The Kokinwakashū, or Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Songs, more commonly known as Kokinshū, is an anthology of some eleven hundred poems compiled in the early tenth century at the Heian court. The “Japanese songs” (waka) of the title are a vernacular poetic form of thirty-one syllables versified into five metrical units in a 5/7/5/7/7 pattern, so named to mark an explicit contrast with the cosmopolitan style of Sinitic poetry, which was also popular among court aristocrats. The “collection” (shū) is “ancient and modern” (kokin) because it anthologized poetry written by its editors and their contemporaries together with poems from the recent and distant past.

The Kokinshū was compiled to create normative models for waka composition and to bring waka poetry to the forefront of the cultural life of the court. To say it succeeded in this aim would be an understatement. From shortly after its completion to the end of the nineteenth century, the Kokinshū was revered as the classical text that served as a cornerstone not only for the composition of waka, but also for later forms of vernacular poetry such as linked verse and haikai (which developed into the modern haiku form), and also for the tradition of vernacular literary writing that developed from poetry collections and commentary. The status of the Kokinshūis evident from its extraordinary number of citations in the vernacular prose writings of the period. The famous anecdote in Sei