Renga by Sasaki Dōyo: Selected from the Tsukubashū (Tsukuba Anthology)

Waka literally means “Japanese poetry,” but in the premodern era the term generally referenced thirty-one syllable poems (typically subdivided into a rhythmic pattern of 5/7/5/7/7) in native Japanese (as opposed to Chinese or Sino-Japanese). After the Tsukubashū, an additional four imperial, and one quasi-imperial, anthologies of waka were compiled to bring the total of official waka anthologies to twenty-two. The second (and last) official collection of renga modeled on the imperial waka anthologies, Shinsen Tsukubashū (Newly Compiled Tsukuba Anthology) was compiled in 1495. Renga, like waka, was composed in Japanese and based on the thirty-one syllable form, except that one person composed the first three rhythmic groupings of 5/7/5 syllables (called maeku, or “preceding verse”), and someone else composed the next two groupings of 7/7 syllables (the tsukeku, or “following verse”). The two poets (or any additional poets) would alternate throughout the sequence, which could run anywhere from 36 to 1000 links. Renga sequences were sometimes composed at, and dedicated to, shrines, while at other times they were composed as simultaneously collaborative and competitive entertainment at parties. It is not only the collaborative nature of renga that differentiates it from waka, however. As an extension of the communal process of composition, the act of linking to someone else’s aesthetic expression meant the second poet had the option either of attempting to harmonize with the maeku, or of highlighting some kind of contrast, whether through wordplay, a reference to a canonical poetic expression, a chronological shift, or other device.

Notably, Scrolls 19 and 20 contain some variations. For instance, there are two examples of ten verses, all responding to the identical starting verse; Japanese-Chinese renga in which a Japanese line follows a Chinese line; single links and single starting verses (hokku, which, as the opening lines of a sequence, were required to celebrate the occasion by a reference to the season) independent of what may have preceded or followed.

The numbers attached to Dōyo’s links represent the numbering in the Asahi Shinbunsha edition of the Tsukubashū.

The preceding link recalls wave blossoms. The conceit comes from a Kokinshū wakashū (Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times, the very first imperial waka anthology, compiled in 905) poem celebrating waves breaking out between cracks of ice on a lake as the first flowers of spring bloom. To waves in the lake, Dōyo attaches snow on distant mountains. Haze is associated with spring.

When spring comes, a bare tree that seemed dead blooms. Plum flowers bloom before their leaves emerge.

An evening bell tolls at a distant mountain temple. Carried by the wind blowing from the mountain, the sound reaches a village that the poet imagines, or perhaps that he recalls once visiting when the temple bell rang. Dōyo switches the viewpoint to the mountain temple where people visit its cherry blossoms. At dusk they leave, and at flower’s dusk (when the blossoms fall) no more visitors appear. The mountain temple is lonely at dusk, particularly after the cherry blossom season.

The path under maki (literally, “genuine tree,” such as cedar or cypress) darkens first while the evening sun still lingers elsewhere. Dōyo evokes a spring evening scene in a cypress grove. Cherry blossoms that mingle with cypresses here and there are light, catching the moon. It is as if the moon is trying to fight the dusk by lighting up the cherry blossoms.

So many voices of mountain warblers are heard, now here and now there, that the poet imagines how they may be flying with wings touching. Mountain warblers are spring birds, but Dōyo switches to a summer scene. As wings overlay wings, trees stand side by side, their foliage thick.

Nojima (Field Island) is a scenic headland on northwestern Awaji. As waves wash over the shore, the grass hides underwater and then reappears. “Princess-lilies,” or mountain lilies, are yellow or orange in color and grow in mountainous areas in southern Japan. As in poem 1500 of the poetic anthology Man’yōshū a massive, non-imperial anthology of over 4500 waka compiled in 759), the mountain lily is associated with a young woman’s hidden longing. It blooms in the mountains amidst tall summer grass, occasionally revealing itself when the wind blows.

One of Dōyo’s best. His answer to the maeku, clear and rhythmic, is that he is saddened by the autumn evening and is attending to the sound of the wind blowing through the blades of reeds. It is also a general statement that echoes the style of the opening passage of Sei Shōnagon’s Makura no sōshi (Pillow Book, late tenth century): the most moving hour in autumn is dusk, and the most moving of all winds is the melancholy one blowing through reed blades.

Dōyo takes the moon of the maeku to be a fall moon, the mountain to be the snow-capped Fuji. He also echoes the sound patterns of the previous verse: shirarekere in shirayuki and narikeri. Finally, his verse resonates with the dramatic gesture of the prior one in the dynamic expression, Fuji narikeri na, which conveys affirmation, realization, and self-persuasion.

The previous verse laments that autumn is once again departing. Evening is a melancholy time, but a late fall evening is even more melancholy. To the word kasanete in the original (folding over, doubled, yet again) Dōyo responds with the repetition of the word yama, mountain. He imagines a lonely autumnal mountain where the poet is. The moon rises over a yet farther mountain. The poem suggests loneliness beyond loneliness, and mountains beyond mountains.

The cry of wild geese migrating from the north heightens the poet’s sense of the chill in the air. He looks up to see the geese and finds the late autumn clouds that signal the coming of winter. Picking up the sound of the wild geese, Dōyo responds with its visual counterpart: the moonlit peak of a mountain. Dōyo’s link generates a mood of relatively lighthearted intimacy, as he switches from a distant scene in the sky to here, where we sit with him enjoying renga. Wild geese (kari, karigane, gan) are associated with the autumn moon.

The previous verse imagines an itinerant monk who refrains from, or tries to avoid, becoming attached to worldly phenomena, including settling in one place. Dōyo responds with the brushwood door of a mountain hut, which is the monk’s temporary abode, and the moon that does not favor any single tree.

From a thousand-verse sequence hosted by Prince Kajii at Kitano Shrine. The previous verse is about a whimsical mountain shower in autumn that rains down only in certain places. Dōyo interprets it to be due to rain clouds that float one after another across the moon.

Clouds float on wind. Looking at clouds, one knows which way the wind blows. Dōyo takes this to describe an evening sky. The moon is already up in the sky, but at the foot of the mountain twilight still lingers.

The previous link is about the endless sorrow of autumn. An indeterminate number of tears have fallen on the sleeve of the poet’s robe. Ikutsura can mean “how many drops I don’t know” or “a number of drops.” Dōyo responds to this with the number of geese. He hears the loud cries of geese and imagines a large host of them. On looking up, he sees fewer geese than their voices suggest. Ingeniously, this makes us think that, in the previous link, the sorrow was also deeper than the number of teardrops.

The white caps of the waves recall the snow. The snow still remains in late winter, although elsewhere there are hints of spring’s arrival. Dōyo conjures up ice-crusted streams forming as the tide ebbs and the river flowing into the sea follows the ebbing tide onto the sand. Low tide is particularly associated in waka convention with early spring.

Hunters armed with bows and arrows used falcons to frighten other birds into revealing themselves in the hunting grounds. Because the tsukeku introduces a winter scene, Dōyo brings in frost. As a bird falls from the sky, brushwood hangs its frost-covered leaves under a likewise frosty pine. Since leaves (ha) and wings (ha, hane) are homonyms in Japanese, ha o tarete in Dōyo’s line, meaning “hanging leaves,” suggests “hanging or drooping wings.”

From a thousand-verse sequence composed at Dōyo’s house in the third lunar month of the fifth year of Bunna (1356). The plurality in the maeku is contrasted by Dōyo’s lone mountain in the distance and a single falcon resting on the poetic persona’s wrist. “Snow-capped mountain” is introductory to “white falcon,” and “snow” works both to characterize the mountain peaks as covered in snow (katayama no yuki) and as a descriptor of the falcon’s white-as-snow feathers (yuki no shirataka). Katayama is a scene in which there is a mountain adjacent to a field. Pheasants were often the objects of falconry.