Saigū no Nyōgo

Who They Were

Saigū no Nyōgo (徽子女王, さいぐうのにょうご) was a Japanese poet and musician of the middle Heian period, born in 929 and dead by 985. She was a princess of the imperial family, a consort of Emperor Murakami, and one of only five women counted among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals (三十六歌仙, Sanjūrokkasen), the canonical grouping of the thirty-six greatest waka poets of the classical age.

Her life sits at the centre of the Heian court. Her father was Imperial Prince Shigeakira (重明親王), which made Emperor Daigo her grandfather. Her mother was Fujiwara no Kanshi. She married Emperor Murakami and bore him a daughter, Imperial Princess Kishi, and a son. Before that marriage she served as the Ise Priestess, the chief priestess of the Ise Shrine — the office that gave her the name by which she is remembered.

Life and Career

Kishi was born in 929, in the seventh year of the Enchō era (延長), a reign name that ran from 923 to 931. As a daughter of the imperial house she was raised inside the court, and her education in poetry and music belonged to the ordinary accomplishments expected of a princess of that rank.

Before she became a consort, she was appointed Ise Priestess — in Japanese, saigū (斎宮). This was a position held by an unmarried imperial princess who was sent to serve at the Ise Shrine, the shrine of the sun goddess Amaterasu, on behalf of the reigning emperor. The appointment was religious and political at once: the priestess stood in for the emperor at the most important shrine in the realm. The title Saigū no Nyōgo, by which she is known, joins that earlier office to her later one — saigū, the Ise priestess, and nyōgo, a consort of the emperor.

She left the shrine to enter the court of Emperor Murakami as a consort. She gave birth to Imperial Princess Kishi and to a son. Her position at court was high enough that her poems circulated among the same circles that produced the great anthologies of the age.

She died in 985. Her poetry was collected into the third imperial anthology, the Shūi Wakashū (拾遺和歌集), issued in 1006 — more than twenty years after her death.

Why They Matter

The Thirty-six Poetry Immortals was a list compiled in the middle Heian period to fix the canon of waka, the thirty-one-syllable court poetry that was the central literary form of the era. Of the thirty-six names, only five are women. Saigū no Nyōgo is one of them. That fact alone places her among the small group of female poets whom later ages treated as the standard against which court poetry was measured.

She also belongs to the Thirty-Six Immortal Women Poets (女三十六歌仙, Onna Sanjūrokasen), a parallel list devoted to women. Membership in both lists reflects the double life she led: a princess of the blood who served as a priestess, then as an imperial consort, and who was remembered chiefly for her verse.

Her poems entered the Shūi Wakashū, the third of the twenty-one imperial anthologies that the court commissioned over centuries. Inclusion in an imperial anthology was the formal test of a poet's standing; it meant that a later generation, working under imperial order, judged the poem worth preserving for the throne itself.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 徽子女王 and read さいぐうのにょうご (Saigū no Nyōgo). It is not a birth name but a court name, assembled from the office she held and the rank she later acquired.

徽 — read ki here — means "fine," "splendid," or "emblem." It is the first character of her personal name, Kishi.

子 — read shi — means "child." It is the standard closing element in women's personal names of the Heian court, and it appears in thousands of female names of the period.

女王 — read joō — means "princess," a woman of imperial blood. 女 is "woman"; 王 is "king" or "royal." Together the two characters mark her as a member of the imperial family rather than a commoner.

So 徽子女王 is the formal written form: the personal name Kishi plus the title Princess. The reading さいぐうのにょうご does not match those characters at all, because it is a different kind of name — a nickname drawn from her career.

斎宮 (さいぐう, saigū) is the office of Ise Priestess. 斎 means "purification" or "abstinence"; 宮 means "shrine" or "palace." The saigū was the princess who served at Ise, and the word came to stand for the woman herself.

女御 (にょうご, nyōgo) is a court rank for an emperor's consort, below the rank of kōgō (empress). 女 is "woman"; 御 is an honorific prefix. A nyōgo was a woman of high birth who had entered the emperor's household.

Put together, 斎宮女御 means "the Ise Priestess who became a consort" — an exact description of her life, and the name under which her poems were copied and transmitted.

Legacy

Her poems were gathered into the Shūi Wakashū in 1006, and from there into the wider tradition of court poetry that later ages studied and imitated. The two lists she belongs to — the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals and the Thirty-Six Immortal Women Poets — kept her name in circulation for centuries, and her verse was copied, quoted, and painted alongside the other canonical poets.

She is remembered as a musician as well as a poet, one of the accomplishments that marked a woman of the Heian court. The combination of imperial birth, service as Ise Priestess, marriage to an emperor, and a place in the poetic canon made her a rare figure even by the standards of a court that produced many celebrated women writers.