Waka

Waka is a traditional Japanese poetic form, especially the five-line, thirty-one-mora pattern known as tanka. It developed as a major literary form in Japan.

Tanka: A five-line Japanese poem with a 5–7–5–7–7 mora pattern. This is the waka form most commonly identified with the thirty-one-mora pattern.
Man'yōshū: The oldest surviving major anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the eighth century. Its poems preserve early waka by people across social ranks.
Ki no Tsurayuki: A Heian-period poet and prose writer who helped shape the Kokin Wakashū and its critical preface. His preface articulated influential ideals for Japanese poetry.
Haiku: A short Japanese poetic form commonly written in three lines with a 5–7–5 mora pattern. Haiku is shorter and historically distinct from the thirty-one-mora tanka form.
Mora: A unit of sound timing that structures rhythm in languages such as Japanese. Waka counts morae, not syllables, despite the common shorthand of thirty-one syllables.
Kokin Wakashū: A Japanese imperial poetry anthology completed around 905 and influential in defining classical style. Its preface and poems established standards for courtly waka.
Ono no Komachi: A celebrated ninth-century Japanese poet whose surviving poems explore love, longing, and impermanence. Her waka became enduring models of emotional intensity and ambiguity.
Renga: A Japanese linked-verse form in which poets alternate connected sections of different lengths. Renga turns waka’s stanza pattern into collaborative, sequential composition.
Kireji: A Japanese cutting word that marks a pause or rhetorical turn in poetry. In short waka, a cutting word can shape the poem’s division and emphasis.
Imperial anthologies of waka: A sequence of Japanese court-sponsored collections of poetry compiled from the tenth through fifteenth centuries. These collections shaped which waka entered the literary canon.

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