Lady Kasa

Who They Were

Lady Kasa (笠郎女, Kasa no Iratsume) was a Japanese waka poet of the early eighth century. Her surviving work consists of twenty-nine poems, all preserved in the Man'yōshū (万葉集, Man'yōshū), the oldest extant anthology of Japanese poetry. Every one of those twenty-nine poems is a love poem addressed to a single man: Ōtomo no Yakamochi (大伴家持, Ōtomo no Yakamochi), the nobleman and poet who compiled the anthology in which her verses survive.

That concentration is unusual. Most poets represented in the Man'yōshū write across a range of subjects — travel, mourning, the seasons, public ceremony. Lady Kasa's corpus is a single sustained address to one person, and it is on that narrow but intense foundation that her reputation rests.

Life and Career

Lady Kasa belongs to the Asuka period (飛鳥時代, Asuka jidai, 538–710), the era in which the Japanese state consolidated around a court that moved between a succession of capitals before settling permanently at Nara in 710. Her activity is dated to the years around 700 to 800, and her death is recorded as 800. The Man'yōshū was compiled in the decades after that, and it is the only reason anything of her writing survives.

Her poems were exchanged with Ōtomo no Yakamochi, a far better documented figure: a senior court official, a prolific poet in his own right, and the man generally credited with assembling the Man'yōshū in something close to its final form. Yakamochi is known to have had at least fourteen other lovers, and the relationship with Lady Kasa ended in a break-up. The poems that record it are therefore not abstract exercises in the love convention; they trace an attachment that was real, unequal, and eventually finished.

Nothing else about her circumstances is preserved. Her family, her rank at court, her other writings, and the details of her daily life are all absent from the record. What remains is the sequence of twenty-nine poems, and through them a distinctive voice: direct, unornamented, and unusually exposed for a court poetry that often prized indirection.

Why They Matter

Lady Kasa's importance is twofold. First, she is one of the earliest Japanese women whose poetry survives in quantity and with a clear personal signature. The Man'yōshū preserves a substantial body of women's verse, and Lady Kasa stands near the beginning of that tradition — a woman writing love poetry in her own voice, addressed to a named man, in a period from which very few individual women's writings of any kind survive.

Second, her love poems became famous in their own right and were remembered long after the relationship they describe had ended. Later generations of female poets — Izumi Shikibu (和泉式部, Izumi Shikibu) and Ono no Komachi (小野小町, Ono no Komachi) among them — inherited a tradition in which a woman's love poetry could be a public achievement rather than a private embarrassment. Lady Kasa's twenty-nine poems are among the earliest and most concentrated examples of that possibility in Japanese literature.

She also matters as a counterweight to her correspondent. Yakamochi is the towering figure of the Man'yōshū; Lady Kasa is the woman whose side of the exchange survives alongside his. Reading the two together gives a rare, close-up view of how a relationship between two poets of the eighth-century court was conducted in verse.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 笠郎女 and read かさのいらつめ (Kasa no Iratsume). In romaji: Kasa no Iratsume.

Character by character:

• 笠 — read かさ (kasa) here. It means a wide conical hat or bamboo hat, the kind worn for rain or sun. It is also a surname element, and in this name it functions as the family or clan name.
• 郎 — read いら (ira) here. It is a male-associated character meaning "young man" or "lad," commonly used in male personal names and titles. In this name it is part of the title element rather than a description of her sex.
• 女 — read つめ (tsume) here. It means "woman" or "female."

The compound 郎女 (いらつめ, iratsume) is the key to the name. It was a title applied to women of good family, roughly "young lady" or "noblewoman," and it appears in the names of several Man'yōshū poets. The particle の (no) between 笠 and 郎女 is the possessive or linking particle, so the whole name means something like "the lady of the Kasa [family]."

Readers will also meet the name written 笠女郎, with the same reading. The element 笠 (kasa) survives in modern Japanese in words for hats and in place names, and 女 (usually read onna or jo) is one of the most common characters in Japanese, meaning "woman."

Legacy

Lady Kasa's legacy is carried entirely by the Man'yōshū. The anthology preserved her twenty-nine love poems to Ōtomo no Yakamochi, and through them she became a named, remembered poet rather than an anonymous contributor to a court collection. Her verses were admired by later generations and are cited as an early model for women's love poetry in Japanese.

The relationship they record — unequal, ended, and preserved in verse by the man who compiled the anthology — has kept her name attached to Yakamochi's for over a thousand years. That attachment is the shape of her survival: a poet known through the man she addressed, and known, within that frame, for the directness and force of her own writing.