SOURCE: "The Poetry of Izumi Shikibu," Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. XXV, No. 1-2, 1970, pp. 3-125.

[In the following excerpt, Cranston examines many of Izumi's poems, discussing her techniques, choice of themes, and imagery.]

The Heian poetess Izumi Shikibu has left a collection of over 1500 tanka and a reputation for genius, passion, and piety. She is also the heroine of what appears to be a fictionalized memoir, the Izumi Shikibu nikki, as well as of several legends, noh plays, otogizoshi, and temple histories. She lived in an age of memorable women, and her name is commonly mentioned in the same breath with those of her famous contemporaries Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu. A typical appraisal of Izumi the poet appears in a modern Japanese biographical dictionary: 'Her poems are passionate and free, exploding with brilliance; the wealth of her imagination is like heavenly chargers coursing the void; and her freedom of expression is rare. She must be accounted the first poetess of our land.'⁴ And Ikeda Kikan describes Izumi the woman in much the same terms: 'Izumi's nature was unbridled and unrestrained; she acted as her passions directed her.'⁶ The rhetoric of the ancients is somewhat more muted, but in her Diary the acerbic Murasaki Shikibu sniffs that 'Izumi has aspects which are far from praiseworthy.'⁷ More bluntly, Fujiwara no Michinaga calls her a 'wanton' in an exchange recorded in the Izumi Shikibu kashu to which we shall refer again. But as with her ninth-century predecessor in passion and poetry, Ono no Komachi, Izumi was traditionally believed to have turned her back on the worldly life and attained to Buddhist enlightenment in her old age. An Izumi Shikibu cult is preserved at the Joshin'in, a small Shingon temple in Kyoto, where services are held and noh texts recited every year on 21 March, the supposed anniversary of her death. The seventeenth-century writer of guide books, Nakagawa Kiun (1636-1705), on visiting Izumi's alleged tomb at this temple was moved to write, 'Here is the ancient tomb of Izumi Shikibu … Truly there cannot have been another heart as chaste as hers, and for this reason even now I soak my sleeves with tears. Her name is a familiar word which has not fallen into obscurity, and which will remain to the last generation.'¹¹

An examination of the content of Izumi Shikibu's collected poems will reveal the sources of both of her reputations and of much else besides. But first a brief synopsis of the known facts of her life should be given. These tend to confirm her reputation as a femme fatale. Izumi Shikibu was the daughter of a minor court official, Ooe no Masamune, who like others of his class had periods of service both at court and in the provinces. Izumi was born probably during the 970s or 980s, and it seems likely that she was brought up at the court of the Grand Empress Dowager Masako (950-1000), a consort of Retired Emperor Reizei (950-1011; r. 967-9), in whose service both her father and mother were during the years of her childhood. At some time close to the end of the tenth century she married Tachibana no Michisada, an acquaintance of her father who served as governor of Izumi Province during the first years of the eleventh century. The first element of Izumi's name is derived from her husband's gubernatorial post. By Michisada Izumi had a daughter, Koshikibu, also famous as a poet. Izumi's marriage to Michisada was broken off after a few years, however, because of an affair with Prince Tametaka (977-1002), one of the younger sons of ex-Emperor Reizei. This affair created something of a scandal according to the Eiga monogatari,'¹⁷ especially so in that the Prince perished in the epidemic of 1002 at the age of 26 after having against all advice kept up his constant nocturnal visits to Izumi in the midst of the contagion which was devastating the capital. Izumi's misbehavior apparently brought on severe parental displeasure and at least temporary disownment. Izumi went into mourning after her lover's death, and was still living alone with her sorrow when Tametaka's younger brother, Prince Atsumichi (981-1007), approached her about ten months later, in the early summer of 1003. She soon became his mistress, moved into his mansion at the end of the year, and lived with him until his death in 1007 at the age of 27. This affair entailed even greater scandal, and Atsumichi's wife, the sister of the consort of the Crown Prince, deserted him because of it. The Izumi Shikibu nikki deals with this period of Izumi's life, from Atsumichi's first message to the indignant departure of his wife, a period of less than a year. Its authorship was traditionally ascribed to Izumi herself, but it seems at least possible that it was written later by someone else. After Atsumichi's death Izumi again went into a year's mourning, at the end of which she joined the court of Fujiwara Akiko, Michinaga's daughter and consort of Emperor Ichijo (980-1011; r. 986-1011). Here she came into contact with Murasaki Shikibu, Ise no Tayu, and the rest of Akiko's talented ladies. During her period of court service, which may havebegun in 1009, Izumi met and married Fujiwara no Yasumasa (958-1036), an older man of a certain military reputation, whom she thereafter followed to a succession of provincial posts. Yasumasa died at one of these in 1036 at the age of 79, but Izumi's own death date is unknown. References in her poetry make it plain that her two husbands and two royal lovers were not the only men in her life.

The Izumi Shikibu kashu is composed of several documents, of which two, the Seishu or 'Main Collection' and Zokushu or 'Continued Collection', are the longest and most important. Their contents consist of a large number of discrete poem-groups interspersed with miscellaneous verses, and it is thought that they were gradually put into their present shape over a period of two centuries following Izumi's death. The Seishu begins with ninety-seven tanka on love and the four seasons, perhaps a hundred-poem sequence from which three are missing. Some of these verses show the formal side of Izumi's art, the decorous and proper handling of a set topic. To introduce the season the initial spring poem, the first in the collection, employs the traditional felicitous imagery of melting ice and mountains trailing wisps of filmy haze:

 The mild spring haze
No sooner rises on the hills
 Than mountain rivulets
Float upon the air the first faint sound
Of water trickling deep among the rocks.

From a later daiei sequence a poem (Seishu 135)²⁴ on the topic of 'Mist' shows Izumi trying for a more startling and eccentric use of natural imagery:

 In this autumn mist
The way ahead cannot be seen,
 And the very steed
That carries me stands hesitant
On a pathway through the sky.

The earliest known poem of Izumi Shikibu is her most famous, and, ironically, one that tradition has mistakenly called her deathbed poem. This is the moving plea for enlightenment:

  From darkness
Into the path of darkness
  Must I enter:
Shine upon me from afar,
O moon above the mountain crest.

The poem draws its inspiration from the Lotus Sutra,²⁵ the darkness being that of the human heart enmeshed in error and beset by worldly temptation, while the moon symbolizes the perfect light of Buddhist truth. One need not believe that Izumi began her poetic career with a poem of this level of accomplishment. Nevertheless, it must have been written while she was quite young, for it appears in the Shuishu (no. 1342), an imperial anthology compiled during the years between 996 and 1007. 'Kuraki yori' is Izumi's only poem in the Shuishu (sixty-seven of her verses appear in the nextimperial anthology, the Goshuishu, compiled in 1086). It also appears in the Seishu, twice, as numbers 150 and 834. It is accompanied by the headnote, 'Sent to the Sage of Harima to establish ties of Karma'. 'The Sage of Harima' (Harima no hijiri) was Shoku Shonin (910-1007), a famous cleric patronized by members of the imperial family including Grand Empress Dowager Masako. Izumi was apparently religiously drawn to the aged holy man, for 'Kuraki yori' is not the only poem she sent him. It is certainly the best of her religious poetry, however, and probably does much to account for her later reputation for piety. It was often anthologized, and crops up in apocryphal stories about the author. The following (Seishu 808) is also among the poems sent to Shoku:

 Knowing no landmark
On those shoreline cliffs toward which
 I would steer my boat,
Row though I may, I cannot
Reach the Strand of Harima.

Here the 'shoreline cliffs' (kishi) refer to the 'Further Shore' (higan) of Buddhist enlightenment, as well as to the coast of Harima where Shoku's temple, the Engyoji, was situated.

Other poems on Buddhist themes treat of transience and the desire for escape from worldly passions.

Seishu 55

   What though we live:
Is mere being certainty?
  How the world goes
Is made clearly known to us
By a blossom of morning glory.

Seishu 268

  Even a dream
Can be trusted while it lasts,
 But deluded
Is the man who spends his life
Thinking the real is real.

Zokushu 976

 Weary am I
Of this flesh that will not melt,
 Loathe it as I may,
And enviable is the lamp flame
Flickering before the evening breeze.

Zokushu 1456

 Distraught with worldly
Passions in this Burning House,
 Shall I leave it now
And drench my flaming body
In the All-Embracing Rain?

From what we know of her life it is clear that, much as she sometimes may have felt a need for the soothing rain of Buddhist renunciation, Izumi had many adventures in the Burning House. Her collected poems often show her in more worldly moods. Seishu 165, entitled 'Wakeful Bed', is a charmingly frank appeal:

 Sweet-tongued lover,
Would that I might have you
 For my pillow!
Let me beg of you to stay
Here in my sleepless bed.

Another, Seishu 43, employs the well-known pun on ominaeshi ('lady-flower'):

 Pluck, if you will,
This lady-flower from the ground—
 Pluck her root and all:
Never would she have it said of her
That she was left forgotten in the field.

Fire as a metaphor for human passion recurs in such poems as the following:

Seishu 34

  My human body
I have given to love's flame,
  Though not as fireflies
Glowing across the summer night,
But with a burning none can see.

Seishu 93

 These rivers of tears
Flow from the same body as
 My love, but never
Can their coursing currents quench
The burning of inflamed desire.

Other natural images also express the destructive forces or ineluctable power of love:

Seishu 80

  Recklessly
I cast myself away;
  Perhaps
A heart in love
Becomes a deep ravine?

Zokushu 941

  Even though my heart
Is not a summer grassland
 It lies thickly choked
With a tangle of rife love
That grows and grows forever.

The bed is the scene envisaged in some of Izumi's most characteristically passionate—even somewhat erotic—poetry. Her most celebrated verse along these lines is the famous 'Tangled Hair' poem, Seishu 86:

 I fling myself down,
Heedless of the wild disorder
 Of my long black hair,
And soon I'm yearning once again
For him who used to stroke it smooth.

The theme of the lonely bed is treated again and again, as in the following:

Shikashu 253

 Nights when hail falls,
Patterning incessantly
 On rustling bamboo leaves,
I swear I cannot find
The heart to sleep alone.

Seishu 87

  Hoping that in dreams,
If then only, I might look
  Upon you, I lay,
But my pillow's restless motion
Kept me even from my sleep.

Seishu 67

  Over the chamber
Where I sleep frost must lie thick,
  For underneath
The single cover of my bed
There mounts a penetrating cold.

Sometimes Izumi handles love in a more coolly reflective manner:

Seishu 97

 Though in this world
There is no color
 Known as love,
Yet deeply is my person
Stained therewith.

Or its hopelessness and end in death may be brought out:

Seishu 91

 Even should my heart
Shatter in a thousand shards
 Of hopeless passion,
Not one fragment would be lost,
Ever, of my broken love.

Seishu 92

  If I love him thus
I shall not for long endure,
  But die: that man
I looked on as a stranger
Was in fact my very life.

Along with love and piety, grief takes its place as a major theme in the poetry of Izumi Shikibu. In addition to the usual complaints over the inconstancy of her lovers, she had occasion to mourn their deaths, and that of her daughter Koshikibu, who predeceased her, dying in childbed in 1025. Izumi's wayward life also caused a rupture in her normal relations with her parents. Zokushu 1312 refers to this estrangement. It has the headnote, 'One day when dew formed on the very charming hagi [bush clover] in front of the place where, reluctant to face her parents, she was living in concealment':

  Looking upon the dew,
I brushed no drop from off
  The autumn hagi;
But now a secret breaking brings
Showers to wet my sleeves.

Over a hundred laments on the death of Izumi's lover Prince Atsumichi have been preserved. The following (Zokushu 968) is an example:

 At dusk the path
You followed when you came to me
 Is blotted out—
All hung with spiderwebs
And threaded through with grief.

The Izumi Shikibu nikki contains many plaintive expressions of loneliness divorced from erotic overtones. The following is an example:

 Frost-withered,
Desolate is this forsaken scene;
 Yet while the autumn wind
Still blew music through the reeds
You used to come to me.³³

Towards the close of the Nikki Izumi's lover expresses his foreboding of early death. Izumi replies in her last poem in the work:

  Will I alone be left
To tell the story of our past—
 Destiny to be numbered
With old tales of painful loves,
Many as the nodes of black bamboo?³⁴

After her daughter Koshikibu died Izumi wrote a poem pondering the relative intensity of sorrow felt by herself for her dead daughter, by the dying Koshikibu for her mother (Izumi) whom she was leaving behind, and by Koshikibu for the soon to be orphaned son to whom she had just given birth.

 Leaving us behind,
Whom will she have pitied more—
 Infant or mother?
My child it was for me:
Her child it must have been.

The altered repetition of 'Ko wa masarikeri/Ko wa masaruran' is illustrative of a favorite technique of Izumi, that of the reduplicated phrase or word. The technique was utilized in both serious and comic poems, as shown by the above and the following verses, which have been arranged in a rising crescendo of repetition.

Seishu 75

 Ice has closed water,
All the water in the land,
 Under such a seal
That every winter hamlet
Becomes a Soundless Village.³⁶

Seishu 82

 Would that the man
By whom I wish that I were seen,
 And whom I wish to see,
Could be the mirror that I face
Every morning when I rise.

From the Izumi Shikibu nikki, when Izumi has sequestered herself in Ishiyama Temple, and her lover has been urging her to come back:

 Just for a test
I'm tempted to make trial
 Of my own heart:
Come! Make the attempt!
Tempt me to the Capital!"³⁸

Zokushu 870, which has the headnote, 'When I first went to take service in the palace, the Empress sent to welcome me a person called Tayu, the daughter of Sukechika,⁴⁰ the Master of the Rites at Ise. After chatting with her I wènt to my quarters and sent her the following poem':

 To myself I thought,
'Tis she I thought that I would
 Think of as a friend,
And now we've met I think her
Just the person I had thought.

Zokushu 1227, 'On reading a message sent by a man to a woman, and seeing that he had written, "Piteous, piteous …"':

  'Piteous, piteous'?
Piteous, piteous 'tis:
 Piteous, piteous,
Piteous, I wonder now
What sort of person you mean.

A reading of the Izumi Shikibu nikki and Izumf Shikibu kashu makes it plain that the poetess had a many-faceted personality, and that among her facets were an unabashed boldness and a pixyish sense of humor. Whether serious or in fun, she was never at a loss for an answer in a poetic exchange. One typical instance of competition in love pangs from the Nikki shows her readiness to reply. The Prince sends Izumi the following plaint:

 All the winter's night,
My eyes wide open, longing
 For my love, I lay,
My cloak spread out without a mate,
Alone until the dawn.

But Izumi tops him easily in her reply:

 All that winter's night
My eyes indeed were closed—
 But closed with ice!
While I wore out the darkness
 To the laggard dawn.⁴¹

Once Izumi was asked who was the father of one of her children, a question to which her irregular habits exposed her. She answered (Seishu 772):

 How can one decide
Such matters in this life?
 Go ask the man
Whose natural role it is
To make investigation of past deeds.

That is, go ask Emma, King of Hell.

She had an answer, too, for Michinaga, when that plenipotentiary sought to jest with her with a more than avuncular jocularity. Seishu 225 tells the story: 'Seeing a certain man holding a woman's fan, his Lordship asked, "Whose is it." On being told that it was "hers", he took it and wrote on it, "a wanton's fan", beside which I later added the verse:

 Perhaps it is breached,
Or perhaps its gates stand fast,
 Love's mountain barrier:
Let him forbear to question
Who is not guardian of the pass.'

One may contrast this with Murasaki Shikibu's fretful sufferings when approached by Michinaga. Indeed, after all her poetry of sorrow, passion, and piety has been read and enjoyed, it is best and most vividly as this lady of ready wit and charming wickedness that Izumi Shikibu lives on 'to the last generation'.

Notes

…⁴Shinsen daijimmei jiten, ed. Shimonaka Yasaburo, 1938, I, p. 239.…

⁶Nihon bungaku daijiten, ed. Fujimura Tsukuru, I, 1963, p. 137.

⁷Murasaki Shikibu nikki, ed. Ikeda Kikan and Akiyama Ken, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei (hereafter NKBT), XIX, 1958, p. 495.…

¹¹ Nakagawa Kiun, Kyo warabe, in Kinsei bungei sosho, ed. Kokusho Kankokai, I, 1910, p. 296.…

¹⁷Eiga monogatari (I), ed. Matsumura Hiroji and Yamanaka Yutaka, in NKBT, LXXV, 1964, p. 234.…

²⁴ The numbering of Seishu and Zokushu poems is that in Kubota Utsubo (ed.), Izumi Shikibu shu, Ono no Komachi shu, in Nihon koten zensho, (no vol. number), 1958.

²⁵ From a passage in the Parable of the Magic City (Kejo yuhon) describing the fate of all beings before the coming of the Tathagata:

Entering from darkness into
darkness,
For long they do not hear the
Buddha's name.

Taisho shinshu daizokyo, ed. Takakusu Junjiro, IX, 1925, p. 22.…

³³Izumi Shikibu nikki, ed. Endo Yoshimoto, in NKBT, XX, 1962, p. 435.

³⁴ ibid. p. 441. …

³⁶ There actually was a village called Otonashi no Sato ('Soundless Village') in Kii Province.…

³⁸Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 417. …

⁴⁰ Oonakatomi no Sukechika (954-1038), appointed Head Priest (Saisbu) at the Ise Shrines in 1001.

⁴¹Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 441. By 'ice' Izumi intends the reader to understand 'frozen tears'.