Appendix 1

TECHNICAL TERMS

ageku 挙句. Last verse. The last verse of a renga sequence.

banka 挽歌. Lament. Usually written to commemorate a death. A subgenre in Man’yōshū times. The tradition continued into the Edo period, although later the term used was generally aishōka 哀傷歌 (or aishōku). Nakao Kaishi (1669–1731) wrote such a poem (Haikai sabishiori, p. 358) after the death of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694).

Anything at all	nanigoto mo
and I find myself in tears.	namida ni narinu
Hut, in winter.	fuyu no io

byōbu uta 屏風歌. Screen poem. Poems written for inscription on standing screens, which were used as privacy barriers, windbreaks, and decoration in elite households.

chōka 長歌. Long poem. Poems of more than five lines in length, consisting of alternating five- and seven-syllable lines, concluding initially with a 7-7 couplet; often followed by one or more hanka, or “envoys.” A major genre during the seventh and eighth centuries, thereafter appearing sporadically in travel writings and as a form for the expression of lament.

chokusenshū 勅撰集. Imperial anthology. The first imperial anthologies were of kanshi, but most literary histories begin their accounts with Kokinshū. The last of the imperial anthologies was compiled in the 1430s, although attempts to put together imperial anthologies were made into the early Edo period. Generally speaking, only highly formal poems were included in such anthologies. The nobility are better represented than any other social group, but there are exceptions, a notable one being the itinerant monk Saigyō (1118–1190), ninety-four of whose waka were included in Shin kokinshū (no. 1205), the most of any poet in the anthology. The first three anthologies (sandaishū) carried more weight in the tradition than any others, although in time Shin kokinshū also gained many champions.

dai 題. Prescribed poetic topic. Some basic dai (flowers, travel, love, snow, etc.) first appear in Man’yōshū, and from the time of Kokinshū until the twentieth century, formal waka and waka composed at gatherings were generally on topics. Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216) says, “In poetry, one must understand the meaning of topics,”1 and the subject is of universal concern in critical writing. Over time, certain topics were standardized and canonized, the most important umbrella topics being the seasonal topics, love, and miscellaneous themes like travel and Buddhism. From medieval times onward, topics for elite gatherings had to be chosen by the members of poetic houses, who paid strict attention to precedent. Gradually, simple topics such as cherry blossoms developed into complex topics such as “seeing first blossoms” and “cherry trees in full bloom along a mountain river.” Topics would generally be passed out beforehand (see kendai in this appendix), but from early on poets also drew topics (tandai or saguridai) for composition on the spot (see tōza no uta). Composition on dai was also practiced in various contexts in renga and haikai. Anthologizers in the world of haikai often organized material in chapters of hokku by dai, according to predominant imagery or logic, even when the hokku was not written on a dai in the first place. Furthermore, many dai from the court tradition served in haikai as kigo. See also daiei in appendix 2.

daisan 第三. Third verse of a renga sequence. See also hokku, waki.

fu 賦. Rhapsody or rhyme prose. A long, descriptive Chinese poem involving lines of various lengths, using extensive parallelism.

fuzei 風情. Artistic atmosphere or idea. Often related to yojō and fūryū.

haikai 俳諧. Comic, unorthodox, or eccentric poems. A general term for humorous or unconventional poetry that in the 1500s began to be used to refer to comic or unorthodox renga and in the Edo period often referred to what we now call haiku.

haikai no uta 俳諧の歌. Comic, unorthodox, or eccentric waka; a subgenre of waka. Poems containing nonstandard vocabulary, abundant wordplay, or humorous rhetoric or subject matter. Such poems appear in Man’yōshū, but the category emerges fully only in Kokinshū.

haikai renga 俳諧連歌. Comic, unorthodox, or eccentric renga; a subgenre of renga. Poems containing nonstandard vocabulary, abundant wordplay, or humorous rhetoric or subject matter. Much early renga was humorous, but the subgenre did not fully emerge until the late medieval period.

hanka, kaeshi uta 反歌. Envoy. A 5-7-5-7-7-syllable poem appended to the end of a chōka, often summarizing or restating its contents.

han no kotoba, hanshi 判詞. Judgments or words of judgment. Words of explication and criticism appended to poem contests. Sometimes participants at an event made comments (shūgihan) that were later written up; more often major poets and scholars were assigned the task of awarding wins and penning statements of judgment. In the golden age of the poem contest (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), Minamoto no Shunrai (1055–1129), Fujiwara no Mototoshi (d. 1142), and, preeminently, Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), served as judges, using aesthetic terms and ideas that became central to the courtly poetic tradition, which continued to be of relevance into the Edo period.

hare no uta 晴の歌. Formal or public poem. Waka written for formal, public occasions such as poem contests or small commissioned anthologies. The ideal was a poem that expressed its topic fully, was dignified in diction and subject matter, and had no poetic “faults” (yamai). Fujiwara no Tameie (1198–1275) lists the following poem by Shunzei (Shin kokinshū, no. 677), written for a sequence requested by a prince, as an example of formal composition.2 The setting Shunzei chose was a hoary mountain on the Yamato Plain near Nara that was associated with events in ancient history, and the images he employs—snow, sakaki trees (branches of which were used in imperial ceremonies), and moonlight—are among the most iconic of the tradition.

The sacred sakaki	yuki fureba
high up on the mountaintop	mine no masakaki
are buried under snow;	uzumorete
and polished by the moonlight—	tsuki ni migakeru
the Heavenly Peak of Kagu.	ama no kaguyama

Grand celestial imagery, lofty rhetoric, dignified subject matter—this descriptive poem was clearly intended to impress the man who commissioned it.

The concept carried over into renga, although often referring more to considerations of class than formality. In a fifteenth-century beginner’s handbook of uncertain authorship, we read, “Formal meetings are sure to involve nobles and adepts,” and that in such settings students should be modest and restrained.3

hokku 発句. The first or initiating verse of a renga sequence. A handbook for beginners dating from the mid-1400s counsels poets to remember that renga is a social art: “In writing a hokku one should carefully study the look of the meeting place and accommodate the weather; if you do that, your hokku will sound like it emerges from the meeting place and be of interest. An overly clever hokku will make it seem that you are running through old poems in your head and put a damper on things.”4 Here the influence of waka poetics, as expressed by Fujiwara no Tameie, is obvious: “When composing extemporaneously at a gathering, you should describe the scenery and surroundings at the moment.”5 According to convention, each hokku had to indicate the season of composition and the mood of the gathering—proper and dignified for formal events, somewhat more relaxed in more intimate settings. Hokku were often contained in separate chapters in anthologies, and in time the subgenre developed its own identity, leading in the Edo period to what we now call haiku.

hon’i. See appendix 2.

honkadori. See appendix 2.

hyakuin 百韻. Hundred-verse renga sequence. The standard format of linked-verse composition. Early on, shorter sequences were the rule, and even in the late medieval period poets sometimes produced just a few links in casual settings, but references to hyakuin appear as early as the early 1200s. Our first full examples of the form date from the time of Nijō Yoshimoto. Longer sequences—senku 千句 (thousand-verse sequences) and manku 万句 (ten-thousand-verse sequences)—were essentially made up of separate hyakuin. The rules of the genre relate almost exclusively to the hundred-verse format.

hyakushu-uta 百首歌. Hundred-poem sequence of waka. The first such small anthologies began to appear in the late tenth century. They were generally commissioned works, often solicited by an elite patron. Other “numbered” anthologies—of fifty poems (gojisshu-uta), etc.—also appeared. Such works became resources for imperial anthologies.

iisute 言捨て. A short renga sequence dashed off for amusement. Sometimes only the first three verses of such a sequence were recorded, but often the verses were not recorded at all. The term is also used sometimes to mean a “cast-off” poem that was not meant to be taken seriously but just composed and cast off.

imayō 今様, imayōuta 今様歌. Modern song. Documents evince the popularity of various kinds of song from the earliest times. The term imayō refers specifically to songs popular among the aristocracy from the 1100s and on into the medieval period. The songs usually consisted of eight or twelve alternating seven- and five-syllable lines and were considered a form of amusement.

ji. See jimon in appendix 2.

jisei no uta 辞世の歌 (also jisei no kanshi, jisei no ku). Death poem. Poem written just before death in some cases, but often simply the last poem a person wrote.

jo, joshi, jokotoba 序, 序詞, 序詞. A metaphorical preface incorporated into the first few lines of a poem. Often the material of the preface is metaphorically related to the theme, scene, or idea of the final lines, but sometimes not.

johakyū 序破急. A term used in renga commentary and criticism, meaning prelude, breakaway, and presto. The idea was that at the beginning of a sequence, the pace of composition should be smooth and subject matter and technique relatively formal, giving way to more experimentation and variety during the middle eighty or so verses, all leading to a fairly rapidly flowing conclusion. Great variations on this pattern no doubt existed, but the general idea of a three-part structuring of a renga session is consistent from the mid-fourteenth century onward. The same concept appears in the discourses of music and Noh drama.

jueju 絶句. Quatrain. A four-line Chinese poem, with rhyme usually occurring in the second and fourth lines.

kagurauta 神楽歌. Sacred song. Songs sung at shrines or at the imperial court on ritual occasions.

kakekotoba 掛詞. Pivot word. A technique involving the use of a double entendre—a homonym or partial homonym that functions as the end of one phrase and the beginning of another.

kanshi 漢詩. Han poem. A general term for Chinese poetry written by the Japanese.

kasen 歌仙. A thirty-six-verse renga or haikai sequence. Our earliest references to this shorter alternative to the hundred-verse hyakuin come in the early 1500s. The form became especially popular in the time of Bashō and later.

kayō 歌謡. Popular song. A general term for various kinds of lyrics set to music.

keiki 景気. Scene or scenery. Sometimes used to mean simply natural description, but more often something like “evocative scenery” or scenery of affective resonance or atmosphere. (See also keikyokutei in appendix 2.)

kendai 兼題, kenjitsu no dai 兼日の題. A conventional topic distributed to participants invited to a planned poetic event (kenjitsu no kai 兼日の会) beforehand, in contrast to tōza no dai, topics drawn for extemporaneous composition. Usually, four or five topics were sent out, which would be aired together, constituting a sort of informal poem contest.

ke no uta 褻の歌. Informal waka, written casually or for personal occasions, in contrast to hare no uta. A famous example comes from Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241):

Composed when he went with other courtiers to see the blossoms in the Imperial Palace compound, after he had served many years in the Guards Bureau:

Spring upon spring,	haru o hete
I have watched your blossoms fall	miyuki ni naruru
like snow, cherry trees.	hana no kage
As I grow old, here in your shade,	furiyuku mi o mo
do you too feel pity for me?	aware to ya omou

Retired Emperor Go-Toba (1180–1239) had high praise for this poem as a statement of personal feeling (jukkai), using the terms yasashi and omoshiroshi.6 He noted that Teika said it was not one of his own favorites and felt it was not appropriate for an imperial anthology, although it did finally appear in Shin kokinshū (no. 1455, a lament).

kigo 季語. Renga, haikai, haiku. Season words. Required in all hokku. Lists of acceptable items were available in various handbooks and are still used by haiku poets today.

kireji 切字. Renga, haikai, haiku. “Cutting words.” Particles and verb suffixes (ya, kana, keri, ramu, etc.) that assist in making every hokku or haiku an independent statement.

kodai kayō 古代歌謡. An umbrella term for sacred songs (kagurauta), eastern songs (azumauta), planting songs (taueuta), saibara, and other works recorded in gazetteers (fudōki), and compilations from Nihon shoki to Man’yōshū and later anthologies.

kokoro 心. A word of broad connotations, signifying heart, feeling, mind, meaning, idea, conception, and so on. Often used in contrast to kotoba. The tension between kokoro and kotoba was basic to Japanese poetics. Already in the early eleventh century, poets—competent poets, that is—were instructed to concentrate on kokoro but were also told that if they had trouble coming up with interesting ideas they should aim for something that is at least formally polished and pleasing.7 Generally speaking, waka and renga poets subscribed to the counsel of Shunzei and his son Teika to use “old kotoba, new kokoro,” while some haikai poets sometimes reversed the dictum or abandoned it altogether.

kotoba 詞. A term of broad connotations, signifying diction, rhetorical technique, vocabulary, materials, and so on. Often used in contrast to kokoro.

kotobagaki 詞書. Headnote. The note preceding a poem in a written text, often including contextual information, conventional topic, textual source, and the name of the author.

kotowari 理. Principle, logic, cleverness. A concept derived primarily from Chinese discourse, particularly the vocabulary of neo-Confucianism. Sometimes used in a positive way in describing a poem as “making sense,” but also used in a derogatory sense in reference to poems that were too clever or lacked subtlety, as in an example noted by Asayama Bontō (b. 1349):

One should compose verses in such a way that the diction is graceful and profound, and in which the wording is crisp and flows well. This poem is instructive:

Showing us gaps in the snow—	yukima o misuru
clumps of grass in the fields.	nobe no wakakusa

This verse is so intent on displaying kotowari that it lacks class: it’s like tying a rope around something that’s already nailed shut. “Showing” is too boorish.8

kouta 小唄. “Little songs” of the Muromachi era and later, which were strongly associated with women performers and were one of the influences on Noh drama and were popular among all social classes. Early on, accompaniment was provided by bamboo flute, but in the Edo period they were accompanied by samisen and had a strong affiliation with women’s dance.

kudai waka 句題和歌. A waka written with a line from a Chinese poem as a dai (topic).

kyōka 狂歌. Madcap or zany waka. A subgenre of uta that began to emerge in the medieval era but came into full form only in the Edo period. Kyōka generally involve elaborate wordplay and subject matter considered too colloquial or vulgar for standard uta and sometimes parody well-known poems of the past.

kyōku 狂句. Madcap or zany haikai. See also senryū.

lüshi 律詩. Regulated verse. Eight-line Chinese poem of five or seven characters per line, with a single rhyme generally occurring in the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines.

makurakotoba 枕詞. Pillow word. Formulaic phrases of five syllables preceding certain nouns, such as ashihiki no yama, “foot-wearying mountains.” By the time of Kokinshū, the precise meaning of these mostly archaic expressions was generally unknown.

meisho, nadokoro 名所. Famous places in the Japanese canon. It was virtually obligatory for poets to write poems about places they visited on their travels, and most renga sequences also included meisho.

mon. See jimon in appendix 2.

musubidai 結題. Compound topics involving more than one item, such as “moon above a lake.” See also daiei in appendix 2

renga 連歌. A subgenre of waka that maintained the same aesthetic conventions. A communal form of poetry in which participants produce alternating 5-7-5 syllable stanzas to make up a string of linked verses. Haikai linked verse was referred to as renku.

saibara 催馬楽. Literally, “horse-readying music,” referring to songs sung when tribute from the provinces was sent to the imperial court.

sakimori no uta さきもりの歌, 防人の歌. Poems by frontier guards; literally, “guardians of the capes.” Written mostly by men posted to guard duty in the southern islands, where fear of invasion from the continent continued into the 700s.

sama, yō 様. Poetic style. At times the word is also used to mean “manner” or “scene.”

sarikirai 去嫌. Clashing. Shorthand for rules of renga that require spacing of words, images, and ideas within sequences so as to avoid repetition (rinne 輪廻). A synonym is uchikoshi o kirau, “avoiding links back to the next-to-last verse.”

senryū 川柳. Comic or unorthodox haikai. A subgenre of haikai, sometimes called zappai, or “miscellaneous” or “parodic” haikai, distinguished not only by broader humor but also by the absence of season words (kigo).

shakkyōka 釈教歌. Buddhist poem. Sometimes used in reference to any poem with strong Buddhist content, but also referring more narrowly to poems on lines from sutras or depicting Buddhist practices contained in separate chapters in imperial and other anthologies.

shi 詩. Earliest form of classical Chinese poem. Of indeterminate length, usually made up of four-character lines.

shikimoku 式目. The rules of linked-verse composition. From very early in its history, the culture of linked verse, which was in the beginning a game of sorts and would always display some aspects of play, produced rules for behavior in the za (no chatting, no napping, etc.) and for the proper conduct of a sequence. Over time, these rules became quite numerous and, to the minds of moderns especially, arcane and trivial. At bottom, however, the ideal behind the rules is simple: variety in technique and subject matter, within the general boundaries of the courtly poetic tradition, reflecting on one level an attempt to offer an overview of that tradition, on another level an attempt to analyze that tradition in aesthetic terms, and on still another level, at least in the case of some poets, an attempt to carry out an aesthetic meditation grounded in Buddhist philosophy. In practical terms, this led to stipulations concerning the seriation, intermission, and repetition of words and categories.

shirabe 調. Tone or fine tuning. An enigmatic term that originates in considerations of rhythm and rhyme in Chinese poetry. In the early days of the waka tradition it referred to the aural quality of poems, usually rendered into English as “tone” or “tuning.” In the poetics of Edo-era poets such as Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843), however, it developed connotations related to ideas of purity and sincerity (makoto) while retaining some sense of relation to the euphonic quality of poems.

shū 集. Collection, anthology. Along with twenty-one imperially commissioned anthologies of waka (chokusenshū), the Japanese archives also contain literally thousands of other kinds of collections, small and large, from the personal anthologies of individual poets (shikashū) to anthologies representing groups (shisenshū), and in all genres. This tradition continues today, as witnessed by numerous modern editions of poetry such as the ten-volume Shinpen Kokka taikan, which includes indexes for every single line of the poems in the imperial anthologies, and a similar indexed collection of the linked-verse canon, Renga taikan, now in the process of publication.

sugata すがた, 姿. Variously translated as “total effect,” “configuration,” “overall effect.” Generally referring to the effect upon the reader of a poem taken as a whole in both thematic and aesthetic terms. Chōmei begins his essay on the subject by admitting, “It is difficult to comprehend the total effect [sugata] of a poem,” but he then gives an instructive comment: “For example, what one sees in the sky at dusk in autumn has neither color nor sound, so one may wonder about exactly the source of its sugata, and yet one finds oneself shedding tears.”9 He probably has in mind a poem by Saigyō (Shin kokinshū, no. 367):

A puzzlement:	obotsukana
just what is it, one must ask,	aki wa ika naru
how might one explain	yue no areba
how somehow in the autumn	suzoro ni mono no
one finds oneself feeling sad?	kanashikaruramu

tanka 短歌. Short poem. Another word for waka appearing sporadically from the earliest times; the word most widely used for waka since the earlier twentieth century.

tei 体, 躰; sometimes pronounced tai. Style or mood. Usually used to in correlation with aesthetic terms of praise: the style of mystery and depth (yūgentei), the lofty style (taketakakiyō), the style of refined feeling (ushintei), and so on. Beginning in the eighth century, poets and scholars began distinguishing a number of different styles, and the so-called ten styles associated with the names of Mibu no Tadamine (fl. 905–950) and Teika had considerable impact on both practice and exegesis in the Kamakura period and later. Sometimes the term is also used to mean scene. The word yō is a synonym.

tōza no uta 当座の歌. Extemporaneous waka. Waka composed extemporaneously, usually on a topic shared with others. Masters of the art were expected to perform well on such occasions, and much of training was aimed at developing the ability to respond quickly and with impressive results. The atmosphere of tōza composition was often more relaxed than at formal events. Often topics were drawn by lot (saguridai).

tsukeai 付合, tsukeyō 付様. Link, linking, or connection. The word refers to the most fundamental practice of linked verse—namely, the joining of verses together in sequence. Many renga handbooks and treatises are dedicated to the examination of this fundamental technique, often through the offering of examples of different kinds of linking—by wordplay, by idea, by logic, by suggestion, etc. Sometimes synonymous with tsukeku; also sometimes used synonymously with yoriai.

tsukeku 付句. Link or linked couplet. The name for both the second verse in a two-verse “link” and the two-verse couplet itself.

tsukinamikai 月並会. Monthly meeting. From the mid-medieval period on, many poetry masters, as well as imperial, noble, and warrior houses, held monthly meetings that gathered together their salon. Typically, some topics were handed out beforehand (kendai), with others being “drawn” on the spot, for extemporaneous composition (tōza). Later, many houses also held monthly waka or renga meetings, as did haikai masters of the Edo period.

uta 歌. Japanese poetry, in this book used in reference not just to the 5-7-5-7-7 form that was the primary genre of Japanese court poetry until modern times but also to Japanese poetry of all genres.

uta-awase 歌合. Poem contest. In the Heian era, poem contests were actual social affairs, in which two groups of people, constituted as factions of the left and right, met together and wrote poems on dai (conventional topics), with judgments rendered on-site. This model remained in play for centuries to come. In later eras, however, many variations emerged. The poet Saigyō, for instance, made paper contests of his own poems and requested judgments—including commentary—by Shunzei and Teika; and around that same time, the time of Shin kokinshū, some very large contests were held in which the poets never met for a complete “airing” of poems.

The poem contest was a form of publication for poets, and such contests—at which only highly formal poems were acceptable—became resources for those putting together various anthologies, including imperial anthologies, for which similarly proper poems were favored by compilers in most cases. The hanshi, or words of judgment, often appended to the written records of contests, are important documents in the history of poetics and courtly aesthetics.

Various contest formats were also employed among renga poets, although not as prominently; in the world of haikai, however, the hokku-awase was of considerable importance throughout the Edo period.

utamakura 歌枕. Literally, “pillows for poems.” Until the mid-Heian era, a generic term for formulaic words used in poetry such as makurakotoba. Later, however, the term referred to famous places that were seen as appropriate for poetic description. The list of the Buddhist monk and poet Nōin (b. 988), who was known as a traveler, includes places mostly in the area around Kyoto (Arashiyama, Fushimi Village, Katsura River, Asanohara) but also remote places in Michinoku (Shirakawa Barrier) and Dewa (Yasoshima). See also meisho.

waka 和歌. Short poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Also used in reference to all Japanese poetry in traditional forms.

waki 脇. The second verse of a renga or haikai sequence. Renga pedagogy compared the first three verses of a sequence to a social event, the hokku being offered by the guest, the waki by the host, and the daisan by a companion of the guest.10 (In any given case, this scenario might realistically describe a renga gathering, but not always so.) The implication was that the second verse should “defer” to the hokku, staying in the same seasonal context and using restrained style and rhetoric. The third verse should move the sequence forward, but only in subtle ways and not in a way to upstage the first two verses. See also hokku.

yamai 病. Poetic faults or “ills.” Various forms of mostly syntactic, aural, or semantic features identified as displeasing in aesthetic terms, usually in the context of formal composition for poem contests and elite social gatherings.

yamatouta やまとうた, 和歌. The Japanese reading of waka.

yariku. See appendix 2.

yoriai 寄合. Conventional associations. Related to engo (“associated” words), a term used in waka criticism in reference to words such as “blossoms” and “scatter” that have an obvious real-world relationship but also to words linked by precedent. Yoriai appears in renga criticism primarily in reference to various semantic, lexical, and logical associations between words, images, and ideas. Some are seemingly natural (“dream” and “see,” for instance, or “sky” and “rain”), while others are dependent upon long-established precedent (“snow” and “cherry blossoms”) or explicit sources (Suma and zither, based on scenes in The Tale of Genji describing Genji’s life as an exile.) Linked verse is often described as yoriai no bungei, “an art of associations”—referring both to the fundamental importance of linking in renga as a genre and to the fact that people came together in “association” in the za.

za 座. Literally, “seat” or “seating”; venue. Used in reference to the place where a poetry gathering was held and also to mean the gathering itself. Of particular importance in renga discourse, in which aesthetic and social assumptions nearly always involve the idea of communal effort that in some ways was thought of as a performance. As Bontō says in a work made up of teachings he had heard from Nijō Yoshimoto, “Since art [geinō] is a time for people to mingle together, there should be no feelings of inferiority at all, nor should one feel proud just because one has produced something.”11

zōtōka 贈答歌. Exchange of waka. Poems written between two people, the second usually responding rhetorically and thematically to the other.