SOURCE: Horton, H. Mack. “Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1388).” In Medieval Japanese Writers: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume Two Hundred Three, edited by Steven D. Carter, pp. 200-16. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1999.

[In the following essay, Horton discusses Yoshimoto's personal and literary heritage and his formative years as a poet. He also analyzes the poet's works and evaluates his legacy.]

Nijō Yoshimoto was the most important court literatus of the violent and divisive era of the Northern and Southern Courts (Nanbokushō, 1336-1392). Born into the highest stratum of the aristocracy, he served the Northern Court four times as regent, dominating court politics either personally or through his sons for most of the last four decades of his life. His political position was buttressed by extensive literary activity; he became adept at uta and Chinese poetry, wrote voluminously about court ceremonies and protocol, and may have composed the famous historical tale Masukagami (The Clear Mirror, circa 1376). His most important contributions to literary history, however, lay in the field of renga (linked verse). Yoshimoto composed the first extant renga treatises, compiled the first extant anthology, and codified the renga rules. Through his efforts linked verse began to gain recognition as a high courtly art.

It was Yoshimoto's heritage to rule. He was born the fifth head of the Nijō house, which had been founded by his great-grandfather Nijō Yoshizane. Though Yoshizane and the subsequent heads of the house before Yoshimoto all rose to the office of regent, however, the Nijō house was not as wealthy as the Ichijō and Kujō regental houses, which like the Nijō were descended from sons of the eminent politician Kujō Michiie. The cause of this financial inferiority, which may have helped spur Yoshimoto's own deep-seated will to political and literary leadership, was a falling out between Michiie and his son Yoshizane when the latter was still a boy. The rift evidently deepened with time; the son's promotions did not come as fast as those of his Kujō and Ichijō brothers, and some think that he secretly informed on his father to the Hōjō regent, who oversaw the military government in Kamakura. Whether that allegation was true or not, Yoshizane finally acquired the office of regent through the backing not of his father but of the military. Yoshimoto's own career would similarly profit from close ties to military rulers. The estrangement between father and son culminated in 1252, when Yoshizane was cut out of Michiie's will. The family library passed into the hands of the Kujō and Ichijō heirs, who also acquired most of the house property.

Two of Yoshizane's sons succeeded him as heads of the Nijō house, but both took religious orders at forty years of age, probably, it is thought, for financial reasons. The fortunes of the house revived, however, under the fourth Nijō head, Michihira, Yoshimoto's father, who went on to an eventful political career that culminated in his service as regent to Emperor Hanazono and then to Emperor Go-Daigo.

His heir, Yoshimoto, was born in 1320, when Michihira was thirty-three. Yoshimoto's mother, Enshi, was the granddaughter of the powerful courtier Saionji Sanekane (or Sanekanu), chancellor (daijō daijin), poet, and lover of Lady Nijō (no relation to the regental Nijō house), who wrote the Towazugatari (Confessions of Lady Nijō, circa 1313). Blessed with powerful connections among both his paternal and maternal relatives, the young Yoshimoto prospered, rising to the office of provisional middle counselor at the age of nine in the court of Go-Daigo. His father, Michihira, was particularly close to that emperor, having served as his tutor when the latter was still crown prince and then having installed one of his daughters (Yoshimoto's half sister Eishi) in his court as Nyōgo (junior consort). Michihira was accordingly an enemy of bakufu power.

Yoshimoto's literary heritage was no less brilliant. Through his father he was a lineal descendant of Gokyōgoku Yoshitsune, the famous regent and poet. Even more impressive was his connection, via the wife of Michihira's father, to Fujiwara Tameaki and thence back to the great Fujiwara Teika. The Kyōgoku poet Eifukumon'in, consort of Emperor Fushimi, was his mother's aunt. Some of his own Nijō antecedents were themselves accomplished poets, as well: Yoshizane, Michihira, and Michihira's mother, Senshi, are particularly well represented in the imperial anthologies. Yoshizane was also a renga enthusiast.

Yoshimoto's early prosperity at court came to a shattering halt in 1331 when Go-Daigo's plot to overthrow the Hōjō bakufu was prematurely discovered, resulting in his flight to Nara and eventual exile to Oki Island. Michihira was implicated in the coup, known as the Genkō Disturbance, and Yoshimoto resigned his court office in 1332. The Hōjō replaced Go-Daigo with a son of Emperor Go-Fushimi, known to history as Kōgon. The following year, however, Go-Daigo's generals rose up against the bakufu enemies of the throne and paved the way for Go-Daigo's return in 1333. Hōjō Takatoki, the last Hōjō shogunal regent, dispatched Ashikaga Takauji to deal with this new loyalist threat, but with Go-Daigo's blessing Takauji turned on his erstwhile leader, defeated the bakufu army, and occupied the capital in 1333. Nitta Yoshisada destroyed the Hōjō stronghold in the east later the same year. Relieved of Hōjō interference, Go-Daigo reinstituted direct imperial rule, at which time his servant Nijō Michihira returned to office as well, eventually surpassing in power his Kujō and Ichijō relatives. It was perhaps fortunate that Michihira died two years later in 1335, at the height of Go-Daigo's Kenmu Restoration, for he did not live to see Takauji apostatize once more in 1336, this time turning on the emperor himself.

Yoshimoto's formative years, then, were fraught with political division and instability. There had been two rival imperial lines since the days of his great-grandfather Yoshizane, when the princely sons of Emperor Go-Saga established the senior (Jimyō'in) and junior (Daikakuji) imperial houses, whose heirs alternately occupied the throne. Go-Daigo was descended from the junior branch. Complicating this political division was the poetic split in the Mikohidari house, the descendants of Fujiwara Teika's son Fujiwara Tameie having divided into the competing Nijō (not the regental Nijō), Kyōgoku, and Reizei lines. The Nijō poetic house then became affiliated with the Daikakuji imperial line, and the Kyōgoku and Reizei with the Jimyō'in. These divisions remained in effect during Yoshimoto's youth, and as a young man he composed in both the Nijō and Kyōgoku styles.

In 1336, however, with his father's imperial ally Go-Daigo opposed by an uncommonly ambitious and powerful warrior, Yoshimoto was faced with a momentous choice of allegiance. He was just sixteen years old and fatherless. Go-Daigo had treated him well after his father's death and groomed him as heir to a regental family. Yoshimoto was aware of his debt, writing much later in Sagano monogatari (Tale of Sagano, 1386) that “in my youth I received special favor from Emperor Go-Daigo and Emperor Kōgon, perhaps because they felt I possessed a retentive memory.” Evidently he was also treated well by Kōgon, who was a puppet of Takauji; this favored status, plus Takauji's own goodwill, may have influenced Yoshimoto to support the new regime. He may have also been moved by the example of his granduncle Nijō Morotada, the second head of the family and former regent, who likewise chose Takauji's side. Yoshimoto may, even at this young age, have consciously decided for himself that direct imperial rule was by now a chimera and that the court would thereafter necessarily cooperate with the military. The reasons for Yoshimoto's decision must remain speculative, as no extended diary of his survives.

Yoshimoto's decision was soon rendered irreversible when Takauji chose to appoint a new sovereign, Kōmyō, who at the time was staying at Yoshimoto's own mansion. Whether by accident or design, Yoshimoto was thus fully committed to his new course, at a time when it was by no means sure that Takauji would emerge victorious. The warrior had already been driven out of the capital once by loyalist troops earlier that year. Several months later, however, it was Go-Daigo's turn to flee, whereupon he took the imperial regalia with him to the southern mountains of Yoshino and established a rival Southern Court. In this endeavor he was aided by Yoshimoto's uncle, Nijō Moromoto, who would serve the south as regent.

Yoshimoto's rise at Kōmyō's court was swift, and by age twenty he had reached the office of palace minister. Two years later he was made tutor to the crown prince, and a year after that, in 1343, he was minister of the right. Upon attaining high office he set out to school himself in court usages and precedents (yūsoku kojitsu), upon which so much of court life and government were based, building on the knowledge he had already acquired with his uncommonly “retentive memory” in earlier years at court. This concerted study would serve him well in later life; he used it to reinforce his own authority in high office and traded lessons on it for preferment from successive shoguns. His determination to master the subject is also an early indication of his deep-seated ambition not only to succeed but to lead. Even more telling was a prayer that he wrote at age twenty-three to Kasuga Shrine, asking that he might soon be granted the office of regent.

These were also years of isolation, however; his mother had already died in 1339, and his granduncle Morotada, presumably a source of advice and support, followed in 1341. One of his main rivals was Tōin Kinkata, an astute politician who had served Go-Daigo and then Kōgon. When Yoshimoto was made minister of the right, Kinkata was promoted to the higher position of minister of the left, and he was immeasurably better connected at court through many relatives. (Remarkably, he would go on to serve in the same office in the Southern Court when they briefly captured the capital in 1351, largely because of his scholarly reputation.) Yoshimoto, by contrast, had few influential relatives left, and his first marriage, if it may be so called, was to a lady-in-waiting in his house named Saemonnokami no Tsubone, who is otherwise unknown and who evidently brought no influential family backing of her own to the match. From this union Yoshimoto's first son, Moroyoshi, was born in 1345.

Though sheer speculation, it is possible that his own lack of influential relatives predisposed him to finding sources of support outside the court, notably members of the military aristocracy, especially in view of their increasing political power. He would also go outside the confines of the court in the cultural arena, forging ties with talented commoners as he progressively dominated the field of linked verse.

By the time Yoshimoto reached maturity in the 1340s, linked verse had become an extremely popular literary form, and poets both at court (dōjō) and in the various commoner strata (jige) were becoming increasingly skilled at linking seventeen- and fourteen-syllable poems into hundred-verse sequences (hyakuin). At court teams of poets had been gathering since at least the time of Emperor Go-Toba and competing for prizes by linking serious (ushin) and frivolous (mushin) verses. This constituted an early example of the interaction between the elegant (ga) and the mundane (zoku) that would animate the entire subsequent history of the art. Such competitions were still popular among court poets when Yoshimoto was born; Emperor Hanazono wrote in his Hanazono tennō shinki (1320), for example, that “there was renga during a moment of leisure. We divided into ushin and mushin teams … I was mushin.” As regent in Hanazono's court, Yoshimoto's father, Michihira, may have competed in such competitions.

In jige circles it had long been popular for poets to gather beneath the cherry blossoms in the spring at certain temples to compose verse under the guidance of hananomoto (beneath the blossoms) masters. As important as the sheer numbers who attended such meetings was their social variety. The dōjō and jige spheres were indeed separate, but they overlapped even in this formative period of renga history. The court poet Nijō Tameyo, who compiled the second of his two imperial anthologies, Shoku senzaishū (Collection of a Thousand Years Continued), in the year Yoshimoto was born, is known to have composed at hananomoto gatherings, and he is generally believed to have cooperated with the prominent jige master Zenna in the composition of an early collection of basic renga rules, Kenji shinshiki (New Rules of the Kenji Era, circa 1275-1278). Another of the court renga enthusiasts who composed at the annual hananomoto sessions was Michihira, who, as Yoshimoto would later relate in Tsukuba mondō (Questions and Answers on the way of Tsukuba, circa 1372), “stopped his carriage … beneath the blossoms at Washinoo and contributed hokku [opening poems] and other verses.” Such “cultural straddling” or “circularity” marks the development of the discipline far more profoundly than in the case of uta, the initial canonization of which was limited more generally to the courtly sphere.

Go-Daigo's destruction of the Hōjō regime in Kamakura during Yoshimoto's youth and the subsequent establishment of the Ashikaga bakufu not in Kamakura but in the ancient capital fostered cultural exchange by bringing easterners and westerners together at linked-verse sessions. With such concourse came confusion, however, for disparate renga circles brought with them different sets of renga rules. In 1334, the year after Go-Daigo's restoration, an anonymous lampoon displayed at the intersection of Nijō Avenue and the Kamo riverbed claimed that renga sessions were in disarray because of the mixing of Kyoto and Kamakura poets and that anyone now felt qualified to be a judge at renga gatherings. That renga should be so singled out bears witness to its popularity and cultural impact; the genre was now so important to the anonymous critic that the lack of standard rules deeply mattered. Given the interpersonal nature of the art, standardization would be essential to the smooth functioning of individual sessions.

Yoshimoto's formative years, therefore, were marked by growing interaction between renga groups and concomitant disorder. While still a young man he apparently determined that he would become the courtly arbiter of the art, shape its poetic energy, codify it, and try to introduce it into the courtly canon. His own given name, Yoshimoto—literally “good foundation”—was fortuitously symbolic of his enterprise. He probably had various motives, although one of the most basic appears to have been an abiding love of renga for its own sake. He certainly had other, more political, motivations, however. Indeed, to the fourteenth-century courtly mind poetic creativity and literary scholarship were closely related to political concerns; cultural accomplishment had for centuries been seen as a basic requirement for imperial esteem and political power. Regardless of the political realities of the period, the court still defined itself as tastemaker for the nation, and much of the rest of society agreed. The new generation of Ashikaga warrior leaders made it one of their central concerns to buttress power won by force of arms with cultural legitimacy, after the fashion of their courtly antecedents, and they actively solicited courtly cultural direction and patronized the arts themselves to demonstrate their moral fitness to govern.

No one was more aware of the interrelation between cultural and political authority than Yoshimoto. His work to raise renga to the level of uta and have it accepted as a high art at court must be understood within the context of his own political position and enormous political ambition. His love of the art was always a prime motivator in his task, but his need for political power was also always operative. Renga perfectly suited his political ambitions, both because he enjoyed it for its own sake and because it had no preestablished doyen at court. Renga leadership was not dominated by longstanding and exclusive poetic houses such as the Kyōgoku, Reizei, or Nijō, and the mantle of courtly renga authority had not been contested for centuries as it had for uta. Yoshimoto evidently recognized both the groundswell of renga popularity and also the power vacuum that existed at court, and he determined early in life that he would step into the leadership role.

Unlike some of his courtly colleagues, then, Yoshimoto chose to recognize new centers of political and literary power and work with them to their mutual interest. His task, in short, was to enhance and trade as effectively as possible his immense cultural capital as a leading representative of the court tradition (and to a diminishing but still considerable extent his political capital as a high court minister as well) for the political power of the military and the literary vitality of the jige stratum. It remained for Yoshimoto to implicate the new military hegemons as completely as possible into the political and cultural value system of the court, trading courtly rank and literary guidance for shogunal support of his own political and literary goals.

His choice of the jige master Kyūsei as his teacher and collaborator displayed an open-minded attitude rare for one of his social class, and it also demonstrated that he had already generated some idea of what he was setting out to do in the renga world. As he wrote in Renri hishō (Secret Treatise on Joined Grain [or Renga Principles], 1349), “Time passes and styles change, so there is no need to preserve mindlessly the old standards in all things. Adjust to peoples' preferences, avoid personal biases, and respect the masters of the day and the usages of the age.” Kyūsei, of unknown origins, was a disciple of the jige poet Zenna but had also studied waka with the court poet Reizei Tamesuke, an ontogeny that again evidences the cross-fertilization in the renga world that was developing at the turn of the fourteenth century. He was already a recognized renga master before Yoshimoto was born. Yoshimoto apparently chose Kyūsei because he was the most catholic of all the jige candidates in his linking skills. Extraordinarily long-lived, Kyūsei served as Yoshimoto's advisor for most of the courtier's life. Hekirenshō (Distorted Treatise on Linked Verse, 1345) is influenced by Kyūsei's teachings, and he had an enormous impact until his death on Yoshimoto's subsequent renga work.

Once Yoshimoto had developed his mission and acquired the requisite skill and adviser, he then began to advocate a single high style and a body of supporting documents. That style blended what he considered to be the best characteristics of the prevailing dōjō and jige approaches, and he evidently hoped that it would become a universal standard. By Yoshimoto's day the cultural circularity of the era was already beginning to blur differences between dōjō and jige styles, neither of which was in any case monolithic. Though a huge generalization, it appears that traditionally dōjō renga had been more deeply influenced, naturally enough, by court uta practice than had jige work. In their serious verse, dōjō renga poets tended toward elegant expressions of ineffable beauty (yūgen), loftiness (take), and deep feeling (ushin). Reflecting the courtly roots of renga as a two-person waka poem, the upper and lower verses of dōjō verse often were not as independent as in the jige variety.

Jige practitioners in particular tended toward a different type of linking, in which each verse was independent yet linked closely through verbal associations (yoriai). Obviously this style was also influenced by the uta tradition, since those verbal associations had been established in uta poetry. The upper and lower verses in jige couplets did not fit together as an uta poem might, however; instead they worked to generate a dynamic tension between the two parts of the couplet, linked by association and meaning and yet separate. They often lacked the elegance and high-mindedness of dōjō uta.

It seems that of all of Zenna's disciples, Kyūsei alone was able to imbue his verse with the elegance and depth of uta while retaining the dynamic and independent equipoise between the links. Yoshimoto's contribution to the style he personally championed was therefore less one of independent invention than perspicacity in knowing what he hoped to achieve and then recognizing it in Kyūsei. Yoshimoto's politics of fusion between the court and the holders of real power was thus reiterated in his stylistic blend of courtly and non-courtly elements.

Early in his career Yoshimoto presented examples of his preferred approach in Gekimōshō (Treatise Assailing Darkness, 1358). Among them are these poems by Kyūsei, which are linked to other poets' preceding verses:

… (Regrets are not limited
to blossoms after all.
Shall I see it again?
The dawn moon
in the morning haze.)

.....

… (With this has come
the final parting.
Blossoms falling in the rain,
then last night's
mountain gusts.)

.....

… (Cool by the spring,
the pine wind blows
South of
the Bay of Sumiyoshi
the moon appears.)

All three are notable for their waka lexicon and their attempt to generate the ineffable beauty of yūgen. Each verse is packed with meaning that is expressed with even more condensed rhetoric than in uta stanzas, and each also possesses a rhythm and a tension between the verses that is unique to renga.

Yoshimoto's project, however, was not to make renga the same as uta but rather to make it equal yet different. This is evidenced by a remark in Tsukuba mondō insisting that in the ideal renga verse “the poet concentrates on the conception, polishes its expression, and works to generate interest at the session.” As if in reflection of his own times and his own career, Yoshimoto's preferred style of renga mixed the courtly tradition with a contemporary contestatory spirit and the conviction that the unpardonable sin was to be elegant but boring. Only by combining elegance and “interest at the session” could Yoshimoto hope to win both courtiers and commoners to the new stylistic approach.

In passing, however, it must be reiterated that Yoshimoto's primary contribution here was less the invention of a new style than its aristocratic co-optation; Kyūsei's many disciples were already following their teacher in composing with both vitality and elegance, and Yoshimoto was not alone among court and warrior aristocrats in admiring them. Again, Yoshimoto's project would not have been as successful as it was had he not catalyzed a movement that already had a broad social base.

In the domain of uta Yoshimoto probably received his initial instruction from his father and his father's circle in Go-Daigo's court. This meant that the fledgling courtier was initially trained in the conservative Nijō poetic style that Go-Daigo's Daikakuji line had espoused. He also appears to have studied with the great jige poet Ton'a in his early twenties, as well as with Nijō Tamesada, both of whom were Nijō-style adepts. Renga was always Yoshimoto's first love, however, and he does not appear to have been active in courtly uta circles as a young man.

In 1346 Yoshimoto's prayer to be made regent was finally realized, and it then became incumbent on him as a premier member of the court government to participate in formal uta gatherings. Emperor Kōmyō's court supported the Kyōgoku style of poetry, which was more liberal than the Nijō variety, however. The senior branch of the imperial house had been out of power since Go-Daigo acceded in 1318; Emperor Kōmyō, and more importantly the retired sovereigns Kōgon and Hanazono, intended to take advantage of their ascendancy to compile an imperial anthology that would showcase the Kyōgoku style, the first since Gyokuyōshū (Collection of Jeweled Leaves, 1313) by Kyōgoku Tamekane. To gather new material for their venture they sponsored a major court poetry gathering for which each participant would submit one hundred uta verses. Yoshimoto accordingly composed his verses for this Jōwa hyakushu (Hundred-verse Sequences of the Jōwa Era, 1346) in the Kyōgoku manner, and five were chosen for inclusion in the new anthology, named Fūgashū (Collection of Elegance), which appeared in 1349. He was perfectly aware of his stylistic shift, and at the end of his life he wrote in Kinrai fūteishō (Poetic Styles of the Present, 1387) that “For Jōwa hyakushu I composed verses in the variant style (ifū) of Lord Tamekane.” His rival, Tōin Kinkata, who had immediately resigned as minister of the left when Yoshimoto was made regent, sniffed in his diary Entairyaku (1311-1360), “The Regent is not yet a familiar” at poetry meetings. It was certainly true that Yoshimoto's main interest was still renga, not uta. His decision to compose uta at all and then to do so in a new style was perfectly in keeping, however, with his renga dictum about changes in stylistic taste. Yoshimoto supported the principle that art must constantly change if it was to remain vital. At the same time, however, he was constantly aware of the relationship of literature and politics and always ready to shape his literary activity to reflect—or influence—political realities in his quest for leadership in both spheres of endeavor.

Yoshimoto's remarkable openness to jige culture extended into other forms of art as well. In 1349 he and the new shogun, Ashikaga Takauji, went to Shijō Bridge in the capital to watch a performance of dengaku, one of the precursors of nō drama. As related by Senshu in Ama no mokuzu (1420): “Personages of high rank and office did not wish to attend. In more recent times, however, His Lordship the Nijō Regent went to see it for the first time. One of the cloistered princes, the Kajii Abbot [Son'in], went as well. Thereafter many other courtiers and courtier-clerics [monzeki] did likewise. But Lord Konoe and Lord Ichijō did not.” The anecdote bears witness both to an iconoclastic streak in a courtier who was at the same time a scholar of ancient court precedent and also to his delight in new forms of art, regardless of their provenance.

The times increasingly required such adaptation. Yoshimoto was able to hold onto his coveted office of regent when Emperor Kōmyō retired and was replaced by Emperor Sukō (son of Kōgon). Yoshimoto had previously capped the young prince at his coming-of-age ceremony, and the accession in early 1349 took place at Yoshimoto's mansion, as Kōmyō's had. Yoshimoto's rival Kinkata concurrently became chancellor, and Konoe Michitsugu rose to palace minister. Sukō came to the throne at a particularly inauspicious time. The new bakufu was torn by an internecine struggle between Ashikaga Takauji and his brother Ashikaga Tadayoshi, and perhaps to buy time to consolidate the bakufu, Takauji in 1351 declared himself loyal to the Southern Court. Sukō was retired, and the northern era name (different from that used by the south) was terminated. The three abdicated northern sovereigns, Kōgon, Kōmyō, and Sukō, were all taken south to Anō. Takauji then set out to defeat his brother, driving him to Kamakura, where the brother died, probably by poison. The war tale Taiheiki (The Great Peace, circa 1372) relates that Yoshimoto accompanied the three abdicated northern sovereigns south, but the truth is unclear. Yoshimoto's uncle Moromoto was named regent, and then Yoshimoto went to visit the southern emperor, Go-Murakami (a son of Go-Daigo), in Sumiyoshi, perhaps trying to ingratiate himself.

The unification soon collapsed, however, and in early 1352 southern forces invaded the capital, defended at the time by Takauji's son Ashikaga Yoshiakira. He retreated east to Omi province, then drove the southern forces back less than three weeks later. In the absence of the retired northern sovereigns the mother of Kōgon and Kōmyō took temporary charge of government affairs and ratified Yoshimoto as regent of the reconstituted northern government. He then conferred with Kinkata and other top ministers and raised another son of Kōgon to the throne as Go-Kōgon.

Yoshimoto found time amid this chaos to assemble one hundred of his waka verses into a sequence titled Go-Fukōon'indono onhyakushu (Hundred-verse Sequence of Lord Go-Fukōon'in, 1352) and submit it for grading to three of the best poets then active: Ton'a, Keiun, and Yoshida Kenkō. Regardless of the likelihood that the verses themselves were composed a few years earlier, the sequence is one more demonstration of Yoshimoto's uncommon dedication to the way of letters.

This peaceful interlude too was short-lived. In 1353 the south once again invaded the capital, this time forcing Go-Kōgon to flee to Yoshimoto's mansion, after which both men went northeast of the capital for safety. Thereafter Yoshiakira took the emperor even further away, to Ojima in Mino province. Yoshimoto was ill, but he soon thereafter joined his sovereign in temporary exile. Yoshimoto was particularly reviled by southern adherents because of his central role in Go-Kōgon's accession, and his house records were confiscated in his absence and transferred to his uncle Moromoto, who served the southern cause. Yoshimoto turned even his exile to literary ends, however, writing an important travel chronicle titled Ojima no kuchizusami (Reciting Poetry to Myself at Ojima, 1353). His description of his arrival in Ojima is evocative of the melancholy nature of the journey: “I was unfamiliar with scenery of this kind. There was not a break in the clouds that hung heavily over the mountains to left and right. Truly, nothing is so heartrending as such a place as this. No words can convey the look of these remote mountains, especially in autumn, and the indescribable pathos of the landscape squashed in between the hills.” Shogun Takauji met the party some weeks later, and the tone of the rest of the work is accordingly much brighter:

It was a happy and lively occasion. For two or three days troops had been arriving incessantly. The roads were crammed with their baggage, and they were in a cheerful mood after their long march. They came in continuously, like a long ribbon or a bale of cloth being unrolled. The Dainagon [Takauji] wore a broacaded mantle over a light coat of mail, and rode a chestnut horse. He was escorted by Yūki, Oda, Satake, and other warriors. Armour flashed in the afternoon sunlight, making a gay and lively scene.

Takauji, who like so many warrior aristocrats was also an enthusiast of poetry, used the opportunity to ask Yoshimoto to judge some of his verses. Here, then, was an early illustration of the value of literary authority in forging personal and political ties.

The Ojima journey had other important repercussions for Yoshimoto in that he was introduced to the daughter of Toki Yoriyasu, Shugo of Mino and host to the imperial party. Known as Senji no Tsubone, she went to live in the capital and in 1356 bore Yoshimoto a son, Morotsugu. Two years later there followed another son, Tsunetsugu, who later became the heir of the Ichijō family and sire of the great court literatus Ichijō Kaneyoshi. In this marriage Yoshimoto again chose to ally himself not with an ancient court family but with one of the rising military elite. Yoriyasu too was a good poet; he was known to Ton'a, and ten of his waka are preserved in three imperial anthologies. He later took advantage of his position as Yoshimoto's father-in-law to participate in much of the poetic life at Yoshimoto's mansion and to listen to his son-in-law lecture on the classics.

Yoshimoto and the emperor returned in state to the capital in the ninth month. As Yoshimoto wrote in Ojima no kuchizusami, “The terrible nightmare that had been afflicting us disappeared without a trace, and now everything was indescribably joyous.” This peaceful interlude was also short-lived, however. In 1355 the south invaded a fourth time, and the northern emperor was forced once again to flee, this time with Takauji, to Omi. Civil unrest was by now endemic in the capital. Even the palace was robbed, and court ministers were in want. At one point Yoshimoto, who was still regent, was happy to receive military rations from the northern troops.

Yet, literary activity also flourished in spite of—or perhaps precisely because of—the unsettled times. The poetry sessions and elaborate tea ceremonies of Takauji's lieutenant Sasaki Dōyo are particularly famous. Yoshimoto too continued to host literary gatherings, planning a major linked-verse event in 1355, just months after the capital was cleared of southern troops. His teacher and collaborator, Kyūsei, provided the opening verse of this Bunna senku (Thousand-verse Sequence of the Bunna Era, 1355), which praises his courtly host through the metaphor of the cuckoo:

… (Its fame high,
and its call unrivaled:
the cuckoo!)

Eight of the verses of this sequence were taken into the collection that Yoshimoto considered one of his greatest contributions to literary history, Tsukubashū, which he compiled with Kyūsei's help in 1356-1357. Named after Mount Tsukuba, where Yamato Takeru no Mikoto and his keeper of the fires linked verses preserved in Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), Tsukubashū included approximately two thousand examples of linked verses composed since the ostensible beginnings of the genre. Organized in twenty books on the same basic topical principles as the first imperial waka anthology, Kokinshū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, 905), the work underscores with examples the long history of the genre outlined in the abstract in Yoshimoto's renga treatises. The collection received formal recognition in 1357 from Emperor Go-Kōgon, who proclaimed it an imperial anthology. That proclamation was partly achieved through the political influence of Yoshimoto and the warrior-aesthete Sasaki Dōyo and was the first formal step in renga acquiring formal parity with waka at court. Go-Kōgon balked at granting the genre full equality, however, conferring on it instead “quasi-imperial” (junchokusenshū) status. Yoshimoto also wrote the Japanese preface to the anthology, and the Chinese preface was written by Konoe Michitsugu, who was well known and respected for his Chinese scholarship.

The organization and content of the collection affirmed its ostensible position as the Kokinshū of renga, claiming for the art something of the grandeur of its uta predecessor. Unlike that earlier work, however, it also reflected contemporary social realities. It was, for instance, indeed compiled by a court noble, but with the heavy involvement of a commoner, which would not have happened in earlier centuries. Its roster of poets was equally suggestive, in that the four contributors with the most poems were first Kyūsei, a commoner; then Yoshimoto, a noble; then Cloistered Prince Son'in, a member of the imperial house who had become a monk; and finally Sasaki Dōyo, a warrior, the last three similar in that they all studied with Kyūsei. In other respects the anthology was more exclusive than Kokinshū, for it heavily favored poets affiliated with the Northern Court and the bakufu, an unavoidable occurrence given the state of war that existed between the two dynasties. It also did not give much representation to the contemporary generation of northern courtiers, who Yoshimoto felt were generally not the equals of jige poets. In this respect it was again different from Kokinshū and later imperial anthologies.

Yoshimoto's links in Tsukubashū tend more toward the elegance and simplicity of the uta style and focus less on the impact of the individual verse than on overall effect:

… (The blossoms fall beneath the shade
of the pines on the strand.
On this spring day,
some sunlight lingers
even near the mountains.)

.....

… (Even when used to it,
one finds autumn
so melancholy!
In the mountains stags must be coming
to hamlets too, calling for their mates.)

.....

… (The evening cold
came with the wind.
In my dreams
on a pillow wet with dew,
that person appears.)

Though he admired Kyūsei's style, adopted it himself, and recommended it universally, Yoshimoto's own verses in Tsukubashū are not generally quite as closely linked through word associations as Kyūsei's, whose verses in turn are not always as closely linked through such associations as those of his contemporary jige poets. Yoshimoto's Tsukubashū verses are among his most conservative efforts, however, chosen because the collection was meant to posit general parity between the renga and uta genres. Kidō Saizō finds that some of Yoshimoto's other verses not taken into that collection, such as these from Bunna senku, have a rhythm unique to linked verse:

… (The ancient capital
has grown so different
from what I once knew.
Left behind by one departed,
and at the end of autumn.)

.....

… (This too is in Ise—
the shrine to the Moon Deity.
Even so
is the light of our lord
who illumines the heavens.)

The prescriptive nature of Tsukubashū is clear from Yoshimoto's comments in Jūmon saihishō (Most Secret Treatise on Ten Questions, 1383) about his policy regarding the verses of Kyūsei's own teacher: “Zenna's style was old-fashioned, and Kyūsei never used it. The older poet did have some good verses, and eleven were included in Tsukubashū, but all in slightly revised form.” Yoshimoto was well aware that he had undertaken an historic project, as he indicated in a passage in Tsukuba mondō, rare in the literature of the period for its self-congratulatory tone: “The Imperial Anthology preserves many different styles, and our descendants will revere this era.”

Yoshimoto also continued to write on renga theory and history, composing Gekimōshō at the command of Emperor Go-Kōgon the year after finishing Tsukubashū. It reviews the linked-verse style a beginner should pursue, linking techniques, the use of poetic quotations (honka) and poetic sites (meisho), and other such basic renga matters, illustrated by 170 verses. Forty-seven of those, all by Kyūsei, are also found in Tsukubashū, again demonstrating the elder poet's centrality to Yoshimoto's renga theory and practice.

The courtier's uta composition was developing concurrently. In 1356 Go-Kōgon commissioned Nijō Tamesada, one of Yoshimoto's uta teachers, to compile a new imperial uta anthology, which would be titled Shin senzaishū (New Collection of a Thousand Years, 1359). The project was actually initiated by the shogun Takauji, who broached the topic to the emperor, probably in an effort to help legitimize the reconstituted Northern regime. To generate a corpus of new poetry for the collection, hundred-verse sequences were submitted by thirty-one poets, among them Yoshimoto, Takauji and his son Yoshiakira, Kinkata, and Konoe Michitsugu. Fully one-third of the verses Yoshimoto composed for Enbun hyakushu (Hundred-verse Sequences of the Enbun Era, 1357) were included in Shin senzaishū and subsequent imperial collections.

Yoshimoto had by this time abandoned the Kyōgoku style that he had adopted for the purposes of the Fūgashū collection a decade earlier and gone back to the more conservative Nijō style in which he had been raised. He also helped convince Emperor Go-Kōgon to do the same. The emperor was a grandson of Emperor Fushimi, a major exponent of the Kyōgoku style. When the three retired northern emperors were taken south in 1351, however, there was no more imperial patronage for that style at the Northern Court, and the initiative passed to the Nijō faction. Go-Kōgon adopted the Nijō style himself and took Tamesada as his teacher. Yoshimoto wrote of the move years later in Kinrai fūteishō: “Go-Kōgon decided to compose in the style of Lord Tamesada at the urging of myself and Prince Son'en of Shōren'in. He thereafter abandoned the style of Emperor Fushimi.” Prince Son'en, founder of the Oie style of calligraphy, was a son of Emperor Fushimi but likewise a convert to Nijō principles. Ashikaga Takauji died in 1358 before the anthology could be completed, but it was pushed through to a conclusion in early 1360 by his son, the new shogun Yoshiakira, at the urging of Ton'a. It was the first warrior-initiated imperial waka anthology in history and thus bears witness to the rising power of the military aristocracy and their recognition of the value of poetry in reinforcing political authority.

The year 1358 marked the end of an era in several respects: not only did Takauji die in that year, but Yoshimoto's remarkable thirteen-year period as regent also came to an end due to his implication in a battle for the succession to the abbacy of Ichijō'in temple between the adherents of Yoshimoto's adopted son Ryōgen and those of Michitsugu's son. The latter monk finally won the post after a year of fighting and the destruction of several hundred temple buildings. The degree of Yoshimoto's involvement in supporting his own candidate is uncertain, but as regent he was held responsible by both Go-Kōgon and the bakufu and was forced to resign in early 1359. In his place was appointed Kujō Tsunenori, who was then followed by Yoshimoto's rival, Michitsugu, in 1361.

This was a bitter setback for a man so consumed by the will to lead. Equally threatening was the increasing intimacy between the emperor and Michitsugu, founded largely on a shared interest in Chinese poetry and wakan renku, linked verse in Japanese and Chinese. Michitsugu lent the emperor his copy of the Song-dynasty poetic treatise Shiren yuxie (Jade Chips from the Poets, circa 1240), still rare in Japan, and he graded imperial wakan renku several times in 1359. Poetry sessions in Chinese quickly increased at Go-Kōgon's court. Yoshimoto was doubtless alarmed by this united front, particularly because he had chosen to specialize in Japanese linked verse and possessed only a basic education in Chinese poetry. So he set out to use his new leisure to make up for that deficiency.

On the verge of forty, Yoshimoto was getting a late start as a sinologue. He possessed, of course, the normal background in Chinese literature for a courtier of a literary bent. The year before, for example, he mentioned in Gekimōshō such Chinese poets as Li Bo, Du Fu, Su Dongpo, and Huang Shangu and the Wakan rōeishū (Songs in Japanese and Chinese, 1018) anthology. Now, however, fueled by his enormous ambition and aided by his uncommonly retentive memory, he applied himself to further studies in Chinese poetry, and in 1361 he attended lectures by the monk A'ichi on Shiren yuxie and Shijing (The Book of Songs). Remarkably, by 1363 he was appearing at Chinese poetry gatherings at court, at which point Michitsugu began absenting himself. Where Yoshimoto had set out two decades before to become the renga arbiter at court, he evidently had through determination and application become a prominent force in Chinese verse as well. It was also in 1363 that he once more addressed a prayer to Kasuga Shrine asking to be reinstated as regent. Not three weeks passed before his prayers were answered and he was appointed to a second term. It may be that his increased visibility at Go-Kōgon's Chinese poetry gatherings had played a role.

Yoshimoto also pursued his uta studies with deepened fervor during his forties. The prime example of his new concentration on that art is shown by his first treatise on uta poetry, Gumon kenchū (Wise Answers to Foolish Questions, 1363), a work that also reflects Yoshimoto's new familiarity with Chinese concepts. He sent it to Ton'a for his responses, which were included in the final version. In the treatise Yoshimoto sets out the Nijō and Reizei positions on poetic style and asks which one a poet should follow. Ton'a of course comes down in favor of the conservative Nijō approach. The work may have been undertaken to help Yoshimoto clarify for himself his own point of view, but it was probably also directed to the contemporary poetic world at large. One leading poet of the Nijō faction, Tamesada, had died three years before, and one of his successors, Nijō Tameshige, was not yet forty and had yet to consolidate a strong following. While Go-Kōgon had accepted Tamesada as his teacher, his own poetic origins had been in the Kyōgoku tradition, and there were still Kyōgoku and Reizei poets active at court despite their loss of imperial backing. The most important of those was Reizei Tamehide, a son of the founder of the Reizei house, Tamesuke.

The origins of the document are believed to have been bound up with the compilation of the next imperial anthology, Shin shūishū (New Collection of Gleanings, 1365), the second bakufu-initiated collection, undertaken at Yoshiakira's instigation. The aged Nijō Tameakira had been selected as compiler, but the project had languished when he died before it could be completed. Gumon kenchū may have been written in view of the possibility of Reizei Tamehide being brought into the compilation process. Tamehide was a close friend of Yoshiakira, and Yoshimoto evidently hoped that Gumon kenchū would bring Ton'a closer to both Yoshiakira and the sovereign. If that was true, the document was successful; it impressed Yoshiakira sufficiently for him to appoint Ton'a to complete the imperial anthology project. Though the work finally supports the Nijō position, it is notable for its evidently even-handed expression of the Reizei point of view, for Yoshimoto was not only a personal friend of Tamehide, but he also recognized the strong points of the Reizei style. Konishi Jin'ichi believes that Yoshimoto in his renga composition demonstrates a taste of not only Nijō-style simplicity and conviction but also the Reizei partiality toward yūgen. Gumon kenchū, in short, is another demonstration of the interconnectedness of art and politics in Yoshimoto's world.

Yoshimoto's literary energy appears only to have increased with time. In 1363, the same year that he wrote Gumon kenchū, he invited Gyōa, a scholar of Genji monogatari, to lecture on that work. Gyōa conveyed the information in his major work on that classic, Genchū saihishō (Most Secret Treatise on Genji monogatari, 1363), to Yoshimoto soon after it was written. Two years later the courtier used that knowledge to write, with others, Hikary Genji ichibu renga yoriai (Word Associations for Linked Verse from the Shining Prince, 1365), a study of how to introduce word associations from the great Heian classic into linked-verse sequences. References to Genji monogatari are also frequent in Nenjū gyōji uta-awase (Poetry Competition on Annual Rites and Ceremonies), composed two years later.

Yoshimoto also improved his knowledge of the ancient poetic classic Man'yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, circa 759). Jige poets had already taken the lead in introducing words from Man'yōshū into their linked verses, and therefore in 1365 Yoshimoto dispatched Reizei Tamehide to Kamakura, where the latter had spent part of his youth, to escort a Man'yōshū scholar, Yūa, to the capital. The following year Yoshimoto heard him lecture on the anthology, and those lectures were subsequently assembled into Yūa's work Shūi saiyōshō (Gleanings of Collected Leaves, 1367). Yoshimoto's study bore fruit a decade later, when he wrote Man'yōshi (Man'yōshū Lexicon, 1375), which contains advice on using Man'yōshū words in linked verse.

As regent, Yoshimoto had ample opportunity to increase his participation in formal uta gatherings, something he had done little of when younger. Early in 1367 he sponsored Nenjū gyōji uta-awase at the suggestion of Tamehide. In attendance were the cream of contemporary literary society, including Yoshimoto and his sons Moroyoshi (now palace minister) and Morotsugu; Yotsutsuji Yoshinari, who had begun his classic study of Genji monogatari titled Kakaishō (River and Sea Treatise) at the instigation of Yoshiakira around 1362; Tamehide and his son Reizei Tamekuni; the warrior literatus Imagawa Ryōshun; Ton'a and his son Kyōken; and the Kyushu monk Sōkyū, author of the medieval travel classic Miyako no tsuto (Souvenir for the Capital, circa 1372), for which Yoshimoto himself wrote the postscript in 1367. The poems were critiqued by the entire group, and the judgments were summarized by Tamehide. Yoshimoto explained the meaning of each annual event, reflecting his preeminence as an authority on ancient matters.

A few months later Yoshimoto was again involved in a poetry competition, Shintamatsushimasha uta-awase (Poetry Competition at Shintamatsushima Shrine, 1367), sponsored by Yoshiakira and including among its sixty-six participants many of the same poets as in Yoshimoto's competition earlier that year. The poetry topics (dai) were chosen by Tamehide, demonstrating the esteem invested in him (and by extension in the Reizei style) by the shogun. Six days later a similar event took place at the palace, Chūden waka gokai (Chūden Uta Convocation, 1367), also suggested by Yoshiakira, perhaps at the urging of Tamehide. The literary vitality of the Northern Court in this period was remarkable, as was the evident cooperation between the court and the military aristocracy.

Yoshimoto also began increasingly to write himself into the history of the period by chronicling formal ceremonies in which he was involved. Jōji rokunen Chūden gokaiki (Chronicle of the Chūden Celebration of the Sixth Year of the Jōji Era, 1367), also known as Kumoi no hana (Blossoms above the Clouds), is a memorial of the palace uta-awase he had just completed. In the work Yoshimoto extols the merits of uta poetry and of the tradition of the Chūden celebration (chūden no utage), expatiating in particular on the impressiveness of the recent event and implying that the resusciation of an obscure court ceremony, long held in abeyance, demonstrates the authenticity of the Northern Court and its protector, the bakufu. The way of poetry, Yoshimoto adds, likewise flourishes under the northern regime. He is careful to praise his military benefactors in writing but also to preserve his own contributions for posterity. The document is not in Chinese but in the Japanese kana syllabary, a style Yoshimoto overwhelmingly favored in such documents, and he adopts the pose of a disinterested third person, thus allowing him to praise with apparent humility his own knowledge of court precedent. This was a technique he returned to thereafter.

Yoshimoto's self-congratulation was premature, however, and he soon discovered that Shogun Yoshiakira had planned to use the Chūden celebration as an elegant opportunity to request Yoshimoto's resignation from his second term as regent. The cause may again have been Yoshimoto's peripheral involvement in a conflict centering on a temple under Nijō protection, but it is just as likely that Yoshiakira thought it was high time that the post was rotated to another of the five regental families. It is characteristic of Yoshimoto's immense ego and unbridled self-aggrandizement that it took more than a week for him to acquiesce, during which time he took all possible steps to pave the way for his son Moroyoshi's eventual assumption of that office.

Gravely ill, the shogun too stepped down several months later in favor of his son, the nine-year-old Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who was aided by Hosokawa Yoriyuki. Yoshiakira's death several days later and Yoshimoto's resignation did not signal a decline of the courtier's influence, however. Quite the contrary, in his last two decades he rose to his greatest political and literary heights. The glory of his house was presaged by a white dragon that was purportedly seen ascending from the famous garden of the Nijō residence. Such omens were taken seriously, and diaries make awed note of the event. As if to bear out the felicitous occurrence, Yoshimoto's son indeed became regent in 1369, after his predecessor, Takatsukasa Fuyumichi, resigned, brought down, it is suspected, by Yoshimoto's covert machinations.

Yoshimoto, now in his early fifties, demonstrated his position as doyen of linked verse at court with his revision of the renga rules, which he carried out with the aid of Kyūsei. These rules, initially known as Ōan shinshiki (New rules of the Ōan Era), would become the norm for nearly all subsequent renga sessions nationwide. Completed at the end of the fifth year of the Ōan era (early 1373), they were revised twice thereafter and probably reached their final form in 1374-1375. These rules were motivated by the knowledge that renga sessions across the country still did not operate according to the same set of rules. The postscript to the Hasedera manuscript of the work states that “the above were generally based on the Kenji Rules. But many new usages have been introduced by later masters, and these cannot be disregarded. These rules were designed to end arguments at poetry sessions.”

Yoshimoto's rules came to be known simply as Renga shinshiki (New Rules for “Renga”), and they were eventually successful in their goal of uniting most formal renga sessions under a single set of operating principles. Yoshimoto's rules, therefore, became the standard set, and with two subsequent revisions after his death would remain in use at orthodox sessions for centuries thereafter. The political lawgiver thus became the poetic lawgiver as well. Yoshimoto's rules could never have become the standard had he not already established himself as the premier renga authority at court. Additional weight was certainly added by his political preeminence. Equally essential to the success of Renga shinshiki, however, was the fact that Kyūsei and his disciples already constituted the elite renga school; once they accepted the rules that Kyūsei had helped Yoshimoto compose, the adoption of those rules by the school and by the students of Kyūsei's disciples was a foregone conclusion.

It was likely also at this time that Yoshimoto composed one of his most important renga treatises, Tsukuba mondō. The work differs from Yoshimoto's other linked-verse writings because it was written with no specific person in mind and because it is structured on the purported narrative of an ancient adept more than ninety years old. The work discusses renga history, theory, and practice, much as Hekirenshō had earlier. Like Hekirenshō, it is devoted to establishing the importance of linked verse and its parity with uta. To underscore the importance of the art, Yoshimoto traces its founding not only to Kojiki and Man'yōshū but all the way back to the exchange between the male and female deities Izanagi and Izanami, out of whose union the nation itself was born. He also compares the genre to Chinese linked poetry and to Indian hymns, both eminently canonical forms. His references in Tsukuba mondō to Chinese works bear ample witness to his recent Chinese studies.

By 1375 Yoshimoto had achieved preeminence in both his political and his literary careers. His eldest son was regent, and his second son was minister of the right. The next year Yoshimoto was awarded the title jugō (equality with the three empresses), a mark of great distinction and one that still carried some financial advantages at that time. The glory of the Nijō house is part of the subject of Eiwa daijōeki (Chronicle of the Great Thanksgiving Service of the Eiwa Era, 1375), which commemorates a major court ceremony during the reign of Go-Enyū. The work also goes into considerable detail about the imperial regalia, which were in the custody of the Southern Court, and argues that the loss did not affect the legitimacy of the northern imperial line. Yoshimoto thus presents a counterargument to that of Kitabatake Chikafusa, warrior and apologist for the southern cause, who expressed the belief in his famous Jinnō shōtōki (A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns, 1343) that the emperor is the sovereign no matter where he resides as long as the regalia are in his possession. It is unclear whether Yoshimoto was acquainted with Chikafusa's work. Eiwa daijōeki is another case of Yoshimoto's combining the cultural and political, and it shows him in the new guise of political philosopher.

His interest in chronicling the events of his time may also have led to the composition of the famous historical tale Masukagami in about 1376. Though there is no proof of authorship, many attribute the work to him. The tale covers the years between Go-Toba's reign, marked by his unsuccessful rise against the Kamakura bakufu, and ends with Go-Daigo's successful attempt to reassert imperial power. The author hears the story from an ancient person—a device Yoshimoto was fond of using—and its focus on court precedent, its quotation of renga verses, and its references to Yoshimoto's ancestors (notably Kujō Michiie and Yoshimoto's father, Michihira) indeed make the attribution plausible, as does the fact that Yoshimoto was a great reader of history and had many of the necessary reference works at his disposal.

Also at this time, Yoshimoto made the acquaintance of the young actor who came to be known as Zeami. Yoshimoto had witnessed him perform in the capital the year before and invited him to visit his mansion. Thereafter, typical for Yoshimoto, they composed linked verse together. Yoshimoto was captivated by the boy and bestowed on him the name Fujiwaka. Later he wrote a letter praising his many virtues:

The entire day was wonderful, and I quite lost my heart. A boy like this is rare—why, look at hisrenga and kemari, not to mention his own particular art! Such a charming manner and such poise! I don't know where such a marvelous boy can have come from … In praising his uta and renga, I refer to his interesting manner of expression and his attention to the elegant beauty of yūgen. … In spite of myself, I feel as if the flower of the heart still remains somewhere in this fossilized old body of mine.

It is possible that Yoshimoto's enthusiasm was meant to praise not only the young Zeami himself but also the taste of the shogun, Yoshimitsu, who was also taken by the young actor.

As the letter indicates, Yoshimoto was also fond of kemari, a genteel form of kickball traditionally popular at court. Over a decade before, in 1363, Yoshimoto had participated in a court kemari tournament. With characteristic antiquarian interest, Yoshimoto organized it according to strict ancient practices, of which he had made a study, and he later made a record of the event titled Jōji ninen onmari no ki (Kemari Chronicle of the Second Year of the Jōji era, 1363). A month later there was another contest at court, pitting a team of young men, including the sovereign, against an older team, including Yoshimoto. The young men won. Yoshimoto also evidently dabbled in falconry and horsemanship, two other arts he felt courtiers should acquire. At the end of his life he composed a guide to both, titled Sagano monogatari (1386), in which he speaks of the horsemanship of his grandfather Kanemoto and his granduncle Morotada, who made the pursuit something of a house tradition.

It was also in his mid fifties that the courtier established a close relationship with the young Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who began appearing at court in 1375. The two men formed a close relationship to their mutual benefit, and most of the works on nonliterary themes that Yoshimoto wrote thereafter were meant either directly or indirectly for Yoshimitsu's eyes. Such works include commemorative pieces such as Udaishō Yoshimitsu sandai kyōen kanaki (Kana Chronicle of General of the Right Yoshimitsu's Palace Visit and Banquet, 1379); Kumoi no minori (August Rites above the Clouds, 1380), a depiction of the seventh anniversary of the death of Go-Kōgon; Sakayuku hana (Flourishing Blossoms, 1381), a record of the visit of Go-Enyū, Yoshimoto, and others to Yoshimitsu's Muromachi palace; Go-Enyū'in gojōki (Chronicle of the Abdication of Retired Emperor Go-En'yū', 1382); and Yōrokumon'in sanjūsankaiki no ki (Chronicle of the Thirty-third Anniversary of the Death of Yōrokumon'in, 1384). In all these works Yoshimoto at once accords flattering literary immortality to his subjects but also parenthetically demonstrates his own importance and writes himself into history as well. As Yoshimitsu's arrogated higher and higher court offices, he progressively relied on Yoshimoto's detailed knowledge of court precedents and usages. Two works that Yoshimoto wrote for the shogun on this topic are Hyakuryō kun'yōshō (Basic Guide to Court Offices, circa 1382-1384) and its companion volume, Nyōbō no kan shina no koto (Ranks of Female Officials, 1382).

As the shogun became more and more powerful, he inspired progressively greater awe and even fear among his courtly colleagues; eventually no court ranks or offices could be awarded without his approval. Yoshimoto seems to have enjoyed a charmed relationship with the military hegemon, however, in part because of his literary and historical knowledge and in part because he served as an unrivaled conduit into courtly affairs. Yoshimoto constantly did him favors, and Yoshimitsu rewarded him richly for them. As in his poetic practice, Yoshimoto respected the past but rejected dogmatic conservatism. By ingratiating himself with Yoshimitsu he recognized the fait accompli of military power and used his own influence to make that power serve the purposes of the court and, not incidentally, of himself. Konoe Michitsugu would have none of it, writing in his diary Gukanki about a shogunal visit to Yoshimoto's mansion: “The Shogun called on the Jugō again today. There was linked verse, a warbler contest (uguisuawase), and other entertainments, they say … the Jugō planned it all to suit [Yoshimitsu's] wishes. I am speechless.” In exchange Yoshimoto benefited from Yoshimitsu's influence on the sovereign—Yoshimoto's rise to chancellor in 1381, for example, was pushed through by the bakufu—and he profited financially as well.

Eventually the conservative Michitsugu too would have to bow to the shogun's power, but his skin was thinner than Yoshimoto's. Whereas Yoshimoto evidently enjoyed the pomp and personal advantage that accrued from his dealings with another ambitious and self-seeking autocrat, Michitsugu cringed from them. Upon Michitsugu's death in 1387, another courtier wrote: “After he grew closer to the Muromachi Jugō his wealth increased, but so did his emotional strain; this was the start of his last illness.”

Yoshimoto's common interests with Yoshimitsu also extended to his first love, linked verse, and in 1379 he wrote Renga jūyō (Ten Styles of Linked Verse) for the shogun. He also wrote for the shogun's deputy in the west, Imagawa Ryōshun, who had became one of his disciples. Ryōshun had been posted by the bakufu to Kyushu to suppress forces that were loyal to the Southern Court. In response to Ryōshun's queries Yoshimoto in 1376 composed Kyūshū mondō (Answers to Questions from Kyushu). Since Ryōshun was himself a highly skilled poet, the information in the work is advanced and a particularly valuable source on Yoshimoto's late ideas on renga theory. It includes questions about the disadvantages of preparing verses before the session (in the manner of Yoshimoto's disciple Shūa), the use of old verses and old words, and advisable books for study. Then in 1380 Ryōshun sent him more questions together with a collection of his verses for comment. Yoshimoto's favorable response to the collection qualified his warrior disciple to be a judge at Kyushu renga sessions. The collection of verses, with Yoshimoto's comments, is titled Ryōshun shitakusa (Undergrowth, by Ryōshun, 1380). It is particularly notable for its explanations regarding the role of yūgen, a poetic quality that would be central to the verse of Ryōshun's own student, Shōtetsu.

In Kyūshū mondō and Ryōshun shitakusa, not to mention Tsukuba mondō, Yoshimoto expresses concern for the relationship between strong single verses, favored by some jige composers, and overall stylistic development. He enlarges, for example, on the concept of jo-ha-kyū (introduction, development, conclusion) borrowed from musical terminology, which stipulates the style of composition appropriate to various stages in the hundred-verse sequence. Also related to the idea of sequential development is the notion of mon (design) and ji (background) verses, which Yoshimoto felt should be effectively alternated throughout the entire hundred verses, rather than having each verse attempt to surpass the previous in technical brilliance, as jige poets tended to do.

He also became even more devoted to the notion of uta-style elegance and depth of feeling in linked verse. This does not mean, of course, that his verse became more like uta. His later hokku in particular generate a rhythm unique to renga:

… (Which shall I look at?
Colored foliage in the gusts of wind;
snow in the pines.)

The following verse comes from Ishiyama hyakuin (Hundred-verse Sequence at Ishiyama, 1385), a classic late work he composed with his disciples Sh ūa, Bontō, and others at Ishiyamadera temple:

… (Moon over the mountains;
wind blowing away the cold rain:
the Nio Sea.)

At the same time that Yoshimoto became more and more insistent that renga too should be elevated and sublime (albeit on its own terms), he displayed decreasing tolerance for the vulgar or commonplace (ga). In another late renga treatise, Jūmon saihishō, which he wrote for the warrior Ōuchi Yoshihiro, a subordinate of Ryōshun, he writes: “In Maoshi [The Book of Songs] it is written ‘Let there be no heterodoxy.’ The oral transmissions of Shunzei and Teika too teach us to avoid the heterodox ways and cleave to the straight. The private teachings of our predecessors in Chinese and Japanese poetry all say the same. Therefore, renga too should be straight and strong of conception.” He thereafter amplifies this with the statement “In the treatise on Chinese poetry entitled Shiren yuxie, it is written ‘Avoid vulgar conceptions, vulgar words, and vulgar styles.’ So should it be in renga.” These remarks suggest that some of his increasing elegance developed from his serious study of uta and Chinese poetry, which he began in middle age. He was committed to the dual concepts that renga was different from uta but that it should be just as elegant, and on this point he progressively departed from more-popular trends. His ideal style, a blend of vital individual links, elegance, and overall effect through the entire sequence, was not generally accepted as the orthodoxy until a half-century and more had passed, in the time of Shinkei and Inō Sōogi. Those poets looked back on Yoshimoto as a great progenitor; in Sasamegoto (Murmured Conversations, 1464) Shinkei in fact would refer to him as a famous holy man. Yet in the right circumstances Yoshimoto too could indulge in humorous verse.

Despite Yoshimoto's undisputed leadership in the courtly literary and political world, his last years were not ones of unalloyed happiness. His eldest son, Moroyoshi, succumbed to mental illness in 1378. Moroyoshi died four years later, at age thirty-seven. Yet Yoshimoto was not above competing with his second son, Morotsugu, pestering Yoshimitsu to be made regent again in 1379 instead of lobbying on his son's behalf. Morotsugu nevertheless received the post. Three years later, however, with the accession of Emperor Go-Komatsu in 1382, Morotsugu stepped down and Yoshimoto for the third time acquired the office of regent (Sesshō in the case of a minor) to the young sovereign.

Despite these new responsibilities, Yoshimoto also continued his growing role in court uta activity, and in 1382 he wrote the preface to the new imperial waka anthology, Shin goshūishū (New Later Collection of Gleanings, 1384). The work, the fourth imperial uta anthology in which Yoshimoto appeared, had been commissioned by Go-Enyū at the request of Yoshimitsu, and another collection of hundred-verse sequences, titled Eiwa hyakushu (Hundred-verse Sequences of the Eiwa Era, 1375-1378), had been initiated to provide material. The anthology was completed by Nijō Tameshige (the last of the major Nijō Tametō (son of Tamesada). This was one of the few cases in which the Japanese preface was not written by the compiler himself. The emperor had requested that Yoshimoto perform the task, but it was probably Yoshimoto himself who, not content with having the single largest number of verses in the collection, had asked the bakufu to suggest that course of action to the throne.

Three years after the anthology appeared, Yoshimoto finished another major treatise on uta, Kinrai fūteishō. It was named after Korai fūteishō (Notes on Past and Present Poetic Styles, 1197) by Fujiwara Shunzei, indicating Yoshimoto's respect for the work of his ancestor and, by extension, his continuation of that lineage. It begins with an overview of the contemporary poetic scene and includes a history of Yoshimoto's own uta career, then provides information on standard poetic issues, such as quotations, topics, and various poetic styles, that he had “heard from skilled poets over the last forty or fifty years.” Yoshimoto insists in his introduction that “I have absolutely no gift for uta, nor have I practiced sufficiently. Thanks to my attraction to linked verse over many years, the world acknowledges me in that field, but uta is a path I have never pursued.” Though to the end of his life he continued to see himself as more of a renga specialist, he nevertheless had by his last years clearly also become one of the leading practitioners of uta.

Yoshimoto continued his studies of Chinese poetry as well, most notably with Gidō Shūshin, a premier authority of his day. A disciple of the great Musō Soseki, Gidō was trained in the Gozan (Five Mountains) tradition of Rinzai Zen, then had been sent to Kamakura, where he spent two decades. He returned to Kyoto in 1380 at the request of Yoshimitsu, where he eventually became abbot of Nanzenji. Yoshimoto also immediately wished to make the acquaintance of the esteemed poet and prelate, and he invited him to his mansion. Gidō deepened Yoshimoto's understanding of Chinese literature and also his ability in wakan renku, and they saw much of each other until the priest's death in 1388.

Yoshimoto was now an old man. In the same year that he wrote Kinrai fūteishō, he took a central part in the coming-of-age ceremony for Emperor Go-Komatsu, capping the young sovereign himself. One courtier wrote in his diary of seeing the old man take part in the parade in the palace courtyard: “he looks pitiful; he is sixty-eight this year, I am told. Bent of back, he is extremely aged and decrepit”; he added that Yoshimoto later told him that on the day of the capping parade he felt lucky to have avoided falling down. Yoshimoto resigned his offices of regent and chancellor soon thereafter.

Yet he was still addicted to power, and when the new regent suddenly died, Yoshimoto accepted an appointment to a remarkable fourth term in that office. It is equally remarkable that Yoshimoto agreed to serve, despite his manifest infirmities, instead of recommending his son, who had served as regent himself. The strain was too great, however; two months after taking the post he retired, finally passing on the post to his son Morotsugu. On the day he stepped down he wrote a short account of the famous garden of the Nijō mansion, Nijō Oshikōji kamonteisenki (Chronicle of the Pavilion and Garden of the Mansion at Nijō Oshikōji, 1388); the day after, politician and literatus to the last, he died. He expired just before the hour of the dragon (about 8:00 a.m.), as if to acknowledge the auspicious role of the white dragon said to have ascended from his garden twenty years before.

He left an enormous legacy, having served four times as regent and having fathered three sons who also attained that post. In addition he had at least four other children, all of whom went on to positions in the clergy, and other adopted sons as well. In all, five of his children attained the rank of jugō, a record never matched before or after.

It was a legacy to which he had devoted all his enormous talent, energy, and ambition. The central fact of Yoshimoto's character was his will to lead, to be the giver of law in both the political and poetic arenas. He devoted his incredible drive to the acquisition and maintenance of power, both for himself and for the court. This overriding goal may help explain the apparent contradiction of a man born to high courtly position who nevertheless cultivated political alliances with the military. It also explains how he could become an expert on court precedent and resuscitate ancient court rituals yet also break those precedents to accommodate a military patron. Rather than study and reinstitute court rituals for their own sake, he used them to the advantage of himself and his class. He had chosen at a young age to serve the joint civil and military administration that was the Northern Court rather than to attempt a return to pure imperial rule with the Southern loyalists, and he always recognized the fact of military power. Instead of pursuing futile apartheid between the court and military, he devoted himself to implicating the military into the courtly world, thereby helping guarantee courtly prestige as well as his own primacy. The same was true for his poetic career; by cooperating with Kyūsei and other commoners, he infused courtly renga with the vitality of jige practitioners and brought them under his courtly patronage, to mutual benefit.

Success such as Yoshimoto's does not come from ego and push alone; he was gifted with an extraordinary intellect, combining a retentive memory with considerable political canniness. He appears to have possessed great self-confidence, enough to embark on a study of Chinese literature and uta poetry in middle age and rise to positions of leadership in both and also to have enjoyed a wide range of interests, including not only all forms of literature and court usages but also traditional sports and garden art. His enormous literary productivity is all the more impressive given the turbulent conditions under which much of it was written.

References:

Ebara Taizō, “Yoshimoto no rengaron,” Kokugo kokubun, 11 (January 1941): 1-21; (June 1941): 1-12;

Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo's Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996);

Thomas Hare, Zeami's Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1986);

Hisamatsu Sen'ichi, “Nijō Yoshimoto no rengaron,” in his Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: shiikaron hen (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1950), pp. 96-117;

Ijichi Tetsuo, “Kyūsei, Shūa, Nijō Yoshimoto, to Gonshōsōzu Eiun no hyakuin, kushū ni tsuite,” Renga haikai kenkyū, 24 (December 1962): 44-49;

Ijichi, Renga no sekai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1967);

Inoue Muneo, Chūsei kadanshi no kenkyū: Nanbokuchōki, revised edition (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1987);

Kaneko Kinjirō, Tsukubashū no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1965);

Kaneko, “Yoshimoto no rengaron,” in his Rengaron no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1984), pp. 19-119;

Donald Keene, “Reciting Poetry to Myself at Ojima,” in his Travelers of a Hundred Ages (New York: Holt, 1989), pp. 186-193;

Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Holt, 1993), pp. 926-937;

Kidō Saizō, Rengashi ronkō, 2 volumes (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1971, 1973), I: 197-256;

Konishi Jin'ichi, A History of Japanese Literature: Volume Three: The High Middle Ages, translated by Aileen Gatten and Mark Harbison, edited by Earl Miner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 425-432;

Earl Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 19-23;

Okuda Isao, Rengashi: Sono kōdō to bungaku (Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1976), pp. 67-88;

David Pollack, “Wakan and the Development of Renga Theory in the late Fourteenth Century: Gidō Shūshin and Nijō Yoshimoto,” in his The Fracture of Meaning: Japan's Synthesis of China from the Eighth through the Eighteenth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 134-157;

George Sansom, A History of Japan 1334-1615 (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1984), pp. 3-194;

Shimazu Tadao, Renga no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1973), pp. 163-266;

Shimazu, Rengashi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1969);

Tanaka Yutaka, “Yoshimoto no rengaron,” in his Chūsei bungakuron kenkyū (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1969), pp. 285-325;

Ueda Makoto, “Yoshimoto on the Art of Linked Verse: Verse-Writing as a Game,” in his Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1967), pp. 37-54;

H. Paul Varley, “Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and the World of Kitayama: Social Change and Shogunal Patronage in Early Muromachi Japan,” in Japan in the Muromachi Age, edited by John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 183-204.