A Study on the Word “Sleeve” in Japanese Waka

Abstract

This study analysed the word "sleeve" in the waka poem of "The Tale of Genji", using natural language processing and text analysis methods, mainly studied the frequency and distribution of "sleeve" and the role of "sleeves" under different classifications. Results show that "sleeve" is one of the most frequently occurring nouns in "The Tale of Genji", and the frequency of occurrence is second only to "heart", "people", "flower", and "world", ranking No. 5 among all nouns. Furthermore, in different contexts, the usage of "sleeve" is also different. It can be mainly divided into two categories. The first category is that "sleeve" appears alone and has no strong correlation with other words. The other category is that "sleeve" is strongly related to other words and express different meanings and contexts together with different words. This study further enriched the study of Japanese poetic imagery, and helped us research on Japanese poetry to better understand the Japanese spiritual world.