Fujiwara-no-Teika (1162-1241) records in his diary that his son, Fujiwara-no-Tameie, requested that he arrange one hundred poems to furnish the residence of Utsunomiya Yoritsuna, Tameie’s father-in-law, near Mount Ogura (in Kyoto). The result was this book, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (‘Ogura hundred-poets’ one-poem’).

This anthology includes works from the Asuka (538-710) and Nara Periods (710-794) to the early years of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185-1333), thus also spanning the entire Heian Period (794-1185), with representative works from eight Emperors, one Shogun, and twenty-one women (including one woman Emperor – Empress Jito) in roughly chronological order. Teika, the compiler, also included a poem of his own (#97).

The Heian Period was one which celebrated the aristocratic classes, and this anthology is no exception. The authors are uniformly of the highest families and cared little about the reception of their work outside the imperial enclave of Kyoto, yet there is scarcely a literate Japanese person who does not know these works. Whether intended or not, the collection may be read as a commentary upon the political landscape of the day, with the emerging samurai of the Kamakura Shogunate wresting power from the Emperors and traditional aristocracy.

The anthology consists almost entirely of love-poems intended to bring before the mind's eye some well-known scene in nature, but the aesthetic undercurrent that runs through them all is the characteristic Japanese sense of mono-no-aware – ‘the pathos of things.’ It mourns over yet celebrates the cherry blossoms which are doomed to fall, the dewdrops scattered by the wind, the mournful cry of the wild deer on the mountains, the dying crimson of the falling maple leaves, the sadness of the cuckoo singing in the moonlight, and the loneliness of the recluse in the mountain wilds.

Japanese poetry has no rhyme or meter as we understand it. The verses in this Collection are all tanka, having five lines arranged by the number of equally stressed syllables: 5-7-5-7-7.

Regarding pronunciation, every vowel in Japanese poetry must be sounded, a long vowel is lengthened as if it were two syllables, a final n (originally –mu) must be sounded as a full syllable, and a final vowel is generally elided if the following word begins with a like vowel. Figures of Speech are discussed in the Appendix.

This translation has attempted to bring the reader as close as possible to the original with the goal of understanding the poem in the original Classical Japanese. We have struggled mightily to translate each line individually, though the word order of English often does not correlate to that of Japanese. In such cases the Notes will hopefully afford a fuller sense of the meaning of the poem. One factor that may tend to alienate the poems from a modern reader is the use of Classical Japanese endings for verbs and adjectives. This subject has been addressed in detail in the Appendix, and each verbal or adjectival form is analyzed in the Notes of each poem.

The woodblock prints for each poem were made by Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694). On the front cover is the illustration for Poem #1 by Hokusai; the illustration for #48 is by Kuniyoshi; and that for #66 is by Horoshige.

San Francisco 2018