Organizer and Chair: Edward B. Kamens, Yale University
Discussant: Edward B. Kamens, Yale University
In 905, Ki no Tsurayuki described the Japanese poem as having its origin in human emotions that take form through their expression in the words of song. The rhetoric of this description became a dogma of traditional Japanese poetics, espoused by practitioner-theorists for hundreds of years. But in Tsurayuki's own time, and earlier and later as well, most poetic production took place in settings and circumstances that removed poets and their poems several steps from this idealized process of "heart" to "word," and the way in which a poem or poems took shape was as likely to be determined by social or political aspects of the occasion, or by convention, as by a poet's own "feelings." In many cases a reversal of Tsurayuki's account of poetic production seems more apt: "word" (discourse, oral and written) existed in a state conditioned by prior usage and then was put to use in poems which, to a greater or lesser extent, reflected something that their makers "felt" when they made them. But often what was "felt" more than anything else was the consciousness that a poem was being made.
One trend in recent scholarship on traditional Japanese poetry has been to focus on the contexts in which poetic texts were made. The papers in this panel will present such interpretations and analyses of poems and related documents from various eras and environments, illuminating the relationship between the conditions governing compositional events and the poems produced in those circumstances. For Western scholarship on Japanese poetry, in particular, such an approach represents a shift away from emphasis on the affective lyricism of Japanese poetics, as an isolated aesthetic, toward an interest in the matrix of multivalent factors that shaped individual works in the tradition as well as the tradition itself.
The Silla Envoy Poems in the Man'yoshu
H. Mack Horton, University of California, Berkeley
In the sixth month of 736, a diplomatic mission from the Nara court set out for Silla on the Korean peninsula. The envoys, Kenshiragishi, undertook the mission during a period of strained relations with the country of their destination, met with adverse winds and disease during the voyage, and returned empty handed.
The story of this ill-fated effort is recorded in Book Fifteen of Man'yoshu...... This group of 145 poems (nos. 3578-3722) is the first extended poetic treatment of travel in extant Japanese literature, antedating Tosa nikki by nearly two centuries. It demonstrates in a prototypical manner the mechanisms through which the travel experience is transmogrified by the literary imagination. The Silla Envoy Poems constitute the beginnings of the fixed travel form, and as such correspond well to questions about the relationship between form, creativity, and observed fact that will be the panel's theme. A more sophisticated extension of the border guard category of poetry, these Silla poems construct the travel experience in a fashion premonitory of the utamonogatari genre, and they prefigure the travel hon'i, the use of honka and proto-utamakura, and the associative-progressive techniques found in later travel works. I will discuss selected poems to show that the group is a work of "documentary fiction," with the actual facts of the voyage, told in part in Shoku nihongi, selectively refashioned to create a conscious literary travel tale, in which natural imagery is creatively employed as the temporal and spatial correlative of the poetic imagination.
Minamoto Ienaga's View of the Shinkokin Era
Robert N. Huey, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Minamoto Ienaga (1173?-1234) was a minor courtier who might have been consigned to obscurity except, it seems, for his handwriting. Go-Toba, who "retired" in 1198 at the age of 19, took a liking to him and brought him into service, first as a confidant and later as Recording Secretary (kaiko) for the Bureau of Poetry (Wakadokoro). Unfortunately, Ienaga was not much of a record-keeper. When he sat down to write his memoirs about 1220, he found that he had forgotten a lot, and had lost his notes for much of the rest! Nevertheless, he produced a remarkable document now known as Minamoto Ienaga Nikki, a unique view of the courtly and poetic world surrounding the creation of the waka anthology Shinkokinshu, covering the years between 1196 and 1207. An intimate, relaxed, anecdotal portrait of a pivotal moment in Japanese cultural history, it forms the basis for much of what we know about the process and the players. It is also in wabun, which sets it apart from the kanbun journals that make up the usual historian's documentation.
But Ienaga's diary is nonetheless a document. Among other things, it tells how Go-Toba set about to build a literary consensus by bringing new poets into his court. It also describes in moving language that betrays much about the medieval mind the deaths of several important figures, including Shikishi Naishinno and the priest Jakuren. The rhetoric of waka lies behind the world Ienaga describes, and my presentation will look closely at several sections of Ienaga's diary to see what they reveal about poetry-making and other aspects of Go-Toba's literary world, and how they are revealed.
The Persistence of the Personal in Late Medieval Uta
Steven D. Carter, University of California, Irvine
The ancient uta form was by the fifteenth century a highly conventionalized genre. And poetic practice was equally conventionalized. For historical records make it clear that almost all uta written in the late medieval period were produced in social settings, according to rigid standards of performance and etiquette. Unfortunately, there is little sign of the latter fact in the poems as we tend to encounter them now. There is, however, one bit of "residue" of the setting of their production that is generally retained even when the poems have been radically recontextualized-namely their dai, conventional topics.
One function of dai was to give participants in poetic gatherings common ground on which to display their competence as "masters" of the courtly arts. Ironically, however, this meant that their individual poems were at the point of presentation immediately recontextualized as part of a communal effort that denied the possibility of more personal statement. So dai, along with other conventions, made it possible to stand out from the crowd only in terms of a higher level of competence. Yet there are hints in diaries, poetic memoirs, and sometimes even in anthologies, that give us room to dispute that generalization. In this paper it will be my business to present a few of those hints that show a desire among both producers and consumers for a more personal poetic voice and then to consider how that desire can be directly related to the medieval ideal of ushin, or sincerity-an ideal that seems, in the late medieval period, at least, to be often at cross purposes with itself.
Voices from the Oku: The Poetic Tradition and Sengoku Castle Women
Janet Ikeda, University of Virginia
This paper will examine the social and cultural context of castle women writing waka from their position in the late medieval ie. Scholars have been harsh in their treatment of waka composed by members of the warrior class during the late fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. Many claim that, in search of legitimacy, warrior men and women imitated the court in a number of ways, from adoption of ancient ceremonial practices, food and dress to appropriation of the waka tradition. Literary studies of warrior poetry seem to blame its authors for their strict adherence to the orthodox Nijo style exemplified by the well-known poet-warrior, Hosokawa Yusai (1534-1610). In the case of waka, the search for a balance of bu, the military arts, and bun, the literary arts, among the warrior elite has been viewed as the cause of a rupture between poetic tradition and personal experience: while bu and bun politically complemented each other, warriors continued to write orthodox poetry in settings that seldom intersected with their other spheres of activity.
Some or all of this may have been true for male poet-warriors. But were women as tightly shackled to the court tradition? Was silence the only result when they were relegated to the oku, or inner recesses, of their castle dwellings? Newly identified sources now allow us to examine the environment in which sengoku women received education in the literary tradition and then composed waka-to commemorate special occasions, for didactic purposes, and to record their own death. Kokubungaku scholars have not even recognized these women as poets, but it is my purpose to reopen a discussion of waka composition as it was actively practiced among women of the elite warrior class.