Hiro Protagonist

Misc notes from George Braziller's "Hokusai - One Hundred Poets."

Pg 8.
"There are many technical restrictions to the classical Tanka. Words of Chinese origin, which now constitute about half of the words in Japanese, were not permitted. For counting syllables, it should be realized that there are no dipthongs in the pure Japanese language; ae , for instance, counts as two syllables. Long vowels, o and u, also are two syllables, and the final n counts as one. As Kenneth Rexroth points out, the common devices of Western poetry simply do not work because of the nature fo Japanese language. Stress is impossible. rhymes are trivial and alliteration quickly becomes intolerable. With such seemingly impossible restraints, Japanese poetry has produced many materpieces, rich in natural beauty and personal insight.

It is also important to realize that the purely Japanese portion of the spoken language has stayed remarkably consistent through the centuries. Similarly the Hiragana, or syllabic characters, with which the oen hundred poems are mostly written, have remained the same. Hokusai's nurse could probably read much of the earlier poetry, written centuries earlier, only a few words might be strange to her, and even many of those she could pronounce correctly. For a modern speaker of English, on the other hand, Beowulf, written in the eighth century, like some of the Japanese poetry, is a total mystery, both in meaning and in orthography.

Uji - "heavenly, peace"
Ushi/Uki - "evil" or "sorrowfull"
Momiji - any red autumn leaves. Traditionally depicted as maple leaves.
Koe - "voice"
Koi - "love" particularly physical love.