This fun website will let you pick a Hyakunin Isshu poem at random, and that will be your fortune for the day. After your poem is selected it is shown in the upper right corner:
On the left hand side is your “lucky color” for the day, and in middle is a fortune for you. You can see the matching karuta card on the bottom. The site is entirely in Japanese, so you will have to use an online translator. It reminds me of those page-a-day calendars I used to buy for work.
In any case, this is a terrific site and worth visiting. Enjoy!
First, I appreciate the feedback recently about challenges finding a suitable poem for an occasion. I’ve experienced this problem too, so I decided to update the poem index, and sort it three ways: by traditional, numerical order, by poetry topic, and also by the kimari-ji syllables. Different readers come to this site for different reasons, and hope this will make everyone’s life easier. Some of these lists already existed, but I tried to collect them in one, convenient place.
Second, I took a few months from the blog to focus on other things, and get some much-needed rest. Now that I am picking up the blog again, I decided that I want to focus more on the Hyakunin Isshu specifically. That was the original focus of the blog, but over time I branched out to other poetry anthologies and other topics. It was fun to explore, but I’d like to get back to the blog roots and narrow the focus again. It means fewer blog posts in the short-term, but I think I will make the blog more enjoyable in the long-run.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to continue dropping feedback and such.
This was a particularly nice poem that I found in the Manyoshu heralding early Spring.
Original Manyogana
Japanese
Romanization
Rough Translation
石激
石走る
Iwa bashiru
Are not
垂見之上乃
垂水の上の
Tarumi no ue no
the bracken buds
左和良妣乃
さわらびの
Sawarabi no
sprouting next to a
毛要出春尓
萌え出づる春に
Moe-izuru haru ni
waterfall
成来鴨
なりにけるかも
Narinikeru kamo
the first sign of Spring?
This poem was composed by Shiki no Miko or Prince Shiki (志貴皇子, ? – 716), who was the seventh son of Emperor Tenji (poem 1 in the Hyakunin Isshu). Unlike his siblings who were embroiled in the political strife of the times, Prince Shiki retreated and focused on poetry instead. His talents with poetry earned him a place in the Manyoshu, and Japanese poetic history.
Ironically, despite staying out of succession struggles, Prince Shiki’s own son, Prince Shirakabe later ascended the throne as Emperor Kōnin despite not being the dominant line, and all subsequent emperors in Japan are descended from him. So, in the end, Prince Shiki won afterall.
The poem itself evokes a truly wonderful image of a tiny sprout peeking through the rocks by a riverbank, heralding the first signs of spring.
Note that in the traditional Japanese calendar, based off the Chinese model, Spring started much later than the modern meteorological Spring, namely at the start of the second lunar month. Hence, the holiday of Setsubun relates to the start of Spring, and helps conclude the Lunar New Year. Plum blossoms are also frequently associated with this time of year since they bloom earlier than cherry blossoms, and were highly prized by poets of Manyoshu, as we can see in this poem (also posted here):
The Hyakunin Isshu 