STRING OF BEADS Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi Translated by Hiroaki Sato

Translator,  Hiroaki Sato  indicates she is indebted to Robert Fagan for supporting her project.

The Princess is the Princess who haunts the reader, in the Hut in the Genji who converts first to being a priestess and then a nun.  There are three 100 poem sequences indicated as A, B, and C, and then a section of Other (miscellaneous poems).  She wrote 400 poems.   Reading these poems encouraged me  in that I was dismissing my lyrical poetry of late, as forlorn, and listless, and only about nature….but her poems are wistful, and filled with longing and perhaps loneliness and deeply steeped in natural references. 

The Princess died of breast cancer. 

Like the Sumerian princess, poet and priestess, about whom I wrote, Enheduanna, Princess Shikishi, a princess, became a priestess for the Kamo Shrine parallel to the grand shrine of Ise,  and a poet. Her poems are luminous oftentimes filled with tranquil beauty and sadness, associated with solitude and loneliness.  I identified with them, as I had just done a search and find for all the poems I had not gathered in notebooks, since 2016. 

Princess Shikishi wrote 400 poems in the tanka tradition.  She took Buddhist vows.  Her life was eremitic. Murasaki describes her in the Genji. I had little knowledge that this Princess Poet Priestess was that Princess….Her poetry as a whole conjures up the image of a lady that her contemporary Kamo no Chomei visualized as an embodiment of the poetic ideal of the time,"yugen: say it is in essence an overtone that does not appear in words, a feeling that is not visible in form…Think of a noble woman who, though she has some grievance, does not express it in words, but endures it secretly.  To find her in half light and understand it all gives you more pain, moves you more deeply, that it would to see her air her grievance in all the words she can muster and make a show of wringing her tear soaked sleeves.  “

Princess Shikishi and her contemporary poets regarded allusion as an indispensable part of their craft.  Chomei describes two woman poets he admired, Lord Shunzei’s Daughter and Kunai-kyo:  I quote the part about Shikishi.  In the present imperial reign, the person known as Lord Shunzei’s Daughter and Kunai-kyo – these two are the amost accomplished poets and need have felt no embarrassment among the ancient masters.  Their methods  of making poems are quite different.  People tell me that Lord Shunzei’s Daughter, when making poems for official presentation (hare no uta) begins days in advance to read various poetry collections over and over; when she has looked them over to her heart’s content, she sets all of them aside, lights a lamp dimly in some isolated place, and works her poems out. “

A real gem of a book, and a linkage on the path of appreciation of Japanese poetry and The Genji that I had not anticipated to be so compelling...at last I read it.