Another poem dedicated to those who were lonely for Valentine’s Day recently:

The author of this poem is Nijōin no Sanuki (二条院讃岐, 1141 – 1217), also known as “Lady Sanuki of Nijōin”. Her real name isn’t known. It is known that she was a daughter of famous warrior/poet Minamoto no Yorimasa and served the retired Emperor Nijō, hence her name nijōin (Imperial House of Nijō). The “Sanuki” part comes from Sanuki Province where her father was once posted on assignment.

Sanuki, like Sokushi, was a leading female poet of her day, and this poem helps illustrate why. As we discussed recently in poem 90, the image of sleeves wet with tears was a popular poetic technique used at the time for unrequited love (again, see poems 42, 65, and 72) but the idea of such sleeves being hidden like a submerged rock offshore was a novel, new way of expressing this.

Indeed, Sanuki became so famous for this verse, she herself was often referred to as oki no ishi no Sanuki (沖の石の讃岐) by later poets and authors. It was pretty rare for a poet to receive such a name for a famous verse they composed but a few other examples exist. Another female poet named kunaikyō (宮内卿) was called wakakusa no kunaikyō (若草の宮内卿) because of a famous verse she wrote regarding young grass (wakakusa, 若草) from the Shin Kokin Wakashū:

Pretty awesome when you can make a name for yourself that way.

This poem is a clever variation on the “sleeves wet with tears” poems we often see in the Hyakunin Isshu:

The author of this poem is Inpumon-in no Taiyu (殷富門院大輔, dates unknown) or “Taiyu of the Household of Princess Ryōshi”. She served Princess Ryōshi (“Inpumon-in”), the daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa. Princess Ryōshi was also known as Inpumon-in (殷富門院) hence the name here. Taiyu was an accomplished poet and another member of the elite “Garden in the Poetic Forest” group (see poem 85).

The poem here, according to Mostow, is a 200-year old rebuttal of an earlier poem that celebrates the “wet sleeves” of the fisherman of Matsushima, but saying “if you think their sleeves are wet, mine are even more wet and stained with blood-red tears!” We’ve seen other “sleeves wet with tears” poems in the Hyakunin Isshu, namely poem 65, poem 72, and my favorite poem 42. But Taiyu takes this one to a new level, I think. 🙂

Regarding the location, “Male Island” (雄島, Oshima in Japanese) is one of 200+ tiny islands in a famous island chain called Matsushima (松島) in modern-day Miyagi Prefecture. The featured photo above is Matsushima (photo by Chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons). The islands are all pretty small, and very scenic, and each has their own unique name. However, in the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, the area was badly devastated and still recovering.

In any case, poets from antiquity and centuries later used Matsushima in their poetry and it’s easy to see why.

One other point worth mentioning is that this poem, and poem 89 use a clever trick in Japanese poetry called kugire (句切れ). The idea is to add a single syllable in there, usually on the first line, in order to add impact, but also as a filler to help maintain the standard 5-7-5-7-7 lines in Waka poetry. In this poem the kugire is on the first line, at the end: 見せばやな (mi-se-ba-ya-na), while in poem 89 it is 玉の緒よ (ta-ma-no-o-yo).

You can see this technique centuries later in Japanese haiku, such as in the famous poem by Basho in the year 1686:

This haiku was composed 500+ years after the poems of the Hyakunin Isshu, but it’s interesting how some poetic-devices never quite get old.