English: Illustration from page 312 of PLAYING ODE-CARDS..
Caption: "PLAYING ODE-CARDS. Quote: The game is played sometimes by spreading all the pictures in the middle and the players sitting around them. One person reads out the proverbs in any order he pleases, and the corresponding pictures are seized and put away. The player who has taken the largest number of cards in this way is the winner. The game, however, is more frequently played in the following manner:—The cards are dealt evenly among the players who spread them out exposed before them. When a proverb is read out, a player takes out the corresponding picture if he has it, and if not, he looks over the other players’ hands and seizes the card as soon as he sees it. He takes it and gives one of his own exposed cards to the player from whose hand he has taken it. A slow-witted person’s hand is always full, while a sharp player clears his quickly; and the one who has first got rid of his hand is the winner. As the cards are often pounced upon at the same time by several players, the game is an exciting one, and not a few come out of it with their hands scratched and bleeding. Friends and relatives of both sexes join in these games in winter evenings, and some of them, it is said, consider it the best part of the game that they can touch or squeeze the hands of the players of the opposite sex by pretending to seize the same cards. For this reason, a strict paterfamilias not unfrequently forbids his household to play the game with those who are not its members.
The uta or ode-cards are in two sets of a hundred each. There is a famous collection of a hundred odes composed by as many poets, which used in former days to be learnt by heart. These odes are used for the ode-cards. An ode, as has been explained in a former chapter, is made up of two couplets of five and seven syllables each, closing with a line of seven syllables. For the purposes of the cards, the odes are divided into two parts, the first comprising the first three lines, that is, the lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and the second the last two lines of seven syllables. The cards in one set give each the whole ode with the name and picture of the poet, while in those of the other set appears generally the second part, and rarely the first part, of the ode. Thus, in the first set the first ode of the hundred runs:— Tenji Tenno Aki no ta no Kariho no iwo no Toma wo arami Waga koromode wa Tsuyu ni nuretsutsu. Emperor Tenji Decayed is the rush-thatch of the watch-shed in the autumn rice-field, And the sleeves of the robe are becoming wet with dew. And the card of the second set has the lines Waga koromode wa Tsuyu ni nuretsu. The game is played in the same manner as the iroha cards; and the scramble for the cards is more exciting as the players do not always wait till the whole ode is read out."