Ōshikōchi no Mitsune

15/10/2024| Eli| 0 Comment| 9:42 am

Hear about Ōshikōchi no Mitsune on Episode 60E of our Podcast, the Japan Archives.

- Period: Heian Period
- Occupation: Waka Poet
- Family:
- Birth: –
- Death: c.925

Ōshikōchi no Mitsune

Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (凡河内躬恒) was a Heian poet who had a modest career in imperial bureaucracy, dying around 925.

He was a renowned poet whose service were often requested by his friends as well as the Emperor, included as one of the Thirty Six Poetic Geniuses

He acted as one of the compilers of the Kokinshū and can find a total of 196 of his poems in the Imperial Anthologies after the Kokinshū.¹ 60 poems can be found in the Kokinshū itself and he is also known to have had a personal collection called the mitsune-shū which depending on the edition contains between 140 and 384 (482⁴) poems.³

These poems can also be found on screens (byōbu-uta) and as part of poetry competitions (uta-awase).

One of his poems (No.29) can be found in the ogura hyakunin isshu and goes as follows:¹

Japanese text²	Romanized Japanese¹	English translation¹
心あてに折らばや折らむ初霜のおきまどはせる白菊の花	Kokoroate ni oraba ya oran hatsishimo no okimadowaseru shiragiku no hana	To pluck a stem I shall have to guess, for I cannot tell apart white chrysanthemums from the first frost.

Gallery

Footnotes

1. MacMillan, P. (2018) ”One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse”. St. Ives: Penguin Classics.
2. Suzuki, H. et al. (1997) ”Genshoku: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu”. Tokyo: Bun’eidō.
3. Louis Frederic, translated by Kathe Roth (2002) “Japan Encyclopedia”. London: Harvard University Press.
4. Kodansha. (1993) ”Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia”. Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd.

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