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Power and Passion: Heian and Kamakura Patronage from Poetry to Sumo
Organizer and Chair: Robert Omar Khan, University of London SOAS, United Kingdom
Discussants: Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia, Canada and Steven D. Carter, Stanford University
Patronage relationships that negotiated and recorded the hierarchy structures between the powerful and their clients during the Heian and Kamakura eras left some of their most eloquent and subtly nuanced testimony in poems expressing those relationships. Such materials thus acquire a documentary value and richly elaborate the specific relationships between historical figures, exemplify the range of patterns that these relations could assume, and provide an insight into continuity and change in such configurations over four hundred years and a range of cultural practices that went beyond the purely literary.
The papers in this panel examine poems relating to patronage relationships between men at three distinct historical moments: the period of the first two imperial poetry anthologies, the Kokinshû and the Gosenshû, in the early tenth century; the sumô rituals between the late twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries; and the imperial court in the early fourteenth century. These materials show some surprising inversions of expectations and vigorous negotiation of the hierarchical relationship from both sides, including triangulations involving third parties, performance and manipulation of gender roles, and highly instrumental usage of poetry within apparently passionate relationships.
The two discussants are encouraged to address the papers contrastively, commenting on gender, sexuality and the use of relevant theory, as well as the validity of the close-readings of the poems and their interpretation in the light of their sociopolitical, cultural, literary, and historical context.
Ritual Dominance and Submission: Patronage and Courtship in the World of The Sumô Tale and its Poems
Robert Omar Khan, University of London SOAS, United Kingdom
The surviving fragments of the lost thirteenth-century Sumai Monogatari offer a highly suggestive commentary on the conventional formulations of romantic intercourse in the court tale fictional tradition, but they also marry this both to the sparsely-documented world of elite male same-sex sexuality and to highly politicized changes in the patronage of sumô rituals over the course of the Heian and Kamakura periods.
As a purely literary document, the Sumô Tale might be thought merely to exemplify the inversion of conventions and expectations considered to be a hallmark of late-Heian and Kamakura court fiction, including particularly gender inversions. But even here the full-fledged transposition of courtship conventions to an all-male relationship is relatively unusual in a court context. Yet the text goes further and provocatively transgresses the expected social and geographical hierarchies.
Perhaps most interestingly, by situating the romance in the world of the sumô rituals, the text may even be commenting on important shifts in patronage relationships that had occurred in numerous cultural domains up to the medieval period. This paper will examine how this text could be read as a document commenting on these shifts in patronage and the wider political context, thus showing the importance of recuperating such fragmentary and neglected materials.
A Perfect Union? Emperor Fushimi, Kyôgoku Tamekane, and Their Poetic Gems
Stefania Burk, University of British Columbia, Canada
Amaterasu’s unruly brother Susanoo finally relinquishes to her his sword. In Kojiki, this gesture occurs immediately before Susanoo composes his yakumo tatsu poem, which the Kokinshû preface enshrines as the first regular (and meaningful) 31-syllable waka. The progenitors of the imperial line and waka come from the same “house,” but one rules and the other submits. The Kokinshû preface goes on to recount the benefits of a “perfect union” between ruler and subject via the relationship between the Nara Emperor and the poet Hitomaro. These mytho-histories helped construct and naturalize an intimate—yet hierarchical and often charged—relationship between imperial authority and waka.
While in reality patronage came in many shapes over the course of the centuries, it is arguable that the relationship between a ruler and his favored poet remained, at least until the end of the Kamakura period, the central model in terms of the communal imaginary as well as actual court production. The relationship between Emperor Fushimi and Kyôgoku Tamekane certainly stands out in these terms. Four hundred years after the Kokinshû preface, during the late Kamakura period, the ruler Fushimi and the poet Tamekane both faced threats to the authority of their lineages. Through readings of some poems from their collaborations—Kingyoku utaawase (ca. 1304) and Gyokuyôshû (ca. 1312)—this paper will consider how and to what ends these two men embraced and manipulated the paradigmatic relationship of ruler and servant/poet.
Male Triangles of Poetry, Patronage, and Passion at the 10th-Century Heian Court.
Gustav Heldt, University of Virginia
The development of officially-sanctioned forms of waka poetry at the 10th-century Heian court, exemplified by the compilation of the Kokinshû, poetry matches, and screen poetry, is commonly described as the product of a mode of poetic patronage in which lower-ranking male officials received promotions in exchange for composing poems that were used by aristocrats in their dealings with one another. To date, however, the threefold nature of these relationships involving “professional poets,” their patrons, and those patrons’ peers have been neglected in favor of a focus on the first two parties.
This paper will explore the triangular dimensions of Heian poetic production, by focusing on an exchange of banquet poems between the paradigmatic ”professional” court poet Ki no Tsurayuki and two of his aristocratic patrons, men who were themselves involved in a patron-client relationship with one another. The complex social dynamics of this situation are expressed through a correspondingly ambiguous use of erotic language in the three men’s poems. This paper will argue that, in addition to complicating any one-dimensional reading of expressions of sexual desire between Heian men, this three-way exchange also allows us to see court poetry as something that could produce political and personal relationships which were open to manipulation by multiple parties.