One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each Read online

  Along with The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji, the One Hundred Poets is one of the three most influential works of classical Japanese literature. It has had an almost inestimable influence on Japanese culture and the visual arts at every level: every major Japanese print (ukiyo-e) artist has illustrated the entire collection, for instance. For hundreds of years it was the primer of Japanese classical poetry, and even today it is still the most widely known collection of Japanese verse, despite the fact that most Japanese have only the vaguest idea of what the poems mean. There is no equivalent to this short collection in English literature; Shakespeare’s sonnets may appear close, but less than half a dozen of them are widely taught in schools today, whereas in Japan this book is an essential part of every secondary-school curriculum.

  Who was Fujiwara no Teika?

  Fujiwara no Teika (also known as Sadaie) was born into a minor branch of the noble Fujiwara family in 1162. His father, Shunzei (poem 83 in this collection), was a poet and critic and, in that capacity, held the highest position at the Imperial Bureau of Poetry, unrivalled in his generation. In person, Teika is said to have been irascible and strikingly ugly; but he was recognized as a great poet and authority on waka poetry, and his reputation exceeded even his father’s. Teika’s poetic and editorial achievements include poetry collections (both official and private), several one-hundred-poem sequences, commentaries on older works and treatises on poetry. He was also known for his work in philology, including the conservation of many important writings of the Heian period (794–1185), such as The Tale of Genji and The Tales of Ise. His Maigetsushō (Monthly Notes; 1219) was his Ars Poetica, in which he established the canons of poetic taste that would remain influential in Japan for hundreds of years. In addition, he wrote numerous other poetic treatises, including the Kindai shūka (Superior Poems of Our Time; 1209) and Eiga no taigai (Outline of Composition; c.1222), while his own collection of poetry, the Shūigusō (The Dull Musings of a Chamberlain; 1216) contained over 3,500 poems. The One Hundred Poets is but one of many anthologies Teika compiled during his lifetime. Some of these were intended to be used as textbooks on poetry by aristocratic pupils, and they were still in use for hundreds of years after Teika’s death. Though One Hundred Poets was not included among these, it became the textbook par excellence for aspiring poets for the next six hundred years.

  Teika’s reputation was established quite early. In 1192, he was one of the twelve poets who provided poems for the famous Roppyakuban uta-awase (Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds), an important competition held at the house of the regent Fujiwara no Ryokei (see poem 91) and presided over by Shunzei.

  Teika was initially excluded from the list of contributors of a poetry event held eight years later, in 1200, in which twenty-two poets were ordered by Emperor Gotoba (r. 1184–98) each to compose a one-hundred-poem sequence (known as hyakushu in Japanese). Teika was only included later thanks to his father’s intercession, but Emperor Gotoba was extremely pleased with his selection of poems and as a result granted him access to the imperial palace, a much-coveted honour. A year later, Gotoba ordered thirty of the best poets (including himself and Teika) each to present a one-hundred-poem sequence as the basis for another poetry contest. And from 1201 Teika was also involved in the compilation of the Shin-kokin wakashū (New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), usually abbreviated to Shin-kokinshū, the eighth of the imperial waka anthologies that had been ordered since the Kokin wakashū (Collection of Waka Ancient and Modern), or Kokinshū, was commissioned in 905. Being asked to edit one of these collections amounted to being acknowledged as the foremost literary figure of the day.

  Teika’s troubled literary relationship with Emperor Gotoba dates from this period. A poet himself (see poem 99), and a key figure in the literary world of the time, Gotoba wished to be involved in the editing of the Shin-kokinshū. He and Teika disagreed over the final selection of poems, however, and not even the fact that forty-six of Gotoba’s own poems were selected for inclusion seems to have assuaged the emperor’s bitterness. Although Teika’s relationship with Gotoba never recovered after this, he was none the less able to retain power and influence because of his connection with other government figures whose power was growing at that time. He was also close to Fujiwara no Kintsune (poem 96), the most influential politician of the period following the fall of Gotoba in 1198.

  In 1232, Teika was appointed to compile the Shin-chokusen wakashū (New Imperial Waka Collection), or Shin-chokusenshū, making him the only poet up until then to have the honour of editing two imperial anthologies. (His son Tameie was later accorded the same honour.) It was completed in 1235 and it was during this decade, the 1230s, that he assembled the One Hundred Poets.

  Many of Teika’s early poems are intricate and difficult to understand, leading some to accuse him of composing ‘faddish, groundless Zen-nonsense poems’ (shingi hikyo daruma-uta).2 The poems by Teika’s father, Shunzei, were more contemplative in tone. He championed the literary ideal of yūgen and established it as one of the major styles of the age. The term is difficult to define, and its meaning has changed over time, but it favours an indirect, enigmatic form of expression. One of the finest examples of yūgen, according to Shunzei, was a poem from the Shin-kokinshū, by Saigyo (see poem 86), who abandoned the world to become a monk:

  I have no heart, nor pathos,

  and yet I feel moved

  looking out over the marsh

  where snipe are rising

  in the autumn dusk.

  (Kokoronaki / mi ni mo aware wa/ shirarekeri /shigi tatsu sawa no / aki no yugure)

  The type of poetry favoured by Teika and his younger contemporaries, by contrast, conformed to the yōen (lofty and ethereal) style, which combined dream-like imagery and allusions to earlier works to produce poems of remarkable subtlety. The following poem, composed for a poetry tournament in 1232 by Shunzei’s Daughter3 – later included as poem 32 in the Shinshui wakashū (New Collection of Waka Gleanings; 1364) – was regarded by Teika as a wonderful example of this poetic style:

  The morning frost

  sparkling on her sleeves,

  as the river wind at Uji

  sweeps through the mist –

  the Lady of the Bridge.

  (Hashihime no / sode no asa-shimo / nao saete/ kasumi fukikosu / Uji no kawa-kaze)

  The ‘Lady of the Bridge’ was a goddess who appears in legends, stories and poetry collections. She has several forms, including that of a lover waiting for a nightly visitor. Here, the haze and the morning frost imbue the romantic scene with ethereal beauty and elegance, and the poem is typical of the way that yōen celebrates fleeting and dream-like encounters portrayed in a mysterious atmosphere. Other characteristics of yōen include the sad or plaintive, the feminine, and subtle allusions to classical Chinese and Japanese stories that give the poems ‘tale-like’ qualities or the sense of being a scene taken from a drama.

  Poems in the yōen style tend to be rich in imagery, with multiple, striking images compressed within a few lines, resulting in incredibly rich, layered verse. Teika’s interest in love poetry is also related to his advocacy of the yōen style. Nevertheless, while the concept of yōen certainly influenced Teika’s selection and interpretation of the poems in this collection, to what extent is difficult to establish definitively.

  Later in life, Teika is said to have preferred a new stylistic ideal, ushin (conviction of feeling), a starker style favouring greater immediacy and intensity of passion over remote beauty. It was said to be an excellent vehicle for expressing difficulties in love, of which poem 89 is a fine example:

  Should I live longer

  I could not bear this secret love.

  Jewelled thread of life,

  since you must break –

  let it be now.

  Ushin was also favoured for giving voice to the tribulations of life in general, as exemplified by poem 84:

  Since I now recall fondly

  the painful days of the past, />
  if I live long, I may look back

  on these harsh days, too,

  and find them sweet and good.

  Indeed, it seems fair to say that the majority of the poems in this collection are far removed in style from the bold experimentalism of the yōen and reflect Teika’s later preference for a more sober, controlled approach.

  Fujiwara no Teika has always been synonymous with Japanese high culture and waka, its most acclaimed literary genre, and there were many literary and artistic reinventions of his poetry and poetics in later periods, most notably at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For example, the samurai warlord Hosokawa Yusai (1534–1610) and his disciple Karasumaru Mitsuhiro (1579–1638) revered him and took his poetic treatises as the foundation for their own poetry. Great calligraphers such as Hon’ami Koetsu (1558–1637) created stunning visual interpretations of Teika’s poems about birds and flowers. Fragments of his idiosyncratic calligraphy were sought after by tea-ceremony aficionados, and hung in their tea rooms to invoke the spirit of elegance and refinement he represented. Today, Teika is still regarded as one of the greatest of Japanese literary figures and editors.

  Understanding Waka and its Rhetorical Techniques

  All of the poems in the One Hundred Poets are waka, the most ancient and prestigious of the traditional poetry genres. Waka serves as a general term for classical Japanese poetry in all its forms – except renga (linked verse) and haiku – as opposed to foreign verse, especially Chinese poetry. However, in the more usual, restricted sense, waka designates Japanese poetic forms pre-dating renga and haiku, namely chōka, sedōka and especially the thirty-one-syllable tanka. Since the Meiji period (1868–1912), the ancient term tanka has been revived and the form updated, replacing waka as the preferred term for poems in the classical thirty-one-syllable form. The poems are arranged in five lines in an alternating pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. In this volume, the majority of the translations are accordingly laid out over five lines.

  Since early times, it was common practice to collect waka in large anthologies (kashū). The first extant waka anthology is the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves; c.770). In the early tenth century, the first imperially commissioned anthology, the Kokinshū, was compiled. Imperial sponsorship made waka a highly prestigious genre, a status that it retained for a thousand years until the modern period. The tradition of compiling selections of poems by famous poets (shūkasen) began in the early eleventh century with Fujiwara no Kinto (966–1041; see poem 55), whose Sanjūrokuninsen (Selected Verse of Thirty-Six Poets; c.1009–12) can be considered the first work of this kind. By the time of Teika’s One Hundred Poets (1230–40), the tradition was well established.

  Like all genres, waka has its own rules and conventions, a knowledge of which allows for a deeper appreciation of the poems. When translated, some of the poems seem to be saying very little, but the originals often rely on a masterful use of rhetorical expression – especially wordplay and punning – to make them linguistically complex and aurally pleasing. For Heian-period poets, this enabled them both to demonstrate their mastery of the genre and to delight their readers. Notable rhetorical devices include literary puns (kakekotoba); prefaces (jokotoba), where an initial segment of a poem serves as a ‘preface’ to a word introduced later in the poem; associative words (engo), clusters of semantically related words embedded within a poem; and pillow words (makura kotoba), epithets used as conventional embellishments for certain words, ‘raging’ (chihayaburu) being often paired with ‘gods’ (kami), for example. An explanation of the main rhetorical techniques and some of the poetic forms is provided in the Glossary, while usage in specific poems is discussed in the Commentary.

  Comparison with the Hyakunin shūka

  Although the exact circumstances of the compilation of the One Hundred Poets are unknown, some facts are well established. In 1235 Teika was asked by his son’s father-in-law, Utsunomiya Rensho (or Yoritsuna), to select a hundred poems to appear on the sliding doors of his country villa on Mount Ogura, west of Kyoto. An extant work known as Hyakunin shūka (Superior Poems by One Hundred Poets; 1229–36?) is thought to represent the original selection of poems that Teika gave to Rensho, although it is not known whether this pre-dates the One Hundred Poets. The poems were to be copied on squares of fine stiff paper (shikishi) and affixed to the doors of the villa, possibly accompanied by paintings.

  There are several differences between the two works. Firstly, the Hyakunin shūka contains 101 poems instead of a hundred, leading some scholars to conjecture that Teika initially did not include one of his own poems in the selection out of modesty, but eventually was forced to do so by Rensho, driving the total number of poems up to 101. Furthermore, the poem by Minamoto no Toshiyori (no. 74 in the One Hundred Poets) is different in the Hyakunin shūka, while three poets who appear in the Hyakunin shūka (Emperor Ichijo’s consort Teishi, Minamoto no Kunizane and Fujiwara no Nagakata) do not appear in the One Hundred Poets and are replaced by emperors Gotoba (poem 99) and Juntoku (poem 100). This has generated much debate. One view is that Gotoba and his son Juntoku were initially excluded from the selection for political reasons: they had rebelled against the shogunate in the Jokyu rebellion of 1221 and, as a consequence, Gotoba had been exiled to the Oki Islands and Juntoku to Sado Island. Teika included them in the selection at a later date when he felt comfortable enough to do so. Another possibility is that the One Hundred Poets may in fact pre-date the Hyakunin shūka, and that Gotoba and Juntoku were removed from the list after being initially included, again for political reasons. It is also possible that changes to an earlier version of the collection were made by someone other than Teika after his death, possibly his son Tameie and possibly at Teika’s request. One of the main reasons supporting this conjecture is that the emperors Juntoku and Gotoba are referred to in the text as in (retired emperors), a title that they acquired only after Teika’s death. Similarly, in the current version of the One Hundred Poets the poet Ietaka (poem 98) is referred to as Ietaka of the Junior Second Rank, but he only reached that rank after the date Teika himself recorded compiling the collection. Because so much about the details of compilation remains uncertain, it is difficult to make definitive claims regarding the formative process of the work.

  Editorial Principles and Prominent Themes

  Though the poems can be read and enjoyed with no background knowledge, a few details of the political context and culture are worth mentioning, along with Teika’s principles for selecting, interpreting and arranging poems. These include the theory of ‘association and progression’ in the establishment of the poetic unity of the text; Teika’s aesthetics and his predilection for love poetry; and his use of imagery.

  It is no exaggeration to say that association is a central preoccupation of Japanese culture, both traditional and modern. An important idea in Japanese society is that of connection – embodied in the concept of en – and having a connection with someone or something is thought to be special and desirable. It is a fundamental element in the tea ceremony, for instance, where a tea utensil will be associated with the hanging scroll (such as cherry blossoms appearing on the tea bowl and in a poem on the scroll) and in poetry, where word association triggers internal resonances and creates verbal play. Because the Japanese language has countless homonyms, punning and word association are very easy to achieve. They constitute the basis of rakugo, a popular form of storytelling, in which wordplay provides a great part of the comic effect. Wordplay and word association are still important ingredients in many forms of contemporary culture, such as advertising and manzai (traditional stand-up) comedy.

  Anthologies of Japanese court poetry often display a high degree of internal organization. In an influential article, Konishi Jin’ichi argued that the principles of progression and association were the main editorial techniques employed to create unity within an anthology.4 Progression, in this context, might refer to the passing of time represented by the changing seasons,
the cycle of court calendar events or the movement of a love affair from initial longing and brief fulfilment to betrayal and despair. Association may consist of grouping poems according to interrelated themes, such as, for example, poems invoking the same place name (Yoshino, Naniwa, etc.), dealing with the same topic (such as the coldness of dawn partings) or employing the same or similar imagery and diction.

  Given that Teika was considered one of the editorial geniuses of his age, one would expect the One Hundred Poets to display strong principles of unity. It is true that there is a great deal of wordplay and association in the collection; however, it is not as coherently organized as some waka anthologies. Though some continuity between the various poems exists, the two main principles that seem to have guided Teika are chronological succession and the quality of the individual poems. This lack of internal structure and regularity is evident from a consideration of the main poetic categories (budate), as employed in imperial waka anthologies, that appear in the collection (see table).5

  As the table shows, poems in one category are not always grouped together but may be interspersed throughout the collection. Nevertheless, a measure of unity is achieved by placing poems with common themes, imagery or diction together or near each other. Examples include autumn (poems 22 and 23), the dawn (30 and 31), hidden love (39–41), night (67–68), dusk (70–71), water (90, 92–93), robes and sleeves (90–92 and 93–94). And there are two large clusters of poems (38–46 and 48–54), all of which deal with love. This was clearly Teika’s favourite theme, featuring in a great many of the poems.