The Shape of Love and Loss: Izumi Shikibu’s “Gojusshu waka” (五十首和歌, Fifty-Poem Sequence)

Abstract

This paper will examine the lesser known poetry of Izumi Shikibu (b. 976?). As a poet, she had an interest in composing (or at times assembling) sets of poems in novel formats, and through a number of them, summoning up an image of herself as a solitary woman, bereft of the care of family or a lover.   This paper proposes to examine two of these sequences of novel format: “Jūdai jusshu” (Ten Poems on Ten Topics) and “Gojusshu waka ” (Fifty-Poem Sequence).“Jūdai jusshu,” a less ambitious forerunner of “Gojusshu waka,” presents in ten poems on ten self-assigned topics the feelings of a woman dwelling alone without a lover, who fashions an image of herself within the poetic narrative of love, in particular that of the “waiting woman.”  I will argue that these two sequences show the integration of two forms of poetic production: the composition of novel formats of poems that became popular from the mid-tenth into the eleventh century and women’s  tenarai , the solitary composition or copying of verses to express or explore their feelings, especially in times of emotional distress.