Honkadori — where poetry and music meet
So I got myself that book about Japanese poet Tonna. What I found in it brought my understanding of hitoyogiri music under a new light. It stands in one word: honkadori The meaning of this poetry rule describes very precisely the workings at the heart of hitoyogiri music. Let me tell you about it.
Tonna, the poet I just mentioned, was a Buddhist lay monk. He lived from 1289 to 1372. This puts him at the very beginning of the Muromachi period, possibly when the hitoyogiri made its first early apparitions in the poetic circles of Japan.
Tonna was considered one of the leading waka poets in his time, and I was really excited to find a book not only about his art but also about his life. Reading it felt like being allowed into a room where something real was happening — the poetry contests, the careful weighings of a line, the discipline of treating composition as a devotional act.
Tonna considered the way of poetry a Buddhist path toward enlightenment, and his practice of keiko — composition practice — was something between a professional craft and a form of prayer.
Borrowing from another poem
While I immersed myself in the intrigues of court poetry, I stumbled on that term: honkadori. Honkadori (本歌取り) means, literally, “taking from an original poem.” It is the practice of borrowing words, phrases, or the emotional atmosphere of an older, well-known poem and weaving them into something new as a kind of dialogue across time. The new poem assumes the old one and sets off in a different direction.
This technique emerged around the 12th century and was codified by Fujiwara no Teika, the great poet and critic of the Kamakura period, who laid out the rules with precision: you may borrow up to two phrases, but use them differently from how they appear in the original — shift their position, alter their angle, let them mean something other than what they once meant while carrying the shadow of what they meant before.
What the technique requires, more than anything, is that both poet and reader already know the original. It only works inside a shared tradition. The allusion must land.
The author of the book writes that in the hands of lesser poets, honkadori led to mere repetition — a tired reshuffling of familiar material. But in the hands of someone who had truly absorbed the original, the aim was something else: to enter into a dialogue with it. Not a copy. A true variation.
This observation landed hard. I’d experienced that before. With hitoyogiri. A flute played by poets and samurai — a musical instrument whose repertoire was created by people who knew the rules of that poetic game. Could it be that between the notes, poets had woven some of the rules pertaining to their art, just like a discreet signature?
Where poetry made me a better player
I sat there confused, book in hand, reminiscing about my first months with my hitoyogiri. When I first started playing, the tunes felt almost indistinguishable from each other. Everything sounded the same. Some pieces varied only by a handful of notes — the rest was identical. And yes, in the hands of a beginner, that sameness was simply boring.
But something eventually shifted, slowly, over time and then it resolved itself all at once with this brutal epiphany — recognition is the point! The similarities, I had already guessed it, were not accidental. On the contrary, they felt like a very deliberate decision. With the notion of honkadori though, it became a gentle nod to the past, a promise of continuity. As if each composer was keeping his predecessors in his wake. This gesture was an elegant acknowledgement of something that worked so well it deserved not to be replaced, but to be continued.
As I remained sat there beaming to myself, like someone who’s just unlocked a big truth, my mind drifted a little further, to China. I wondered if there was a Chinese root to this sensibility. I’ve read that in classical Chinese intellectual culture, a brand-new idea with no precedent was viewed with suspicion rather than admiration. To be taken seriously, your idea had to be built on a reliable, time-tested model — it had to be an improvement of something already proven. Newness, as such, wasn’t a virtue. Depth was.
Honkadori might be one application of that broader orientation. Hitoyogiri may have inherited that same orientation, note by note.
Repetition doesn’t need to be boring, regardless of what we do. It’s the depth that it carries, or maybe that we allow it to carry, that makes it unique and beautiful every single time.