JL 10 — Waka and Tanka: Love and Poetic Exchange

Waka and Tanka: Love and Poetic Exchange

A beautiful love poem can be a disappointing answer. If someone has asked why you stayed away, another compliment may only deepen the hurt. What sounds tender on its own can become evasive when we know what came before it.

Such tensions run through waka (documented in written collections from the eighth century). A short poem could invite a visit, acknowledge a shared night or question an absence. Its recipient could answer in the same form while seeing the relationship very differently.

These exchanges give intimate relationships a distinctive place in Japanese literature. We hear what people want from one another and how carefully they may have to ask for it. 

1. What Five Phrases Make Possible

Tanka (in use by the seventh century) means short poem. Its conventional five phrases contain 5–7–5–7–7 Japanese sound units, usually counted as morae. These differ from English syllables. Waka originally included several forms of Japanese poetry. As the short form became dominant, the two names increasingly overlapped in usage.

The five phrases leave room for a thought to develop. A poem might begin with the weather before revealing why the speaker has been watching it so closely. Another might carry a question through the whole composition. Its final two phrases need not explain its opening three.

In an exchange, a change of direction can become a negotiation. An image offered as reassurance may return in the reply as evidence of disappointment. The second speaker borrows the first speaker’s language while refusing the comfort it was meant to provide.

2. Before the Poem Was Read

The letter made a first impression

Within Heian court literature (794–1185), poems traveled in letters as well as collections. The recipient saw the handwriting and paper along with the words. Calligraphic skill could suggest care and cultivated taste. The letter’s appearance helped form an impression of its sender before the message had been fully considered.

Timing and the work of delivery

Timing mattered as much as appearance. A poem sent promptly after a visit occupied a different place in a relationship from one arriving after an unexplained absence. The same expression of affection could reassure in one situation and sound inadequate in another.

These customs belonged to particular social circles rather than to everyone in Japan. Even within those circles, intimate contact depended on other people’s labor. Servants and messengers carried the letters through which we now hear two apparently private voices.

3. Growing Up Beside a Well

A childhood memory becomes an invitation

Episode 23 of The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, developed during the tenth century) shows how much a reply can accomplish. The work has no securely identified single author. Its short prose episodes place poems within encounters that help us understand what is being said.

A boy and girl grow up as neighbors. As they become older, they grow shy of one another. The young man sends a poem remembering the well curb against which he once measured his height. He has grown since they last met.

She answers through a different sign of growing up. The hair she once compared with his now falls beyond her shoulders. She asks for whom other than him she would put it up.

What the answer adds

The poems are paraphrased here. His reference to growing taller invites her to recognize that their childhood relationship has changed. Her answer acknowledges the change and makes her own preference clear.

The well matters because both can remember being there. Neither needs to reconstruct their childhood for the other. A few words bring it back while allowing them to speak about what they want now.

The exchange is tender because recognition is mutual. He risks giving their old familiarity a new meaning. She answers in a way that makes his hope possible. Reading only one poem would leave us with half of that encounter.

4. A Night Can Be Longer for One Person

Michitsuna’s Mother makes waiting difficult to dismiss

Poetic skill offered no guarantee that a lover would be attentive. Michitsuna’s Mother (c. 935–995) records the strain of an unequal marriage in The Kagerō Diary (Kagerō nikki, composed in the later tenth century; recounting 954–974).

One celebrated poem asks whether the person addressed knows how long it takes for dawn to arrive when someone lies alone in sorrow. The complaint concerns how time is experienced. A night passes differently for the person who is free to leave and the person hoping for a visit.

Her question asks him to acknowledge that difference. He may know that she has waited. Does he understand what waiting has been like? The poem’s restraint makes the complaint no less pointed.

The writer decides what we remember

The diary gives this question a longer history. Poems appear among hopes, disappointments and attempts to regain attention. An accomplished response may sustain contact without settling the grievance that prompted it. We can admire the writing while seeing that the relationship remains painful.

Reading Japanese women writers in their own sustained works lets us hear these judgments. Michitsuna’s Mother selects the exchanges, recalls their circumstances and tells us what followed. Her literary skill gives her ways to challenge neglect even when it cannot secure the attention she wants.

The diary also gives her control over how the exchanges reach later readers. We encounter the recipient’s answer within the relationship as she remembers it. Her judgment continues beyond the immediate conversation. That opportunity belonged to this particular writer; other women’s resources and circumstances could differ considerably.

5. Familiar Words, Uncertain Promises

Why a conventional image could still feel personal

Dew, sleeves, night and seasonal change recur throughout love poetry. Readers who knew their associations could recognize an emotional situation before the poet had explained it. That familiarity also made small changes in phrasing noticeable.

The Kokinshū (Kokin Wakashū, commissioned in 905) offers a revealing example. In poem 772, a speaker keeps waiting at evening despite knowing that the desired visitor will not return. The cicadas continue to sound. Knowing what to expect has not made it possible to stop waiting.

Torquil Duthie (b. 1968) connects this poem with poem 205, where evening cicadas surround an unvisited mountain dwelling. The repeated language allows one lonely setting to be heard through another. A familiar sound acquires a more personal urgency when someone stands waiting for a lover.

In the love poem, the familiar evening sounds accompany an expectation that remains unfulfilled. Their emotional force comes from the speaker’s predicament and the earlier poem they recall.

6. The Speaker Is Not Always the Poet

The Kokinshū contains five books of love poetry. Their arrangement brings together different speakers and changing experiences of attachment. The collection does not record one actual romance. Nor did every poem necessarily originate in a private exchange.

Poets also composed on assigned topics. A convincing voice of longing can be an imaginative achievement. It is not sufficient evidence of an event in the named poet’s life.

A prose headnote may identify an occasion or explain an attribution. The anthology then gives the poem another setting among its neighbors. In The Kokinshū: Selected Poems (2023), Duthie pays close attention to these relationships.

It helps to distinguish the feeling expressed from what we know about the poem’s composition. The speaker’s longing may be vividly realized even when the occasion is uncertain. We can respond to that emotion without assuming that we know the poet’s private life.

In The Tales of Ise, prose presents two poems as an exchange within an encounter. An anthology can produce a different kind of conversation through editorial arrangement. Neighboring poems may answer one another for readers even when their authors never corresponded.

7. What We Hear in English

Repeated words and uncertain tone

An exchange depends on details that can be easy to lose. If a reply repeats a significant word, readers need some way to recognize its return. If it questions a promise, its uncertainty should remain audible.

Decisions in literary translation affect how we hear this. Two unrelated English expressions may conceal a repeated Japanese word. An emphatic declaration may resolve something that the original leaves unsettled. A translation can preserve a syllable count while making the relationship between the voices harder to recognize.

An annotated translation helps us distinguish what the poem says from what its surrounding context explains. Comparing versions can also reveal how differently a reply may sound: affectionate in one translation, guarded in another.

8. Reading an Exchange as an Encounter

Pause after the first poem and consider the response it invites. Then read the answer. Does it accept the invitation, change the subject or return a familiar word with a different implication?

Now return to the first poem. The reply may make its confidence sound less secure. It may also help us hear the tenderness of an invitation once we know how it was received. Reading the exchange changes our first impression.

Notice what remains unanswered. A reply can acknowledge a graceful image while passing over a request. It can preserve courtesy without restoring confidence. Those small discrepancies are often where the relationship becomes most audible.

The later history of modern tanka extends well beyond courtly correspondence. These earlier poems nevertheless reward a return to the exchange itself. Beside the well, an answer makes a shared future imaginable. In the question about dawn, it is the absent person’s understanding that remains in doubt.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Are waka and tanka the same form?

The terms often overlap. Waka originally had a broader meaning while tanka specifies the short form conventionally composed in 5–7–5–7–7 Japanese sound units.

Were all waka love poems?

No. Waka also addressed seasons, travel, mourning, celebration and other subjects. Love was one important field within a wider practice.

Did every love poem describe a real relationship?

No. Poems could belong to correspondence, respond to assigned topics or appear within literary narratives. The speaker should not automatically be identified with the author.

Must English tanka use thirty-one syllables?

No. Japanese morae differ from English syllables. A matching total does not necessarily preserve the original rhythm or meaning.

Where should I begin reading?

Start with episode 23 of The Tales of Ise. Then compare the love sections of the Kokinshū with poems embedded in The Kagerō Diary. Keep the prose and explanatory notes beside the poems.

References

1. Carter, Steven D. (trans.), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

2. Duthie, Torquil (trans.), The Kokinshū: Selected Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

3. McCullough, Helen Craig (trans.), Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968).

4. McCullough, Helen Craig (trans.), Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, with Tosa Nikki and Shinsen Waka (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).

5. Michitsuna’s Mother, The Kagerō Diary: A Woman’s Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan, trans. Sonja Arntzen (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997).

6. Mostow, Joshua S., Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996).

7. Ueda, Makoto (ed. and trans.), Modern Japanese Tanka: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).