SOURCE: McCullough, Helen Craig. Introduction to Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan, translated by Helen Craig McCullough, pp. 1-65. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968.

In the following excerpt, McCullough explores the importance of the figure of Narihira to the tales and comments on the difficulties of classifying Ise by genre and establishing its authorship.

Japanese Court Poetry in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

Tales of Ise is anonymous and of uncertain date, and so are a majority of its poems, but it is probably safe to assume that few, if any, of the poems are more recent than 950, and that most of them were written during the ninth century.¹ The poems coincide roughly in period, therefore, with those in the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, Kokinshū, or Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, in whose title “ancient times” means essentially the early decades of the...