Hyakunin Isshu: Meet the Poets
Fujiwara no Okikaze

Meaning

Who can I call a true friend now? Even the old pine of Takasago knew the friends of long ago no longer.

Commentary

The pine tree of Takasago was proverbially ancient — a symbol of endurance across countless generations. Yet even this venerable tree was not alive in the days when the poet knew his closest companions. All those friends are gone. The speaker turns to the most enduring thing in the landscape and finds that even it cannot reach back to the time when those friends were alive.

Fujiwara no Okikaze was a mid-Heian court poet counted among the celebrated "Thirty-six Poetry Immortals." This poem meditates on a loneliness that is not romantic but temporal — the loneliness of outliving one's own era. It is one of the few poems in the Hyakunin Isshu that speaks not of love, but of the slow erosion of companionship by time.

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