Compilation of the Kokin wakashū, the first imperial anthology of waka

The anthology was conceived by Emperor Uda and ordered by his son Daigo. Tsurayuki’s Japanese preface bears the date of the 18th day of the 4th month of the 5th year of Engi — 24 May 905 — and the Chinese preface, attributed to Ki no Yoshimochi, is dated three days earlier. Because the collection includes poems written after 905, some scholars take this as the date of the command and place the presentation later, but the prevailing view is that the anthology was presented in 905 and enlarged and revised afterwards; by some accounts it was completed only around 913–914, and its final form is dated to about 920. Tomonori, named first among the compilers, died before the work was finished.

Of the twenty books, the first six hold poems of spring, summer, autumn and winter; then come congratulations, partings, travel and acrostics, five books of love, laments, miscellaneous poems, poems in other forms and songs of the court Bureau of Song. The poems are ordered so that each leads into the next — the love books follow the course of an affair from first longing to its end — and this linking made the anthology an ancestor of renga and haikai. About four in ten poems are anonymous, and the compilers contributed more than a fifth; Tsurayuki alone has 102.

Tsurayuki’s preface, which begins by saying that Japanese poetry grows from the seed of the human heart into countless leaves of words, set out the purpose and history of native verse in Japanese rather than in Chinese and became the starting point of Japanese poetics. The Kokinshū established the tradition of compiling anthologies by imperial command as an undertaking of the state; knowing it by heart was expected of Heian courtiers, as the Pillow Book shows.