Hokku on “New Year’s Crow,” with a Painting of a Courtier
Inscription by Yosa Buson Japanese
Colophon by Matsumura Goshun Japanese
After the death of the poet-painter Yosa Buson, his pupil Matsumura Gekkei (who used the alias Go Shun when creating Chinese-style paintings) was asked to authenticate surviving examples of his master’s handwriting. On the narrow slip of paper placed at the far right of this scroll, Buson had inscribed a hokku (seventeen-syllable poem) alluding to the tradition of welcoming the crow’s first caw as a harbinger of spring and the New Year.
At left, Gekkei added a playful portrait of Tachibana no Suemichi, a poet from the Heian period (794–1185) whom Buson had often depicted after having a peculiar New Year’s dream about him. The hokku reads:
己か羽の 文字もよめたり 初烏
I, too, can read
the characters on the feathers
of the year’s first black crow.
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