mid-Heian period · ?–1000?Minamoto no Shigeyuki

A mid-Heian poet, great-grandson of Emperor Seiwa, whose family had been reduced to commoner status. He served the future Emperor Reizei as a guard officer, held provincial posts, and late in life followed Fujiwara no Sanekata to the far north, where he died. One of the Thirty-Six Immortals, he has about sixty-five poems in imperial anthologies; the hundred-poem sequence he presented to Reizei is the oldest surviving example of that form. His Hyakunin Isshu poem likens his unrequited love to waves breaking on an unmoved rock.