Kokin-wakashu

The , also abbreviated as , is an early Heian waka Imperial anthology, conceived by Emperor Uda (r. 887â€"897) and ordered by his son Emperor Daigo (r. 897â€"930) in ~905. Its finished form dates to c. 920, though according to several historical accounts the last poem was added to the collection in 914. The compilers of the anthology were four court poets, led by Ki no Tsurayuki and including Ki no Tomonori (who died before its completion), Ōshikōchi Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine. Its name means "Collections of Ancient and Modern Times".

The Kokinshū is the first of the , the twenty-one collections of Japanese poetry compiled at Imperial request. It was the most influential realization of the ideas of poetry at the time, dictating the form and format of Japanese poetry until the late nineteenth century; it was the first anthology to divide itself into seasonal and love poems. The primacy of poems about the seasons pioneered by the Kokinshū continues even today in the haiku tradition.

The Japanese preface by Ki no Tsurayuki is also the beginning of Japanese criticism as distinct from the far more prevalent Chinese poetics in the literary circles of its day. (The anthology also included a traditional Chinese preface authored by Ki no Tomonori.) The idea of including old as well as new poems was another important innovation, one which was widely adopted in later works, both in prose and verse. The poems of the Kokinshū were ordered temporally; the love poems, for instance, though written by many different poets across large spans of time, are ordered in such a way that the reader may understand them to depict the progression and fluctuations of a courtly love-affair. This association of one poem to the next marks this anthology as the ancestor of the renga and haikai traditions.

The exact number of poems in the collection is a matter of dispute. The online editionOnline edition of the Kokin wakashu at the UVa Library Japanese Text Initiative. contains 1,111 poems. The collection is divided into twenty parts, reflecting older models such as the Man'yōshū and various Chinese anthologies. The organisation of topics is however different from all earlier models, and was followed by all later official collections, although some collections like the Kin'yōshū and Shikashū scaled the model down to ten parts.

The following divisions of the Kokinshū mention the Japanese names of the parts, their modern readings, and their English translationspg 482 of Japanese Court Poetry, Earl Miner, Robert H. Brower. 1961, Stanford University Press, LCCN 61-10925.

topic	parts
Seasons	1-2
	3
	4-5
	6
	7
	8
	9
	10
Love	11-15
Miscellany	16
	17-18
	19
	20

The compilers included the name of the author of each poem, and the or inspiration of the poem, if known. Major poets of the Kokinshū include Ariwara no Narihira, Ono no Komachi, Henjō and Fujiwara no Okikaze, apart from the compilers themselves. Inclusion in any imperial collection, and particularly the Kokinshū, was a great honour.

References