87
My family is not one of generals.
As Confucian scholars we earn our keep.
My revered grandfather attained the third rank.
My kind father’s office was high court noble.33
Well, they knew the power of learning
and wished to bequeath it for their descendants’ glory.
The day I was promoted to advanced student,34
I resolved to master the craft of my forefathers.
The year I became a professor,
happily, the lecture hall was rebuilt.
When everyone rushed to congratulate me,
my father alone expressed concern.
Why did he express concern?
“Alas, you are an only child,” he said;
“the office of professor is not mean,
the salary of a professor is not small.
Once I too held this post
and learned to fear people’s feelings.”
Having heard this kind admonition,
I proceeded with care as if walking on ice.
In the fourth year,35 the council met
and ordered me to lecture the students.
But after teaching only three days,
my ears heard slanderous voices.
This year, evaluating students for advancement,
the decisions were absolutely clear.
But the first student dropped for lack of talent,
denounced me, and begged unearned promotion.
In my teaching, I did not make mistakes.
My selections for advancement were fair.
How true was my father’s advice
when he warned me before all this occurred.
EXILE
Just as Michizane’s public career resembled that of the Chinese scholar officials whose writings he so admired, exile also was a fate shared with some of China’s greatest poets. In his last years, Michizane joined them in lamenting his misfortunes and protesting his innocence. The poetry he wrote in Kyushu alludes to both the specific circumstances of his exile and the appropriate Chinese exemplars.
Seeing the Plum Blossoms When Sentenced to Exile
This is Michizane’s best-known poem written in Japanese. He is said to have particularly admired plum blossoms (ume), and, according to legend, the tree in his garden was so touched by this poem that it flew to be with him at his place of exile.
SHŪISHŪ, NO. 1006
kochi fukaba When the east wind blows,
nioi okoseyo send me your fragrance,
ume no hana plum blossoms:
aruji nashi tote although your master is gone,
haru o wasuruna do not forget the spring.
Autumn Night, the Fifteenth Day of the Ninth Month
As in so many of the poems he wrote in exile, Michizane protests his innocence while complaining of his personal hardships.
485
My complexion a withered yellow, topped by white frost,
worse still, I am banished over a thousand ri from home.36
Once ensnared in the trappings of glory,
now I am an exile, imprisoned amid rustic weeds.
The moon, shining like a mirror, exposes no crime.
The wind, blowing with swordlike force, cannot end my protests.
Looking or listening, both make me shiver.
This year’s autumn is my own personal autumn.
In Exile, Spring Snow
This is Michizane’s last poem. In it, he discovers some flowers in Dazaifu, the plum blossoms he is said to have so admired. He died on the twenty-fifth day of the Second Month, 903, probably not long after writing this. According to the lunar calendar, spring usually began in February, and so “spring snow” was not, in fact, uncommon. Perhaps still more common were poems pretending that the plum blossoms of that month were snow.
514
Filling the town, overflowing the district, so many plum blossoms.
Wind rustling them in the sunlight, the first flowers of the year!
They stick to the feet of the geese, just like pieces of cloth.37
They dot the heads of crows: perhaps I will return home.38
[Introduction and translations by Robert Borgen]
KOKINSHŪ (COLLECTION OF ANCIENT AND MODERN POEMS, CA. 905)
The Kokin wakashū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems), informally known as Kokinshū, is an anthology of 1,111 Japanese poems (in the most widely circulated editions) compiled and edited in the early tenth century. The collection begins with a kana (Japanese) preface and, in some editions, concludes with a postface in Chinese. The Kana Preface, opening with the famous words “Japanese poetry takes as its seed the human heart,” was long regarded as a model of classical prose and, line for line, is undoubtedly the most heavily commented secular prose text of the Japanese tradition. The poems are divided into twenty scrolls or books (maki), each of whose titles refers to a conventional poetic topic (the seasons, love, parting, mourning, miscellaneous or “mixed” topics) or to a genre (“acrostic” poems, “mixed” or miscellaneous forms, poems of the “Bureau of Song”). Most of the poems (all but nine, in fact) are in the form of waka (thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem), the canonical form of Japanese poetry from the eighth until the late nineteenth century.
The Kokinshū’s poems can be roughly divided into three periods, which also reflect certain broad stylistic differences: anonymous poems of the early to mid-ninth century or before; those of the age of the Six Poetic Immortals, the mid-ninth century; and poems by the editors and their contemporaries, from the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Well over half the poems are attributed to nearly 130 known poets, mostly of the late ninth century. Of the approximately 450 anonymous poems, many are believed to derive from folk songs, although some Heian and medieval commentaries assert, plausibly enough, that the editors deliberately identified as anonymous certain poems by those of the highest social rank, others by persons of very low status, some of those by the compilers themselves, and poems that touched on various taboos.
The waka is defined prosodically as a poem of thirty-one syllables grouped according to a pattern of five ku, or measures, of, respectively, 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables, each of which is also required to be grammatically independent in that the phrasal breaks in syntax regularly coincide with the divisions between successive measures. At a higher level of organization, the first three measures were traditionally called the kami-no-ku (upper measure) and the last two, the shimo-no-ku (lower measure). Although this was a purely quantitative distinction, it reflects a tendency (increasingly evident after the late twelfth century) to place a strong syntactic break after the third measure and less often after the first, resulting in what is called a 7/5 rhythm (as opposed to the alternative, a 5/7 rhythm in which breaks occur after a seven-syllable measure). The 7/5 rhythm is a characteristic distinguishing the later poetry of the Kokinshū from that of the eighth-century anthology Man’yōshū and much oral poetry, including many of the early anonymous poems of the Kokinshū, which favor breaks after the second and fourth measures. By the time of the early-thirteenth-century anthology Shinkokinshū, the 7/5 rhythm had become established as the waka’s dominant rhythm.
A majority of the poems in the Kokinshū can be parsed syntactically as a single compound sentence or as two simple sentences. In the latter case, these often are in a relation between question and answer, enigma or dilemma and (often inadequate) solution, or a generalization followed by a restrictive condition. Exceptions abound, and some of the anthology’s most memorable poems can be read as lyrical observations of how things are. But it is safe to say that a questioning or plaintive mood prevails, with the poet asking why things must be as they are or why experience does not better agree with either reason or imagination. This prevailing mood has earned the Kokinshū (or, more precisely, the middle- and later-period poems usually taken to typify the anthology) a reputation for ironic wit and ratiocination that in turn has, in a favorable interpre
tation, been read as evidence of a sophisticated awareness of the discrepancies between language and reality or, in a less sympathetic reading, as indulgence in sophistry or sheer wordplay.
Along a somewhat different axis, later scholars and critics have debated whether this interrogative mood reflects the ironic affirmation of a recently acquired technical facility of poetic expression; a sense of nostalgic resignation, even of despair, perhaps inspired by the dissemination of Buddhist doctrine; the increasing political hegemony of the Fujiwara lineage; or some combination of these. It is up to the reader to decide, but even though individual poems do display a fairly wide range of tonal variation, few, especially those in the seasonal and love books (which together make up more than two-thirds of the collection) are completely free of irony, and only a rather small minority of the Kokinshū’s poems can be counted as celebratory or “pastoral” without qualification.
The immense prestige of the Kokinshū as the unrivaled canon of classical waka, especially after its recanonization in the late twelfth century, meant that it largely determined the range of acceptable variations on a given poetic motif as well as the rules of decorum governing the choices of diction and topics. Some of the most influential poets of the late twelfth century (including Shunzei, Saigyō, and Kamo no Chōmei, as well as Teika) asserted that the Kokinshū’s poetry represented the whole range of acceptable styles for serious poetry.
Most, though not all, of the haikai poetry in the Kokinshū is gathered in a subsection of book 19, “Mixed Forms,” suggesting that although prosodically identical with waka, haikai was regarded as a distinct genre. This book apparently was thus classified on the basis of its unorthodox (colloquial or archaic) diction as well as its obtrusive irony or wit (to the editors of the Kokinshū, the term haikai seems to have meant “discordant” or “dissonant” as well perhaps as “comic”). If we regard haikai as marking the lower bound of decorum, then its antithesis, yūgen (mystery and depth), represented, at least for medieval readers, the surpassing ideal that few poems in fact achieved.
One quality of the Kokinshū that helped define its authority as the paradigm against which subsequent imperial anthologies (there were twenty) were measured and on which they were modeled and that may account for the number of years apparently spent compiling the anthology is the manifest care its editors applied to the structural arrangement of individual poems in sequences within each book, most conspicuously in the sequences of seasonal and travel poems. These many arrangements include temporal progression through the seasons and through the stages of a courtly love affair, subsequences of topical images with subtle variations in treatment, alternation of anonymous (older) poems with those by contemporary (new or modern) authors and of rhythmic forms (poems with a caesura after the second versus those with one after the third measure), patterns in which strongly original poems are set off by more conventional verses, and so forth. Medieval exegetes were very attentive to these principles of arrangement, which they identified as budate (structure of the book or section) and shidai (sequence) and regarded as more pertinent than satisfactorily interpreting individual poems in the context of the anthology.
One consequence of the editors’ concern with arranging the poems into larger, aesthetically tangible patterns was that they omitted some of the finest poems at their disposal (most of which were eventually used by later anthologists) but included many that have never since been esteemed very highly. The Kokinshū sufficiently mapped the world of courtly poetic topoi such that (supplemented by the two later imperially commissioned anthologies, the Gosenshū and the Shūishū) it was regarded for centuries as an indispensable guide for aspiring poets. But it was evidently not meant to be a treasury of all (and only) the best poetry of its age, and it has rarely been regarded as such. Instead, thanks to the care with which it was arranged, the Kokinshū is an eminently readable anthology, which may have contributed as much to its endurance as the excellence of its finest poems.
The Kana Preface
The Kana Preface to the Kokinshū, by Ki no Tsurayuki, foremost among the editors of the anthology, was among the earliest statements of Japanese poetics and by far the most influential. The passage translated here is an assertion of the universal value of poetry and of waka in particular.
The songs of Japan take the human heart as their seed and flourish as myriad leaves of words.39 As long as they are alive to this world, the cares and deeds of men and women are endless, so they speak of things they hear and see, giving words to the feelings in their hearts. Hearing the cries of the warbler among the blossoms or the calls of the frog that lives in the waters, how can we doubt that every living creature sings its song? Not using force, it moves heaven and earth, makes even the unseen spirits and gods feel pity, smoothes the bonds between man and woman, and consoles the hearts of fierce warriors—such a thing is poetry.
Spring 1
1
Composed on a day when spring arrived within the old year.
toshi no uchi ni Spring has come
haru wa kinikeri before the year’s turning:
hitotose o should I speak now
kozo to ya iwamu of the old year
kotoshi to ya iwamu or call this the new year?40
Ariwara no Motokata41
2
Composed on “the first day of spring.”
sode hijite Waters I cupped my
musubishi mizu no hands to drink, wetting
kooreru o my sleeves, still frozen:
haru tatsu kyou no might this first day of
kaze ya tokuramu spring’s wind thaw them?42
Ki no Tsurayuki43
3
Topic unknown.
harugasumi Where are the promised
tateru ya izuko mists of spring?
Miyoshino no In Yoshino, fair hills
Yoshino no yama ni of Yoshino, snow
yuki wa furitsutsu falling still.44
Anonymous45
35
Topic unknown.
ume no hana I lingered only a moment
tachiyoru bakari beneath the plum blossoms
arishi yori and now I am
hito no togamuru blamed for my
ka ni zo shiminuru scented sleeves.46
Anonymous
Spring 2
69
Topic unknown.
harugasumi On hills where mists of spring
tanabiku yama no trail, glowing faintly,
sakurabana do the flowers’ fading
utsurowamu to ya colors foretell
iro kawariyuku their fall?47
Anonymous
70
Topic unknown.
mate to iu ni If saying “stay!”
chirade shi tomaru would stop their
mono naraba falling, could I hold
nani o sakura ni these blossoms
omoimasamashi more dear?48
Anonymous
71
Topic unknown.
nokori naku It’s their falling without regret
chiru zo medetaki I admire—
sakurabana Cherry blossoms:
arite yo no naka a world of sadness
hate no ukereba if they’d stayed.49
Anonymous
72
Topic unknown.
kono sato ni I seem bound to sleep
tabine shinu beshi in this village tonight:
sakurabana led astray by falling
chiri no magai ni blossoms, I’ve forgotten
ieji wasurete my way home.50
Anonymous
73
Topic unknown.
utsusemi no Are they not like
yo ni mo nitaru ka this fleeting world?
hanazakura Cherry blossoms:
saku no mishi ma ni no sooner do they flower
katsu chirinikeri than they fall.51
Anonymous
103
From the empress’s poetry contest in the Kanpyō era.
kasumi tatsu The hill
s where
haru no yamabe wa spring mists rise are distant,
tookeredo yet the wind comes,
fukikuru kaze wa bringing the
hana no ka zo suru blossoms’ scent.52
Ariwara no Motokata
104
Composed when looking at fading blossoms.
hana mireba When I gaze on
kokoro sae ni zo fading blossoms
utsurikeru this heart, too, would fade with them:
iro ni wa ideji may my feelings not be seen
hito mo koso shire lest others come to know.53
Ōshikōchi no Mitsune54
105
Topic unknown.
uguisu no To each meadow where
naku nobe goto ni the warbler cries
kite mireba I come and see
utsurou hana ni the wind blow
kaze zo fukikeru fading flowers.55
Anonymous
Summer
135
Topic unknown.
wa ga yado no Wisteria flowers
ike no fujinami blossom in waves
sakinikeri on my garden pond:
yamahototogisu will the mountain cuckoo
itsu ka kinakamu come, then, and sing?56
Anonymous
Some say that the preceding poem was composed by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro.57
152
Topic unknown.
yayoya mate Wait, cuckoo,
yamahototogisu take my message
kotozutemu to the mountains:
ware yo no naka ni I, too, have learned
sumiwabinu to yo to weary of this world.58
Mikuni no Machi59
Autumn 1
172
Topic unknown.
kinou koso Only yesterday
sanae torishika seedlings were planted:
itsu no ma ni so soon, now,
inaba soyogite ears of grain tremble
Traditional Japanese Literature Page 14