“A poet among poets, a true immortal of Japanese verse, deified as the God poetry, his works are the pinnacle of this nation’s literature—Hitomaro, without a real rival in Japan.”¹

 

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 653–655–c. 707–710) was a seventh-century poet in the Imperial Court who is one of Japan’s 36 Immortal Poets and was deified as the god of Japanese poetry. His influential poetry departed from the more rigid and prescribed subjects of earlier eras, exploring new subject matter and poetic structure, and infusing a more vivid and direct human experience into his verse, something that surely appealed to Zen monks. Here, Daishin Gitō painted his portrait from two stylized characters, hito (person or man) and maru (round), which together form an alternate reading of the poet’s name.

 

—Bradley Bailey