Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry

Kokin Wakashu is an anthology of 1,111 Japanese poems (in the most widely circulated editions) compiled and edited early in the 10th century. The title, conventionally abridged in Japanese to Kokinshu, may be translated "Collection of Old and New Japanese Poems" or, perhaps more precisely, "...Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems." The collection begins with a Preface in Japanese and, in some editions, concludes with one in Chinese. The Japanese Preface, opening with the famous words "Japanese poetry takes as its seed the human heart," was long regarded as a model of classical prose, and line for line is undoubtedly the most heavily commented secular prose text of the Japanese tradition. The poems are divided into twenty scrolls or books (maki) each of which bears a title referring to conventional poetic topics (the seasons, love, parting, mourning, miscellaneous or "mixed" topics, etc.) or to genres ("acrostic" poems, "mixed" or miscellaneous forms, and poems of the "Bureau of Song"). The great majority of poems in the collection (all but 9, in fact) are in the form today usually called tanka (literally "short poem or song") but traditionally referred to as waka ("Japanese song / poem") or simply as uta ("song, poem") because this was the predominant canonical form of Japanese poetry from perhaps the 8th century until the late 19th century. —Lewis Cook, Queens College http://etext.virginia.edu/japanese/kokinshu/intro.html