Organizer: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Chair: Steve Rabson, Brown University
Traveling Home: The Poetry of Yamanoue no Okura
Karen Thornber, Harvard University
The poetry of Yamanoue no Okura (660–ca.733) occupies a unique position in the Man’yoshu. Okura addresses social concerns left unarticulated by other Japanese poets until the twentieth century. Moreover, unlike most of his peers, he adopts the persona of a strident moralist seemingly devoid of emotion, or that of an aging individual with an almost obsessive focus on his every ache and pain. However, while Okura’s poetry often isolates the reader, it also takes the poet to a new understanding of his responsibility to his people.
I will open with some brief comments concerning the importance of Okura’s emergence in the Man’yoshu. I then will discuss the transformation that occurs in the fifth book, where the majority of his poems were placed. In the early poems, the poet attempts to retreat from the suffering of those around him by resorting to rhetoric. Gradually, however, he begins to struggle to speak for his people. Because Okura’s poems are not arranged in the order of their composition, it is not that the historical poet Okura "changed" over time. Rather, in compiling the Man’yoshu, Otomo no Yakamochi "created" a poet who searches for a voice with which to speak for those whose suffering knows no bounds.
Much has been written on the "uniqueness" and "originality" Okura displays in individual poems. However, it is examining these poems in context that allows us a greater appreciation of Okura’s contributions both to the Man’yoshu, and to Japanese poetry.
Textual Seduction and the Art of Resistance: Silence and Eloquence in the Tamakazura Chapters
Lili Selden, University of Michigan
Hikaru Genji’s impressive success in courtship is due no more to his physical attractiveness than to the aesthetically and emotionally compelling rhetoric he employs with potential lovers. In my paper, I wish to examine Genji’s promotion of his foster daughter, Tamakazura, as an object of desire, and Tamakazura’s agency as a desiring subject responding to the appeals of an array of suitors. Complicating the usual negotiations between father figures and potential husbands is the fact that Tamakazura has to cope with the very real threat of Genji taking her as his own lover.
As might be expected, Genji relies upon a variety of imaginative discursive strategies, first, to attract desirable attention to his foster daughter, and second, to press his own suit. How does Tamakazura, handicapped by being at Genji’s mercy financially and psychologically, resist his rhetorical and physical advances? Her resistance to Genji’s manipulative rhetoric persuades him to resign himself to the role of flirtatious but benign benefactor. In terms of the narrative structure, however, what does it mean that Tamakazura is eventually deprived, by an aggressive suitor who invades her boudoir, of the opportunity to select her mate?
Significantly, the intrusive scribe-narrator’s perspective shifts in the crucial moments before and after Tamakazura’s unexpected seduction. I argue that the narrator’s silence regarding the night of Tamakazura’s forced marriage indicates an implicit comment on the vulnerability of a woman’s agency. I explore the social constraints operating on Tamakazura in and around that ellipsis, and investigate the seams between her poetry and the narrator’s prose to reveal the text’s manipulative strategy of alternately fulfilling and frustrating the narratee’s expectations.
From Fratricide to Brotherly Love: Refiguring Fraternity in Medieval Warrior Narrative
Elizabeth Oyler, Stanford University
This study investigates the narrativization of events concerning Minamoto Yoritomo’s consolidation of power following the Gempei War (1180–1185). Focusing primarily on episodes from the Tale of the Heike, Yoshitsune, and the Tale of the Soga Brothers, this presentation engages the difficult issue of fratricide within the Minamoto kinship group during the war and the refiguring of fraternal affinity and loyalty in accounts of the exploits of Soga Gorô and Jûrô that occur immediately thereafter. Particular attention is paid to explicit allusion to Minamoto heroes Yoshinaka and Yoshitsune in characterizations of the Soga brothers, who are portrayed both as inheritors of the heroic tradition initiated by Yoshitsune and Yoshinaka and as a new slate upon which the terms fraternity could be rewritten.
In addition to the more or less codified texts mentioned above, I will draw from representations of this heroic lineage in other narrative and dramatic traditions (nô, otogizôshi, kôwakamai) from the Muromachi and early Tokugawa periods. My intention is to first trace the development of characterization of the Soga brothers as refigurings of Yoshinaka and Yoshitsune, and then consider the impact of affiliation between the two pairs within the realm of historical narrative. In so doing, I will demonstrate the parameters involved in the production of historical narrative and the role that narrative plays in authorizing versions of the past.
Discursive Chaos in the Age of Modernization: The Production of National Literature in Tsubouchi Shôyô’s Shôsetsu shinzui
Atsuko Ueda, University of Michigan
In a conventional narrative of modern Japanese literary history, Tsubouchi Shôyô’s Shôsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885–6) is valorized as the first critical work to call for the modernization of Japanese literature. This line of argument, however, presupposes the existence of Japanese literature as "national literature" prior to Shôsetsu shinzui. Meiji (1868–1912) was a time when the boundaries of "Japanese" and "literature" were yet to be fixed. In fact, Meiji Japan was in the process of establishing a new national identity. In the age of "de-Asianization and Westernization" (datsu a nyû ô), it was vital that Japan sever itself from China, its long term mentor, and enter into a relationship with the West. By discussing the inextricable relationship between the production of modern shôsetsu and the drive to establish a modern nation state, my paper argues that Shôyô needed to produce the "national literature" of Japan in accordance with this historical condition. In writing Shôsetsu shinzui, Shôyô constructed a Japanese "literary tradition" embodying the national identity of Japan. Such a "literary tradition" is still reproduced in the master narrative of modern Japanese literary history we have today.
By focusing on the moment national literature was produced, my paper explores what was suppressed and what was emphasized in the formation of national literature. My point of departure will be the genealogy of shôsetsu provided in the opening passage of Shôsetsu shinzui. Contextualizing the genealogy within the discursive space of the time, I analyze the selection/filtering process involved in Shôyô’s attempt to construct this genealogy. My paper thus attempts to situate Shôsetsu shinzui within the discursive chaos of its times in order to reexamine the definition of "national literature" that governs the institution of Japanese literature today.
The Postmodern Cognitive Map in Murakami Haruki’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Chiyoko Kawakami, Pennsylvania State University
The suppressive social institution/suppressed individual binarism is an ideological paradigm that has long served modern Japanese writers of the so-called jun bungaku (pure literature) as a conceptual framework for relating the self to the larger society. Since the 1970s, however, the authenticity of this privileged paradigm has been eroded by Murakami Haruki’s (1949–) protagonists—invariably male, urbane, bored with life, often unemployed—who are not at all interested, much less engaged, in any social or political struggle. The seemingly frivolous and unsubstantial quality of the protagonists led the critic Miyoshi Masao, for one, to dismiss Murakami’s works as "all sophisticated stylization of trivia," and Oe Kenzaburo to criticize them as a mere "influence on the lifestyles of youth."
I argue, however, that Murakami’s protagonists, despite, or rather because of, their insubstantiality, raise a timely question—that is, how is the individual to maintain a social bond when the society itself is losing its ideological identity? In other words, these characters problematize the very viability of the privileged binarism that Miyoshi or Oe base their criticism on and point out the change in the perception of social suppression. For Murakami’s protagonists, suppression no longer originates from a power that assumes the form of a self-consistent ideological unit (such as the State, the Emperor system, or the patriarchal system) but rather from its absence. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) addresses these issues in a most consistent manner: it provides a Jamesonian "cognitive map" that presents "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality." What we see in the story is a new form of the power which is not at all ideological, but far more materialistic and irrevocably fragmented.