SOURCE: "Kokinshu as Literary Entity" in Brocade by Night: "Kokin Wakashu" and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1985, pp. 421-93.

[In the following excerpt taken from her important critical work on the Kokinshu, McCullough reviews all the books that comprise the anthology, particularly their topics, transitions, and arrangement.]

Introduction

Tsurayuki and his colleagues undoubtedly viewed their imperial commission as a mandate to advance beyond the modest accomplishments of their immediate predecessors, the compilers of Kudai waka and Shinsen man-'yōshū. As we have seen, they brought together far more poems by far more authors, covered a wider range of topics and themes, and worked diligently to achieve a better balance between the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions in order to establish the waka as the literary peer of the shi. They also confronted, with unprecedented vigor and inventiveness, the difficulties created by the brevity of the tanka as a vehicle for the new aesthetic.

Contemporary opinion, which was strongly influenced by Six Dynasties attitudes, conceived of the ideal hare no uta as a witty, essentially impersonal expression of familiar courtly sentiments, composed, perhaps, for a specific social or other occasion, but, like the Chinese composition below, capable of independent existence as a work of literature.

Du Shenyan. Harmonizing with Wei Chengqing's
"Going to Princess Yiyang's Mountain Lake"

The path twists: lofty peaks press near;
The bridge detours: crumbling banks bar
  passage.
Jade waters move wine flavor;
Stalactites substitute for rice aroma.
Binding the fog: green twigs are supple;
Pulling the wind: purple vines hang long.
Now we say feasting pleasure has waned,
Go off toward the rear lake embankment.
QTS, p. 426

Unlike Du Shenyan's poem, however, numerous waka esteemed by early Heian taste, such as the allegorical poems below, required at least a word or two of explanation in order to be appreciated.

KKS 282. Fujiwara Sekio. Composed when he had been away from court for a long time at a mountain retreat

 … They will doubtless fall
without having seen the light
 of the shining sun—
the colored leaves enclosed by rocks
far back in the mountain depths.

KKS 364. Fujiwara Yoruka (?-?). Composed when she presented herself on the occasion of the birth of the Crown Prince

 … Ever will it shine,
undimmed by a clouded hour—
 the sun emergent
from the lofty eminence
of Kasuga-no-yama.

And there was a more serious, because more pervasive, problem stemming from the practice of borrowing Six Dynasties techniques like Du's. Admittedly shallow, "Harmonizing with Wei Chengquing's 'Going to Princess Yiyang's Mountain Lake'" nevertheless offers a degree of structural and imagistic novelty by mere virtue of its length. We may find it a briefly amusing exercise in witty reasoning. But a thirty-one-syllable poem based on the same technique may prove too slight to engage our attention at all. Although the tanka below might be called an exemplary combination of wit and beauty, the author has found room for only a single mitate, a trite one presented in a form so conventional that there is little but the makura kotoba—hisakata no—to distinguish it from innumerable others of its kind. How might the compilers of an imperial anthology include many such poems without committing the unpardonable sin of boring their august patron, to say nothing of lesser readers?

KKS 334. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … We cannot detect
the flowering plum tree's blossoms,
 for white flakes of snow
flutter to earth everywhere,
obscuring the lofty skies.

It was apparent that some kind of supportive environment was needed. Whether or not Tsurayuki and the others were slow to acknowledge the fact, as the manajo seems to intimate, they did so in the end. And although we might infer from a hasty survey of the category names in Table 1, Chapter One, that they merely fell back on well-known subject-matter classifications, presumably with a view to facilitating potentially interesting comparisons between poems on related topics and themes, they in fact devised and applied an elaborate set of editorial principles. The result was a complex structure that not only presented individual poems in intriguing contexts, but also constituted in itself an original aesthetic achievement.¹

Basic Editorial Principles

The compilers' ninth-century predecessors had attempted in various ways to deal with similar problems. The Ise monogatari author had embedded peoms in prose narratives, some of considerable length. Others had combined waka with seasonal paintings on folding screens, often in contexts with romantic narrative overtones inviting speculation about the figures presented, as in the case of Tsurayuki's winter-plover tanka (HT 339). Uta awase organizers had paired poems on topics general (the four seasons, love) and specific (the cuckoo, maidenflowers, chrysanthemums, love before meeting), thus reinforcing literary appeal with challenges to the competitive instinct. Ōe no Chisato, in Kudai waka, had adopted Chinese subject-matter categories and tacitly called on the reader to guess the sources of his Chinese lines and examine the ways in which he had treated them. The Shinsen man'yōshū compiler had sorted poems into categories and, to some extent, into subcategories (for example, by distinguishing between two kinds of love, omoi and koi), had paid some attention to seasonal progression (for example, by assembling a group of "departing spring" poems), had made a tentative start toward pairing through diction, as in the two poems below (each of which occupies the eleventh place in its book), had paired waka with kanshi, and, in a final bid for the reader's attention, had implicitly invited comment on his critical acumen by dividing poems into superior and inferior categories.

SSMYS I Spring II, KKS 46. Anonymous

 … If we might transfer
plum-blossom scent to a sleeve
 and detain it there,
we would have a memento
though springtime were to pass.

SSMYS 2 Spring II. Anonymous

 … If there were always
field lands dyed in deepest green
 for us to behold,
we would have a memento
though springtime were to go.

For the Kokinshū compilers, who were required to deal with larger numbers of poems, authors, and topics, and who had no intention of introducing shi or kanshi into their collection, such potential models were necessarily of limited utility. Nevertheless, they furnished many hints and, except for the privately oriented Ise monogatari, functioned as validating precedents.² In particular, acquaintance with Shinsen man'yōshū—or with its parent, the Empress's Contest—taken in conjunction with the other contest and screen-poem activity of the day, paved the way for the determination that Love should figure as the largest category in the anthology. The decision was conservative in its return to native values, revolutionary in its readiness to grant the traditional Japanese poetic mainstream equality with imported subjects and themes. Although the Empress's Contest and Shinsen man'yōshū had recognized love as a formal topic, they had included only about one-fourth as many love as seasonal poems, and Kudai waka had omitted the topic altogether.

At the same time, Tsurayuki and the others endorsed the contemporary assumption that formal public poems on public topics deserved priority over similar poems on private topics—even to the extent of arbitrarily classifying a love poem under Spring, as they did with Komachi's KKS 113. Their 342 seasonal poems, the hare no uta par excellence in the collection, were assigned to the position of greatest prominence at the beginning (Books One-Six); and the 360 Love poems (Books Eleven-Fifteen) became the mainstay of the second half of the anthology. The minor subject-matter categories were positioned in descending order of publicness. Book Seven was allotted to Felicitations, poems composed for or otherwise associated with formal social occasions of an auspicious nature; Book Eight to Parting, a Chinese-inspired category considered relatively public because of the association between such poems and farewell parties for departing bureaucrats; and Book Nine to Travel, logically associated with Parting but more private. The five Love books were followed by Laments (Book Sixteen), which included both elegies and poems composed by the dying, and by Miscellaneous (Books Seventeen and Eighteen), a category including many poems in the expressing-feelings mode, such as the one below.

KKS 961. Ono no Takamura. Composed after his exile to Oki Province

 … Did I ever think
to find myself reeling in
 a fisherman's line
away from all my old friends,
cheerless in a distant land?

A symmetrical design was thus created, with Love balancing the seasons, and with the three small books in the first half of the anthology balancing the three in the second half.

At the end of each of these sections the compilers placed a group of poems that posed implicit challenges to the reader, and that, for reasons to be discussed later, failed to meet the aesthetic standards applied elsewhere in the anthology: Names of Things (Book Ten) and Eccentric Poems (most of Book Nineteen). Finally, in a kind of appendix (Book Twenty), they brought together a collection of songs used for court and Shinto ceremonies.

We may perceive in this structure not only dedication to principles of progression and association, but also consistent attention to balance—to harmonious opposition between the public and the private, and between the hare no uta of the two great subject-matter aggregations and the nonstandard waka of Books Ten and Nineteen. To examine individual books is to observe many instances of compromise. For example, Tsurayuki and the others, charged with "preserving the memory of the past," felt impelled to find room under Miscellaneous for famous waka like Narihira's KKS 884, even though such works were more public and impersonal (in content and tone, if not in kotobagaki) than many Love poems.

KKS 884. Ariwara Narihira. Once Narihira accompanied Prince Koretaka on an excursion. Back at their lodgings, the Prince's party drank and talked all through the night. When the eleven-day-old moon was about to set, the Prince, somewhat befuddled, prepared to retire, and Narihira composed this poem.

 … Must the moon vanish
in such great haste, leaving us
  still unsatisfied?
Retreat, O rim of the hills,
and refuse to let it set.

But the principles of progression, association, and balance had been formulated with more than one end in view. By presenting a richly imagistic procession of the seasons, and by tracing the bittersweet course of a paradigmatic love affair, the compilers sought to echo the elegant, poignant beauty of the individual poems; by including Names of Things and Eccentric Poems, and by playfully inviting the reader to search for the sometimes elusive connecting links between poems or groups of poems, they intended to parallel the wit that constituted the second element in the Kokinshū style; by endowing the anthology with a logical structure, they hoped to increase its usefulness as a reference work. They consequently followed their guidelines as consistently and in as much detail as possible, using such specific tactics as association by season or other kinds of chronology, by author, by event, by locale, by imagery, by content, by theme, and especially by diction in the broadest sense.

Books One-Six: The Seasons

Turning now to the anthology itself, we may view KKS 1 in a perspective somewhat different from Masaoka Shiki's. First and most obviously, the poem's subject matter, bridging two years, made it an ideal selection to lead off a chronologically arranged group of seasonal poems. When we note, in addition, that the author of every initial poem in every other Kokinshū book was either anonymous or dead at the time of compilation, we begin to understand why Motokata's maligned composition was not only included, but given precedence over Tsurayuki's better KKS 2, composed on the first day of spring.³ Considerations of smooth seasonal progression and of balance apparently prevailed.

KKS 1. Ariwara Motokata. Composed on a day when spring arrived during the old year

 … Springtime has arrived
while the old year lingers on.
 What then of the year?
Are we to talk of "last year"?
Or are we to say "this year"?

KKS 2. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed on the first day of spring

 … On this first spring day
might warm breezes be melting
 the frozen waters
I scooped up, cupping my hands
and letting my sleeves soak through?

It is probably no accident that Tsurayuki's poem, with its Chinese allusion, its artful review of the seasons, its engo, and its excellent aural pattern, was placed precisely where it showed to best advantage, between the shallow wit of Motokata's waka and the simple, songlike, anonymous KKS 3:

KKS 3. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Where are we to seek
the layered haze of springtime
  while snow still falls
in the hills of Yoshino,
the hills of fair Yoshino?

The technique employed in the sequence—a precursor of the medieval practice of constructing poetic sequences made up of ji ("background") and mon ("design") compositions—is one that recurs with some frequency in Kokinshū In the scattering-blossoms group below, for example, the originality of Sosei's conception stands in sharp contrast to Sōku's two hackneyed treatments.

KKS 75. Sōku. On seeing cherry blossoms scattering at the Urin 'in

 … Although it is spring
where the cherry tree's blossoms
 take leave of the boughs,
the ever falling snowflakes
are unlikely to dissolve.

KKS 76. Sosei. On seeing scattered cherry blossoms

 … Does anyone know
the dwelling place of the wind,
  scatterer of flowers?
Tell me that I may go there
and deliver a complaint.

KKS 77. Sōku. On cherry blossoms at the Urin 'in

 … You cherry blossoms,
I would like to scatter, too,
  for human beings
are but dismal spectacles
once their brief blooming is done.

Likewise, two good Felicitations waka by Henjō and Narihira, KKS 348 and KKS 349, seem even better when compared with the mediocrity of their neighbors. Emperor Kōkō's KKS 347 merely presents a thirty-one-syllable prose statement, and Koreoka's KKS 350 is competent but trite.

KKS 347. Emperor Kōkō. A poem composed by the Ninna Emperor for His Majesty's celebration in honor of Archbiship Henjō's seventieth year

 … If only I might
manage somehow to survive,
 savoring pleasures
such as these, to witness your
eight thousand generations!

KKS 348. Archbishop Henjō. While the Ninna Emperor was a Prince, he sent his grandmother a silver-trimmed staff to commemorate her eightieth year. When Henjō saw the staff he composed this on the grandmother's behalf

 … Might it have been cut
by one of the mighty gods?
 With its assistance,
I can climb the hill of age
for a thousand happy years.

KKS 349. Ariwara Narihira. Composed when there was a fortieth-year celebration for the Horikawa Chancellor [Mototsune] at the Kujō Mansion

 … Scatter at random,
O blossoms of the cherry,
 and cloud the heavens,
that you may conceal the path
old age is said to follow.

KKS 350. Ki no Koreoka (?-?). Composed on the day when Prince Sadatoki held a celebration at Ōi in honor of his aunt's fortieth year⁴

 … Like the countless years
of her life—such is the sum

  of the pearly drops
in the cascade rushing down
Kameyama's mighty rocks.

In the same way, Tadanine's finely lyrical KKS 625 is enhanced by emerging unexpectedly from a huddle of wordplay poems:

KKS 623. Ono no Komachi. Topic unknown

 … There is no seaweed
to be gathered in this bay.
  Does he not know it—
the fisher who comes and comes
until his legs grow weary?

KKS 624. Minamoto Muneyuki (d. 939). Topic unknown

 … If this night goes by
with no meeting between us,
 shall I, for a time
lengthy as a day in spring,
think you completely heartless?

KKS 625. Mibu no Tadamine. Topic unknown

 … The hours before dawn
seem saddest of all to me
 since that leave-taking
when I saw in the heavens
the pale moon's indifferent face.

KKS 626. Ariwara Motokata. Topic unknown

 … As a breaking wave
must glimpse the shore and return,
 so must I go back
frustrated and embittered
without having met my love.

KKS 627. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … That people should talk
before we have even met—
 might it be because
gossip resembles a wave
rising before the wind blows?

KKS 628. Mibu no Tadamine. Topic unknown

 … How painful to have
this groundless reputation
 as though I were kin
to the River of Scandal
flowing in Michinoku.

KKS 629. Miharu Arisuke (?-?). Topic unknown

 … Pointless though they be,
empty rumors have risen
 like Tatsuta's stream.
Shall I now abandon hope
of a successful crossing?

Besides serving as a foil for Tsurayuki's KKS 2, KKS 3 introduces the first Spring topic, which might be identified as "lingering traces of winter in the new year"—and in so doing, illustrates another ordering device sometimes employed by the compilers, that of authorship. There is a persistent tendency for the anonymous poems in a group to precede those by known authors, whose works are then given in roughly chronological order. The "young greens" topic, for example, consists of three poems by anonymous authors (KKS 18-20), one by Emperor Kōkō (KKS 21), and one by Tsurayuki (KKS 22).…

In the opening pages of Book One, the authorship pattern is obscured by the introduction of the warbler, an image conventionally associated with the transitional period between winter and spring because of the bird's presumed inability to distinguish between snow and plum blossoms. KKS 4, a poem by a Period Two author, hints that the warbler will soon appear; KKS 5 (anonymous) and KKS 6 (Sosei) show him as present. The bird's elegant confusion in KKS 6 serves as a link to a new topic introduced in KKS 7, a man's similar confusion, and that poem is consequently anonymous. The last two "lingering snow" poems, KKS 8 and KKS 9, are by Yasuhide (Period Two) and Tsurayuki (Period Three).

At this point in the Spring section, the weather has settled sufficiently for the reintroduction of the warbler, which henceforth becomes a unifying image for the season, flitting in and out while the characteristic terrestrial phenomena of the first three months—young greens, new willow leaves, plum blossoms, cherry blossoms, wisteria, and kerria—make their appearance in chronological order, with primary attention devoted to the two most important, cherry blossoms and plum blossoms. As has been noted, almost 45 percent of Book Two (KKS 90-118) is devoted to a final major topic, hana—an inartistic disposition occasioned by the necessity of including substantial numbers of existing hana poems, and by the difficulty of placing these undifferentiated blossoms within the seasonal pattern.

For the three major flower divisions, in particular, there are numerous subdivisions: plum scent, elegant confusion, scattering petals, and others. Individual poems are further linked through subordinate images, diction, grammatical constructions, rhetorical techniques, and the like. Of the four plum-blossom poems below, for example, the first two have in common the word sode ("sleeve") and the use of a short, emphatic declarative sentence followed by a question. The second and third share the word yado ("house"), scented garments, and the short declarative sentence; the third and fourth, scented garments, cause-and-effect reasoning, and a suggestion of romance. The four together constitute an elegant-confusion group, with bewilderment experienced first by the warbler, next by the speaker (in two poems), and finally by a third person. They are further bonded by tonal harmony, by the technique of indirect praise, and by the close union between man and nature established in each.

KKS 32. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … My sleeve is fragrant
just because I plucked a spray.
  Does the warbler think,
"I have found a plum in bloom,"
that he comes here with his song?

KKS 33. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … More than the color
it is the fragrance I find
  a source of delight.
Whose sleeve might have brushed against
the plum tree beside my house?

KKS 34. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I will never plant
a flowering plum near my house:
  it is too vexing
to find myself mistaking this
for the scent of one I await.

KKS 35. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I stopped but briefly
beside the plum tree in bloom—
  yet since then, I find,
the fragrance of my garments
calls forth someone's reproaches.

In some cases, the juxtaposition of two poems creates an explicit or implicit conversational exchange:

KKS 62. Anonymous. Composed when someone called during the height of the cherry-blossom season after having stayed away a long time

 … They are called fickle,
these blossoms of the cherry,
  yet they have waited
for a person whose visits
come but seldom in the year.

KKS 63. Ariwara Narihira. Reply

 … Had I not come today,
they would have fallen tomorrow
 like drifting snowflakes.
Though they have not yet melted,
they are scarcely true flowers.

KKS 70. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … If, when we said, "Wait,"
they held fast to the branches,
  never scattering,
what could anyone prefer
to blossoms of the cherry?

KKS 71. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … It is just because
they scatter without a trace
  that cherry blossoms
delight us so, for in this world
lingering means ugliness.

The Spring books end with a block of eight poems lamenting the season's final passing. The size of that group and the prominence of its authors—Mitsune (three poems), Tsurayuki, Fukayabu, Motokata, Okikaze, and Narihira—demonstrate the importance attached to the theme by the compilers and, at the same time, remind us of the substantial nature of the contribution made by Tsurayuki and his colleagues to the Spring category as a whole. Fittingly, Mitsune utters the last word:

KKS 134. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. An end-of-spring poem from the Teijiin Contest

 … Even were we not
disconsolate that today
  spring should take its leave,
might we simply walk away
from flowers blooming overhead?

Similar ordering principles characterize the treatment of Autumn, the other main seasonal category, which balances Spring but exceeds it slightly in size, thus paralleling the relationship between Love and the seasons. Book Four starts with a trio of "beginning autumn" waka using wind imagery—the first by Toshiyuki (deceased at the time of compilation), the second, a showy piece in the new style, by Tsurayuki, and the third, a songlike composition, by an anonymous author.

KKS 169. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. Composed on the first day of autumn

 … Nothing meets the eye
to demonstrate beyond doubt
  that autumn has come—
yet suddenly we are struck
just by the sound of the wind.

KKS 170. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed when he accompanied some courtiers on an excursion to the Kamo River beach on the first day of autumn

 … How cool the wind feels
blowing across the river!
  Perhaps autumn, too,
is taking shape with the waves
as they ripple toward the shore.

KKS 171. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … First breeze of autumn—
fresh and fine as the lining
  it has uncovered
blowing against the bottom
of my dear husband's robe!

Another anonymous composition in the same vein, KKS 172, serves as a connection to a Star Festival sequence of eleven poems presenting the successive stages of the meeting between the Weaver Maid and the Ox-Driver. … The link is established through. wind imagery.

KKS 172. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Only yesterday
they transplanted the seedlings.
  When then did it start—
this blowing of autumn wind
rustling the rice-plant leaves?

KKS 173. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Ever since the day
when the first autumn wind blew,
 not a day has passed
but I have stood on the beach
of the heavenly river.

The related topic of autumn sadness, treated in the group of poems following the parting of the star lovers, leads in turn first to melancholy autumn nights and then to enjoyment of the autumn moon, a topic signifying the arrival of the season's midpoint, the Fifteenth of the Eighth Month. The well-established position of autumn as a poetic subject is reflected in the large number of Eighth Month topics that follow: insects, wild geese, deer, bush clover, maidenflowers, and others. Sometimes the transitions between topics or between individual poems within groups are made through aural imagery, as in the examples below.

KKS 205. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … When cicadas sing
beside a mountain dwelling
 in the gathering dusk,
not a soul comes to visit—
unless we might count the wind.

KKS 206. Ariwara Motokata. On the first wild goose

 … First of the wild geese:
though it is not the person
  I have waited for,
how splendid it seems to hear
the calling voice this morning!

KKS 213. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. On hearing wild geese call

 … Ranged in procession
like a string of gloomy thoughts,
  the winging wild geese
give voice to mournful complaints
as night succeeds autumn night.

KKS 214. Mibu no Tadamine. A poem from the contest at Prince Koresada's house

 … Of the year's seasons,
autumn is the loneliest
 at a mountain house.
How often I lie awake,
roused by the cry of the stag.

Sometimes the transitions rest on linguistic or rhetorical similarities, as in the next pair, both of which personify insects and use the phrase aki no yo no ("of autumn night[s]").

KKS 196. Fujiwara Tadafusa (?-?). On a night when he heard crickets at someone's house

 … Do not wail, crickets,
in disconsolate accents.
  Though your sorrows be
long-lasting as autumn nights,
my own woes are longer still.

KKS 197. Fukiwara Toshiyuki. A poem from the contest at Prince Koresada's house

 … Might it be because
they have fallen prey, like me,
  to melancholy
that those insects still lament
though the autumn night is done?

Sometimes the transitions depend on temporal progression. Thus poems about early migrants precede others in the wild-goose group, and poems about flowers in bloom precede those on scattering in the bush-clover group. And sometimes they work through thematic association. In the first two maidenflower poems below, the common element is the travel status of the speaker; in the second and third, it is spending the night in the fields.

KKS 227. Furu no Imamichi. On seeing maidenflowers at Otokoyama [Man Mountain] when he went to Nara to visit Archbishop Henjō

 … I travel along
casting reproachful glances
  at the maidenflowers.
What made them decide to grow
on a mountain named for a man?

KKS 228. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. A poem from the contest at Prince Koresada's house

 … Though not journeying.
I will seek shelter tonight
  in an autumn field,
drawn by the intimacy
of the maidenflower's name.

KKS 229. Ono no Yoshiki (d. 902). Topic unknown

 … If I stay the night
in a field brimming over
  with maidenflowers,
might I, although innocent,
be branded a ladies' man?

The major Autumn topic, brilliant foliage, is divided into two parts, colored leaves on the trees and scattering foliage, separated by the aesthetically effective interposition of a series of poems about white chrysanthemums. Within the group, links are established in the usual ways. Fujiwara Sekio's allegorical KKS 282, for example, has been paired with a poem entirely different in theme and tone, but very similar in structure and diction.⁵

KKS 281. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 …"Gaze even at night,"
the shining moon tells us,
 "on the colored leaves
of the Saoyama oaks,
for they are soon to scatter."

KKS 282. Fujiwara Sekio. Composed when he had been away from court for a long time at a mountain retreat

 … They will doubtless fall
without having seen the light
 of the shining sun—
the colored leaves enclosed by rocks
far back in the mountain depths.

The first two of the four momiji poems below are closely connected by theme, by a common place name, and by cause-and-effect reasoning; the second and third by rain and wind imagery; and the third and fourth by wind.

KKS 283. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Were one to cross it,
the brocade might break in two—
  colored autumn leaves
floating in random patterns
on the Tatsuta River.

KKS 284. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Late autumn showers
must be falling at Mimuro,
 the divine mountain,
for colored leaves are floating
on the Tatsuta River.

KKS 285. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … O gale from the hills,
do not blow them all away—
 those many-hued leaves
at which I gaze for solace,
recalling their autumn show.

KKS 286. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … How wretched am I,
no more master of my fate
 than colored foliage
scattering from the branches,
helpless on the autumn wind.

As with Spring, Autumn ends with a sizable group of end-of-season poems by major figures—in this case, Sosei, Okikaze, Tsurayuki (two poems), and Mitsune. Again, the final composition is from Mitsune's brush:

KKS 313. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed on the last day of the Ninth Month

 … Autumn has set forth,
offering many-hued leaves
 like fragments of cloth.
If I knew what path to take,
I would go and seek it out.

The relationship of the Summer and Winter books to the Spring and Autumn ones resembles that of the smaller categories like Felicitations and Laments to the seasons and Love. They deal with topics outside the poetic mainstream, included for the sake of comprehensiveness. The short Book Three (Summer) contains few poems by named authors other than the compilers and three or four of their contemporaries. It begins with an anonymous composition, KKS 135, in which wisteria, a transitional flowering plant found also under Spring, is associated with the cuckoo, the Kokinshū summer topic par excellence. As with Spring and Autumn, the second poem, KKS 136, is by a named author, but—perhaps in witness to Summer's subordinate role—one of minor importance; and the third, KKS 137, as we may now expect, is anonymous. KKS 135 and KKS 136 both contain spring images, and each asks a question. KKS 137 is linked to KKS 136 by personification and to KKS 138, which ends the initial group, by thematic similarity and word repetition.

KKS 135. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Cascades of flowers
bloom on the wisteria
 by my garden lake.
When might the mountain cuckoo
come with his melodious song?

KKS 136. Ki no Toshisada. Seeing a cherry tree blooming in the Fourth Month

 … Was it unwilling
that some of our praise should go
  to all the others—
this tree blooming by itself
after the passing of spring?

KKS 137. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … You mountain cuckoo
awaiting the arrival
 of the Fifth Month:
flap your wings and sing today.
Last year's voice will do quite well.

KKS 138. Ise. Topic unknown

 … If the Fifth Month comes,
we may have more than enough,
 cuckoo, of your song.
I would like to hear your voice
before the season begins.

The principle of progression governs the basic structure of the cuckoo block. The speakers await the bird's coming, delight in its first song, and react to its presence in various ways as the summer advances. Small groups of poems on subordinate topics, such as the wakeful listener, the cuckoo's association with the nether regions, and the shortness of summer nights, appear occasionally. Since the reservoir of eligible poems was small, the links in such cases are not always strong. For example, KKS 153, the first of two wakeful-listener poems, seems to be related to its predecessor, KKS 152, only through the author's common membership in the Ki family; and KKS 154, the second, to its successor, KKS 155, primarily through a common source, the Empress's Contest.

Similar problems of linkage confronted the compilers toward the end of Book Three. Two waka on two otherwise unrepresented topics, KKS 165-66, were apparently considered too good, or possibly too well known, to omit; and it was also necessary to work in suitable end-of-season poems. The sequence below was the one adopted.

KKS 164. Oshikōchi Mitsune. On hearing a cuckoo singing

 … Since you are not I,
cuckoo, why need you lament
 as you go through life
in this world that seems to me
only a source of sorrow?

KKS 165. Archbishop Henjō. Seeing dew on a lotus

 … How puzzling it seems
that lotus leaves untainted
 by impurity
should nonetheless deceive us,
displaying dewdrops as gems.

KKS 166. Kiyowara Fukayabu. Composed toward dawn on a beautiful moonlit night

 … Now that dawn has come
while the evening lingers
 on this summer night,
in what cloudy hostelry
might the moon have gone to rest?

KKS 167. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed and sent off as a substitute, through reluctance to comply with a neighbor's request for some of his wild pinks

 … I have guarded them
even against specks of dust
 since first they blossomed—
those wild pinks, "flowers of the bed"
where I lie down with my wife.

KKS 168. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed on the last day of the Sixth Month

 … Are there cool breezes
blowing on a single side
 of the celestial path
where summer and autumn meet,
going their opposite ways?

In the case of KKS 165, the solution was to match the poem with another composition written from a Buddhist point of view, KKS 164; in that of KKS 166, the link with KKS 165 was probably intended to be forged through grammatical similarity.⁶ KKS 166 associates with the next poem, KKS 167, through the notion of sleeping. The main image in KKS 167 is the wild pink (nadeshiko), which begins to bloom in summer, and which, as shown in the poem, is sometimes called tokonatsu, a name partially homophonous with natsu ("summer"). It is, however, best known as one of the Seven Plants of Autumn, and KKS 167 is consequently an appropriate choice to precede Mitsune's KKS 168, which ends the book, and which can be associated with it through common authorship and the word natsu. The wind imagery in KKS 168 prepares the reader for Toshiyuki's KKS 169, the first Autumn poem.

Book Six (Winter) begins with waka by an anonymous author, by Muneyuki, a Period Three figure with six poems in the anthology, and by a second anonymous author. The images in the first—fallen leaves and shigure (late autumn/early winter showers)—link it closely to Autumn, and specifically to the last poem in Book Five, KKS 313, where momiji is the central image. The link to KKS 315 is through the common notion of withering, and KKS 315 is connected to KKS 316 not only by cause-and-effect reasoning, but also by tonal similarity: the second poem, by its explicit mention of freezing weather, develops the withering theme of the first. As a group, the three demonstrate temporal progression from the transitional early rains through increasingly colder weather, paving the way for KKS 317, the first composition on the book's central topic, snow.

KKS 314. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Taking warp and weft
from the wintry showers falling
 in the Godless Month,
the Tatsuta River weaves
a fabric of rich brocade.

KKS 315. Minamoto Muneyuki. Composed as a winter poem

 … It is in winter
that a mountain hermitage
  grows lonelier still,
for humans cease to visit
and grasses wither and die.

KKS 316. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Because the bright rays
of the celestial moon
  stream down chill and clear,
the waters where their light falls
have become the first to freeze.

KKS 317. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … As night settles in,
the cold finds its way through sleeves.
  Snow will be falling
at fair Yoshino, falling
in the hills of Yoshino.

The first and largest group of snow poems, consisting of six by anonymous authors (KKS 317-22) and ten by the compilers and their contemporaries (KKS 323-32), traces the progress of winter from preliminary flurries of quickly melting flakes to the height of the season, when drifts pile high in the mountains. The second, a group of late-winter poems (KKS 333-37)—two by anonymous authors, one by the Period One figure Ono no Takamura, and two by Tsurayuki and Tomonori—anticipates the coming of spring and comments on the resemblance between snow and early plum blossoms. Within both, there are links of the kind we have noticed for the other seasons. The two early-winter poems below, for example, share themes and images.

KKS 319. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … The falling snowflakes
must be melting as they strike:
 the sound grows louder
from the boisterous waters
flowing in the mountain stream.

KKS 320. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Brown leaves come drifting
in the current of this stream:
 waters from snow-melt
must be increasing these days
in the heart of the mountains.

In the quartet below, KKS 327 is associated with KKS 326 through mountain imagery and the Empress's Contest, and with KKS 328 through mountain imagery, the same contest, common authorship, and the theme of reclusion. KKS 328 is linked to KKS 329 by emotional harmony.

KKS 326. Fujiwara Okikaze. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor [Uda]

 … Gazing at snowflakes
as they blow in near the shore,
  we wonder if waves
might not indeed pass over
Sue-no-matsu Mountain.

KKS 327. Mibu no Tadamine. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

 … Not even so much
as a message reaches us
 from one who entered
the hills of fair Yoshino,
finding his way through white drifts.

KKS 328. Mibu no Tadamine. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

 … At the mountain house
where all is overwhelmed by
 masses of white snow,
might even he who dwells there
feel overwhelmed by misery?

KKS 329. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed as he watched falling snow

 … My heart is forlorn,
overburdened with misery.
 Might it be because
I am like a trackless road,
deserted when snow descends?

Five year-end poems (KKS 338-42) serve both as a conclusion to Winter and as a summation of the seasons. Although the group may seem to lack coherence, the placement of the poems is not random. KKS 338 and KKS 339, by Period Three poets, present similar feelings of unhappiness evoked by the passing of time. KKS 339 is connected imagistically, through snow, to KKS 340, an anonymous poem on a related but separate theme. KKS 340 shares a common grammatical feature—the suffix keri, indicating surprised discovery—with KKS 341, a composition by a Period Three author. Tsurayuki's KKS 342 would appear to belong with KKS 339, but was probably placed at the end of the book to establish a connection through its kotobagaki with the superior-inferior relationship central to the following Felicitations book, and also to demonstrate by its authorship the importance of the seasonal books as a whole. In view of the compilers' interest in symmetry, it may be pertinent to note that the survey of the past, present, and future in KKS 341, the second poem from the end, parallels Tsurayuki's review of three seasons in KKS 2, the second poem from the beginning.

KKS 338. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed on the last day of the Twelfth Month, while the author was waiting for a person who had gone off somewhere

 … The thing I await
is not the new year's coming,
  yet it happens now
without so much as a note
from the one who went away.

KKS 339. Ariwara Motokata. Composed at year-end

 … As each year in turn
gives way to its successor,
  the new one brings in
still greater descent of snow,
still steeper descent into age.

KKS 340. Anonymous. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

 … When snow has fallen
and the year draws to a close,
  ah, then it is clear
that the pine tree is a tree
whose color never changes.

KKS 341. Harumichi Tsuraki (d. 920). Composed at year-end

 … Swift is their passage
as the flow of the Asuka,
  "Tomorrow River"—
the long months I spend saying,
"yesterday," "today," "tomorrow."

KKS 342. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed and submitted by imperial command

 … My heart fills with gloom
as I watch the year depart,
  for shadows descend
even on the face I see
reflected in the mirror.

Books Seven-Nine: Felicitations, Parting, Travel

Most of the next book, Felicitations (KKS 343-64), consists of poems in which speakers of lower status wish long life to an Emperor or other personage. Many were composed for longevity celebrations, events that in the Heian period usually commemorated a decennial milestone in an individual's life. The formal elements of such occasions—a banquet, dances, the recitation of poems, and so forth—are conjectured to have been patterned after Chinese models, and it is likely that most of the early poems composed for them were kanshi.⁷ No Kokinshū Felicitations waka by a known author antedates Period Two. There was, however, a native tradition of auspicious waka, traceable as far back as Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and closely allied to belief in word magic, as is demonstrated in the exchange below, between a Fujiwara nobleman and Emperor Daigo, which took place during a celebration on the hundredth day after the birth of an imperial son.⁸ "Moon" is a metaphor for the child.

 … For a hundred years
from this night on which we count
  every day a year,
we shall rejoice to behold
the light of the shining moon.

 … If the word-spirit
lives in your auspicious speech,
  we shall indeed gaze
on the moon shining undimmed
though a hundred years elapse.

It was natural that the compilers should include Felicitations as part of their demonstration of the waka's fitness to replace the kanshi on formal occasions, and that Tsurayuki should have taken care to establish the credentials of the category, both in the kanajo and in his chōka, "A Long Poem Submitte d As a Prefatory Catalogue When He Presented Old Poems" (KKS 1002). In the kanajo, he first points out, "In the beginning … men found comfort in composing poems in which they expressed wishes for a lord's long life … through comparisons with pebbles." Later, during his description of the compilation process, he adds, "Selections were made from among … poems in which masters were revered and friends congratulated with mentions of cranes and turtles." In KKS 1002, he says, "It has been composed/through all the generations/since the divine age/of the mighty gods: poetry/called into being … /when, in annual custom,/men utter prayers/for our sovereign's long life,/speaking words of praise."

However, the number of available waka on the subject seems to have been small. Book Seven contains only twenty-two poems, of which eight (KKS 351, KKS 357-63) are actually seasonal compositions from four-seasons folding screens produced for longevity celebrations. A ninth (KKS 348), expressing thanks for a birthday present, is also peripheral to the main theme of the book. Of the other thirteen, four (KKS 343-46) offer anonymous good wishes to anonymous people, one (KKS 364) extends felicitations on the occasion of a child's birth, and the rest commemorate longevity observances held for Henjō (KKS 347), the Regent Moto-tsune (KKS 349), a lady of uncertain identity (KKS 350), an imperial Prince, Motoyasu (KKS 352-54), and two obscure figures named Fujiwara Miyoshi and Yo-shimine Tsunenari (KKS 355-56).

The poems are arranged in rough chronological order by author, proceeding from the anonymous quartet through Period Two to Period Three, with attention to seasonal progression within the large screen-poem group, where the main images are, successively, young greens, cherry blossoms, the cuckoo, autumn winds, colored leaves, and snow. A less immediately apparent unifying principle has also been followed. With few exceptions, the poems in the book are closely associated with the three most prominent figures of the day, Retired Emperor Uda, Emperor Daigo, and Fujiwara Tokihira, and especially with their immediate ancestors, Emperor K k and Fujiwara Mototsune. The relationships may be summarized as follows.

KKS 347: written by Emperor Kōkō, father of Emperor Uda and grandfather of Emperor Daigo

KKS 348: written on behalf of Emperor Kōkō's grandmother to be presented to the Emperor

KKS 349: written for Mototsune, cousin of Emperor Kōkō, father-in-law of Emperors Uda and Daigo, and father of Tokihira

KKS 350: written for a lady conjectured to have been Mototsune's daughter⁹

KKS 351: written for Empress Kōshi, Mototsune's sister

KKS 352-54: written for Emperor Kōkō's brother

KKS 357-63: written for Emperor Daigo's maternal uncle

KKS 364: written for Emperor Daigo's son, the future Emperor Murakami, whose mother was Mototsune's daughter and Tokihira's sister

Of the six waka not accounted for in the list, the four anonymous ones, KKS 343-46, appear to have been old songs, selected both to set the tone of the book and to comply with the imperial directive to present "old poems missing from Man'yōshū." Within that group, which is headed by the ancestor of the present Japanese national anthem,¹⁰ the first two poems are linked by pebble/sand imagery, the second and third by shore imagery, and the third and fourth by the word yachiyo ("eight thousand years").

KKS 343. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … May our lord endure
for a thousand, eight thousand
  long generations—
may he live until pebbles
grow into mossy boulders.

KKS 344. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … By counting the grains
of fair sand on the seashore,
  I will find the sum
of the great number of years
you are destined to enjoy.

KKS 345. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … The plovers dwelling
at Sashide-no-iso
  by Shio-no-yama
cry yachiyo, wishing our lord
a reign of eight thousand years.

KKS 346. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … We will add my years
to your span of eight thousand
  and set them aside.
Let them remind you of me
when the time comes to use them.

The pebbles in KKS 343 and the turtles and cranes in KKS 355 recall the kanajo's references to congratulatory poems. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that the otherwise puzzling inclusion of KKS 355, honoring the minor figure Fujiwara Miyoshi, was considered necessary to give representation to two of the three main symbols of longevity, none of which appears elsewhere in Book Seven, and to surmise further that KKS 356, composed for the equally unimportant Yoshimine Tsunenari, was added to represent the third.

KKS 355. Ariwara Shigeharu (d. 905?). Composed for a celebration in honor of Fujiwara Miyoshi's sixtieth year

 … Even turtles and cranes
meet unknown fates at the end
  of a thousand years.
Please leave the length of your life
to one whose heart is greedy.

KKS 356. Sosei. Composed on behalf of Yoshimine Tsunenari's daughter for a celebration in honor of her father's fortieth year

 … This pine represents
prayers for your eternal life.
  May I always dwell
in the shadow of the tree
that endures a thousand years.

The thematic unity of Book Seven is greatly strengthened by the composition selected for the final position—KKS 364, by the Assistant Handmaid Fujiwara Yoruka (?-?). Tsurayuki and his colleagues could not have guessed that KKS 343, the first poem in the book, would some day become the national anthem, but it must have been apparent to them that with KKS 364 they were returning smoothly to their point of departure. Moreover, the pairing of KKS 364 with KKS 363, a waka by Tsurayuki (who once again appears in a strategic location), contributes powerfully to the total effect of what is in essence a formal, book-long tribute to the ruling powers. Tsurayuki's reference to the Yoshino mountains, an area long associated with the imperial house, leads into Yoruka's mention of Mount Kasuga, the famous site of the Fujiwara tutelary shrine, and to her theme, the glory of the imperial family and its special relationship to the Fujiwara; his snow/flower mitate parallels her sun/Prince and Kasuga/Fujiwara metaphors; and his snowstorm paves the way for the dramatic contrast of her rising sun, symbolic of the divine majesty and eternal prosperity of Amaterasu's line.

KKS 363. Ki no Tsurayuki. A poem written on a four-seasons screen behind the guest of honor when the Principal Handmaid celebrated the fortieth year of the Major Captain of the Right. Winter.

 … When white flakes of snow
flutter thick and fast toward earth,
  flowers indeed scatter
before the gale sweeping down
from fair Yoshino's mountains.

KKS 364. Fujiwara Yoruka. Composed when she presented herself on the occasion of the birth of the Crown Prince

 … Ever will it shine,
undimmed by a clouded hour—
  the sun emergent
from the lofty eminence
of Kasuga-no-yama.

Book Eight (KKS 365-405) brings together poems on male friendship and parting, two interrelated topics so important in Chinese poetry that they could not conceivably have been disregarded by the Kokinshū compilers. Tsurayuki's mention of the first in the kanajo, "[Poets of the past] yearned for friends at the sound of waiting-insects," suggests that he and his colleagues may have considered the possibility of creating a separate category to accommodate it. But there was no Japanese precedent for such a step, and it is more likely that they planned from the start to combine the two, as Tsurayuki does by implication in his chōka, KKS 1002, where he writes, "[Poetry is composed] when tears are shed by people / who must part too soon." The relative weakness of Confucianism in Japan, the strength of the love-poem tradition, and the compilers' determination to assert native values must all have contributed to the further decision that Parting should not exclude poems on separation between the sexes.

Book Eight is divisible into two parts. The poems in the first, more public in tone than those in the second, usually deal with situations in which government officials are about to set out on trips entailing sustained absences, to the sorrow of those close to them; most of those in the second record briefer or less significant partings.

The initial poem, KKS 365, seems to owe its position to two circumstances. First, it combines an attractive sound pattern with two kakekotoba, thus illustrating the compilers' notion of a properly balanced treatment of the topic; second, the speaker is the traveler himself, rather than someone seeing him off, as was more usual, and the poem consequently can be combined neatly with the old waka that follow. Read in isolation, KKS 365 might be regarded as a jesting composition addressed to male companions at a farewell party, but in context it becomes part of a three-poem exchange between a man and a woman. KKS 368, the plaint of a grieving mother, ends what might be called a prologue, four poems bound together by Man'yō-style lyricism.

KKS 365. Ariwara Yukihira. Topic unknown

 … I must leave you now,
to journey to Inaba,
  where pines top the peaks,
but I will return at once
if you say you pine for me.

KKS 366. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … How long must I wait
to see again the traveler
  who leaves this morning,
journeying where wild bees hum
in autumn bush-clover fields?

KKS 367. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Though I part from you,
journeying to boundless
  lands beyond the clouds,
you shall accompany me
in the fastness of my heart.

KKS 368. Composed by the mother of Ono no Chifuru when Chifuru went to take up his duties as Vice-Governor of Michinoku

 … Please do not deny,
you men of the barrier,
  passage to this heart
sent by a loving mother
as guardian for her son.

There follows a group of six waka (KKS 369-74) by named Period Two and Period Three authors, which are all by and for men, and which introduce the chief topic of Book Eight, the departure of an official for the provinces. As with the pair below, they tend to express similar sentiments in similar ways.

KKS 371. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed at a farewell party

 … I mourn your absence
even as we say farewell.
  How then might I feel
after you have journeyed forth
to lands beyond the white clouds?

KKS 372. Ariwara Shigeharu. Composed when a friend left for the provinces

 … Might it be because
I think of the great distance
  soon to divide us—
this longing I feel for you
while we are still face to face?

Perhaps to break the monotony, a trio of poems by women follows KKS 374. The private tone of the first one, KKS 375, links it to the introductory quartet at the start of the book, but the speaker, unlike the Man'yōshū wife whose husband shares her grief, is a Kokinshū-style neglected woman with Chinese affinities. Utsuku, the author of KKS 376, is a lonely lady using Chinese-inspired wordplay to lament her plight; and the anonymous author of KKS 377 bases her poem on Six Dynasties reasoning. Chinese associations thus establish this as a group standing in contrast to the earlier one of approximately the same size.

KKS 375. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I will not inquire
when you might be setting forth,
 though if you leave me
I will vanish from the earth
like a drop of morning dew.

KKS 376. Utsuku (?-?). Sent to Fujiwara Kimitoshi when the author left for Hitachi

 … I cannot rely
on regular attentions
 from Kimitoshi,
and so I have decided
to journey to Hitachi.

KKS 377. Anonymous. A poem composed and sent out by a lady when Ki no Munesada, who was preparing to journey eastward, took his leave toward dawn after having spent the night at someone's house

 … We cannot tell now,
but let us try a small test:
 if we both survive,

will it be I who forget
or you who fail to visit?

A second group of male Parting poems (KKS 378-84) seems to differ from the first only in that none of the departing travelers is mentioned by name in the kotobagaki. But since two of the seven compositions are addressed to "close friends," and since none is identified as a banquet piece, the compilers may have considered the group more private in nature than the first, an attitude that would account for their relative positions. "Close friend" does not appear in any of the earlier kotobagaki.

The first part ends with another group of seven poems (KKS 385-91). In a sense, the group forms a pair with the preceding one: the number of poems in each is the same, and whereas the earlier one names none of the travelers, this names them all. (The first long group contains six poems and names some but not all of the travelers.) But its content is relatively diverse. The first two poems are formal farewells composed at a party for a man traveling to Tsukushi on official business, and the next three concern a man who is going to the same area for private reasons. Of these three, one was written by the traveler, one by a male friend, and one by a female entertainer named Shirome. Shirome's waka, a unique fusion of the Japanese lovers'-parting theme with the Chinese friendship theme, might be said to resolve the tension between the two earlier groups involving women.

KKS 387. Shirome (?-?). Composed at Yamazaki, at a farewell party for Minamoto Sane, who was going to Tsukushi to bathe in the hot springs

 … If life were to last
however long we saw fit,
  would we be likely
to suffer such deep distress
just because of a parting?

The placement of the last two poems in this part, KKS 390 and KKS 391, appears designed to demonstrate the attributes of the Parting poem proper, and thus to return to the note sounded at the outset with Yukihira's KKS 365. As frequently happens, a work by Tsurayuki occupies the penultimate position. Modern readers may find it of minor interest. Nevertheless, it deals with the topic in the approved manner, expressing muted unhappiness, playing on the name of the place, and creating accomplished aural effects with k's, n's, a's, and o's. That Tsurayuki himself rated it highly is shown by its presence in Shinsen waka.

KKS 390. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed at Ōsaka Barrier when he went to see off Fujiwara Koreoka, who was leaving to serve as Vice-Governor of Musashi

 … So now after all
you go across and leave us!
  The Hill of Meeting
has turned out to be a name
that merely feeds empty hope.

KKS 391, doubtless one of many eligible candidates for the last position, was probably chosen in part because the author was Fujiwara Kanesuke, a young court noble who became Tsurayuki's patron around the beginning of the tenth century, and in part because it forms a smooth link, through Shirayama ("White Mountain"), between Tsurayuki's poem, written in the mountains between the capital and Ōtsu, and Henjō's KKS 392, the first waka in the second part.

KKS 391. Fujiwara Kanesuke (877-933). Composed at a farewell party for Ōe no Chifuru, who was leaving for Koshi

 … Though I know little
of White Mountain in Koshi
  where you are going,
I shall follow behind you,
seeking your tracks in the snow.

KKS 392. Archbishop Henjō Composed as someone was preparing to return home at dusk after having come to worship at Kazan

 … Would that in the dusk
our brush-woven fence might seem
  a range of mountains:
then he would stay here, saying,
"I cannot cross them at night."

KKS 392 is the first of five poems written by monks when parting with visitors who were returning home after brief pious or sightseeing excursions. The next three waka commemorate an even less consequential separation: Tsurayuki and Mitsune, having been summoned to attend upon an Imperial Prince, exchange farewells with him as they leave (KKS 397-99). These are followed by four anonymous poems on unspecified topics, which form a unit with solid imagistic and linguistic connections:

KKS 400. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I shall wrap them up
as a memento of you
  and take them away—
these clear beads that strike my sleeve
as we part, alas, too soon.

KKS 401. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … They will never dry
until the day we meet—

 these sleeves drenched with tears
shed because my love for you
exceeds all bound and measure.

KKS 402. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Since you have chosen,
gentle spring drizzle, to fall,
 please turn the sky black
that I may keep him with me
and assign the blame to you.

KKS 403. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Whatever the cost,
I must keep him from leaving.
  Scatter, you cherry blossoms,
until he can no longer
know which is the way to go.

Finally, two poems lead into Travel by discussing partings after chance meetings on the road. The first is Tsurayuki's admirable KKS 404. The second, Tomonori's KKS 405, serves as the last word on the Parting topic and, by echoing the positive tone of Yukihira's KKS 365, returns the reader to the point of origin.

KKS 405. Ki no Tomonori. Composed at parting, after he had addressed a few words to someone in a carriage encountered on the road

… Although we part now,
following our different ways,
 we will meet again
like an under-belt's two ends
circling to come together.

Nostalgia for home, the preeminent courtly travel sentiment, constitutes the theme of the first Travel waka, KKS 406, the author of which, Abe no Nakamaro (698-770), is the earliest known Kokinshū poet and the only one to write from a foreign land. Typical in one sense and unique in another, the poem was a suitable choice to lead off the minuscule Book Nine, which contains only sixteen poems. With it the compilers paired a similar expression of homesickness by the Period One poet Ono no Takamura, who must have seemed to them almost equally remote in time and space. Nakamaro wrote at the beginning of a long sea voyage home, Takamura at the beginning of a long sea voyage into exile.

KKS 406. Abe no Nakamaro. Composed on seeing the moon in China

 … When I gaze far out
across the plain of heaven,
  I see the same moon
that came up over the hill
of Mikasa at Kasuga.

KKS 407. Ono no Takamura. Sent to someone in the capital as he boarded ship after having been sentenced to exile in Oki Province

 … Carry word to them,
seafolk in your fishing boat,
  that I have rowed forth
onto the spreading sea plain
bound for many an island.

Like Takamura's KKS 407, the next four poems (KKS 408-11) describe water-associated outward journeys. KKS 412, linked to KKS 411 by bird imagery, forms a return-journey pair with KKS 413, which is linked by mountain imagery to KKS 414, the first of three poems concerning outward journeys without watery associations. The compilers thus repeat, on a smaller scale, their tactic of breaking up groups of similar poems, observed previously in the treatment of the autumn-leaf and bureaucratic-parting themes.

Book Nine ends with a series of five poems about short private excursions (KKS 417-21), a disposition recalling the structure of Book Eight. As in the two examples below, the tone of all is jesting.

KKS 418. Ariwara Narihira. Once when Narihira was on a hunting trip with Prince Koretaka, the party dismounted on the bank of a stream called Amanogawa [River of Heaven]. As they were drinking there, the Prince commanded Narihira to offer him a wine cup with a poem expressing sentiments appropriate for a hunter arriving at the River of Heaven.

 … Having hunted all day,
let us borrow a lodging
  from the Weaver Maid,
for we have come to the shore
of the River of Heaven.

KKS 421. Sosei. Composed at Offering Hill when Retired Emperor Uda traveled to Nara

 … I must make cloth strips
by cutting up my patched sleeves—
 but perhaps the gods,
surfeited with autumn leaves,
may just give them back again.

Although Sosei's KKS 421 is a good poem, it cannot be said to express orthodox travel feelings, and so seems at first glance a strange choice for the conspicuous position it occupies. Granted that the compilers apparently found Travel poems hard to come by, we might have expected them to prefer a poem like Mitsune's KKS 416 below. Their selection of KKS 421, like their decision to allocate the whole last third of Book Nine to poems aiming at courtly wit, can best be understood if we postulate a desire to provide a tonal link to Book Ten, which, as will be noted in more detail later, brings together a collection of versified puns.

KKS 416. Ōshikōzchi Mitsune. Composed on the way to Kai Province

 … During this long trip
I have lain time after time
  with grass for pillow,
brushing away the first-frost
that forms when the nights grow cold.

Books Eleven-Fifteen: Love

The five Love books trace the history of an imaginary romance from beginning to end, through stages identifiable as (1) one-sided attachment prior to intimacy (categorized by Japanese scholars as awanu koi, "not-meeting love"), (2) strong mutual attachment with frequent nocturnal meetings (au koi, "meeting love"), and (3) mutual attachment declining on one side, with erratic meetings ending in final separation (aite awanu koi, "meeting and not-meeting love"). As we have seen, the idea of a structured collection of Love poems was not new: the Man'yōshū editors had made a start toward seasonal and imagistic ordering; the early Heian contests had sometimes used awanu koi and au koi as topics (dai); and Shinsen man'yōshū had attempted to establish a distinction between omoi and koi. But there was no precedent for the Kokinshū compilers' comprehensive chronological treatment, for the complexity and consistency of their subgroupings, or for the care with which they fitted the whole into a larger framework, balancing the seasonal books by presenting the course of a love affair as a human parallel to the environmental cycle of new growth, full bloom, and decay, and preserving tonal harmony by emphasizing the unhappy aspects and transitory nature of sexual attraction.¹¹

Awanu koi, the concern of the first subdivision (KKS 469-633, Books Eleven and Twelve and more than half of Thirteen), emerges as the best-represented Kokinshū Love theme. Tsurayuki and the others assembled a total of 165 poems, most of which dealt with lovesick men and the diverse, inconsistent, predominantly melancholy states to which they were prone: inability to think clearly, daydreaming, pessimism, optimism, frustration, self-reproach, yearning to find solace in dreams, fear of scandal, reckless indifference to gossip, and so on. Since most upper-class Heian couples were probably strangers, or nearly so, when they spent the first night together, it would be natural to think that real-life awanu koi was at best a lukewarm emotion, and that a poem like KKS 551 below would normally indicate a relatively advanced stage in a relationship. However, the compilers have assigned KKS 551 to stage one; and examination of the structure of the stage-one group indicates that they have done so with a specific decorum in mind.

KKS 551. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Burdened by this love,
must I perish like the snow,
 which in its falling
parts the sedge and cloaks its roots
far back in the distant hills?

In organizing this group of poems, the compilers modified their usual practice of interweaving anonymous and known authors on the basis of chronology and topic. They followed that procedure in the eighteen-poem section of Book Thirteen with which the subdivision ends, but—possibly in response to the problems posed by exceptionally large numbers of anonymous poems, or possibly in a quest for novelty—they allocated Book Eleven almost wholly to anonymous authors and Book Twelve to named ones. With uncharacteristic disregard for symmetry, however, they inserted a group of named authors into the first part of Book Eleven. Although the initial poem in Book Eleven, KKS 469, is anonymous, the next is by Sosei.

KKS 469. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … This love has cast me
into confusion as sweet
  as sweet flags growing
in the Fifth Month, in the time
when cuckoos come forth to sing.¹²

KKS 470. Sosei. Topic unknown

 … Though I but know you
through others, love has made me
  like chrysanthemum dew,
rising by night and by day
fading into nothingness.

Sosei's composition elucidates the character and significance of its predecessor. The anonymous poet's mental turmoil, we are to understand, arises not from intimate involvement with his mistress, but from romantic infatuation with a stranger. And that this is to be regarded as the paradigmatic stage-one situation is made explicit in eleven more waka by named authors, of which the two below are representative.¹³

KKS 474. Ariwara Motokata. Topic unknown

 … Over and over,
like white waves from the offing,

 my fond thoughts return
to an absolute stranger
who has carried off my heart.

KKS 476. Ariwara Narihira. On the day of an archery meet at the riding grounds of the Body-guards of the Right, Narihira glimpsed a lady's face through the silk curtains of a carriage opposite. He sent her this poem.

 … How very foolish!
Shall I spend all of today
 lost in pensive thought,
my heart bewitched by someone
neither seen nor yet unseen?

It is not certain that all anonymous Kokinshū stage-one authors meant to depict men in such straits. KKS 493 and KKS 498 below, for example, might well have been intended to reflect intimate relationships. But the compilers, eager to distance Kokinshū from what the kanajo called the "trivial words" of the bona fide lover, apparently considered it necessary to seek out or compose poems in which the stage-one speaker was unmistakably identified as a man head-over-heels in love with a woman known to him only from hearsay, through a chance glimpse, or by some other accident—a supremely literary, because patently implausible, situation. Only then, it seems, were they content to follow their basic structural plan by filling the remainder of Book Eleven with anonymous compositions like KKS 551, which were susceptible to interpretation as treatments of the same theme.

KKS 493. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Others have told me
quiet pools are to be found
 in the swiftest stream.
Why, then, is this love of mine
all unrelieved turbulence?

KKS 498. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Distraught by passion,
how can I not weep aloud
 as the warbler cries
perched on the uppermost branch
of the plum in my garden?

The subject of the stage-two group—romance at its happiest—was one that the compilers were unlikely to wish to emphasize, since it not only lacked substantial Chinese and Japanese literary associations, but also conflicted with the basic tone of the anthology. They limited it to sixty-eight waka (KKS 634-701), many of them focusing on the minor difficulties besetting the relationship. The man laments the shortness of nights spent with his mistress, grieves over dawn partings, complains about time spent between meetings, professes an inability to control his passion, and so on. The woman, who was a remote figure in stage one but shares the stage here, worries about gossip, meets her lover in dreams, waits for visits, and echoes the man's distress at daybreak. Although the presence of numerous anonymous compositions makes generalization risky, approximately 50 percent of the stage-two poems, like the example below, can be constructed as expressions of feminine emotions.

KKS 692. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Were I to send word,
"The moon is fine, and the night
  is also pleasant,"
it would be like saying, "Come."
It is not that I do not wait.

Stage three concentrates on the woman whose lover is gradually losing interest and drifting away. In a manner reminiscent of the seasonal books—where, for example, harbingers of spring alternate with late snowfalls—the downward course of the affair is interrupted by short-lived signs of reconciliation, but the roles of the sexes have been effectively reversed. Although the man appears from time to time, protesting his devotion or expressing a reluctance to say a final farewell, he tends to recede into the background. It is the distraught woman with whose feelings we are now principally concerned. She begins to doubt the man, becomes aware of infidelities, views the future with misgivings, tries to forget, feels resentment, mourns, blames herself, hopes against hope, and, as in the poem below, attempts to resign herself to the situation.

KKS 799. Sosei. Topic unknown

 … What am I to do
with someone who would leave me
 despite my deep love?
I must simply think of you
as flowers that scatter too soon.

Taken out of context, KKS 799 might be construed as a man's comment on a woman, but there is little doubt that Heian readers regarded the speaker as a woman, or that Sosei intended them to do so. Of 127 poems in stage three (KKS 702-828), nineteen are by named women, several by known male authors assuming transparent feminine personas as in Yu tai xin yong, and a very large number, of which KKS 739 below is representative, by anonymous writers speaking as women. By making approximately 95 percent of the speakers in stage one men and approximately 80 percent of those in stage three women, the compilers have established a rough balance between the sexes (equally mixed in stage two). Or to put it differently, the two main groups embody, respectively, Japanese and Six Dynasties approaches to love, with the romantic Heian man, in a significant assertion of independence, enjoying a slight numerical priority over the Chinese lonely lady.

KKS 739. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Rest a while, at least,
when I beg you not to leave,
  for if you rush off,
I will ask the bridge in front
to bring your horse to his knees.

Two groups of waka, one in stage one and the other in stage three, conspicuously depart from the above authorial norms. The second (KKS 747-53), which is the less problematic, begins with Narihira's famous tsuki ya aranu. The poem's theme—the misery of the lover separated by an impenetrable barrier from a former mistress—is repeated, with some modification, in compositions by two important court nobles, Tokihira's brother Nakahira and Emperor Daigo's maternal relative Kanesuke, which are followed by compositions by Mitsune, Motokata, an anonymous author, and Tomo-nori; and the seven together form a block interrupting a long sequence of feminine complaints about desertion. Although we may find the precise location of these poems puzzling, it is not difficult to understand why they were included under stage three: the theme was at least marginally appropriate for the subdivision; Narihira's poem clearly could not be omitted from the anthology; and almost all the other authors were men with a special claim to the compilers' attention.

But most of the poems in the stage-one group (KKS 552-59), which divides a series of laments by forlorn male lovers, seem simply out of place. For example, Komachi appears to allude to an established relationship in KKS 552 below, and Sosei and Toshiyuki appear to assume stage-three lonely lady personas in KKS 555 and KKS 559.

KKS 552. Ono no Komachi. Topic unknown

 … Did you come to me
because I dropped off to sleep
 tormented by love?
If I had known I dreamed,
I would not have awakened.

KKS 555. Sosei. Topic unknown

 … Now that the cold breath
of the autumn wind strikes deep,
 I hope against hope
to see an indifferent man,
night after darkening night.

KKS 559. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the KanpyōEmperor

 … Does my beloved
avoid the eyes of others
  even on dream paths
visited by night as waves
visit Suminoe shore?

And what are we to make of the flirtatious exchange in KKS 556-57?

KKS 556. Abe no Kiyoyuki. Suggested by the monk Shinsei's sermon during a memorial service at the Lower Izumo Temple; sent to Ono no Komachi

 … They are only tears
shed for one I cannot see—
  those fair white jewels
that will not stay in my sleeve
when I seek to wrap them up.

KKS 557. Ono no Komachi. Reply

 … Tears that do no more
than turn into beads on sleeves
 are formal indeed.
Mine flow in a surging stream,
try though I may to halt them.

The best explanation seems to be that the compilers decided to insert KKS 747-53 with an eye to breaking up a potentially monotonous series of similar poems, and that they then assembled and inserted KKS 552-59, doing probable violence to authorial intent, for purposes of symmetry. By including the Kiyoyuki-Komachi exchange, they arrived at a total number of feminine speakers exactly equal to the number of male speakers in the later group.

That kind of sequence-breaking, which we have already observed in other subject-matter categories, recurs on a smaller scale in other Love contexts, such as the following, where a dream poem divides a group focusing on tears.

KKS 572. Ki no Tsurayuki. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

 … Did I not pour forth
these tears of longing for you,
 the breast of my robe
would take on the red color
of the flame that consumes me.

KKS 573. Ki no Tsurayuki. Topic unknown

… As the years pass by,

so its ceaseless flow rolls on—
 the river of tears
whose bubbles never congeal
before winter's icy breath.

KKS 574. Ki no Tsurayuki. Topic unknown

 … Might dew have settled
on the dream paths I followed
 throughout the long night?
My sleeves, drenched before I slept,
even now remain undried.

KKS 575. Sosei. Topic unknown

 … How reluctantly
I arise in the morning
  following a night
when I have at least glimpsed you
in an evanescent dream!

KKS 576. Fujiwara Tadafusa. Topic unknown

 … If these tears I shed
were simply a false display,
 I would not use stealth
to wring moisture from the sleeve
of my silken Chinese robe.

KKS 577. Ōe no Chisato. Topic unknown

 … Although I soaked them,
weeping and wailing aloud,
 to those who may ask
I will answer that my sleeves
were drenched by the springtime rains.

There are other familiar organizing strategies in the Love books as a whole. One of the commonest is imagistic association, as in KKS 498-99 (birds) below.

KKS 498. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Distraught by passion
how can I not weep aloud
 as the warbler cries
perched on the uppermost branch
of the plum in my garden?

KKS 499. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Do you, O cuckoo
from the foot-wearying hills,
 seek in vain to sleep,
your heart, like mine, never free
of longing for a loved one?

Here the spring warbler precedes the summer cuckoo. Similar attention to seasonal progression occurs in other instances, notably in this ten-poem sequence:

KKS 542. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I pray that your heart
may lose its coldness toward me
 and melt completely,
even as ice vanishes
with the coming of springtime.

KKS 543. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … When a new day dawns,
like a wailing cicada
  I spend it in tears,
and by night my smoldering heart
emulates the firefly's glow.

KKS 544. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … That summer insects
should thus immolate themselves
  is simply because
they are enthralled by the flame
as I am enthralled by you.

KKS 545. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … On this sleeve of mine,
harder than ever to dry
  when evening draws in,
the dew of autumn comes down
to add its bit of moisture.

KKS 546. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … There is no season
in which we can find respite
  from love's sad yearnings,
but how strangely our passion
deepens in the autumn dusk!

KKS 547. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Mine is not a love
as plain to see as rice ears
  in the autumn fields,
but never is there a time
when you are not in my heart.

KKS 548. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Shall I forget you
even for an interval
 brief as the radiance
of lightning illumining
rice ears in autumnal fields?

KKS 549. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Why should I suffer
from this urge to concealment?
  What is to keep me
from flaunting my devotion
as miscanthus flaunts its plumes?

KKS 550. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … For me these are days
when miseries multiply—
  when my heart shatters
as layers of foamy snow
crumble beneath their own weight.

KKS 551. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Burdened by this love,
must I perish like the snow,
  which in its falling
parts the sedge and cloaks its roots
far back in the distant hills?

The principle of progression frequently operates elsewhere as well—for example, in gossip poems, which speak of groundless rumors in stage one, lament the inevitability of justified talk in stage two, and fear irreparable harm to the relationship in stage three; and in stage-two poems where concern shifts from the night of meeting to the moment of parting to the next day.

Sometimes pairs of poems present conversational exchanges, either explicitly, as in KKS 556-57 above, or implicitly, as in KKS 659-60 below.

KKS 659. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Burning with passion,
I shrink before the high dike
  of other men's eyes.
My heart is set on the stream,
but how am I to reach it?

KKS 660. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … How might it happen
that the dike of others' eyes
  suffices to dam
a passion as turbulent
as a rapid's seething flow?

Sometimes the use of a place name is the common element:

KKS 695. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Ah, if I might see
without an instant's delay
  the flower I yearn for—
a wild pink of Yamato,
blooming by a mountain fence!

KKS 696. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I am not thinking
anything (like "Anything"
 in the land of Tsu)
except "I long to meet you
'Forever' (in Yamashiro)."¹⁴

KKS 697. Ki no Tsurayuki. Topic unknown

 … I long for a way
to meet you as constantly
  as in far Cathay
people dress in gorgeous robes
foreign to Yamato's isles.

In many cases, two poems appear to be joined through diction or grammar. KKS 763 and KKS 764 both end with noun-particle-verb constructions using the suffix ramu, indicative of speculation about the cause of a perceived phenomenon; shimo ("frost") in KKS 693 repeats the particles shi mo in KKS 692; koto ni ("especially," suppressed in the translation) in KKS 587 is probably to be taken as punning on koto in KKS 586.¹⁵

KKS 763. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … That year-end showers
fall so soon upon my sleeve—
  might it be because
satiety has called forth
the autumn of your passion?

KKS 764. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … My passion is not
shallow as a mountain spring.
  Why, then, must that man
never show himself to me
save as a fleeting image?

KKS 692. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Were I to send word,
"The moon is fine, and the night
  is also pleasant,"
it would be like saying, "Come."
It is not that I do not wait.

KKS 693. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Should you fail to come,
I will avoid the bedroom
  and remain outside,
even though frost may gather
on my deep purple hair-cord.

KKS 586. Mibu no Tadamine. Topic unknown

 … Why should I languish
in vain longing for someone
  merely at the sound
of a koto being played
while the autumn wind whispers?

KKS 587. Ki no Tsurayuki. Topic unknown

 … Whenever rain falls
my love for her increases,
 rising as rises
swamp water at Yodo marsh,
where harvesters glean wild rice.

As Book Fifteen draws to a close, a six-poem sequence establishes a firm connection between autumn (the classic symbol of evanescence) and the dissolution of romantic ties.

KKS 819. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … What grief to see you
growing ever more remote,
 as when a wild goose
takes leave of the reedy shore
and wings its way toward the sky.

KKS 820. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Still more saddening
than the leaves of trees changing
  in year-end drizzles—
the encounter of old vows
with the autumn of your love.

KKS 821. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … At Musashino
where the chill wind of autumn
 has blown ceaselessly,
every leaf on every plant
has lost its former color.

KKS 822. Ono no Komachi. Topic unknown

 … Because I trusted
someone who grew tired of me,
  my life, alas, must be
as empty as a rice ear
blasted by harsh autumn winds.

KKS 823. Taira Sadafun. Topic unknown

 … Having resented,
I merely resent anew
  that as autumn winds
turn back a kudzu vine's leaves,
so you turn back from your vows.

KKS 824. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … I thought of aki
as autumn, no kin to me,
  but now I hear it
as satiety, naming
the flirt who cast me aside.

Two more compositions, both ending with the phrase toshi zo henikeru ("years have gone by"), attest to the irrevocable nature of the couple's estrangement; and the final word is pronounced in a conversational exchange using water imagery (KKS 827-28). Tomonori's distraught speaker in KKS 827 compares himself (or, more likely, herself) to a bubble, the prime Buddhist symbol of transitoriness; the anonymous author of KKS 828, playing on a river name, replies with a Buddhist rebuke, reminiscent in its pessimistic tone of the last seasonal poem, KKS 342: "Nothing is more ephemeral than love. What did you expect?"

KKS 827. Ki no Tomonori. Topic unknown

 … Consumed by misery,
I long to vanish as swiftly
  as a floating bubble.
Were the bubble to flow on,
what might its future become?

KKS 828. Anonymous. Topic unknown

 … Let us accept it.
Love's course can but remind us
  of the Yoshino,
the river falling between
Husband Mountain and Wife Hill.

KKS 342. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed and submitted by imperial command

 … My heart fills with gloom
as I watch the year depart,
  for shadows descend
even on the face I see
reflected in the mirror.

Books Sixteen-Eighteen: Laments, Miscellaneous

The river imagery and religious overtones of KKS 827 and KKS 828 lead into the next book, Laments (KKS 829-62), which begins with a poem about the River of Crossings, a hazard faced by the souls of the dead in the nether regions:

KKS 829. Ono no Takamura. Composed upon the death of a woman he had loved

… I wish my teardrops
might descend like driving rain,
 for she would come home
if flood waters were to rise
in the River of Crossings.

Like other initial poems in the anthology, KKS 829 is both typical and atypical of its category. The compilers, obliged to include Laments for the sake of comprehensiveness, made it their business to demonstrate that waka about death need not be too personal and specific to qualify as hare no uta. On the one hand, they controlled the range of subject matter and style in the thirty-four poems they admitted, supplying 41 percent of the total themselves, their largest joint contribution to any Kokinshū category; on the other, they minimized personalism by placing the most formal compositions at the front. Takamura's poem was probably chosen to begin Book Sixteen because it distanced the experience of bereavement by using Six Dynasties reasoning, exaggeration, and a blatantly artificial conception. The kotobagaki tells us that the author was mourning a woman he had loved, but the language of the waka is so general that it might refer to a casual acquaintance. (There are no pronouns in the original.)

Other poems near the front of the book, such as KKS 830 and KKS 832 below, also dilute grief with elaborate conceits.

KKS 830. Sosei. Composed on the night when the remains of the Former Chancellor [Yoshifusa] were taken to the vicinity of Shirakawa [White River]

… Anguished tears of blood
descend in seething torrents:
 White River, it seems,
was a name doomed to vanish
with the passing of our lord.

KKS 832. Kamutsuke Mineo (?-?). Composed after the burial of the Horikawa Chancellor [Mototsune] at Fukakusayama [Mountain of Rich Grasses]

… If you have feelings,
flowering cherries in the fields
 at Fukakusa,
will you not just this one year
put forth charcoal-colored blooms?

Some merely rephrase Buddhist aphorisms:

KKS 833. Ki no Tomonori. Sent to the house when Fujiwara Toshiyuki no Ason died

… He appears to me
when I wake and when I sleep.
 Ah, but after all
this transient world itself
is only an empty dream.

KKS 834. Ki no Tsurayuki. Written upon the death of someone he had known well

… I should have called it
no more than a fleeting dream,
 yet it seemed to me
to possess reality—
this world in which we exist.

What makes Takamura's poem atypical, then, is not its tone or style but its subject matter. Presumably as a deliberate policy, the compilers have failed to include a single poem on the death of a child, one of the cruelest of bereavements; and Takamura's is the only one of the thirty-four in which a spouse or lover is mourned. Of the other elegies in the book, one concerns a sister, six speak of parents, and most of the remainder commemorate the deaths of important personages, friends, and acquaintances.¹⁶ The deaths are, in short, almost all of a kind to be borne with relative equanimity.

Tsurayuki and his colleagues have adjusted structure to subject matter with remarkable care in this book. It comprises four major parts. The first three contain poems composed, respectively, during the period immediately following the individual's death (KKS 829-39), during the formal mourning period (KKS 840-47), and after the mourning period (KKS 848-56), and the fourth consists of six deathbed poems (KKS 857-62). Although the reader might anticipate the most poignant expressions of loss in part one, the first three poems after Takamura's (KKS 830-32) prove to be highly formal compositions on the deaths of public figures. KKS 833 is a condolatory poem, and the next two, KKS 834 and KKS 835, concern friends of the authors. KKS 836, on a sister, forms a pair in authorship and style with KKS 835. Both focus not on the deceased, but on the concept of death:

KKS 835. Mibu no Tadamine. On a friend's death

… Why should we say "dream"
only of that which we see
 while we lie asleep?
This fugitive world itself
is scarcely reality.

KKS 836. Mibu no Tadamine. On his older sister's death

… Even a swift stream
may become a standing pool
 when we dam it up,
but no weir exists to block
someone going from this world.

KKS 837 is another condolatory poem, and KKS 838 and KKS 839, by Tsurayuki and Tadamine, commemorate the passing of their colleague Tomonori. KKS 838 and KKS 839 have probably been placed at the end of the group because they are slightly less formal and abstract than the other nine.

KKS 838. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed when Ki no Tomonori died

… Though I cannot tell
whether my transient life
 may end tomorrow,
all my thoughts today belong
to sorrow for another.

KKS 839. Mibu no Tadamine. Composed when Ki no Tomonori died

… Why of all seasons
did he take his leave of us
 in these autumn days
when loneliness chills our hearts
even at the sight of the living?

Of the eight poems involving the mourning period, the first five concern the deaths of parents, and so might be expected to convey a deeper sense of loss than most of those in part one. But the compilers have lessened the impact by selecting only poems written after the first access of grief, by including a condolatory verse (KKS 843), and by preferring formal, impersonal works similar in tone to those in part one. The poets' principal concern in most of the five has been to exhibit originality in the use of tear imagery. For example:

KKS 841. Mibu no Tadamine. Written while in mourning for his father

… This unraveled thread
from a wisteria robe
 now becomes a cord
on which to string the jewels
of a moumer's bitter tears.

KKS 843. Mibu no Tadamine. Written when he went to condole with someone who was in mourning

… That your tears should fall
thus ceaselessly as raindrops—
 might it be because
your sleeves, dyed in charcoal hues,
somehow share the stuff of clouds?

The last three poems in this part, all written during or shortly after years of national mourning, might seem to be out of order, since they are more public in nature than their five predecessors. It appears, however, that the compilers meant them to serve as a link to part three, where almost without exception the deceased are again prominent figures, friends, and acquaintances, rather than close relatives, but where the style is less formal and ornate than in part one. All three are free of conspicuous artifice:

KKS 845. Ono no Takamura. Composed while viewing blossoms near a pond during a year of national mourning

… Unbid, his image
rises clear in memory's eye
 when I see the flowers
in bright, quiet reflection
on the surface of the pond.

KKS 846. Fun'ya no Yasuhide. Composed on the death anniversary of the Fukakusa Emperor [Ninmyō]

… Today marks a year
since the shining sun darkened,
  hiding its radiance
in a haze-shrouded valley
overgrown with tall grasses.

KKS 847. Archbishop Henjō. During the reign of the Fukakusa Emperor, the author was in constant attendance on the thone as Head Chamberlain. When the Emperor died, he abandoned court life, went to Mount Hiei, and became a monk. He wrote this poem in the following year, when everyone had stopped wearing mourning and he had begun to hear of rejoicings over promotions and other such things.

… Everyone, they say,
has made the change from mourning
 into gay attire.
Will you not, O mossy sleeve,
at least give up your moisture?

Part three complements part one. The two resemble one another in basic respects—they are nearly the same size, both focus on public figures, friends, and acquaintances, and each contains one poem about a close relative—but part three establishes a separate identity through the greater particularity of its conceptions. No Heian reader could have mistaken the subject of the waka below for anyone but Minamoto Tōru, the man who shaped his famous garden lake to resemble Shiogama Bay in northeastern Japan.

KKS 852. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed on seeing the re-creation of Shiogama when he went to the home of the Kawara Minister of the Left after the Minister's death

… How lonely it looks—
the vast expanse of garden

  with no smoke rising
above Shiogama shore
now that the master is gone.

Poems like the two below also point to relatively specific persons and situations.

KKS 848. Minamoto Yoshiari (845-97). Passing the residence of the Kawara Minister during the autumn of the Minister's death, he observed that the leaves had not yet taken on a deeper color. He composed this poem and sent it inside.

… Ah, how suddenly
all is desolate and sad!
  Not even the leaves
wear their accustomed colors
at the masterless dwelling.

KKS 850. Ki no Mochiyuki. Someoné who had planted a cherry tree had died just as the tree was about to bloom. Mochiyuki composed this poem when he saw the blossoms.

… Human life, alas,
has proved more transitory
  than cherry blossoms.
I had not thought of wondering
which of them I might mourn first.

In all three compositions, the poets complain that the times are out of joint: smoke is not rising from the salt fires at Shiogama; leaves are not changing color in autumn; men are not outlasting cherry blossoms. And the compilers have responded by disrupting the natural order in another respect. In one group of four successive poems, they present autumn leaves, the cuckoo, cherry blossoms, and plum blossoms (KKS 848-51); in a second, only slightly less tight grouping, miscanthus, cuckoo, and hana (KKS 853, KKS 855-56). Such deliberate, sustained reversals of normal seasonal progression occur nowhere else in the anthology.

The mention of flowers connects KKS 856 to KKS 857, the first of the six deathbed poems in part four, which also uses spring imagery. KKS 857 in turn forms a pair with KKS 858 by virtue of authorship and style: the two are by the only women represented in this part, and both make affecting, straightforward lyrical statements.

KKS 857. The Princely Minister of Ceremonial [Atsuyoshi] had begun to live with the Kan 'in Fifth Princess, but before long the Princess died. The Prince found a note tied to one of her curtain-dais streamers, took it down, and saw a poem in her handwriting.

… If in truth your love
is too ardent to permit
  of forgetfulness,
please feel pity when you see
haze trailing in the mountains.

KKS 858. Anonymous. A man's wife suddenly fell ill while he was away in the provinces. When she had grown fatally weak, she composed this poem and died.

… It grieves my spirit
to take leave without hearing
  the sound of your voice,
yet what will it be for you
to sleep in an empty bed?

After a pair of Buddhist reflections on ephemerality (KKS 859-60), Laments ends with two nice blends of reasoning and emotion by Narihira and his son Shigeharu. Shigeharu's poem, the last in the book, functions as a bleak rejoinder to KKS 829, the first.

KKS 862. Ariwara Shigeharu. The author suddenly fell ill while on his way to visit a friend in Kai Province. Realizing that he was dying, he gave someone this poem to take to his mother in the capital.

…"Only a short trip
to Kai Province and back,"
  so I thought as I left—
yet it was the departure
from which there is no return.

As we would anticipate, the two Miscellaneous books, Seventeen and Eighteen (70 and 68 poems, KKS 863-932, KKS 933-1000), contain numerous poems not readily classifiable under more specific rubrics. For example:

KKS 865. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… In what might I wrap
the great happiness I feel?
  Had I foreseen it,
I would have said, "Make wide sleeves
on this robe of Chinese silk."

KKS 997. Fun'ya no Arisue. Composed and presented during the reign of the Jōgan Emperor [Seiwa], when His Majesty asked about the date of 'Man'yōshū'

… It is an old work
from that famous capital
  bearing the same name
as nara oaks whose leaves gleam
rain-wet in the Godless Month.

There are also two distinct groups of waka, centering respectively on the moon and water, which might have been expected to appear in a separate category comparable to Chisato's Wind and Moon, but which nevertheless could be considered miscellaneous in Xiao Tong's sense. On the other hand, most of the remaining compositions (approximately three-fifths of the total) seem, like the two below, to be obvious candidates for Expressing Feelings (jukkai). Tsurayuki and his colleagues, we perceive, have not only rejected a tripartite division like Chisato's, but also ignored the conventional distinction between Miscellaneous and Expressing Feelings.

KKS 948. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Has life on this earth
given rise to human grief
  since antiquity,
or am I the only one
who finds it so hard to bear?

KKS 993. Fujiwara Tadafusa. Composed when the men in the Crown Prince's Attendants' Office received wine, at a time during the reign of the Kanpyo Emperor when Tadafusa had been named third-ranking officer in an embassy to China

… Nowadays I find
that during the lengthy nights
  I rise as first-frost
rises on slender bamboo
and sit with much on my mind.

A partial explanation is probably to be sought in the compilers' disinclination to draw attention to the jukkai category, which, although too well established to be excluded altogether, stood on the boundary between the hare no uta and the inadmissibly personal statement. To subsume the category under Miscellaneous was to make it less personal. Another, more exclusively structural consideration must also have been involved. The creation of three separate categories would have violated the symmetry of the Kokinshū master design, which envisioned three, and only three, post-Love books, including Laments, to balance the three post-seasonal books. It was thus desirable for more than one reason that the poems be presented in two books, both labeled Miscellaneous.

The compilers decided to mass approximately half of their thirty or so truly miscellaneous poems in each of two locations, the first at the beginning of Book Seventeen, to confirm the appropriateness of the title, and the last in a complementary position toward the end of Book Eighteen. They assigned the thirty moon and water poems to Book Seventeen and the bulk of the jukkai compositions to Book Eighteen. To fill out Book Seventeen, and perhaps to provide a change of pace, they then divided moon from water by inserting old age, which although properly a jukkai theme could defensibly be distinguished from the main concerns of Book Eighteen: the troubles stemming from social relationships, career problems, and other external circumstances. In that manner, they were also able to create two books containing almost identical numbers of poems.

Carrying the principle of balance a step further, Tsurayuki and the others pursued a conscious policy of making the tone and style of Book Seventeen as buoyant and formal as possible in order to establish a contrast with, and attenuate, the pessimistic personalism inherent in the main subject matter of Book Eighteen. In the fourteen-poem miscellaneous group with which Book Seventeen begins (KKS 863-76), there are witty treatments of such pleasant matters as the meeting of the Weaver Maid and the Ox-Driver, parties, individual good fortune, auspicious court events, and amusing incidents. Tone and theme, rather than topic, seem to have determined the placement of several of the poems, such as the two below, of which the first would probably have been assigned to Autumn and the second to Parting if the authors had emphasized the frustration of the lovers and the sorrow of separation, rather than the joy of meeting.

KKS 863. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Dew sprinkling my robe:
might it be spray from the oar
  of a boat crossing
where the banks come together
on the River of Heaven?

KKS 864. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… With what reluctance
we say goodbye on a night
  when a ring of friends
sits in fellowship precious
as robes of Chinese brocade!

Almost all the moon poems (KKS 877-85) either offer praise, make courtly comments suitable to social situations, or construct clever conceits; and most of the water poems (KKS 910-30) play with words, feign elegant confusion, question, reason, and otherwise exemplify the hare no uta at its most formal. For example:

KKS 881. Ki no Tsurayuki. On seeing the moon reflected in a pond

… There could not be two,
so I had believed—and yet
  here is a bright moon
not at the rim of the hills

but rising from watery depths.

KKS 882. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Swift runs the channel
in the River of Heaven
  where clouds take their course,
and thus the moon flows onward,
its bright rays never pausing.

KKS 918. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed on encountering rain at Tamino Island when he had gone down to Naniwa

… To escape the rain,
I have gone to Tamino,
  Isle of Straw Raincoats,
but its name, I have observed,
does nothing to keep me dry.

KKS 919. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed when the Priestly Retired Emperor commanded him to present a poem on the topic "cranes standing on a sandbank" during an excursion to the Western River

… We might mistake them
for waves blown in by the wind
  and lingering there—
that flock of reed-dwelling cranes
standing beside the river.

In making selections for the large old-age block (KKS 886-909)—a potentially disruptive element because of its subject matter—the compilers limited overt expressions of melancholy to seven or eight compositions. In the first four poems, the speaker looks back to a happy past; in the next four, and in several later ones, he recognizes his condition without complaint; in others, he discusses the longevity of pine trees rather than his own advanced years; and in one, quoted below, he goes so far as to congratulate himself on being old.

KKS 903. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. Composed during the [reign of Emperor Uda], when His Majesty gave wine to the men in the Courtiers' Hall and presided over a concert

… Why did I repine
because old age had claimed me?
  Had I not grown old,
how might I have been present
to join in this day's pleasure?

Book Seventeen ends with three screen poems. The first was probably included, in spite of its melancholy tone, because its topic and provenance permitted a smooth transition between a preceding waterfall group (KKS 922-29) and Tsurayuki's KKS 931. Tsurayuki, who again occupies a penultimate position, makes a strong, positive statement, reaffirming the basic tone of the book:

KKS 930. Sanjō no Machi. Composed during the reign of the Tamura Emperor [Montokul, when His Majesty looked at a screen painting in the Table Room and said to the ladies-in-waiting, "The waterfall is charming. Compose some poems about it."

… Might it be the same
as the cataract of grief
  dammed fast in my heart?
Though we see water falling,
no sound reaches our ears.

KKS 931. Ki no Tsurayuki. On flowers in a screen painting

… Eternal colors!
Might it perhaps be that spring
 has remained on earth,
never leaving since the time
when they first began to bloom?

The last poem, KKS 932, is linked to Tsurayuki's by provenance and seasonal progression, and to KKS 933, the first poem in Book Eighteen, by theme and tone:

KKS 932. Sakanoue Korenori. A poem composed and written on a folding screen to accompany a picture

… This autumn sadness
evokes tears reminiscent
  of crying wild geese
crossing where hill paddy rice
is reaped and hung down to dry.

KKS 933. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… In this world of ours
what is there of constancy?
 Yesterday's deep pool
in the River of Tomorrow
today becomes a rapid.

Consciousness of ephermerality, implicit in KKS 932 and explicit in KKS 933, contributes to the gloomy ambience of Book Eighteen. It may be observed, for example, in the two poems below, as well as in numerous others.

KKS 942. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Might this world be real,
or might it be but a dream?
  Whether it be dream
or reality I know not,
for we are here and not here.

KKS 943. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… For one in this world
life means being here today
  and gone tomorrow.
Might we call it saddening,
or shall we call it bitter?

But the typical Book Eighteen speaker is concerned with more immediate personal problems. He leads a miserable life in society, ponders means of escape, considers the advantages of reclusion, worries about his aptitude for the eremitic life, longs to seek refuge in the mountains, bewails such specific misfortunes as exile, dismissal from office, and estrangement from friends, and at last becomes either a recluse or, as in the poem below, a homeless wanderer.

KKS 989. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Fate seems to decree
that my wandering must soon
  lose all direction—
I who have no more roots now
than dust floating in the wind.

As a group, the waka in Book Eighteen are more personal than any others in the anthology. A kotobagaki like the one below warns us, however, against the assumption that their sentiments spring directly from individual experience. Like the Love poems in Books Eleven-Fifteen, these are conventional treatments of conventional themes.

KKS 955. Mononobe Yoshina (?-?). A poem in which no syllable is repeated

… I think of going
into mountains to escape
  the trials of the world,
but the person in my thoughts
becomes a chain to hold me.

Perhaps to point up the fact that Expressing Feelings, properly treated, could claim a legitimate place alongside other hare no uta topics, the compilers have ended Book Eighteen with three formal waka presented to the throne. The first two are tactful complaints about bureaucratic disappointments; the third is probably to be taken as an oblique reminder of the author's earlier position as an imperial favorite.

KKS 998. Ōe no Chisato. Presented when he submitted poems during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

… May its accents reach
to the realm above the clouds—
  the sorrowful voice
of the crane among the reeds,
left alone behind his mates.

KKS 999. Fujiwara Kachien. Presented when he submitted poems during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

… Would that like spring haze
it might take visible form
  for our lord to see—
this longing, locked in my heart,
of which others know nothing.

KKS 1000. Ise. Composed and set down at the end when she presented poems in response to an imperial command

… I long for a way
to recapture bygone times,
  to see the palace
of which I but hear rumors
noisy as a rushing stream.

Within the major groupings of both Miscellaneous books, poems are joined in the customary ways. Just as there is temporal progression (albeit imperfect) in Book Eighteen from early unhappiness to thoughts of reclusion to actual divorce from society, so the old-age group in Book Seventeen deals first with the speaker's past, then with his present, and finally with his future (i.e., with the prospect of imminent death). The last old-age composition is associated imagistically with the first water poem:

KKS 910. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Though I cling to life,
I resemble floating foam
  where sea currents meet:
the froth exists, but for it
there is no sheltering shore.

KKS 911. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Awaji Island,
encircled by a garland
  of fair white breakers
such as the sea god uses
when he decorates his head!

As usual, many other links are accomplished through imagery. KKS 911 is linked to KKS 912 by islands and waves:

KKS 912. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… As from the broad sea
waves come rolling in toward shore,
  over and over,

so would I gaze, time after time,
on fair Tamatsu Island.

In the pair below, the common element is tears.

KKS 940. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… The dew that appears
on each leafy utterance
  of the word called "ah"—
what is it but fallen tears
shed in memory of the past?

KKS 941. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… I do not tell them
of each sorrow and travail
  life burdens me with—
and yet my tears, I perceive,
are always the first to know.

The last two waka of the initial Miscellaneous group are bound together by seasonal progression:

KKS 875. Kengei. Composed when some women looked at him and laughed

… I may look to you
like a tree rotting unseen
  deep in the mountains,
but if I should will it so,
blossoms would flower in my heart.

KKS 876. Ki no Tomonori. Once when he had gone to someone else's house to avoid an unlucky direction, his host lent him a robe to wear. He composed this poem as he prepared to return the garment on the following morning.

… Light was the night robe
as a cicada's frail wings,
  yet heavy indeed
hangs the sumptuous fragrance
perfuming all it has touched.

Other connections are established through place, as in the first pair below, through authorship, as in the second, or through both, as in the third (where the authors are brothers).

KKS 928. Mibu no Tadamine. Composed while viewing Otowa Falls on Mount Hiei

… Not a strand of black!
It must have passed through long years
  into ripe old age—
the upper stream of this fall
seething in headlong descent.

KKS 929. Oshikōchi Mitsune. On the same waterfall

… That fleecy white cloud,
steadfast to a single place
  despite blowing winds—
what might it be but water
descending through the ages!

KKS 969. Ariwara Narihira. When Ki no Toshisada was appointed Vice-Governor of Awa, Narihira planned a farewell dinner for him. The hour grew late, but Toshisada, busy with last-minute errands, failed to appear. Narihira sent him this poem.

… Now that I have learned
how painful it is to wait,
  I will be faithful
in my visits to houses
where people may expect me.

KKS 970. Ariwara Narihira. In the days when Narihira attended Prince Koretaka, the Prince be-came a monk and went to live at Ono. Narihira set out to call on him there in the First Month. Since Ono was at the foot of Mount Hiei, the snow was very deep, but he managed to struggle to the hermitage, where he found the Prince looking bored and forlorn. After returning to the capital, he sent the Prince this poem.

… When for an instant
I forget, it seems a dream.
  Did I imagine
I would make my way through snow
in order to see my lord?

KKS 922. Ariwara Yukihira. Composed at Nunohiki Falls

… I will gather up
the transparent beads scattered
  by the waterfall
and borrow them when sadness
has consumed my store of tears.

KKS 923. Ariwara Narihira. Composed when a group of people were reciting poems at the foot of Nunohiki Falls

… There must be a man
unstringing them at the top—
  those transparent beads
scattering incessantly.
Alas for my narrow sleeves!

Books Ten and Nineteen: Names of Things, Miscellaneous Forms

The next book, Miscellaneous Forms, shares a number of characteristics with Book Ten, Names of Things. Each follows a series of books compiled on the basis of subject matter but is not itself so compiled, each appeals to the reader's competitive instinct, and each deviates from the usual Kokinshū aesthetic standards.

Book Ten, the shorter and less interesting of the two, comprises forty-seven poems arranged in four groups, roughly classifiable as birds and insects, plants, places, and artifacts. Almost all are examples of the "hidden topic" (kakushidai) waka, a composition in which the object is the clever concealment of a specified word or words. Sometimes, as with KKS 426 below, there is a connection between the kakushidai and the poem's subject matter; more often, as with KKS 428, there is none.¹⁷

KKS 426. Anonymous. Ume [plum]

… Although they diffuse
a fragrance we shall long for,
  the blossoms, alas,
show little disposition
to linger before our eyes.

KKS 428. Ki no Tsurayuki. Sumomo no hana [damson blossoms]

… Now that so little
remains to us of springtime,
  even the warbler
seems to gaze off into space,
lost in melancholy thought.

The poet may conceal more than one word, as in the first two compositions below, or distribute syllables in a designated pattern, as in the third.

KKS 454. Ki no Menoto (?-?). Sasa, matsu, biwa, baseoba [bamboo grass, pine, loquat, banana leaf]

… Though I have shown him
the true state of my feelings,
  the days have slipped by
while I have waited calmly,
expecting to see him soon.

KKS 455. Hyōe (?-?). Nashi, natsume, kurumi [pear, jujube, walnut]

… This is quite pointless.
Cease your constant lamenting.
  It is not as though
you were leaving the body
that has come through the crisis.

KKS 468. Archbishop Shōhō (ca. 832?-909). Composed when someone told him to recite a sea-sonal poem beginning and ending with the sylla-bles ha and ru and playing on nagame [pensive gaze]

… Intending to feast
my eyes to satiety,
  I wandered among
the blossoms, and now my heart
threatens to scatter with them.

And in the variation known as oriku, illustrated below, the five initial syllables spell out the topic word.¹⁸

KKS 439. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed on the occasion of a Suzakuin maiden-flower contest, with one of the five syllables of ominaeshi [maidenflower] beginning each of the five lines

… No human can tell
the full sum of the autumns
  he has lived to see—
the belling stag frequenting
Ogurayama's high peak.

That such literary games were already popular in the mid-ninth century is suggested by the existence of poems like Yasuhide's KKS 445 and Narihira's KKS 410 below. That their vogue persisted is apparent from the preponderance of Period Three authors in Book Ten, from Retired Emperor Uda's sponsorship of a Names of Things contest around 905, and from the decision to establish a mono no na category in Kokinshuū That the compilers personally welcomed them as vehicles for the display of virtuosity can be inferred from the inclusion here of generous samples of their own work.¹⁹

KKS 445. Fun'ya no Yasuhide. Composed by command of the Nijō Empress [Kōshi] when she was still known as the Mother of the Crown Prince. Topic: medo [a plant resembling bush clover] into which artificial flowers made of wood shavings had been thrust.

… It is not, it seems,
a flowering tree—and yet
  it puts forth blossoms!
May there also be a time
when this aged stock bears fruit.

KKS 410. Ariwara Narihira. Once Narihira was traveling toward the east with one or two friends. When the party reached a place in Mikawa Province called Eight Bridges, they dismounted to sit under the trees, attracted by the sight of some irises blooming beside the stream. Narihira composed this poem, his object being to express sentiments appropriate for a traveler, while beginning each line with the proper syllable from the word kakitsubata [iris].

… I have a dear wife

familiar to me as skirts
  of a well-worn robe,
and thus these distant travels
darken my heart with sorrow.

An occasional kakushidai or oriku poem succeeds in satisfying the aesthetic criteria by which the compilers have appraised other Kokinshū waka. Narihira's KKS 410 appears under Travel, and the composition below would not seem out of place in Autumn.

KKS 432. Anonymous. Yamagaki no ki [mountain persimmon tree]

… Autumn has arrived:
now as the breezes blow cold,
  will not the crickets
utter their plaints night by night
from the plaited brushwood fence?

For the most part, however, the content of Book Ten has been measured with an indulgent yardstick. KKS 455 above, negligible as literature, has gained admission merely because the author has produced an intelligible statement concealing three designated words; and similar considerations have prevailed in many other cases. Book Ten is put forward not as serious literature but as a diversion, a species of kyōgen, a lighthearted invitation to the reader to forget mono no aware, admire displays of mental agility, and amuse himself by trying to find hidden words without recourse to the kotobagaki.

In Book Nineteen, the compilers have brought together waka on assorted subjects, composed in assorted poetic forms and arranged in three categories identified as tanka, sedōka, and haikaika. The "tanka" section, which appears to have been mislabeled by an early copyist, consists of five chōka and a hanka (KKS 1001-6); the sedōka of four repeating poems (KKS 1007-10); and the haikaika of fifty-eight poems resembling ordinary Kokinshū tanka in external form but distinctive in content (KKS 1011-68).

Because dictionaries define haikai as "jest," early scholars assumed that humorous authorial intent was the defining characteristic of the fifty-eight Kokinshū haikaika. In support of their position, we might cite such poems as KKS 1023 and KKS 1062:

KKS 1023. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Beyond enduring,
this passion that attacks me
  from pillow and foot:
I get up and seat myself
in the middle of the bed.

KKS 1062. Ariwara Motokata. Topic unknown

… What distressful thoughts
must afflict the anguished mind
  of the poor old world,
made an object of hatred
by such multitudes of men!

But if the compilers had wished to isolate humorous poems, they would presumably have assigned waka like the following to Book Nineteen, rather than to Miscellaneous.

KKS 873. Minamoto Tōru. Composed on the morning after the Gosechi dances, when he had found a jewel from a hair ornament and had gone looking for the owner

…"Who is your owner?"
To my query the white jewel
 returned no answer.
Might it be permissible
to fall in love with them all?

KKS 874. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. During the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor, the men in the Courtiers' Hall told someone to take a jar to the Empress's apartments with a request for leftover wine. Her Majesty's Chamberlains laughed and took the jar to their mistress, but no answer was made. Toshiyuki sent this poem to one of the Chamberlains after the messenger had returned with his report.

… Where might he be now—
the little wine-jar turtle?
  He has paddled out
far into the open sea
through Koyorogi's rocky surf.

KKS 923. Ariwara Narihira. Composed when a group of people were reciting poems at the foot of Nunohiki Falls

… There must be a man
unstringing them at the top—
  those transparent beads
scattering incessantly.
Alas for my narrow sleeves!

They also would probably have excluded poems like the three haikaika below, which are unlikely to have been written to provoke mirth.

KKS 1018. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… The mists of autumn
now clear away, now gather,
 and thus the beauty
of maidenflowers in bloom

now appears, now vanishes.

KKS 1030. Ono no Komachi. Topic unknown

… On those moonless nights
when I long in vain for him,
 love robs me of sleep
and my agitated heart
burns like a crackling fire.

KKS 1067. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Composed when the Priestly Retired Emperor, on a visit to the Western River, ordered poems on the topic "monkeys crying in mountain valleys"

… Desist, O monkeys,
from melancholy laments.
  Is this not a day
when rich honor is bestowed
on all your mountain valleys?

When we note, in addition, that two Kokinshū haikaika, KKS 1020 and KKS 1031, appear as formal seasonal compositions in the Empress's Contest, and that the organization of the fifty-eight haikaika in Book Nineteen parallels the overall Kokinshū structure in major respects, progressing from the seasons through love to miscellaneous, it seems reasonable to agree with modem scholars who regard the poems not as informal jokes, but as flawed attempts at hare no uta.²⁰

Why, we might ask, did Tsurayuki and his colleagues not discard these waka, as they discarded other compositions from the Empress's Contest and elsewhere that they deemed inferior? A partial explanation may be found in the unquestionable superiority of a poem like Mitsune's KKS 1067 to verses such as the two below from Shinsen man'yōshū.²¹ The compilers may simply have considered KKS 1067 and the others in Book Nineteen too good to ignore altogether.

SSMYS 2. Autumn 8. Anonymous

… I have never heard
that they make their way back to
  the heavens above,
yet one mistakes them for stars—
those autumn chrysanthemums.

SSMYS 2. Love 1. Anonymous

… To feel this yearning
on a single occasion
  would be hard enough,
yet my heart will soon be torn
into a thousand pieces.

The availability of this large group of poems also suggested the possibility of creating a counterpart to Book Ten, and so of recognizing the popularity of the kakushidai poem without damage to the anthology's overall structure. And, as a final consideration, incorporating the haikaika helped solve the problem of where to put the tiny chōka and sedōka sections, which were necessary for the sake of completeness but could not stand alone.

The resultant collection, like Book Ten, provided a change of pace and offered an implicit challenge. As befitted its prominence at the end of the anthology proper, the bid to engage and divert was a strong one. In Book Ten, the answers to the puzzles are plainly stated in the kotobagaki, and the puzzles themselves are of only momentary interest. In Book Nineteen, the reader receives an invitation to bring the full range of his critical faculties to bear. What is the difference between these poems and their seasonal, Love, and Miscellaneous relatives? In what specific respects does each fall short of the compilers' standards? Since such questions are pertinent to our concerns, let us review a few sample cases.

Sometimes the defect is apparent. Seeking a novel treatment of the star lovers theme, Kanesuke, the author of KKS 1014 below, has shifted the focus from the Weaver Maid, where we would expect it, to the Ox-Driver. His conception is amusing and original, as the compilers have recognized in including the poem, but it lacks the deft touch needed to reconcile it with the romantic tone appropriate to a Tanabata composition. The contrast with KKS 175, a model of its kind, is instructive. By using the intensely evocative word momiji, the anonymous poet suffuses his lines with the beauty of autumn leaves; by resorting to the colloquial-sounding, faintly ridiculous hagi ("shins"), Kanesuke moves outside the limits of the permissible, not only for his topic, but for the hare no uta in general. Hagi, which cannot be made compatible with an ambience of elegance and grace, appears nowhere else in the anthology.

KKS 1014. Fujiwara Kanesuke. Written on the Sixth of the Seventh Month in anticipation of the Seventh

… Might he be crossing
the heavenly stream today,
  showing with bared shins
his consuming impatience
to be with his beloved?

KKS 175. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Is it for a bridge
of many-hued leaves to span
  the heavenly stream
that the Weaver Maid awaits
the arrival of autumn?

KKS 1027, a poem with a noticeable utagaki flavor, provides another example of an original conception defeated by questionable diction. Its author, too, has sacrificed beauty in the pursuit of wit. She seems to have hoped to create the requisite balance by introducing the pillow word ashihiki no, which was thought to confer an aura of archaic dignity, but a ludicrous effect results from the juxtaposition of that term with the colloquial sōzu ("scarecrow"). There is no other scarecrow in Kokinshū

KKS 1027. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Ah, what a trial!
Even you make bold, it seems,
 to run after me—
you scarecrow in a paddy
among the foot-wearying hills.

KKS 1027 also suffers from the absence of an attractive sound pattern, a shortcoming it shares with many other haikaika. KKS 1040 below, for example, presents an acceptably conventional conception, and there is no fault in the vocabulary. The author achieves a degree of wit by means of his ōnusa ("sacred wand") conceit, which is probably an allusion to the well-known exchange between Narihira and an anonymous lady (KKS 706-7). But ōnusa is not a sensuous image, and no beauty is provided by the language, which fails utterly to achieve the rhythmic, subtly patterned flow of a superior hare no uta like Tsurayuki's HT 801.

KKS 1040. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… If you assured me
that you cared only for me,
  I would be able
to place all my trust in you—
but your heart is a sacred wand.

HT 801. Ki no Tsurayuki

… No chill in the wind
blowing beneath cherry trees
  where blossoms scatter,
yet we see a fall of snow
unknown to the firmament.

Although the second poem below, KKS 1046, also lacks a clearly discernible sound pattern, its placement suggests that the compilers questioned it primarily because of its mitate. The author of the preceding waka, KKS 1045, cannot be criticized for an indifference to auditory effect (note the repetition of syllables beginning with g and t), but the poem is robbed of beauty by the comparison of the woman to a horse—particularly unfortunate because the Heian animal, scruffy and stocky, in no way resembled the clean-limbed thoroughbred that a modern reader might picture. The compilers, by pairing the two poems, imply that the simile is equally at fault in KKS 1046 (probably because it carries dusty, bedraggled overtones).

KKS 1045. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Do you regard me—
the person you cast aside—
  as a horse in spring
ready to be sent away
to forage in the meadows?

KKS 1046. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Does your coldness mean
that you are discarding me
  as though I were only
an old nest, last year's lodging,
abandoned by a warbler?

Formal imbalance seems to be the problem in other cases. In KKS 1035, for example, the emphasis is not on the speaker's feelings, the putative subject of the composition, which must have been intended as a love poem, but on the jo—on the summer robes thin as cicadas' frail wings—which could be said to occupy four of the five lines. (The verbs in the fourth line do double duty.) For contrast, let us consider KKS 715, a poem from Love (4) with a similar theme. Natsukoromo ("summer robes") is there used as a makura kotoba, adding elegant overtones without distracting attention from the main statement. The cicada imagery associates directly with the speaker's sadness, reinforces the theme of transitoriness (by association with autumn, the main cicada season in poetry), and links unobtrusively, through thin wings, with usuku (a form of usushi, "thin") in line 4. KKS 1035 is heavy-handed by comparison.

KKS 1035. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. Topic unknown

… Habituation
leads, does it not, to close ties,
  even as wrinkles
mold well-worn summer garments
thin as cicadas' frail wings?

KKS 715. Ki no Tomonori. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

… How it saddens me
to hear the cicada's voice
  heralding a time
when your affection for me
will seem thin as summer robes.

Some haikaika authors stumble when they attempt originality in the use of personification. We may surmise that Motokata's basic aim in KKS 1062 below was not to arouse laughter, but simply to use personification in an unexpected way, and thus to add a touch of novelty to the conventional theme of the world as a vale of tears. But the compilers, in pairing his poem with one attributing rational thought processes to the years, indicated that there were limits to the acceptable use of the device. Elegant and amusing when applied to birds and flowers, personification relegated a poem to eccentric status when applied to the world and time.

KKS 1062. Ariwara Motokata. Topic unknown

… What distressful thoughts
must afflict the anguished mind
 of the poor old world,
made an object of hatred
by such multitudes of men!

KKS 1063. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… What was I doing,
that now I am an old man
  with nothing achieved?
And what embarrassing thoughts
might have passed through the years'
     minds?

KKS 1063 can be said to suffer from tonal imbalance as well. In the first three lines, the poet utters a despairing cry; in the last two, he impresses us as flippant. A similar flaw seems to have doomed KKS 1047. Unlike most of the other poems we have examined, it possesses a sound pattern and imagery of the requisite grace, but they are not sufficient to bridge the gulf between the romantic atmosphere of the last three lines and the brisk, prosaic approach of the first two, with their overtones of sweaty summer heat.

KKS 1047. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… Feigning great good sense,
I followed summer custom,
  but still I sleep alone
now when leaves of bamboo grass
whisper on cold frosty nights.

An inappropriate use of imagery was another cause of demotion. Although Komachi's KKS 1030 has been praised in the West,²² the compilers must have felt that it overstepped the fine line between decorum and exaggeration. It was permissible to compare smoldering passion to the hidden fires in Mount Fuji, but a heart could not snap, crackle, and pop.

Sometimes it is difficult to follow the compilers' reasoning. KKS 1018, for example, seems a competent treatment of a conventional topic, deficient in aural interest but nevertheless combining reasoning with attractive imagery. We are obliged to conjecture that Tsurayuki and his colleagues did not consider the conception a sufficiently interesting substitute for the usual approach, which was to play on the flower's name as Mitsune has done in KKS 233.

KKS 1018. Anonymous. Topic unknown

… The mists of autumn
now clear away, now gather,
 and thus the beauty
of maidenflowers in bloom
now appears, now vanishes.

KKS 233. Ōshikōchi Mitsune. A poem composed and presented at a Suzakuin maidenflower contest

… Yearning for a mate,
the stag utters plaintive cries.
  Is he not aware
that in the field where he dwells
the blossoms are maidenflowers?

Similarly, there appears to be no fault in Mitsune's penultimate KKS 1067, which impresses the reader as a model of its kind—witty, expressing auspicious sentiments appropriate to the occasion, and distinguished by great aural appeal. The compilers may have felt that mashira ("monkey"), in spite of its contribution to the sound pattern, departed unacceptably from the assigned topic, which used the word saru for monkey, or, alternatively, that mashira erred on the side of colloquialism.²³

Despite such problematic cases, exaggeration in the broadest sense (i.e., imbalance or breach of decorum resulting from the pursuit of novelty) appears to have been the common element in most haikai poems. Almost all of the flaws we have identified might be subsumed under that heading. So, too, might the shortcomings of Muneyana's KKS 1020, mentioned earlier, where the poet, desirous of punning on fujibakama ("wisteria-trousers"), makes the blatantly arbitrary claim that crickets produce the sound tsuzuri sase ("patch and sew"). And so might those of KKS 1031 below. The subject matter of KKS 1031 is ambiguous, a defect from the compilers' standpoint, but the poem's fatal weakness is that the author has reached for originality by using the verb tsumu ("pick," "pinch") in a manner incompatible with courtly elegance.

KKS 1031. Fujiwara Okikaze. A poem from the Empress's Contest during the reign of the Kanpyō Emperor

… I wish I could be
a young herb in a meadow
  where springtime haze trails,
for then perhaps that person
might feel tempted to pick me.

The haikai section can be called a faithful mirror of contemporary social and cultural realities. On the one hand, ninth-century Heian aristocrats were acutely conscious of the greatness of Chinese civilization; on the other, they were demonstrating a growing desire to assert native values. The authors who strained too hard for wit were emulating what they regarded as the most advanced Chinese literary fashion; the compilers who faulted them were responding to a new emphasis on grace, elegance, and beauty, apparent in literature, in all the fine and applied arts, and in almost every other aspect of upper-class daily life. Even more clearly than the rest of the anthology, Book Nineteen reveals that the Chinese-inspired notion of balance between form and content had come in practice to mean a harmonious blend of Chinese wit and Japanese beauty, and that a poem deficient in beauty could not rank as a successful formal composition. The book is, in short, not only a witty challenge to would-be literary critics, as was suggested earlier, but also, like Kokinshū itself, an assertion of national pride and confidence.

As a structural entity, Book Nineteen exhibits familiar patterns of association and progression. Some of them, such as subject-matter groupings and rhetorical pairings, have been mentioned above, as have correspondences to Book Ten within the overall arrangement of the anthology. One of the latter, the deviation from Kokinshū aesthetic norms, can now be characterized in more specific terms. A review of sample compositions has shown the nature of that deviation to be the same in both cases—namely, a consistent tendency on the part of the authors to stress wit at the expense of grace. It is characteristic of the compilers' taste for paradox that the wit counts as a virtue in Book Ten and a fault in Book Nineteen.

Book Twenty: Songs

By adding the appendix-like Book Twenty, a selection of thirty-two song lyrics (KKS 1069-1100), Tsurayuki and his colleagues accomplished three ends. They equaled the number of books in Man 'yōshū and Keikokushū, the major predecessors of their anthology; they made room for a type of waka probably considered worthy of inclusion both because it could be roughly equated with the yue fu and because it embraced eastern folk songs like the ones in Book Fourteen of Man'yōshū; and they provided a structural and tonal counterpart to the prefaces, thus completing their organizational pattern.

Unlike the other nineteen maki, Book Twenty appears at first to lack a general title. The first five of its thirty-two poems are grouped as Folk Music Office Songs (ōutadokoro no ōn 'uta), the next thirteen as Sacred Songs (kami asobi no uta), and the last fourteen as Eastern Songs (azuma uta). Actually, however, all three groups consist of selections from the repertoire of the Folk Music Office,²⁴ and we may consequently regard Folk Music Office Songs as both a general title and a heading for the first group.

That small group consists of miscellaneous songs for ceremonial occasions, brought together, it seems, partly on the basis of shared antiquity and partly with other structural considerations in mind. The first two, for example, follow the principle of seasonal progression, the third and fourth are linked by diurnal progression, and the fourth and fifth share mountain imagery.

Kami asobi no uta, the heading attached to the second group, is another name for kagura uta, songs used in "sacred music" performances at Shinto shrines and the Heian court.²⁵ The customary structure of such events is adumbrated in KKS 1074-81. The first six uta derive from the kagura category known as torimono ("things taken"), songs so called from the auspicious objects successively flourished as a god was welcomed during the initial stages of a program. The compilers have recognized the special religious importance of sakaki branches by including two sakaki torimono:

KKS 1074. A torimono song

… How luxuriant
in the presence of the gods—
  the sakaki leaves
growing where a sacred fence
encloses the mountain shrine.

KKS 1075. A torimono song

… Like the sakaki,
flourishing with leaves unscathed
  by recurrent frosts,
even so will they prosper,
those attendants of the gods.

After the torimono, which accounted for a large segment of the total performance, it was usual to present a song to Karakami, a palace guardian deity. The compilers have substituted one in honor of the goddess Amaterasu:

KKS 1080. A song for the Sun Goddess

… Rein in your young horse
at Hinokuma River,
  at Hinokuma,
and let him drink there a while
that I may at least see your back.

A standard kagura performance ended with another substantial round of singing and dancing, designed to entertain and then to see off the divine visitor. It is represented by a single song:

KKS 1081. A song in modulated key

… Plum blossom rain hats!
Those are the hats the warblers
  stich up for themselves,
finding willow filaments
and twisting them into thread.

The last five songs in this group (KKS 1082-86) prove to derive not from the kagura repertoire, as would have been expected, but from the Great Thanksgiving Service (daijōsai), a Shinto ceremony staged at the start of a new reign, with the Emperor as its central figure.²⁶ Some daijōsai uta, like KKS 1083 for Emperor Seiwa below, treat folk concerns; others, like KKS 1084, concentrate on the sovereign (here Emperor Yōzei). All include place names associated with their places of origin.

KKS 1083. A song in modulated key

… I would feel sorry,
sorry (ah, Sarayama
  in Mimasaka!)
if gossip tarnished my name.
Never, never must it be.

KKS 1084. A song in modulated key

… We shall serve our lord
for countless generations,
  ceaselessly as flows
the barrier's Fuji River
in the province of Mino.

With one exception, the songs in the third group are identified as azuma uta from specific eastern provinces. Folk Music Office songs from the east were often presented as adjuncts to kagura performances, notably at the special festivals (rinjisai) of two major shrines near the capital, Kamo and Iwashimizu. The compilers have arranged their examples by province, with subdivisions of the usual kind. KKS 1093 and KKS 1094, for instance, are linked by ocean imagery, KKS 1088 and KKS 1089 by a common place name. The last poem in the group—and the only one in Book Twenty by a named author—is a song composed for the Kamo Special Festival by Toshiyuki:

KKS 1100. Fujiwara Toshiyuki. A song for the Kamo Winter Festival

… Through ten thousand years,
never will their color change—
  the fair young pine trees
fresh and green at the great shrine
of the mighty Kamo gods.

Several questions suggest themselves. Why has KKS 1080 replaced the orthodox song in honor of Karakami? Why are daijōsai songs listed under the heading kami asobi no uta? Why are azuma uta emphasized and other types of regional songs virtually ignored? Why does a collection of folk songs end with a work by a famous contemporary poet? The answers are probably to be sought both in the compilers' sense of mission and in their concern for form.

As noted in Chapter Five, Tsurayuki attempts in part one of the kanajo to describe the characteristics, uses, and history of Japanese poetry in such a way as to place the waka on an equal footing with the shi and kanshi. The second part of the preface, although it may be regarded as primarily an account of the anthology's immediate origins, demonstrates the same attitude when it praises the reigning sovereign, boasts that it is he who has commissioned Kokinshū4 asserts that the collection will guarantee the survival of the waka (thus maintaining it to be worthy of preservation as serious literature), and rejoices that the compilers "have been born in this era and … have lived to see poetry receive official recognition." The apparent anomalies in Book Twenty can be said to arise from similar concerns. By inserting KKS 1080, the compilers have not only honored the progenitor of the imperial line, but also linked their anthology to the puissant goddess; by including daijōsai songs associated with Period Two and Period Three sovereigns, they have paralleled the kanajo praise of Emperor Daigo; by placing the daijōsai group immediately after the kagura songs, where it acquires a borrowed aura of holiness, they have further complimented the ruling house.

The Man'yōshū precedent provides one probable reason for the emphasis on azuma uta. Assuming that Tsurayuki and his colleagues wished to keep Book Twenty small so as to balance it against the preface(s), they may have slighted other types of folk songs in order to include an ample representation of the one singled out by their predecessors. We should also bear in mind, however, that there was a close connection between the azuma uta and the Kamo Special Festival, an event said to have been founded by Emperor Uda.²⁷ If the tradition is correct, to call attention to such songs was to pay indirect homage to one of the men most responsible for the return of the waka to public life.

Finally, Toshiyuki's poem, KKS 1100, was a uniquely felicitous choice for the key position at the end of the anthology. Because it had been composed for the first Kamo Special Festival,²⁸ it repeated the obeisance to Retired Emperor Uda. Stylistically, it returned the reader to the Kokinshū norm, bridging the gap between the compilers' basic standards and the relative naivete of the Book Twenty songs. Tonally, it was a ringing assertion of native beliefs, values, and attitudes—a return to the magico-religious roots of Japanese literature, and to Man'yō-style optimism, proclaiming even time, the invincible antagonist, to be powerless against the mighty gods. And no Heian reader would have missed the implicit comparison of the fair young pine trees to Kokinshū itself. In this, their last poetic statement, the compilers echo Tsurayuki's triumphant pronouncement at the end of the kanajo: "Time may pass and circumstances may change, pleasures and sorrows may succeed one another, but these poems will endure."

Notes

¹ The discussion below draws frequently on Matsuda, Kokinshū no kōzō, which is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. See also Arai; Konishi, "Association and Progression"; and Kikuchi, Kokinteki sekai.

² Although Ise monogatari as such was not an acceptable model for an official poetry collection, it or similar works may have helped to inspire the inclusion of the kotobagaki, the introductory remarks that function in Kokinshū as brief notations of the circumstances under which the waka were composed. The origins of the individual comments cannot be traced today, but it seems likely that the compilers provided some from their own brushes—including many instances of the commonest one, dai shirazu, "topic unknown," which often seems to mean "circumstances of composition unknown"—and that they obtained others from the sources they used. For a discussion of the possible relationship between one group of Kokinshū kotobagaki and a group of almost identical prose passages in Ise monogatari, see McCullough, Tales of Ise, pp. 60-61. The verbatim reproduction of sources, taken in conjunction with the Heian predilection for flexible nomenclature, may also help to explain the varying forms in which authors' names appear in the anthology. (See McCullough, Kokin Wakashū.) The notion of editorial consistency in this respect, which has been imposed in the present volume, was as foreign to Tsurayuki and his colleagues as to their Man'yōshū predecessors.

³ Reasoning from analogy, scholars conjecture that Motokata must have been dead by the time Kokinshū was completed. However, his dates remain unknown.

⁴ Prince Sadatoki (874-929) was Emperor Seiwa's son by a daughter of Fujiwara Mototsune.

⁵ The translations obscure the correspondences between the first 3 lines: the colored leaves on the oak trees at Saoyama will probably scatter (KKS 281); the colored leaves enclosed by rocks in the deep mountains will probably scatter (KKS 282).

⁶ Mitsune expresses the conventional Buddhist belief that this world is a place of sorrows; Henjō probably alludes to a passage in the Lotus Sutra, "These songs of the Buddha … are as untainted with worldly things as the lotus flower in the water." (Translation from Katō et al., Three-Fold Lotus Sutra, pp. 246-47.) KKS 165 and 166 both ask questions in feigned puzzlement: "Why should it deceitfully seek to make us take dewdrops for gems?" (KKS 165); "Where in the clouds might the moon be sheltering?" (KKS 166).

⁷ This was the case, for example, at an event commemorated in Kaifūsō (KFS 64).

⁸Ōkagami, p. 47 (translated in McCullough, Ōkagami, p. 76).

⁹ See Matsuda, Kokinshu no kōzō, p. 342, for a discussion of her identity.

¹⁰ The first line of the anthem reads kimi ga yo wa ("[May] our lord's reign [endure]"), a variation that appears to date from the medieval period. See Ozawa, Kokin wakashu, p. 168.

¹¹ There seems to have been nothing comparable in early Chinese literature. It might be noted, however, that the principle of progression was employed in Vidyakāra's Subhāştaratnakoşa, an 11th-century anthology of Sanskrit court poetry. See Ingalls, p. 192.

¹² In attempting to call attention to the wordplay, the translation of KKS 469 falsifies the tone. See Chap. 5, n. 79.

¹³ There are actually 13 poems in the group beginning with KKS 470, counting an anonymous lady's reply to a composition by Narihira.

¹⁴ There are puns on naniwa (place name; "anything") and towa (place name Toba with medial voicing; "eternally," "forever").

¹⁵Koto ni masaru can mean "exceeds the koto."

¹⁶ The relationship of the deceased to the poet is unclear in a few cases, such as KKS 850, 855, and 856.

¹⁷ The syllables wa and ha are developments from an original single syllable.

¹⁸ Still more complex forms flourished later in the Heian period, but it is uncertain whether they were known in Tsurayuki's day. See Waka bungaku daijiten, p. 139: oriku kutsukamuri no uta; and McCullough and McCullough, p. 77, n. 46.

¹⁹ Tsurayuki, Tomonori, and Tadamine, with 6, 5, and 2 poems respectively, account for more than 27 percent of the compositions in Book Ten. Only Mitsune is unrepresented.

²⁰ See Kikuchi, "Kokinshū haikaika ron"; and Kikuchi, Kokinteki sekai, pp. 204-18, to both of which the discussion below is generally indebted. The title haikaika has yet to be satisfactorily explained. The translation Eccentric Poems is based on the conjecture that the compilers used the term to mean deviation from a norm. Alternatively, Tsurayuki and the others may have intended it to be taken as license to smile at the authors' shortcomings; or, like "tanka," it may represent a misinformed later addition.

²¹ See the discussion in Chap. 4, p. 268.

²² Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, pp. 205-6.

²³ The second suggestion is an old one. See Matsuda, Shinshaku, 2: 933.

²⁴ An administrative entity created around the end of the 8th century to gather, preserve, edit, perform, and teach native folk songs, as opposed to imported musical forms, which were under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Elegant Music (gagakuryo).

²⁵ See McCullough and McCullough, pp. 410-11, for a discussion.

²⁶ For details, see McCullough and McCullough, pp. 374-78.

²⁷ See Tachibana, Ōkagami, pp. 51-52 (translated in McCullough, Ōkagami, pp. 295-96).

²⁸Ōkagami, p. 253 (translated in McCullough, Ōkagami, p. 216).

Abbreviations

Citations of poetry contests in the form "B.1" refer to the numbers in Appendix B. For the editions used and full publication data, see the Works Cited section, pp. 561-67.

BKSRS

Bunka shūreishū

BS

Bo shi chang qing ji

CC

Chu ci

FDK

Fudoki kayō

GR

Hanawa Hokinoichi, comp., [Shinkō] Gunsho ruijū

GS

Uchida Sennosuke, ed., Gyokutai shin 'ei

GSS

Gosenshū

HH

Hagitani Boku, Heianchō uta awase taisei

HT

Ki no Tsurayuki, Tosa nikki (ed. Hagitani Boku)

KBKK

Sugawara Michizane, Kanke bunso6, kanke koshu

KeiKS

Keikokushū

KFS

Kaiffūsō

KJK

Kojiki kayō

KKS

Kokin wakashū (ed. Saeki Umetomo)

KT

Kuroita Katsumi, ed., Kokushi taikei

KW

Kudai waka, in [Kōchū] Kokka taikei

MYS

Man'yōshū (ed. Takagi Ichinosuke et al.)

NKBT

Takagi Ichinosuke et al., Nihon koten bungaku taikei

NS

Nihon shoki kayō

QHSJN

Ding Fubao, ed., Quan han sanguo jin nanbei chao shi

QTS

Quan tang shi

RUS

Ryōunshū

SIS

Shūishū

SJ

Shi jing. The numbers cited are those in Karlgren, Book of Odes

SKKS

Shinkokinshū

SSMYS

Shinsen man 'yōshū (Takano Taira)

SW

Shinsen waka

TN

Ki no Tsurayuki, Tosa nikki (ed. Suzuki Tomotarō et al.)

WX

Xiao Tong, ed., Wen xuan

YFSJ

Guo Maoqian, ed., Yue fu shi ji

YTXY

Xu Ling, comp., Yu tai xin yong

ZKT

Matsushita Daisaburō, Zoku kokka taikan