SOURCE: Kamens, Edward. “Waking the Dead: Fujiwara no Teika's Sotoba kuyo Poems.” Journal of Japanese Studies 28, no. 2 (summer 2002): 379-403.

In the following essay, Kamens offers an interpretive analysis of ten memorial waka from Teika's Shui guso collection, concentrating on the allusive intertextuality of these works.

Most Japanese poems (yamoto uta, waka) have their seeds in Japanese poems and are likely to flower forth as still more Japanese poems. When Japanese poets compose waka, those acts of production—like those of other poets in other cultures—are enabled as well as constrained by the poem-composing acts of their antecedents. Whether this condition is demonstrated or acknowledged, or one of which the poem-producer is even partially or fully aware, it is nevertheless in force in the making of the poem itself and definitive of the poem-composing act. Thus, virtually every poem in the Japanese corpus is an inscription over another...