His offering for Saigyo was typical:
Saigyo (1118–1190) A priest and a poet who was active from the late Heian period through the beginning of the Kamakura period. Born with the name Sato Norikiyo. Served as a guard to retired emperor Toba, but at the age of twenty-three, for reasons of his own and over the protests of his weeping child, he became a priest. From then on he traveled all over the archipelago, writing numerous poems. “Let me die in spring/under the cherries in bloom/and let it be/in Kisaragi month/at the time of the full moon!” This poem is familiar to one and all. Any Japanese person would be deeply moved by the scene Saigyo paints and share his wish. In his works Saigyo created a unique poetic style that skillfully evokes nature and human emotion, shot through with a sense of life’s ephemerality. He died in Hirokawa Temple in Kawachi.
Well, Nishioka thought, I’m Japanese, but this poem doesn’t particularly move me. Perplexed, he printed out the document. A dictionary was supposed to be precise. Was it all right to write “any Japanese person”? What if other people who failed to be moved sent in complaints?
Probably the professor’s thoughts had gone along these lines: “February is almost over. In classical poetry, the second lunar month is Kisaragi—the month that comes up in that poem by Saigyo. That reminds me, I’m supposed to write something for the new Gembu dictionary. Might as well do the entry for Saigyo right now.” He then sat down and dashed off this text. Nishioka was annoyed that the writing was so perfunctory.
“Hey, Majime. Take a look at this.” He handed the printout to Majime, who was sharpening a red pencil with a penknife. Majime took the paper respectfully in hand and held it before his face like a new pupil the teacher had called on to read aloud.
The half-sharpened pencil rolled across the desk. The tip was still round, despite Majime’s intense efforts to whittle it to a point. The wood bore gouges—the blade hadn’t been put to effective use. Jeez, Nishioka thought, the guy’s all thumbs, and he started to sharpen the pencil for him.
As Majime pored over the paper, Nishioka silently whittled. It was still morning, so the part-time student workers hadn’t shown up yet. Only he and Majime were in the office. The room was still.
He pared the dry wood and gradually exposed the red core, sharpening it to a point. He liked sharpening pencils with a penknife or a box cutter. The pencil core made him think of bone marrow. Something secret . . . a hidden life force . . . never-ending. In elementary school, he used to use freshly sharpened pencils that smelled fragrantly of wood to draw pictures of robots and monsters in his notebook. He felt he could draw better when he sharpened them by hand, so he had never used a pencil sharpener.
It made him nostalgic, remembering those old drawings. He hadn’t thought about that notebook in twenty years. He held up the pencil to inspect his handiwork. The tip was so narrow it seemed to melt into the air. Satisfied that he hadn’t lost his touch, he thought, Majime ought to buy himself a pencil sharpener. After I leave, he’s likely to cut off a finger with this knife.
Majime grunted and laid the paper on his desk. He twisted his hair with his left hand while his right hand groped blindly on the desktop. Nishioka put the pencil between his fingers, and Majime looked up.
“Thank you. You know, this needs drastic revision.”
“Thought so.”
“Did you get the guy’s permission to revise what he wrote?”
“Well, of course. When I first went to see him I told him we might have to make some changes. But he can be difficult.” Nishioka peered at the entry. “To be on the safe side, I guess I’d better let him know about any changes we make.”
Majime nodded, picked up the red pencil, and set to work.
“First off, there are too many unnecessary words. And subjective opinions have no place in a dictionary. It should just be the facts. Also, he’s written the poem using modern orthography, which is not how Saigyo wrote it.”
“Do we even need the poem?”
“We can think about it again later, but for now I think it’s okay to leave it out.”
Saigyo (1118–1190) A poet and priest of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. His religious name was En’i, his lay name Sato Norikiyo.
“Wasn’t Saigyo the name he took as a priest?”
“No, that’s his pen name. His name as a priest was En’i.”
“Okay. This is already a lot better. What else should we fix? The line ‘for reasons of his own’ is full of holes.”
“Yes, it is. Some say he decided to become a priest because the death of a friend made him feel the frailty of life, others say it was because of an unhappy love affair. There are various theories but no one knows for certain.”
“How could they? I bet he himself couldn’t have put it into words all that easily.”
“That’s right,” said Majime with a faint smile. “What lies deep inside the heart can be a mystery even to oneself.”
“And what about ‘over the protests of his weeping child’? Who was watching, I’d like to know?”
“That part is vague, so let’s cut it. Okay, this still needs work, but how about something like this?”
A palace guard of the retired emperor Toba, he entered the priesthood at twenty-three. After that he traveled the land writing poems on nature and human emotions, creating his own poetic style. The eighth imperial anthology, Shinkokinshu, (ca. 1205) contains ninety-four poems by Saigyo, more than by any other poet. His poetry collections include Sankashu. He died in Hirokawa Temple in Kawachi.
Now it was sounding like a dictionary. Nishioka looked admiringly at the corrected text, but Majime seemed still unsatisfied.
“Defining ‘Saigyo’ only by explaining the man is hardly enough, though.”
“You mean the word has another meaning?”
“It also means fujimi, as in ‘invulnerable, immortal.’”
“How come?”
“There was a time when people liked to paint pictures of Saigyo looking at Mount Fuji. The characters for ‘looking at Mount Fuji’ are also read fujimi, so both meanings became associated with him.”
“A lame joke.”
“A play on words.”
Nishioka felt discouraged. Why would people want to paint pictures of Saigyo looking at Mount Fuji in the first place? He had no idea. What would be fun about painting some itinerant priest?
“Besides that—”
“There’s more?”
“Oh, yes. Since Saigyo traveled his name also took on the meaning of ‘wanderer’ or ‘pilgrim.’”
Nishioka took down a volume of the Great Dictionary of Japanese from the shelf and looked up Saigyo. Majime was right. After the man himself, various associated meanings were listed. Evidence of the affection people had for Saigyo, how close they felt to him.