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A Message to Everyone Who Visits

Reading the Hyakunin Isshu again as an adult, I found in it the lives of people who felt for the changing seasons, longed for those far away, and faced a life that rarely went as they wished.

Even across a thousand years, even as the world and the language we speak have changed, the human heart has changed remarkably little. Each poem distills a feeling into just thirty-one syllables.
And precisely because the words are so few, the scene that unfolds beyond them is left to the reader's imagination. The same poem can offer a new impression each time you read it — I think that is the true charm of waka.

This site was created to bring each and every poem of the Hyakunin Isshu closer to you, and to convey it more deeply. I write it day by day, hoping that you might come to feel these poets as close friends, and enjoy the poems they left behind together with me.

It would bring me great joy if this site could be even a small opportunity for the charm of the Hyakunin Isshu to reach one more person.

Site Administrator: Daisuke Ishigure