Minase Sangin Hyakuin

Locale Minase, Japan

Date March 5, 1488

The composition of the Minase sangin hyakuin marked the high point in the development of linked-verse, or renga, poetry in Japan.

Key Figures

• Sōgi (Iio Sōgi or Inō Sōgi; 1421-1502), literary critic and scholar of classics, the leading renga poet of his time
• Botanka Shōhaku (1443-1527), Sōgi’ senior student and a renowned poet
• Saiokuken Sōchō (1448-1532), another of Sōgi’ students, also renowned as a poet and critic
• Go-Toba (1180-1239), Japanese emperor, r. 1183-1198, to whom the Minase sangin hyakuin was dedicated

Summary of Event

Linked verse or renga—a poetic form created by several or many individuals who assembled to share, by alternating turns, the line-by-line composition of a poem constrained by numerous specific topical rules—emerged in the fifteenth century as Japan’s most important form of poetry against a backdrop of social turmoil. The Ōnin War of 1467-1477, which burned the capital and ushered in nearly a century of interstate war, resulted in severe social disarray. Social mobility—unpredictable both upward and downward—was the order of the day, as was increased cultural intercourse between many levels of society. The manner in which linked-verse poems were composed—in gatherings of writers from diverse backgrounds who shared the process of composing a single poem among them—was emblematic of the new social dynamics of the time.

The Minase sangin hyakuin, literally “one hundred lines offered by three poets at Minase” (English translation, 1956), consists, as its title indicates, of one hundred lines of renga composed on the twenty-second day of the first month of the second year of Chōkyō (March 5, 1488). It was presented to a shrine in a village west of Kyōto, Minase, after having been composed there or close to there, as a reverent offering to Emperor Go-Toba, who was respected as a patron deity of poetry because of his outstanding contributions to the art during his lifetime. The exact date of composition was chosen in consideration of the anniversary of the emperor’s death 250 years earlier. Minase was the location of one of his villas, where he had sponsored numerous poetry banquets.

The three poets who collaborated to compose Minase sangin hyakuin were Sōgi, Botanka Shōhaku, and Saiokuken Sōchō. In the year Minase was composed, Sōgi was sixty-seven, and though it is generally believed that he was born of humble origins, by this time he was at the peak of his career and firmly established as the premier poet and literary critic of the day, appearing before the shogun, major military leaders, and nobility. He had studied under the great authorities of his time, receiving instruction in the revered classics Kokin Waka Shū (wr. c. 905, Kokinshu; the first imperially commanded poetry anthology, first full English translation 1984) and Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (c. 1004; The Tale of Genji, 1925-1933), the massive eleventh century classic still highly esteemed today. During the most violent years of the Ōnin Wars, he lived in the east of the country, and throughout his life he traveled widely. His travels exposed him to many literary masters and, conversely, extended his own reputation. Sōgi was admired for the verses he composed but above all for his ability to orchestrate verse sequences better than any other living linked-verse poet.

Shōhaku and Sōchō, both some twenty years younger than Sōgi, were his disciples. Shōhaku was a Buddhist monk whose father was a minister with exceptionally high rank. He traveled with Sōgi and helped him with his seminal Shinsen Tsukuba shū (1495; the newly selected tsukuba linked-verse collection), a work that redefined the aesthetic standards of renga. Sōchō is the better remembered of the two, partly because of his colorful personality, one amply conveyed by the diary he wrote late in his life. More important, however, his reputation stands on the excellence of his work. After Sōgi’s death and Shōhaku’s retirement, Sōchō became the reigning authority on linked verse.

Because it is a one-hundred-verse sequence written as an “offering by linked verse” (hōraku renga), the tone of Minase sangin hyakuin is formal and solemn. This is evident in the first movement, or preface (jo), of the poem, its first eight lines, which over the centuries have been called perfect by more than one literary critic. The opening lines establish this tone with a grandness of scale and reference to a poem written centuries earlier by the emperor the poets wish to honor:

1: yuki nagara yama moto kasumu yūbe kana  This evening—  At the base of snow-dotted mountains,  Spring mist has settled.    —Sōgi2: yuku mizu tōku mume niou sato  Afar cascades the springmelt;  At hand, a hamlet glows with the perfume of plums.    —Shōhaku

The scene is expansive, like a Chinese-style screen painting, with the distant mountains and foregrounded village playing off each other to generate a sense of space. The reference to Emperor Go-Toba lies in the phrase “Spring mist has settled,” which is a line from the emperor’s own poem describing an autumn evening at Minase River.

The special achievement of a linked-verse poem is in how the preconditions of multiple authors and compositional rules establish shifts in scenes and topics as a new verse picks up and alters the line of poetry that preceded it. Such verse-to-verse progressions also work at higher levels to weave overarching patterns of elaborate repetition and diversion. Evolutions of images proceed concurrently at several levels, involving conceptual categories such as transitions between objects near and far, rising and falling, light and dark, one season and another, or, as below, the world of nature and human concerns:

68: usuhana susuki chiramaku mo oshi  What a loss  Should they be wind-scattered—  These burnished plumes of pampas.    —Sōchō69: uzura naku katayama kurete samuki hi ni  A cold day  Fades on a hill’s shoulder  And cries a quail,    —Sōgi70: no to naru sato mo wabitsutsu zo sumu  While I live with my sorrows  In a hamlet now a moor.    —Shōhaku71: kaerikoba machishi omoi o hito ya mimu  Should you ever return  Might you see how I waited,  Tender in thought?    —Sōchō

In this series the predetermined topics are autumn and grass for line 68; autumn, mountains, and birds for line 69; being at home for line 70; and love for line 71. The conceptual flow is from the chill of autumn to the loneliness of living in a desolate location to the very personal question of the state of affairs between two lovers or spouses.

Significance

Minase sangin hyakuin is widely considered the preeminent achievement of the linked-verse genre. It succeeded in the linked-verse ideal, that is, to offer an ever-changing, fresh reading experience by orchestrating the many poetic images and topics that must be included at specific points in the poem. Sōgi’s poetic abilities joined in turns with the talents of the other two poets while his exceptional skill in negotiating the rules of linked-verse composition gave the poem in its entirety a subtly complex structure. In many of this era’s arts, aesthetic sensibility took shape around the demanding discipline of formal rules. Minase sangin hyakuin is an excellent example of this strict formalism.

On a broader scale, the manner in which linked verses were composed and patronized, cutting across social groups and levels, affords a window into the dynamics of Japan’s fifteenth century. The Minase sangin hyakuin itself, with its melancholic mood, draws deeply both on the direction of several centuries of poetics that evolved in conjunction with Buddhist reforms and on the more immediate context of a war-torn country. Yet its supreme balance reflects a mastery of the discipline required of the arts as well as the level of sophistication that poetry had achieved from centuries of active critical self-evaluation.

Bibliography

Carter, Steve, trans. Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Complete translation with brief introduction and limited notes.

Horton, H. Mack. “Renga Unbound: Performative Aspects of Japanese Linked Verse.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, no. 2 (December, 1993): 443-512. Discusses the details of the finer points of the rules of linked-verse composition.

Horton, H. Mack. Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Sōchō and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. A thorough examination of Sōchō’s life, with some discussion of the broader historical period.

Horton, H. Mack, trans. The Journal of Sōchō. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. A complete translation of Sōchō’s colorful personal diary.

Keene, Donald. Seeds of the Heart: Japanese Literature from the Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Extensive biographical information on all three poets, placing them in the context of Japan’s literary history.

Konishi, Jin’ichi. The High Middle Ages. Vol. 3 in A History of Japanese Literature. Translated by Aileen Gatten and Mark Harbison. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. A keen discussion of the Minase sangin hyakuin and the history of linked verse. Konishi is one of the few living individuals who has received traditional training in the art.

Konishi, Jin’ichi, Karen Brazell, and Lewis Cook. “The Art of Renga.” Journal of Japanese Studies 2, no. 1 (Autumn, 1975): 29-31, 33-61. Discusses the details of the rules of linked-verse composition.

Miner, Earl. Japanese Linked Poetry: An Account with Translations of Renga and Haikai Sequences. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. The most extensive analysis of linked verse in the English language. Includes a complete translation of the Minase sangin hyakuin with extensive introductory material and thorough notes.

Yasuda, Kenneth, trans. Minase Sangin Hyakuin: A Poem of One Hundred Links. Tokyo: Kogakusha, 1956. The first complete translation into English.