Izumi Shikibu was a female poet who lived in the 10th century. She was a beautiful court poet and caused the scandal of her day: she often fell in love and wrote several excellent love songs. She expressed her intense feelings of love in the form of short poems.

Her songs have lyrics motivated by an intense longing for male sexuality, while also expressing a Buddhist longing for liberation from worldly desires. The harmony is created by the deposition by the canon of melodic fragments. It gra...