever-changing play of light and dark.

We have seen in several poems above how boldly Teika approaches his predecessor's works and then introduces a difference. These differences need to be brought into sharper focus, and the place to begin is the relationship between Teika's verses and those of his father. Since Teika must have worked under his father's supervision in the preparation of Shogaku Hyakushu, Shunzei exerted a strong influence, no doubt, on the poems. Teika's poems here are quite close to Shunzei's own style, in fact more so than to Teika's own later style.³⁵ In a number of cases, Shunzei's poems are clearly Teika's literal models in both construction and tone. There are often other earlier works from which Teika may have taken images or vocabulary, but it is Shunzei's manner that he has borrowed. Many of the Shogaku Hyakushu poems approach the rich but somehow decorous emotionally of Shunzei's verses. For example:

          Tsuyu no mi wa
kari no yadori ni
          kienu tomo
koyoi no tsuki no
kage wa wasureji(36)
          Though I should vanish,
From this insubstantial abode,
          As swiftly as the dew,
Yet imperishable will be my memory
Of the moonlight I saw this night.

This is remarkably similar in tone to such a poem by Shunzei as the following:

          Yume samemu
nochi no yo made no
          omoide ni
kataru bakari mo
sumeru tsuki kana(37)
          In that world to come,
Where we shall awaken from our dreams,
          Even there would I recall
And tell of my memories of this moon
So lovely is its radiant light.

Others of Teika's verses, while not perhaps analogous to specific poems by Shunzei, recall his lyrical manner. The following is one of two Shogaku Hyakushu poems that Shunzei included in Senzaishū:

          Wakarete mo
kokoro hedatsu na
          tabigoromo
ikue kasanaru
yamaji naritomo(38)
          Though you must leave me,
Let nothing divide our hearts,
          However many the paths
You follow in traveler's garb
Through mountains layered on mountains.

The poem comprises the skillful wordplay that characterizes the best of Teika's works in this sequence. Tabigoromo (traveler's garb) and kasanaru (layered) are engo. Wakaruru and hedatsu are nearly synonyms, the first, however, here describing physical separation, the second, psychological. This poem also effectively conjures up a sense of the great distance the traveler will go and the hoped-for communication of feelings across the separating landscape.³⁹

There are also, however, significant differences between Shunzei and Teika, differences that disclose Teika's stance as a poet. The following is included among Teika's autumn poems:

          Tsuyu fukaki
hagi no shitaba ni
          tsuki saete
ojika nakunari
aki no yamazato(40)
          Deep laden the dew,
On the lower leaves of the bushclover,
          Where the moon gleams cold;
I hear the deer call for his mate,
In a mountain village in autumn.

Teika has clearly learned from his father how to organize images. Compare the above to Shunzei's poem:

          Yū sareba
nobe no akikaze
          mi ni shimite
uzura nakunari
fukakusa no sato(41)
          When evening falls,
The autumn wind in the field
          Pierces the body,
And the quail are crying
In the Village of Deep Grasses.

Shunzei's poem, which according to Mumyōshō was his personal favorite,⁴² differs entirely in subject matter from Teika's. But note the identical grammatical structures of the last three lines of the poems including the slight pause at the end of the third line, not a true caesura but still having the effect of dividing the poem so that the images of the first three lines are juxtaposed to those of the last two.⁴³ Likewise, both verses present a sequence of images that together define a place, named in the fifth line. Finally, Shunzei alludes to Ise Monogatari and Teika to Genji Monogatari.⁴⁴ The tranquil progression of images, one resonating with the next, in this poem is much in keeping with Shunzei's art.⁴⁵

It is interesting, however, that Teika has put aside the speaker's emotional response that is found in the third line of his father's poem. As recorded by Kamo no Chōmei, his teacher Shun'e had criticized Shunzei's poem on precisely this point, insisting that images be used to conjure up a mood.⁴⁶ There is no reason to believe that Teika intended to side with Shun'e in this matter; Shun'e's manner of soft-focused images that convey moods is not Teika's. But that shift away from Shunzei's poem perhaps reveals Teika's propensity to be a far less lyrical poet than his father, one who does not locate even the semblance of his responding self within the subject of a poem. In contrast to Shunzei, Teika generally avoids expressions that describe the feelings of the speaker or the object depicted. In Shunzei's Kyūan Hyakushu appear such expressions as aware, ‘pathos’; tsuraki kana, ‘how painful’; ajikinaki ya, ‘how pointless’, and so on that are absent from Teika's Shogaku Hyakushu. Often, as in the case of the Tsuyu fukaki poem above, Teika will employ only images.

Even when Teika uses a strongly emotional expression, he may not trace the unfolding of the emotion but instead presents an image that emblematizes the impossibility of relating it:

          Aki no yo wa
kumoji wo wakuru
          karigane no
atokata mo naku
mono zo kanashiki(47)
          On an autumn evening—
Geese fly away in the sky,
          Wings parting the clouds,
Till they vanish—
Traceless is the source of my sorrows.

Teika's poem echoes several works by his predecessors, including one by Shunzei,⁴⁸ and his difference from his father's verse is significant. Shunzei's poem reads:

          Yūmagure
kiri tachinoboru
          toribeyama
sokohaka to naku
mono zo kanashiki(49)
          As darkness gathers,
Mist rises against the mountain
          Of Toribe,
And though I know not precisely why,
I am moved to sorrow.

Shunzei uses a poetic placename to summon up a mood and to suggest, even if nebulously, the nature of the speaker's sorrow. Toribeyama was the cremation ground in the eastern hills of Kyoto, and haka, in sokohaka, pivots to mean ‘grave’. The speaker of the poem should probably be taken as a visitor who is moved by the place's desolate atmosphere.

Teika uses his images to quite other ends. Structurally, first of all, his poem differs from Shunzei's. The statement of the poem is, ‘On an autumn evening, the source of my sorrow is traceless.’ Lines two and three are a preface used to summon up the fourth line atokata mo naku, which itself pivots to modify the fifth line. As a result, there is some question whether one should imagine a speaker who has watched the geese vanish into the sky or whether one should take the image of the geese solely as part of a simile. The poet summons up an image of the geese flying away until they vanish, at which point even their initial substantial presence becomes doubtful. In any event, the geese, which are so concretely evoked and then erased twice over, are not the object of the speaker's emotions, unlike the images in Shunzei's poem. Rather they are part of a larger scene emblematic of his or her sorrow.

Further, this emblem of sorrow is constituted of absence. The sky corresponds to the sorrow only negatively in that they both display an absence of qualities. Several poems in Shinkokinshū speak of the sadness aroused by the very lack of qualities that can be discriminated in the sky of an autumn evening.⁵⁰ The statement of Teika's poem is close to theirs. But rather than saying simply that, Teika empties the sky, conjuring it as a space from which all presence has fled. Compared to nani to naku, sokohaka to naku, or obotsukanashi, Teika's atokata mo naku reflects not at all the speaker's state of mind and wholly denies the presence of what it describes. Thus the image of the geese that the speaker may or may not have seen is doubly removed from providing any connection between the speaker and the natural scene. And the expression mono zo kanashiki, so conventionally sentimental, is suddenly denied any comfortable content or focus.

In addition, Teika's sensibilities are not entirely those of Shunzei's carefully modulated pathos that reverberates in the reader's mind. The sensibilities of Shunzei, or at least of the poet implied by his composition, seem co-extensive with those of the poetic canon. His is perhaps its most polished voice. Teika's relationship is more uneasy; he no longer as readily or skillfully translates the sensibilities into the semblance of convincing impulses of the heart. He cannot and does not, of course, repudiate the canon, although, significantly, several poems in Shogaku Hyakushu address the issue of continuity:

          Inishie no
hito ni misebaya
          sakurabana
          tare mo sakoso wa
omoi okikime(51)
          Ikanishite
ikani shirasen
          tomokaku mo
iwaba nabete no
koto no ha zo kashi(52)
          With the people of the past,
How I wish I could share the beauty
          Of these cherry blossoms.
          Have each of us across the years
Left behind this very thought?
          By what methods,
By what means shall I let her know?
          Since no matter what,
Were I to speak of my love,
There are only the habitual words.

Taken individually such poems are not particularly original, but it is interesting that Teika chose to insert these sorts of ideas into his sequence.⁵³ The first poem opens with a generous impulse to share the beauty of the season, but the implications of the latter lines are more ambiguous. Do they celebrate the constancy of the human heart? And if so, does the speaker find comfort in the thought? Further, one of the meanings of omoioku, the one that seems to fit best in this context, is to leave behind a thought or an unfulfilled desire.⁵⁴ The poets may have shared a common impulse, but one that could never be fulfilled. Likewise, the second poem, on love, seems to question the capacity of the words of poetry to express anything new. On the one hand, there is nothing but words with which to work; on the other, they enforce a dull sameness.

Teika's uneasiness, his difference from his father, discloses his point of departure as a poet in Shogaku Hyakushu. We saw earlier his fascination with unusual diction and his mastery of his predecessors' styles, and the former characteristic was probably life-long. At the same time, these both attest more to his competence as an apprentice poet than to what would flower as his distinctive genius. Thus Teika brings an intensity that at times becomes a bluntness and a cerebral quality that appear to deny all overtones; he has a proclivity for organizing poems in such a way that one part negates, qualifies, or abruptly shifts in thought from another. At other times, he conjures up an intoxication with the beauty of nature or of some other experience. These two characteristics, which seem to oppose each other, in fact are two sides of the same coin. Teika pushes an idea or feeling, which constitutes hon'i, to its extreme. In so doing, he may on the one hand move to deny the softening compromises of feelings and mood found in poems by others, while on the other, he arrays images that conjure up a breathtaking beauty that has no counterpart in the ordinary world. If the Teika of the first type of poem seems to subsume emotion under intellectual judgment, so too the other sort depends on complex wordplay and the manipulation of images and not on the creation of a lyrical voice.

Let us examine the first characteristic. Compare these two poems, the first by Shunzei, the second by Teika, that are the last spring poems in Kyūan Hyakushu and Shogaku Hyakushu respectively:

          Yuku haru no
kasumi no sode wo
          hikitomete
shioru bakari ya
urami kakemashi(55)
          Uramite mo
kai koso nakere
          yuku haru no
kaeru kata wo ba
soko to shiraneba(56)
          As spring slips away,
I would cling fast to her sleeve,
          Woven of haze,
And pour forth my reproaches
Till it was drenched by my tears.
          To no avail
Would I utter my reproaches.
          For I do not know,
As springtime slips away,
What place is its journey's end.

Teika's poem does not directly allude to Shunzei's but instead to one in Kokinshū:⁵⁷

          Hana chirasu
kaze no yadori wa
          tare ka shiru
ware ni oshie yo
ikite uramimu(58)
          Is there any who knows
Where dwells the wind that scatters
          The cherry blossoms?
Please tell me of that place.
I shall go and speak my reproaches.

Nevertheless, it is probably not mere coincidence that Teika's poem shares several phrases with Shunzei's verse and more directly seems to negate its statement. Teika appears even to address it, denying Shunzei's (and Sosei's) wishfulness. Since Teika's poem has no pronouns, its grammatical subject could just as readily be ‘you’ or ‘one’ as ‘I’. Shunzei and Sosei suggest the speaker's grief; Teika focuses on the finality of the loss of spring itself. No amount of sadness can alter the fact of spring's passing. It is not that Teika's poem is without feeling, but the speaker's intellectual awareness pushes that feeling to an uncompromising despair.

A similar movement toward negation, this time between the two halves of the poem, characterizes this autumn verse by Teika:

          Tsuyu nagara
          ori ya okamashi
          kiku no hana
shimo ni karete wa
miru hodo mo nashi(59)
          Could I gather them
So gently to spare the dewdrops,
          These chrysanthemum flowers?
For once blasted by the frost,
They no longer delight these eyes.

The harshness of the last two lines diverges strikingly from the almost precious notion, in the first three lines, of plucking the blossoms, dew and all. Teika suggests the fragility of the flowers' beauty. At the same time, his unyielding awareness of their impending loss and the finality of his statement check any resonance of emotions.

Teika is also attentive to the stark aftermath of change, that scene from which conventional beauty has vanished:

          Kazu shirazu
shigeru miyama no
          ao tsuzura
fuyu no kuru ni wa
arawarenikeri(60)
          Countless their runners,
The vines climb high among the trees
          In the mountain depths.
Now that winter grips the forest
They are fully exposed to view.

The phrase ao tsuzura … kuru can be found in a number of earlier love poems.⁶¹ Teika, however, may have borrowed not only the last line but also the basic conception of the following poem on an altogether different subject:

          Hisagi ouru
sawabe no kayahara
          fuyu kureba
hibari no toko zo
arawarenikeru(62)
          When winter comes,
To the marsh lined with oak
          And miscanthus grass,
The nests of the skylarks
Are fully exposed to view.

Although Teika's images are drawn from the poetic canon, they were previously unused in seasonal poems. He retains the word association, common in love poems that use the vine image, of tsuzura, ‘vine’, and kuru, which pivots to mean in his poem both ‘to grip’ and ‘to come’. He has, however, sundered the connection between the vine image and love, and moved closer to Yoshitada's descriptiveness. Teika's interest was probably the starkness of the scene of the wintry forest, bereft of the leaves that in summer and fall had adorned it with beautiful colors.⁶³ Teika follows Yoshitada's lead in selecting inelegant, homely images, but his colder vision replaces Yoshitada's pathos. The vines wrapped around the tree limbs are that part of nature hidden beneath its conventionally celebrated, seasonal beauty. They are what remain when the latter vanish. A poem such as this is perhaps the precursor to Teika's celebrated poem in Futamigaura Hyakushu, 1186:

          Miwataseba
hana mo momiji mo
          nakarikeri
ura no tomaya no
aki no yūgure(64)
          When I gaze about,
Of cherry blossoms and autumn leaves
          I see no trace:
A fisher's hut by the bay
On an autumn evening.

Here Teika summons up the blossoms and autumn leaves, exemplary images in waka and its aesthetics, only to point to their absence. What is present is the poor hut, itself soon to be consumed by the darkness of night.

Teika brings to his love poems in Shogaku Hyakushu the same bluntness found in some of the seasonal verses. He tends to seek depth and intensity in his love poems by choosing to push the familiar sensibilities and situations of love to their extreme so that some of his expressions appear hyperbolic. This is a way of focusing upon hon'i; the poet seeks to portray the situation or emotion that is quintessentially telling of love. Teika is not drawn to fatuous conceits. What one misses in some of these poems, however, are once more a modulation of tone and an emotional resonance. Five of the twenty poems end with a strongly negative expression. One or two such examples would not be worthy of remark. To end five out of twenty poems in this way, however, appears to be without precedent, and it seems unlikely that Teika desired to vary his program. Further, it is the concept of the situation or emotions rather than the lyrical unfolding of a speaker's feelings themselves that seems to interest Teika. In his day, love poems composed on assigned topics were no more meant to be expressions of the poet's own feelings than any other type of topical verse. With his references to his predecessors' vocabulary and his cerebral approach to hon'i, Teika goes far toward abandoning all pretense that his poems reflect the subjectivity of a particular human being. Instead, love is objectified, and even the speaker is but one part of the incarnation of hon'i.

In Shogaku Hyakushu, Teika's efforts to achieve depth through pushing a canonical situation or argument as far as it can go results at times in poems that are emotionally unconvincing:

          Tsuraki sae
kimi ga tame ni zo
          nagekaruru
mukui ni kakaru
koi mo koso sure(65)
          You are cruel to me,
And yet it is for you
          That I must grieve.
For each pain we inflict on a lover,
Will be repaid in kind by another.

Teika's source may be the following Kokinshū poem included in the section devoted to haikai poetry:

          Ware wo omou
hito wo omowanu
          mukui ni ya
waga omou hito no
ware wo omowanu(66)
          Am I now repaid
For my failure to love
          One who loved me?
For the person I do love
In turn loves me not.

A handful of poets after Kokinshū also used this notion of retribution in their love poetry. For example:

          Awazu tomo
nasake wo kake yo
          onozukara
mukui ni kakaru
koi mo koso sure(67)
          Nagekaji na
omoeba hito ni
          tsurakarishi
kono yo nagara no
mukui narikeri(68)
          Though you will not meet me,
At least look upon me with pity.
          We are all subject to love,
And the pain we inflict on a lover
Will be repaid in kind by another.
          I will not lament,
For was I not, too, once cruel
          To one who loved me.
And now, swiftly, in this very life,
I am repaid in kind.

Whatever the original intent of the anonymous Kokinshū poet, the compilers of that anthology seem to have regarded the poem, with its repetitious use of omou, ware, and hito and its breezy tone, as evidence of a less than serious intent to portray the emotions of love. In Sanekiyo's hands, the notion of retribution becomes a clever device for seeking a woman's sympathies. The speaker of Owari's poem, in contrast, is most likely a woman who attempts to rationalize her suffering. In all these cases, the tone of the speaker's reasoning is as important as the reasoning itself.

This does not appear to be so in Teika's poem. It is improbable that he intended the verse to be humorous; humor had no place in the formal poetic compositions of the twelfth century, and the poem itself gives no indications that it should be read in such a manner. No doubt, Teika was attracted to the process of reasoning. The speaker constructs a paradox in the first three lines. The beloved is cruel and yet is also the one to be more pitied. The last two lines provide the solution to this puzzle. In addition, Teika seems to intend the speaker's sympathy to be a measure of the depth the love possessed. But it does not ring true emotionally. Nor is Teika attentive to subtle shadings of expressions and sensibilities. Had he introduced some measure of ambivalence in the speaker's feelings, some sense of struggle to turn anger into understanding, the poem might have been moving.⁶⁹ In a small way, Owari achieves just that.

A similarly unmodulated tone characterizes the following poem, although here Teika's focus is on an unusual image:

          Sode no ue wa
hidari mo migi mo
          kuchihatete
koi wa shinobamu
kata nakarikeri(70)
          Leaving no fragments,
My sleeves both left and right
          Are dissolved by tears,
And to conceal my love from all eyes,
No more have I the means.

Teika borrows the phrase hidari mo migi mo from Genji Monogatari, a phrase that had been unused in poetry during the intervening centuries:

          Ushi to nomi
hitoe ni mono wa
          omohoede
hidari migi ni mo
nururu sode kana(71)
          My heart is divided.
Not wholly from bitterness alone
          Do I weep.
And so both left and right
My sleeves are moistened with tears.

The Genji scene takes place in Suma, Genji's place of exile. He has taken out a robe given to him by the emperor, his brother, and speaks of the resentment intermingled with nostalgia that it summons up. Both left and right sleeves are moist with tears because he is moved by those two emotions. Hitoe ni, ‘wholly’, pivots with hitoe, ‘singlet’.

In addition, Teika's notion of sleeves dissolved by tears is not without precedent. Among several poems in Senzaishū that employ this conceit are the following:

          Ne wo nakeba
sode wa kuchite mo
          usenumeri
nao uki koto zo
tsukisezarikeru(72)
          Ima wa tada
osauru sode mo
          kuchi hatete
kokoro no mama ni
otsuru namida ka(73)
          When I cry aloud in pain,
Tears dissolve away my sleeves
          Till they are no more.
But never is there an end
To the sorrows that afflict me.
          So long it has been,
That even my restraining sleeves
          Have dissolved away,
And now my tears stream forth,
Free to flow as they will.

Both Izumi Shikibu and Suemichi speak of sleeves dissolved away by tears in order to evoke the suffering that attends the miscarriage of love. In Senzaishū at least, both Izumi Shikibu's and Suemichi's poems occur late in the love affair, where it is drawing to its bitter close, and the sleeves that have dissolved away also suggest the dissolution of the lovers' relationship. Izumi Shikibu organizes her poem around the paradox that although her sleeves may be dissolved by her tears of sorrow, sorrow itself seems imperishable. Despite its reasoned quality, that latter realization gives the weight of emotional conviction to her poem. Likewise, Suemichi presents a mildly interesting and even somewhat moving image of tears flowing as they will, unrestrained either by sleeves or by the speaker's heart. As is Teika's poem, Suemichi's is also a composition on a topic. Yet his portrayal of a weary speaker passively giving way to sorrow is emotionally plausible.

Teika's poem is perhaps more ambitious and also flawed than those in Senzaishū. Emotionally, compared to them, it is extravagant. The subject of his poem is love concealed, and love is still in its early stages. Other poems on the same subject speak of tears and sleeves, even crimson tears of blood, but seldom of sleeves utterly dissolved away.⁷⁴ The speaker has tried valiantly to conceal the abundant tears, a metonym for feelings of love, until the very sleeves are dissolved. Now that they are gone, nothing can prevent the flow of tears and the disclosure of love. Unlike the passive speaker in Suemichi's poem, Teika's seems horror-stricken by the prospect of revelation.

More importantly, Teika attempts to use the sleeves as an objective image that evokes both the speaker's intense love and the equally strong impulse to conceal it. He tries to crystallize that emotional conflict into the one image. He has eliminated the conceit that was the crux of the Genji poem, two separate emotions and thus two sleeves, one for each. Teika's ‘left and right’ thus makes the sleeves far more concrete as objects than they were in the Genji poem or in Izumi Shikibu's or Suemichi's verses, and draws attention to the hyperbolic quality of the conception of tears dissolving sleeves. It is only in the last line that we discover why he has insisted on both left and right sleeves. Kata means not only ‘direction’ or ‘side’ but also ‘method’ or ‘means’. All means of concealment have been exhausted, literally but more importantly emotionally as well, by the intensity of the speaker's love.⁷⁵ Teika's intent must have been to summon up a double image of the sleeve, first concretely present as a barrier, and second as an equally concrete absence that evokes the speaker's helplessness. Nonetheless, the very extremity of the image and the peremptory and explanatory nature of the last two lines thwart all overtones.

From the beginning of his career, then, Teika was not a poet of affecting lyricism. The Shogaku Hyakushu poems quoted above push aside conventional sentiments that mask the completeness of loss, whether of a season or of a blossom, or present them in hyperbolic form likewise unmodulated by shadings of emotions. One feels that in the face of his bluntness and extremity, nothing more could be said about the subjects his poems address. …

Notes

1. Most scholars agree that Teika began to develop his new style with his composition of Futamigaura Hyakushu, the third of his hundred-poem sequences, in 1186. See Akahane Shuku, Fujiwara Teika no Kafū, Ōfūsha, 1985, pp. 91-94.

   In addition, Kondō Jun'ichi compares specific poems of Futamigaura Hyakushu that display characteristics of Teika's innovative style with those from Shogaku Hyakushu, and notes that many are similar, except for the greater experimentation with diction in the later sequence.

   Kondō Jun'ichi, ‘Futamigaura Hyakushu e no Michi’, in Noda Hisao Kyōju Taikan Kinen Nihon Bungaku Shinken: Kenkyū to Shiryō, Kasama, 1977, pp. 165-78.

2. Horikawa Hyakushu was apparently the brainchild of Minamoto Toshiyori, who along with fourteen other poets composed in 1102-1103 individual hundred-poem sequences.

   This undertaking then caught the attention of Minamoto Kuninobu, the leading figure of Emperor Horikawa's poetic circle. The work of some other poets was added, and all the sequences were submitted to Horikawa in 1105-1106.

3. Kubota Jun, Shinkokin Kajin no Kenkyū, Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1973, pp. 515-18.

4. There are no records to indicate the readership of Shogaku Hyakushu. Kamo no Shigeyasu, the host of the Wakeikazuchi-sha Uta-awase, selected four of its poems for his anthology Tsukimōdeshū, 1182.

   In addition, Teika comments in Shūi Gusō that his second hundred-poem sequence was written after his first one was published (hirō suru), suggesting that the sequence was shown to more than immediate family members.

5. For a discussion of this period of Shunzei's career, see Clifton W. Royston, ‘The Poetics and Poetry Criticism of Fujiwara Shunzei’, doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974, pp. 112-13.

6. For Shunzei's concern for and efforts on behalf of his son's career, see Royston, pp, 239-43, and passim.

7. For a detailed discussion of Shunzei's notion of hon'i, see Fujihira Haruo, Shinkokin Kafū no Keisei, Meiji Shoin, 1969, pp. 137-55.

8. Fujiwara Shunzei, Shōji Ninen Shunzei Kyō Waji no Sōjō, in Hisamatsu Sen'ichi, ed., Karonshū 1, Miyai, 1971, p. 273.

9. See, for example, the discussion of Shunzei's judgments of the Roppyakuban Uta-awase in Konishi Jin'ichi, Shinkokin Kajin no Kenkyū, Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1973, pp. 689-702.

10. As early as the 1220s or 1230s, Go-Toba described Shunzei's poetry as ‘gentle and evocative, infused with deep feelings, and moving in its sensitivity.’ He notes, in contrast, Teika's ‘polished ingenuity’, ‘rich evocativeness of diction and gentle elegance of total effect’, and claims that Teika ‘is not fond of the effect known as the “style of intense feeling” (ushintei).’

    Robert H. Brower, ‘Ex-Emperor Go-Toba's Secret Teaching: Go-Toba no In Gokuden’, in HJAS [Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies] 32 (1972), pp. 36, 38 & 40.

11. The most interesting contemporary sketch of Teika as a person is found in ‘Go-Toba's Secret Teachings’, pp. 38-41, in which twenty years later the former emperor recounts the snubs he received from Teika, who, he claims, considered even his father's poetry to be shallow.

    For a discussion of what might have been Teika's ambivalent feelings toward his father, see Kondō Jun'ichi, ‘Teika no Shūshin, in Kokugo to Kokubungaku, 61:9 (September 1984), pp. 1-13.

12. Minamoto Toshiyori, Toshiyori Zuinō, in Hashimoto Fumio et al, ed., Karonshū, NKBZ [Nihon koten bungaku zenshū] 50, Shogakukan, 1975, pp. 41-42.

13. I have used two annotated texts of Shogaku Hyakushu: Kondō Jun'ichi et al., ed., Fujiwara Teika Shūi Gusō Chūshaku: Shogaku Hyakushu, Ōfūsha, 1978, and Kubota Jun, ed., Fujiwara Teika Zenkashū, Kawade, 1987, 2 vols.

14. Shogaku Hyakushu 1 (Spring 1).

    The poems in the present article are identified according to Shimpen Kokka Taikan, Kadokawa, 1983, 10 vols. The numbering differs at times from the old Kokka Taikan.

15. Mibu no Tadamine, Shūishū 1:1.

16. Fujiwara Yoruka no Ason, Kokinshū 7:364.

17. Takasue, Kyūan Hyakushu 501.

18. Water imagery also occurs in a Kinyōshū poem, originally from Horikawa Hyakushu, which also shares its fifth line with Teika's poem:

    Tsurara ishi / hoso tanigawa no / toke yuku wa / minakami yori ya / haru wa tatsuran.

    Deep in the valley / The narrow stream long clogged with ice / Begins to melt. / Does spring itself flow / From its distant source?

    Kōgōgū no Higo, Kin'yōshū-a 1:4 (Horikawa Hyakushu 14).

19. Chikataka, Kyūan Hyakushu 601.

20. Shunzei, Kyūan Hyakushu 801.

21. Shunzei may have chosen the placename Kasuga simply because it is written with the characters for ‘spring’ and ‘day’. Mt Kasuga was also the location of the shrine honoring the tutelary deity of the Fujiwara clan.

22. Shogaku Hyakushu 64 (Love 4).

23. Sosei, Kokinshū 15:768.

24. Fujiwara Tokihira, Kokinshū 19:1048.

25. Shogaku Hyakushu 69 (Love 9).

26. Ise Monogatari, 53 (Episode 24).

27. Ise Monogatari, 54.

28. I can find no other poem that uses the lines azusayumi / mayumi tsukiyumi. Teika must have found the phrasing interesting. In his Shinchokusenshū, 9:545, he includes the kagura poem on which the Ise poem is based.

29. Shogaku Hyakushu 4 (Spring 4).

30. Mitsune, Shūishū 1:14.

31. Tomonori, Kokinshū 1:13.

32. Shogaku Hyakushu 43 (Autumn 13).

33. Toshiyori, Shikashū 1:26.

34. Sankashū, 1356.

35. Ishida Yoshisada, for example, compares the incidence of caesuras and nominative endings in Teika's first three hundred-poem sequences and Shunzei's Udaijin Ke no Hyakushu, 1178. By these measurements he shows that Shogaku Hyakushu is indeed similar to Shunzei's sequence, while in contrast Futamigaura Hyakushu is far less so.

    Ishida Yoshisada, Fujiwara Teika no Kenkyū, Bungadō Ginkō Kenkyūsha, rev. ed., 1975, pp. 285-87.

36. Shogaku Hyakushu 40 (Autumn 10).

37. Shunzei, Kyūan Hyakushu 846.

38. Shogaku Hyakushu 90 (Parting 1); Senzaishū 7:497.

39. The poem may be related to a Kokinshū composition:

    ‘To be given to a person traveling to Michinoku.’

    Shirakumo no / yae no kasanaru / ochi nite mo / omowan hito ni / kokoro hedatsu na.

    Though you travel far, / Beyond countless layers / Of these white clouds, / Let nothing divide your heart / From one who yearns for you.

    Tsurayuki, Kokinshū 8:380.

40. Shogaku Hyakushu 35 (Autumn 5).

41. Shunzei, Kyūan Hyakushu 838; Senzaishū 4:258.

42. Kamo no Chōmei, Mumyōshō, in Hisamatsu Sen'ichi & Nishio Minoru, ed., Karonshū Nōgakuronshū, NKBT 65, Iwanami, 1973, p. 73.

43. Hishikawa Yoshio notes this fact in his discussion of this poem in Fujiwara Teika Shūi Gusō Chūshaku: Shogaku Hyakushu, p. 96.

44. The Genji poem to which Teika may refer reads:

    Ojika naku / aki no yamazato / ikanaramu / kohagi no tsuyu no / kakaru yūgure.

    Where the deer cry, / In that far mountain village, / How fare your lives, / On an evening when the dew / Drenches the bushclover plants?

    Genji Monogatari, Shii ga Moto, 638.

45. Compared to Shunzei, however, Teika has characteristically sought out more unusual expressions. Each of Shunzei's lines or closely related expressions are found in multiple poems among the imperial anthologies.

    Teika's tsuyu fukaki and tsuki saete appear once each for the first time in Senzaishū.

46. Mumyōshō, pp. 73-74.

    Shun'e takes issue with Shunzei's third line, mi ni shimite. Grammatically the line refers to the quail, but on reading the poem for the first time, one's first impression is that the speaker alludes to his own feelings. In either event, the suffering then in the fifth line is embraced within the significance of the poetic placename (utamakura), fukakusa no sato.

47. Shogaku Hyakushu 44 (Autumn 14).

48. The other two related poems are by Toshiyori and Saigyō:

    Nani to naku / mono zo kanashiki / sugawara ya / fushimi no sato no / aki no yūgure.

    Though I know not why / I am moved to sorrow. / In Sugawara / In the village of Fushimi, / This autumn evening.

    Toshiyori, Senzaishū 4:260.

    Nani to naku / obotsukanaki wa / ama no hara / kasumi ni kiete / kaeru karigane.

    What makes one uneasy, / So indistinct they appear, / Are the geese / That wing homeward through the haze / High above in the heavens.

    Saigyō, Sankashū 46.

49. Shunzei, Chōshū Eisō, 148.

50. See, for example, Yoshitsune's two poems in the first volume of autumn poems, nos. 358 & 359. In Mumyōshō, p. 87, Kamo no Chōmei also uses the absence of qualities in the sky of an autumn evening as one of his metaphors for effect of the style of yūgen.

51. Shogaku Hyakushu 11 (Spring 11).

52. Shogaku Hyakushu 65 (Love 5).

53. Teika was not the only poet troubled by the question of continuity, for Saigyō and Shunzei had already addressed the matter. It is tempting to read Teika's poem as an expression of his despair of employing the canonical idiom of waka for personal expressive needs.

    On the one hand, out of the many familiar themes available to him to complain of unrequited love, Teika selects the inadequacy of language, and he hints at no alternative form of expression. He does not draw attention to his inexpressible feelings; instead of wistful, he is bluntly dismissive of the possibility of disclosing his feelings. At the same time, his poem is a pastiche of lines from other verses, so that even his disgruntlement is expressed in the words of others.

54. The other meanings are to resolve in one's mind or to remember or keep in mind.

55. Shunzei, Kyūan Hyakushu 820; Shinchokusenshū 2:136.

56. Shogaku Hyakushu 20 (Spring 20).

57. See also Sutoku no In's poem in Kyūan Hyakushu:

    Hana wa ne ni / tori wa furusu ni / kaerunari / haru no tomari wo / shiru hito zo naki.

    The flowers drop to the root; / The birds wing homewards / To their accustomed nests, / But where spring's journey ends, / There is none who knows.

    Sutoku no In, Senzaishū 2:122.

58. Sosei, Kokinshū 2:76.

59. Shogaku Hyakushu 46 (Autumn 16).

60. Shogaku Hyakushu 53 (Winter 3).

61. For example,

    Hitome nomi / shigeki miyama no / ao tsuzura / kurishiki yo wo mo / omoi wabinuru.

    The eyes of others / Are countless as the vines / Deep in the mountains. / Pain grips my heart, / And I grow weary of this world.

    Akiyuki no Ason no Musume, Goshūishū 12:692.

62. Sone no Yoshitada, Shikashū 4:141.

63. There is some question as to whether the vines in this poem are bare of leaves or not, and if they are not, what is the color of the leaves. What is at present called ao tsuzura is a deciduous vine, but it is not clear that this was the specific type of vine that Teika had in mind. It may be that he used ao tsuzura to suggest that the leaves were still green. Kubota, p. 16, opts for bare vines; such a scene seems to best suggest the ravages of winter.

64. Teika, Shinkokinshū 4:363.

65. Shogaku Hyakushu 76 (Love 16).

66. Anonymous, Kokinshū 19:1041.

67. Fujiwara Sanekiyo, Kyūan Hyakushu 762.

68. Kōka Mon'in Owari, Shinkokinshū 15:1400.

    This poet's dates are unknown. She lived in the second half of the twelfth century, and there is no way of knowing whether her poem precedes Teika's or not. But there was probably no direct influence on the part of either poet.

69. Teika summons up a more effective irony in the poem that immediately precedes this one:

    Ushi tote mo / tare ni ka towamu / tsurenakute / kawaru kokoro wo / saraba oshie yo.

    However great the torment, / To whom can I turn save you? / So enlighten me / In the ways of a heart that changes / And cruelly casts a lover aside.

    Shogaku Hyakushu 75 (Love 15).

    Teika's poem may be based on the following anonymous poem and derive its tone from it as well:

    Sari tote wa / tare ni ka iwamu / ima wa tada / hito wo wasururu / koto wo oshie yo.

    Though you have left me, / To whom shall I turn save you? / This is all I ask: / Instruct me in the ways / One may cast a lover aside.

    Anonymous, Shikashū 8:267.

70. Shogaku Hyakushu 3 (Love 3).

71. Genji Monogatari, Suma 205.

72. Izumi Shikibu, Senzaishū 14:903.

73. Fujiwara Suemichi, Senzaishū 15:937; Kyūan Hyakushu 464.

74. One exception is the following:

    Namidagawa / sode no iseki mo / kuchihatete / yodomu kata naki / koi mo suru kana.

    A river of tears— / Even the floodgate on my sleeves / Has dissolved away, / And my love rushes ever forward, / With nothing to hold it back.

    Kōgōgū no Uemon no Suke, Kin'yōshū 7:377/400.

75. The notion of a barrier that the speaker sets up against the revelation of his or her own feelings also informs the first of Teika's love poems in Shogaku Hyakushu:

    Ikani semu / sode no shiragami / kakesomuru / kokoro no uchi wo / shiru hito zo naki.

    What shall I do? / On my sleeves it sets a barrier / To stop a flood of tears, / This heart, there is no one to fathom, / Though I have begun to love.

    Shogaku Hyakushu 61 (Love 1).