was a Japanese female '' waka'' poet of the early 8th century. Little is known of her except what is preserved in her 29 surviving poems in the ''

Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...

''; all these were love poems addressed to her lover

Ōtomo no Yakamochi was a Japanese statesman and '' waka'' poet in the Nara period. He was one of the ''Man'yō no Go-taika,'' the five great poets of his time, and was part of Fujiwara no Kintō's . Ōtomo was a member of the prestigious Ōtomo clan. Like his g ...

who compiled the ''Man'yōshū'' (and who is known to have had at least 14 other lovers and have broken up with her). Nonetheless, her love poems made her famous and inspired a later generation of female poets like

Izumi Shikibu was a mid-Heian period Japanese poet. She is a member of the . She was the contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, and Akazome Emon at the court of empress Joto Mon'in. She "is considered by many to have been the greatest woman poet of the Heian pe ...

or Ono no Komachi."The entranced eroticism of her poems to Yakamochi were imitated by the great women poets of the 9th and 10th centuries, notably Izmi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi." ''Women poets of Japan''.

Poetry

References

;Sources *Page 141 of ''Women Poets of Japan'', 1977, Kenneth Rexroth, Ikuko Atsumi, ; previously published as ''The Burning Heart'' by The Seabury Press. *Pages 151-152, 175-176 of ''

Seeds in the Heart ''Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century'' is the first book (though the last to be written and published) in Donald Keene's four-book series ''A History of Japanese Literature''. It is followed ...

'' ;Notes

External links

Manyoshu
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kasa 8th-century Japanese women writers 8th-century Japanese writers Women of medieval Japan Japanese women poets 8th-century Japanese women 8th-century Japanese people