tanka

   The tanka is a Japanese poetic form that became the dominant genre in medieval Japan by the time of the HEIAN PERIOD in the late eighth century. The Japanese prized brevity and suggestiveness in their poetry, and the tanka showcases those qualities. It is a five-line poem of 31 syllables, containing lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. A tanka was divided into the kami no ku (the “upper poem” or first three lines) and the shimo no ku (the “lower poem” or last three lines). The third line usually contained an image that united the two halves of the poem, which addressed different subjects. The agglutinative nature of the Japanese language, in which a simple verb, for example,may trail several suffixes indicating things like probability and mood, complements this kind of a poem. A single verb, for example, may be seven syllables long, and therefore take up an entire line of a tanka. The KOKINSHŪ, completed about 905, contains 1,111 of these short poems. The poems are all composed by members of an aristocratic class that considered the ability to create a poem in response to any given social situation essential for good breeding. Most often these poems deal with human relationships, particularly love, or are a response to or appreciation of the beauties of nature. Ideally the tanka should express yojo, a kind of deep yearning that involved all of the emotions. At their best tankas express universal human emotions in understated but striking and memorable images, as, for example, does this anonymous poem (number 746 in the Kokinshu).Note how the third line links the keepsake, subject of the upper poem, with the expressed emotion, subject of the lower poem:

   This very keepsake

   is now a source of misery,

   for were it not here

   there might be fleeting moments

   when I would not think of you.

   (McCullough 2002, 2171)

   Bibliography

   ■ McCullough, Helen Craig, trans. The Kokinshu. In The Norton Anthology ofWorld Literature, 2nd ed. Vol. B, edited by Susan Lawall et al., 2,160–2,174. New York: Norton, 2002.