The Shape of Love and Loss: Izumi Shikibu’s “Gojusshu waka” (五十首和歌, Fifty-Poem Sequence)

Roselee Bundy

doi:10.5195/jll.2020.152

Abstract

This paper will examine the lesser known poetry of Izumi Shikibu (b. 976?). As a poet, she had an interest in composing (or at times assembling) sets of poems in novel formats, and through a number of them, summoning up an image of herself as a solitary woman, bereft of the care of family or a lover. This paper proposes to examine two of these sequences of novel format: “Jūdai jusshu” (Ten Poems on Ten Topics) and “Gojusshu waka ” (Fifty-Poem Sequence).“Jūdai jusshu,” a less ambitious forerunner of “Gojusshu waka,” presents in ten poems on ten self-assigned topics the feelings of a woman dwelling alone without a lover, who fashions an image of herself within the poetic narrative of love, in particular that of the “waiting woman.” I will argue that these two sequences show the integration of two forms of poetic production: the composition of novel formats of poems that became popular from the mid-tenth into the eleventh century and women’s tenarai, the solitary composition or copying of verses to express or explore their feelings, especially in times of emotional distress.

Highlights

Japanese Language and LiteratureThe Shape of Love and Loss: Izumi Shikibu’s “Gojusshu waka” (五十首和歌, Fifty-Poem Sequence)[1]
The topics of “Gojusshu waka” trace the passage of a day, but they unfold to display a longer progression of time from a period near the Prince’s death to a gradual realization of irrevocable loss. (This is the general overall progression of the Sakakibara bon 榊原本 “Sochi no miya banka gun.”)[7] with “Gojusshu waka,” Izumi Shikibu sets herself the challenge of composing or gathering together multiple poems on a given self-assigned topic, integrating the verses by echoing the same or closely associated images, and suggesting the passage of time
Distributing five emotions associated with the experience of love into five discrete time periods, the forty-six poems of “Gojusshu waka” trace Izumi Shikibu’s shifting emotions of love and grief, from an early period of hope that the Prince might return, through the hours when once she expected his visits and her sleepless nights bereft even of dreams, to memories of the past and an awareness of the finality of the Prince’s death