by Hiroaki Sato
33.
紅粉染の唐紙に花の香をしぼり
beni-zome no tōshi ni hana no ka o shibori
flower-scenting Chinese paper dyed vermilion
Bashō
Category: spring. Kigo: flower. The flower position in this section normally occurs in the 35th link; here it is moved forward by two links, evidently in deference to Bashō.
Tōshi means Chinese or Korean paper because the word Tō, or in a different reading, Kara, meant either country in those days—a fact that at least one Korean visiting Japan in the early eighteenth century found offensive, although, as far as such things go, tō and kara were also synonyms for “foreign land,” while the Japanese in those days held Koreans in the highest respect. Sin Yuhan, the offended Korean visitor, accompanied the large Korean embassy to Japan in 1719 as a scribe, and left a highly entertaining and enlightening account titled A Record of Crossing the Sea (Kaiyū-roku).
Tōshi, at any rate, was prized for calligraphy and painting. The word beni, here given as “vermilion,” may also refer to benibana, “safflower,” commonly used as dyestuff, as is unabashedly suggested in one of Bashō’s more sensuous hokku:
行すゑは誰肌ふれむ紅の花
yukusue wa taga hada furen beni no hana
In the end whose skin are you going to touch, safflower?
The suggestion of this link is that the man described in the preceding one is not necessarily a Japanese warrior-turned-farmer in a former enemy land but rather a Korean gentleman-farmer who delights in delicate pastimes. It may be noted that The Pictorial Illustrations of All Phenomena of Japan and China links Koma, “Korea,” to tōshi.
34.
ちいさき宮の永き日の伽
chiisaki miya no nagaki hi no togi
he plays with the little prince for one long day
Kōzan
Category: spring. Kigo: nagaki hi, “long day.” Now the one who’s engaged in the delicate work is someone employed to entertain a young imperial prince for a whole spring day. Balmy, languid spring days are felt to be long, it is suggested, because they come after the short, miserable days of winter.
35.
春雨に新発意粽荷ひ来て
harusame ni shimpochi chimaki ninai kite
in spring rain the novice has brought cakes on his back
Tōyō
Category: spring. Kigo: spring rain. In theory at least, only one imperial prince was needed to succeed the emperor. As a result, most of the “excess” princes were routinely sent to temples at an early age to become priests. By bringing in a novice, Tōyō specifies the prince in the preceding link as one who was forced to give up court life under this arrangement. The novice is one assigned to serve the prince.
Chimaki, given simply as “cakes,” are rice cakes wrapped in the leaves of bamboo, bamboo grass, or any large leaves, then steamed. The making of such cakes may have originated in China or the South Pacific, though wrapping cakes in leaves to add fragrance doesn’t require special inventiveness or imagination. The chimaki is usually a summer kigo, as in Bashō’s hokku:
粽結ふかた手にはさむ額髪
Chimaki yū katate ni hasamu hitai-gami
Tying chimaki she holds up the hair on her forehead with one hand
36.
青草ちらす藤のつぼ折
aokusa chirasu fuji no tsubo-ori
green-grass wisteria pattern, sleeves tucked in
Tōtō
Category: spring. Kigo: wisteria. Aokusa, “green grass,” is usually a summer kigo, while kusa aomu, “grass turns green,” is a spring kigo.
The final 7-7 verse unit, called ageku, is required to complete the sequence on a congratulatory or generally optimistic, bright note; here it does so by describing the colorful design on the novice’s kimono—“wisteria with scattered green grasses,” to be more faithful to the original wording—and the way the lower parts of his long sleeves are tucked in with a sash in a manner called tsubo-ori, “pot-folding.” The link also suggests the way the novice has hurried through the spring rain, trampling on the green grass, in his eagerness to deliver the cakes.
Renga and Assassination: The Cultured Warlord Akechi Mitsuhide
On the twenty-fourth of Fifth Month, the tenth year of Tenshō, 1582, the warrior-commander Akechi Mitsuhide sat down with eight people in a temple on Mount Atago, north of Kyoto, to compose a hundred-verse-unit renga, hyakuin. He, along with a few other commanders, had just been ordered by the warlord Oda Nobunaga to take his army west and help their fellow commander Hashiba Hideyoshi, who was trying to subdue the warlord Mōri Terumoto in Takamatsu, Bitchū, today’s Okayama. It was toward the end of Japan’s Age of Warring States that lasted a hundred years. Nobunaga had by then gained control of nearly a third of the country, an important step toward the unification of Japan.
Nobunaga’s order had come while Mitsuhide was carrying out a different Nobunaga order, supervising a grand banquet for the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, Nobunaga’s important ally, at Azuchi, in today’s Shiga, on the southeastern bank of Japan’s largest lake, Biwa. There Nobunaga had built a spectacular castle that rose 190 meters high at the top of a mountain. The Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis reported:
. . . as regards architecture, strength, wealth and grandeur [it] may well be compared with the greatest buildings of Europe. Its strong and well-constructed surrounding walls of stone are over sixty spans in height and even higher in many places; inside the walls there are many beautiful and exquisite houses, all of them decorated with gold and so neat and well fashioned that they seem to reach the acme of human elegance. . . .
Actually, it would be more accurate to call it a castle/palace complex, because the whole mountains was covered with houses and apartments “linked by corridors of great perfection and elegance” to the main castle with its thirty-two-meter-tall, seven-floor donjon (tenshu).
At any rate, upon receiving Nobunaga’s new orders, Mitsuhide left his Sakamoto Castle, southwest of Azuchi across Lake Biwa, and returned to his residential castle in Kameyama, today’s Kameoka City, northwest of Kyoto. It was while preparing an army for the southwest campaign that Mitsuhide went to Mount Atago, northeast of the Kameyama Castle, to the Shirakumo Temple in order to compose the hyakuin—a prayer for victory in the upcoming battle. Shirakumo, “White Cloud,” also known as Atago Gongen, had amalgamated Shinto and Buddhism, and one of its deities was Shōgun Jizō, “the Jizō for the Victorious Army.” Helping the military is one of the more contradictory attributes of Jizō, the Japanese name of Ksitigarbha, for he is revered mainly as the savior of wayfarers and children, especially those who die before birth. Among other things, he grants transvestitism if needed.
The renga that resulted would soon win great fame. Mitsuhide, following its composition, consulted his top aides and decided to turn against Nobunaga. On the night of the first of Sixth Month, he led 13,000 troops not to the southwest but to the southeast, to Kyoto, and in the early morning of the next day, attacked Nobunaga at the Hon’nō-ji Temple in the middle of the capital, where the man of stern military genius was staying with a small retinue of pages. Mitsuhide killed him. A man who loved to dance, singing, “A man lives for fifty years. / When compared with the Lowest Heaven, / it’s like a dream, an illusion,” Nobunaga was forty-eight.
Luís Fróis, who happened to be staying in a church “situated only a street away” from the Hon’nō-ji, heard the “commotion” and was thus able to give a firsthand report on Mitsuhide as a “traitor” and the aftermath of the attack.
The Hyakuin
The hyakuin, called Tenshō Jūnen (Tenth Year of Tenshō) Atago Hyakuin, or simply Atago Hyakuin, opened with Mitsuhide’s hokku, in 5-7-5 syllables, declaring:
ときは今天が下しる五月哉
Toki wa ima ama ga shita shiru satsuki kana
The Toki must now rule the world: it’s Fifth Month
Actually, this translation may be a case of jumping the gun. A plainer rendition may be: “The time is now when Heaven rules: it’s Fifth Month.” Such different interpretations are possible because classical Japanese poets liberally employed puns, just as Shakespeare and his contemporaries did.
Toki, here given in the Japanese syllabary hiragana (とき), can mean “time,” “ibis,” and other things. But, as a proper noun, it could be Mitsuhide’s original clan name (土岐). Ama is here written with the Chinese character tian (天), which can also be read ame, and can mean “sky,” “heaven,” or “rain.” Shiru means “know” as well as “rule,” among other things. Also, satsuki, “swamp month,” one of the “poetic” names of Fifth Month by the lunar calendar, that year corresponded exactly to June by the solar calendar, and June makes up the bulk of Japan’s rainy season that lasts about forty days. The word can imply sakki, “killing intent.”
As mentioned before, renga rules require that the hokku, the opening verse of the sequential form, describe what you actually see in the session you are part of, indicating the time or season of composition in positive and celebratory terms. Taking this into account and stressing the seasonal factor, Mitsuhide’s 17-syllable verse could be translated as simply, “Now the time is peaceful in the rain: it’s Fifth Month.”
Regardless of which interpretation you take, this hokku includes a word that may begin to hint at the unusual complexity of renga rules: the name of the month. But before we get into that we must look at the overall structure of a hyakuin.
Some of the Complexity of the Rules
The one hundred verse units or “links” were written on four sheets of paper, each sheet folded at the center with two outer sides to write on, a total of four “folds” (ori) and eight sides (with the front, omote, and the back, ura, sides for each folded sheet). With the sheets so arranged, the hundred units were allocated to those eight sides by dividing them into the first eight, followed by six fourteens, ending with the last eight.
Renga accords special status to tsuki (月), “moon,” and hana (花), “flower,” with moon to be mentioned on each side, except that doing so in the final side is optional, and with flower to be mentioned in each fold. With these rules come further complications that are partly orthographic.
Tsuki, moon, also means “month” (just as the English word month derives from moon). Japan adopted their writing system, as well as the lunar calendar, from China. But in renga, when the name of the month includes the word tsuki (or zuki if a phonetic change occurs), it is not regarded as mentioning the moon even as the rule applies that the same Chinese characters must be separated by at least five verse units. Even then, when the month tsuki is mentioned, a word suggesting the moon, if not the word “moon” itself, must be used when the placement of the moon becomes necessary nearby. In this hyakuin, the word that suggests the moon is ariake, “daybreak,” which appears in the sixth link. The word ariake, by convention, suggests “daybreak moon.”
Also, when tsuki is mentioned unmodified, it means the autumn moon. Otherwise you must specify the season, as in fuyu no tsuki, “winter moon.”
Hana, “flower,” can be equally tricky. One of the participants in the renga session we are looking at, Satomura Jōha, wrote a treatise on renga, Jewels (Shihōshō), and in it explained:
As regards the essential nature (hon’i 本意) of hana, if you just say hana, it means, I dare say, sakura (cherry). If you say sakurabana (cherry blossoms), it ceases to be the correct hana. Also, you may mention hana with sakura in the next link. Nevertheless, you cannot set sakura far apart from hana and on the same side. We speak of hana as something highly appreciated (shōgan): it is to be mentioned just four times in each session, and someone who is not a nobleman or an accomplished man (kōsha), that is, someone who is an ordinary man, should stay away from it.
Aside from such intricate rules, you are required to make classical allusions directly or indirectly in most of your verse units to “justify” them—a requirement that constricts or expands the reader’s interpretation narrowly or indefinitely, depending on his knowledge and predilection. For example, Mitsuhide’s hokku specifies Fifth Month. So, if you want to see that he clarified his intention in his piece to revolt against Oda Nobunaga, you may turn to The Tale of the Heike, the account of the civil war between the Minamoto and Taira clans toward the end of the twelfth century: It was the same month, in 1180, that Minamoto no Yorimasa revolted against the ruling Taira clan, touching off a five-year war that ended in its vanquishment.
Following Mitsuhide’s hokku, Gyōyū responded with a 7-7 syllable unit:
水上まさる庭の夏山
minakami masaru niwa no natsuyama
the water above grows at garden’s summer hill
Gyōyū, on the face of it, described what he saw in the temple garden to complete the description of the hokku. He was the resident monk of Nishi-no-bō Itoku-in, one of the sub-temples of the Shirakumo, where the nine men gathered, and therefore the host of the session. The garden was, we assume, so constructed as to represent a microcosm of an idealized natural landscape: a hill-shaped mound suggesting a mountain, a meandering brook indicative of a river, a pond evoking a lake, and so forth. However, the focus here may be unstated, merely suggested: a man-made fountain or a miniature waterfall. Gyōyū may be saying that the sound of the waterfall is more audible than usual because the volume of water above it has increased as a result of the continuing rain.
By the lunar calendar, Fifth Month is the midsummer month, and the second unit, called waki(ku), mentions the season, making the when of the first two consecutive units unmistakable. According to the rules of composition, matters suggestive of summer may not be mentioned in more than three consecutive verse units. That is to say, the next writer could have continued on with the same season. But that writer, Jōha, the renga master we mentioned earlier, decided to drop the season.
花落つる池の流れをせきとめて
hana otsuru ike no nagare o sekitomete
the flow from the flower-scattering pond being dammed
The third unit, daisan, is expected to “change the subject,” however vague the switch may seem to the modern reader. Here, Jōha suggests that the body of water up there that Gyōyū mentions, a pond, has increased in volume because of the brook that has been dammed, rather than because of the rainy season. Also, by introducing hana, “flower” or “blossom,” he changes the season to spring, because hana, unmodified, refers to cherry blossoms, the foremost indicator of the season.
Jōha took it upon himself to introduce the first hana in this sequence, evidently regarding himself as an accomplished poet (kōsha), or master (sōshō). He did so with the full knowledge that he was the leading renga master of the day, and thus, aside from Mitsuhide, the most important participant in this renga composition. There were three other renga professionals in this gathering, but they all belonged to Jōha’s school. A professional poet like Jōha played the role of sabaki, the teacher/conductor of a renga session.
Jōha may have known Mitsuhide at least since he had taken part in the hyakuin party the warrior-commander sponsored eight years earlier, in 1574. And the two men’s teacher-student friendship had since grown closer. On the fifth of Fourth Month 1577, Mitsuhide had sponsored a session for a thousand-verse-unit renga, that is, ten hyakuin, on Mount Atago, most likely at the same temple, with sixteen participants that included Jōha. And on the fifteenth of Ninth Month, he had hosted another renga party in Kyoto with Yoshida Kanemi among the participants. Kanemi, the Shintoist, played a liaison’s role between some warlords and Kyoto aristocracy.
On the eighteenth of Seventh Month, 1579, Mitsuhide held another party for a thousand-verse-unit renga in the Kameyama Castle he had just built, with four participants, including Jōha. One of his letters to Jōha, probably written in 1578 as he was h
eading to the battle front in the west, discusses poetry. Mitsuhide was among the more cultured warriors of the era, well-versed in poetry and other civilized fields of knowledge, although many other warriors were similar to him in this respect.
The third unit, or link, most often ends, as here, in a progressive grammatical construction that suggests a sense of syntactical incompleteness, roughly equivalent to the suffix “-ing” in English—a sentence construction, that is, to be completed by either the preceding verse unit or the unit that follows.
The fourth link, by Yūgen, another monk of the temple, says:
風に霞を吹き送るくれ
kaze ni kasumi o fuki-okuru kure
a wind blows in haze this evening
By convention, kasumi (haze) indicates spring, so Yūgen reinforces the spring image that Jōha has given. It must be pointed out that, in orthodox court poetry, a wind or a breeze is supposed to waft a cloud or the scent of flowers toward you, but in renga, haze may be what a wind or a breeze wafts toward you. Jōha implies that the water increases because the brook is dammed by someone; Yūgen suggests that it is dammed by a mass of cherry blossoms that have scattered onto the pond as a result of the wind.
With just these first four units of a hundred-unit sequence, it should be clear that classical renga was a literary construct bound by strict rules and conventions. In fact, however meandering a sequence as a whole may appear today, the renga was such a tight narrative with imaginative and allusive constraints that it allowed just one unit in a hyakunin to mention something that directly, honestly reflected a social, political, or psychological reality of the moment, as the historian of Japanese literature Konishi Jin’ichi noted in his book on the greatest renga master Iio Sōgi. In the case of Atago Hyakuin, the hokku may well have been that one piece—if you want to bind yourself to that particular rule.
If we look at the hyakuin with some thought of what Mitsuhide must have had in mind that day, however, there may be at least two other links (among the fifteen Mitsuhide contributed to this hyakuin) that can be interpreted to reflect the warrior-commander entertaining a daring assassination scheme that would prove fatal.