A thousand years of poetry, reborn as J-POP.
Garu JP reimagines classical Japanese poetry — the Man'yōshū, the Tale of the Heike, the Iroha song — as contemporary music. Words that have lived a thousand years, reborn in today's sound.
A thousand years ago, people cried through the same nights we do — longing in love, wounded by partings, anxious about tomorrow, and still rising to meet the morning. The words left in these old poems are the honest, unguarded hearts of people who lived a thousand years ago.
Those feelings were handed down from song to song, from heart to heart, until they became Japanese culture itself — the very sensibility we carry today. Without knowing it, we have all received a baton carrying a thousand years of human feeling.
Garu JP takes up that baton and sets it against the scenery of modern life. For each poem we study the air of the age it was born in, listen for the poet's breath, and recompose it in the genre where it comes most alive — ballad, funk, swing, electronica, metal. Every song comes with the story behind the original: its historical background and the poet's heart.
May the today of someone a thousand years ago overlap, somewhere, with yours.
Waka (literally "Japanese song") is Japan's own form of short poetry, and it is very old — older than the oldest surviving books. Songs in this shape were already being sung before the seventh century, and by the eighth century they had been gathered into the Man'yōshū, Japan's oldest anthology, with more than four thousand poems by emperors, soldiers, farmers, and lovers. From the tenth century on, emperors ordered official collections of waka (the chokusen wakashū, or imperial anthologies), and to have a single poem chosen for one was the honour of a lifetime.
Waka was never only literature. At the imperial court it was woven into daily life: a love letter was expected to be a poem, and its reply another poem; a poem opened a ceremony, greeted the first blossoms, or marked a friend's departure for a distant post. People judged one another by how well they could put a feeling into thirty-one syllables. That is why the themes of waka are the themes of any life — love and its longing, the turning seasons, partings and journeys, and mujō (the Buddhist sense that nothing lasts).
You may know haiku, the seventeen-syllable form that grew out of waka many centuries later; waka is the older, longer, and more personal parent, with room for a whole heart in one breath.
A waka is built from five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 sounds — thirty-one in all, which is why the form is also called misohitomoji ("the thirty-one letters"). Strictly speaking these are morae (beats of even length) rather than English syllables, so the rhythm feels lighter and more regular than the numbers suggest. The first three lines (5-7-5) are the kami no ku, the "upper verse," and the last two (7-7) are the shimo no ku, the "lower verse." Often the upper verse paints a scene and the lower verse turns it toward the heart, so the whole poem pivots in the middle like a hinge.
Within those thirty-one sounds, poets developed a toolkit of techniques for saying two things at once. A kakekotoba ("pivot word") is a single sound that carries two meanings at the same time, something like an English pun but used for depth rather than for laughs. A makurakotoba ("pillow word") is a fixed, ancient epithet placed before a noun — the way Homer says "wine-dark sea" — that adds weight and echo. An utamakura ("poem pillow") is a place name that centuries of poems have charged with a set feeling, so that naming it is already saying something.
Poem 88 of the Hyakunin Isshu, Naniwa-e no, shows the pivot word at full stretch. In one short verse, karine means both "cut reed-root" and "a night's sleep"; hitoyo means both "one joint of the reed" and "one night"; and mi o tsukushi means both "channel-marker post" and "wearing my body out." On the surface it is a picture of the reedy shore at Naniwa (today's Osaka); underneath, it is a woman asking whether one night of love must cost her a lifetime of longing. Both poems are true, and both are sung in thirty-one sounds.
Hyakunin Isshu means "one hundred people, one poem each." It is an anthology of a hundred waka by a hundred different poets, one poem apiece, and it is by far the best-known collection of poetry in Japan. Tradition holds that it was chosen in the thirteenth century by Fujiwara no Teika, the greatest poet and critic of his age, for the sliding doors of a mountain villa at Ogura, on the western edge of Kyoto — which is why it is usually called the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu.
The hundred poems run in rough chronological order from Emperor Tenji in the seventh century to the exiled Emperor Juntoku in the thirteenth, so reading them in sequence is like walking through six hundred years of Japanese history — emperors and empresses, priests and court ladies, statesmen and wanderers, each speaking once. In the Edo period (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) the anthology left the court for good when it became a card game, karuta: one player reads the upper verse aloud, and the others race to snatch the card showing the lower verse. Because each poem can be identified by its first few sounds, the kimariji ("deciding syllables"), skilled players move before the reader has finished the first line. Families still play it at New Year, and competitive karuta is a serious sport with national championships.
For centuries, this is how Japanese people have first met classical poetry — not on a page, but by ear, as sound and rhythm and speed. Garu JP takes that same path one step further: we are setting all one hundred poems to music, one by one, as J-POP songs, so that the hundred voices can be heard again the way they were always meant to be — sung.
Hyakunin Isshu — all one hundred poems. The Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is Japan's most beloved anthology: one hundred poems by one hundred poets. Our challenge is to turn every one of them, without exception, into a song of today — love poems become love songs, travel poems unfold like road movies. Each song page carries the original text, a romaji reading, an English translation, the historical background, the poet's heart, and a note on how the classical poem was reworked into modern lyrics. Explore the Hyakunin Isshu series.
Classics. Beyond the Hyakunin Isshu, we also sing the wider classical canon: the Iroha song, the Tale of the Heike, the Man'yōshū, Bashō's haiku. Browse them by source anthology in Classics.
We sing the original words inside the song. In every track, all five lines of the classical poem ring out at least once. When words from a thousand years ago and the words of today meet on the same melody, the heart held in the poem crosses time and reaches you — that is where this whole body of work began.
The lyrics, commentary, and translations are all original work by Garu JP. We do not hide that the music itself is made with AI: the sound is composed and performed with AI tools, guided line by line by a human who has studied the poem, its age, and its poet. The technology is new; the words, and the feeling behind them, are a thousand years old.
New songs premiere on YouTube every day at 19:00 JST, and are released to music streaming services afterwards.
Concept, lyrics, and production: Garu JP.
Questions, thoughts, or just a hello — feel free to send a DM on X (Twitter) (@GaruJPmusic).