One Hundred Poets’ One Poem
I stumbled across video clip from a foreign movie that attracted my attention.
The film is called ちはやふる — and I cannot read Japanese, so I have no idea at first what this means or what the film was about. I can tell it is some sort of cardgame where the players slap cards through the air while displaying intense looks on their faces.
Curiosity sparked, I follow random links and unleash Google translate, and find out the name of the film and the anime and manga that inspired it, and, more to the point, the name of the card-slapping game behind it.
I found the movie posted here, complete with subtitles. It is called Chihayafuru: Kami no Ku.
(Kami-no-Ku refers to the first element, or verse, of a waka poem. Naturally, the sequel film is called Shimo-no-Ku or “Second Verse”)
Crunchyroll has the animated precursor, which I have not seen. It is based in turn on a manga by Yuki Suetsugu.
The card game is called Karuta, which, or so I am told, is now growing in popularity due in part to this film. Here is a brief description:
One hundred Japanese poems from a famous anthology are written on cards. Fifty cards are put in play, randomly dealt between the two players.
Each player arranges his 25 cards within his territory face up. As a random poem from the anthology (including the “ghost poems” not currently in play) is read, each player must swipe the correct poem card before his opponent. Touching the wrong card is a scratch.
A success allows a player to add a card to the opposing territory. Strategic card-giving can improve the odds. The first player to rid his territory of all cards wins.
One of the several elements in the film I found fascinating was the beauty of the poems, even in translation, even as quoted in fragments as part of the story background.
Let me digress for a moment to explain why my curiosity was sparked. I mean, aside from the obvious that the song in the video was catchy and that the actress, Suzu Hirose, was cute as a button. To my unenlightened Western eyes, the card-slapping game seemed as nearly unexciting and even silly as can be imagined.
But I have faith in Japanese storytelling: I suspected the film would likely have a well crafted plot to wring drama, tears and joy, the triumph of victory and the agony of defeat, from this simple game. The question was: how?
How does one make the silly, the boring, and the innately undramatic into something rich with drama?
As it turns out, there is a way. But first, a digression:
As a writer, it is wise for one to study the craft of other writers to flatter them by borrowing, if one is modest. If one is ambitious, of course, the idea is not to borrow, but to steal.
Speaking strictly in my professional character as an attorney, let me hasten to assure you that taking the property of another is only theft if the tortfeasor has the intent permanently to deprive the true owner.
The borrower returns the goods. The thief makes the goods his own. He is skilled in filing off serial numbers, or otherwise altering the goods, to suit himself. This is why the ambitious writer is a thief, not a borrower. He reworks and revises the stolen idea to suit himself, to put his own spin on things, to make the words come out in his own voice.
This power can be used for evil, or for niceness.
It was in service of goodness and truth, for example, when C.S. Lewis took the ideas of socialist secularist H.G. Wells in his seminal FIRST MEN IN THE MOON and filed off the serial numbers, and reworked the stolen goods into OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, whose theme and message, unlike the original, was thoughtful, deep, and sublime.
The same is true in reverse. When secularist nihilist George R.R. Martin took the inspirational and Catholic-themed trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, an reworked it into GAME OF THRONES, he added plot twists to subvert audience expectations as unexpected as those in THE LAST JEDI. In Mr. Martin’s series, a surprising number of main characters met their ends abruptly, but, as of the time of this writing, the series has not.
On both cases, albeit in service to antithetical causes, neither Mr. Lewis nor Mr. Martin are not merely borrowing. Both are skilled craftsmen and artistically ambitious. Each man made the ideas he took to be his own.
End of digression.
In the case of CHIHAYAFURU, we are dealing with a sports drama, similar to ROCKY, or CHARIOTS OF FIRE.
Drama, as anyone who has ever attempted to write one should know, consists of taking a character the audience really likes, giving him a goal he really craves, and placing an obstacle really hard to overcome between him and his goal. This is the first rule of story telling.
(This, by the bye, is why story telling is by its nature conservative, whereas political correct lectures disguised as stories are by their nature boring. The political correction officers live in a universe where the mechanical hence inevitable process of social evolution will eventually lift all men into an ethereal utopia where only intentions matter, not the means selected, nor the result obtained. The goal is unavoidable, as is the defeat of any opposition. Hence the goal is meaningless and resistance is futile.)
The second rule is that the character, if he is to have internal conflict also, must have two or more goals motivating him, including two mutually exclusive goals, forcing him into costly yet inescapable choices. Every win demands a sacrifice.
(Again, this is why storytelling is conservative. In the gassy, cloud castle utopia of the politically correct, everything is free, and nothing has a cost or a price. Sacrificing others might be needed — after all, one cannot make an omelette without gulags, genocides, and orchestrated mass starvation — but no sacrifice of one’s own part.)
The third rule is that at least one of these things to be sacrificed is a vice or drawback or childish atavism, so that the hero must overcome an internal flaw during the course of the tale. This is called a character arc.
(And yet gain, this is why storytelling is conservative. In political correctness lectures dressed as stories, each character is taken to represent all members of a collective group jointly and severally, so that no member of assigned grievance group can be shown with any flaws to overcome. The heroine is always perfection incarnate, without any training or struggle.)
A sport, any sport, has an inbuilt drama, because any fair contest matches champion against challenger, both of whom crave victory and each forms an obstacle to the other.
To wrench more drama out of this takes a little cunning, since the audience already is confident your hero is fated to win. Each champion challenged in the next match has to be presented to the audience as unconquerable, and much tougher than the defeated opponent in the prior match in the previous episode.
The hero also needs some personal stakes in the matter. Winning the match with a knockout or crossing the finish line is not enough. He needs the prize money to pay for milk to feed his children; or his victory will uncover the crooked race-fixing scheme of Royalton Motors.
My curiously was provoked to see how this particular game could be fitted into the typical sports drama framework.
In this case, Chihaya Ayase, our heroine, as a little girl makes a pact with her two young neighbors.
All three enjoy the game, but when one moves to another town and the other to another school, tearful farewells loom.
The three promise to keep in contact by playing the game and becoming champions, the idea being that going to the prefecture-wide then nation-wide tournaments will draw them back together.
And the girl grows up to be a beauty, albeit she is unaware of it, and both boys into handsome youths, so naturally a love triangle forms.
This is above and beyond the soap opera and comedy entwining the attempt to start a card playing club for a game older kids rarely play, as the traditions of Japan fade away in the modern day.
Now, if it were the intent of the original author of the original manga, Yuki Suetsugu, to generate some interest in the traditional hundred poems, I doubt she had me in mind.
Yet my interest was spurred. The imagery is delicate, absurdly brief, elegant.
Here is a website describing the traditional hundred, written by a Mr. Mark Jewel at Tokyo University, who is venturing original English translations. His description:
The Ogura hyakunin isshu is a collection of one hundred poems composed for the most part over a period of some three hundred years, from the early tenth to the early thirteenth century. The poems are assumed to have been selected by Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), the outstanding waka poet and critic of his day, although a number of textual issues exist.
Teika mentions in his diary, the Meigetsu-ki, being requested by his son Tameie to choose one hundred poems that, when transcribed onto rectangular strips of paper known as shikishi, could be used to decorate the door panels in the villa owned by Tameie’s father-in-law Utsunomiya Yoritsuna near Mount Ogura on the outskirts of Kyoto (an alternative interpretation holds that the father-in-law made the selection, which was then transcribed by Teika).
First known as the Hyakunin isshu, the collection became the model for a variety of other similar anthologies, so the place name “Ogura” was subsequently added to distinguish it from the others.
Yet such was the prestige of this particular collection that it eventually acquired definitive status, so that even now whenever one speaks of “the” Hyakunin isshu, it is the Ogura hyakunin isshu that is meant.
Its influence and authority would be hard to overstate, and it seems safe to say that when the average Japanese thinks of waka, these are the ones that inevitably come to mind (they are, in fact, the first waka memorized by most schoolchildren).
Here is a sample. Some translation are Mr. Jewel’s, others not. All the notes below are his:
The coarsely thatched roof
sheltering the harvest hut
in the autumn rice-fields
admits the falling dew that
gathers thickly on my sleeves.
— Emperor Tenji
Oh, the foot-drawn trail
Of the mountain-pheasant’s tail
Drooping like down-curved branch!
Through this long, long-dragging night
Must I go to my couch alone?
— Kakinomoto no Hitomaro
Translator’s Note: The poem neatly makes a comparison between the length of the tail on a mountain pheasant and the slow passage of time experienced by a lover who must sleep alone, and is based further on the fact that male and female copper pheasants do indeed sleep in separate locations.
As I venture out
onto the shore at Tago Bay,
I see snow, pure white,
falling now ever deeper
on Mount Fuji’s lofty peak.
–Yamabe no Akahito
Deep in the mountains,
striding through red, fallen leaves,
a stag calls for a mate–
when I hear its plaintive cry,
I am struck by autumn’s sadness.
— Sarumaru Dayu
In a hut that stands
southeast of the capital,
I live thus at peace;
yet people say I came to Mount Uji
out of despair at a callous world.
— Priest Kisen
Translator’s note: The poem relies for its effect upon the use of the word uji, which on the one hand stands for the place name Uji (a popular spot for aristocratic villas in the Heian period, and the location of the exquisite Phoenix Hall at the Byōdō-in Temple), and on the other is used as an adjective meaning “disagreeable,” “unpleasant,” or “unfeeling.”
Such a word is known as a kakekotoba, or “pivot word,” one of the central devices of waka poetry.
The pivot word serves to give the poem a double meaning by establishing an associative link between two linguistically unrelated homonyms, allowing the objective world of nature and the subjective sensibility of the poet to inform each other within the restrictive constraints imposed by the waka form (and not incidentally making concise translation very difficult indeed).
Here the poet expresses a bemused consternation that people think his life at Uji is characterized by a feeling that the world is disagreeable, when in fact it is free of such concerns.
The cherry blossoms
have faded now in hue–
gazing emptily
upon the long spring rains,
I too know what it is to age.
— Ono no Komachi
Although I depart
for where Mount Inaba stands,
its peak covered with pines,
should I hear that you too pine,
I am sure at once to return.
— Middle Counselor Yukihira
Translator’s note: The waka depends on a fairly tricky use of multiple kakekotoba (pivot words) for its meaning… Then there is matsu, meaning both the pines of Mount Inaba and the “pining” of those from whom the poet is taking leave. Because of the coincidence with the English “pine,” matsu is frequently used as a convenient example to illustrate how a pivot word might function in English.
Simply because
My lover promised to come soon,
I have spent the long
Ninth Month waiting only for
the lingering moon to appear.
— Priest Sosei
Translator’s Note: Under the pre-Meiji lunar calendar, the ninth month was called Nagatsuki (Long Month) because of the lengthening nights. Here the effect is to juxtapose the length of a late-autumn night with the deepening frustration and resentment of the forsaken narrator, who has in effect spent the night waiting to greet the early-morning moon — a time when under different circumstances the woman’s lover would instead be bidding a reluctant farewell.
Over Mika’s plain,
Gushing forth and flowing free,
Is Izumi’s stream.
I do not know if we have met:
Why, then, do I long for her?
— Middle Counselor Kanesuke
My comment: of course, one can enjoy the sports drama anime, or the live action movie, without being concerned with the beauty of the poetry. After all, how will the love triangle resolve itself? Heartbreak is certain! And what will become of Meatbun and Desk? Who will become the immortal Queen and national champion of Japan?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
