Sedoka
Quick answer: Sedoka explained: the rare Japanese form of two 5-7-7 halves, its question-and-answer roots in the Man'yoshu, and how to write one in English today.
A sedoka is a rare classical Japanese form built from two three-phrase halves, each running five, seven, seven sound units, so the whole poem counts thirty-eight units in six phrases. Each half is a katauta, literally a half-poem or fragment, and the name sedoka is often glossed as head-repeated poem, since the second half restarts the 5-7-7 pattern from the top.
What makes the sedoka more than a curiosity is its dialogic soul. Its two halves naturally fall into exchange: question and answer, call and echo, one lover's voice and the other's. The oldest examples in the Man'yoshu and the Kojiki often read as courtship dialogue, which gives modern poets a ready-made engine that most short forms lack: two speakers inside one small poem.
How It Works
Write one katauta of three lines in roughly five, seven, seven; then answer it with a second. The halves may share a single speaker looking twice at one subject, or two speakers passing the poem between them like a cup. The seam in the middle is the form's dramatic resource: whatever changes across it, voice, mood, distance, is what the poem is about. An original two-voice example:
The first half asks from inside impatience; the second answers from inside experience. Neither half would amount to much alone, which is the point.
Where You Will See It
The Man'yoshu preserves around sixty sedoka among its thousands of poems, and a handful appear in Japan's earliest chronicles, where paired katauta serve as sung exchanges. The form never rivalled the tanka and slipped out of fashion more than a millennium ago, but small revivals recur: some contemporary tanka poets in Japanese and English keep it alive precisely because its two-voice structure feels surprisingly modern, closer to a text exchange than to a monologue.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Use the sedoka wherever a poem wants a reply built in. Draft the first half as a genuine question, complaint or dare; then change chairs and answer it as someone else, your grandmother, your future self, the landscape itself. Resist resolving the exchange too neatly. The best sedoka leave a gap between the voices that the reader has to cross, and that gap is where the feeling lives.
What poets can take from this
- Treat each 5-7-7 half as a complete utterance that could survive alone, barely.
- Put a real change across the middle seam: speaker, tone or time.
- Try genuine dialogue first; it is the form's oldest and strongest mode.
- Keep counts approximate in English; the two-part symmetry matters more.
- Read your draft as two people would speak it, with a breath at the turn.
Try it yourself
Write three sedoka as tiny arguments: in each, the first half asks or accuses, and the second half answers in a different voice. Let one pair reconcile, one refuse, and one change the subject entirely.
Questions
What is a katauta?
A katauta is a three-phrase unit of five, seven, seven sound units, regarded in early Japanese poetics as half a poem. Two katauta joined make a sedoka, and the term implies that a lone katauta waits for its answer.
How does a sedoka differ from a tanka?
A tanka runs 5-7-5-7-7 in one continuous movement of thirty-one units, while a sedoka runs 5-7-7 twice, making thirty-eight units in two symmetrical halves, often voiced as an exchange.
Is anyone still writing sedoka?
Yes, though it remains the rarest of the classical forms. Some tanka journals in English accept sedoka, and poets attracted to dialogue and two-voice structures periodically revive it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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