couplet-composing

Updated: May 16, 2025

The Western critic, with his totally different literary conventions, has difficulty in bringing himself to regard Japanese verse as a literary form or in thinking of it otherwise than as an exercise in ingenuity, an Oriental puzzle; and this notion is heightened by the prevalence of the couplet-composing contests, which did much to heighten the artificiality of the genre.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

"Had they waited to "Saddle him, my life were lost "O, horse of Kai!" The whole incident is full of instruction. It is an instructive picture of the ways of Yuryaku's Court. In truth, this couplet-composing proclivity is one of the strangest features of the Yamato race as portrayed in the pages of the Records and the Chronicles.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era