Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  “I’ve tried hard to find a moment when we could be alone, but they’re always watching. Last year in the Seventh Month, I was about to tell you all this, but just when I was going to approach you, I realized Mother was following me. So I panicked and walked the other way. After that they’ve kept us completely apart, and we haven’t seen each other even once. But they haven’t been able to keep me from secretly sending you my love. It never stops or changes. It’s an underground stream running from my heart to yours. Every single day I pray from morning to night that you’ll be safe and find success and wealth.

  “But you can’t expect me to endure your coldness forever. Is it really your duty to your aunt to abandon your own wife? If you felt for me even a hundredth of what I feel for you, you would have explained to me clearly that you didn’t know whether you would ever come back here, and you would have asked me to go away with you secretly. We’re already engaged, after all, and no one would have accused us of being immoral. You’re very cold. But the more I pity you, the more I don’t want to be apart from you. It’s my woman’s true heart. So I want you to kill me with your sword. It’s much better to die right now than to stay on in this village, abandoned, slowly dying of a love you ignore completely. I’ll be waiting for you in the other world until we can meet again, no matter how many years it takes.”

  Hamaji explained her many objections and appealed to Shino with the utmost feeling. She refused to cry, fearing someone would hear them, but tears found their way down her cheeks and covered her sleeves.

  “Don’t speak so loudly,” Shino wanted to say, “or someone will hear us. It would look pretty bad, wouldn’t it, our being together like this?” Overwhelmed by the strength of Hamaji’s feelings, however, he said nothing. There was no way for him to try to explain that their engagement had been only a temporary convenience for her stepparents. Overcome with sadness, he unfolded his arms and rested his hands on his knees.

  “Hamaji,” he said finally, “everything you say is reasonable and justified. But I didn’t choose to go. I’m making this trip because my aunt and her husband ordered me to make it. The real reason is that they want me out of the way so they can ask another man to come to live here as your husband. From the very beginning, I’ve been your husband in name only. They were just using me until they could find the right man. Your stepparents can’t tell you this directly, but surely you can guess their motives. Not only that. If I gave in to my feelings and invited you to go with me, everyone would think we did it only out of lust. If you could only control your desire to go with me and stay here instead, you would actually be acting for my sake. By forcing myself to leave, I’ll be acting for your sake, won’t I? Even if we’re separated for a while, as long as we stay true to each other, we’ll surely be together again someday. Quick, go back to your bedroom before your stepparents wake up. I won’t forget about your real parents, either. Somehow or other I’m sure I’ll be able to find out whether they’re still alive. Please, you’d better go now.”

  Hamaji remained where she was and shook her head. “I’ve come this far,” she said, “and I’m not going back now. If my parents wake up and criticize me for coming here, so be it. I have some things I’d like to say to say to them, too. Unless I hear you tell me you’re going to take me with you, I’m not going to leave this room alive. Please, kill me!” Women are usually weak, but Hamaji’s will was unshakable, and she refused to move.

  Shino was stunned. “Now you’re being unreasonable,” he said in a low yet emotional voice. “As long as we’re alive, we’ll surely meet again sometime. How can anyone possibly show she’s true to someone else by dying? And now, if you keep me from going out and making a career for myself as a warrior just when my aunt and her husband have finally given me permission to leave, if you block me now, then you’re not my wife! What are you, anyway? A karmic enemy from a previous life?”

  Hamaji broke down and cried. Finally she spoke. “When I try to persuade you from the bottom of my heart, you call me an avenging enemy! All right. There’s no way to get through to you. This is due to my own pettiness. All right. I give up. I’ll stay here in this house. Well then, please have a safe trip. The days have been getting very hot recently, so don’t stay out in the sun too long or you’ll get sick. Go on to Koga, make a name for yourself, and establish a clan with a line of descendants. Stay inside in winter, and when the storms come down from the northern mountains, send me messages on the wind. I’ll be content just to know the man I love is living safely on this side of Mount Tsukuba. I don’t think I’ll live very long after we separate, so this will be the last time we ever see each other in this world. Yet I’m sure we’ll meet again in the other world. They say husbands and wives are linked for two lives. Always remember we’re going to be married in our next lives, too, and never be untrue to me.” Hamaji’s sorrowful words and her prayer to meet Shino in the next life reflected the fervent, pathetic wishes of a bright young woman who still did not know enough about the world.

  Shino, strong as he was, sat dejected, feeling helpless to comfort Hamaji. He nodded his head at whatever she said and was unable to reply.

  Outside, roosters began to crow, and Shino grew anxious. “Your parents in the back room,” he said, “they’ll be waking up any moment. Hurry! Hurry!”

  At last Hamaji stood up. As she did, she recited a poem:

  “When dawn comes

  I’ll feed them to a fox,

  the damn roosters—

  though it’s still dark,

  they’ve made my lover leave.12

  “This was once a love poem sent by a country woman to a traveler who stayed only half the night. Now it’s from a wife to a husband who’s about to leave on a long trip. If the roosters hadn’t crowed, dawn wouldn’t have come. And if dawn hadn’t come, people wouldn’t be waking up. I hate the sound of their crowing! No night will ever hide us and allow us to meet again. For us, the open gate at Meeting Barrier13 is closed forever. How pitiful—the moon is at dawn.”

  As Hamaji turned to leave, someone coughed in the hallway outside and rapped on the sliding door. “The roosters are crowing already,” a man’s voice said. “Aren’t you up yet?” It was Gakuzō, Shino’s sworn blood brother who was leaving with him. Shino replied in a hurried voice, and Gakuzō went back to the kitchen.

  “Quick, before he comes again!” Shino said, pushing Hamaji out the door. With swollen eyes she looked back at Shino from the dark hall a final time. Through her tears she couldn’t see anything clearly. Leaning against the mountain-patterned wallpaper for support, she made her way back to her room, weeping. Truly, nothing is sadder than separating forever from someone who is still alive. It is even harder than parting from someone who has died.

  Hamaji, lying on the floor beside the floor lamp, delivers her complaint. Shino (left) has left the mosquito netting and has his hand on his sword. His traveling gear lies ready under the lattice window, and the light of the full moon shines through bamboo leaves. The servant and future dog-hero Gakuzō (right), wearing a robe with the character “gaku” on it, stands in the next room, urging Shino to leave. Text: “Sugawara Michizane: ‘Such painful partings because roosters have crowed! Ah, for a dawn in a village where roosters are not heard.’”

  What a rare young woman Hamaji was. She and Shino had never shared the same covers, and they had yet to join their bodies as one, but their love was greater than that of a couple married for many years. Shino’s love was equally strong, but he never let it sway his mind. Although he acted from love, he knew that men and women should keep a proper distance. In our world the wise and the foolish alike lose themselves in sensual pleasure. How many young people are drawn to these pleasures—and, once they come to the edge, how few do not fall in and drown! But here was a husband who was virtuous and a wife whose heart was completely true. Hamaji’s passion did not come simply from a desire to enjoy lovemaking, and Shino’s great sadness did not cause him to give in. Hamaji’s love is a model for all, and Shino�
��s equal is rarely found.

  [Nansō Satomi hakkenden, Iwanami shoten, 1985, 1: 207–210, 219–220, 237–239, 337–342; 2:81–87, translated by Chris Drake]

  ________________________

  1. The opening lines are directly inspired by the opening to The Tale of the Heike, which sets out similar Buddhist themes.

  2. Yoshizane had broken his word with regard to saving Tamazusa’s life. Now Fusehime sacrifices herself out of a sense of righteousness, since a ruler must always uphold his word. In a manifestation of karmic causality, Yoshizane pays for his earlier broken promise by losing his daughter to a dog.

  3. Inui (northwest), governed in yin-yang geomancy by the Dog and the Boar. This is the “divine gate,” worshiped as the direction of ancestral spirits, human fertility, and good fortune.

  4. A half-shamanic, half-Buddhist deity believed to be the soul of the eighth-century ascetic mountain monk En no Gyōja.

  5. The eight are humanness, rightness, courtesy, wisdom, loyalty, sincerity, filial piety, and respect for elders. Bakin mixes them syncretically with Buddhism. In Buddhism, the 108 beads represent the 108 worldly desires.

  6. The journey to a mountain cave with a dog implied both the animal carnality associated with the dog and the spiritual awakening associated with the holy mountain. As a result of the efficacy of the Lotus Sutra, Yatsufusa, to whom the spirit of the desire-filled Tamazusa had been transferred, goes from being a dog with animal lust to one who awakens spiritually, eventually revealing that “animals can achieve enlightenment.”

  7. As a small girl, Fusehime was sickly and unable to talk, so when she was three, her mother sent her to pray at Susaki. After seven days, the mountain god En no Gyōja appeared and put the beads around Fusehime’s neck, protecting her and giving her the power of speech.

  8. Especially in the area just east of Edo, female dogs were revered for their power to ensure a safe, easy childbirth. If a female dog died during labor, her body was buried near a crossroad and her soul prayed to. Such a grave was called a Dog Mound.

  9. The same Buddhist phrase appeared in Fusehime’s beads when she left with Yatsufusa.

  10. In what was later Edo. Benzaiten is a female deity from India worshiped by Buddhists.

  11. In 1460, almost two years after Fusehime’s death.

  12. A poem from The Tales of Ise, sec. 14.

  13. Ausaka (Osaka, as it was pronounced in Bakin’s time) no seki (Meeting Barrier), associated with the meeting of lovers in classical poetry. Hamaji is alluding to a poem by Sei Shōnagon in sec. 139 of the Pillow Book, later included in Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu, no. 62).

  Chapter 23

  NATIVIZING POETRY AND PROSE IN CHINESE

  From the mid-eighteenth century, kanshi (poetry written only in Chinese characters) became the most respected literary form of poetry among intellectuals, and the number of kanshi poets and the quantity of kanshi vastly increased. These new kanshi poets attacked the style of Ogyū Sorai’s Edo-based school, or the Ancient Rhetoric (kobunji) school, which had dominated the kanshi world and had attempted to imitate the poetry of the high Tang. In the view of these new poets, Sorai’s school, which had insisted on an “elegant and grand” (kōka yūkon) style, using only diction from high-Tang poetry, tended to depart from reality and fall into hyperbolic rhetoric and did not answer their need to express the emotions and thoughts of contemporary, everyday life. This criticism gradually grew, coming from various kanshi groups outside Edo, particularly the Kyoto-Osaka region, and finally from within the Edo kanshi groups, most dramatically from Yamamoto Hokuzan, who wrote a blistering critique of the Sorai school’s style in Thoughts on Composing Poetry (Sakushi shikō) in 1783.

  YAMAMOTO HOKUZAN

  The poetics espoused by Yamamoto Hokuzan (1752–1812) initiated a major shift in the nature and style of kanshi poetry, resulting in the demise of the neoclassical style and the birth of what has been called the “Fresh Spirit” (seishin) school. Poets such as Ichikawa Kansai (1749–1820) led the trend, turning not to the high Tang but to Song poetry, particularly the Southern Song poets concerned with everyday, commoner life. With the emergence of the Fresh Spirit school and the incorporation of everyday, easy-to-understand subject matter and vocabulary, kanshi became a more integral part of the native literature and was widely composed and appreciated. In the late Tokugawa period as the vernacular poetic forms—haikai, senryū, and kyōka—became more and more vulgarized, kanshi and waka were the only two genres in which serious men and women of letters could engage without any sense of embarrassment. Of these two forms, kanshi was the more recently liberated form, thus seeming both fresher and newer. With the disappearance of the neoclassicism represented by Sorai’s Ancient Rhetoric school, which tried to write Chinese as a Chinese poet would have, the kanshi poets actively embraced “Japanese” kanshi (Chinese poetry that would have seemed strange to Chinese), expressing themselves as they pleased without concern for Chinese grammar and rules of pitch and rhyming—a major shift that popularized kanshi, especially from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward. By the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–1830), kanshi poetry groups had sprung up across the country, among all the four classes (warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants), and kanshi was being composed in the kind of relaxed setting and manner that had hitherto been associated with haikai.

  THOUGHTS ON COMPOSING POETRY (SAKUSHI SHIKŌ, 1783)

  In Thoughts on Composing Poetry, Yamamoto Hokuzan argues that the value or objective of kanshi lies not in the imitation of classical models, which marks the Sorai school poets (such as Hattori Nankaku), but in the direct expression of one’s own “spirit” (seirei) through new and “fresh” (seishin) words: “When one imitates others in composing poetry [shi], it is someone else’s poetry, not one’s own poetry” (NKBT 94: 285). That is, when composing kanshi, one must not be concerned with only the poetic form and rhythm (kakuchō), as the Sorai school was; instead, one must value and reveal one’s own true feelings (jiko no shinjō), the unrestricted expression of which would result in fresh and true poetry. In the following passage, Hokuzan distinguishes between Li Panlong, the Ming poet who advocated imitating high-Tang poetry and who was revered by the Sorai school, and Yuan Hongdao, a late Ming poet who valued “freshness” and the individual “spirit” and whom Hokuzan holds up as a model for the new kanshi poetry.

  On Spirit and Freshness

  The poetry of the Ming can generally be divided between that of Li Panlong and of Yuan Hongdao. When people of today hear of Ming poetry, they generally think only of the style of Li Panlong. Li Panlong and Yuan Hongdao are as different as water and fire or ice and hot coals. Hongdao stresses sentiment [omomuki], while Panlong stresses form and rhythm [kakuchō]. Yuan Hongdao is refreshing [seishin] and fluent; Li Panlong is stale and repetitious. Yuan Hongdao uses all the historical periods freely and does not single out one period from among the high Tang, late Tang, Song, and Yuan, whereas Li Panlong draws a strict division between the high Tang and the middle Tang.1 He devotes himself to plagiarism and claims that “by basing ourselves on models, we bring about variations.”2 Yuan Hongdao’s poetry is based on spirit [seirei], while Li Panlong seeks poetry in words [ji]. Yuan Hongdao’s poetry is endlessly changing; Li Panlong’s poetry is always the same.

  Yuan Hongdao writes in his critique of Li Panlong, “. . . if people of today try to continue writing Tang poetry unchanged, then they will produce not the poetry of today but, rather, create counterfeit Tang poetry. Why should great men discard the true poetry they possess within themselves and plagiarize and imitate the poetry of others?”3 Su Shi makes an excellent point when he writes, “To judge a painting based on its resemblance to the object it depicts is a view no different from that of a child. When composing poetry on a set topic, one who insists on a certain kind of poem is truly not one who knows poetry.”4 So those who compose poetry by imitating others produce only the poetry of others and not their own. When Yuan Hongdao writes, “In the Tang there i
s no poetry; poetry is found in the illustrious writers of the Song,”5 he does not mean to say that Tang poetry is deficient but, instead, that the way in which Su Shi and Ouyang Xiu in the Song period did not imitate the Tang represents true poetry.

  Today those of shallow learning and no discernment, who are ignorant of the Way of poetry and who have been duped by Ogyū Sorai and Hattori Nankaku, are steeped in the bad poetry produced by plagiarism. They declare that it is not poetry if it includes even a single word they are not used to hearing or a single character they are not used to seeing. This is what Yuan Hongdao deplored, and it persists to this day.

  The Conclusion

  The two words “freshness” [shinsei] and “spirit” [seirei] are the lifeblood of poetry. When one does not imitate and plagiarize, one will always have freshness and spirit. When one lacks freshness and spirit, one will have imitation and plagiarism. Therefore, the Way of poetry can generally be divided between Yuan Hongdao and Li Panlong. . . . Today the poets of this country have long swallowed the poison of Li Panlong and Hattori Nankaku, so when they open their mouths, their poetry is rotted and fetid. If they are to rid themselves of this habit, they should do as Yuan Hongdao does. When I say that they should do as Yuan Hongdao does, I do not mean that they should imitate and plagiarize the poetry of Yuan Hongdao. Rather, they should follow Yuan Hongdao in not imitating or plagiarizing.

  [Kinsei bungaku ronshū, NKBT 94: 284–285, 328, translated by Peter Flueckiger]