Ono no Komachi

Almost nothing of Komachi's life is known for certain, save for the names of various men with whom she engaged in romantic affairs and whose poetry exchanges with her are preserved in the Kokin Wakashū.

[2] The Edo-period scholar Arai Hakuseki advanced the theory that there was more than one woman named Komachi and that the legends about her referred to different people.

[9] A third type of legend tells of an aged Komachi, forced to wander in ragged clothes, her beauty faded and her appearance so wretched that she is mocked by all around her, as punishment for her earlier mistreatment of her lovers.

Her poems begin the extreme verbal complexity which distinguishes the poetry of the Kokinshū Anthology from the presentational immediacy of the Man'yōshū.

[17] In his Seeds in the Heart, translator, critic and literary historian Donald Keene said that "[t]he intensity of emotion expressed in [her] poetry not only was without precedent but would rarely be encountered in later years.

"[7] He also praised her poetry along with that of the other poets of the “dark age” of waka in the ninth century in the following terms: The passionate accents of the waka of Komachi and Narihira would never be surpassed, and the poetry as a whole is of such charm as to make the appearance of the Kokinshū seem less a brilliant dawn after a dark night than the culmination of a steady enhancement of the expressive powers of the most typical Japanese poetic art.

[20] She and her contemporary Ariwara no Narihira are considered archetypes of female and male beauty, respectively, and both feature heavily in later literary works, particularly Noh plays.

These works tend to focus on her talent for waka and her love affairs and the vanity of a life spent indulging in romantic liaisons.

Komachi's old age is also frequently portrayed: when she has lost her beauty, has been abandoned by her former lovers, and now regrets her life, wandering around as a lonely beggar woman — albeit still appreciated by young admirers of her poetry.

Komachi is also a frequent subject of Buddhist kusōzu paintings, which depict her dead body in successive stages of decay to emphasize transience.

[24] The basic plot (the age-worn former beauty encounters a young poet and relates some of her life's story, which causes him to fall in love with her, with fatal results) is retained, but the action takes place in a public park, with flashbacks to the salons and ballrooms of Meiji-era Japan.