ATTRIBUTED TO SESONJI YUKIYOSHI (1179-1255?)

Courtiers of Heian Japan (794-1185) enjoyed singing poetry to musical accompaniment. The most popular source of poems was the bilingual anthology known as the Wakan roei shu (Japanese and Chinese poems to sing). Compiled in the eleventh century by the preeminent poet and critic Fujiwara no Kinto (966-1041), it contains over eight hundred Chinese poems by Chinese poets, Chinese poems by Japanese courtiers, and Japanese poems (waka). For centuries these short, evocative poems were memorized and sung at court, into lovers' ears, or at moments when spoken words were inadequate to express an emotion.
As Ann Yonemura of the Freer/Sackler Gallery has written, "for the calligrapher, the text of the Wakan roei shu, which alternates frequently between sequences of Chinese characters and Japanese kana, is particularly challenging, like a musical score that demands a high level of technical skill and virtuosity for performance. The close juxtaposition of poems written in substantial and structurally stable Chinese characters to waka verses written in slender, insubstantial lines of kana demands of the calligraphers a parallel and articulate mastery of both calligraphic modes." (Yonemura, "The Art of Calligraphy and the Wakan roei shu" in Rimer and Chaves, op. cit., p. 263)