Organizer: Torquil Duthie, University of Pittsburgh

Chair: Haruo Shirane, Columbia University

Commentaries, the main form in which literary scholarship was conducted in premodern and early modern Japan, are not just records of the textual interpretations of particular individuals or institutions. They are also traces of interpersonal transactions wherein a party with some claim to authority attempts to persuade an audience or group of readers.  Commentaries are thus intimately connected to the power relations within and among various scholastic institutions, by virtue both of the distinctive knowledge they contain and of the practices surrounding their production and transmission.

This panel examines aspects of the massive commentarial traditions surrounding four of the most important premodern texts in the Japanese literary canon. Jamie Newhard considers late medieval commentators’ constructions of Ise monogatari as either factual or fictitious, and the role of genre designations in their production of distinguishing secret teachings. Lewis Cook examines the aesthetic imperative implicit in three major Nijo School commentaries, arguing that their use as textbooks served to redescribe the classical  (Heian) canon according to a program of post-classical (medieval) values which was never effectively challenged. Torquil Duthie explores the relationship between philological and ideological argument in early modern and modern commentaries of the Man’yoshu. Haruo Shirane examines the ways in which eighteenth century Confucian and Kokugaku commentaries of The Tale of Genji used earlier medieval readings of the Genji to counter the popular erotic perceptions of the tale. We have chosen not to have a formal discussant in order to allow more time for questions and comments from the audience.

Jamie L. Newhard, Arizona State University

Premodern commentators’ perceptions of the genre with which the 10^th century poem-tale Tales of Ise is most closely aligned (history, fiction, or poetry collection) exert a profound influence on the details they single out for attention, their interpretation of those details, and their sense of the Tales’ larger significance.  While late medieval commentators rejected in strong terms the earlier esoteric commentaries that had sought out historical facts and personages behind every incident in the Tales and began to view the text as at least partly fictitious, a closer examination reveals that what appears to be opportunistic use of old, unsupportable historical interpretation persists in these commentaries, a phenomenon related to value-enhancing stratification policies whereby "correct" interpretations were reserved for disciples of highest standing in the school, and alternate interpretations disseminated more widely.  This paper examines a corpus of secret teachings published in 1679 but traceable to 16^th century Nijo school scholars involved in the transmission of the kokindenju, that hinge on Tales of Ise’s generic status, attempting to resolve its ambiguities for insiders and to be certain that they endure for others, and highlights the significance of genre designations to the production of the text’s moral and ideological value.

Revised, Veiled, Beautified: Reading the Canon according to the Kokindenju

Lewis Cook, Queens College, CUNY

The imperative to "read (the text) beautifully," stated explicitly in Sogi’s comments on section 96 of Tales of Ise, is a pervasive motif of the textbooks and commentaries on the classical (mostly Heian) literary canon -- including Kokinshu, The Tale of Genji, Jisanka, and Hyakuninisshu in addition to Tales of Ise – composed or transmitted by Sogi and his school. The primary effect of this imperative was to draw the canon into conformity with a program of post-classical esthetic values – purportedly faithful to the intentions of Teika, and generically referred to by the term yugen -- even when doing so entailed deliberate, in some cases abusive misprision of the text.

From the moment of their initial dissemination in the late 15^th century, the Sogi school readings of the canon enjoyed immense prestige among the custodians and recipients of the classical canon, and although disputed with considerable intensity, they were never quite superseded by the counter-commentaries of Keichu, Norinaga, and other scholars associated with the Kokugaku movement. It is thus only reasonable to hypothesize that the influence of those readings persists today, and that it should be worth paying attention to what, exactly, Sogi and his heirs were doing when they promoted their estheticized reprision of the canon.

This paper will provide evidence for each of the assumptions implied by the contentions stated above, and a tentative argument regarding their import for contemporary reception of the classical literary canon.

Torquil Duthie, University of Pittsburgh

In the early twentieth century, the poetry anthology known as the Man’yoshu (c. eighth century) was canonized as one of the greatest and most fundamental works of Japanese literature. However, for much of its premodern history the Man’yoshu was regarded for the most part as an archaic and largely unintelligible text. According to its twentieth century canonizers, the history of the anthology consisted of a long and gradual process of deciphering that began hesitantly in the Heian and medieval periods, gathered momentum in the Edo period, and culminated with the restoration of the Man’yoshu to its rightful place at the top of the Japanese literary canon in the modern period. Of particular importance in this twentieth century narrative is the role of the so-called kokugaku scholars in the Edo period, who are credited with initiating the philological approach to the anthology that brought it out of obscurity. Since the end of World War II, kokugaku has also been the protagonist of a different narrative, in which it is the precursor of modern Japanese nationalism. This paper examines and questions the complex relationship between these two narratives—kokugaku as the origin of Japanese philology and kokugaku as the origin of Japanese nationalism—in the context of early modern and modern commentaries of the Man’yoshu.

Haruo Shirane, Columbia University

The major medieval commentaries of the Tale of Genji—from Koreyuki’s Genji shaku to the Kakaisho (c. 1360) and Ichijo Kanera’s Kacho yosei (1476)—focused on poetic allusion (hiki-uta), historical references (junkyo), chronologies (toshidate), genealogies (keizu), and narrational markers (soshiji), that is to say, they stressed The Tale of Genji’s relationship to poetry and history, two genres of recognized value, pushing it toward earlier genres such as history, biography, or poetry, by which the Kokinshu and The Tales of Ise had been defined. In the medieval period, reading the Tale of Genji became a part of aristocratic court (kuge) culture. In the Edo period commoners began to read The Tale of Genji in printed editions, probably using the Kogetsusho (1673), a printed edition of The Tale of Genji edited by haikai-scholar Kitamura Kigin (1624-1705). Eighteenth century Kokugaku scholars such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori no Norinaga also wrote commentaries for commoner disciples. Most commoner readers, however, probably did not have the ability to read even the Kogetsusho and likely read one of the Genji digests or contemporary translations/adaptations that proliferated in the Edo period and that often linked the world of the Genji to the pleasure quarters and Edo popular culture. This paper examines the various ways by which 18^th century Confucian and Kokugaku commentaries of The Tale of Genji used earlier medieval, Buddhist (and increasingly Confucian) readings of the Genji to counter or sublate the increasingly erotic and popular perception of The Tale of Genji among commoner audiences.