Fujiwara no Teika begins to write

1184

In Kyoto a young courtier of the declining Fujiwara family began keeping a diary in Chinese and composing waka in Japanese. His aesthetic of yugen - mysterious depth - would shape Japanese poetry for centuries and culminate in his edited imperial anthology the Shin Kokin Wakashu. Teika's insistence that poetry should evoke what cannot be said directly became the defining principle of Japanese literary aesthetics.