Ono no Komachi was a female court poet from ninth-century Japan – often described as the “dark age” of poetry in Japanese – and is counted as one of the Rokkasen (Six Poetic Immortals), but there is little biographical information about her. Eighteen of her waka poems, a type of poetry composed in the vernacular with phonetic scripts, are collected in the first imperially sponsored anthology Kokinshū (c. 905), and her most famous waka poem is included in the Ogura Hyakunin-isshu, originally compiled by Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). Her works are highly valued by modern scholars for their technical excellence and emotional intensity. A collection of poems ascribed to her, the Komachishū, survives, but recent studies have shown that many of the works in it were probably written by other poets. Komachi became the subject of various legends soon after her death, but these legends were ultimately derived from her own poems and other works later attributed to her. The tendency to depict her as a symbol of transient female beauty suggests that the legendizing of Komachi, based on the intertwining of her actual poems with the later legends, reflects the rise of a patriarchal system and the influence of Buddhism in the Heian (794–1185) and later period.