Semimaru
Semimaru was a blind lute player who lived alone in a straw hut in Ausaka, which means "meeting slope". "Ausaka is a slope about five miles east of the center of modern Kyoto. Its apex is a narrow pass through the eastern range of mountains separating Kyoto from the area of Lake Biwa." The emperor established a formal check point barrier, "Ausaka no seki", at this summit in 646. Today the place is known as Osaka. A Shinto shrine was built there by the tenth century and eventually became known as Semimaru "jinja". Supposedly, on seeing the traffic on  the road to the capital, he composed the following The above "waka" appears in the imperial anthology "Gosen Wakashū". Other Semimaru poems appear in the anthologies "Shin Kokin Wakashū", "Kokin Wakashū" and "Shokukokin Wakashū". For this poem, he became known as . According to the Konjaku Monogatarishū (Book 24, tale 23), for three years Minamoto no Hiromasa travelled from the capital regularly, hoping to hear and meet Semimaru. Finally, they met and Semimaru tutored him in playing the melodies and . Legacy. In "nō" there is a Zeami Motokiyo play, "Semimaru", that depicts the life of a "young man, blind from birth ...abandoned on a mountainside by is father", and his sister, , "a beautiful young woman" that "suffers episodes of inexplicable madness which compel her to wander the countryside aimlessly." Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote the Joruri "Semimaru".