27. Zhuo Lu, in the present Hebei Province, China, was the scene of an ancient battle involving the legendary Yellow Emperor.
28. Alludes to a poem by Ki no Tsurayuki: “Composed for a person who was going to Michinokuni: Even far away where white clouds pile in myriad layers let not your heart grow distant from him who thinks of you” (Kokinshū, no. 380).
29. “Cosmic epoch” (kō): kalpa, a Sanskrit term for an almost unimaginably long period of time. Here the reference is to the second kalpa, during which there is life on earth. Epidemics and famines did occur throughout the country in the 1450s. This sentence echoes Kamo no Chomei’s description of Kyoto in 1182, in An Account of my Ten-Foot-Square Hut (Hōjōki).
30. “Grass of forgetfulness” (wasuregusa) is a kind of day lily (Hemerocallis aurantiaca) mentioned in The Tales of Ise, sec. 100: “Long ago, as a man was passing by the Kōrōden, a high-ranking lady sent a message out to him, saying, Do you refer to the grass of forgetfulness as grass of remembrance? to which he replied, This may look to be a field overgrown with grass of forgetfulness, but it is remembrance, and I shall continue to depend on you.”
31. Alludes to a poem in the Man‘yōshū: “I wish for a horse whose hoofs would make no sound. Across the jointed bridge of Mama in Katsushika would I always go to her” (no. 3387).
32. This paragraph contains several echoes of “The Wormwood Patch,” chapter 15 of The Tale of Genji.
33. “The Cloud of Shaman Hill” refers to a story in the Wen Xuan (sixth century), in which King Xiang of Chu dreams that he has slept with a woman at Shaman Hill (Wu Shan, in Sichuan), who turns out to have been a cloud. “The Apparition in the Han Palace” derives from a story in the Han shu, in which the Han emperor, Wu, grieving the death of a beloved lady, commands a sorcerer to summon her spirit. Both episodes bespeak a confusion of illusion and reality.
34. That is, “I would not prolong my life [the perfect tile] by being unfaithful, even though death [crushing of the jade] might be the consequence.”
35. Alludes to a poem by Taira no Kanemori: “If unknown to him I die of longing while I wait for him to come, for what shall I say I have exchanged my life?” (Goshūishū, no. 656).
36. Alludes to a poem by Priest Henjō: “The house is ruined, the people are grown old—both garden and brushwood-fence have become a wild autumn moor” (Kokinshū, no. 248).
37. Alludes to a poem by Ariwara no Narihira: “The moon is not that moon nor the spring the spring of old, I alone am as I was before” (The Tales of Ise, sec. 4, and Kokinshū, no. 747).
38. Miyagi’s waka is borrowed from Gon Chūnagon Atsutada kyō shū (Gunsho ruijū, no. 235), the collection of the courtier and poet Fujiwara no Atsutada (905?–943).
39. The old man’s narrative is based on a long poem by Takahashi Mushimaro: “Of the Maiden of Mama of Katsushika” (Man‘yōshū, no. 1807).
40. Cape Miwa (Miwagasaki) is in the present city of Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, on the southeast shore of the Kii Peninsula.
41. Yamato is now Nara Prefecture, south of Kyoto.
42. The Three Mountains (shrines) of Kumano—the Hongū, Shingū, and Kumano Nachi Shrines—together constituted a popular destination for pilgrimages in the Heian period. The retired emperor Go Shirakawa is said to have made the pilgrimage, a round trip requiring nearly a month, as often as thirty-four times.
43. Toyoo is showing off his learning. The poem is by Naga Okimaro and is in the Man‘yōshū, no. 265.
44. That is, “If I died without saying anything, some god would be blamed unfairly for my death, and so I shall tell you.” Manago’s speech tends to be flowery and decorated with poetic allusions. In this case, the allusion is to a poem by Ariwara no Narihira: “If I died of love unknown to others, pointlessly, which god would carry the unfounded blame?” (The Tales of Ise, sec. 89, and Shinzokukokinshū, no. 1157).
45. In Heian court society, it was customary for the husband and wife to live separately and for the husband to spend the night with his wife from time to time.
46. Alludes to a poem by Naga Okimaro: “Even in the palace it can be heard—the cry of a fisherman assembling the net boys to pull in the nets” (Man‘yōshū, no. 238).
47. Here and later the text uses stock expressions to indicate, without repeating them, that all the details are being provided.
48. The description of the house and grounds echoes “The Evening Faces,” chapter 4 of The Tale of Genji.
49. Hoes (kuwa, here perhaps plows), symbolic of agriculture, are often found among a shrine’s treasures.
50. Tsubaichi (Tsuba Market), now part of Miwa-chō, Sakurai City, at the foot of Mount Miwa, in Nara Prefecture, was a market town on the approach to Hasedera, the celebrated Buddhist temple at Hatsuse (now Hase, in Sakurai). Since ancient times, Mount Miwa has been associated with a snake cult.
51. A popular belief held that ghosts and other supernatural beings cast no shadows, nor did their clothing have seams, however cunningly they might disguise themselves as humans.
52. Naniwa is the present-day city of Osaka.
53. Twin cedars standing on the banks of the Hatsuse River and associated with the sun goddess, Amaterasu, were celebrated in poetry as a sign of meeting or reuniting. In “The Jeweled Chaplet,” chapter 23 of The Tale of Genji, Ukon, overjoyed to find Tamakazura at Hasedera, recites: “Had I not come to the spot where twin cedars stand would I have met you on this ancient river bank?” Ukon adds, “on the rapids of joy” (ureshiki se ni mo), in which se (rapids) also denotes an occasion or opportunity and echoes the se in Hatsuse.
54. The image of clouds rising at night and producing rain, which then abates at dawn, suggests lovemaking. There is perhaps an echo here of the legend of King Xiang of Chu, who dreamed that he had slept with a woman at Shaman Hill who turned out to have been a rain cloud. Mount Takama is the highest peak in the Katsuragi (formerly Kazuraki) Range, southwest of Hatsuse. The bell at Hatsuse Temple anticipates that of Dōjōji, the temple that figures in the ending of the story.
55. Alludes to a poem by Emperor Tenmu: “On the occasion of a visit to the Yoshino palace: Yoshino, which good people could well see was good, and said is good—look well, good people, look well” (Man‘yōshū, no. 27).
56. Much of this description derives from “Lavender,” chapter 5 of The Tale of Genji: “Stepping outside, he looked out from the high vantage point and could clearly see monks’ residences here and there below.” “The sky at dawn was very thick with haze, and mountain birds were chirping everywhere. The blossoms of trees and grasses whose names he did not know scattered in a profusion of color.”
57. She echoes the spirit that possesses the lady in “Evening Faces,” chapter 4 of The Tale of Genji: “Though I admire you so much, you do not think of visiting me, but instead keep company with this undistinguished person and bestow your favors on her. I am mortified and hurt.”
58. In addition to reminding the reader of the cliché that vows are “deeper than the seas and higher than the mountains,” this phrase refers to the seas around the province of Kii and the mountains in the province of Yamato.
59. The Buddhist temple Dōjōji, about twenty-five miles from Shiba, is remembered particularly for the legend of the monk Anchin, from Kurama, and Kiyohime, the daughter of the steward of Masago in the village of Shiba. According to the legend, Kiyohime fell in love with the handsome young Anchin when he spent the night at her father’s house on a pilgrimage to Kumano. When he failed to return to her, as he had promised, her jealous anger turned her into a serpent and she pursued him to Dōjōji, where he had taken refuge inside the temple bell. She coiled around the bell and roasted him to death. The story is familiar through many versions, including the nō play Dōjōji.
Chapter 15
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WAKA AND NATIVIST STUDY
By the mid-eighteenth century, the center of poetic activity for the thirty-one-syllable waka had shifted from the dōjō, or court aristocrats, who had monopolized waka in the m
edieval period, to the jige, or commoner poets, who revolutionized the genre. The court poets had belonged to various aristocratic poetic houses such as the Nijō, Reizei, Kyōgoku, and Asukai, which formed exclusive societies in which poetry was read, composed, and taught. These poets based their poetry on that of the Kokinshū, the Shinkokinshū, and other imperial waka anthologies of the Heian and early medieval periods, with guidelines for the interpretation and composition of poetry passed on from master to disciple in the form of closely guarded hiden, or secret transmissions.
In the seventeenth century, a number of commoner scholars challenged the authority of the court poets, charging that their blind acceptance of the traditions of their poetic houses, as imparted in the secret transmissions, drove them to perpetuate errors in textual interpretation and imposed arbitrary restrictions on poetic composition. Such scholars as Shimokōbe Chōryū (1627–1686), Toda Mosui (1629–1706), and, most notably, the Buddhist priest Keichū (1640–1701) responded to the weaknesses they found in court poetics by developing a philological mode of scholarship in which they interpreted texts not by relying on the authority of previous commentaries but by searching for evidence within the texts themselves. This methodological break with the court poets was accompanied by a shift in emphasis to the eighth-century Man‘yōshū, which generally lay outside the purview of court poetics. Chōryū and Keichū produced groundbreaking studies of this anthology, which were followed in the eighteenth century by a revival of poetry in the Man‘yōshū style, a movement led by the scholar and poet Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769).
Kokugaku, or nativist learning, is a term used to refer to a number of tendencies in Tokugawa literary, religious, and political thought, all concerned in some way with recovering native Japanese traditions and cultural forms. Although in the nineteenth century, kokugaku developed into a form of religious-political activism aimed at overthrowing the Tokugawa bakufu and restoring imperial rule, during the eighteenth century it was primarily a scholarly movement directed toward the study of native literary texts and Shintō. Important early figures in kokugaku include Keichū, who is often considered its founder, and Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), who was a Shinto priest at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto and a scholar of Shinto and waka. In turn, Keichū and Azumamaro were important influences on Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), both of whom wrote commentaries on Japanese texts and helped systematize kokugaku as a scholarly methodology.
As a form of scholarship, kokugaku can refer broadly to scholarship centered on native Japanese texts, but the term is usually used more narrowly to indicate a certain attitude toward these texts, one that tries to find in them a uniquely Japanese spirit or tradition. The study of the Japanese classics had taken the form of commentaries as early as the Nara period (710–794), when scholars began to comment on the Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan) not long after it was written. Such major works of the Heian period as The Tale of Genji, The Tales of Ise, and the Kokinshū became the object of extensive commentaries from around the twelfth century onward. The development of kokugaku in the Tokugawa period involved a repudiation of many of these earlier commentaries, in part because of their philological inaccuracies, but also because they interpreted Japanese texts through the lens of foreign value systems like Buddhism.
Kokugaku scholars leveled similar charges against contemporary Tokugawa period attempts to view Japanese texts through a Song Confucian conceptual framework, especially the application to Japanese texts of the notion that literature should serve to “encourage good and chastise evil” (kanzen chōaku). By liberating native texts from what they saw as the constrictive moralism of foreign forms of thought, kokugaku scholars could read these texts as the product of a native emotionality that expressed human nature on a more elemental level, irreducible to the rigid good and evil of Confucianism and Buddhism (although as many scholars have pointed out, the supposedly purely native values of kokugaku in fact owed much to various strains of continental thought). Indeed, the development of kokugaku represents one response to the growing sense of social fragmentation in the eighteenth century, and in this context the discovery of a native emotionality was related to the imagining of a distinctly Japanese social structure in which people lived in a state of harmony, their relations governed by mutual empathy rather than by oppressive moral codes.
As scholars became concerned with identifying purely Japanese forms of literary expression, waka—which had been the orthodox literary form from as early as the Heian period—acquired greater ideological significance. Kokugaku scholars such as Mabuchi and Norinaga regarded Japanese history as a process of decline from an ideal past, a decline brought about by the infiltration of foreign (particularly Chinese) institutions and forms of thought. These scholars were attracted to waka because both its language, which eschewed Chinese loanwords, and its subject matter, whose emotional character was contrasted with Chinese rationalist thought, were considered to be purely native. Also, many kokugaku scholars were preoccupied with the supposedly corruptive effects of the introduction of Chinese characters (kanji) to Japan and saw waka as preserving an ancient oral culture uncontaminated by the continental writing system. In this way, even though the composition and study of waka retained their importance as literary endeavors, they also became a way to access an idealized native language and culture.
DEBATE ON THE EIGHT POINTS OF JAPANESE POETRY
The debate on the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry (Kokka hachiron), which centered on the question of the relationship of poetry to politics and morality, was probably the most important literary controversy of the eighteenth century. It began in 1742 when Tayasu Munetake requested that Kada no Arimaro (1706–1751), who was in his service at the time as a classical studies assistant, give his views on waka. Arimaro, the nephew and adopted son of the kokugaku scholar Kada no Azumamaro, responded with an essay entitled Eight Points of Japanese Poetry (Kokka hachiron), made up of eight short sections, each dealing with a specific aspect of waka, such as poetic diction, the origins of waka, and the relative merits of various periods in the history of waka.
The section that sparked the greatest disagreement was the one entitled “On Poetry as Amusement,” in which Arimaro argued that although waka was a source of pleasure and a means for scholars to appreciate the purity of the Japanese language, it had no ethical or political value. This view collided with that of Munetake, who, in a rebuttal entitled My Views on the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry (Kokka hachiron yogen, 1742), upheld the political and moral functions of poetry from a Confucian perspective. Both Arimaro and Munetake saw poetry as having undergone a process of historical change in which it had become separated from its original character as orally performed song and developed into a form of linguistic artifice. But whereas Arimaro celebrated this transformation of poetry into artifice or rhetoric (waza), praising the Shinkokinshū for its refined expression and criticizing ancient poetry as crude and unsophisticated, Munetake deplored what he regarded as the trivialization and decadence of poetry and tried to recover its moral function by returning to the poetry of the Man’yōshū.
In time, Munetake asked Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) for his opinion on the matter. Mabuchi agreed that poetry should have a role in governance and, like Munetake, found his poetic ideal in the Man‘yōshū. But he criticized Munetake for locating the political function of poetry in its ability to serve as a vehicle for rational principle (ri). In the passage included here from Another Reply to Tayasu Munetake (Futatabi kingo no kimi ni kotaematsuru no sho, 1744), Mabuchi argues that the political benefits of poetry come instead from its ability to express people’s deepest emotions, thereby allowing rulers to know the true nature of their subjects (a view that itself can be seen as very Confucian, although Confucian in a different way from the position taken by Munetake). Within Munetake’s framework the depiction of immorality in poetry was tolerated to the extent that it showed the negative consequences of such behavior, thus serving as an admonition. For Mabuchi,
however, this immorality was admissible because it represented genuine emotion, a view that appeared again and was developed further in Motoori Norinaga’s theory of literature as an expression of mono no awaré, or the pathos of things.
While Munetake and Mabuchi did not agree completely, the series of responses to Arimaro’s essay made it apparent that Mabuchi had more in common with Munetake than Arimaro did, and eventually Arimaro resigned from his position with Munetake and recommended Mabuchi as his replacement. Mabuchi served Munetake from 1746 to 1760, a period in which both cultivated their Man‘yōshū-style poetry and became two of the most influential poets of their day. The debate over the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry marked a watershed in the history of early modern waka. All the participants were united in rejecting the authority of medieval court poetics and so clearly belonged to a new age in waka, while their differences of opinion brought to the forefront key issues regarding the value, function, and content of poetry. The debate was revived in the 1760s with a new set of participants, when Norinaga, Ban Kōkei (1733–1806), and others offered responses to the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry, in this way developing their own ideas through a dialogue with Arimaro’s essay and demonstrating its continued relevance.
KADA NO ARIMARO
EIGHT POINTS OF JAPANESE POETRY (KOKKA HACHIRON, 1742)
On Poetry as Amusement
Poetry [uta] does not belong among the six arts,1 and so by nature it is of no use in governing the realm, nor is it of any benefit to everyday life. The statements in the preface to the Kokinshū about how poetry “moves heaven and earth” and “arouses feeling in gods and demons” come from believing in baseless theories.2 To a certain extent, poetry may console the hearts of brave warriors, but how could it do this as well as music does? Poetry may facilitate the relations between men and women, but doesn’t it also encourage licentiousness? Poetry is therefore not something to be venerated. Rather, when we see poems that are elegant in expression or deep in meaning, with their words skillfully connected or depicting a scene as if before our very eyes, we also want to achieve this. And if we can manage to compose even a single poem that satisfies our heart, it will never fail to bring pleasure. This is the same feeling as, for example, that of a painter who successfully completes a picture or a go player who wins a game.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 86