Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  8. This poem, perhaps composed shortly after Saigyō took Buddhist vows, expresses his consternation at his remaining attachments. The phrase “stained by blossoms” (hana ni somu), which has also been interpreted as referring to a romantic or worldly attachment, implies a deep attachment to the cherry blossoms. This internal conflict is a hallmark of Saigyō’s style.

  9. This is one of Saigyō’s most famous poems, primarily because it forms the basis of Saigyō zakura (Saigyō and the Cherry Tree), one of the most beloved nō plays. In the play, the spirit of the cherry tree appears to rebuke Saigyō for blaming the blossoms for his discomfort. But Saigyō is stating that the only fault to be found in a cherry tree is that it is so beautiful that crowds of people come to see it and destroy the serenity of a monk in retreat.

  10. The Kamo Priestess was an imperial princess chosen to serve as the high priestess of the Kamo Shrine in the capital. The poem alludes to a late spring poem by Ki no Tsurayuki, Kokinshū, no. 117: “That night when I lodged and slept in the spring foothills, the blossoms scattered even in my dreams.” Saigyō’s poem describes the state of the poet after waking from that dream. The verb “to stir” (sawagu) is a word associated in the poetic tradition with “wind,” but it also implies a racing heart.

  11. Saigyō draws a direct parallel between the scattering blossoms and himself (waga mi). If we take waga mi to mean the poet’s body specifically, the poem can be read as foreseeing death. Most commentators see a more general expression of uncertainty: if the whole world is as impermanent as scattering blossoms, then he cannot escape that uncertainty.

  12. “That day in the Second Month” refers to the fifteenth day of the Second Month in the lunar calendar, the day that Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, is said to have died. Saigyō here combines his three central devotions—cherry blossoms, the moon, and the Buddha—in one poem. Saigyō actually died on the sixteenth day of the Second Month. At least four other monks of the medieval period are said to have successfully entered nirvana on the same day as the Buddha, and it was not unusual for many to try.

  13. Although cherry blossoms are not usually chosen as offerings to the dead, Saigyō here insists on his favorite flower. Saigyō’s request has been seen as further evidence of his lingering attachment to the world, but the cherry blossoms can also be associated with the death of Siddhartha (the historical Buddha) beneath the sala blossoms.

  14. This poem is one of the “three evening poems” (sanseki no uta) of the Shinkokinshū. The other two poems are by Jakuren and Teika. Autumn evenings (aki no yūgure) are associated with loneliness in classical poetry. The sound of the wings of the snipe(s) fading into the approaching darkness deepens the sense of loneliness in the autumn dusk. According to the headnote, Saigyō composed this poem while traveling, which also connotes loneliness. The phrase kokoro naki mi (body/self without heart/spirit) has basically two interpretations: one who has taken Buddhist vows and has presumably transcended joy and sadness, or one who has no aesthetic or poetic sensibility and does not understand the pathos (aware) of things. Either way, this scene would move even such a person. More specifically, the speaker has been caused to know (shirarekeri) the pathos of things through this scene.

  15. This poem is an allusive variation on Nōin’s famous poem on Naniwa, or Osaka Bay, in the Goshūishū, vol. 1, Spring 1, no. 43: “To someone with a heart I’d like to show this scene of spring at Naniwa in the province of Tsu.” Saigyō rarely alluded directly to earlier poems, but he was fond of Nōin’s poetry. Here the allusion establishes a seasonal contrast between spring at Naniwa and the barrenness of winter. The implied sound of the wind through the reeds, which always are associated with Naniwa, adds to the sense of loneliness. Fujiwara no Shunzei described this poem as an example of yūgen (mystery and depth) style.

  16. Soba is a slope, bluff, or precipice, suggesting that this field is in the hills or mountains. The combination of images—the sound of the dove, the abandoned fields, evening, and so forth—suggests autumn. The dove crying to a friend is an implicit metaphor for the poet, implying both loneliness and love. The use of the word sugoki, suggesting fright, cold, and isolation, is highly unusual in waka but common in prose.

  17. Aki is part of present-day Hiroshima Prefecture. Ichinomiya is the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island. The subject of moonlight filtering through the roof or eaves of a thatched hut was a favorite of Saigyō’s. A night in a hut on a beach almost always implies wind, waves, and the moon. Saigyō was known for making friends out of inanimate objects like the moon and pine trees.

  18. The voice of an insect, especially a gradually weakening voice, is commonly used to suggest the loneliness of autumn and the gradual loss of life. Saigyō, however, is engaging the cricket directly in a conversational mode. The cricket may be a cricket, a friend of the poet, or the poet himself.

  19. The poet wishes for a friend who, like himself, can bear the loneliness. Saigyō does not wish to escape the loneliness but, rather, to share it with another. Implicitly the thatched hut of a recluse is a place for reflection, meditation, and composition.

  20. Much of the effect of this poem derives from the repetition of the i sound in michinobe ni shimizu and in shibashi and from the series of a sounds in nagaruru yanagi kage. The koso … tsure construction leaves out the logical conclusion, “but I lingered much longer than planned.” Later interpreters read this as a travel poem, with willow trees becoming part of the legend (as in the nō play Yugyō yanagi and Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no hosomichi). Both the shade of the willow and the flowing stream are cool images appropriate to summer.

  21. This is the first of a series of thirteen poems written by Saigyō late in life. It is thought that they were composed shortly after his second trip to Michinoku, around 1188. They are unusually playful and colloquial in tone and are thus called tawabure uta (playful poems). Some commentators believe, however, that these play poems contain deeper Buddhist connotations and that this poem in particular describes a moment of awakening analogous to enlightenment.

  22. Sayanonaka Mountain, in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture, was a difficult pass along the Eastern Sea Road. This poem was composed on Saigyō’s second trip to Michinoku and refers to his amazement at being able to cross Sayanonaka some forty years after his first trip. The key to the poem lies in the fourth line, translated here as “Such is life!” Inochi refers to the poet’s life or lifespan, but it can also mean “fate” or “destiny.” Long life is remarkable when one assumes that life is fleeting and insubstantial.

  23. Nabiku (trailing), keburi (smoke), yukue mo shiranu (destination unknown), and omoi (thoughts/longing) are all words traditionally used in love poems. The hi of omo(h)i also suggests fire (hi). Mount Fuji was long a symbol of smoldering passion. Hence, this poem is placed in the love section of Saigyō shōninshū, but it is placed in the miscellany category of the Shinkokinshū, and most commentators go out of their way to deemphasize the love imagery. According to Saigyō’s friend Jien, Saigyō himself considered this perhaps his best poem (jisanka), and it has received critical and popular acclaim. The nexus of meaning is thought to be in the word omohi. In a traditional love poem, these “thoughts” would imply a lover or longing. The first half of the poem, while suggesting love imagery, can also be interpreted as funerary, with the image of smoke fading away suggesting the smoke of a funeral pyre. The death imagery suggests that it is not only his thoughts but also himself that is trailing toward extinction, or nirvana. “Destination unknown” is a pivot phrase that modifies both the smoke and the poet’s thoughts.

  24. Fuke ni keru is generally used to mean night or autumn “growing deep.” It can also mean “growing old.” Saigyō puns on the word yo, which can mean “one’s life” as well as “night.” Kage can mean “shadow” or “one’s physical form” (or face). If we take yo to be one’s lifetime, then kage would be the accumulation of one’s life experiences. If we take ma to be a moment, this becomes a sudden awakening to the reality of old age. If we
take ma to be a period of time, we can imagine the poet pondering his long life throughout the night, only to notice that in the meantime the moon has begun to set.

  25. The topic of this poem is kanjin (looking at one’s heart)—that is, meditation on the heart and self-realization. Often in Buddhist discourse, the heart is compared to a mirror that, when clear and unspotted, is able to reflect the full bright moon, a symbol of the Buddha and the Buddhist law. The darkness is that of attachment and sin. The “western hills” symbolize the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. This poem was chosen as the final entry in the Shinkokinshū, occupying a privileged position.

  26. There are five (5/7/5/7/7) measures (ku) in a thirty-one-syllable waka.

  27. Seventy-one volumes in all, of which the first twenty consist of Chinese poetry.

  28. Haikai poems as represented in the Kokinshū are not, in fact, prosodically different from conventional waka but, rather, violate the aesthetic ideals of court poetry, lexically or thematically, through their use of archaic or “inelegant” diction, tendentious humor, or extravagant conceits—and thus they served by contraries to define the bounds of decorum. The exclusion of haikai is notable because even though Fujiwara no Shunzei, the sole editor of the Senzaishū, had demoted “poems in variant prosody” (zōtai), the topic of a separate book (no. 19) in the Kokinshū, to the subtitle of his third book of miscellany (zōka), he followed the precedent of the Kokinshū to the extent of including twenty-two haikai poems in his collection.

  29. A poem on the topic risshun (“Spring Begins,” the first day of spring by the solar calendar) became conventional for the opening of an imperial waka anthology. Yoshino, a mountainous area in Yamato and near the capital, was noted in poetry for deep snow as well as for cherry blossoms and autumn foliage. It was also the site of a seventh-century “detached” imperial palace, which qualified it for recognition as a former capital, acknowledged in the conventional phrase furinishi sato (literally, “old village”), with a pun on furinishi meaning “[snow] was falling.” The imperial association, underscored by the laudative prefix mi- in miyoshino, may well have been one reason this poem was chosen for first place in the anthology, which was compiled under the attentive gaze of the retired emperor GoToba. The base text (honka) is the first poem from the third imperial anthology, Shūishū: “‘Spring begins today’—is it only saying so that makes the snowy mountains of fair Yoshino look draped in mist, this morning?” (Mibu no Tadamine). Yoshitsune’s poem affirms that indeed mist, an auspicious sign of spring, has replaced snow even in the cold mountains of Yoshino and that therefore spring has arrived in due time. It was the prerogative of the imperial household to issue the calendar, and the implicit moral responsibility of the emperor to ensure that the seasons followed it. Signs that they did so were taken as a cause for celebration.

  30. Fujiwara no Yoshitsune (1169–1206). Born into an illustrious and powerful branch of the Fujiwara clan, Yoshitsune became regent-prime minister at the early age of thirty-six and then died under mysterious circumstances two years later. An enthusiastic and gifted poet, he used his position at court to patronize Teika and other major poets of the age and to sponsor numerous events, including the monumental Poetry Match in Six Hundred Rounds, a source of many poems for the Shinkokinshū. Seventy-four of his poems were included in the anthology.

  31. Spring comes late to deep mountains: the first sign of its arrival here is the melting of winter snow rather than the appearance of mist. “Gate of pine” is a metonymy for a recluse’s dwelling too remote from the capital to rely on an official calendar to announce the coming of spring, while the evergreen pines by their nature do not “know” and hence cannot inform the speaker of the change of seasons.

  32. Princess Shokushi (d. 1201), the third daughter of Emperor GoShirakawa, studied poetry as a disciple of Shunzei, whose major treatise on waka, Korai fūteishō, was dedicated to her. She was admired as one of the most accomplished exponents of the Shinkokinshū style, and forty-nine of her poems were included in the anthology, more than for any other female poet.

  33. Snow is still falling from a sky darkened with clouds, and if spring personified has indeed made its way to this village, the tracks it should have left are covered in fresh snowfall and darkness. No visible evidence supports the poet’s confidence in the arrival of the season. None is needed: winter must yield to convention and let the calendar prevail.

  34. Kunaikyō (ca. 1185–1204?). Her earliest recorded poems are those presented in a poetry match sponsored by the retired emperor GoToba in 1200, when she was fourteen or fifteen, and during the next five years she enjoyed a reputation as a leading adept of intricately wrought and complexly allusive poems in the Shinkokinshū style. Legend had it that her death at the age of nineteen or twenty was caused by intense concentration on poetic composition. Fifteen of her poems were included in the anthology.

  35. The poetry match of the headnote, completed in 1194, has come to be known as the Poetry Match in Six Hundred Rounds. It was sponsored by the author of this poem, the regent–prime minister Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, and was a major source of poems for this collection. Instead of the longed-for mist of early spring, it is snow-laden clouds that obscure the light of the moon.

  36. The poet has opted to address the nominal topic of this poem, “Spring Mountain Moon,” with imagery—moonlight chilled by snow clouds—drawing the poem into alignment with the formal topic of the previous poem, “Lingering Cold.”

  37. The topic of this poem breaks away from the previous two. The link is maintained by contrasts: a shift from mountain depths to seaside village, snow replaced by frost, and chill winds by those proper to the season.

  38. The budding reed-shoots of the previous poem are now leaved in green as frost becomes froth. The contrast of green against white underscores the progression from lingering cold to early spring proper.

  39. This spring poem alludes to and challenges the famous assertion in Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book that evening is the most poignant moment of an autumn day and thus best appreciated in that season. Compare nos. 361 and 363. The broader context is a timeless debate over which season, spring or autumn, is aesthetically more interesting.

  40. “Far Pine Mountain” (Sue no Matsuyama) is an utamakura, a place-name with well-defined poetic connotations. This one is traditionally identified with Michinoku, in northeastern Honshu. It first appeared in an anonymous folk song in the Kokinshū that may be paraphrased as “Should I ever set you aside and let my heart stray, then might the waves surge over Far Pine Mountain,” implying that the former is as improbable as the latter and, in turn, that Far Pine Mountain rises near the shore well above sea level on the coast in Michinoku. As so many later poets did, Karyū imagined conditions under which the impossible takes place as waves of mist rise over the mountain at dawn. This poem shares with the previous few poems the season word “mist” but begins a new sequence of three poems on the topic akebono (spring dawn).

  41. Ietaka (or Karyū, 1158–1237) became a disciple of Shunzei at about the age of twenty and soon was recognized for his technical expertise in what was to become known as the Shinkokinshū style. Several of his most admired poems are paired with Teika’s in the anthology, underscoring the impression that he was acknowledged by Teika as a rival and predecessor. He was one of the four chief compilers of the anthology, in which forty-three of his poems were included.

  42. Numerous interpretations have been proposed for this poem, one of Teika’s best known, especially for the phrase “floating bridge of dreams,” an allusion to the last chapter of The Tale of Genji. One suggestion is of fleeting, perhaps unrequited, love, imaged in the sky at dawn by a cloud drifting away from a mountain peak. In this context, however, in which the topic of the poem is “Spring Dawn,” the “floating bridge” is usually taken as a broader image of human life and its evanescence. In the late-thirteenth-century poetic treatise Chikuenshō, Fujiwara no Tameaki (a grandson and poetic heir of Teika) acknowledges the fame of this p
oem while also offering it as exemplary of one of the traditional “eight poetic faults” (ranshibyō, or “disordered thoughts”). Perhaps in response, Tameyo (a great-grandson and heir in another poetic lineage) is reported as having asserted that this poem is so superior that its meaning could not help but be uncertain, in the same way that music is able to move the heart, even though it carries no meaning (kotowari) as such.

  43. The son of Fujiwara no Shunzei and heir to the Mikohidari house of poetry, Teika (1162–1241) was recognized at a fairly early age as one of the most controversially innovative poets of his generation and was one of the four primary compilers of the Shinkokinshū. Despite his audacious experiments with syntax and disdain for convention, he could also be remarkably conservative, especially in his later years, and notoriously called for a return to early classical models of composition. His dictum “new meanings, old words” is an emblem of the difficult demands he made for originality within the constraints of precedent. Forty-six of his poems were included in the anthology.

  44. Both nos. 44 and 45 are striking examples of the innovative early poems that shocked their more conservative contemporaries and earned them recognition as young poets whose departures from precedent delineated what came to be known as the Shinkokinshū style. What is disturbing is that the spare but fluent syntax so successfully enfolds an obtrusive conceit—the prosopopoeia of moonlight competing with the scent of plum blossoms—within an impeccably decorous scene of high classicism, the speaker assuming the attitude, pensive regret, of Ariwara no Narihira in the fourth episode of The Tales of Ise. In that story, Narihira returns to an abandoned house one year after visiting to call on a woman who had been abducted to the imperial palace. It is a night in the first month of the year by the lunar calendar, early spring. The plum trees are in blossom. The moon is in the sky. Narihira looks around in vain for some trace of his long-absent lover and of the past, lies down weeping under the ruined eaves as the moon sets, and offers a poem: “Is there no moon? Is the spring not the spring of the past? I alone am as I was.” It is only the confluence of imagery and mood (omokage) that may recall The Tales of Ise for the reader. The compilers of the Shinkokinshū apparently decided to propose the allusion by placing this poem at the beginning of a sequence of four (nos. 44–47), none of which cites Narihira’s poem but each of which can be taken as evoking it. The creation of the sequence effectively imposes on each of the four poems a reference to The Tales of Ise that none of the authors may have meant but that readers of the anthology must keep in mind.