Saigyō’s poem first appeared in the Shinkokinshu, of which Teika was one of the compilers. The commentators speculate that knowledge of it may have only circulated amongst the younger generation of poets at the time – hence Shunzei’s comment.

In his judgement Shunzei is referring to the famous incident in The Tale of Genji where the hero, while waiting for the gate of his wet-nurse’s house to be opened, looks out from his carriage and sees some flowers blooming on the fence of the house next door. He smiles and says, ‘Distant strangers,’ to himself. One of his bodyguards, overhearing then identifies the flowers for him.

Here the left refer to a well-known poem by the famous Chinese Buddhist monk, Chih-i (智者), and originally included in the Treatise on the Great Cessation and Contemplation (Mo-ho chih-kuan 摩訶止觀), although the poets would have know it from its inclusion in the Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wa-Kan Rōei-shū 和漢朗詠集):

When the moon is hid ‘hind rangéd mountains,
I lift a fan to take its place,
When the wind blows in the Void
The trees do move, and so I teach!

In the above poem, the moon and wind represent inexpressible Buddhist truth, which can only be taught by representation, or by viewing its effects.

The Right here refer to a well-known poem, written in Chinese, from the Wakan Rōeishū 和漢朗詠集(‘Anthology of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing’) by Yoshishige no Yasutane 慶滋保胤 (931?-1002) which, in turn, builds on an earlier famous Chinese poem. Yasutane’s poem is:

班姫裁扇応誇尚
列子懸車不往還

‘Lady Pan has made her fan – now, truly, may she boast of it, for
Master Lieh, upon his carriage, no longer travels back and forth’

Lady Pan (Pan Chieh-yü 班婕妤) (fl. ca. 48 B.C.) was an imperial concubine known for a poem in which she compares herself to a paper fan abandoned at the beginning of autumn. Master Lieh (Lieh Tzu 列子) was a Daoist immortal said to be able to ride the wind.

Shunzei in on record elsewhere as saying that adjectival forms such as atsuki (‘hotness’) give an unpleasant impression in poetry, and the nominal atsusa (‘heat’) is better, and this seems to be at the root of his objection here.

I have been unable to locate the text of this poem, however, the commentators summarise it as expressing ‘distaste for the day for changing into summer garb, and disliking changing into summer clothes on catching the longed-for scent of cherry blossom on the sleeve of a spring robe.’

A hidden interpretation of this poem sees the ‘summer garb’ representing a woman and the visiting wind, a man.

A musubidai or ‘combined topic’ was one which was combined two or more elements and was written with three, four, or more Chinese characters, like for example, ‘the full moon over the sea’ (kaijô meigetsu 海上明月),or ‘cuckoos calling from between the clouds’ (kumoma hototogisu 雲間郭公). In topics like these, there were some characters which were considered less central than others, for example, 上 (‘above’) and 間 (‘between’) – these were termed mawasu moji, and including them in a poem on the topic was intended as an indirect reference to the topic as a whole.

In his judgement, Shunzei has deliberately misunderstood the nature of the Right’s criticism of the Left’s poem. The Right essentially say that the reference to ‘spring dawn’ comes as an afterthought in a poem which is more about a Buddhist desire to free oneself from wordly attachments, and the focus should be more strongly on the topic, which is a fair enough criticism – they are not querying why it’s there at all, which is what he responds to.

Yoshitaka was appointed to the position of Junior Lieutenant in the Headquarters of the Inner Palace Guards, Right Division (右近少将) in 971 and died only three years later. The Captain at the time was Fujiwara no Kane’ie 藤原兼家 (929-990), the notoriously unfaithful husband of the Mother of Michitsuna, the writer of Kagerô Nikki 蜻蛉日記.

Yorimasa reached the relatively elevated heights of junior third rank, with the position of Provisional Master of the Right Capital Office. He was killed at the Battle of Uji River on the 26th Day of the Fifth Month Jijō 4 (1180) at the advanced age of 77. His personal poetry collection, the prosaicly titled Minamoto Sanmi Yorimasa Shū (‘The Collection of Third Rank Minamoto Yorimasa’) is extant, but the poem mentioned here does not appear in it.