Although Fujiwara no Tameaki was apparently well regarded in his own day, for centuries he was considered a minor figure among the poets of the late Kamakura period. The son of Fujiwara no Tameie and an unidentified lady-in-waiting at court, Tameaki has been overshadowed by his much more famous half brothers Tameuji, Tamenori, and Tamesuke, who founded the Nij, Kygoku, and Reizei schools of poetry, respectively, and whose families' poetic feuding dominated the latter half of the medieval period. It has only been with the renewal of scholarly interest in the late Kamakura period's development of secret poetic commentaries influenced by esoteric Buddhism that Tameaki has become a focus of scholarly attention.

Tameaki's life is frustratingly obscure. He was probably born between 1229 and 1240—sometime after Nij Tameuji (1222), Gensh (1224), and Kygoku Tamenori (1227) but a good deal before Tamesuke (1263) and Reizei Tamemori (1265). In a sense Tameaki was caught squarely in...