Fujiwara Teika's Hundred-Poem Sequence of the Shoji Era

Abstract

T UHE great Japanese classical poet and critic Fujiwara no Sadaie, or Teika,2 is best known to popular history for his little anthology of thirty-onesyllable poems called Hyakunin isshu,3 'One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets'. Even today, this collection is memorized by most cultured Japanese, if only because a literary card game played during the New Year season is based upon it. More important, the Hyakunin isshu has for the past three hundred years and more been the chief vehicle by which the Japanese have come to learn something of their native tradition of classical poetry, and so closely is Teika identified in the popular mind with this anthology (and often little else), that I may perhaps be forgiven this rather peculiar way of beginning: namely, by stressing that the collection presented here is an entirely different work. The 'Hundred-Poem Sequence of the Shoji Era', or Shoji hyakushu4-the set of a hundred poems we are dealing with here-is a sequence of Teika's own composition written in 1200 (the second year of the Shoji era) by command of Ex-Emperor Go-Toba.5 This was a little more than two years after the young