Just Living: Poems and Prose of the Japanese Monk Tonna

Of course, Sanekage was not a modern reader. In fact, he was probably not thinking about readers at all, modern or otherwise, when he made his comment, but rather about young poets—producers rather than merely consumers of the art. That he chose not an earlier master such as Saigyō or Fujiwara no Shunzei or his son Teika but Tonna (1289–1372) is noteworthy, however, especially when one realizes how neglected the works of Tonna have been by mainstream Japanese scholarship. The modern Japanese academic establishment has concentrated so much on earlier periods of literature that poets writing after the Shinkokin age (1180–1225) have generally gotten short shrift. It is also true that Tonna has often been attacked simply because he was a conspicuous target for anyone reacting against the old traditions he was unfailingly adduced to represent. For whatever reason, assaults against him have seldom been true critiques based on a careful reading of his work, the importance of which is hard to deny in either historical or artistic terms.

There is no disputing that the Shinkokin age was a golden one for the uta. Yet the continuing importance of that ancient form in elite culture for the next three hundred years should not be overlooked. Long after the death of Teika, his progeny in various lineages and their scores of students continued to produce exemplary work in the genre, which over time also gained adherents among the military elite. At court, then, but also in the houses of great warlords, the uta was pursued as an avocation via poetry gatherings and contests and the compilation of anthologies in the manner of earlier poets. Furthermore, during these years the uta was more than ever before a part of social life among those in positions of power, whether at court, in the halls of military institutions, or in Buddhist monasteries and Shinto shrines. Many social events—celebrations, votive and memorial services, dedications, and so on—virtually required the composition of poems; and on less formal occasions the ability to compose a proper poem of felicitation, greeting, or condolence was a useful, if not necessary, talent. Among other things, this meant that there was a need for masters of the art who could teach it as a craft to younger poets. Tonna was, first and foremost, one of these masters, who pursued his art as a professional poet in a lively cultural market.

Tonna was born into a high-ranking military family, the Nikaidō, in 1289, most likely in Kyōto. About his father, Nikaidō Mitsusada, we know little except that he served for a time as a provincial governor. Whether his son was trained for an administrative career or not, the records do not say, but we can ascertain that by his early twenties he had taken the tonsure as a lay monk and was studying at Enryakuji, the Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei. For the younger sons of prominent families who could never hope to displace their older brothers as heirs to family offices and titles, the priesthood offered both a living and a measure of social respectability. Furthermore, Buddhist monasteries were artistic and intellectual centers that offered young men of talent a way into the cultural elite. Tonna (also pronounced Ton’a)—which is the religious name by which he would be known—doubtlessly was such a young man.

Tonna would remain a lay monk all his life but would never hold ecclesiastical office. Records associate him in particular with the Ji, or “Time,” sect, which for complex historical reasons was favored by commoner artists of all sorts, especially poets, gardeners, dramatists, and, later, tea masters. It is fairly clear, then, that from early on Tonna dedicated himself to the Way of poetry, which he thought of as a Buddhist way toward enlightenment as well. Many poets of the past who were from similar backgrounds—most prominently, Saigyō, whom he looked to as a mentor—had walked the same path. For Tonna, then, keiko, or “composition practice,” would be something akin to a devotional, as well as professional, activity, as important in and of itself as the poems he produced in the process.

To pursue the Way of poetry in Japan in the fourteenth century required, first of all, study under an acknowledged master who could provide both instruction and the social introductions that were necessary for entrée into the elite society that was the only arena for poetic recognition and success. In Tonna’s case, the master turned out to be Nijō Tameyo, head of the senior branch of the Mikohidari lineage at the imperial court. For some time, the Nijō house had cultivated close relationships with the warrior elite, who were always ready to enhance their social profiles by participation in artistic activities and who offered considerable wealth and resources in gratitude for artistic services. The other prominent Mikohidari house, the Kyōgoku, was so dominated by high-ranking courtiers and members of the imperial family that it was probably not within the reach of a man of such humble status. For these reasons, and no doubt other ones that remain unknown to us, Tonna became a disciple of Tameyo, under whom he studied composition and to whom he submitted work for scrutiny. By 1320 Tonna had so impressed his teacher that he was even given the house’s “secret teachings” on the Kokinshū (Collection of ancient and modern times, 905) and other early poetic works, which soon allowed him to put out his own shingle as a master of poetry.² Before long, he was taking on disciples and students of his own and engaging in the accepted activities of his profession—correcting students’ work, collecting manuscripts, writing commentaries, lecturing on the classics, and of course organizing and supervising poetry gatherings at his own cottage and at the homes of patrons. We know of at least half a dozen other commoner masters in Kyōto at the time engaged in similar activities. Tonna would soon reign supreme among them.

For the next fifty years, Tonna was a fixture in the capital, through good times and bad. When the Nijō house went through lean years during the ascendancy of the Kyōgoku house and their patrons in the Jimyō’in imperial lineage, Tonna remained loyal; in return, when the Nijō house dominated poetic circles, as it did for most of the time, he benefited. By the mid-1340s, records indicate, Tonna—along with other notable monk-poets, such as Yoshida no Kenkō, author of the famous miscellany Tsurezuregusa (Essays in idleness)—was polishing his craft as one of a select group of participants in Nijō poetry meetings, which were held three times monthly.³ Living in cottages in various areas on the outskirts of the capital, he seems to have enjoyed a comfortable existence. Tonna’s patrons among the military families no doubt paid him well for his services as master of ceremonies at their poetic gatherings, and it may be that he also had some income from his family. In any case, records make it clear that he was a man of great social, as well as artistic, gifts—no aloof recluse but a suki, or recognized devotee of the arts.

But even for a monk like Tonna, poetry, especially Japanese poetry in the uta form, was a courtly form the practice of which required specialized knowledge and, ultimately, a courtly pedigree, or at least strong courtly affiliations. Through hard work, Tonna gained the last. However, he could never supplant his teachers of the Mikohidari bloodline. No one of commoner status could hope to attain the social prominence of the Nijō masters, on whose political and ideological support Tonna was more or less dependent. Thus when imperial anthologies of the genre were issued—and seven of them were compiled during his long career—he could never hope for more than a few of his poems to be included; and on formal occasions he could never truly take center stage, instead always deferring to his superiors in birth, however inferior some of them may have been in terms of talent. By the 1350s, however, it is clear that he was highly respected by even the leaders of the courtly factions. His personal anthologies and other sources indicate that he could number among his patrons the Ashikaga shoguns Takauji and Yoshiakira, other prominent military figures such as Utsunomiya Sadayasu and Saitō Mototō, several imperial princes, courtiers of the highest rank such as the regent Nijō Yoshimoto (of the regental Nijō family, not to be confused with the poetic lineage of the same name), and clerics of all ranks too numerous to mention. In a sense, his Nijō teachers were also patrons in that they made a place for him in their activities and sanctioned his work as part of their tradition.

The mid-fourteenth century was a time of great political upheaval: the rebellion of Emperor Go-Daigo, the fall of the Hōjō family and the establishment of the Ashikaga shogunate, and conflicts associated with the warring Northern and Southern Courts—the last beginning in the 1330s and continuing into the next century. Tonna, of course, experienced and lived through these conflicts. Occasionally, he even wrote poems that hint at his sadness over endless battles that never seemed to result in an age of peace (poem 78):

Just which of the “woes” of the time he is referring to in this poem we do not know. Battles broke out near the capital, and even within its precincts, many times during his life. It must be said, though, that for a devout Buddhist such happenings were simply the way of the world: the annals of the past told a bloody story. Like most of those not directly involved in conflicts, Tonna thus tried to stay aloof, following the dictum of Teika many years before: “Red banners and chastising rebels are no concern of mine.”⁵ And the same attitudes evidently characterized his life as an artist, as evidenced by the fact that he was also able to maintain working relationships with four generations of Nijō poets despite constant infighting and intrigue within their ranks. As a monk with some financial independence, Tonna seems to have been able to remain above politics most of the time, mixing safely with members of warring factions, political or otherwise. In his last decades, he even had cordial relations with the courtier Reizei Tamehide, a member of another lineage of the Mikohidari house that was generally hostile to Nijō interests.

It goes without saying that there was no “publishing” of literary works in fourteenth-century Japan, at least in the modern sense of the word. Only Buddhist sutras were available in woodblock form, and Japanese court poetry, in particular, was so bound up with the art of calligraphy and so much an artistic tradition in its own right that to reduce it to the impersonality of print would have seemed a sacrilege. In his own day, those who knew Tonna’s work knew it only through word of mouth or handwritten records of the many poetic events—such as hundred-poem sequences, poem contests, and votive offerings to shrines—in which he participated. As preparations were under way for an imperial anthology in the late 1350s, however, the poet began to put together a personal anthology of his poems, titled Tonna hōshi ei (Poems by Monk Tonna).⁶ From its pages, Nijō Tamesada chose four poems for inclusion in the imperial anthology (Shin senzaishū [The new collection of a thousand years], 1359)—a modest number, it would seem, but equal to the number accorded his late colleague Jōben. As noted before, jige kajin (commoner poets without court rank) could never hope to receive the attention their courtly counterparts received in such venues. Yoshida no Kenkō was represented by only three poems, while Jōben’s son, Keiun (precise dates unknown), was passed over entirely.

Not long after the appearance of the new imperial anthology, Tonna compiled a more substantial collection of his work to date, to which he gave the title Sōanshū (The grass hut collection). It contained 1,446 poems, divided, like virtually all poetic works of the time, into books on the four seasons, love, and miscellaneous topics. Soon it was widely circulated as a compendium of poems that could serve as models for aspiring poets hoping to master the uta form. So by 1360 Tonna had truly arrived as a master. Sometime before, he had built a cottage near Ninnaji that he called the Saike’en (White Lotus Garden), a very substantial residence surrounded by gardens with the finest plants from famous places all around Japan—plums from Naniwa, cherry trees from Yoshino, bush clover from Miyagino, maples from Mount Tatsuta, and creeping vines from Mount Utsu. There he hosted poetic gatherings for his friends and patrons and by about 1366 produced another personal anthology, Zoku Sōanshū (The grass hut anthology, continued), that contained poems not included in the earlier works, as well as works from more recent years. Now regarded as the preeminent jige master of the art, he was evidently in great demand as both teacher and lecturer. So impressed by his work was the imperial regent and literatus Nijō Yoshimoto that the latter penned a work based on questions he had asked the patriarch, which he titled Gumon kenchū (Wise answers to foolish questions, 1363). Not long after, Tonna put together his own most comprehensive pedagogical work, Seiashō (Notes of a frog at the bottom of the well), in which he copied for his students important passages from earlier works by masters of the past on a variety of topics, adding a few comments of his own and a section of chatty anecdotes, bits of lore, and advice (zōdan) from his own experience over the years.

Tonna’s greatest public honor came in 1364, when he was asked to complete the work of compiling the next imperial anthology (Shin shūishū [New collection of gleanings]) after the untimely death late in that year of the man acting as chief compiler, Nijō Tameakira. Never before had one without court rank been trusted with such a task. Although he accepted the job with some trepidation, Tonna finished the work—which Tameakira had left about half done—speedily, offering the completed anthology for review several months after receiving his charge. The final product received criticism from some quarters for including too many of his own poems (nine; ten, counting one entered as anonymous; and eleven, counting one that is quoted in the headnote to another poem) and too many poems by monks and military men in the sections he had put together. However, the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiakira, who was by this time studying under Tonna, was pleased, as were the young heirs of the Nijō lineage for whom Tonna was clearly an avuncular figure of considerable poetic authority.

Obviously, association with the most prestigious of poetic endeavors improved Tonna’s standing even more in the cultural community of his time. For one thing, serving as compiler gave him access to various secret Mikohidari documents concerning the proper handling of such tasks—knowledge that gave the monk-poet a kind of cultural capital usually denied those of commoner status. Still, he could not serve as master at court affairs; that was a task reserved for young members of the Nijō and Reizei lineages with the proper pedigrees. But his many honors and the treasured teachings that came along with them did make it possible for him to set up a separate poetic lineage of his own that would continue for more than a century after his death. This descended through his son Kyōken, eventually to Gyōkō of the Jōkō’in cloister near Saike’en at Ninnaji, where the heirs of the line held sway with the title Dharma Sign and the office of bishop. Records also indicate that, beginning in Kyōken’s time, Tonna’s heirs held the title of superintendent (bettō) of Niitamatsushima Shrine, a Shintō shrine located in Kyōto (first on Fifth Avenue, then at Saike’en and on First Avenue, and finally back to Ninnaji in Gyōkō’s time) that was specifically dedicated to the god of poetry.⁷ All these appointments involved incomes, of course, which helped solidify the place of Tonna’s heirs in court culture. With such finances to support it, the Saike’en would go on to become one of the most famous gardens in the capital, attracting visitors as prominent as the Ashikaga shoguns.⁸

Tonna’s honors rubbed a number of his social “betters” the wrong way. Within a few decades after his death, Imagawa Ryōshun, a military man who could boast court rank and a partisan of the Reizei lineage, complained that he could not understand why people looked up to Tonna as if he were “some kind of sage of poetry.”⁹ In the main, though, later generations extolled him as precisely that. The next imperial anthology, compiled after his death in 1383, with a preface by Tonna’s friend and student Nijō Yoshimoto, included eight of Tonna’s poems; and the one after that, for which his descendant Gyōkō served as librarian, included nineteen. His stock continued to rise into the Edo period, finally resulting in the reputation noted at the beginning of this introduction.

Tonna’s poetic attitudes are usually characterized as conservative, and there is some truth in the characterization: he was a believer in carrying on the poetic traditions of the imperial court and rather dismissive of anything that could be described as unorthodox. This does not mean, however, that he was rigid and uncompromising. Indeed, his very existence as a master operating in a social arena depended on the ability to act as a mediator. If anything, he was therefore a practicer of the “middle way”—which he encouraged, especially in his less gifted students, as the safest route to acceptance in social circles. In this sense, on pedagogical issues he is perhaps best described as a moderate who believed in teaching his students a craft that could be relied on rather than a mysterious “art” that demanded imponderables, such as inspiration and creativity, that could probably not be taught in any case. And it also must be said that his was a society in which powers of memory were more important than powers of originality. The exhibition of knowledge and mastery of technique (that is, the exercise of imagination within accepted conventions) counted for more in a social setting than flights of fancy.

To properly understand Tonna’s critical works, one must therefore remember that they were written primarily for beginning students who wanted concrete direction on the practice of poetry in a very particular setting. To properly understand his poetry, one must further keep in mind that it was almost all produced in social situations, requiring a thorough knowledge of the canon and rhetorical skill above all else. The headnotes to his poems show that he was a constant participant in monthly poetry gatherings at the homes of patrons, in poem contests, and in commissioned sequences—all formal venues in which work had to be produced according to strict precedents. Of course, such events required the exercise of imagination, too, although an imagination exercised only within prescribed limits. A poet in such a setting might be compared with a gymnast or figure skater whose task is to work various required skills into a performance that seems effortless but in fact is the product of long hours of preparation and training. Like other poets, Tonna aimed to impress, but less with flashes of creativity than with subtlety and wit—with compulsory skills and, if possible, a little more.

Beyond elevating a scene of labor (farmers working in rice paddies) into the realm of the aesthetic (travelers “detained” by cherry blossoms), Tonna’s poem does little in the way of semantics. Instead, it simply appropriates the earlier poem as a syntactic “shell” to be filled with new imagery. In doing so, however, it also serves the purpose of inviting those around him to appreciate a gesture intelligible only to those with special knowledge—thus reinforcing the “social bond” of a shared canon that perforce underlies notions of taste. Clearly, the ability to invoke poems of the past in this way was highly prized among poets at poetic gatherings. That Tonna used the technique in so many of his poems is evidence not of a lack of creativity but, on the contrary, of his mastery of the art of composition in his own literary field.

At a poetry gathering attended by Tamehide along with Ton’a, Keiun, Jōben, and Kenkō—celebrated poets of the day known as the Four Guardian Kinds of Japanese poetry—each of these last chose six topics on which to compose his poems, while Tamehide chose even more. The participants of lower rank who were still novices in the art chose one or two topics apiece. Now Ton’a, having glanced through his six topics, said, “I must excuse myself for a short time. I shall be back as soon as I am free.” And depositing his six topic slips under a shelf at the side of the room, he went out. Thereupon, Keiun substituted his own six topics for those that Ton’a had left.

In due course, when everyone had composed his poems and written them down to be passed in, and people were asked what could be keeping him, Ton’a came back. Picking up the topics he had left behind, he ground some ink and prepared to write his poems, only to discover that these were not his topics, all six of them proving on examination to be different from the topics he had originally chosen. Even so, not a bit flustered, he said, “Well, someone has been playing a trick on me, I see. Who did it?” And he continued to grind his ink, dip in his brush, and quickly write down six poems, one right after the other.

After the poems had been read out loud, Keiun said, “You performed most creditably. It is at a time like this that a poet’s true mastery is revealed.” Ton’a replied, “What an outrageous thing to have done! You, one of the senior poets, who ought to have been warning the others not to play such tricks!”¹²

Yet our involvement with the poem is only enhanced when we approach it in a way that takes into account the way it was produced, in a particular poetic culture whose values were rather different from our own. As a first step toward moving in this direction, it is useful to begin with attention to things such as honkadori and dai, in contemplation of which almost all the poems of Tonna and his contemporaries were composed. Knowing that the poem was composed on the conventional topic “Fallen Blossoms,” for instance, may add something to our appreciation of Tonna’s mastery. In particular, that knowledge can help us catch the subtle new ways the poem deals with the idea of fallen blossoms. For at the time of its composition, the poem was probably not a description of any actual scene at all but the “treatment” of an idea—and a rather creative one. Many earlier poems had compared blossoms to snow, as many poems had depicted blossoms blown from the trees by storm winds; Tonna’s accomplishment was to add to this the idea of “blossom flurries” created time and time again by winds after the blossoms have fallen. For those who first heard it at the poetic gathering for which it was composed, the tension of the poem must have turned on that point, and there is no reason that readers today—if properly prepared for the task—cannot experience the poem at least partly in the same way.

Dai, of course, had been in existence since long before Tonna’s day. They had their origin in the early Heian period, when poems were first composed in poem contests, providing “common ground” on which poets could be judged. It was later on, in the late Heian period, when the composition of poem sequences had come to dominate poetic affairs, that dai were virtually enshrined as part of poetic discourse. The earliest examples were one-word topics, such as “spring,” “summer,” “autumn,” “winter,” “love,” “travel,” and so on—which also happened to be the major categories of imperial and other anthologies. In time, more complex varieties developed, involving phrases such as “Blossoms at Night” and “Love, with the Word ‘Cloud’ as an Image.” By Tonna’s time, one finds the whole range of topics in use, from one-word topics of the distant past to compound topics of relatively recent vintage. Almost never, however, was a poet able to concoct a topic entirely on his own.

Rather than titles that were attached to poems after the fact, dai were thus part of a conventional lexicon of the genre; and, in most cases, the poet did not even choose his own topics but received them from a participant charged with the task of choosing—generally from sanctioned lists—for the group. In this sense, the topic was therefore given to the poet exactly as an assignment or challenge. Generally speaking, the poem he produced had to contain the actual word or words of the topic. The task was to accomplish this within accepted rhetorical limits and to present the topic in a slightly new way. The topic “Fallen Blossoms,” for instance, had been daunting poets for hundreds of years before Tonna ever confronted it. Compound topics such as “Cherry Blossoms at Night” were slightly less overworked but demanded the handling of more vocabulary.

One way for modern readers to understand Tonna’s poems in their otherness, then, is to regard them as a master’s response to the challenge presented by the dai. The first poem in the translations that follow is a good example of how Tonna measured up to the task. The headnote indicates that it was written at the Poetry Bureau, referring to the offices at court where the compilation of imperial anthologies and other formal business were undertaken. Exactly what sort of meeting took place is not mentioned. But we can be sure that at the bureau, the rituals would have been honored. Perhaps the poem was written beforehand on a topic that had been passed out (kenjitsu); perhaps it was composed on the spot (tōza). In either case, it would have been read aloud by the lector before the assembled group. And it was judged, first of all, on how well it dealt with its topic, in this case “Early Spring.” Past precedent dictated that such a topic introduce images associated with both winter and spring in a way that showed movement toward the latter:

Tonna’s poem succeeds well in doing what was expected on the occasion, depicting a scene that is the perfect blend of winter and spring imagery—snow and spreading haze. But this would be only routine for a master. No doubt what truly impressed his auditors was the wonderful contrast provided by the first and last lines of the poem, beginning with the lofty image of Yoshino—a storied place in southern Yamato Province famous for its rugged mountains and spectacular vistas—and ending with awayuki, “delicate flakes of snow.” The occasion demanded nothing revolutionary but instead a poem of dignity and power, lofty in tone, which is exactly what the master produced.

In other venues, Tonna could be somewhat more adventurous, although always within the limits of decorum. The following poem on “Returning Geese,” for example, is again on a conventional topic about which thousands of poems had already been produced. In this case, those present no doubt expected some variation on the usual treatment, which would involve some image of the geese fading off into the spring sky, making their way back to the continent for the summer. But in this poem, Tonna produced something slightly unexpected:

Nijō Yoshimoto said of Tonna that his “cadences are profound, his conceptions smooth and never overstated; and there is something just a little different about each of his poems that is felt by those around him in any gathering.”¹⁶ This poem is a fine example of what Yoshimoto meant. Not until the last line does the topic come in, a fact that must have produced some suspense in the za. Indeed, the first lines of the poem lead one to expect a love poem. But at the end, Tonna pulls it together in another masterful performance.

The emphasis on a moment of change in the natural scenery, the imagery of light and shadow, the attempt to push the “witnessing” subject into the background and let the scene appear “as it is” (ari no mama)—all these things are associated not with the Nijō house but with Kyōgoku Tamekane and his adherents. That Tonna produced a number of similar poems is evidence that he was above all a versatile master of the art. This is a point borne out even more so by some of the poems produced in his later years that have all the marks of the Song monochromatic aesthetic entering Japan through Zen monasteries, as evidenced in this example from Zoku Sōanshū:

This fact is also evident when one reads the anecdotes he recorded in the last book of Seiashō, a few of which are translated in this book. For the student of poetic history, these notes, recorded late in life, provide a gold mine of information about the poetic practice of the time, as well as biographical details about famous poets of the past—Tonna himself and his contemporaries. The most common recurrent theme is the central place of the master–disciple relationship in poetic affairs—perhaps a natural outcome for something written by a master. But the anecdotes also show how wide was his circle of patrons and friends, which included not only Nijō stalwarts such as Tameyo (the Late Master) and Tamefuji (the Minister of Popular Affairs) but also Reizei Tamehide, numerous courtiers, warlords, and poet-priests like himself, many of whom were not directly affiliated with the factions of the time. This is not to suggest that the anecdotes reveal Tonna as something other than a Nijō partisan in most matters, which he most definitely was. It is to insist, however, that they reveal a man not completely blinded by the self-justifying rhetoric of his discourse. Indeed, one of the few truly personal comments he makes states explicitly that, like Shōtetsu in a later day,²² he was disenchanted with a poetic world that was “divided into many currents, with cronies at poetic gatherings always ready with their various opinions, throwing my old heart into confusion and leaving me looking for the one path I first heard of long ago.”²³

When exasperated by the factionalism of his own day, Shōtetsu would look back to Teika as mentor. Tonna instead looked back to the latter’s son, Tameie, whose works he characterized as “mellifluous and full of feeling.”²⁴ Above all, what Tonna encouraged as the foundation for poetic art was the educated and disciplined sensibility, delicate and refined. His impatience with Kyōgoku Tamekane was less over the relative importance of “creativity” in composition than over the issue of whether poetic language should be elevated over ordinary language. One of his anecdotes makes the point somewhat obliquely:

Perhaps it was the humor of this story that initially appealed to Tonna. Nevertheless, there is a serious contention behind it: that poetry should not be a mechanical business, not the simple description in everyday language of nature observed according to logic, or kotowari. Nor were ingenuity and cleverness enough, in his opinion, to sustain the enterprise. Instead, poetry for Tonna was a matter of deep thought and feeling, and of the careful crafting of thought into elevated, sonorous language—the sort of language that gains in power by being read aloud at a poetry gathering. As Yoshimoto reports it, Tonna’s credo is actually straightforward: “What Tonna always said was that one should put new meaning into one’s poems, delicately and with no exaggeration, stringing the words together to beautiful effect.”²⁶ That this was an acceptable goal for many generations of Japanese poets in the uta form is evidenced by Tonna’s high reputation for nearly five centuries after his death and by the enduring beauty of his poems, which I hope is at least partially apparent in the translations in this book.

If this indicates that linked verse was not taken as seriously as composition in the uta, it is probably an accurate reflection of the attitude of most court-poets in Tonna’s day. It was only later, and largely due to the efforts of Tonna’s student and friend Nijō Yoshimoto, that linked verse began to gain real artistic credibility. Like most poets of his day, however, Tonna seems to have composed linked verse quite often, usually, as the anecdote indicates, after more formal uta gatherings. In such settings, the atmosphere was often playful, with composition very much like a game, as in this couplet:

When Nijō Yoshimoto put together his famous anthology of linked verse, Tsukubashū, in 1356, eighteen of Tonna’s links (tsukeku) and one of his hokku were included—more than twice the number accorded his teacher Tameyo, who was represented by only eight contributions. As the anecdote again intimates, masters of the uta were no doubt expected to take a leading role in linked verse as well, and Tonna was up to the task. While perhaps lacking the serious tone of the work of later poets such as Sōgi and Shinkei, his renga show a mastery of convention and the gentle beauty one grows used to in his uta:

In preparing the translations of the poems, I have used the texts of Sōanshū and Zoku Sōanshū published in volume 4 of [Shinpen] Kokka taikan (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1986), both edited by Fukatsu Mutsuo. My interpretations have been aided by the short glosses of some individual poems provided by Inada Toshinori in his edition of Tonna hōshi ei, a selection of poems from Sōanshū that the poet made in 1357, which appears in volume 47 of Shin nihon koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990). Occasionally, I have also referred to the commentaries on Sōanshū and Zoku Sōanshū by the Edo scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) in volume 2 of Motoori Norinaga zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1968). In translating portions of Seiashō, I have used the text as published in volume 5 of Nihon kagaku taikei (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1957) and also referred to Sasaki Takahiro et al., eds., Karon kagaku shūsei, volume 10 (Tokyo: Miyai Shoten, 1999).

Readers wanting an explanation of the format used in my translations of Tonna’s poems may refer to my comments at the end of the introduction to an earlier book, Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen Monk Shōtetsu. In brief, I have adopted an approach that I hope helps reflect the syntax and image-order of the originals. Each of the five lines that make up a complete uta are thus “anchored” on the left margin, with the syntactic patterns of the originals then represented by “jogging” of lines to the right, suggesting the way the Japanese poems seem to “unfold.” I have also tried wherever possible to stick to the 5–7–5–7–7 syllable format of the originals, which I find useful as a form to work against in order to create rhythm and tension.

NOTES

1. Shirin shūha, in Nihon kagaku taikei, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1956), p. 375.

2. Inada Toshinori, Waka shitennō no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1999), pp. 41–42.

3. Kinrai fūteishō, in Nihon kagaku taikei, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1957), p. 141.

4. Sōanshū 1208. Poem 78 in this volume.

5. Steven D. Carter, “Mixing Memories: Linked Verse and the Fragmentation of the Past,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48 (1988): 6.

6. Inada argues that Tonna hōshi ei was probably submitted to the Poetry Bureau at the time Shin senzaishū was being compiled, Sōanshū being put together shortly thereafter (Waka shitennō no Kenkyū, pp. 53–56).

7. Inoue Muneo, Chūsei kadanshi no kenkyū, Muromachi zenki (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1961), p. 49.

8. Ibid.

9. Rakusho roken, in Nihon kagaku taikei, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1957), p. 191.

10. Zoku Sōanshū 65. Poem 96 in this volume.

11. Shin kokinshū 67. See note to poem 96 in this volume.

12. Robert H. Brower and Steven D. Carter, Conversations with Shōtetsu (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992), pp. 105–106.

13. Sōanshū 204. Poem 13 in this volume.

14. Sōanshū 7. Poem 1 in this volume.

15. Sōanshū 86. Poem 4 in this volume.

16. Kinrai fūteishō, p. 141.

17. Sōanshū 741. Poem 35 in this volume.

18. Imagawa Ryōshun was probably the first to utter this exaggeration, in Nigonshō, in Nihon kagaku taikei, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1957), p. 173.

19. Sōanshū 655. Poem 27 in this volume.

20. Zoku Sōanshū 315. Poem 120 in this volume.

21. Steven D. Carter, “Seeking What the Masters Sought: Masters, Disciples, and Poetic Enlightenment in Medieval Japan,” in Robert Borgen, Thomas Hare, and Sharalyn Orbaugh, eds., The Distant Isle: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Robert H. Brower (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996), p. 52.

22. Brower and Carter, Conversations with Shōtetsu, pp. 33–37.

23. See p. 212.

24. See p. 212.

25. See pp. 189–190.

26. Kinrai fūteishō, p. 143. J. atarashiki kokoro o yasuraki ni kotogotoshiku nakute utsukushiku tsusuku beshi.

27. See p. 196.

28. Zoku Sōanshū 584. Poem 140 in this volume.

29. Zoku Sōanshū 564. Poem 135 in this volume.

30. Steven D. Carter, Regent Redux: A Life of the Statesman-Scholar Ichijō Kaneyoshi (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996), p. 238.