百人一首 (Hyakunin-isshu)

Hyakunin-isshu (lit. 100 people, 100 poems each) is a collection of poems, nowadays mostly known as a kind of card game which Japanese kids play on New Year's Eve. The game itself is pretty violent, a little bit like 'Snap', or P.I.G. (if you know what that is). But the cards themselves are interesting - extremely remotely similar to the European Tarot, except with poems.

There are a hundred cards, each representing a person from Japanese antiquity, and each with an associated poem. So for example you have the Koko Emperor's poem:

It is for your sake
That I walk the fields in spring,
Gathering green herbs,

While my garment's hanging sleeves
Are speckled with falling snow.

The Chunagon Yukihara's poem:

Though we are parted,
If on Mount Inaba's peak
I should hear the sound

Of the pine trees growing there,
I'll come back again to you.

Okikaze Fujiwara's:

Who is still alive
When I have grown so old
That I can call my friends?

Even Takasago's pines
No longer offer comfort.

And 97 others. You can read them all here in rather nifty Japanese/Romaji/English frames; click on the numbers to get pictures.

If I was going to run a game set in Japan, I'd like to use the Hyakunin-isshu as a kind of randomiser mechanism, perhaps dictating different events for a given month or season. So each in-game month you'd draw one of the cards and, based on that, determine matters which are not directly related to the PCs - e.g. things going on between different NPCs, the weather, general success or failure or shifts in power dynamics of different groupings. That sort of thing.