KOKINSHŪ

(Kokin Waka Shū)

(ca. 905–920)

TheKokinshū, literally the “Collection of Old and New Poetry,” was the first imperially sanctioned anthology of Japanese poetry. Inspired perhaps by an earlier collection of poetry, theMAN’YŌSHŪ, the emperor Daigo ordered a group of court intellectuals to compile a collection that would include the best contemporary poetry they could find as well as the best poems they could collect from past generations. Working on the anthology from about 905 until perhaps as late as 920, and guided by the genius of the poet and critic Ki no Tsurayuki, the four editors put together a collection of 1,111 poems, nearly all in the form of the 31-syllable TANKA. This anthology was to be the touchstone for Japanese poetic composition for the next 1,000 years. For one thing, it established the brief, lyrical tanka as the preferred form for poetry. It set a precedent for imperial anthologies, 20 more of which were to be published by the year 1439. Through the example of its poetry and through Ki no Tsurayuki’s Japanese preface to the collection, theKokinshūestablished the canons of taste for Japanese poetry, based exclusively on the values of the noble class, since all of the writers represented in the anthology were minor aristocrats involved in the life of the court.Most important, the anthology was an announcement to the world thatwaka(that is, native Japanese) poetry was of value in itself, and that Japan was no longer dependent on China for its cultural models.

The poems of the olderMan’yōshūhad been composed in Japanese, but were recorded using Chinese characters or ideographs—thus the Japanese word was represented by the Chinese character for the same concept. By the time of theKokinshū, the Chinese characters had been adapted to represent the sounds of syllables in the Japanese language, so that the poems were far easier to read, since the reader need no longer be familiar with thousands of Chinese characters, but only the limited number that represented the sounds of Japanese.The collection contains two prefaces, one in Chinese (by Ki no Yoshimochi) and the more significant Japanese one, in which Ki no Tsurayuki gives birth to the critical analysis of Japanese verse. He makes the following declaration: Japanese poetry has its seed in the human heart and burgeons into many different kinds of leaves of words.We who live in this world are constantly affected by different experiences, and we express our thoughts in words, in terms of what we have seen and heard. . . . Poetry moves without effort heaven and earth, stirs the invisible gods and demons to pity, makes sweet the ties between men and women, and brings comfort to the fierce heart of the warrior. (Keene 1999, 246)

These qualities of poetry—that it is a reaction to an experience, that it comes from the heart, that it enhances male-female relationships—are qualities that would have been important to the intellectuals and officials at the HEIAN court. The composition of poetry was expected of every member of the aristocratic society, so that every educated person knew to commemorate important moments in verse. Indeed, one’s status as a cultured aristocrat depended on the sensitivity and verbal dexterity manifested in the often introspective lyric form of the tanka. It was from the best of these kinds of poems that Ki no Tsurayuki,Ki no Yoshimochi, and their fellow editors drew their selections. The most prominent subject for these poems was, by far, nature and observations on the seasons. The second most common theme was love. Of the 1,111 poems in theKokinshū, 342 are seasonal poems and 360 are love poems. Part of the genius of theKokinshūis the choice to arrange the poems not in order of chronology or by author, but rather by topic. The 20 books of theKokinshūfall into two halves: The first half is dominated by nature poems, which fill the first six books; the second half by love poems, which fill books 11 through 15. Within their topical sections, the poems are arranged in a way that outlines a loose narrative. The nature poems, for example, begin with poems on spring (Books 1 and 2), and move through summer (Book 3) to autumn (Books 4 and 5) and finally winter (Book 6). More inspired is the arrangement of the love poems, which are intended to follow the progression of a love affair: The earliest poems deal with first meeting and infatuation, and they progress through passion and courtship, consummation of the affair, then cooling or disillusionment, separation and loneliness, and painful memories.

Certainly the tanka poems of theKokinshūare limited in their subject matter. There are no poems on war or poverty or ugliness, nothing to break the precious mood of the delicate poetry. Even the love poetry tends to be circumspect about the sex act itself— unlike the poems of theMan’yōshu, which tend to be much more frank. In theKokinshū, the lover is generally presented only as someone the narrator is thinking of, or perhaps dreaming about. Many of the tanka of theKokinshūare anonymous, but the compilers did preserve the names of several poets with their poems. The most revered of these include Ki no Yoshimochi himself, the admired love poet Ariwara Narihara, and the women Ono no Komachi—author of perhaps the most passionate love poems in the collection—and the prolific Izumi Shikibu, the most admired poet of her day, who was lady in waiting to a royal consort. TheKokinshūpreserved countless polished gems of poetry. It began a tradition of royal anthologies that imitated it for 500 years, and began the conventions of brevity and suggestiveness in Japanese poetry that have continued into the haiku of today. It established aristocratic taste as the standard of poetry. And it gives us, even today, a glimpse into the refined courtly culture of Heian Japan as it existed, and as it saw itself.

■ Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner.Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961.

■ Keene, Donald.Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. Vol. 1 ofA History of Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

■ McCullough, Helen Craig.Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985.

■ ———.Brocade by Night: “Kokin Wakashū”and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985.

■ Rodd, Laura Rasplica, and Mary Catherine Henkenius.Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.