Kokinshu Commentary -- 2

Book 1 – Spring

1.

Spring has arrived
While the old year lingers on.
What then of the year?
Are we to talk of “last year”?
Or are we to say “this year”?

2. Ki no Tsurayuki. Composed on the first day of spring.

On this first spring day
Might warm breezes be melting
The frozen waters
I scooped up, cupping my hands
And letting my sleeves soak through?

Comment: The second Tanka answers the questions raised in the first Tanka. The first Tanka is ambivalent about time and season, but the second Tanka makes the assertion that this is the first day of spring. It does so by pointing to the melting of frozen waters; in other words, we know it is spring because nature tells us it is spring. Gone, in Tanka 2, is the tension between the human calendar and the seasonal display.

The Kokinshu’s inquiry into the nature of time can be framed in this way: is time a vessel in which things happen or is time the happening of things itself? The tendency is to think of time abstractly, as a kind of scale along which things happen at certain points. The view of the Kokinshu is that the seasons are time; in the sense that time is the emerging and disappearing of things in the world. If this is true then time can best be grasped through attentiveness to the world around us and through the journey of the seasonal changes.

I also think that the choosing here of the image of melting can be thought of as a metaphor for the melting of fixed human conceptions. The human mind creates fixity, but nature is flowing like warm breezes and ice melting. If we let nature “soak through” our human tendency to fixity, then we can find ourselves more at home in the world.

A note on the author: Ki no Tsurayuki was the primary editor of the Kokinshu. The anthology contains 102 Tanka by Tsurayuki, more than any other named author (“anonymous” is the most numerous group). I feel that by placing this Tanka as number 2, and using it to respond to the questions raised in Tanka 1, Tsurayuki is communicating to us his editorial stance and, perhaps, more broadly, his basic sense of life.