late Heian period · dates unknown (12th c.)Taikenmon'in no Horikawa

A late Heian woman poet, daughter of a chief of the Bureau of Divinities. She served first a former Kamo priestess and then Empress Taikenmon'in, consort of Emperor Toba, from whose name her own title derives. When the empress became a nun in 1142 she followed her, and her friendship with the monk-poet Saigyō is recorded in his collection. She was chosen among the poets of Sutoku's Kyūan hundred-poem sequences and took part in many contests. One of the Thirty-Six Women Immortals, she has about sixty-five poems in imperial anthologies. Her Hyakunin Isshu poem tangles her tangled black hair with her uncertainty the morning after.