Solo Poetry Contest as Poetic Self-Portrait: The One-Hundred-Round Contest of Lord Teika's Own Poems Part One

In the second month of 1216, the waka poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) undertook the compilation of the work that came to be known as Teika-kyō hyakuban jikaawase,or The One-Hundred-Round Contest of Lord Teika's Own Poems. Using a form—the jikaawase,or solo poetry contest—that had recently become popular, Teika selected two hundred of his poems, dating from the beginning of his career to the time of the jikaawase's compilation, and arranged them in pairs ("left" side and "right" side) in the form of a poetry contest in one hundred rounds. According to the brief comment at the head of the jikaawase, Teika made some minor alterations in the poems in the sixth month of 1217. In 1219, he sent the set of poems to Emperor Juntoku (1197-1242; r. 1210-1221) and requested him to provide judgments for the one hundred rounds. Finally, around 1232, the poet undertook a final revision, replacing ten poems with works composed after 1217.¹

Teika-kyō hyakuban jikaawase and the jikaawase genre in general have been undeservedly neglected by both Japanese and Western scholars of waka.² These self-contests were far more than a solo version of the centuries-old utaawase, the poetry contests in which opposing groups of poets—the left and right teams—composed verses on set topics, with a judge evaluating each round. As practiced by Teika and his contemporaries, jikaawase represented the drawing together of a number of genres of poetic texts, each with a distinct purpose: the utaawase; the integrated poetic sequence, particularly the hyakushu uta (hundred-poem sequence); and collections of the representative works of outstanding poets—senkashū and shūkasen. Jikaawase fruitfully united these different forms of poetic compilation into a new artistic whole designed to display a poet's evaluation of his own history of composition.

These features of jikaawase reflect the increasing seriousness with which poetic composition was regarded and the assertion of individual standards of judgment characteristic of the second half of the twelfth century and continuing into the thirteenth. The jikaawase of this period notably were all prepared by poets associated with the Kujō/Mikohidari salon—the poets responsible for the innovations that led to the so-called Shinkokin style, linked to the eighth imperial collection, the Shinkokinshū These poets were known for seeking new modes of diction and images within the framework of reverence for an unchanging order of quintessential poetic experiences and sentiments. We might speculate that this circumstance, as well as an awareness of the historical import of their efforts, led them to develop jikaawase as a form of poetic collection that highlighted the particulars of one's own production and its relationship to the shaping force of established norms.

The leading practitioner of this innovative style of poetry was Fujiwara no Teika, whose productive life as poet, critic, anthologizer, and teacher spanned roughly half a century between 1180 and 1240. From his middle years, Teika produced a number of compilations of illustrative verse, including Kindai shūka (Superior Poems of Our Time) and Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Verse Each).³ Some of these contain examples of his own compositions, but the jikaawase is the only text, besides the poet's personal collection, Shūi gusō (Gleanings of Worthless Weeds), devoted entirely to his own verses. Teika's jikaawase further marks important moments of renewal and reappraisal in his own career. In 1216, in particular, Teika's poetry and poetics were in a period of transition from the daruma uta ("crazy verse")/Shinkokin style, of which he had been the leading practitioner, to the less complicated style of his later years. The jikaawase, which reviews and selects from the various stages of his poetic production, not only illustrates the features of the genre as such; it also is an invaluable tool for elucidating Teika's retrospective judgment of the body of his work.

The present study, which is divided into two installments, will explore several dimensions of Teika's solo contest. In...