Kakinomoto no Hitomaro is considered to be a saint of Japanese poetry. Little is known about him beyond stories from poems attributed to him and about him in the Man’yōshū, the oldest Japanese poetry anthology, compiled around 760 C.E. No contemporary portrait of Hitomaro survives, and visual renderings of him require an artist’s imagination. This portrait and the calligraphy are by Konoe Nobutada, a high-ranking court official who lived nearly nine hundred years after Hitomaro. The blunt, scant brushstrokes that make up Hitomaro’s body also form the kanji characters for his name, though they are not easy to discern. The face is depicted in the delicate lines characteristic of traditional portraiture. Hitomaro’s poem at the top reads, “Do I have to sleep alone through the long nights, nights long like the dragging tail of a mountain pheasant?”