Waka and Things, Waka as Things 9780300231793

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Waka and Things, Waka as Things

Waka and Things, Waka as Things

E DWA R D KA M E N S

Yale university press/new haven & london

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2017 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Frontispiece: Seta Bridge as depicted in Ōmi meisho zue (Hata Sekiden, Akisato Ritō, et al., 1797). Kanemori’s “Mitsugimono taezu . . . oto mo todoro ni” poem is inscribed at the right, and at the left is a hokku composed in 1688 by Matsuo Bashō and later included in his Oi no kobumi (1709): “Samidare ni kakurenu mono ya Seta no hashi” (“Could it disappear in all the summer rains?—not likely! Seta Bridge”). Courtesy of the National Institute of Japanese Literature. Set in Minion Pro type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936593 ISBN 978-0-300-22371-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 ­(Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844 This book is dedicated to Thomas J. Harper, who first encouraged me to learn about these things.

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Contents

Acknowledgments,  ix A Note on Transcriptions, Transliterations, Translations, and Abbreviations,  xiii ONE  Introduction: Waka and Things, Waka as Things,  1 T WO   Daijōe waka: The Uta as Tribute and Charm,  19 THREE  Suhama: Waka and Spaces of the Imagination,  76 FOUR   “Eight Views of Ōmi”: Waka and the Translation of Place,  113 F IVE   A Lotus Sutra Offering: Waka on the Threshold, Waka as Seal,  159 SI X   Postscript: Where Does the Poem Go?,  202

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Appendixes 1. Shunzei’s Yuki-Side Poem Sequence for the Daijōe of 1166,  211 2. Daijōe waka in the Senzai wakashū,  219 3. Fujiwara no Kiyosuke on “Details of the Procedure for Daijōe no uta,” in Fukuro zōshi,  225 4. The Ōmi hakkei Poems in the Beinecke Scroll,  230 5. Sanjōnishi Sanetaka’s Poems on “The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang,”  233 6. Teika’s Lotus Sutra Offering Poems,  236 Notes, 239 Character List for Japanese and Chinese Names and Special Terms,  279 Glossary of Terms and Titles,  291 Bibliography, 299 Index, 311

Color illustrations (figures 1–11) follow page 30

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the inspiration, encouragement, and aid I have received from innumerable colleagues, friends, and family members while working on this book. Lillian Tseng conceived of and organized the conference “Representing Things: Visuality and Materiality in East Asia” at Yale in 2009; I thank her for the opportunity to participate and David Bialock for his response to my presentation on suhama during those proceedings. I also thank all those who raised questions or made comments on presentations I have given based on versions of what are now chapters of this book at meetings of the Material Culture Workshops at Yale and the Association of Asian Studies (2012); at the University of Washington (2013); and at the School for Oriental and African Studies (Japanese Research Centre), Cambridge University (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies), Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (Norwich), and Leiden University (2015). Comments received on talks based on parts of various chapters at the Waka Workshops at UCLA (2010) and Yale (2009 and 2013) were also extremely helpful. I completed the first draft of this book during a term as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) in Norwich, England, in the spring of 2015. I thank the director, Mami Mizutori, for her support; Simon Kaner for the use of his office (with its soothing view of the cathedral close) and for his

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friendship; and all of the affiliates and staff of SISJAC, especially Denisa Edwards. During the same period, my wife and I lived in Cambridge as guests of Clare College, and I am deeply grateful to the Master of Clare, Lord Grabiner QC, and to all the fellows and staff of Clare for that extraordinary experience. I extend more thanks for so much to the following: Harold Bloom, ClaireAkiko Brisset, Kang-i Sun Chang, Edward Cooke, Fabian Drixler, Will Fleming, Christine Guth, Hirano Tae, Caroline Hirasawa, Mick Hunter, Peter Kornicki, Yukio Lippit, Tina Lu, Melissa McCormick, Alex Nemerov, Nicole Rousmaniere, Sasaki Takahiro, Satō Michio, Ivo Smits, and Mimi Yiengpruksawan. Angelika Koch thoroughly searched the diaries of Konoe Motohiro and Ichijō Kaneteru for details pertinent to the Beinecke “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll discussed in chapter 4; I am grateful for her efforts. Special thanks to Araki Hiroshi and Uejima Susumu (of Nichibunken and Kyoto University, respectively) for their assistance in arranging my access to Kajūji in Yamashina, Kyoto, and to the abbot (Gomonzen), the Reverend Tsukuba Jōhen, for his gracious welcome and permission to photograph the paintings in the Shoin there. Yokoya Ken’ichirō at the Ōtsu-shi Rekishi Hakubutsukan, Yoshitane Fumiko at the Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library, and Ishitsubo Yuiko at the Suntory Museum were especially generous in sharing photographic resources for illustrations in this book. The Yale University Library’s extraordinarily dedicated Japanese librarian, Haruko Nakamura, graciously facilitated many stages of this research, and the Yale University Art Gallery’s deeply knowledgeable associate curator, Sadako Ohki, did likewise: I thank them both and still owe them a great deal. At Yale University Press, Sarah Miller has been a most gracious editor and Ash Lago a tireless resource. I am grateful to Margaret Hogan for sensitive and scrupulous copyediting. My deepest thanks also to the two anonymous readers for the press for their keen critiques and supportive suggestions. Sydney Shea applied her design skills to the creation of a map, charts, and line drawings for chapters 2 and 5, and I thank her for that contribution. Above all, I have been fortunate beyond imagining in the many ways that former and current students have helped me form, develop, and refine the ideas and arguments in this book. They include Dylan Kenny, Mikko Salovaara, Jeffrey Niedermaier, James Scanlon-Canegata, Drisana Misra,

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Adam Haliburton, Loren Waller, and many others. Ryan Hintzman has been a tireless interlocutor, perspicacious reader and critic, and research assistant par excellence, especially in the process of obtaining photographs and permissions for their reproduction and in creating the glossary. In doing so he identified many errors, but I am responsible for any mistaken readings that may remain. For the ever more stimulating and challenging conversations about poetry and much besides that we have shared over many years, and for his insightful reading of this text, I thank Riley Soles, and for his friendship as well. William Kamens and Alice Kamens are the best of moral supporters. It has been a joy to see their adult lives take shape during the time that I have devoted to writing this book. And without Mary Miller’s constant support and patience, kindly criticism, shared interest, and love, nothing of this sort or otherwise would be possible.

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A Note on Transcriptions, Transliterations, Translations, and Abbreviations I have transcribed all Japanese names, titles, poems, and text excerpts as found in the cited sources. Transliterations are in standard Hepburn Romanization format except for the particle を, which I render as wo to distinguish it and its functions from those of お (o). In transliterations of Japanese poems, I also retain orthography as found in the cited modern editions, which preserve the spellings in those manuscripts on which these editions are based. Japanese names are given in traditional format, that is, surname followed by personal name, with the inclusion of the attributive particle no where used according to convention in Japanese sources for persons of rank or distinction in the past (e.g., Fujiwara no Shunzei). As is also customary, I refer to literary and other historical personages of the past by their personal names, and many of these appellations use, as is traditional, the Sinitic readings of these names: thus, Shunzei, not Toshinari (俊成), and Teika, not Sadaie (定家). (However, in the bibliography I follow the name forms used according to Library of Congress cataloging protocols.) I render the name of the scholar Origuchi Shinobu as it appears in the catalogs of the National Diet Library (Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan), although it frequently appears in publications and indices as “Orikuchi.” All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have rendered the term Tennō, for the Japanese sovereign, as “Emperor” when referring to those individuals because this is the term most

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familiar to nonspecialist readers of studies of Japanese history and culture, but I recognize that many specialists prefer other renderings; I have also used the term “sovereign” when referring to but not translating a term for the occupant of this office as well as “royal” for properties and practices associated with the same. A number of emperors’ names contain the element Go-, indicating “the latter-day . . .” or “the second . . .”; I render these names as GoToba, GoShirakawa, and so on. I have not translated place-names except in some poems where doing so helps to achieve a better understanding of the figural scheme of the poem in question. My translations of poems do not attempt to recreate their metrical schemes but are intended, likewise, to suggest how these poems work as poems; I do not claim to have made any attempt to create equally poetic versions but rather versions that abet my explanatory and interpretive tasks. Definitions of Japanese terms and their forms in Japanese scripts, titles of texts in Japanese and Chinese, and names, in Japanese and Chinese script, may be found in the glossaries. In most cases, Japanese terms that occur frequently in the text (such as waka) are italicized only at the first occurrence. Citations of standard texts use the following abbreviations: • For classical anthologies of poems: MYS KKS SKKS

Man’yōshū Kokin wakashū Shin kokin wakashū

• For standard modern critical editions of premodern texts in various series: NKBT

SKT

Nihon koten bungaku taikei. 102 volumes. Tokyo: ­Iwanami Shoten, 1957–68. Digital version available online via Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan, http://base3.nijl.ac.jp/. Shinpen kokka taikan. 10 volumes plus indices. Ed. Shinpen kokka taikan Henshū Iinkai. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1983–92. CD-ROM version 2, 2003, Kadokawa Shoten.



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SNKBT SNKBZ

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Digital version available online via Koten Library, http:// kjsystems.sakura.ne.jp/kotenlibrary/. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei. 106 volumes. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989–2005. Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū. 88 volumes. Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1997–2001. Digital version available online via Japan Knowledge, http://japanknowledge.com/library/.

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Waka and Things, Waka as Things

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ON E

Introduction Waka and Things, Waka as Things

みつぎ物たえずそなふるあづまぢのせたのなが橋をともとゞろに mitsugimono taezu sonafuru Azumaji no Seta no nagahashi oto mo todoro ni Over the long bridge at Seta, on the Eastern Sea Road, goods are borne in tribute with no pause, raising a joyous clamor.1

P

ictures and texts as such are ostensibly inert and silent, but they can and do create worlds full of motion and noise, and all the more so when encountered in tandem. The text above reproduces (in three forms) a Japanese poem from the latter half of the tenth century. Its creator, a courtier of royal descent named Taira no Kanemori, very likely had a painting of the scene described in the poem in mind as he wrote it. That painting may have existed for him to see, or his poem may have served as a guide to its making. Poem and painting would themselves become tribute goods proffered among many others on the occasion that called for their creation, a “Great Tasting Banquet” (Daijōe) celebrating the accession of a new sovereign. With or without a pictorial rendering at hand, we can imagine the lively scene invoked here: a stream of men and beasts of burden laboring under the weight of sacks of rice and casks of sake pouring westward toward the capital city; from the long arch of the bridge come the thunderous reverberations of their footfalls on its wooden planks, and the air fills with their shouts and cries, the creaking of ox-cart

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wheels and axles, and the sound of rushing water from far below. On a sixpanel folding screen made specifically for the Daijōe banquet, this scene and poem would appear beside other pairs offering similarly coordinated compositions celebrating specific places (here, “Seta Bridge”) with features, contours, and names that would likewise suggest (rhetorically) that a land and its people were at one in their desire to join in the consecration of the renewal of rulership. To that end, Kanemori chose his figures and indeed all the elements of this poem with deliberate care, to maximize its yield of auspicious signs: the flow of goods (mitsugimono) is ceaseless (taezu), as is the uninterrupted succession of sovereigns (mitsugi) arching over the long span of time for which the “long bridge” (nagahashi) also stands. And the poem itself— set in motion when inscribed in ink on the surface of the painted screen (byōbu) with and for which it was made, and activated yet further as auspicious charm if voiced as song—adds to the noise raised so boisterously (todoro ni) on this occasion as at so many previous and subsequent “Great Tasting Banquets,” with their processions of musicians, dancers, singers, and bearers of gifts and goods, including just such screens and poems. Likewise, this “long bridge at Seta, on the Eastern Side Road,” the focal point and scene of the action in Kanemori’s poem (which survives) and in the painting that mirrored and contained it (which does not), was one of many places named repeatedly in poems and depicted often in paintings for these rites, as a representative, evocative, and auspicious “famous place” (meisho) in the province of Ōmi (just east of the capital region, skirting the shores of Lake Biwa), which also, again and again in ancient times, was selected by augury (and later by convention) for the honor and burden of supplying, from specified communities within its borders, the necessary goods—rice, sake, and other festive comestibles—as well as poems, paintings, performers, and performance texts for the Daijōe. By Kanemori’s time (records differ, but it is fairly certain that he wrote this “Seta” poem for the rite held in 970, at the inception of the reign of Emperor En’yū), Daijōe poems and screens were in fact made by designated poets and artists working in the capital as proxies for the named provinces and their constituent communities. Felicitous texts cited from the Chinese classics were also inscribed on screens for presentation in the ritual space, and the honor of selecting the appropriate passages (called honmon) for these

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screens was tantamount to that redounding to the proxy poets composing original verses in the vernacular. And in addition to the texts for these two sets of screens, with their Japanese poem texts and Chinese wisdom texts, a full suite of song-texts (fuzoku waka2) for live performance at various stages of the unfolding of the rite were required as well, as were ritual comestibles and other offerings, from a representative eastern (Yuki) province (here, Ōmi) and from a western one (Suki), both selected by augury at the outset of planning for the assembly.3 Thus, a poem such as Kanemori’s was but one contribution to a panoply of items specially prepared and presented each time that a Daijōe was observed; but, perhaps by virtue of its having been an offering of language, of text, it still exists in the archives of these events—while all the other ritual appurtenances and material traces of these epochal occasions have perished. One thing that is especially striking about Kanemori’s “Seta Bridge” poem is the extent to which it goes toward marking itself, through its figural scheme, as an essential, material thing, without which—no more nor less than the rice, the wine, the bearers transporting them across the bridge and, later, at the site of the ritual itself, the dancers and singers, and the display of the painted and inscribed screen—the act cannot be complete, the charm cannot have its effect. Motion—labored but propitious movement across that bridge—is vividly depicted as the central action of the poem, as is noise, and these would have been vivid, eye-catching, and clamorous in the painting as well. At the end of that arc of motion, accompanied by all that noise, a final delivery of precious goods would occur when the screen bearing the image of the teeming bridge (and other Ōmi scenes) and the poem invoking it (and others “voiced” and inked on behalf of Ōmi’s folk, its land, and its kami—its local deities) was borne into the ceremonial space for display in proximity to the emperor’s seat, so that he might view them, take possession of them, and thus consume them, much as he would also consume, in other phases of the ceremony, less figuratively but just as symbolically, the Ōmi rice, the Ōmi wine, and other Ōmi fruits.4 All these things were made for him and were brought before him to enable his own performance of ritual acts marking the renewal of the cycle of rulership, without a pause (taezu). When the screen bearing images of and poem texts embodying Ōmi’s fulfillment of its obligations took its place in his audience hall (during the Heian period, the Burakuin), the distance

4 i n t rodu c t ion

between the originating province and the central royal court was closed: through the alchemy of representation, in words and images, difference and distance were elided or erased, and the flow of time was smoothed and leveled. The power of things—including words, including pictures—to do such things was once again implemented, witnessed, and affirmed. As its title and the preceding initial pages suggest, this book is a study of classical Japanese poems (waka) in their intimate engagements and collaborations with things—and as things. Readers familiar with the classical waka corpus and the waka tradition’s own highly consistent ideological formulation of its internal poetics may take this description to refer to the way that waka work with things (mono) as their subjects or (more importantly) as figural resources and rhetorical means toward the articulation of sensation and emotion, whether real or ideal, as can readily be seen in a poem like Kanemori’s—and in thousands of other examples, whether prominent or obscure. But, beyond that, I want to direct attention to some telling examples of co-origination, functional cooperation, and communicative commingling of waka with physical things as such—that is, to the phenomenon of waka coming into being in company with and often incorporated with things such as paintings (as with the Daijōe “vernacular” screens) and also, as shall be seen, in three-dimensional landscape models, in horizontally revealing scrolls that depict the unique features of “famous places” or reproduce Buddhist scriptures for devout purposes and the like. So what transpires here is, in a sense and in part, a consideration of this poetry from outside the poems themselves, through a shift of our attention to the physical objects with which and for which certain poems—in fact, many poems—were made. This leads, in turn, not just to some different ways of re-reading poems that are made in such circumstances but also to a characterization of them, and of many others besides, as objects—things— as well. In short, this is a study of Japanese poetry and material culture, and of Japanese poetry as material culture.5 “Material culture” and “thing theory” have taught us (and it is no joke) that “things matter,” that the significance of things in our world is too often taken for granted or woefully underestimated, sometimes with the result that we only realize their value, importance, or meaning for us when it is too late to preserve or recover them (think extinct languages, endangered species, melting ice caps, lost

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cities).6 This book is scarcely the first to turn its attention to waka’s intimate relationship to things, nor the first to argue, in one way or another, for such poems’ and such poetry’s “thingness,” but I think it is the first to place such notions front and center as the guiding principle of its interpretive strategy, theme, or thesis. Such an endeavor entails not only a transposal of orientation toward its subject—classical Japanese poetry—but also a search for new ways to articulate what then comes to light. When we adopt this alternative perspective for a reexamination of waka culture—by which I mean the traditions and practices of making, reproducing, receiving, circulating, and preserving classical Japanese poems in a variety of settings and media through time (and this includes the various forms of teaching, critiquing, editing, and commenting that thrive in tandem with these practices and their results)—we readily see intimate relationships with objects in two and three dimensions taking shape in ways that need to be accounted for with something more than the condensed formulae of “word and image” or “text and image.”7 This is because, in many important instances, “text” (a poem or poems) and “image” (a painting or series of paintings, a miniature landscape model, a screen, or a scroll) are or were produced or reproduced, in subsequent recreations and revivals, together and in reference to one another rather than in a sequence in which one responds to the other after the fact. Even where we do not and cannot know the precise circumstances, conditions, and sequences of production of such works (as is more often the case than we are frequently led to suppose), we can see that the encounter between poem text(s) and visual, tactile object(s) yields something like a dual conversation or duet, perceptible by the reader/observer as an engaged third party, that in many instances goes beyond ekphrasis. In these creative and recreative programs, texts do more than describe or respond, poetically, to that which is seen in the visual and physical object or space: they engage with that which is seen (which often, though not always, includes these texts) in a symbiotic exchange that heightens the meaning or impact (for the reader, viewer, or audience) of both as an integrated communicative entity. “Text and image” has long since become a commonplace in the study of traditional Japanese culture, and in many other fields as well, but this book focuses on works (poems and objects) and their stories of p ­ roduction,

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­reproduction, and reception in which it is clear that “and” alone is insufficient as an indicator of the intimate interactions between and among the components of these programs and the artifacts (texts, images, objects) that issue from them. What I share here, then, represents a current stage in an ongoing search for a “third term”—or a composite set of alternative perspectives and a fitting vocabulary for their articulation—that can enable a fuller and better account of this defining characteristic of waka culture. It is grounded in and takes the form of a series of close studies of specific artifacts (texts, images, and more) of that culture. To meet this need for a “third term” beyond “text,” “image,” and their conjoined function, some readers may recommend the use of “intersemiotic,” coined by Roman Jakobson in 1959 and used in reference to waka culture by Claire-Akiko Brisset, among others.8 Another possibility is the term “intermediality,” which came into wide use in literary studies in connection with the advance of film and media studies in the 1990s.9 For now I prefer not to impose any particular term on this account of the relationships and characteristics I want to describe but rather hope that the examples given here will educe a multifaceted and textured sense of this quality or condition of waka without reducing it to a single formula. In other words, here I try to illustrate, through examples or case studies, several ways in which we might recognize the “thingnesses” of waka. Furthermore, as I have already suggested, a redirection of attention to such fertile relationships and their durably signifying dynamics in a few exemplary (and in several ways interrelated) instances of poem-and-object production (this book treats four major examples, as outlined hereafter) can also serve as a vehicle for proposing an alternative way of thinking about waka themselves—that is, as part of, rather than outside of or other than, Japanese material culture itself. This claim matters because it, too, goes against the grain and shifts the focus away from the conventional, traditional, and deeply entrenched conception of Japanese poems as expressive aftereffects, vehicles, or containers of emotion arising from contact with and in response to or in awe of natural, social, and psychic phenomena. Waka often are such, or (far more often) they perform as such: that is, emotion and its expression are more often than not rhetorical constructs mediated by programmatically defined conditions (and thus far from natural or spontaneous, despite many practitioners’ and theorists’

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claims), and awe and reverence most often arise from and are offered in implicit (and sometimes explicit) homage to the hallowed act of poemmaking itself, carried out through endlessly repeated, self-referential, and self-­perpetuating acts. Thus, this praxis and its results lay out before us as readers a vast matrix of intertextually enabled, codependent, cross-fertilizing poems that are in constant conversation with one another about this very relationship. The corpus of waka is a storehouse or museum (or, as I have elsewhere called it, a mausoleum alive with echoes) in which we see displayed, in vast numbers, and hear, in ghostly resonance, the amassed artifacts of an intertemporal and interspatial series of engagements maintained, nurtured, and celebrated by the makers of these poems themselves: their noise, or music, is perpetual.10 Beyond the purported (and yes, sometimes real) claims for a generative process that begins with inciting psychic conditions (kokoro) that then lead, as if free of deterring mediation or temporal delay, to heartfelt articulation (kotoba), resulting in the durable poetic artifact (as the master narrative of how a waka comes into being and what it does would have it) lies this more convoluted, prickly, but utterly human aesthetic practice—utterly human because it is about making and remaking, extending a connective thread and weaving it together with others ad infinitum, in a fabric made of language, of words. That is how I see waka culture, and this is how I hope readers will see it as well. At the very least, by shifting the scope of examination to take full account of the physical, material settings in which waka (or the greater part of those that make up the classical corpus) are presented and in which they perform, and by examining the objects that also occupied the settings in which those poems can or could have been heard and seen, I aim to open up additional avenues for understanding the integrated aesthetics of words and objects created, cultivated, and perpetuated by and for waka culture throughout its long history. But here, at the outset of a study that seeks in such ways to recalibrate perceptions of what waka is and does, I reiterate that my aim is to portray this material facet of waka culture as coexistent and interrelated with and yet distinct from the more familiar and canonical theory and practice of the classical Japanese poem’s expressive (often termed “lyrical”) genesis and function. The overwhelming impact of this ideology—promulgated in the tradition’s own discourse (in various texts that are loosely grouped

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as karon, including prefaces to anthologies and critical compendia and commentaries, handbooks, treatises, letters, notes from master-disciple dialogues, and more) since the early tenth century (but with roots in earlier, and not only Japanese, poetics) and, since then, almost always with reference (as above) to the foundational formula of kokoro as emotionally generative source and kotoba as articulating medium—is not to be denied or downplayed, nor are those elements of this ideology (or theory) that can indeed be corroborated when examined against the evidence and outcomes of this praxis that is the waka corpus itself (as described above).11 But this ideology can and, in traditional, modern, and contemporary criticism and scholarship (more so outside of Japan, perhaps, than in Japanese waka studies), almost always has obscured and diverted attention from other equally powerful principles and practices that have also shaped that corpus and directed the course that this tradition as well as the reception of its artifacts have taken through time. Most importantly and to the detriment of a fuller and multidimensional account of waka culture, the prominence and privilege given to the idealization of an expressive or lyrical conception of waka have too often led to the marginalization of the equally compelling (if more materialistic and quotidian) story of the production of poems as responses and fulfillments of occasional and topical programs, challenges, and opportunities, very frequently alongside and in coordination with the creation or presentation of other visual (material) components besides the poems themselves. An emphasis on materiality in waka culture—and with it, its readily apparent (if we look for it) “occasionality,” a motivating consciousness of the opportunity or challenge created by the presentation of a program for poem-making, or the presence or prospect of an accompanying and special object to be displayed alongside or incorporating the poem—is, in essence, a turn to the obverse of the hallowed expressive or lyrical (kokoro/kotoba-based) conception, or, one might say, to another range of facets of its many manifestations. It is thus as a counterbalance (rather than as antithesis) that I posit the idea of waka as not just “and” but also as “thing,” as part of a “material culture,” as something like the verso aspect of a page of text with an equally important recto—a “flipside,” if you will, as deserving of attention as its more frequently encountered and examined other (“lyrical,” “expressive”)

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face. For just as in visual art-making, a waka, no matter what its particular referents or occasion may be, is ultimately about the act of its own making, its facture, its address to its own innumerable antecedents and future progeny. This function is incorporated and reincorporated in each and every instance of the poem’s inscription on any number of surfaces and in any of a number of possible contexts. It is for this reason that this study is built around particular instances in which this facture and refacture is linked in a variety of ways to the making of things—things seen and heard, things that often include, contain, and display the poems themselves as among and of these things. Here, some attention to the words we take to mean “thing” in Japanese is in order. Every student of the Japanese language—and many others whose encounters with Japanese culture are more casual—knows that the word mono means just about anything: that is, any thing (and that koto can also mean “a thing” or “a matter” and, significantly, “word” or “words”—which matter). Mono can refer to persons, and to animate and inanimate objects.12 A mono can be utterly ordinary, but it may also be utterly extraordinary: mono are things of this world and things that come into this world from some other, so a ghost or a monster is also a mono. It may also be an abstract idea, issue, or problem—something that is in or on the mind, and so the word monogatari literally means “telling things” or “telling about things”—in intimate conversation, or as a story or tale, oral or written. I will be telling a few stories about things and about poems here, and also about quite a few words (koto). Furthermore, as I have already suggested, poems that are “linked to the making of things,” stories about their coming into being and their subsequent ventures and revivals, can in turn help us think about the thingness of poems themselves, their materiality as entities that can be released into, projected, contained, and exchanged in two- and three-dimensional space, tactilely manipulated in the hands of makers, recipients, communicators, collectors. Waka (like many poems and other kinds of text) as well as parts or elements (or fragments or memories) of waka are thus also perhaps best thought of as objects in motion, literally as well as figuratively, from place to place, space to space, and through time. To me, this capacity for movement, realized in the historical manipulation of a poem from one textual

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space to another, is also an essential aspect of their thingness. It is my endeavor to demonstrate and substantiate this in various ways in the pages that follow. Fortunately, I am far from being alone in such efforts. One broad and strong trend in recent scholarship on traditional Japanese poetry has been just such a deliberate turn toward its material and physical aspects. This trend has been taking shape in analyses of the use, disposition, and adornment of spaces in which poetry was composed, as in a number of recent studies by Sasaki Takahiro, Unno Keisuke, and others examining the tradition of Hitomaro eigu—medieval poetry composition rites held in the presence of a portrait of the great Man’yōshū-era poet Hitomaro,13 or in examinations of various modes of writing in scrolls and albums and on or for paintings on screens and other media, in which classical poems are analyzed in and sometimes as visual form—as they are, for example, in the work of Joshua Mostow, Thomas LaMarre, Joseph Sorensen, Claire-Akiko Brisset, and Tomoko Sakomura.14 There are a number of causes for this turn to the material and the physical in waka studies, a trend that can be seen in a number of other fields as well. But in this particular case, this moderately radical and iconoclastic decentering of poetic texts in studies of poetic culture, in favor of other entities and presences in the spaces and practices in which those texts took shape or were received or reproduced, offers one productive way of working toward more sophisticated and innovative understandings of that culture and of those texts as integrated phenomena that signify in multiple, overlapping registers or languages. And while this strategy adds complicating textures, dimensions, and contexts to existing as well as new analyses of the texts of poetry and the processes of their production and reception, it also has the additional benefit of throwing light on objects, spaces, and practices in waka culture that are inherently interesting and well worth examining for their own sake—even though we often know of them almost exclusively through texts and a few rather rare pictorial depictions, as is the case with most, though not quite all, of the objects and practices that I investigate here. Investigations of this kind are made possible and justified largely due to the seemingly simple but fundamental fact that classical Japanese poems (broadly, the uta, alternatively, waka) had and have long lives that are

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not by any means limited to the scope of the surface (paper, silk, wood, or other material) on which their composers first inscribed them. Prior to that inscription (and sometimes afterward as well), many poems were sung or chanted in social settings—at banquets, celebrations, drinking parties, or in competitions where teams of poets vied in the display of their skills. But then, in their extended and multifaceted afterlives—about which we often know more than we do about their origins—many such poems are reinscribed, for a variety of purposes, on scrolls and in screens and other surfaces and media, frequently in visual programs coordinated with pictorial elements, but just as, if not more, often without them. Likewise, poems may be recast in a variety of new contexts—in anthologies, in selective sample collections and sequences, or in narrative frames that create de novo or recreate additional (often imaginary) contexts for them. Thus, at many stages of this process—at its inception as well as in its later configurations—poems are or become constituent parts of objects and entities that in and of themselves have social, ritual, or aesthetic significance or value, or that gain in that significance or value through their engagement with those poems and the traditions of which they are a part. And this happens precisely because of the unlimited maneuverability and portability of poem texts as “objects in motion,” always and ever full of potential for reinstallation in, on, or in close association with other objects and in evermultiplying texts and contexts. One might, in fact, approach the task of shaping a history of waka culture and a survey of its literary genres and related visual forms by mapping the destinations that poems as “objects in motion” have reached at various stages of their life-courses as they are shifted, recast, and revisited by multiple eyes and hands. These would include, but not be limited to, the several kinds of ex post facto anthologies devised for their containment, preservation, and display. Most prominent and privileged among these are the earliest, the mid-eighth-century Man’yōshū, and the twentyone royally commissioned anthologies (chokusenshū). The latter make up a serial canon initiated in the early tenth century and augmented in stages up until the early fifteenth century, in which poems are topically and thematically arranged in groups and sequences, with their internally documented occasions, figural elements, or other infrastructural characteristics and combinations of these serving as building blocks and linkages for the

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devising of supra-texts or quasi-narratives. But many other repositories in which poems come to rest are of equal historical importance. These include the many anthologies compiled under “private” or relatively informal or un­official auspices (shisenshū—a category that begins with the aforementioned Man’yōshū); the “house” or “family” or personal collections of the oeuvres of individual poets (shikashū), in which chronology is usually the prevailing organizational principle; and those handbooks or treatises (karon) that feature hyper-anthologies drawn from all these sources to constitute a master poet’s meta-selection of exemplary poems for the guidance and training of disciples, in which certain stylistic qualities and characteristics, explicated by the master or implicit in the results of the selection, are the determinants of inclusion and ordering.15 Narrative prose works that contain poems and build stories and sequences around and through them (uta monogatari) are also of great historical significance in any tracking of the life-courses of classical uta, and many of these works are likewise conspicuous in the history of the adaptation and interpretation of such texts in and along with visual forms. (The Tales of Ise, an early tenth-century uta monogatari, is the most thoroughly studied example.16) Art historians who work on materials from the eleventh century onward that incorporate, illustrate, or otherwise engage with classical waka also generally find that they are encountering in and on paintings and in calligraphy poems from these same sources—the abovementioned poetry anthologies (chokusenshū, shikashū) and tales (monogatari) for the most part—so their accounts of sources, references, and other textual trajectories likewise lead out of, through, and back to these anthologies and narratives and their own transmission histories, in which works of visual art are themselves agents of re-presentation and media for the preservation or “housing” of peregrinating poems. My focus in this study is on processes in which poems come into being as things and in conjunction with other things, so my attention here goes more toward what we can say (often as but a conjecture) about poems’ originating circumstances than to subsequent developments, including the anthologizing and other recontextualizing deployments and configurations that have become the frames and filters through which we are, in fact, most likely to read waka.17 But I have described these practices, patterns, and tendencies in the waka tradition in order to make this point: the

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prominence in the Japanese poetic tradition of assemblages of selectively arranged, thematically orchestrated, or strategically deployed poems in sequences and other arrangements within anthologies, treatises, and prose fictional works, which are themselves the results of sorting, classifying, sanctioning, preservationist, and connoisseurial work, also contributes to and reflects the tradition’s marked penchant for the treatment of poems themselves, as such, as reproducible entities, each with their various distinctive properties—that is, things that can be moved around, rearranged, displayed anew, just as folding screens or scrolls, for example, can be. The same can be said for the far-reaching webs of allusive cross-reference that link virtually every poem in the classical corpus: not only can whole poems be reproduced and recast in new settings but so can their elements, broken up and rearranged in unlimited variations of phrasing, figuring, and troping. In its movement and manipulation across time and space, this vast repertoire of rhetorical material for poem-making bears a rich matrix of associations that can (or must) be availed of, as a lode or resource in the creative act, and can be readily recognized by trained practitioners and experienced readers. Along with the form of the poem itself, it is the attention-grabbing and rhetorically animating presence of these materials that marks and validates poems made by this means as poems.18 This, then, is why materials and materiality matter so much when we consider the nature of this poetic tradition, and not only in terms of its production and its uses. Classical Japanese poems of the type we see in scrolls and screens and albums and in so many other places and spaces— the uta or waka (in modern times also termed tanka), a thirty-one-morae, nonrhyming form that originates as song and retains throughout its long and ongoing history a rhythmic pattern of alternating segments of five and seven morae, with occasional minor variants—are not only concerned with things of this world, such as the features and names of mountains, rivers, birds, trees, flowers, human encounters, human partings, and much, much more; they are also often the constituent elements of things, such as painted screens and scrolls, letters, objets d’art. As I have already emphasized, they are also often treated as things themselves—entities inviting, available for, and susceptible to reinscription, reuse, and rearrangement, in whole or in part(s), in infinite reconfigurations and recontextualizations. These characteristics altogether are what I refer to when I talk about the

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“thingness” of waka poems. And this “thingness” is not a secondary characteristic but rather an essential aspect or condition of their communicative, affective capability: if they convey feeling, sentiment, or kokoro (to use the traditional Japanese term for this affect), they do so at least in part by means of their physical placement, in tandem with the communicative and affective capability of the objects of which they are a part and in which they are placed, conveyed, and encountered—a book, a scroll, or on or inside other two- or three-dimensional objects, all settings in which, invariably, they appear in adjacency to yet more poems. In such settings, entities, and artifacts, I believe that we see not merely a juxtaposition or interaction of “text and image”—though, as I have already pointed out, it is more than commonplace to read such artifacts in this way—but also a fusion of these elements through their shared material character. It is their mutual “thingness” that makes possible the infinite array of recombinations, rearrangements, and multiple readings that constitutes “waka culture,” which here I want to consider as a material culture—a set of interrelated practices, artifacts, and interactions in which these things called waka and things made with them, for them, about them, and of them—including, but not only, more poems—are, quite literally, what matter. My task here is to show and substantiate what this means and how it works. To do so, I offer in the following chapters accounts and analyses of four forms or phenomena or instances, some of which, or aspects of which, are relatively understudied in waka scholarship, others of which are more familiar. I begin, as I did above, with Daijōe waka, the songs and poems produced for ritual presentation and performance (fuzoku waka) as well as for landscape screen paintings (onbyōbu) as tribute offerings for the Great Tasting Banquet celebrated at the enthronement of new emperors. Beginning in the ninth century and continuing—with some significant and longterm interruptions—to the present (in revival), these songs and poems were integral to these official ceremonies, which were, conversely, their occasion, their raison d’être. By the mid-Heian period, certain provinces, especially Ōmi in the east and Harima and Bizen in the west, were repeatedly called on to make these offerings; also, while the earliest submissions were indeed produced by local, unnamed poets and artists, the institutionalization of this aspect of the rite led to the practice of appointing (and honoring) court poets with the responsibility of composing the verses and

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directing the artists. These practices led in turn to the conventionalization of modes of poetic usage involving place-names and the attributes of those places named and depicted in both poems and images. The role of these productions and practices in the development of the traditions of utamakura (a class of conventionally deployed figures, often place-names or associated with specific places), meisho (“famous place”) poetics, and meishoe (images of famous places) has not sufficiently been explored in English-language publications; my study helps to fill this gap.19 With only a few exceptions, Daijōe (or more broadly Daijōsai) studies— including detailed analyses of Daijōe waka—have been almost exclusively the province of two groups of scholars: those of so-called Shintō or indigenous religious traditions and the practitioners of minzokugaku, or “folklore studies,” in which the foundational work of Origuchi Shinobu is especially notable. Both groups have informed the work of one another, though the interest of the former (for example, Mayumi Tsunetada, Tanaka Hatsuo, and others) has largely focused on the search for original and authentic forms of texts and practices and their stories of evolution, change, and preservation over time, while for the latter (such as Nishimura Tōru and others), the Daijōe is a site, a phenomenon, in which (once again, as with other traditions with “folk” origins) the oscillating dynamics of center and periphery, region and metropole, local belief and state cults are manifest in those practices and their associated texts and objects, and the key task is to identify “original” roots and unsullied forms through analogy and comparison with contemporary “folk” cultural practices, implements, and arts. I draw on the work of these scholars (and others) in my own analysis, but in the present context my emphasis naturally shifts elsewhere. As I explain in more detail in the following chapter, a good deal of Japanese scholarship on Daijōe waka in particular has focused on those examples of this corpus that have found their place, for various reasons, in the chokusenshū royal anthologies, their roles as clusters therein, and how those selected examples might be understood to characterize the larger corpus (that is, the entire archive of surviving Daijōe waka). This is in keeping with a broader pattern in Heian- and Kamakura-period waka studies, which focuses predominately on the chokusenshū, or the roles that waka take and the expressive functions and formal impact they have in nikki (diaries), monogatari (prose fiction as well as quasi-historical narratives), and related genres.

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Waka scholars tend to adhere to these patterns to excess, I believe, causing us to miss a much bigger and also more fine-grained picture of waka culture. This is why I eschew this approach to the Daijōe waka corpus: not only would it obfuscate and distort any attempt to track this poetry’s history, conventions, style, and more, but it would also be at odds with my larger purposes here.20 These include but are not limited to showing how Daijōe poetry sustains the uta’s enduring sacral, incantatory, mantic roots and functions; how these functions “come alive” in presentation or performance; and how those poems found on the tribute screens (Daijōe onbyōbu waka) in particular carry this further into the dimension of the physical and the visual with their inscribed texts and their pictorially represented idealized, utopian places and spaces. Another kind of object required among the necessary accouterments of the Daijōe ritual was something called a suhama—a three-dimensional, miniature model (the size of a large tea-tray) of an imaginary paradisial place or space, depicting the dwelling of ancient immortals amid artificial trees, water, flowers, rocks, and sand. So Daijōe suhama also materialize “idealized, utopian places and spaces” in forms that mirror and complement the content and purpose of the Daijōe screen paintings and poems. They figure as focal points in the records of many poetry contests (­utaawase) and similar gatherings in the Heian period (and later). In this setting they morph into low table-sized landscape models, often highly elaborate and lavishly made with rare metals, shells, and jewels, representing “famous places” (meisho) or imaginary spaces that serve, or are related to, the topics presented to contest participants for the composition of verses. My study of suhama explores the meaning and function of these three-dimensional objects and the poems generated in reference to and often in conjunction with or integrated with their display, along with a reconsideration of the importance of such object-centered utaawase in the development of topicdriven poem composition (daiei). I also offer some thoughts about the relationship between the condensed scale of the miniature landscape and the condensed form of the waka poem itself: both are confined to limited dimensions and crafted structures, but both provide a space for directed but unfettered exercises of the imagination.21 The following chapter also explores the operations of the imagination in a uniquely delineated space marked through the complementary and coop-

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erative function of both poem and pictures. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, a new program and topos for waka composition in conjunction with image production emerged as a favored framework in projects created by aristocratic poets, calligraphers, and the artists they commissioned to work alongside them. The “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei) is especially notable as a naturalization to the Japanese setting of a Chinese topos, “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers,” merged with the domestic traditions of utamakura and meisho poesy. This chapter focuses on a scroll version of the “Eight Views” by the late seventeenth-century painter Yamamoto Soken and eight court calligraphers that is now in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I situate it in the midst of its antecedents and sequels, which reach back to the earliest stages of waka history (including, as discussed above, Daijōe waka and the special role that Ōmi and Ōmi place-names held in that corpus) and forward toward the many recapitulations of the “Eight Views” topos in early modern and modern literary and visual culture. I show how, in Soken’s and in other configurations and coordinated orchestrations of images and texts, “Ōmi” is reconstructed as a space that is simultaneously physical, topographical, historical, and “real,” but also fictive, idealized, polished, and thus yet another space in which the poetic imagination roams along defined but open pathways. In a final “case study,” I focus on an instance of waka composition as a material practice in the specific context of Buddhist ritual. I examine a series of poems written for inscription on the decorated outer surfaces (hyōshi) of each scroll in an illustrated copy of the Lotus Sutra (with appended partner sutras) and dedicated as a memorial offering from Fujiwara no Teika on behalf of the departed spirit of his mother, a court lady known as Bifukumon’in no Kaga, in 1194, on the first-year anniversary of her death. Here again I locate this particular instance of the design and execution of a coordinated visual and textual program within a lineage of related practices and productions. It is clear that such devotional exercises were of unique importance to Teika; his father, Shunzei; and their contemporaries and successors—that is, not just in the “Mikohidari” family but in the larger “family” of waka poets. When they designed and composed such sequences, they acknowledged, accessed, and reactivated the extraordinary efficacies and powers that lay in these sacred words and objects, releasing

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but also enveloping them in newly made forms in which their latent combined powers might operate ad infinitum. I suggest that exercises of this kind, and in particular Teika’s 1194 offering, worked not only as prayer for the dead but as homage to that “larger family of waka poets,” and thus to waka poetry itself. These four studies serve, I hope, to suggest directions that others may wish to follow in their examination of a host of nexuses of word, poem, picture, object, and things in waka culture. There is much, much more that one might take up, and no doubt other students of Japanese culture will wish to do so in a host of other ways. Across the genres of classical Japanese literature, we all can see poems moving to and fro; we can see structures built of them and around them, and we can see images brought together with them in illustrated books, scrolls, screens, and other media. My aim in this book is to substantiate my claim that it is the thingness of poems, their materiality, that makes much of this possible, and that this characteristic is one that poems share with the things around them and the things that are made of and from them—their housings, their vessels, the media that carry them out into the world. But that is just one starting place, beyond which lie many other possible elaborations and refinements of such a claim, and many questions will arise from it. One of them is this: if poems are things— or, at least, if traditional Japanese uta or waka are things, and things that matter—then what characteristics of poems do other material “things”—in Japanese culture and beyond—possess, and how, in this light, should we assess the power that they can exert on us, their observers, receivers, and keepers?

T WO

Daijōe waka The Uta as Tribute and Charm

東路やひつぎの御つきたゝじとて雪ふみ分くる勢多の長橋 Azumaji ya hitsugi no mitsuki tataji to te yuki fumiwakuru Seta no nagahashi The Eastern Sea Road! “Let there be no pause in the flow of goods, day after day, reign upon reign!”—so say those who make their way through the snow on the long bridge of Seta1

A

lmost two hundred years after Kanemori composed his “Seta Bridge” poem for the Daijōe of 970, Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114– 1204) composed this one—recapitulating the same conception as Kanemori’s, mirroring and echoing its figures, but with a difference. The year was 1166; the occasion, the Daijōe for a newly named child emperor, Rokujō. Once again, in Shunzei’s poem as in Kanemori’s, there is movement, labor, noise—in this case perhaps more a murmur than a clamor, with footfalls muffled in drifting snow. It opens with a quasiarchaic salute to the scene of action (Azumaji ya!), a call across time and space summoning memories and reverberations of sights and sounds and grounding the song at a specific locale in the transport network that spans the eastern half of the Japanese archipelago. The poem then repeats or recasts many of the elements of Kanemori’s: mitsugimono here becomes the synonymous mitsuki (“tribute goods” in both cases); taezu morphs to ­tataji,

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“no pause,” and in the name of the bridge itself once again anchors the poem. Shunzei’s introduction of the word hitsugi, which sonically overlaps with the following mitsuki, also suggests both “day after day” (日次ぎ), the constant flow of traffic on the bridge, and “royal succession” (日嗣), the unbroken continuity of sovereign rule—a lengthy span reaching across time as does the “long bridge” (nagahashi). In the scene thus depicted, just as in Kanemori’s poem, goods and chattels, material wealth produced in the province, are flowing toward the capital, where they are required for the consecration of yet another restart of the likewise (purportedly) uninterrupted sequence of royal enthronements, which, the poem avers, shall not be broken (tataji). But unlike Kanemori, and for a variety of purposes and effects, Shunzei specifies a temporal setting, winter, with the addition of snow to the scene. The word yuki, for snow, also suggests Yuki, the designated role for the province of Ōmi, the eastern province serving on this occasion, as so often, as source and provider of tribute for these rites and, of course, the location of Seta and the bridge. Further, if we unpack the orthography used in this rendering of the poem (as seen above, in the edition of Shunzei’s collected poems, Chōshū eisō, by Kawamura and Kubota)2 for the place-name “Seta” with two graphs that mean “power aplenty” and “vitality in abundance,” the poem then gains another cluster of overlapping signs for a uniquely potent synergy created by material goods, labored movement, royal charisma, and the physical space in which they are seen (or imagined to be) interacting.3 Conversely, if we ignore the graphic meaning of the character used for “snow,” yuki, in this rendering, the word itself becomes a synonym not only for “snow” but also for movement in tandem with the following verb compound fumiwakuru: these tribute bearers are literally “making their way, going toward” (yuki) the capital with their special burdens, slowed, perhaps, but unphased by the snow (yuki) through which they must tread (yukifumiwataru). That seasonal detail, snow, also served to bind the Seta poem to the space it would occupy, on a square of paper affixed to the last panel of six on the Yuki-side (Ōmi) Daijōe screen, which would depict, specifically, eleventh and twelfth month scenes with visual elements also specified (most likely) by Shunzei for an artist to render in paint: for this poem (the second of three bringing the full sequence to its close),



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勢多橋 白雪積敷人馬過之 Seta Bridge: Amidst drifts of white snow, men and horses pass one another as they cross.

and for the poem to follow, the last of all, this topical tag (dai) whereby Shunzei provided additional prompts for the artist to follow in filling the same visual frame: 吉身村 人家盛多立松之所 Yoshimi no mura, “Good-life Village”: a profusion of prosperous dwellings, and a place where pine trees rise.

This is also the prompt, and program, for Shunzei’s final poem for the sequence: 君が代は吉身の村の民もみな春を待とやいそぎたつ覧 kimi ga yo ha yoshimi no mura no tami mo mina haru wo matsu to ya isogitatsuramu “Let his reign be a good one!” they say—all the folk of Yoshimi, “Good-life Village,” as they hasten to prepare wreaths of pine to welcome the coming of spring.

There are further, multiple doublings of signification here—not only of tropes shared by painting and poem but also dual functions for such words as yoshi—in the name of the “Good-life Village” (yoshimi no mura) doubled in the “goodness” of the new sovereign’s rule (kimi ga yo ha yo­ shi)—and more double entendres, in matsu, both “waiting [for spring]” and “pines,” but also a dual role for the integrated text-and-image pairing as well: it completes the seasonal and calendrical cycle but at the same time, in its anticipation of the new year and the coming of spring (in anticipation of which the villagers are bedecking their dwellings with evergreen, as was customary in the waning days of the twelfth month), it also points to an anticipated renewal of that cycle beyond the textual/visual space of the screen and its program. Thus, like each of the poems and paintings in the sequence leading up to it, the poem gestures in turn to the very acts of consecration and renewal of sovereign rule that are its occasion, its res, its

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grounding in the past, its function and place in the present, and its signifying trajectory into the future. With these two extracts from the end of Shunzei’s 1166 Yukigata (Yukiside) screen-poem sequence, we have already entered into a thick mesh of cofunctioning visual signs of more than one kind—graphs for the representation of language, painted images for the representation of place, space, human activity, and its motivations (and this in the absence of the painted image itself; the poem text is its only vestige). I described the “topic tags” (or dai) for these poems (“Seta Bridge: Amidst drifts of white snow, men and horses pass one another as they cross,” and “Yoshimi no mura, Good-life Village: a profusion of prosperous dwellings, and a place where pine trees rise”) as directives for the execution of these signs on the screens, but another way to think about this is to see the poems as well as the paintings as fulfillments of the challenge posed by the definition of these deliberately crafted topics, prepacked with an abundance (or overabundance) of auspicious signs that ground the entire multipartite composition (the entire screen and the entire Daijōe waka suite) in specificity (in this case, Ōmi and its named sites) but, simultaneously, in the long-evolving past, present, and future verbal/visual rhetoric of Daijōe poetics. So poems such as these can serve to begin to flesh out the multiple meanings of what I have referred to as the intimate relationship of waka and things, which overlaps with and mirrors the notion and function of waka as things. Kanemori’s and Shunzei’s poems, and many others composed like these within Daijōe programs, were made to be part of material things (screens), but they also celebrate material things (tribute goods, ritual objects) and are such things (offered in tribute in ritual settings) themselves. In their mutual and collective recycling of figures, tropes, names, and words that evoke specific sights, sounds, and sensations, they also treat all such poem-building materials, and other poems that have contained them, as things, and become things themselves that can be recorded, remembered, remade. The repetition and reuse of a figure, name, and symbol such as “the long Seta Bridge” suggests also, like the bridge itself, a long span, or reach, across space and time, or rather spaces and times: the physical and geographical but also the imagined space of “Japan,” the idealized past, present, and future times to which sovereign rule is expected to bring (again, ideally or rhetorically) order, harmony, prosperity, long and happy



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lives for both rulers and ruled. The task of the composers of Daijōe uta was to create texts that would quite literally work toward that end, by accessing a rhetoric of sameness and difference burnished through consistent use over time. Their poems, and the full text, image, and performance programs with which they were coordinated, were manifestations of a deepseated (and long-since institutionalized) investment in and deployment of the power of words and images, both uttered and seen, to make things happen in the here and now, as in the past and in the future, in accordance with an ideal, a wish, a utopian vision of the eternal. The Daijōe, a celebration and enactment of cyclical repetition (at its heart, an annual harvest rite), of continuity and renewal, and of idealized (imaginary) order in the relationships of gods, lands, rulers, and peoples, was a more than fitting setting for the exercise, affirmation, and periodic rebooting of this functionality and empowerment of the Japanese song-poem; here, we can see waka “in action,” in place, revisiting, reviving, and reclaiming its role at the core of the geopolitical and cultural matrix that is its home. And yet, despite its readily apparent significance among the cyclical festivals and rites that consecrated and perpetuated sovereign rule and embodied its sacred functions, many details in the history of the Daijōe are obscure. The stages in the process leading to its institutionalization in the form to which poets like Kanemori, in the tenth century, and Shunzei, in the twelfth, contributed their compositions are not at all easily traced—nor were observances of the rite as uninterrupted as the rhetoric of its poetry would suggest. The earliest observance of a rite celebrating and sanctifying the inception of a new reign in something of the manner that came to be the full-fledged Daijōsai is said to have taken place in 674, when Emperor Temmu came to the throne.4 (Daijōsai is the most proper term for the comprehensive, multiphased ceremony; Daijōe refers more narrowly to the four consecutive days of feasts and banquets that are central to the program.) The performance of a program of songs ( fuzoku uta) based on or adapted from local sources—that is, authentic “folksongs” in the cultures of regional peoples and places (kuniburiuta)—seems to have been introduced in 833, at the time of Emperor Ninmyō, and if at first the performers of these songs were indeed “locals” from the tribute-offering provinces (Yuki, from the east, and Suki, from the west), they were eventually (perhaps as early as the end of the ninth century, certainly by the early tenth century)

Table 2.1. The Structure of Daijōe waka Programs (based on Yagi, Daijōe waka no sekai, 5)

大嘗会和歌 Daijōe waka (28 poems) 御屏風和歌 Onbyōbu waka (18 poems) 甲 1st panel: 3 poems (1st, 2nd months) 乙 2nd panel: 3 poems (3rd, 4th months) 丙 3rd panel: 3 poems (5th, 6th months) 丁 4th panel: 3 poems (7th, 8th months) 戊 5th panel: 3 poems (9th, 10th months) 己 6th panel: 3 poems (11th, 12th months)

風俗和歌 Fuzoku waka (10 poems) 稲舂 歌 Inetsuki uta (1 poem) 神楽歌 Kagura uta (1 poem) 風俗和歌 Fuzoku waka (8 poems) 巳日風俗 Mi no hi songs (4 poems) 辰日 Tatsu no hi songs (4 poems) 参入音声 Introit 参入音声 Introit 楽破 Development 楽破 Development 楽急 Presto 楽急 Presto 退出音声 Recessional 退出音声 Recessional

Table 2.2. Format of the Nin’an 1 (1166) Yuki-side (Ōmi) Daijōe waka: Types and Toponyms Fuzoku waka 巳日風俗 (3rd-day songs)

辰日風俗 (2nd-day songs)

参入音声 Introit 岩根山 Iwaganeyama

参入音声 Introit 鏡山Kagaminoyama

楽破 Development 安川 Yasukawa

楽破 Development 余吾海Yogo no umi

楽急 Presto 木綿園 Yuhusono

楽急Presto 真木村 Maki no mura

退出音声 Recessional 高御倉山 Takamikurayama

退出音声 Recessional 音高山Ototaka no yama

神楽歌 Kagura uta 長峰山 Nagaminenoyama

稲舂歌 Inetsukiuta (Rice-Pounding Song) 坂田郡 Sakata no kōri

Onbyōbu waka

冬Winter

秋Autumn

夏Summer

春Spring

己 (11th, 12th Months)

戊 (9th, 10th Months)

丁 (7th, 8th Months)

丙 (5th, 6th Months)

乙 (3rd, 4th Months)

甲 (1st, 2nd Months)

千坂浦 Chisaka no ura

吉水郷 Yoshimizu no sato

高宮郷 Takamiya no sato

長沢池 Nagasawa no ike

桜山 Sakurayama

小松崎 Komatsugasaki

勢多橋 Seta no hashi

大蔵山 Ohokurayama

滋賀浦 Shiga no ura

吉田郷 Yoshida no sato

山吹崎 Yamabukigasaki

亀岡 Kameoka

吉身村 Yoshimi no mura

松賀江岸 Matsugae no kishi

玉野原 Tamano no hara

玉陰井 Tamakage no i

大滝山 Ohotakinoyama

梅原山 Mumehara no yama

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displaced by “professional poets” (kajin), that is, courtiers serving in the official bureaucracy with experience in and extensive knowledge of the art of composing waka, formally tasked with creating poems that spoke, or sang, for them, in their voices, as surrogates. Onbyōbu waka, additional poems composed for inscription on and integrated into the visual program of painted standing screens depicting designated sites and scenes in the Yuki and Suki provinces, were first introduced in 1012, at the time of Emperor Sanjō. From that point on, full programs of Daijōe waka (ten fuzoku waka for performance, eighteen onbyōbu waka for inscription, presented on behalf of both the Yuki and Suki provinces by such assigned, surrogate composers) were continually produced and archived for the next four and a half centuries, for each Daijōe held in the eleventh month of the year in which each new reign began (with occasional calendrical adjustments or logistical postponements).5 After the Ōnin Wars in the mid-fifteenth century, however, there was a long hiatus in the observance of the Daijōe itself—the court could not muster the resources needed to conduct it in proper fashion—and this continued into the early modern era. The rite itself was revived at last in 1687 with the accession of Emperor Higashiyama, but Daijōe uta as such did not reappear as a feature in the records of subsequent Daijōe until 1738, in the rite for Empress GoSakuramachi (one of the rare female sovereigns in the latter history of the Japanese royal lineage). From that point on, with some modifications in format, Daijōe poems (including onbyōbu waka) have once again been part of every enthronement rite, including that of the present emperor, Akihito (Heisei), in 1990, for which poets and painters of national renown were commissioned.6 As mentioned in the introduction, there was, in addition to fuzoku waka, onbyōbu waka, and the byōbu on which they appeared, another set of texts and images of paramount (and possibly even greater) prominence among the accouterments of the Daijōe—perhaps from its very earliest stages—and it is important to consider these honmon screens, and their inscriptions as well, as constituents of the coordinated but variegated array of objects that, working together, imparted particular meaning to the rite while also bearing and reflecting its inherent meaning. Although Daijōe screens contained text elements in Chinese—the dai (topic tags), devised by poets as guides for their painter colleagues—their content as a whole,



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and likewise that of the fuzoku waka prepared for performance along with them, is local, vernacular, of, for, and about places in Japan and, specifically, from the point of view of the capital, its hinterlands, the provinces (kuni), realms of local gods (kunitsukami), and the people who worship them (tami). But alongside these productions, both the Yuki and Suki provinces (or rather, their surrogates) were responsible for preparing these honmon texts and screens as well; here, the content was Chinese text, citations carefully selected for their auspiciousness from a broad range of works of philosophy, history, and literature, invariably concerning the principles of sagacious rule and its benefits to the state, to the folk, and to the cosmos, and the accompanying painted images likewise depicted idealized spaces, utopias, and paradises of eternal harmony, prosperity, and peace inhabited by blessed immortals.7 In ninth- and tenth-century Japan in particular, but earlier and later as well, and especially among the high- and mid-ranking privileged classes whose constituents were likely to be called upon as Daijōe text-selectors, composers, and scribes, such texts and their themes were canonically favored above all else and composed the core of what professional scholars and literate aristocrats (two categories that often overlapped) strove to master in the course of their education (whether in the formal academies or otherwise) and subsequently mined as both models and sources in their lives as writers, teachers, and public servants.8 Just as such texts—of Chinese origin, but for all practical purposes fully integrated into classical Japa­nese literacy and its topographies of text (and textuality)—were marked as “different” by the scripts in which they were reproduced and read (entirely in Chinese graphs, kanji), so the honmon texts and screens bearing them in the Daijōe array were likewise both different from and yet graphically and visually kindred to those bearing waka, which were themselves inscribed in two contrasting ways. Archives of the poems and songs, and accounts by Daijōe calligraphers and observers, show and tell us that Yuki songs and poems appeared on the screens (and were preserved in these rec­ords accordingly) in the so-called kanamajiri mode—hiragana mixed with relatively sparsely deployed kanji—while Suki songs and poems (at least from the mid-eleventh century onward) were written in mana, that is, kanji used for their phonetic values, as in the earliest stages of the development of the domestic Japanese kana writing system.9

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We might understand the use of mana in the visual renderings of Sukiside waka as a deliberately employed archaism—an evocation of an antique practice, reminiscent of the earliest stages of the history of waka as written text—but we can also see it as a means whereby a unique kind of limited but visually apparent resemblance to the form (and, in another mode of perception or cognition, content) of the honmon inscriptions was made manifest, and thereby also a step toward the coalescence of the signifying work of the entire song-and-screen program. Furthermore, the kana/mana distinction deployed in these inscriptions likewise embodies or underscores the Yuki-Suki, left-right, east-west bilateralism that characterizes so many aspects of the Daijōe ritual structure, in which difference bleeds into sameness, and vice versa, though never to a point at which difference ceases to be readily apparent. This allows sameness, or unity, to be expressed or apparent through both subtle and not-so-subtle modulations of form, while “content” or “message” is simultaneously amplified, recapitulated, and replicated in a host of subtle and not-so-subtle variations on central themes. Within this multiphase orchestrated program as a whole, the Daijōe screen honmon and waka inscriptions, executed and displayed in contrasting but coordinated written forms, respectively and jointly, imparted their own particular auras, atmospheres, and tones of meaning and yet were unified not only by their shared themes and figures but also in their status and function as talismanic offerings, ritual implements without which the Daijōe could not achieve its purpose.10 One might say, in short, e pluribus unum: the Daijōe celebrates the ideal of oneness of the polity over which the sovereign rules through displays of multiplicity and variegation that are at the same time reduced to something more like a simulacrum of a single harmonized (and also homogenized) whole, and the conventions that governed the creation, design, and presentation of the Daijōe texts (both honmon and waka) worked to just that end, defining what would be seen and heard then and shaping what we can see and hear now in them as well. But to bring this off—to make it work, literally—differentiated, special­ ized categories of expertise and knowledge sets were required for the preparation and production of these materials. That is why we see shifts over time in the kinds of qualifications sought for the makers of both kinds of Daijōe text. In the earliest stages, it appears, the “poets” (kajin) named to serve as surrogate voices for the “people” (tami) of the Yuki and Suki prov­



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inces (kuni) were, indeed, scholars first and somewhat secondarily waka specialists or practitioners, often the scions of hereditary waka lineages such as the Ōtomo and Ōnakatomi in the ninth and tenth centuries and, a bit later, distinguished men from certain branches of the Minamoto and Fujiwara clans. Some of them in the earliest recorded instances were most accomplished as calligraphers (Ono no Yoshiki in 897, his sibling Ono no Michikaze in 932 and again in 946), and were responsible for both Yuki and Suki materials.11 Throughout the Heian period, as we know from both historical records and fictional representations, court gentlemen were expected to be accomplished in all these literary skills, and many could move adroitly among various forms, “registers,” and idioms, as occasions and circumstances might demand. (We also know that some women were equally adroit and multitalented.)12 At the same time, specialization and expertise or “genius” in one skill or another (composing verse of one or another kind—kanshi, waka, or both—interpreting and expounding on the classics, singing or chanting, or writing with brush and ink, and so on) were duly recognized and rewarded in a variety of ways, in life and afterward, through the preservation and anthologization of these artists’ works, and through the polishing of their posthumous reputations as masters and standard-setters. Thus, by the early eleventh century, it had become the custom to prefer bona fide “Confucian scholars” (jusha, 儒者) for appointments as Daijōe composers—a move that somewhat privileged one kind of professional identity and hereditary knowledge (classical academics) over another (mastery of waka culture and practice), though both constituted indispensable cultural capital that was transmitted from generation to generation within these families and clans.13 Given this established preference for jusha as Daijōe waka poets, it seems to have come as something of a surprise to Shunzei when, shortly after the abdication of Emperor Nijō and the accession of his two-year-old son as Emperor Rokujō in the year 1165, he received a command to compose the set of Yuki verses for the forthcoming Daijōe, which was to take place in the eleventh month of the following year. Shunzei’s court title at the time was a respectable one (Sakyō no daibu, senior administrator for capital district affairs; he resigned from that post in the first month of 1166, to be succeeded by his eldest son, Nariie), and he held the rank of junior third grade (as of the eighth month of 1166). Such status in itself was sufficient

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for his selection for this special responsibility. Furthermore, he was more than well established in the world of waka as a frequent participant and judge in poetry contests (utaawase) and other organized events for poetic composition such as hyakushu uta, hundred-poem sequence programs for groups of varying size hosted by prominent courtiers or members of the royal family (such as the notable Kyūan hyakushu of 1150, carried out under the auspices of Cloistered Emperor Sutoku). Still, it would be a couple of decades before he would emerge as the preeminent poet and most authoritative arbiter of poetic practice of his time, a singular, pivotal figure whose writings and activities would shape much of the rest of waka history and culture. In fact, his name at the time was not yet Shunzei (or Toshinari); it was Fujiwara no Akihiro. He would make the change in the twelfth month of 1167; a decade later, on taking Buddhist vows, he would take the religious name Shaku’a. All that was still to come, however. For now there was this apparently unexpected obligation to fulfill. We know of Shunzei’s reaction only from the brief introduction he provided for the Daijōe poems that he did eventually produce when he included them in his private anthology, Chōshū eisō (長秋詠藻). Unlike his son Teika, Shunzei left no diary that might allow us to reconstruct the details of his life and career from his point of view; this we must do from the relatively scant information that can be culled in headnotes to his poems in Chōshū eisō and other anthologies, and from the accounts of his contemporaries and later followers, including Teika.14 Here, he says, In the first year of the Nin’an era [1166], I received a royal command to compose and submit the Yuki poems, and when I declined, pointing out that previously this has always been done by Confucian scholars and the like, I received repeated indications from the Ceremonial Coordinator Lord Toshitsune that I was expected to comply, so I composed and presented the following.15

“The following” is a complete suite of ten fuzoku waka and eighteen onbyōbu waka, all built around a selection of place-names in Ōmi, which, like so much else in the ritual program, had been preselected (not by Shunzei but by other court functionaries) on the basis of both augury and precedent. The Suki province in 1166 was Tamba (like Ōmi, also a default

1. Ōmi meishozu byōbu: detail showing traffic on the Seta Bridge, Edo period, artist unknown. Courtesy of Ōtsu-shi Rekishi Hakubutsukan.

2. Yuki and Suki lodges erected for the Daijōe. Detail from Kuji roku, a set of paintings executed by Iwakura Tomomi and others in 1887. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

3. Yuki-side fuzoku performance, from Kuji roku. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

4. Yuki-side yogoto audience; Daijōe onbyōbu are visible in the interior to the right of the sovereign’s seat. Detail from Kuji roku. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

5. Detail from the screen “Amusements at Higashiyama in Kyoto,” Kanō School, circa 1620. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Purchase, 2013 Benefit Fund and Mary and James G. Wallach Foundation Gift, 2014. www.metmuseum.org.

6. Paintings of “Eight Views of Ōmi” scenes and of the Kinki region in the Shoin of Kajūji, Yamashina, Kyoto, by Tosa Mitsuoki, late seventeenth century. The Seta Bridge scene is in the lower left of the painting within the niche. Photograph by the author.

7. Tosa Mitsumoto, “Murasaki Shikibu’s Pilgrimage at Ishiyamadera” (Murasaki Shikibu Ishiyama mōde zufuku). Dated by Melissa McCormick to 1560. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

8. Lacquer box (tansu) for a set of volumes of The Tale of Genji with exterior decoration showing scenes from the “Eight Views of Ōmi.” Seventeenth century. 39.5 x 21.2 x 24.5 cm. By permission of Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo. 9. Detail of the Suntory tansu lid with depiction of the “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” scene. By permission of Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo.

10. Utagawa Hiroshige, “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama,” circa 1850. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Henry L. Phillips Collection, Bequest of Henry L. Phillips, 1939. www.metmuseum.org.

11. Sumiyoshi Jokei (1599–1670), “Makibashira” scene from Genji monogatari tekagami (undated). The young heroine of the chapter leaves her poem in a pillar of her home as she departs. Reproduction courtesy of Amana Images, Inc.



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designation—from the late ninth century, the Suki province was Tamba on ten occasions), and the poet commissioned to produce the songs for it was Fujiwara no Naganori, a bona fide scion of a scholarly lineage who had been the Yuki poet in 1155 for Emperor GoShirakawa’s Daijōe and would serve again as Yuki poet in 1168 for Emperor Takakura’s—whereas Shunzei would never again be called upon for such a task.16 Shunzei’s reproduction of the poems he did compose on this one occasion, in Chōshū eisō, concludes with a note indicating that he formally submitted the poems on the third day of the eleventh month of the first year of Nin’an (1166); the four-day Daijōe rite itself commenced on the fifteenth. Commissions of this kind were usually delivered months in advance; perhaps, in this case, Shunzei’s hesitation and delay caused him to cut things very close to what soon became a pressing deadline. Multiple modest refusals before inevitable acceptance of a prestigious task or promotion were virtually de rigueur in the Heian aristocracy, and this could be all that Shunzei is signaling in his response to the receipt of this command from court. Did he regard the work of composing these poems as a sacred task or a mundane one, as an honor (a form of recognition, an opportunity for further recognition) or a burden? We can only guess. Given the precedent and protocol-driven organization and substance of the rite, it seems likely that he did find the assignment of the task to himself rather than to a true jusha to be anomalous, and perhaps he really was “standing on ceremony”—though as is often the case with such matters, there had been more than a few exceptions to the scholar-only pattern over the course of the two-hundred-plus years since the performance and presentation of uta had become integral to the Daijōe proceedings. Inoue Muneo argues that Shunzei was offended at being asked to perform a service that had for several generations been assigned to members of the middling court ranks (those meriting use of the title daibu); that was in fact his own status at the time, but Shunzei held himself superior to his peers as a direct descendant of Michinaga through his son Nagaie. The matter was further complicated by the fact that at the time of the request to serve, Shunzei was still an adopted heir (yōshi) in the Hamuro family. Inoue further suggests that Shunzei would have sensed that the command reflected the Cloistered Emperor GoShirakawa’s wish and may have been intended to abet subsequent events. In the following year, Shunzei was

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­promoted, returned to the Fujiwara lineage, and took the new name Toshinari in place of Akihiro. Thus, Inoue concludes that Shunzei’s initial refusal was not only pro forma but also a sham, and that his service helped him toward his goals.17 Be that as it may, Shunzei was more than equal to the task: even at this relatively early stage of his career, he knew full well how to draw on a vast archive of earlier verse—in this case, hundreds of previous Daijōe poems, a large portion of them on Ōmi topoi (thanks to the frequent assignment of that province for the Yuki role), as well as many other canonical verses celebrating Ōmi locations—to create a suite of poems that was at once like all those others and yet new and unique for having been made for this singular occasion among so many of its kind. Such déjà-vu and déjà-entendu effects were in great part the goal of the Daijōe waka composer’s efforts. Likewise, though the performers of song and dance and the artists creating the screen on which copies of such poems would make their appearance might be different individuals from occasion to occasion, the point of their performances and productions was, above all, to replicate the familiar and by that means celebrate and consecrate the renewal of an (ostensibly) uninterrupted sequence of reigns. Everything made for every Daijōe thus repeated, mirrored, and echoed its predecessors; Shunzei’s Daijōe poems of 1166, though crafted by a consummate (and, in other circumstances, innovative) master of verse-making, are certainly no exception: they were not meant to be, and if they had been, he would have failed in his mission, as the purpose of their making could not have been realized. One of the most thorough descriptions of the details of ritual preparations and procedures, specifications for the deployment and display of tribute objects, and the roles and movements of key objects as well as participant personae in a late Heian-period (and thus prototypical) Daijōe is to be found in Heihanki, the compendious diary of the courter Taira no Nobunori (1112–87; extant portions cover events from as early as 1132 and as late as 1171)—and it is an account of the same Daijōe for Rokujō in 1166 in which Shunzei’s Yukigata Ōmi poems and Naganori’s Sukigata Tamba poems took their parts.18 Using these Heihanki records blended with structural details of the royal palace interior reconstructed on the basis of the early twelfth-century Northern Sung architectural encyclopedia Yingzao



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fashi (Eizō hōshiki, 営造法式, contained in and transmitted to Japan in the Xutanzhu [Zokudanjo, 続談助] compendium), the Daijōe waka scholar Yagi Ichio devised a schematic diagram that allows us to imagine the spatial dispositions for each of the various screens presented by the Yuki and Suki sides (i.e., the six four-shaku waka screens and the six five-shaku honmon screens19) and installed in the chamber occupied by the emperor and his retinue for the final night of banqueting. Early on, this took place in the ceremonial hall called the Burakuin, a section of the Chōdōin (朝堂院) ceremonial complex within the Daidairi, the Heian royal palace compound (today known as the Kyoto Gosho). After the destruction by fire of the Burakuin in 1063, the courtyard in front of the Shishinden was the site of most Daijōe observances.20 This schematic (fig. 12) gives us the best possible means of envisioning the function and physical presence of screens of the kind that Shunzei, Naganori, and others helped to create in this culminating moment of their performance in the sequential phases of the rite. In particular, we can see how these byōbu were allocated spaces in relationship to the sovereign’s seat at the center of the hall—the Yuki screens of both kinds to his left, the privileged eastern pole, and the Suki screens to his secondary right (his own seat faces south, as always)—and also in relationship to one a­ nother, allowing, at least in the abstract if not in actual viewing or reading practice, for a kind of dialogue between “East” and “West,” “Chinese” and “Japanese” texts and scenes, screens of similar design but slightly different and thus distinguishing sizes and scales, with distinctive dynamics in the interaction of their verbal/visual elements, including distinctively differing but mirroring scripts. It will not escape notice that the honmon screens were placed in greater proximity to the sovereign’s seat than were the waka screens—but the position of the latter, at the east and west ends of the hall, might suggest that, rather than relegation to the margins, they were so positioned to frame the entire space, as avatars of outlying regions (kuni) standing in for their obedient denizens, “spoken for” here by the voices that “speak” (silently) in the inscribed poems, repeating their prayers for and salutes to the ruler seated (attentively? obliviously?) nearby. Meanwhile, the honmon screens stood (also silently) surrounding the respective Yuki and Suki enclosures, performing their own mantic obeisances. The ­respective

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12. Schematic drawing showing arrangement of Daijōe accoutrements surrounding the sovereign’s seat during the yogoto audience. Adapted from Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 128. Drawn by Sydney Shea.

f­unctions and forms of these objects in the ritual space represented and activated a panoply of powers—with roots and origins in the land itself, and in the greater cosmos—physically manifested and assembled here to relaunch royal authority under optimal conditions for the continuation of order, stability, and continuity itself.



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Certainly, in this space and also in the preceding processes of their production, honmon and waka texts and screens informed one another in dynamic ways: Yagi has demonstrated that the content, themes, and preponderant figures, emblems, and tropes of auspiciousness embedded in honmon programs frequently shaped the verbal and visual rhetorics of both fuzoku and byōbu waka heard in performance or displayed in screens on the same or later occasions (and not the other way around).21 He cites, for example, the central conceit in a fuzoku waka (a mairi onjō or entryprocession song, for the final night of banqueting) composed by Sugawara no Tamenaga for the Daijōe of 1235 for Emperor Shijō: 煙にて煙にあらず紫の色こそ見ゆれ雲の岡より kemuri ni te kemuri ni arazu murasaki no iro koso miyure Kumo no oka yori Smoke that is not smoke—just such is that purple haze that we see rising over Kumo no oka, “Cloud Hill.”22

This seems, at first glance, a likely commonplace, but it almost certainly represents a deliberate effort to rework, in the waka idiom, the cognate phrase (若煙非煙) from a recognized honmon source text, Yiwenleiju (J.  Geibun ruiju, 芸文類聚, a seventh-century Tang-dynasty classified compendium, where it identifies such “smoke that is not smoke,” that is, “purple clouds,” as omens of singular auspiciousness [keiun, 慶雲]).23 Yagi also carefully traces the ways in which another four-character phrase—“the autumn grain to be harvested is as dense as a cloud” (秋稼如雲)—embedded in a honmon contrived for the Daijōe held in the ninth year of Chōgen 1036, for the Emperor Suzaku, and derived from a passage in Shanhaijing (J. Sengaikyō, 山海経, an ancient geography) is later reworked in Daijōe byōbu uta on at least three subsequent twelfth-century instances, both as a key element of the topical prompts or “tags” (daishi) and within the poems that fulfill their terse thematic and figural directives: • for the Daijōe in 1159 (Heiji 1), for Emperor Nijō: on the fifth (ninth/tenth month) panel of the Yuki (Ōmi) screen (poet: Fujiwara no Toshinori, 俊憲) 稲村山稼如雲

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The harvest at Inamurayama is like a dense cloud あきのたはくもとぞみゆるいなむらのやまも かひあるよにこそありけれ aki no ta ha kumo to zo miyuru Inamura no yama mo kahi aru yo ni koso arikere These autumn fields might well be taken for clouds: “Inamurayama,” a mountain where all villages are rich with grain, truly does deserve its name!24 • for the same occasion, on the fourth (seventh/eighth month) panel of the Suki (Tamba) screen (poet: Fujiwara no Norikane, 範兼) 増井辺早稲如雲 At Masui, “The Well of Increase,” the early harvest is already like a dense cloud. としつくります井の水をせきいれしわさたのほたち くもかとぞみる toshitsukuri Masui no mizu wo sekiireshi wasata no hotachi kumo ka to zo miru This year at Masui—“the Well of Increase” whose waters fed the fields of rice—the heads of ripe grain might well be taken for a dense cloud.25 • For the Daijōe in Genryaku 1 (1185), for Emperor GoToba: On the fourth (seventh/eighth month) panel for the Suki (Tamba) screen: (poet: Fujiwara no Mitsunori, 光範) 長田村秋田眇々稲如雲 At Nagatamura, where vast fields stretch into the distance, the autumn fields in all directions are full of grain, like a dense cloud. 穂左岐出天秋者雲止曾見衣渡留長田乃田井乃長彦乃稲 ほさきでて秋は雲しぞ見え渡る長田の田井の長彦の稲 hosakidete aki ha kumo shi zo miewataru Nagata no tai no nagahiko no ine Everywhere we look, the ripe heads of grain are dense clouds here at Nagata village (“of the vast fields”) where the stalks of rice grow long and tall.26



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There can scarcely be a better example—though further examples in Daijōe poesy are super-abundant—of the transportation and mutation of a rhetorical property, or trope, in just this manner, across time and through the space we might visualize as that occupied by this ever-expanding corpus. If we could, we might also seek a connection between the repeated figure of clouds (that are not clouds) in these prompts and poems, and the representational deployment of clouds (of purple or golden hue?) in the paintings for which they served as cues, or partners. We should also note here—as elsewhere in Daijōe waka but beyond them as well in waka rhetoric as a whole—how the Chinese conception of likeness (or simile, bleeding into metaphor), constructed with the term 如 (read in Japanese as gotoshi) in the topic tags, morphs into a somewhat more complex analogy as it takes shape in the idiom of uta, often (as in these examples) involving the explicit act of “seeing” (miru) or of “being seen (as)” (miyu)—a transformation that has the effect of conjuring an almost-but-not-quite identifiable “viewer” or “speaker” in the poem’s unfolding articulation as a speech-act coordinated with its referent—that is, that which might be seen, in nature, in the imagination or actually could be seen in the painting, if present and adjacent, or if recalled in memory.27 But this is only one way—one register or dimension—in which a conception, or articulation, inscribed (and thus made present and operative) in the Daijōe space moves between a “Chinese” (externally sourced, locally appropriated and naturalized) form and context and a “Japanese” (domestic, vernacular) production. Thus, in addition to thinking about the Daijōe poems and screens as one especially significant example of the materializa­ tion of the Japanese poem and of its materiality or “thingness,” per se, we are reminded by Yagi to see these phenomena in yet another, overlapping frame, that is, the ever-evolving and protean culture of interacting, crossinforming continental (Chinese-origin) and archipelagic (Japanese-origin, or domestically cultivated) visual, literary, ritual, and other resources. The point here is not the “outing” of yet another seemingly homegrown set of practices and its implements (in this case a set that was developed, preserved, and treasured at the core and pinnacle of Japanese court culture—in which there are, in fact, many such “hybrids”) as “continental” in origin or essence or developed form. Rather, at least insofar as this case study is concerned, and in thinking about the relationship of these

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­particular waka to “things” (the full array of Daijōe tribute goods—singers, dancers, foodstuffs and beverages, songs heard, songs written out and made visual on screens, and all) and the concomitant function of these songs, or waka, as things, we need to keep this larger mixed matrix of foundations, referents, auras, and ambiences in view as we examine them in hyper-detail (which may cause various distortions or exaggerations of artificially isolated features). By means of this admixture, a concoction devised and enhanced over time through adumbration, adaptation, and standardization (though not homogenization), the functionaries of the Japanese royal court designed a rite of renewal that encompassed a carefully crafted and (at least in principle) always reproducible assemblage of acts and signs that spoke for, stood for, and affirmed its authority and jurisdiction within the structure of what they knew as their universe of meaning. And if, in the banqueting hall in the Burakuin as elsewhere, “Chinese” classical (prose) texts and “new” waka texts, and the surfaces on which they were displayed, stood apart, symbolically placed to left and right as standins for the respective “East” and “West” provinces in whose names they played their parts, that very juxtaposition also spoke and stood for and embodied that totalizing vision. The honmon may have blended and paraphrased identifiable, specific source texts in the Chinese classical canon; the waka, on the other hand, spoke and sang in an idiom honed through constant, centuries-long reiteration and refinement, and called out or visually “advertised” the names of specific, locatable (or at least imaginable) places in the provinces (kuni) of their origin. But at the same time the purpose and effect of both was to bind ruler and realm, word, picture, and nature in magical union. Thus, micro was also macro; differentiated idioms came together in blended, harmonized orchestration; multiples and variants were, at the same time, a single, blended chorus of sights and sounds activated with but one purpose, one purport: the reaffirmation and recapitulation of the meaning of Japanese kingship and the recycling of its (supposedly) infinitely renewable powers. This is but one of many ways to think about waka in this particular historical setting; there are many other aspects of Daijōe poetry (the corpus) and poesy (the praxis) that invite serious study. Obviously, they offer a particularly inviting opportunity to think about poetics involving place-



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names, in this case in a context in which toponyms carry significance and convey energy through the activation of strategic possibilities ranging widely from imaginary scene-setting to punning (that is, through appeal to the visual imagination, to potential or actual aural sensation) to a sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle evocation of antique auras and ambiences, and more. Conversely, it is clear that the production of Daijōe waka—both fuzoku waka and byōbu waka—did much to feed the development of place-name poetics and the patterns of conventionalized usage that we associate with the notion (and corpus) of utamakura.28 Again, ­Yagi’s analysis of the 1036 Daijōe honmon screens reveals a pattern of mirroring or echoing in the deployment (or concoction) of auspicious toponyms in both types of screens. Of the Chinese place-names that appear in the texts for eight of the twelve panels for the 1036 honmon screens, four—the names of three mountains and one district—are “translated” and embedded in later waka screen poems: Pingheshan (平蓋山) becomes Hiratani (平谷) in 1213 (Kenpō 1); Gaomixian (高密) becomes Takashima no kōri (高嶋郡) in 1211 (Genryaku 1) in its Yuki screen and Takaoka (高岡) in its Suki screen; Anlinzhishan (安林之山) becomes Yasuyoshikawa (安吉川) in 1087 (Kanji 1) and Yasura no mura (安良村) in 1108 (Tennin 1); and Qingguizhishan (琴皷之山) becomes Ogoto no sato (雄琴郷) in 1211 (Genryaku 1) and Tsuzumi no yama (鼓山) in 1068 (Jiryaku 4). These correlating maneuvers also extend to the deployment of these place-names in similar locations within the seasonal sequencing of both screens as they unfold across the panels from right to left, spring to winter.29 This movement, these “translations” from continental to archipelagic sites and their names—their repositioning and transmutations, which create a special kind of distorting echo that is at first disorienting but then reorients and relocates the perceptor (reader) in a new, “closer to home” named space—are but one example of such maneuvers that take place in the poetics of place-names (and elsewhere) as waka interfaces with its others (here, Chinese geography, Chinese texts, the antiquarian but a­ uthoritative aura of a land and culture so close yet so far away, so “different” and so much the same).30 Such phenomena (or effects) are made possible in large part by the particular way that Japanese writing happened to evolve, incorporating signs (graphs) that could be adapted and “transported” to stand

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for “Japanese” names (and other words) while visually suggesting typological or topological affinities or identifications with “Chinese” names (of places, cities, buildings, and much more). We might think of this as graphic or visual punning, but it also has an aural dimension or register (as, for example, xian [山] becomes san, and then yama, or qing [琴], becomes kin, and then koto). As I have suggested, the puns and double-entendre fiddlings and gimmicks involving the names of the places (villages, counties, and topographic features in them—rivers, mountains, ponds, and so forth) that serve, in Daijōe waka, to salute the sovereign are themselves a key site for investigating the thingness, the materiality of waka of this kind. These poems find their poeticity precisely through these semantic acrobatics, this meaningful and magically energized and energizing play, and in doing so they typify, and provide templates for, many other instances of similar “play” that we encounter in poems of many other kinds, from many other occasions, throughout the waka corpus. Like the torimono no uta found in kagura no uta and saibara collections, and in the Kokin wakashū as well, which were sung about and with a brandishing aloft of sacred objects (branches of sakaki trees or of bamboo, bows, wands, staffs, swords and pikes, and wreaths of vine are typical torimono), Daijōe byōbu poems brandish, by naming, things of special value: fruits and grains, water from springs and streams, beautiful vistas, and, of course, names of places. In so doing they simultaneously make themselves things of special value that were quite deliberately made to be heard or seen or both, on the surface of objects (screens) of concomitant special value that also bore images of those same commodities and the fields, villages, ponds, streams, springs, and vistas that (figuratively) have yielded them in tribute. And the key process of submission, transport, receipt, and display of these goods involves, inherently, movement and exchange: these objects were in motion for a cause, fulfilling a need, and without them the ritual had no substance, no fodder for its mantic exercise. At the same time, particularly in the context of this study, it is especially fitting to think about these poems as very precious “things”: tribute commodities and/or simulacra thereof, created, presented, performed, and preserved amid the production, submission, and consumption of ritually grown and prepared rice and wine, musical and dance performances, and other physical offerings of homage and fealty, talismans imparting lon-



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gevity, prosperity, and communal and cosmic harmony—all key elements among the array of physical objects and precious goods produced as furnishings and accouterments for this all-important court ritual marking the sequential renewals of sovereign rulership and the special symbolic (and, ideally, symbiotic) relationship among the sovereign, the land, and its products (agricultural and otherwise) with each new reign. That was their purpose and function in the Heian and Kamakura periods, when the rite was regularly observed, later when it was sporadically revived in the Edo period, and again in the modern renewals of these enthronement rituals. In theory, every Daijōe tribute good, including these performed and inscribed songs and poems, rendered as physical the transference and proffering of blessings and gestures of allegiance of local deities and divine forces all aligned to ensure the longevity and prosperity of the sovereign. That notion in turn shaped the rhetorical trajectory of the poems themselves: every one of them, in some way, is a prayer or charm uttered in a ritual voice—not the poet’s but that of an invisible chorus of loyal celebrants—reiterating that sentiment. (In the byōbu waka, as I have suggested, these voices and sentiments may also, at least in some cases, be identifiable as those of the “folk,” tami, and other personae depicted as figures in the paintings. The same would be true, structurally and contextually, of the voices “singing” the fuzoku waka, but in that case the additional identifications might be those of the performers actually singing these songs in live performance at the designated stages of the rite—some of whom, at least in the early history of the Daijōe, were in fact denizens of the Yuki and Suki provinces, brought to the capital for this extraordinary purpose.) What varies from poem to poem, occasion to occasion, are the specific elements, selections, and arrangements of place-names and the attributes of those names and places; what remains consistent is that rhetorical posture, tone, and trajectory, and as a result the corpus of Daijōe waka as a whole also constitutes a delimited intertextual domain in which every poem is deliberately designed to resemble, mirror, and echo all the others. This is another aspect of their “thingness” to which I particularly want to draw attention, and we see in particular how this system of referentiality operates in Shunzei’s contributions to this corpus from 1166, and also in the carefully selected examples of Daijōe verses that he included in Senzai wakashū, the royally commissioned anthology he assembled in the 1180s.

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Further, in that they ostensibly began as authentic “local songs” but later became stylized, mediated replications thereof, Daijōe waka invite further interrogation into a number of such processes of appropriation, transformation, and institutionalization of cultural and artistic practices. In this case these processes do not seem to diminish or compromise the sacral functionality of the poems generated, any more than does the requisite recapitulation of patterns of internal referentiality that takes shape within this delimited intertextual domain. Rather, the process yields an almost continuous or at least very long-lived practice in which conventions and tropes are purposefully repeated and recycled with relatively little variation precisely so as to demonstrate the apparent and much-desired continuity of the practice as such and to ensure that it fulfills its purpose. In other words, it is not just the figures of enduring verdure and vitality, l­ ongevity and prosperity that impart and are invested with meaning and invest the Daijōe waka practice with meaning: the endurance and repetition of the practice itself, the preservation of its unvarying rhetorics, share in the construction of that meaning. This is something that might well be said of the entirety of waka practice: every act of making a new poem of this kind is an act of homage to the long history of making poems of that kind, and that posture is often made evident, or material, through gestures of allusion, citation, imitation, and modeling. But I would suggest that, perhaps especially because of their specific and explicit ritual function, this is especially so, and a sine qua non, for Daijōe poetry. This is yet another reason why they invite particular attention here, since it is my contention that such cross-referentiality, such constant recycling movements, and the resulting generic coherence are aspects of and enablers of the “thingness” of such poems and poetry. Much of the history of waka culture overlaps with and is intertwined with the history of court culture, which operated and was maintained at its spatial and sociopolitical core. And often when we examine the motions and movements of capital, whether physical, human, or cultural, in these joint histories, we see recurring and conspicuous patterns that are both centripetal and centrifugal: the capital city (the first, Fujiwara-kyō, then Nara, then Heian-kyo, then Kyoto—and much later, Edo, eventually Tokyo) at the center absorbs and consumes resources and appropriates forms and materials that originate at the peripheries, and the peripheries (provincial cultural centers, social networks operating beyond the range of royal



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and aristocratic elites) acquire, adapt, and transform arts and institutions introduced from the metropole. The Daijōe poems are a coherent corpus of texts that come into being and are set in motion in just such dynamics of commerce between capital and province, in acts of exchange imbued with the aura of royal court ritual and rooted in the hoary origins of that most central of central institutions; they are veritable “objects in motion” first produced in the early stages of their history at the periphery and conveyed to the center in order to fulfill a unique role in the grand feasts that were in turn part of a full program of rituals, all designed to renew and reinvigorate that special relationship between periphery and center, province and metropole, folk (tami) and ruler (kimi) through the transfer and collection of regionally produced goods and local energies, both material and occult, at the axis of the polity. But what actually transpired over the several days of a Daijōe rite in the Heian and Kamakura periods (i.e., from the late eighth through mid-­ fourteenth centuries, during which time it was observed without fail, almost always in the eleventh month of the first year or two following each new sovereign’s accession [sokui, 即位]), at least insofar as the presentation of songs, poems, and byōbu (waka and honmon) from both the Yuki and Suki “sides” are concerned? (Today, as in the past, many aspects of the rite are secret, conducted in spaces hidden from view, withheld from documentation of any kind.31) Recorded examples of the songs themselves (though only a handful), with only the barest details (in the preceding prose prefaces, kotobagaki) providing for context, appear for the first time in a fittingly foundational text: in the Kamiasobi no uta (“songs for divine performance”) subsection of the twelfth scroll or chapter (maki) of the Kokin wakashū.32 Subsequently, selections from Daijōe waka sequences appear in many (but not all) of the royal anthologies, in clusters within chapters devoted to one or the other of two broad topic classifications: Ga no uta (“Songs of Felicitation”) in earlier instances and Jingi no uta (“Kamiworship Songs”) in later anthologies.33 There is a point I want to make here about methods in the study of a corpus such as this. There has been a notable tendency in Daijōe waka studies to approach them as a corpus organized through the patterns of their inclusion and appearance in the chokusenshū, beginning with this group in the Kokin wakashū. One of Yagi Ichio’s most important studies of this ­poetry,

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Daijōe waka no sekai, is organized in this way, which serves to document one aspect of the ways in which Daijōe poems in particular have been canonized (and not) within the larger classical corpus. (Yagi also adopts in the same book and elsewhere much broader and less exclusive approaches— for example, in his treatments of Daijōe waka chūshinki, the lists of proposed place-name topoi submitted at the early stages of topic selection.) In the present study, I have deemphasized this anthologized aspect of Daijōe waka’s reception and disposition because it confines the scope of consideration to just those poems (albeit plenty of them) from the larger Daijōe corpus that have been selected for inclusion and arrangement into these anthologies for a variety of programmatic, structural, and other (sometimes personal and political) agendas. Thus, a “chokusenshū filter,” while in itself a product of a set of historically significant editorial processes that are worthy of study, is just that: an ex post facto filter that distorts the resulting range of critical investigation. It is for this and other practical reasons that I have deployed filters of my own—following my own interests and purposes in this investigation—in the shaping of this presentation, while recognizing that any number of other approaches can and should be equally valid and productive. Indeed, later in this chapter, I discuss the Daijōe poems that Shunzei chose to include, as editor of the Senzai wakashū, in that anthology, precisely because this is a way of seeing how he, himself (by then) a former Daijōe waka composer, created a representative selection of poems of this kind and category through the imposition of his own personal poetic “filter.” That said, there is no complete record of the Daijōe waka composed for all known observances of the rite from 833 onward (that is, from those for which poems are known to have been composed), but the record we do have is an ex post facto assemblage. Over time, court archivists did gather all examples that could be found in the royal anthologies (chokusenshū, beginning with the Kokin wakashū “Kamiasobi” group), the personal anthologies (shikashū) of Daijōe kajin, the writings of others who had reason to record them—for example, in some so-called rekishi monogatari (historically based narratives) such as Eiga monogatari, and in various diaries— and other records of specific Daijōe occurrences that had been preserved in royal household collections. Eventually, all these were arranged into two



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compendia: Daijōe yuki suki eiga and Daijōe waka burui, but by whom we do not know.34 And neither of the eighteenth-century final versions of these documents was the subject of scholarly examination and analysis until 1940, when the art historian Akiyama Terukazu came upon them while conducting research in the Kunaichō Shoryōbu, then known as the Zushoryō (or Toshoryō). His published work based on them (“Daijōe yuki suki byōbu,” which appeared as the second chapter of his 1964 magnum opus, Heian jidai sezokuga no kenkyū) initiated and established the foundations for modern scholarly study of this corpus, its place in the formation and development of landscape and meishoe (famous places) screen-­ painting traditions, and many other aspects of the rite itself.35 As noted briefly in the introduction, current understandings of the character, meaning, development, ritual procedures, and especially ­material culture of the Daijōe derive from studies by scholars affiliated with something close to the full range of disciplines and intellectual movements in Japanese academe, from the most traditional and conservative practitioners of “national literature studies” (kokubungaku), who are the t­ wentiethand twenty-first-century inheritors of the philological a­ chievements of the early modern (seventeenth- to mid-nineteenth century) “nativists” (koku­ ga­kusha) and of the canon-organizing efforts of their successors in the partnerships that developed between the elite universities and official arbiters of education (from Meiji to the middle of the twentieth century),36 to the paradoxically nationalist- and Marxist-inflected historians and ethnographers in the various branches of “folk culture studies” (minzokugaku), including the adherents of “regional” or “local” history (chihōgaku). Their work has been augmented further by the archival labors of sectarian Shintō specialists keen to document the ancient origins of contemporary forms, art historians navigating in the wake of Akiyama, and literary researchers primarily concerned with the study of waka and its history and historiography per se, all of whose motivations and findings are invariably shaped by the conventions and principles of one or more of the aforementioned disciplines or movements.37 All these researchers and interpreters share as their central resource a common core of primary materials (the corpuses of poems themselves, diaries, treatises, collections of literary lore, ­calligraphers’ handbooks, and more—many of which I cite in the pages that follow) that

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is, admittedly, incomplete and somewhat recondite. Nevertheless, its existence, and their studies, make it possible to construct a fairly detailed composite outline of the various activities leading up to and culminating in the rite and, in particular, a reasonably precise (if incomplete) picture of how, when, where, and to what effect the Daijōe songs and poems were conceived, created, transmitted, performed, displayed, and preserved. One of the best “insider” rapporteurs of classical waka culture was Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104–77), scion of the Rokujō branch of the large Fujiwara clan (rival to Shunzei’s branch, which would come to be known as the Mikohidari) from which court poets in various generations were called to serve as Daijōe waka composers, as he was for the rite held in 1168 for Emperor Takakura, as the Suki poet (on behalf of the province of Bitchū). Yet several years prior to that, in the 1150s, he had already created a thorough account of the coming-into-being of a Daijōe waka program in his Fukuro zōshi—an idiosyncratic but encyclopedic compendium of waka history, poetic protocols, legends, gossip, and more.38 There he describes, from the poet’s receiving end, a process that would begin in the spring prior to the designated eleventh-month ceremonial dates—necessarily beginning on a “Day of the Hare” (u no hi) and concluding on a “Day of the Horse” (uma no hi)—when the Yuki and Suki provinces (kuni) and the communities in which specially sanctified rice fields for the production of tribute goods were selected by auguries conducted by specially appointed court officials. Next, as Kiyosuke reports, Lists of the names of places are sent by the provinces to the responsible officials, and these are in turn transmitted to the designated composers.39 The composer makes a selection from among these names according to his judgment (he must in every case avoid words prohibited on the basis of taboo). He then composes his poems and presents these to the head of the Office of Ceremonials. . . . The fuzoku uta are presented to the Office of Music, on the basis of which the staff prepares the scores for performance. The byōbu uta are presented to the Office of Painting, on the basis of which the staff executes the paintings. If there is a delay in the presentation of the waka, notes about the various selected place-names may be presented in the interim, and the waka may follow when completed.40 The poets devise



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the topic-identifying tags [kudan no kotoba, that is, the kotobagaki, which specify the poem and paintings topic for the byōbu]. It is standard practice for the fuzoku uta to be presented without such added text.

Like other “insiders” who have provided descriptions of these activities, Kiyosuke devotes particular attention to the physical handling of lists of topics (chūshinki), poem manuscripts, and other materials that would pass from hand to hand as this process unfolded—that is, their tactile forms, the protocols and customs governing choices among scripts and styles, delivery times, and more. He also makes it clear that the various contributors to this process have specified responsibilities: here he seems particularly concerned with indicating how and by whom the topical delineations are to be determined. In written forms of the fuzoku songs, which are designed for live performance at specific moments in the course of the rite, there is no call for “added text”—that is, no “topic-identifying tags” for any of these fuzoku uta. Rather, they are identified by the type and day of intended performance, that is, inetsukiuta (“rice-pounding song”) and kagura uta (literally, a “song to give pleasure to the kami”), then the mairi onjō (entry processional or introit), gaku no ha (“development” music, with varying tempos), gaku no kyū (quickening song, presto), and makade onjō (recessional) for the Day of the Dragon, and then those for the Day of the Snake (third and fourth days). On the other hand, as Kiyosuke explains, the poem composers who have made their selections of place-name topoi from the larger lists submitted by (or for) the Yuki and Suki provinces are also responsible for devising the dai, topic descriptors or tags (here termed kudan no kotoba—“plain text” accompanying poem texts) that also serve to guide the artists employed by the Office of Painting in their execution of the visual component of the program. Since he specifies that “notes” from the composers may suffice to guide the planning of these images when and if the poems themselves are “delayed,” it is clear that the poets are the drivers of this part of the production process. Since the Daijōe is “about” sustenance and cycles—focused in the cultivation, transportation, and consumption of rice—if it is about anything, and since its celebration in the first year (or close to it) of a new reign subsumes in that year the court’s annual “normal” harvest festival, the ­Niinamesai (or Niiname matsuri, 新嘗祭), it is fitting that the first musical numbers

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performed in the rite (and the first poem in the sequences from both Yuki and Suki sides) should be the inetsukiuta, the “rice-pounding song.” These songs would be sung on the first day of the ceremony, the Day of the Hare (u no hi), in accompaniment to a ritual threshing and pounding of grain grown with special care in designated “sacred” fields (saiden) in the tributeoffering localities of the Yuki and Suki provinces, sampled late in the eighth month and delivered to the capital during the ninth month, then stored in specially constructed granaries at Kitano, in the northern sector of the capital, until just prior to the rite itself. The inetsukiuta (presumably, both the Yuki and Suki offerings) are the first and only fuzoku waka performed on that first day, following a formal p ­ rocession in which the sacred rice as well as sake and other offerings are born from the Kitano storehouses to the specially constructed Daijōkyū, a temporary palace within the palace, which itself contains two main structures, the Yuki and Suki ritual chambers (or “lodges”; see fig. 2).41 The next two days—Days of the Dragon and the Snake—are given over to banquets, first focused on the Yuki offerings and the emperor’s secret activities within the Yuki chamber, and on the following day likewise focused on the Suki offerings and chamber. On each day, once the emperor has secluded himself within the chamber, a series of songs and dances are performed nearby, including ancient tunes and steps exclusively known to members of the Kuzu, an ancient clan based in the mountains of Yoshino, and the Hayato, another ancient clan from Kyūshū, followed by the respective province’s kagura uta from its fuzoku waka set—the remainder of which, the four processional pieces, would be heard during the subsequent days of formal banqueting. Now, guided by indications that can be gleaned from the (often laconic) kotobagaki in those anthologies (especially the chokusenshū), which give us sample Daijōe waka inter alia, and blending this information with addi­ tional data that are to be found in a variety of historical documents (particularly the Jōgan and Engi shiki codes and protocols42), let us scan the highlights of the full four-day rite entailing these performances, processions, and banquets, all of which transpire with the sovereign as both celebrant and celebrated key figure. About a month prior to the ceremony, the new sovereign would have performed lustrations (gokei) in or on the banks of the Kamo River. Then,



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• On the Day of the Tiger (Tora no hi) immediately preceding the first full day of the rite, the sovereign would preside over and take part in the Chinkonsai (鎮魂祭), a spirit-cleansing and exorcising rite, in the Jingikan (“Hall of the Ministry of Rites”). • On the first day of the ceremony proper, a Day of the Hare, the sovereign enters, in succession, the Yuki and Suki halls (Yukiden, Sukiden), which together constitute the Daijōkyū (the temporary “Great Tasting Sacred Compound”) erected in front of the Daigokuden (also known as the Chōdōin Saiden), and carries out intimate, secret rites in the interior. This is the central event of the eponymous Daijōsai (and the one about which the least is known).43 • Next, on the Day of the Dragon (Tatsu no hi), the rites in the Daijōkyū conclude before the first cock’s crow. The sovereign moves to the Bu­ra­ kuin and hosts a banquet (utage) for assembled nobles before the Yuki enclosure, at which goods from the Yuki province (including the Yuki honmon and byōbu waka) are presented. He then moves to the Suki enclosure, as do the nobles, and the Yuki songs and dances (fuzoku kabu) are performed. At dusk the goods (garments, fabrics, comestibles, etc.) presented from the Yuki province are distributed to the assembled princes and nobles. That evening, the sovereign moves once again, this time to chambers in the rear of the Burakuin; military and civil officials remain on duty throughout the night, while those of rank of princes of the blood (shinnō) and below and counselor (sangi) and above attend his person. The performance of music and banqueting continues all night, at the conclusion of which those present again receive garments.44 • On the Day of the Snake (Mi no hi), the sovereign returns to the Yuki enclosure and hosts a banquet for the assembled nobles during which the tribute goods from the Suki province (including its two byōbu) are assembled. When the sovereign moves to the Suki enclosure, the nobles do so as well, at which point the Suki-side fuzoku dances and songs are performed and the garments and other goods from that province are distributed, just as on the previous day. On this night too the sovereign stays in this location, attended by nobles as on the previous night.

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• Finally, on the following Day of the Horse (Uma no hi), the Yuki and Suki enclosures are dismantled, and the emperor moves again to the Burakuin and hosts a banquet (Toyo no akari no sechie) for the assembled officials. (The Yuki and Suki screens are on display at the banquet.) The Taji clan members perform a rice-field dance (tamai, denbu), which is followed by other ancient and proprietary dances: the Ban and Saeki clans perform the Kumemai, the Abe clan members perform the Kishimai, and the Udoneri palace guardsmen perform the Yamatomai. At night the ­Gosechi-mai (“Dances of the Five Feasts”) are performed by young women selected for the honor from the court families. At the c­ onclusion of the banquet all participants receive gifts of silk and quilted cotton cloth. As I have noted already, no examples of any Daijōe screens of either the honmon or waka type from occasions prior to the late nineteenth century are extant. Paradoxical though it may seem, the fact that they were not preserved may in some way be related to their fundamental purpose: they marked a moment of cyclical renewal, and once their ritual function had been fulfilled, they may have been deemed dispensable. (There is no evidence that any parts of them were “recycled,” though in a sense the poems were, as the templates and building blocks for others.) In their ephemerality, these screens were more like than unlike the Yuki and Suki lodges erected for the ceremony and immediately disassembled after the sovereign’s brief (overnight) occupation therein. As a result, it is the preserved texts (particularly the poems) that take their place as archival memorabilia, as virtually all that remains of productions of which other material traces are gone: the poems themselves are now those material traces. Likewise, it is in the nature of this rite that pictorial representations of its special installations, phases of activity, accouterments, and the like are rare; in fact, their production seems to have been actively discouraged if not proscribed. As a result, we have no such images from early times. When the kokugaku scholar Kada no Arimaro (1706–51) did publish a detailed study of the rite as observed in 1738 (Genbun 3, for Emperor Sakuramachi), it was officially suppressed and the author was subjected to one hundred days of house arrest. Fortunately, copies of his work survived and still serve as unique sources of information, including the appearance of the Yuki



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and Suki screens.45 Such strictures were no longer in force in the 1880s, when, at the direction of the statesman Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), court scholars created the Kuji roku fuzu, an elaborate set of paintings depicting major features and phases of the rite (bound in large-scale accordion-fold format and preserved today in the Imperial Household Library).46 In several scenes, and especially those depicting the performance of the fuzoku processions and dances and the “morning audience” following the Toyonokari final banquet, at which court nobles formally offer invocations for the enduring success of the new reign (yogoto), we do find visual records of

13. Kada no Arimaro’s sketch of Daijōe onbyōbu, from his Daijōe zushiki. The inscription at right indicates that the presentation of these screens was overseen by Tosa Takumi no Taijō (Head of the Office of Palace Decoration) Fujiwara no Mitsusada (i.e., Tosa Mitsusada, 1738–1806, whose career was devoted to the provision of such goods for the Kyoto court). By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

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the settings in which, at least in revival, the Daijōe poems were heard and seen (see figs. 3 and 4). With the ritual template thus documented and these scant (and latterday) images in mind, we can turn once again to that moment in the year 1166 when the Yuki (Ōmi) poems, reluctantly but dutifully prepared and submitted for that year’s ceremony, held the stage, as it were. In appendix 1, I offer a transcription and translation of the complete suite. In addition to the other ways I have suggested that we read them—as tribute goods, prized and empowered “things”; as performance pieces in multiple senses of “performance”; as cogs in a great, constantly turning wheel of production or notches in an endless log of contributions to an ongoing, eternally lengthening sequence—I think we can also take them as a point of entry into an imaginary “workshop,” that is, the cognitive space in which Shunzei’s poem-making took place, the precise, intimate operations of which we can neither truly see or know but which yielded these artifacts as it also did the other works in his poetic oeuvre (in a host of other circumstances and to other effects). We (readers of and about waka, that is) think of Shunzei as the great late-Heian master of allusive versification, as the authoritative judge of late twelfth-century utaawase, as the sole compiler of Senzai wakashū (the seventh of the royal anthologies), as the contemplative theorist and historian we see in Korai fūteishō, an instructional manual that he compiled late in life for a royal princess and student (ca. 1197, with revisions in 1201) that offers us the most substantive picture of his poetic ideas and values other than those articulated in his utaawase judgments. But here he is at an earlier stage of his career, accomplished but not yet dominant in the waka sphere, laboring within the constraining but enabling framework of Daijōe poesy. It would be hard to imagine a more richly pre- or overdetermined intertextual space in which to operate as a waka poet—especially so for that part of the task that involved the devising of the byōbu waka within the suite, given the challenge of addressing specified topics and the need for coordination with their pictorial representation—not to mention the weight of governing convention that Daijōe poesy bore by this time. These challenges were not Shunzei’s alone; they were faced by every Daijōe poet. But let us see how he met them, in his own fashion, to the extent that this was possible and appropriate, given the nature of his task.



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That task was emphatically not a composing opportunity that called for displays of individual flair or made room for the personal imprint or “voice” of the poet. Rather, the voices singing or speaking in these songpoems are anything but the poet’s own: they are the voices of an imaginary collective, “the folk,” or of those members of an invisible chorus who observe these celebrations or take part in them. In a sense, these voices speak “in tongues,” though coherently, in the very antithesis of glossolalia, but as if possessed by the spirits, the kami, who make all this happen and ensure its effectiveness. The voices of those who sing Daijōe songs are always implicitly plural, a collective chorus, moved in these special circumstances, a rite that is at once unique (in its moment) and at the same time a repetition, to be repeated again and again, to chant in unison. And also, depending on how we listen, we may hear that in his moment in 1166, Shunzei writes and “speaks” in a voice, or voices, that he shares with every Daijōe poet (and many others) that has carried out this task before him, and perforce (willingly, dutifully, intentionally) he uses their rhetoric, their figures, their tones, also knowing that those who will come after him will do much the same. Their voices, too, make of each Daijōe poem another kind of “chorus”—one in which multiple voices that have “sung” in disparate moments in time are heard again in echo, fragmentary reprise, in familiar and, yes, nostalgic phrases and tones that resound from a distant yesteryear and, having been audible in the here and now, are even more likely to resound again in times to come. This is why Shunzei’s (or my) “imaginary workshop” is also a living and accessible archive—a textual space in which he must have, in some way, carried out a form of “research,” in manuscripts, in memories, so as to ground his Daijōe Yuki poems for this instance, like those made by others, in the well-tilled terrain composed of all those that had been made for that purpose and in that lineage since the practice of doing so began. And again, in this regard there is nothing unique about Shunzei’s task: it was essentially the same for every Yuki and Suki poet and, in principle, would always be so, except of course that the corpus would continue to expand— the cogs on the wheel, the notches on the log would multiply. Had Shunzei left a diary (as his son Teika did), we might find in it some traces of how he handled this assignment, how he actually brought it off, perhaps even how he conducted his “research”; instead, we have only his poems.

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The list or menu of place-names (chūshin fudōki) to compose upon that would have been delivered to him once he had formally accepted the commission would have been yet another and perhaps even the most decisive of the pre- or overdetermining factors shaping his work. Just as Yagi finds in his studies of these lists as prepared for other Daijōe occasions, the 1166 Ōmi place-names thus preprogrammed for Shunzei are replete with signs of the felicitous and the pure, of abundance and prosperity, and of a certain grandeur along with an aura of locality, rural life, a bucolic, near-utopian hinterland where time seems to stand still, except for the turning of the seasons.47 But even in that turning, everything remains just as expected, with flowers blossoming on the trees just when they should, summer heat rising and autumn cool arriving on schedule, harvests burgeoning to meet or exceed expectations. The names of mountains (yama), rivers (kawa), and villages (sato, mura) predominate, along with variants of them (other promontories, bodies of water, communities, and districts). Within these place-names, those general-purpose nominals are invariably combined with signs of plenty (e.g., in the blooming of flowers or the ripening, harvesting, or storing of grain); of impressive height or vast size or scale (takashi and ohoshi, of peaks [mine], cascades [taki], and granaries [kura]); of fecundity, purity, serenity, simple “goodness” (yoshi), or ease (yasu); or of “numerousness,” signaled by the quantitative signs for “thousands” (chi) or “tens of thousands” (yorozu).48 Mixed in with these, we find the deployment here, as elsewhere, of other conventional signs that forecast or conjure solidity, durability, and longevity—for example, boulders (iwa) and anything that is “long” (nagashi), as well as preciousness, most often jewels (tama) but also pure sources of water (mizu, especially that found in a well, i), as well as auspicious fauna (the crane, manazuru; tortoise, kame; and plover, chidori—this last auspicious because its name puns on chi, “thousands,” and because it flocks in great numbers). Likewise, auspicious flora include the pine (matsu), of course, but also the flowering plum (ume), cherry (sakura), festive iris (ayame), chrysanthemum (kiku), and much-admired kerria (yamabuki) and bush clover (hagi) in their proper seasons, as well as the mulberry—or, to be precise, its bark fibers (yufu, 木綿), which were processed to make strands of coarse thread that were in turn wrapped around various sacred implements, including corded pendants, wreaths (kazura, also higake no kazura), and wands (nusa), or draped on the eaves of sanctuaries (shimenawa).49



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In Shunzei’s 1166 sequence, this last figure, yufu, takes its place among his fuzoku waka as “Mulberry Grove” (Yufusono) in the “Accelerando” (gakuha) for the procession on the second day of banqueting (mi no hi): [巳日]楽急木綿園 木綿園のひかげの葛かざしもて楽しくもあるか豊の明の Yufusono no hikage no kazura kazashi mote tanoshiku mo aru ka Toyonoakari no Arraying ourselves in these corded pendants from Yufusono’s “Mulberry Grove,” we know that we shall enjoy this Banquet of Myriad Lights.

“Mulberry Grove,” as a toponym in Ōmi, appeared for the first (recorded) time in a Daijōe sequence and in the same role as a mi no hi “Accelerando” in 1012 (the composer was Ōnakatomi no Sukechika), and subsequently both in fuzoku waka (as a mi no hi introit in 1074 and again in 1155),50 and as an onbyōbu waka (in 1108 and again in 1159).51 But Shunzei’s grounding for its use in 1166, and the configuration of associations he could count on its capacity to convey to hearers and readers, was broader and deeper than these specific Daijōe precedents. The figure “Mulberry-bark coarse thread” itself has a long history as a so-called kago, a word finding and keeping a place in the waka lexicon, traceable in the Man’yōshū, where it appears in songs of purification and cleansing and in association with the particular gesture of brandishing or waving devices for that purpose—decorated wands, branches of sacred sakaki, and the like.52 And it is in just such a torimono no uta—those songs to be sung while dancing or gesturing with just such a device—that it makes its earliest and most prominent appearance in a royal anthology, in the Shūi wakashū (the third royal anthology), as the first item in the chapter of kagura uta (a collection of texts that originate as songs performed in ritual acts, “to please the kami”): 榊葉にゆふしでかけて誰が世にか神の御前に斎ひそめけん sakakiba ni yufushide kakete ta ga yo ni ka kami no mimahe ni ihahisomeken53 With mulberry-bark cords we drape the sakaki branch and its leaves: When, in whose reign, did we first celebrate the kami’s presence in this way?

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A selection of several Daijōe songs—identified as both fuzoku uta and onbyōbu uta—appears later in this “kagura uta” chapter of Shūi wakashū, so it is clear that the anthology’s compilers saw them as kindred forms within a coherent single category. I have already suggested that, in their rhetorical flourishing of objects (in this case, yufu cords, or implements adorned with them), as well as proper names, ritually weighted words, salutations, and more, and in their inherent and actual functions as proffered tribute, Daijōe waka are all, in a sense, torimono no uta, and of course they are all kagura uta as well, in that they embody and articulate the expectation that their creation, performance, display, and sheer presence will move and please those invisible but present spirits that can ensure the sovereign’s success and “staying power.” Likewise, we can see that in the process of creating his 1166 Daijōe waka suite, Shunzei too “takes up” and flourishes this memory-laden figure of “Mulberry-bark,” in its Ōmi-based toponymic form, recycles it and its properties, and performs a rhetorical gesture that is itself a replay of earlier Daijōe performances. Here are just some of the prior examples I cited above: • (from 1012, by Sukechika): 楽急木棉園 木棉園の日蔭のかづらより懸けて豊の御明の面白きかな Yufusono no hikage no kazura yori kakete Toyo no miakari no omoshiroki ka na In wreaths draped with pendant cords from Yuhusono’s Mulberry Grove: how lovely is this Banquet of Myriad Lights! [and glowing faces!]54 • (from 1074, by Sanemasa) 巳日参入音声木棉園村 平久朝奈夜奈仁須倍良支余 懸弖曾祈留由布園乃村 tahirakeku asa na yu na ni suberagi ni kakete so inoru Yufusono no mura In tranquility, each morning and each night, for the sovereign’s sake we don these sacred cords and pray here at Mulberry Grove.

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• (from 1108, by Masafusa) 乙帖木棉園村卯花盛夜人見之 をちこちの卯花月夜あかければひるとはみゆるゆふその々むら wochikochi no unohana tsukiyo akakereba hiru to ha miyuru Yufusono no mura Deutzia in bloom on every side, and on this moonlit night Mulberry Grove is as brightly white as in broad daylight. • (from 1155, by Naganori) 神楽歌木棉園 神宇久留豊乃明爾木棉園乃日影鬘曾波江万佐利計留 kami ukuru Toyo no akari ni Yuhusono no hikagekazura so haemasarikeru In the midst of this Banquet of Myriad Lights, in which the kami graciously partake, our wreaths look brighter than ever! • (from 1159, by Toshinori) 丙帖木棉園行六月祓 君がためかくるかしこきゆふそのにちよをかねたる みそぎをぞする kimi ga tame kakuru kashikoki Yufusono ni chiyo wo kanetaru misogi wo zo suru For your sake, Lord, we display these precious cord pendants at Mulberry Grove, where you perform lustrations to ensure a reign of a thousand years! Shunzei’s poem follows Sukechika’s (a fuzoku waka) and Toshinori’s (a byōbu waka) in adopting the personae of ritual participants looking forward with anticipation to the final “Toyo no akari” banquet; it also takes up and “brandishes” that same brilliant cord-bedecked wreath (hikage ka­ zura) that is celebrated in Sukechika’s and Naganori’s. The two byōbu waka, Masafusa’s and Toshinori’s, neatly match their calendrical positions in the

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full sequences of which they were a part: Masafusa uses the deutzia (uno­ hana), a “classic” early summer floral emblem, to accentuate the motif of magical light (and whiteness) that bathes the ritual scene—here, moonlight enhancing a vision of beds of these radiant flowers in the imagined, then ­pictorialized, “Mulberry Grove.” Toshinori celebrates the annual, sixth-month royal lustration (harae, misogi) that would be depicted on the screen, thus invoking and materializing the motif of cleansing, purification, and the timeless repetition of such acts whereby the ruling lineage constantly renews itself and revives the ruler’s capacity to serve as high priest and avatar for a decontaminated and thus robust polity. But how well did Shunzei know these precedents? How good was his access to records that would have contained these texts? Is there a direct lineage of models here or a more diffuse genetic and reproductive process? I cannot answer with certainty or precision, but it would appear from the results that he was more than able to “do his homework” and by that means fashion this and all his other 1166 Daijōe poems in the light of those that had been made before him—particularly those made in relatively recent times. As we saw earlier, however, his “Seta Bridge” poem looks back toward a considerably earlier stage of the accrual of the Daijōe corpus (the late tenth century), and his “Mulberry Grove” poem is only one of several that reach into the figural and rhetorical repertoire of early song (best known to him in the forms represented in the Man’yōshū) to achieve that peculiar air of the timeless archaic for which so many Daijōe poems (Shunzei’s and others’) strive. This is also true, for example, in the conceit that he develops at the core of his poem on Ohotakinoyama, “Mountain of the Great Cascade,” the topical locus of the second-panel (early summer) poem: 大滝山卯花方開山脚民家多 Deutzia flowers far and wide, and at the foot of the mountain villagers’ houses are numerous 布さらすふもとの里の数そひて卯花さける大滝の山 nuno sarasu fumoto no sato no kazu sohite unohana sakeru Ohotakinoyama At the mountain’s foot where robes whiten in the sun, a new village is added to the count: deutzia flowers on Ohotakinoyama, “Mountain of the Great Cascade.”



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Both by overall scheme and specific figure, this composition ineluctably beckons with transparent traces of the similar rhetorical scheme and image cluster in a very well-known poem attributed to Empress Jitō in the first book of the Man’yōshū and included, in slightly different forms, in the Shin kokin wakashū, in Shunzei’s Korai fūteishō, and later in Teika’s Ogura hyakunin isshu, and so on. Shunzei’s Ohotaki(no)yama poem also shares the older, truly “classic” poem’s explicit early summer setting if not its geographic roots (in the Yamato capital-region homeland), and it also adopts the same posture of gazing upward toward mountain slopes and the discovery there of something eye-catching that looks like (and in Jito’s poem actually is) clothing of white linen: 春すぎて夏きにけらししろたへの衣ほすてふ天の香具山 Haru sugite natsu kinikerashi shirotahe no koromo hosutefu Ama no Kaguyama Spring has gone, and it seems that summer has come along: on Ama no Kaguyama, they say, white linen robes are drying in the sunlight.55

But this is not all: Shunzei also folds into this mixture an evocation, through figure and rhetoric, to an almost equally prominent canonical poem from the Kokin wakashū, attributed there to Ise, a woman court poet of the late ninth century. By lifting the phrase nuno sarasu (“where robes are spread out to whiten in the sun”) and embedding it in his “Ohotakinoyama” verse, he invites recollection of that poem’s setting and context, as reported in that anthology in its kotobagaki: “On a visit to Ryūmon, ‘The Dragon’s Gate’ [the site of cascades in the sacred precincts of Yoshino], composed at the foot of a waterfall.”56 This detail, this simple five-morae phrase, also provides a useful cue for the design of the adjacent programmed painting, which we can visualize even if it cannot be seen. There would be deutzia in profuse full flower and a thriving village, all shown at the foot of a mountain from which, no doubt, white waters—in the same hue as the flowers— would tumble. But notice too both the dai for Shunzei’s poem (also the painting’s program) and the poem itself are direct in their invocation of the theme of burgeoning plenitude: the flowers are in full bloom everywhere one looks (unohana yomo ni hiraku, 卯花方開) and one more village (sato)

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sure to prosper at the foot of a mountain so blessed with beauty (and cascades of fresh water) has been added to the number (kazu sohite) of those over which the sovereign will placidly rule—and at length. This particular example of Shunzei’s borrowing from both in- and outside of the Daijōe corpus in order to construct and orchestrate his contributions to the 1166 program—to fill it to excess with familiars, echoes, living ghosts of times conjured into the present—might easily be associated with his historical identity and critical reputation as a master of the allusive gesture, that cross-referencing poetic maneuver (often, if sometimes anachronistically, called honka-dori, “taking up a foundation poem,” or its parts, to enrich a newly made one) that gives a special depth and resonance to his poetry, as it does to that of so many of the prominent poets of his time (the Emperor GoToba, Shunzei’s son Teika, the woman known simply as Shunzei’s Daughter [actually his granddaughter, but known as Shunzeikyō no musume], and others). This is certainly the aspect of his art that has received the most scholarly attention, especially outside of Japan, and which also is celebrated (with good reason) as the salient, perhaps even defining characteristic of the poetic of his age.57 But what I would emphasize here, as I have done elsewhere, is that a reading of a poem like this “Ohotakiyama” moment in Shunzei’s 1166 suite shows us (as would many another poem from the same set, or almost anywhere else in his oeuvres) how, in that imaginary “workshop” of his (or mine), poems remembered, poems seen or heard elsewhere, make up a store of precious resources—collected, assembled, valuable things—out of which new poems can always and must always be made. Also, as I have suggested several times, the Daijōe occasion and the expectations and demands it places on the composers of its songs and verses ipso facto delineate a creative opportunity or “space” in which precious things and their properties, whether mundane or special (or both), are celebrated, displayed, with a sense that thereby their values, their powers are unleashed, reharnessed, and enhanced—and that these things include poems. My claim is that this is likewise true of every tribute good brought to the capital, every ritual implement in use in ceremony, every flowering branch, towering mountain, peaceful village, glistening jewel, flowing spring, packed granary, and festive wreath about which singers sing, or which painters depict, and likewise true of those songs, poems, and pictures. And it is precisely because they are familiar, because they have



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been hallowed by such uses in the past, that they can carry such value and be enhanced in value in their reuse; this is also why the songs, poems, and paintings seek to show, or insist, that though time moves forward, though one sovereign’s reign duly follows another, nothing has changed (although of course it has) and nothing will change (although of course it must). In this poetic space, repetition works much as it does in ritual practices and spaces elsewhere, but if anything more pointedly, even urgently, because the repetition, the reuse and constant return of the familiar, suggests that somehow, against all odds and in the face of irrefutable evidence, change can be staved off, stopped in its tracks, neutralized by claims made with words, or, even better, by word, image, and action coordinated and codified for further recapitulation to that same end. We have also seen that invocations of purity, cleansing, clarity, and stability—ideal (if impossible) states of perfection—are among the additional and more immediate requirements and goals of the Daijōe rite and themes that find form in many of its trappings, including its songs and poems. We can hear and see this, for example, in Shunzei’s Day of the Dragon introit: 辰日参入音声鏡山 うれしくも鏡の山を立ておきてくもりなき世のかげを見る哉 ureshiku mo Kagaminoyama wo tateokite kumori naki yo no kage wo miru ka na Joyfully, we raise “a mountain of a mirror,” Kagaminoyama, and see in it a clear vision of an era without blemish.

The mirror—from antiquity a precious commodity and powerful ritual property (as evidenced in archaeological sites and in its role as one of the three items in the triadic “Imperial Regalia”)—is not literally a torimono, but here it too is “raised,” figuratively, as one might place a looking glass in order to capture an especially admired, coveted, or awesome image. And it is a vast mirror, mountain-sized and perfect in its capacity to capture an image not only of present glory but of a future in which the sovereign’s virtue will be sustained and shared throughout his realm. Iguchi Tatsuo suggests that, as in several poems in the Daijōe corpus that refer to mountains (yama), this poem most likely refers to the reproduction of “­Mirror

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Mountain” as the shime yo yama (ritual dais) produced for the ritual and constructed in the Daijōe enclosure (Daijōkyū) in that year.58 If so, it is also possible to read Shunzei’s 1166 introit as a song that celebrates the ­raising and appearance of Ōmi’s shime no yama on this occasion—or the idea thereof. But—no surprise—the poem in which Shunzei celebrates this “Mirror Mountain” in Ōmi is itself a mirror as well as echo-chamber: it captures an image of the Kagamiyama song from 897 (sometimes attributed to Kuronushi) included in the Kokin wakashū “kamiasobi no uta” group (“songs for the entertainment of the kami”) and thus among the earliest recorded Daijōe poems): 近江のや鏡のやまをたてたればかねてぞ見ゆる君が千年は Afumi no ya Kagaminoyama wo tatetareba kanete zo miyuru kimi ga chitose ha There it stands where we have raised it, Ōmi’s Kagaminoyama, “Mirror Mountain,” and so we shall forever be able to witness your reign for a thousand years to come.59

It replicates much of what is going on in a byōbu uta (second panel, late summer) for the Daijōe of 1012 (the first in which we know there were byōbu in play) by Sukechika, with this dai: 鏡山のほとりを行く旅人、山を見る所 Kagamiyama no hotori wo yuku tabibito, yama wo miru tokoro Travelers are passing close to the foot of Mirror Mountain and gazing up at the mountain. 鏡山のどけき影ぞみえわたる人の心のくもりなき世は From every viewpoint, Mirror Mountain’s image is serene, and likewise all of us are free of trouble in the unblemished world of your reign.60

The imaginary sojourners pictorialized in the act of gazing at “Mirror Mountain” in Sukechika’s 1012 poem (in this case most likely not its shime no yama replica) and in its accompanying painting—perhaps officials and bearers making their way to the capital with Ōmi tribute goods, perhaps



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simply visitors who have come to admire the spectacle presented by its slopes and peak—bask in the reflected perfection conjured by and for the sovereign: serene, cloudless, eternal. His keywords, in addition to Kagami­ yama itself, are those for the image that it reflects (kage, a property of the thing reflected but also in the mirror itself) such as serenity (nodokeki) and “cloudless” or “blemish-free” (kumori naki): the looking-glass is perfect, smooth and clear, and thus perfect in its capacity to capture an image of the sovereign’s “perfect, blemish-free” and tranquil reign (yo). Shunzei’s include this same kage and kumori naki along with other engo (conventially linked figures) that cluster in poems on mirrors: tateokite, the raising and installation of the mirror itself (or its namesake in a shime no yama), “set in place” as is the new reign whose present and future glory it reflects. Were we to cast our gaze across the entire spectrum of Daijōe waka and within it the corpus of Ōmi Daijōe tribute songs, we would find over a dozen of such Mirror Mountain verses, all with some or several of these figures, engo, rearranged for variation yet readily recognizable, creating a sense of simultaneous déjà vu, déjà lu, déjà entendu—each a mirrored image, a clear echo of one another—just as a shime no yama replica would “mirror” its topographical twin. Sukechika, Shunzei, and all their peers (in disparate times) knew this, anticipated such effects, and sought to replicate them (with variations) in each verse they made. Such consciousness of the Daijōe poet’s place and purpose when called on or given the opportunity to contribute to and extend this textual lineage (or genetic pool) does much to explain why, were one able to scan the entirety of the resulting corpus, so much of it would look (and sound) so much alike.61 The necessarily consistent format of fuzoku uta (a defined series of songs) and (after 1012) byōbu uta (representing a seasonal, twelvemonth cycle) would lend itself to this effect, but so would the very shape of the collection of “things” in the Daijōe waka rhetorical repertoire—­ seasonal ­­motifs, ­auspicious signs, provincial place-names, and tones— that  ­deliberately evoke the archaic and nostalgic ideal of rural and agricultural life. So this effect would be no accident, not a detraction from but a testament to the consistency and durability of understandings of that place and purpose transmitted over time (and often, as we have seen, handed down within family lineages as well as what would emerge as “schools” of poets, thus becoming part of each generation’s cultural inheritance).

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In this regard, it is remarkable and yet also inevitable that motifs of plentiful agricultural production continue throughout this long history to claim their place in the figural and thematic repertoire among all those flowers, blossoming trees, and other flora and fauna, and all those names. Indeed, since every Daijōe waka suite, Shunzei’s not excepted, must begin with a rice-threshing and pounding song (inetsukiuta), that first “movement” will always be a reminder that the Daijōe/Daijōsai is a super Niinamesai, “First Tasting Festival.” The seasonal format of the byōbu sequence will also lend itself to the introduction of similar topoi of rural production—in Shunzei’s case, for example, in his fourth, early autumn panel, we have locally spun threads (ito) symbolically “lengthening” as they are unraveled by the denizens of Takamiya, “Village of the Lofty Shrine,” in their observance of the annual Tanabata festival (on the seventh night of the seventh month, traditionally associated with the myth of the annual meeting of a celestial “Weaver Maiden” and “Herdboy,” the stars Altair and Vega): 高宮郷七夕有引糸家々 On Tanabata, seventh night of the seventh month, there are many houses ­offering wands decorated with five-colored threads: 七夕に今朝引糸のながかれと君をぞいのる高宮の里 Tanabata ni kesa hiku ito no nagakare to Kimi zo inoru Takamiya no sato In Takamiya, “Village of the Lofty Shrine,” prayers that your reign may be long are as lengthy as the threads stretched out this morning in offering to the Weaver Maid.

The very fact that this repertoire is thus essentially fixed—the variants are the provincial place-names that come into play on each occasion and the resulting selection of motifs from the convention-generated “menu” of likely and time-tested options—is itself mirrored in one of the corpus’s fixed themes: fixedness itself. In Shunzei’s suite, as elsewhere, this theme is explicitly signaled with the phrase ugokinaku (literally “without movement—not going anywhere,” which is to say “permanent”) in the opening of his mi no hi recessional: 同日退出音声高御倉山 うごきなく高御倉山祈おきつをさめん御代はかみのまにまに



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ugokinaku Takamikurayama inori okitsu wosamen miyo ha kami no manima ni At Takamikurayama we pray that your vast storehouses may stand tall here for all time and in an orderly reign, as the kami would wish it to be.

Dancers and singers are moving as these words are sung, we imagine, but the “vast” royal storehouses (takamikura) of which they sing never will, they claim; likewise, their prayers for that permanence are firmly made (­inori okitsu)—“put down” for all time, entrusted to preservation over time by means of the composition, performance, and recording of the song itself.62 There is an important distinction to be made here when we think about how Daijōe waka did their work, because they did so in more than one way: rice-threshing and pounding inetsukiuta like this one, and with them the kagura uta and the other processional songs that make up the fuzoku waka sets, all realized their materiality initially in sound, in live performance, while the byōbu waka in these suites materialized in writing on the surfaces of the tribute screens (archival preservation comes later, after the “real” work has been done). And while we can find little or nothing in rec­ords that tells how those “performed” songs were sung (save the images provided by Arimaro and in the Kujiroku fuzu), we do have detailed accounts from some actual contributors that tell us not only how important (and prestigious) the physical act of writing the byōbu waka (and the honmon) texts was, but also how it was done (or supposed to be done)—and this evidence, too, speaks to the physical materiality, the visible and tactile “thingness” of these elements of the rite. For example: just two years after Shunzei’s Daijōe experience—that is, in the year 1168 (or not long after)—Fujiwara no Koreyuki, the sixth-­ generation master calligrapher in the esteemed Sesonji lineage, put together a detailed account of the core principles, best practices, and ­professional protocols of his art. In part because he did so to pass this specialized knowhow on to future generations of his family through his daughter—the woman whom readers of classical literature know as the poet and diarist Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu—he gave the text the title Yakaku teikinshō (夜鶴庭訓抄), which means something like “a father crane’s personal nighttime teaching for his nestling.”63 He may have dictated it to her, or a third party may have recorded their conversations as he ranged through such

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topics as the history of calligraphy (which he refers to as juboku and defines as “writing by hand”), the preparation of ink and brushes, the proper way to write various types of court documents both official and literary, the lineation of poems, the advantages of writing on rainy days (“the ink doesn’t dry out”) and, inter alia, this: “The Daijōe byōbu are very ­important.” That is, the role of the calligrapher in the preparation of the screens is a matter of special consequence, and the honor of being called on to serve in this way is great. Incidentally, Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu never wrote a Daijōe waka: this was an almost completely gender-restricted practice, with just one poem in the corpus attributed to a woman, Nakatsukasa, in the tenth century. Koreyuki continues, They are a pair, Yuki and Suki, left and right. There is a five-shaku screen (of six panels) and a four-shaku screen (of six panels) for both Yuki and Suki. The five-shaku screens receive inscriptions of honmon and the four-shaku screens receive inscriptions in kana. Two scholars, one for each side, select the honmon. And then if the scholar responsible for one side or the other is also an accomplished poet, he also composes the poems. If not, someone else does it. The Yuki poems are written in pure kanna; the Suki poems are written in sō [kana].

That is, the poem texts to be mounted on the Yuki screen, on behalf of the designated eastern province, are to be written in something like hira­ gana, while those for the Suki screen, for the western province, are to be inscribed in a cursive mana style, using Chinese characters as phonetic graphs.64 Koreyuki concludes this section: “There is a secret transmission about how to do this.” By recording these details, he is sharing that to which he is privy in this “secret transmission” with his progeny, beginning with his daughter, or perhaps he is referring to yet additional arcane knowledge that cannot or should not be written down but will be conveyed orally or by other means. But in a subsequent entry in Yakaku teikinshō, Koreyuki goes on to list the names of “Daijōe byōbu shikishigata” calligraphers—those who have been formally commissioned to write these quotations and po-



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ems on square sheets of paper for application to the surface of the painted screens. This incomplete list begins with the identification of Ono no Yoshiki (also known as Miyoshi/Yoshimura) as the calligrapher for the Daijōe held in 897 for Emperor Daigo and his better-known brother Michikaze (Tōfū) for that of Murakami in 946, and it also includes the famous Sesonji-line progenitor Fujiwara no Yukinari (Kōzei), as the calligrapher for the Daijōe of Emperor GoIchijō, in 1016, as well as Koreyuki himself as the scribe in 1159 and again in 1166 for the Daijōe of Emperors Nijō and Rokujō, respectively.65 This list, in turn, is part of a longer entry giving the names of several generations of calligraphers who have had the honor of being assigned such tasks as writing the inscriptions for the formal name plaques installed over the major gates to the royal palace (Dairigaku kaki­ taru hitobito) and major halls and gates of important Buddhist monasteries, again including such names as Michikaze and Yukinari but also the likes of Emperor Saga and Kōbō Daishi (Kūkai, founder of the Japanese Shingon school of Buddhism)—both, indeed, among the most revered calligraphers in Japanese history. By this means, Koreyuki documents the practice and privilege of being a Daijōe byōbu calligrapher—an honor he has himself enjoyed—as an esteemed calling, a contribution to a rite of real significance to the realm, but he does so with a natural emphasis on orthographic format, the proper mode of carrying out the physical act of writing texts (albeit chosen or composed by others) as an essential feature of the rite itself. And there is much of the same emphasis in Kiyosuke’s Fukuro zōshi. We have already seen how his account tracks the stages of the production process and the distribution of contributors’ roles and responsibilities. Having laid out those steps, Kiyosuke also has details to share about the conventions governing poets’ orthographic choices, which serve as templates for the calligraphers who would step in next. It is here that he delineates a concern with formatting conventions that aligns with Koreyuki’s:66 As far as the composition of the waka is concerned, each lineage of poets differs in its approach. Sukechika, Kanezumi, and the like wrote in kana, and they placed their fuzoku uta as well as their byōbu uta all on a single sheet of paper. Noritada wrote his in kana, but on separate sheets.

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Sukenari and his successors wrote in mana, and on separate sheets. Ietsune and his followers wrote their poems in kana, but their topic tags are in mana, and they wrote both groups of poems on a single sheet. (Also, he began with kagura uta, whereas others begin the series with the rice-threshing and pounding song.) Masafusa wrote in mana, on a single sheet. (However, for the Tennin occasion he wrote in kana.)67 Thereafter, all composers wrote in mana and used separate sheets. But my father, the late Lord of the Right Ward (Ko Sakyō Akisuke), wrote topic tags in mana and poems in kana, all on a single sheet. It is not certain how any of this was done prior to the Chōwa occasion.68 When the poems are submitted for formal perusal, they should be covered in formal white paper.

There is more along these lines—more specifications about the number of sheets of paper to be used for recording each type of poem, and the script styles to be used, and then Kiyosuke offers a brief summary of the history of the rite itself and of the role and presence of poems in it. In subsequent sections, Kiyosuke gives lists of “the composers of poems” (waka no saku­ sha) for the rite, beginning with the claim that Ōtomo no Kuronushi was responsible for the Ōmi “Kagamiyama” poem from Kōkō’s rite in 884 and continuing up to his own time—thus showing, without telling, how qualification for this responsibility (or privilege) shifted over time. He also (quite helpfully, for his descendants) includes samples of related official documents from various stages of the process: a royal order to compose waka for the rite (Daijōe waka senge no jō: the sample is the command given to Akisuke in 1142 for Emperor Konoe’s occasion, and it involves a long string of intermediaries conveying directives and replies); a model letter of acceptance of the royal order (here the sample is by the university scholar Moromitsu, and it features handy fill-in-the-blank spaces for dates, names, adaptation to Yuki or Suki assignments, and specifications for certain forms of salutation to be used depending on the rank and office of the addressee); and a model letter to accompany the submission of poems to the Office of Ceremonials (Gyōjidokoro: the sample is by Fujiwara no Atsumitsu for the Konoe occasion, 1142; he was a Shikibu no suke, a functionary in the royal secretariat at the time).69



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All these specifications—the protocols and details of the sort that Koreyuki and Kiyosuke saw fit to record and convey for posterity, to ensure accurate replication and reprise—are the kind of seemingly trivial details that actually make rituals go, that ensure their continuity and preservation (or so their practitioners and archivists believe). Anyone who has looked into any of the courtier journals from the Heian period knows how such matters really mattered to court officials from the top on down, and indeed many scholars suggest that those diaries came into being largely to preserve knowledge of such protocols within specific family lineages, who could then claim it as cultural and social (and thus political) capital.70 Koreyuki and Kiyosuke no doubt had a similar investment in the vital minutiae of Daijōe waka production and submission as a physical act. These things had to be done just so, for all kinds of reasons, and insider knowledge was in itself a thing to be treasured—as were, to be sure, the archival records themselves, where the results of the application of that knowledge were stored. The forms these records took, the methods of classification (presumably chronological), and the protocols for access and consultation—none of this is known to us. But by some means or other, detailed knowledge of this corpus found its way to each succeeding Yuki and Suki poet for their compositional purposes. The information also must have been made available to those to whom the opportunity and honor of compiling and editing royal anthologies devolved—among whom, as we have noted, Shunzei is one of the very few individuals who performed both (essentially unrelated) tasks, in his case with an interval of something close to twenty years.71 Shunzei received the command (sengen) to prepare a new royal anthology (which would eventually be given the title Senzai wakashū, “a collection of waka of and for a thousand ages”) from the Cloistered Emperor GoShirakawa in the second month of 1183—a year of military and political turmoil that saw the defeat of the Taira Army by Kiso Yoshinaka two months later and the flight of the Taira from the capital (and with them the emperor and his retinue) in the autumn (seventh month). But even prior to receiving the official commission, and in anticipation of it, Shunzei had for some time been assembling a “private selected anthology” (shisenshū) that would became the foundation for the official collection.72 An entry in his son Teika’s diary (Meigetsuki) indicates that Shunzei had been ­summoned

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to discuss matters poetic with the Cloistered Emperor in the first month of 1181, and had been given instructions to “come often” thereafter.73 Eventually, as he himself states in his formal preface, Shunzei would include poems “of old” (the earliest dated selections are from the Shōryaku era, 990–95) and “of the present” (i.e., the Bunji era, which began in 1185, after the final fall of the Taira and the accession of GoToba). The formal presentation of the completed work did not take place until 1188 and was subjected to some retooling and further editing by both GoShirakawa and Shunzei himself over a period of several months in the summer and autumn of that year. The waka scholar Matsuno Yōichi points out that during this same period, GoShirakawa, who retained immense influence and considerable authority during the early years of the reign of his grandson GoToba, under­took the sponsorship of various measures appropriate to the task of reestablishing peace and political order after the preceding political upheavals (in which he himself had been a major player, shifting alliances as needed in order to ensure his survival and that of his royal line). In the third month of 1188, he ordered memorial prayers to be read in the Mount Kōya monasteries for all those who had perished in battle since the Hōgen Disturbance (in 1156); he presided over five successive convocations of high-ranking clergy from the various officially recognized Buddhist schools, as a way to restart and rejuvenate their functions on behalf of the realm and its rulers, and saw to it that, after a long hiatus during which the office had been vacant (due to the turmoil of warfare), a new High Priestess of the Ise Shrine (Saigū) was appointed.74 Matsuno believes that GoShirakawa’s motives for commissioning a new royal waka anthology at this time were related to these restorative acts, and that Shunzei was not only obedient to but in sympathy with those goals. In particular, Matsuno suggests that the placement of two groups of selected Daijōe waka from the relatively recent past as the closing sequences within two chapters of the anthology—the tenth and thus middle chapter, “Felicitations” (Ga), and the twentieth, and last, devoted to “Kami-ritual” or Shintō (Jingi) poems, in balance and as if in a sort of dialogue with one another—was deliberate, a sign of the special significance and residual propitiousness of these songs from prior celebrations of renewal: like lodes of precious metals or polished jewels, they might, if so placed, continue to radiate with their unique potency and positive energy.75



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My translations of the seven Daijōe poems that Shunzei placed at the end of the “Felicitations” chapter and the additional seven deployed to close the “Kami-ritual” chapter, and the anthology as a whole, are to be found in appendix 2. The two sequences are both a mix of fuzoku and onbyōbu waka, and both are chronological: the “Felicitations” examples begin with a Suki-side (Bitchū) onbyōbu uta from the Daijōe of 1016 (for GoIchijō), the “Kami-rites” examples also begin with a Suki-side (this time, Tamba) kamiasobi (i.e., kagura) uta from the rite of 1036 (for GoSuzaku), and both sequences end with examples from the most recent Daijōe, GoToba’s, in 1184. No examples—neither his own nor any of Naganori’s—from the 1166 rite are included, but three of Naganori’s poems from other occasions (one from 1155, a kagura uta, and two from 1168, a kamiasobi uta and an onbyōbu uta, all Yuki [Ōmi] poems) are in the mix. (Shunzei did include a total of thirty-six of his own poems in other parts of the anthology, and five of Naganori’s, including the three Daijōe examples. The anthology as a whole contains 1,288 verses.) The named poets, the composers of the poems that Shunzei selected for inclusion, are also a mix: several are true jusha, like Masafusa (represented by two examples) and Fujiwara no Tsunehira and Kanemitsu, while others are, if anything, waka specialists (kajin), such as Fujiwara no Norikane and Suetsune. As is the case in any other chapter or section of the anthology, such inclusions and exclusions were based on many factors: poems are selected and arranged in these anthologies—not only when Shunzei was in charge but conventionally—to be representative of types and of the treatment of topics or handling of occasions or particular kinds of compositional opportunities or challenges. They are not an exhaustive record of such usage per se, but a discriminating sampling that also, sometimes, unfolds in sequences within sequences as a kind of quasi-narrative. The identity of the composer, where known, mattered a good deal, and sometimes governed inclusion or exclusion as well (or might motivate the obfuscation of a poet’s identity, as in the well-known story of Shunzei’s effacement of the identity of Taira no Tadanori as the composer of the poem he included as Senzai wakashū, #66, but labeled “anonymous” [yomibito shirazu]).76 The naming of the composer, with appropriate court titles, and other details in kotobagaki, where provided, present additional elements of “narrative” or documentation for each poem regarding topic, occasion, circumstances,

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the location in which the poem was composed, and so on. In the case of the Daijōe waka examples included in the Senzaishū by Shunzei (as in other anthologies where they appear), the details thus provided with each poem are very specific identifiers that place each poem in its particular moment and confirm its role, as Yuki or Suki poem, as a contribution from its named “origin” province, and as a fuzoku song of one or another type or as a byōbu poem. These details also serve, as do the placement of the poems, as cues as to how they are to be read, individually, contextually, and sequentially. One further way to think about the selections Shunzei made to serve as samples or exemplars of Daijōe poesy in this anthology is to see them as items deliberately chosen out of his personal “archive” or “workshop” or “memory bank,” a vast store of poems (perhaps on paper, perhaps in the mind) remarkable or memorable or admirable or illustrative of one feature or another for reasons best known to him. One might say something similar about everything that he chose (with GoShirakawa’s input and approval) for inclusion in the anthology as a whole. And while he, like all royal anthology compilers, duly supplied all the necessary historicizing detail when and where he could, which makes of each poem an artifact of its own creation, characterized and framed by the story told of its particular coming-into-being, the end result (as in the case of other anthologies) is also a display, a celebration and commemoration, of poems qua poems: the anthology is a newly built storehouse (kura) or treasure-house, a collection of precious things gathered, with discrimination and purpose, to show what waka is, what it has been, what it can be. As Matsuno suggests, it is likely no accident that Shunzei chose to end both the tenth (Ga) and twentieth (Jingi) chapters of his compilation, and the anthology as a whole, with a flourish of Daijōe songs and poems: they deliver to the text, and send it out into the world with, an aura of royal dignity and splendor, avatars of archaic practice vibrant in the recent past and present, and an affirmation of waka’s roots, function, and intimate connection to royal charisma, to regional identity and materiality, embodied particularly in the names of kuni, of towns and villages and rivers and mountains and the like, of products of local soils and local labor, of trees and flowers and birds that thrive in those locales, and a reminder of the enduring presence of all of these as “real” things and of their enduring availability as tropes for mak-



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ing poems, whether in the special circumstances of Daijōe composition or otherwise. And so, ipso facto, in the fourteen Daijōe poems in Shunzei’s two complementary Senzaishū groups, it is possible to survey a panorama in brief of much of what Daijōe poesy does as a whole, what its own enduring themes and tropes are (or were, by his lights at least) and, perhaps, what future composers of such verse might take as paradigms or standards. Surely this is part of the message received when the reader encounters in several poems the various forms of the motif of “endurance” itself—that trope of the unchanging and the eternal that seems to lie at the heart of the Daijōe rite and its poetics. Here is just one example—a Suki-side (Tamba) kagura uta from the 1066 rite for Go Sanjō, by Tsunehira, included as one of Shunzei’s Jingi no uta selections: 治暦四年後三条院御時、大嘗会主基方神楽の歌、岩屋山をよめる 藤原経衡 動きなく千世をぞ祈る岩屋山とる榊葉の色変えずして ugokinaku chiyo wo zo inoru Ihayayama toru sakakiha no iro kaezu shite We pray for a long and stable reign of a thousand years and more with these leafed branches of sakaki from Iwaya Mountain, their color as constant as is that peak of solid rock.

Here again, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the sacred branch of the evergreen sakaki is also a torimono, a ritual object brandished in accompaniment of song and dance, as it most surely was in the performance of this kagura uta. I have deliberately “over-translated” the overlapping figural schemes in this poem in order to try to show what Tsunehira does with it, what one might imagine Shunzei heard and saw in it: a surfeit of interlocking signs that drive home its message that “all is and always shall be the same” if all goes well with this new reign, and saying so will ensure that result. Also, “this is how poems have been made and can and should always be made,” especially if made for a Daijōe but, perhaps, in any and all other circumstances too. Furthermore, this poem, like Kanemori’s 970 and Shunzei’s 1166 “Seta Bridge” poems as well, reminds us again that Daijōe poems are about, and take shape in, both sights and sounds: they are songs that are often

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about the act of singing itself, or about other sounds, such as that clamor on the bridge, those cheers and prayers chanted in chorus by (imaginary) villagers populating the (imagined) rural scene or depicted as the (silent) figures on the surface of screen paintings, the uninterrupted thunder of those cascades, those bird songs caught on the wind, spring after spring, summer after summer. They are words inked on a page or on a square of paper affixed to a screen, bringing into life, in the imagination, the rich array, the surplus of images brought together to celebrate and ensure abundance, plenty, and a reliable supply of precious resources—those packed storehouses of grain, those deep, pure wells and flowing springs, and so much more, and all there for a purpose. For, as we have seen, Daijōe poesy is a practice and a space filled to excess with matter to create a surfeit of propitiousness. That excess matter includes the poems generated on each of these occasions, which each time call for the production and display of these value-charged goods, these meaning-full “things” in nature, properties of the realm, objects in motion in both literal and metaphysical space. And one of the enabling causes of this excess is the sheer longevity of the Daijōe waka practice and the thickness of the archive it produced, before, during, and after Shunzei’s time, the content of which—all those poems, all those figures, all those memories—itself thus becomes a rich store to be drawn on for the making of more poems, for subsequent, future Daijōe, or for poems for other occasions, conditions, and needs. In this way, I think I can say that their “thingness” is double: they come into being as part of a submission and celebration of things, and are delivered as things and preserved as things, and then, also, in the space or sphere of practice, or praxis, in which waka are made and remade, they are also things unto themselves, things that matter, things that are necessary if that practice is to endure, and things to be savored and prized. A few years ago, in a symposium held at Yale about “Representing Things,” I spoke about suhama—another of those special appurtenances of the Daijōe that represent places and “things,” which have a greater after­ life as centerpieces of utaawase, and which are the subject of the following chapter. In that talk I referred to suhama as “fine examples of material fetishism of the elegant oddity.” The panel respondent at the time, David Bialock, helpfully rephrased this as “signs that beget more signs.” And of course like them, as I have tried to show here, Daijōe poems are things that



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beget more things, but so perhaps are all waka poems, begetting progeny as countless—or potentially so—as those rows of Ōmi storehouses, overflowing with grain, and as plentiful as those precious goods borne with such effort from Azuma and over Seta Bridge for delivery to the sovereign’s flowered city.

TH RE E

Suhama Waka and Spaces of the Imagination

O

n the fourth day of the twelfth month in the year 965 (Kōhō 2), the Heian royal court celebrated the fortieth birthday of Emperor Murakami. Five days later, down in the old capital, Nara, at Yamashinadera (Kōfukuji), a monastery founded and supported by and intimately associated with the Fujiwara clan from which Murakami’s mother, grandfather, and many of his ancestors sprung, a group of lay courtiers and monks gathered for a ceremonial sutra offering (kuyō) to mark this milestone in the sovereign’s life: the age of forty was understood to be the threshold to old age, and by this time Murakami had been on the throne for two decades.1 These events are well documented in official contemporary records, and in the Shūi wakashū (the third royal anthology, commissioned two decades later by Murakami’s grand-nephew Emperor Kazan), there is also this episode: 天暦の帝四十になりおはしましける時、山階寺に金泥寿命経四十巻 を書き供養し奉りて、御巻数鶴にくはせて洲浜に立てたりけり。そ の洲浜の敷物にあまたの歌葦手に書ける中に 兼盛 When the Sovereign of the Tenryaku Era [Murakami] reached the age of forty, forty copies of the “Sutra of Long Life” [Jumyōkyō] written in gold ink were presented as offerings at Yamashinadera, and a voucher recording the title and number of copies [mikanju or mikanzu] was displayed in the beak of

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a figure of a crane shown standing in the suhama. On the base of the suhama, there were a number of poems written in ashide [cryptographic “reed-grass” script], among them this, by Kanemori: 山階の山の岩根に松を植へてときはかきはに祈りつる哉 Yamashina no yama no ihane ni matsu wo uhete tokiha kakiha ni inoritsuru ka na We have planted a pine tree among the firmly nested boulders on the peak at Yamashina, and thus have made a powerful prayer that he may live long, that he may live well!

And this, by the Monk Chūsan: 声高く三笠の山ぞよばふなるあめの下こそ楽しかるべし kowe takaku Mikasa no yama zo yobahu naru ame no shita koso tanoshikarubeshi. Mount Mikasa seems to echo with voices chanting loud and clear, and so all of the realm under Heaven surely will rejoice and prosper!2

Mount Mikasa, Yamashina, Kōfukuji: all are essentially one sacred site, an ancestral place of worship (of all kinds—Buddhist, Shintō, and their mixed forms) for the Fujiwara and, hence, for the royal family as well. In this pair of poems encoded in ashide (a script that must be sought out and deciphered by the viewer if it is to be read, but also a text that might fulfill its mantic function simply by being inscribed in paint or ink, whether “read” or not), these two composers—Taira no Kanemori, the same court poet-­ official who would write the Ōmi Daijōe poems for Murakami’s son En’yū in 970, including the “Seta Bridge” poem we saw at the opening of the previous chapter, and who would be a Suki poet in 985 for Kazan and a Yuki poet again in 986 for Ichijō; and Chūsen (955–76), an affiliate resident monk at Kōfukuji, not known otherwise for poetic endeavor—both find ways to celebrate the royal anniversary and the site of its consecration and commemoration, and both do so by blending eminently appropriate auspicious signs that are native to the place and fitting for the occasion: an everlasting pine newly planted on the rocky slopes of an eternal mountain; a twicenamed mountain sacred to the royal lineage with its inter-bred ­Fujiwara

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bloodlines; the echoing of chanted prayer (i.e., the darani sutra itself, its text intoned forty times in the liturgical sounds of Sanskrit phrases rendered as long sequences in Chinese translation and pronunciation). And adjacent to the surface on which these poems would appear, there stood the miniature artificial figure of the ageless crane, bearing another written message in proof of the fulfillment and performance of the ritual act (the kuyō) and embedded, in turn, in a landscape model (the suhama). Did it represent those Mount Mikasa slopes with their boulders and pines? Or some other sacred space? Was it merely an accessory among the furnishings and appurtenances in the space in which the kuyō was held, or did it have a more central role? We can only guess, but what is clear is that on this occasion, along with the dedicated sutra copies and other congratulatory salutations offered at the celebrations at the palace in Heian-kyō, this suhama had a role to fulfill as well—a role not so different, judging by the poems written to be seen with it, as that of the songs, poems, screens, and other objects assembled for each Daijōe, to impart to a newly ascended ruler the capacity to enjoy a long and prosperous life and reign, and by extension to spread those blessings to his entire realm and polity. It may be that there were other poems composed at this gathering in Nara and embedded in this suhama display as well; the compilers of the Shūi wakashū shared only this pair in its “Felicitations” (Ga) chapter, in a sequence among others poems composed on the occasion of birthdays, anniversaries, and other major “life events” of royal and noble personages. But if there were other poems composed at Yamashinadera that day, it seems likely that they too would have worked with many of the same tropes, and in that way may have further amplified the impression that the occasion was a hybrid ritual celebration of kingship, in something like the manner whereby the suites of Daijōe songs and poems, including honmon, brought coordinated multiscript texts and interrelated (and time-tested) tropes together for something like that same purpose. Indeed, the Buddhist monk Chūsen’s poem patently operates in just that hybrid cultural mode: the trope of a mountain “echoing” with sonorous prayer for the ruler’s enduring vitality (kowe takaku . . . yama zo yobahu naru) has roots in a classic Chinese mytho-historical episode in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), which relates that when the Han Emperor Wu (157–87 B.C.E.) entered a sacred cavern on Mount Song in Henan, a mysterious voice resounded with



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prayers that he might live for ten thousand years.3 And so perhaps other details in the suhama, recreating in miniature a habitat for the tranquil crane—a mountain slope or peak dotted with boulders (pebbles) and pines (seedlings, or artificial renderings of them)—suggested that this space too, like Mount Song and Mount Mikasa, was a locus inhabited by divine powers and spirits that would affirm and preserve the royal person, enhance his charisma, and fortify his ties to both his lands and his people. Although suhama do in fact have roots in and found their earliest functions in the Daijōe itself, they did not always carry such metaphysical or political messages as they did there or in this Yamashinadera kuyō for Murakami. On the other hand, where we do encounter them they are always key or at least notable elements of the furnishings of social gatherings, festivities of many different kinds, or accompaniments (and sometimes the medium for) various forms of communication; as such, they almost always appear together with poems and often serve as the prompt for making them and as the vehicle for conveying them. Murasaki Shikibu, author of Genji monogatari, provides a fitting example of this in an early passage in her diary (Murasaki Shikibu nikki): 播磨の守、碁の負けわざしける日、あからさまにまかでで、のちに ぞ碁盤のさまなど見たまへしかば、華足などゆゑゆゑしくして、洲 浜のほとりの水に書けまぜたり。 紀の国のしららの浜にひろふてふこの石こそはいはほともなれ 扇どももをかしきを、そのころは人々持たり。 When the Governor of Harima gave a banquet as a forfeit for losing in a go tournament, I happened to be briefly absent from the royal residence, and so it was only later that I had a chance to see the decorated go board he had made for the occasion. The trays for displaying the comestibles and gifts were quite elegantly made, and in the suhama there was, among other things, this poem, as if written on a bank at the water’s edge: Ki no kuni no shirara no hama ni hirofu tefu kono ishi koso ha ihaho to mo nare These stones, said to be of the kind one finds at Shirara Beach in the land of Ki: May they grow to be huge boulders in time to come!

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The fans given out as mementos at the banquet were so nice that many courtiers made a point of sporting them for quite a while after that.4

The exact dates of this go tournament (which would have taken place in the presence of the empress) and the subsequent banquet that the defeated team’s leader had to host are not known, but they are likely to have taken place in 1008 or so (given their context in the diary). Commentators are also uncertain about the identity of the “Governor of Harima” mentioned here: it might have been one of several of Shikibu’s contemporaries who held that title, including Fujiwara no Yukinari, Fujiwara no Arikuni, or Taira no Narimasa. Of greater significance, perhaps, is the fact that whoever wrote the poem that Shikibu saw embedded in the design of the suhama’s miniaturized depiction of a sea, lake, or pond-shore scene seems to have been well aware of a similar poem, also quite likely from a gathering occasioned by a go contest that took place circa 973: 心あてに白良の浜に拾ふ石の巌とならむ世をしてこそ待て kokoroate ni Shirara no hama ni hirohu ishi no ihaho to naramu yo wo shite koso mate It is not hard to imagine that these stones gathered from Shirara’s shores will in future time grow to the size of boulders!5

That earlier poem may or may not have referred to features of a suhama but, like the poem that Shikibu read and reproduced, it also toyed with the ready-to-hand figure of the go board’s round stone playing pieces, and it displayed an awareness that holding the game or contest in the royal presence made it something more than an ordinary affair, that is, one that called, as did so many, for poems declaring that, if possible, the moment and its special conditions ought to be preserved and caught in time and memory but that its material properties might somehow, over time, gain extraordinary size and thus become monuments to this one particular momentary but exemplary exercise of courtly elegance and taste. Likewise, the person who composed the poem remembered and treated the earlier one as a precious memento too, and made a similarly elegant display of rearranging its parts (like reshuffled go stones made ready for another game) and restating its idea (much as one might restart the game, following well-established rules



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and model tactics). In short, in the hands of these players and poets, and in the eyes of their observers, these go stones and boards, the suhama, and these poems and their contents were all things to savor, to remember, to appreciate by placing them or making them into something new. As these two examples suggest, suhama had various roles and functions, and they also took a variety of forms. They would be far easier to describe if authentic examples existed; instead, we have to rely on descriptions in texts (often partial or sketchy, as in the examples above) and a rather limited number of images in pictorial media, few of which date to prior to the early modern era, by which time the poetic or literary functions of the object had for the most part been occluded (if not entirely forgotten).6 Some scholars suggest that two miniature landscape models of a lotus pond and of what appears to be a magical island, rendered in precious woods, lacquers, and metals, among the ancient objects in the Shōsōin collection in Nara (which are of both ancient continental and very early domestic origin) are precursors to the suhama; the resemblance has much to do with size, shape, and

14. Three-dimensional representation of a lotus pond; property of Shōsōin. The photograph, originally published in Teishitsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku, 18, is reproduced here courtesy of National Diet Library.

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15. Three-dimensional representation of a magical island; property of Shōsōin. The photograph, originally published in Teishitsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku, 18, is reproduced here courtesy of National Diet Library.

the concept of using durable materials as artificial representations of flowers, shrubs, and trees.7 Neither the purpose nor the provenience of these two artifacts is known, but they may well be among the earliest examples in Japan of a diverse category of crafted items, often the products of elaborate production with rare or precious materials, that would come to be called (as they often are in Heian-period texts) tsukurimono, literally “things made [with a lesser or greater degree of elaborate contrivance]”—almost none of which, however, have survived in anything like the conditions that preserved the Shōsōin items. For the most part—and with the aid of a smattering of latter-day visual representations—we can visualize the classical suhama as a tray or shortlegged table, often with a scalloped edge made to resemble the curves and inlets of a shoreline, on which the topography, flora, and fauna of some imagined utopian space or identifiable “famous place” in the Japanese repertoire of poetic topoi (that is, utamakura or meisho) is depicted. For example, it is possible that the Shōsōin “island” and quite certain that many of the suhama that were put on display in the Daijōe ceremonial compound (Daijōkyū) were meant to depict Penglai (蓬莱, Hōrai in Japanese), a peak on a fabulous island said to lie within the Bohai Sea (off the coast of Shan-



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tung) and believed to be occupied by immortal sages and divine beings.8 As noted above, the suhama displayed at the kuyō for Murakami most likely represented the features of Yamashina or Mount Mikasa itself, while the go banquet suhama that so intrigued Shikibu may have had design elements that suggested both Penglai and the “famous place” named in its poem, “Shirara Beach,” in the province of Ki. Mount Mikasa and Shirara might both be said to qualify, on different grounds, as utamakura (even if not so characterized, technically, at the time).9 It is also likely that in some settings, the context of the occasion determined or at least suggested how the “image” represented in a suhama might be read: for example, at almost any celebration of a host’s or other honoree’s birthday, especially with increasing age, the suhama would likely be “read” as a representation of Penglai, an isle of immortals, even if its features were generic or otherwise nonspecific and even if, simultaneously, it was understood to be doubling as that fantastic island as well as some place or space of note in the “real” Japan or the Japan of the imagination. And then there is also the question of “representation” itself: on some occasions, at least, the suhama may have been seen not just as a replica or simulacrum of a utopian island or a named “famous place” but, in some sense, that place itself, its very design, content, and function imbuing it with extraordinary and metaphysical presence. And yet, the most common term used for describing that presence in contemporary records—diaries, utaawase prefaces (also called nikki), and observers’ notes—is fūryū (feng liu in Chinese), which denotes a range of objects and practices that are artful, extravagant, knowingly made, and knowingly displayed to evince a mastery for or an aspiration to au courant fashionability and consummate taste. In certain contexts, fūryū (it is both noun and adjective) is associated with studied but seemingly effortless presentation of that which is elegant and fine. It can be evinced in attire, in dance, and in musical performance, but also at times in wild, unbridled, flashy movement; eccentric connoisseurship; and antiquarian fetishism, and many of these senses, and more, come into play when it is used in and about waka culture.10 That is why suhama, waka, and fūryū are an interlocking cluster, and that is how I treat them here.11 A survey of literary and historical sources in which suhama are mentioned reveals that often (though not always, and not necessarily) they were the

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featured focal points in poetry contests and other ninth-, tenth-, and ­eleventh-century (and some later) royal court events and aristocratic gatherings. In many cases they served as topical or figural guides or cues to the making of those poems. Over the course of the same period, suhama also were objects of exchange as flattering, extravagant gifts accompanying more private or personal communications that feature the sending and receiving of poems, which likewise engage in specific ways with the elements of the design of the simultaneously presented suhama. So, obviously, thinking about suhama and examining their dynamic roles in waka compositional practice and presentation is another way to add to an ongoing discussion about the relationship between described or imagined spaces and places named or referred to in poems and the spaces and places these objects and poems represent—and the materiality of those objects and of those poems. Such an inquiry also adds these things (suhama) to our re­ imagination of specific creative processes alongside the surviving but relatively static texts in which their coming-into-being is recorded and which are in almost every case their only other lasting products. The placement of suhama at the center of this discussion displaces the poems associated with them from that center, but doing so casts those poems and their producers and readers (receivers, referents, addressees) in a new light. Along with the more conspicuous tradition of landscape screen or door-panel paintings executed in one or another relationship to poem texts (which is the more widely studied phenomenon, even though so few examples from as early as the eleventh century exist, and no earlier examples are known other than through textual descriptions), we can also consider suhama as another mode of representation of places, both “famous” and specific (meisho), as well as imaginary or unspecified, with some emphasis on the fact that suhama were things that represented places in three dimensions and were almost always produced in association with or in conjunction with the display, utterance, or conveyance of verses.12 Furthermore, as with landscape paintings and many related images, it is not necessarily easy or appropriate to make sharp distinctions between sacred and secular renderings and functions when contemplating the role and meaning of suhama. In other words, the difference in character between the suhama that contained a poem at the Yamashinadera kuyō for Murakami and the go banquet suhama described by Shikibu may not be as



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great as it might seem at first consideration. As noted above, many of the places and spaces that suhama represented were understood as the habitats, or in and of themselves the very physical manifestations, of divine powers—whether in utopian precincts or “local” Japanese settings. And, of course, a suhama had to be conceived, constructed (once its precious materials were acquired), and then brought to the site for viewing, or for other purposes such as gift-giving. One way of thinking about the physical conveyance and display of the suhama in the space of presentation of poems and other activities is that that presence also conveyed a measure of that represented or embodied divinity (or other-worldliness, such as the otherness of a remote shoreline, riverbank, mountain, or pond “somewhere else” in Japan) into that space. This may be why many accounts of poetry contests in which suhama appeared give special attention to the moment and mode of their physical introduction into the gathering space, the attire and movements of the bearers, and so on.13 I want to treat them here as “objects in motion” for this reason but also because they so often bore poems, or, having been borne into a space, prompted the making of poems that then are found moving through the time and space of waka culture—and, again, by this means become things out of which more poems can be made. Their function was thus similar to that of many screen paintings (and other two-dimensional images), including those created for the Daijōe, in that observers could imagine themselves into the spaces depicted on or in them, or might imagine figures dwelling or moving within those spaces, and might compose “as if ” they were themselves in those spaces or might compose their poems as if addressing or commenting on figures depicted (or imagined as if existing) in those spaces. In other words, like such byōbu and other paintings, suhama were crafted stimulants to the poetic imagination, focal points not unlike mandala in Buddhist meditation practices, but rendered and working, significantly, in three dimensions. However, suhama and their place in waka culture have not been topics on which many have dwelt in much detail, nor with as much attention as has been accorded to paintings, especially screens, that worked in similar ways in the making of poems. While there is no monograph in any language about suhama, there are a few article-length studies by Japanese scholars of literature and art that have appeared in the last few decades, and these have largely informed my discussion here. Suhama have been treated

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in the most detail by scholars studying the records of observed or recollected procedures and results of poetry contests (utaawase) and other related kinds of courtly pairing matches (monoawase), for these were the settings in which they first appeared—beginning with an utaawase that took place in the 880s—and were most prominently featured over time, other than in their somewhat different role in the Daijōe.14 Much of what I have to say about them is drawn from this scholarship about utaawase—a fascinating and still somewhat understudied subject in its own right.15 Although fairly ample records of utaawase from the Heian and Kamakura periods survive and serve as the basis for their detailed study (which, as I have suggested, provides an important counterpoint to the study of waka in the end-point setting of anthologies), the material culture of these gatherings is ephemeral, except for second- or third-hand (or more remote) copies of the documents (usually scrolls) in which the contested and or judged poems (and judgments, where available) are recorded. In particular, there are no extant ancient examples of suhama in museum collections or elsewhere: suhama, like so much else, are a fugitive feature of the poetic and material culture of classical Japan.16 We have seen how the songs, poems, screen paintings, and other tribute goods brought into the ceremonial space from their provincial source sites, or in the name of those sites, made them present and participant in the Daijōe: a recitation of any suite of Daijōe Yuki or Suki songs and poems, or a scan across the panels of a Daijōe onbyōbu, would yield an auditory or visual litany of place-names, and that activation in sound or sight would abet that sense of presence. This conception of function also serves in my reimagining of the work that suhama performed in spaces in which they appeared. There, sometimes (as we have already seen), poems were to be searched out within the suhama itself, but at other times poems arose, or were heard or seen (or both), in its vicinity, and then remain as vestiges and artifacts of the work it has done in that space, and repeat—ad infinitum, hypothetically—the conjuring through imagination of named places, their features, their poetic weight, burden, or lode. I have discussed elsewhere how in so much of the corpus of classical poetry, the name and the features of a particular place are deployed, displayed, and manipulated as a kind of evocative topical focus or fulcrum of the design of the poem itself and as one of the several means whereby any



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one such waka poem reads or can be read as intertextually engaged with so many (and, as I sometimes claim, all) others.17 Pictorial images of places in the Japanese tradition, especially meishoe, frequently function in much the same way, to signal this interrelationship to previous (as well as to possible subsequent) visual and other renderings of the same or some related place, through iconographic coding that works much as does the code of utama­ kura-guided treatment of “famous places” as poetic topoi or memes in the medium of verse. But in many of those recorded instances where suhama were introduced into the space in which poems were being read, offered, compared, judged, or conveyed by one means or another, it was these things (suhama) themselves that were the focus and the fulcrum for at least part of the time that participants were present in that space, or for some time afterward; the evidence for this, in part, is the simple fact that they merited and received detailed description in the written accounts of these proceedings, as did other aspects of the event (such as the dress, movements, and comportment of the participants). Suhama were not always the sole determining guide for the topical direction or configuration of the image schemes of the poems presented in that same space or at that occasion, but where introduced, they were signs of a heightened, pointed, aestheticized ambience or order in force and on display in that space—that is, fūryū. However, in contemporaneous records and in more recent commentary and scholarship on suhama, fūryū is in fact but one of several prevalent terms used in description and explanation of the character of these things, especially in the eyes of the beholder. Another is kazari, which stands for intentionally eye-catching decoration and display and connotes a certain degree of extravagance and excess (or surplus).18 By this means, suhama are associated with and held up as exceptionally fine examples of material fetishism of the elegant oddity—that is, appreciation and admiration of the lavish if temporary contrivance created for display. Such a display is to be “read” or decoded by the connoisseur, “one who knows,” or, if not “read,” then apprehended visually (perhaps also tactilely) in a kind of obverse or oblique conversation with the verbal content and coded messages of the poems that are either present, through presentation, or absent or potential (forthcoming) in that same space of display. In sum, suhama are a superb example of the Japanese refined production of the necessary superfluous, the extravagant manufacture of the ­object of

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admiration, the yet-one-more representation beyond that which has already performed it or which might perform that work of representation by some other means. In a suhama, the imagined, distant, invoked place has become a physical thing, or rather its representation: the object or thing there in the room is exterior to the poem, whereas in the poem, the name of the place (whether explicitly named or more obliquely indicated) or its specified features are “interior” elements of the structure of the poem itself, while at the same time that named or referenced place is necessarily exterior to, distant from, the space of presentation of the thing (the suhama) and the poems. And then—just as in the case of the painting of the place— there is the dynamic of altered scale. The suhama is of course a miniature (“Honey, I shrunk the meisho”), sized for the space of presentation and display. Just as the full-scale features of the invoked place itself, whatever and wherever it may be, are condensed within the small frame of the waka form, as part of the process of achieving representation in that idiom, and just as those features are also altered in the process of their rendering within the space of a painted surface—whether on a sliding door (fusuma or shōji), a panel of a screen (byōbu), in a section of a scroll (emaki), or in some other format—so, in the contrived or suggested three dimensions of the suhama, a downsized world is recreated and made portable. Suhama are carried in and out of spaces in a kind of dramatic conveyance that is not unlike that of the manipulation of a mikoshi or miniature shrine, and, as in that practice, which is much less ambiguously sacral, such manipulation is itself an index of the significance of the object, and the physical contact between object and bearer may signal at least a partial transfer of that aura from thing to person.19 Further: like the concept of fūryū itself, the suhama is Janus-faced in that it is expected to be as up to date as it can be while at the same time, by its very existence and presence, it stands for a time-honored practice and serves as a lens through which the viewer can envision spaces occupied in the past by other suhama, by other participants in similar gatherings, and can be prompted to remember or imagine what transpired there, including the poems made or seen there in conversation with it. In short, its design aims to emulate or define the height of current fashion, but its function and message are about times gone by. It is an avatar and vessel of and for



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nostalgia, and poems that are integral to it or that it enables or inspires are much the same. To be precise, it needs to be said that the Daijōe form and function of the suhama is quite different from that of the utaawase or more personal “gift” suhama; among other things, the former has a much more tenuous link to poetry as such, and in fact, as Yagi has shown in considerable detail, its meaningful textual links are to honmon—those auspicious Chinese texts that carried as much weight as did Japanese songs and poems in the program and purport of the rite. Indeed, descriptions of twelfth-century Daijōe that survive in the writings of such firsthand observers as Ichijō Kaneyoshi (or Kanera, in his Godai hajime shō, which gives the details for all manner of protocols to be observed at the beginning of new sovereigns’ reigns20) and Taira no Nobunori (in his diary Heihanki21) indicate that once the honmon texts had been devised by “the Chancellor of the University and the Professors of Classics” (Daigaku no tō monjō hakase), the next step in preparation for the Daijōe was the construction of a demarcated raised platform (shime no yama; also hyō no yama) upon which the governors of the Yuki and Suki provinces, their retinues, and their tribute goods would eventually take their places during the ritual processions.22 Suhama were prominent among the special furnishings to be displayed on these platforms, but their primary function was to serve as a surface for the display of another item for which Yuki and Suki governors were responsible: mikazashi, flowered headdresses that the sovereign would wear on the days of each side’s processions and banquets.23 All these arrangements—the enclosure, platform, and headgear—were designed, decorated, and implemented in coordination with the preselected honmon. That practice in turn followed precedents in Chinese texts that gave specifications for Chinese enthronement ritual protocols. And since the purport of such rites equated the Chinese coronation site with the mountain dwellings of immortals (shen xian, Japanese shinsen), Yagi suggests, it made sense for the magical space depicted by or embodied in the Daijōe suhama—the dai, or dais, for the mikazashi—to represent likewise a paradisial precinct occupied by immortals. This is why, so far as we know from truly scant records and no pre-eighteenth-century pictorial depictions, a Daijōe suhama usually consisted of an islet-shaped base upon which pines, cranes, and figures

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16. Kada no Arimaro’s sketch of a mikazashi dai. The upper inscription says that the artificial chrysanthemums were made of silver and gold, while the mountain, suhama-shaped island, young pine, and bamboo were made of silver. The inscription at the right indicates that the object was officially presented by the governor of Tōtōmi, Takamuro Yasuhide. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

of ancient sage-immortals (male) could be seen.24 As late as 1818, when an observer drew images of the Yuki made that year for the Daijōe of Emperor Ninkō for the official record, they retained that distinctive scallop-edged shape. That is also the shape that makes any depiction of a suhama in all media, and of any kind, no matter its purpose or occasion, instantly recognizable as such (see fig. 17).25 Fast forward, as it were: it is late in the seventeenth century and a certain Ozasa Tokugorō, a Kyoto-based publisher of woodblock printed editions of the Japanese classics (as we now view them), has produced a beautifully illustrated version of Eiga monogatari (“A Tale of Flowering Fortunes”), a fact-based literary narrative that looks back from the perspective of several



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17. Kada no Arimaro’s sketches of two honmon no ­suhama. By permission of Kunaichō Shoryōbu.

intervening decades to royal and aristocratic affairs at the time of the Fujiwara family’s political and cultural ascendancy (ca. 1000). In the process of its preservation and transmission, Eiga monogatari (like Genji mongatari, Sei Shōnagon’s Makura no sōshi, and many other literary texts) has come to be regarded as, among other things (history? fiction? a hybrid?), a source book for information about the minute details of courtly cultural practices and artifacts that have since become literally “antiquated,” modified beyond recognition, or extinct. This documentary role is abetted by

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18. The presentation of suhama at the “Moon-Viewing Banquet” in the royal palace, autumn 966, as portrayed in an illustration for Eiga monogatari, chapter 1 (“Tsuki no en” or “Tsuki no utage”), in a seventeenthcentury woodblock-printed edition by Ozasa Tokugorō in Kyoto. Artist unknown. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

i­llustrations in early modern woodblock printed editions like Ozasa’s. It is not unlikely that the visual treatments of such “historical” episodes and scenes as are to be found in Ozasa’s verions of Eiga monogatari are based on depictions in earlier printed books or other media, but these models have not been identified. The determination of which scenes to illustrate may also by this time have been fixed by precedent. One of the first illustrations that a reader (then and now) would encounter in the first of the nine booklets that make up the full set in Ozasa’s edition is a two-page spread, a combined interior-exterior scene depicted from an angle suggesting a slightly elevated viewpoint through a roof or ceiling that has somehow magically been removed for the viewer’s convenience, as has been conventional in such illustrations (especially in the depiction of “classical” Heian-period subjects) since at least the twelfth century.26 We



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see three court ladies-in-waiting in their flowing robes at center right; two court gentlemen in black robes to their left; three more gentlemen watching and listening from a veranda at the lower left under moonlight; one more exalted personage, presumably the host, behind a partially raised bamboo shade at the upper right; in the center, unmistakably a suhama with its trademark scalloped edge; and beside it, yet another, though this one has a rectangular shape and, in contrast to the three-dimensional elements suggesting trees in the first suhama (which are notably similar to the flowering plants in the moonlit garden at far left), the surface of this one appears to be carved, showing a landscape with a fence, birds in flight, and two observers of the scene. The reader is in fact looking at an “artist’s rendering” of an historically documented occasion—documented, that is, not only in the first chapter of Eiga monogatari, “Tsuki no en” (or “Tsuki no utage,” “The Moon-Viewing Banquet”) but also in official course histories and in the archives of utaawase, where it is known as “The Garden Contest at the Palace [on the Night of the Fifteenth in the Eighth Intercalary Month of the Third Year of the Kōhō Era]” (i.e., “Kōhō sannen uruu hachigatsu jūgonichi no yo dairi senzai awase,” 966). This event took place in the Seiryōden (a parlor in the emperor’s apartments within the royal palace, frequently the site of both formal and informal court rituals, presentations, and celebrations), hosted by and in the presence of the same Emperor Murakami whose fortieth birthday had been celebrated in the previous year. It is he that is shown as the partially visible presence presiding over the proceedings in the illustration. Curiously, Eiga monogatari makes no mention of the birthday celebrations, but it devotes full attention to the difficult pregnancy of his consort Anshi (it was understood that she was possessed by evil spirits); her delivery of their child, Princess Senshi; and Anshi’s death two years earlier. Those events surely must have cast a shadow over Murakami’s birthday celebrations in the following year, and they render the fervent wishes and holy offerings made in hopes of blessing him with long life even more poignant. The “Garden Contest” of late autumn 966 thus took place during a period in which, as the Eiga narrator repeatedly reminds us, Murakami’s grief remained intense, as did his desire to abdicate and take up a life of retirement—“but the senior nobles refused to hear of it”—and it seems likely to have been planned in an attempt to bolster his spirits.

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The monogatari narrator, who identifies as the transmitter of eyewitness accounts and reliable hearsay, provides these details: Two  .  .  . teams were to produce artificial gardens in front of the Seiryōden. The leader of the left was Naritoki, the superintendent of the Office of Painting, who was . . . the elder brother of the . . . Consort Hōshi. The leader of the right was Tamemitsu, who supervised the Office of Palace Works. Both sides worked furiously, determined not to be outdone. The contestants from the Office of Painting submitted a painted landscape tray depicting flowering plants of heavenly beauty, a garden stream, and massive rocks. Various kinds of insects were lodged in a rustic fence made of silver foil. The artists had also painted a view of the Ōi River, showing figures strolling nearby and cormorant boats with basket fires. The Office of Palace Works presented an interesting tray, carved with great ingenuity to resemble a beach at high tide, which they had planted with artificial flowers and carved bamboo and pines. Their poem was attached to a spray of fresh ominaeshi [maidenflowers].

After the inspection of the suhama and presentation of the poems (which perhaps were read aloud for all to hear), we learn that there were musical entertainments as well—but the emperor, the Eiga narrator tells us, could not help but think of how much the late empress would have enjoyed the event, and he as well as his attendants were all in tears, despite the lavish festivity and playful gaiety that they had witnessed.27 This occasion—sufficiently notable for its details to have been recorded in more than one place (the production and presence of suhama were no doubt a good part of what made it so, as was the timing of the event during the emperor’s lingering sorrow for Anshi)—was but one gathering among many in the tenth and eleventh centuries (and later) that gave rise to this kind of elegant (and expensive) matching of both things (monoawase—the gardens, the suhama, the flowers displayed in and on them) and poems (utaawase). In this instance, the efforts that went into designing and preparing the suhama were doubled in the refurbishing (apparently, with manmade installations) of the nearby inner courtyard gardens, senzai or sezai, so that what was notable here may also have been this very coincidence or



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mirroring of the production of dual sets of artificial miniature landscapes, one larger than the other, one fixed and the other portable.28 Also, as indicated by their titles, the leaders of the two teams competitively producing both the gardens and suhama, Fujiwara Naritoki (942–92) and Fujiwara Tamemitsu (941–95), were high-ranking and well-connected young courtiers (and first cousins) with current responsibilities for the direction of court administrative units (the Edokoro, “Office of Paintings,” and Tsukumodokoro, “Office of Facilities”), who thus had access to the resources required for the designing of gardens and production of such luxury offerings as the suhama, to decorate and adorn a festive court gathering of this kind.29 Such elegant matching yielded rewards, in the form of gifts of bolts of fabric or made garments, to the participants, but another less obvious consequence was accrual to the prestige of the sovereign—here, the Emperor Murakami, who, as host, facilitator, and enabler of the occasion, was thus its true subject, and so, more specifically, were his age, his lingering state of grief, the ongoing tension between his desire to retire and the interests of those (his Fujiwara relatives and their allies) who preferred that he remain in place. This consciousness of the sovereign’s centrality in the event was also implicit in the choice of Ōi, a scenic area on the western edge of the capital city that was a long-favored site for royal excursions (miyuki), as the topic and referent of the left team’s presentation, and it is spelled out in the poem so artfully embedded in its suhama, in which, most impressively, live insects have been installed (sumase, literally “given dwelling”) “in a rustic fence made of silver foil” and a variety of flowers have been attached as well—all suggesting that Ōi, and this simulacrum of it, should still serve as a place of diverting retreat and respite.30 But the poem plays with the notion that the suhama is a temporal creation while at the same time wishing, in the form of a charm, that the royal authority and charisma that it momentarily enhances might be of virtually infinite duration (which, in the then-current circumstances, was not simply a private concern but a matter of state as well): it “speaks,” almost but not quite directly, to (or rather of) the emperor’s person: 君がため花植ゑそむと告げねども千代まつ虫の音にぞなきぬる Kimi ga tame hana uwesomu to tsugenedomo chiyo matsumushi no ne ni zo nakinuru

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We did not tell the crickets that the flowers were planted for Your Majesty’s sake, yet their cries echo our hope for a reign of a thousand years.31

On the other hand, the poem of the right, attached to a spray of real ominaeshi amid the carved representations of other trees and plants, plays with this very mix of the authentic and the fabricated, and addresses itself to those flowers (or, one might say, to their female personae): 心して今年は匂へ女郎花咲かぬ花ぞと人は見るとも Kokoro shite kotoshi ha niohe wominaheshi sakanu hana zo to hito ha miru tomo Though to some you may appear manmade flowers, this year, ominaeshi, bloom with all your might.

From the time of the Man’yōshū, this flower, the ominaeshi (in traditional orthography, wominaheshi), had been (and would continue to be) celebrated not only as one of the outstanding floral emblems of the autumn season but also (and this became more pronounced in the era of the Kokin wakashū) as a figure for beguiling, bewitching, irresistibly inviting female charms, and for seductive females per se—often addressed directly, as they are here, and told how to behave vis-à-vis a male observer.32 Thus, none too subtly but none too lasciviously either, the role of the “maidenflowers” in this contest is shown to be, at least in part, to suggest yet other kinds of distractions and diversion for the downcast sovereign—to prompt him, in a way, to remain in the world of pleasure (again, not only for his own wellbeing but also for the good of the state), even though he has repeatedly demonstrated his desire to leave it. In fact, Murakami officially accepted a young widow, Anshi’s sister Tōshi, as a new intimate partner within a few months after Anshi’s death.33 The term mitate, which refers to metaphorical operations in poetry involving, literally, “setting up one thing to be seen as another,” is sometimes used to describe the function of the suhama itself. The poem from the team of the right points in much the same manner to the substitution of the artificial for the real and to the inclusion amid the fabricated elements of the scene of the real flower and its authentic color and scent.34 Such de-



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liberate, calculated confusion of the artificial and the real calls to mind the famous fūryū garden of the courtier Minamoto no Tōru, constructed in the late ninth century at his villa in the capital known as the Kawara no in: it featured a scaled replica of the land-and-seascape of Shiogama, a famous place (utamakura, meisho) in the far northeast, replete with salt water channeled to the garden to be boiled there in imitation of the salty smokes and steams that were emblematic of the “real” Shiogama.35 Tōru’s miniaturized Shiogama brought a remote, rustic, and exotic locale, a stimulus to the poetic imagination, into the purview of his fellow metropolitan aesthetes in the capital: its creation was a display of his command of resources but also of his engagement with the poetics of place, his control of a vocabulary of signs that could be transferred, reproduced, and set up for purposeful mitate-like substitution. It was the Shiogama garden project that made Tōru himself the emblem of fūryū for later generations, and his example also established the relationship between such extravagant artifice and the traditions of fūryū connoisseurship of which suhama construction and presentation are also a part. It was perhaps with this in mind that the preeminent scholar of Heianperiod utaawase, Hagitani Boku, noted that this 966 “Garden Contest” is the only known example in which “live” and aural effects (that is, the insects and their cries) were incorporated into the design of an utaawase suhama. He also emphasized the special way in which, at this contest, the carefully refurbished gardens and suhama, respectively and together, served as complementary and coordinated focal points both for viewing pleasure and as referents for poem composition, and on this basis declared that both elements, and the occasion as a whole, achieved a unique and consummate realization of fūryū.36 Also, as with the hundreds of utaawase that he conscientiously and thoroughly examined in his monumental Heianchō utaawase taisei, Hagitani reproduced all the known poems from this occasion, of which there were thirty-four in addition to the two “team” poems featured in the Eiga monogatari account. The first poem in that series was the emperor’s own: 花をのみ見るだにあるをのどかなる月さへそへる秋にまるかな hana wo nomi miru dani aru wo nodokanaru tsuki sahe soheru aki ni maru ka na

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It would be fine enough to have the flowers to gaze upon, but in this autumn we have the beauty of this gentle moon to join their company.

One among the many male courtiers present and participating, “the Crown Prince’s Tutor, Ōe no Tadamitsu” (or Narimitsu, 東宮学士大江斎光) was also one of several who picked up on and echoed the emperor’s sentiments: 月影のさやかならずば秋ふかみ千草に匂ふ花をみましや tsukikage no sayakanarazumba aki fukami chigusa ni nihohu hana wo mimashi ya Were the moonlight not this clear and bright, how could we have fully seen all the beauty that these flowers display, with autumn so far advanced?

And in his poem, another member of the Ōe clan, Michimasa (otherwise unknown37) stayed with many of the same motifs but, like several other contributors, made pointed reference to the location of this event, the royal palace itself, here named, as so often in waka (from very early times “the nine-fold enclosure” [kokonoe; in traditional orthography, kokonohe]), and by doing so directs his expression of pleasure in the scene back to his host, the emperor, and makes it simultaneously a wish for and compliment on his stable and lasting reign (that is, he recapitulates the trope of timelessness and “no change” that we have also seen in so many Daijōe waka, and which is of course not exclusive to them): 九重に咲きみだれたる花みれば千歳の秋は色も変はらじ kokonohe ni sakimidaretaru hana mireba chitose no aki ha iro mo kaharaji Gazing at these flowers so beautifully blooming everywhere we look here in the Nine-Fold Enclosure, I feel sure that these autumn colors will be just as they are now for a thousand autumns to come!

The same notions, figures, and rhetorical postures are also adopted by, among others, two of the eight court ladies who added their poems to this collocation. This one is by “Ukon no myōbu”: 九重に匂ひそめぬる女郎花行くさきまでもみゆる月かな kokonhoe ni niohisomenuru wominaheshi yukusaki made mo miyuru tsuki ka na



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These maidenflowers that have imbued the whole Nine-Fold Enclosure with beauty and scent: in this moonlight we can even see them thriving in future times!

And in this, by “Suke no Myōbu,” the Nine-Fold Enclosure appears with another of its poetic sobriquets, “the lofty place among the clouds” (kumo no ue). Likewise, the presence of the moon in this case is encoded in the averred, imagined (or observed, if represented in one or another of the ­suhama) presence of the katsura tree, which was believed to grow on or in it: 秋の夜の花の色色みゆるかな月の桂も雲の上にて aki no yo no hana no iro iro miyuru ka na tsuki no katsura mo kumo no uhe ni te On this autumn night we can see these flowers in all their beauty— for the katsura that grows on the moon is right here in this lofty realm among the clouds!38

Poetic claims of this kind—that the divine charisma with which a royal court is blessed in all its “loftiness” will ensure that such aesthetic pleasures as the cherished color and scent of flowers (and the privileged status that their excellence represents) will endure for eternity, thriving in the light of a righteous and virtuous sovereign—no doubt served their purpose of the moment, rounding out the multidimensional and multimedia program and meeting the expectations and aspirations of this “Garden Contest,” and, at the very least, enhancing it with poetic grace. Still, the hopes expressed here for the emperor’s lasting health were not to be fulfilled. Murakami died in the fifth month of the following year, to be succeeded by Anshi’s eldest son, who ruled as Reizei, though only briefly, to be followed two years later by his younger brother (also Anshi’s son), En’yū (for whom the Daijōe of 970, the occasion of Kanemori’s “Seta Bridge” poem, was celebrated). Court poets in every age felt that need to argue rhetorically for unchanging, never aging permanence in the people, practices, and things cherished in their world; the realities of life were otherwise, of course, but surely that very fact was in great part what prompted them to cling to such rhetoric, to plan and execute events like the “Garden Contest,” to create more

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­ pportunities to repeat these exercises and replicate these sentiments. The o role of the suhama, as prompt and focal point in such an exercise, was to be one of the instruments for that replay, along with the poems that joined the orchestration. In Kokon chomonjū, a mid-thirteenth-century anecdotal tale collection largely preoccupied with literary lore, the compiler, Tachibana no Narisue, offers another account of a similar event: the “Late-Season Chrysanthemum Matching Contest at the Palace” (Tenjō zangiku awase no koto) in the tenth month of the seventh year of the Tenryaku era, 953.39 Like the 966 “Garden Contest,” this event also occurred under the auspices of Emperor Murakami, and as on that occasion there were multiple entities in competition: fine examples of late-autumn kiku were collected and offered by the vying parties, as were the suhama on which they were displayed and the poems composed for the occasion. According to Narisue’s account, the suhama presented by the team of the left featured just one splendid chrysanthemum, but its elegant decoration conveyed “fūryū in a variety of ways” (suhama no fūryū samazama nari). There was a silver figure of a crane holding this single stalk of late-season chrysanthemum, and the team’s opening presentation poem was inscribed on a leaf of that stalk. The team of the right showed up late in the day with its offering; torches had already been lit by the time its bearers entered the contest space with their suhama, which had a similar arrangement of flower, silver crane figure, and inscribed poem, but the overall effect was found lacking (fūryū hidari ni ha otoritarikeri—literally, “the fūryū accomplished by this side was inferior to that of the left”). Eventually, after much discussion of the merits of the flowers selected for display, attention turned (rather as an afterthought) to the poems embedded so cleverly in these configurations. The poem from the left was composed by the courtier Mibu no Tadami; its tone and rhetoric will by now be familiar: 千年ふる霜の鶴をば置きながら菊の花こそ久しかりけれ Chitose furu shimo no tsuru wo ba okinagara kiku no hana koso hisashikarikere Here is placed a crane whitened by a thousand years of falling frost, and the chrysanthemum beside it truly seems always to have been there.



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The poem offered by the right was composed by the accomplished female court poet known as Nakatsukasa:40 たづのすむ汀の菊は白波のをれどつきせぬかげぞ見えける Tazu no sumu migiha no kiku ha shiranami no woredo tsukisenu kage zo miekeru Though white waves may break upon these chrysanthemums at the water’s edge where dwells the crane, surely we shall be able to gaze upon their everlasting forms.

What followed (as at the “Garden Contest”) were festive seasonal dances: judgment does not seem to have been rendered on these or other poems offered for this occasion (as also seems to have been the case in 966). And we can note some other analogous features: at this royal gathering, chrysanthemums and cranes embedded both on the suhama in physical dimensions and in figural counterpoint to them in the poems also embedded within these three-dimensional configurations have all been mustered as signs of loyal well-wishing for the sovereign’s long-lasting vitality. The poems concede that the suhama are temporal creations but insist that what they represent are concepts of far greater durability. Although Narisue does not share details of features of the suhama other than the placement of the flowers and the silver crane figures, we can tell from the poems that the suhama recreated scenes at a shoreline (migiwa), where a crane might pause. And, after all, the name suhama suggests a sandy beach, a curved inlet where land meets water, and, as we have seen in the Daijōe suhama records, a distinguishing feature of most documented or depicted suhama is, in fact, that scalloped rim, resembling the coastline of an “island.”41 Thus, the name of this thing, suhama, is derived from that which many of its examples represented rather than what the thing is or was—a miniature portable model of a place. In other words, it is the “subject matter” of some of these objects that gives the class of objects its name. But the elements of suhama design, and the scenes that they represented, are highly varied. There are examples of suhama that depicted mountains where bush warblers and cuckoos sang, or river banks with bonfires shedding light on figures fishing with cormorants (Teiji’in utaawase, Engi 13.3.13, 91342); there are suhama fashioned from aromatic s­andalwood

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19. Hagitani Boku’s diagram of seating for the Dairi utaawase of Tentoku 4.3.30 (960). The upper pair of black marks (simplified suhama shapes) show the locations of the suhama of the right and left; the lower corresponding pair are tally suhama (kazusashi) for each team. Female participants are seated in the ­galleries in the upper part of the diagram (a single row for the women of the left, a double row for the women of the right in a smaller chamber); male courtiers face each other in single rows in the central space. Musicians and scribes are arrayed in parallel rows in the lower section of the diagram. The entire space straddles the Seiryōden (above) and the Kōryōden (below) structures in the inner palace. Reproduced from Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:437.

c­ overed with fabric in which plum trees, willows, and birds were picked out in embroidery (Dairi utaawase, Tentoku 4.3.30, 96043); others made of silver with mirrors suggesting water, rocks carved from sandalwood, pines, irises, pinks, and seabird figures made of jade, gold, and silver (Kanpaku no Sadaijin Yorimichi no utaawase, Chōgen 8.5.16, 103544); and at many ­utaawase there was a secondary suhama presented for tallying the scores when judgments were made on the competing poems or objects such as flowers, shells, or other precious objects, and some of these score-pad



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­suhama, called kazusashi, also had ingenious designs with movable elements depicting rocks or trees that could serve as the tallies.45 The aquatic, marine, and littoral motifs that predominate in suhama design in general achieved a kind of apotheosis in an event held in Ise in 1040, when a “sea-shell matching utaawase” was organized for the entertainment of the Saigū, the High Priestess of the Ise Shrine (Yoshiko, the twelve-year-old daughter of the Emperor GoSuzaku).46 The poesy of Ise as a site (utamakura, meisho), in addition to its association with the shrine itself, has always privileged marine figures—perhaps most notably “Ise no ama,” fisher-folk of both sexes, divers, tenders of salt kilns, gatherers of shells, kelp, and other shoreline flora and fauna. These traditions materialized quite literally in the multiple suhama manufactured for this occasion, which, according to the nikki (firsthand account) provided by an unnamed female participant, featured representations of “famous places” and local practices in and around Ise itself (a playfully solipsistic inversion in a contest at that very locale) as well as replicas of other sacred and semi-sacred sites, beginning with the exotic Penglai/Hōrai: The suhama of the left team was presented in a pair of comb-cases [kushi no hako]. The top part of one of the cases was inlaid with silver, which represented the sea; there was also a miniature Mount Penglai and a boat with a young boy and girl on board. The bottom part of the case contained a miniature landscape of Nagahama Beach. . . . Poems were engraved on shells scattered hither and thither. The top part of the other case also depicted the sea in silver and a miniature landscape of the Bay of Futami and of Shirora Beach with a couple of boats with fishermen on board. . . . One of the suhama presented to us was a miniature landscape with a rough sea in the far distance, a calm sea in the middle, and near to a beach a number of figures gathering shells in their hands. Another suhama . . . was a table, the top of which was designed as a reed grove where a number of cranes were hovering. . . . Another was a landscape of Fujigata [“Wisteria Bay”] with wisteria in full blossom. . . . The right team prepared their suhama in the form of a large clamshell [hamaguri]. When it was opened one could see . . . a mica plate with painted waves indicating the open sea . . . as well as beaches such

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as Nagahama and Shirahama. . . . Another contained shells gathered from various beaches. It also contained figurines: some were casting fishing nets and some were rowing boats that were coming and going busily on the sea. . . . So many similar types of suhama were presented that day that detailed descriptions of them all would become tedious. One other exhibition should be mentioned, and that is a gigantic fan [kawahori no ōgi] made as a suhama. The central part of the fan was inlaid with shells that suggested the Bay of Futami.47

This scribe does not use the word fūryū in her account, but the occasion clearly marks one of the high points of elaborate and expensive configuration and presentation of suhama for the delight and diversion of an elite utaawase audience. The thirty-nine poems that survive in the record of this occasion are also tours de force: each one plays with the name of one or another of the aforementioned famous places in and around Ise or the names of types of shells found there (funagai, “boat clam”; nadeshikogai, “carnation clam”; sodegai, “sleeve-clam”; semigai, “cicada-clam,” etc.), or both. The result was an elaborate interweaving of objects on display in the suhama and of their names embedded in punning plays within the poems. The assemblage celebrates the place, Ise, itself, through the repetition and multiregister representation of the names of its constituent parts, a region of sacred worship and pilgrimage but with a focus on some of its most prized products, the seashells from its shores. Thus, even more so than in most utaawase settings, where the double function of suhama was to make topics and tropes physically and materially present while also impressing the observer through the display of artifice and craft, the Ise contest’s program for the display of and play with local treasures—the shells themselves—and with their names is a scheme that yields oscillating loci and foci for the production and reproduction of meaning, playfully and amusingly, no doubt, for the priestess and her retinue. And of course the scheme’s intricate and virtuosic effects depend on a recognition and command of the obvious (as is the case with all punning), as well as the capacity or willingness of all participants to enter into or learn, by participating in, the code of fūryū, or fetishism, or this particular “discourse of things.”48



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Likewise, when suhama come into play in exchanges as gifts between individuals rather than in the communal setting of the utaawase, their roles and functions still depend on and manipulate a code of signification that operates through a mutual reading and recognition, by both giver and receiver, of the multiple meanings built into both object and text. In a manner somewhat analogous to that which guided the design of the suhama for the 1040 Ise match (and others), these coded meanings are often conveyed through local products, topographical features, or ritual objects that are incorporated into the design of the suhama, just as their names (or other formulations that verbally point to their meaning within the context of the exchange) are built into the poem or poems that accompany them. A few examples of these person-to-person suhama-and-poem exchanges gathered from the greater corpus of waka (we have already seen one, from Murasaki Shikibu’s diary) further illustrate this additional, equally important dimension of their history—a dimension that by and large has received less scholarly attention than has their role in poetry contests, despite the fact that instances can be found in many readily accessible anthologies (senshū), personal collections (shikashū), diaries and journals (nikki), and elsewhere. At one point in her long life and court career, the distinguished poet known as Akazome Emon (957?–1041; she happens to be one of the persons to whom authorship of Eiga monogatari is attributed) was involved in some sort of relationship with a gentleman named Ōe no Tamemoto.49 When Tamemoto was appointed to a governorship in the province of Mikawa and was setting off from the capital to take up his post (ca. 985), she sent him a gift of a fan (ōgi ) as well as a suhama on which she inscribed this poem: をしむべきみかはと思へどしかすがの渡りと聞けばただならぬかな Woshimubeki mi ka ha to omoedomo Shikasuga no watari to kikeba tada naranu ka na Just how sorry to see you go should I be, I wonder— Ah, but when I think of you at Shikasuga Crossing I do feel moved.50

We can assume that the suhama depicted a watery scene at this Mikawa site (as shown, the province’s name—mi-ka-ha in Heian orthography—

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is ­embedded in a phrase that has yet other functions in the poem) called “Shikasuga no watari,” a ford at the mouth of the Yoshida River. Its name was already encoded: Nakatsukasa had used it in a screen-painting poem (byōbu uta: the program, executed during the reign of Murakami, worked with the names and places of a variety of “famous places,” kuniguni no tokoroko dokoro no na) in which she imagined herself in the persona of an anguished eastbound (and most likely male) traveler. Akazome Emon’s poem makes a deliberate gesture toward that earlier example while suggesting that she is not wholly indifferent to the loss of company that Tamemoto’s departure will mean for her.51 Subsequent exchanges with him reveal that at just this time he had become involved with another lover, so it was in fact rather convenient for him to get out of town for a while. In any case, it appears that Akazome Emon had no serious interest in an affair outside her marriage to the scholar-courtier Ōe Masahira, with whom she had had several children.52 In the poetic diary of the lady known as Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu, compiled in the first half of the thirteenth century from her memoirs of the previous several decades, we find an exchange that occurs when a gentleman who seems to have been interested in marrying her—but, to his frustration, was getting little encouragement from the lady—traveled with her father’s retinue to make offerings and worship at the Sumiyoshi Shrine.53 On his return he sent the lady a suhama decorated with shells gathered at that storied place as well as flowers of a type that, from a much earlier time in literary lore, had been closely associated with it—wasuregusa, “lilies of forgetting”—and on the petals of these flowers, in a thin blue ink that shared their color (hanada no usuyō), he had written: 浦みてもかひしなければ住の江におふてふ草をたづねてぞみる Uramitemo kahi shi nakereba Suminoe ni ohutehu kusa wo tazune zo miru

The poem contains overlapping puns that mirror the overlap between the representing object, the suhama, and its contents, and the place actually visited. Urami means both “I saw (mi) the inlet (ura) at Suminoe” (an alternative and traditional name for the site) and “I resent you” or “you resent me.” Kahi shi nakereba means “there were not even any shells” (­although there are shells at hand) and “it’s all to no avail” (this affair ­between the two, that is). Thus, the gentleman has said something like this:



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Though I saw the bay I got no shells, and bitterly resenting you does me no good, either; so I have gone looking for these lilies of forgetting which, they say, grow there at Sumi no e.

The lady’s reply made it clear that she was not particularly impressed by the gentleman’s elaborate efforts in either the poem or the suhama design; tossing his puns back at him, she said that while he may claim to have sought out flowers that would help ease the pain of her resistance to his suit, it is she who was nevertheless left to lament her woeful, neglected state (mi wo uraminuru), with nothing to be gained in this affair (ware zo kahi naki)—that is, she says she has “no shells” even though he has sent her these souvenirs, because in fact neither his gifts nor his other attentions are likely to sway her. Her poem, she tells us, was written in a light red momiji ink (momiji no usuyō) to match the season: 住の江の草をば人の心にて われぞかひなき身をうらみぬる Suminoe no kusa wo ba hito no kokoro nite ware zo kahi naki mi wo uraminuru You say your heart is now imbued with the color of the Suminoe flower, but it is I who am empty-handed, with no shells, and can only rue my state.

Without belaboring the point, it should be clear that nothing here would “work” poetically, or as a kind of coded discourse, without an understanding of what all the “things” put into play in this exchange stood for: that includes the suhama, of course, and its flowers and shells, as well as the poems, their referents, and even the semiotics of shades of ink. One additional poet from whose work we can cull presentations of a similar kind is Ōnakatomi Yoshinobu (921–91), who was active during that period of Murakami’s reign when suhama seem to have become so prominent in court-sponsored utaawase (and who, incidentally, was a Daijōe poet on three occasions54) but who also seems to have made fairly frequent “private” use of them as gifts. His collected works offer distinctive examples of both. When there was a certain someone whom he was sorry to see setting off for the remote northeastern provinces (Michinoku e makaru

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hito—the phrase is intentionally oblique), he sent a suhama with a model of Ukishima, “Floating Island”—one of the most poetically suggestive ­place-names among many that carried association of the exotic and remote in that region—and with it a poem proposing their mutual constancy: わたつうみの波にも濡れぬ浮島の松に心をかけてたのまむ watatsuumi no nami ni mo nurenu Ukishima no matsu ni kokoro wo kakete tanomamu Like that patient pine on Floating Island that keeps itself from being drenched by the waves of the sea in which it lies, let us rely upon one another to be true.55

The twist here is that Ukishima’s very name suggests inconstancy (to be uki means to be fickle, too), but Yoshinobu is both saying and showing (with the suhama) that his intentions at least are otherwise. On another occasion, during a contest at court comparing (and making playful compositional use of) sweet-flag roots (ayame or shōbu no neawase), as was customary on the fifth day of the fifth month (Ne no hi), Yoshinobu crafted a suhama featuring the figure of a crane (tsuru, tazu) with a flowering sweet-flag in its beak, and placed a figure of a fisherman inside another boat-shaped flower (or root), and then treated both items as the foci for the poems that were his additional contribution to the festivities: ちよよさすすみぎはのたづも年ごとに今日のあやめはかみにとぞ思ふ chiyo yosasu migiha no tazu mo toshigoto ni kefu no ayame ha kami ni to zo omohu The crane at the shoreline, who grants to us a millennium of life, today wears sweet-flags on its head just as we do year upon year. 釣りのをのの糸より長きあやめ草ねながら引きていざ比べみむ tsuri no wono no ito yori nagaki ayamegusa nenagara hikite iza kurabe mimu Here is a sweet-flag longer even than this old fisherman’s line: roots and all, let’s pull it up and compare it with the rest!56

It is true that this sweet-flag “root-pulling” ritual and the festive banqueting that followed (Ne no hi, Tango no sechi) occurred every year and al-



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ways called for poems playing with and celebrating its associations with “length” (of the roots themselves and of lifespans) and the like (kami, the celebrants’ hair, into which they wove the flowers and their stems, and kami, the deities who, it was hoped, would be beguiled by these behaviors and ensure lasting health and fortune for the “root-pullers”) as well as the flexible meaning of hiku, as “pull up” (out of the earth) as well as “extend” (the lifespan). This time, Yoshinobu tried to demonstrate ingenuity in his exercise of these tropes by bringing his suhama onto the scene: the poems he offered are no wittier than others of their kind, but perhaps the suhama demonstrated an unwavering commitment to doing one’s virtuosic best, within convention, in such a setting where a courtier-poet’s resources of all kinds were put on display. On one other dated occasion that also called for such display—in the sixth month of 980, when the court was celebrating the fiftieth day after the birth of a future crown prince and emperor (Ichijō)—Yoshinobu wrote this poem for inscription on a suhama to be presented as one among many auspicious gifts to the royal family: なみなごきうらにおひづる小松こそつぎつぎきみがちよはかぞへむ nami nagoki ura ni ohizuru komatsu koso tsugi tsugi kimi ga chiyo wa kazohen At this shoreline where waves break gently and young pines sprout, let us count each one and add them up as a life of myriad years for our young Lord.57

Here, as at Murakami’s “Moon-Viewing Banquet,” where a previous generation used the occasion, the setting, the things at hand, and the code of that which they represented to offer prayers for the sovereign’s well-being, Yoshinobu repeats the gesture, reinvokes the same code, and directs the magico-religious power of both words and objects (poem and suhama) toward an infant ruler-to-be. For that matter, the sentiment, purpose, and structure of those presentations is much the same as that of the Yamashinadera (Kōfukuji) kuyō for Murakami: in each case, the scalloped edge of the suhama “shoreline” and the three-dimensional space that it defines become sites for taking up an obligatory posture and for the deployment of oft-repeated figures. Each time, the reiteration of such sentiments and of

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20. Wedding scene, with suhama, in Banmin kokoro no kagami. Special Collection, East Asia Library, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

these forms of artful display is enhanced by the production, presence, and use of the suhama per se as the vehicle for the poem and articulation of its wish, its charm. It was surely in great part the fact that such things were said and done as often and as repeatedly as they were, albeit with slight variations, that made that articulation potent, or at least provided the basis of expecting it to be. It was repetition and redeployment of these materials over time that underwrote the investment of meaning in these acts and kept them coming.58 But where have all the suhama gone? They seem to have disappeared with so much else of the material culture of Japan’s classical past—into memory. Or almost. In a mid-nineteenth-century printed book, Banmin kokoro no kagami, or “Mirror Visions of the Hearts of the People,” we see what appears to be a private and rather somber wedding ceremony in an erstwhile samurai’s formal parlor and, near center stage, a suhama (or, in the usage of the time, a shimadai) with a miniature pine tree and the figures of an elderly couple sweeping and raking the shoreline, in an invocation of the ancient form of Penglai (Hōrai) models with similar some-



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what mystical semi-human forms (they are understood to be sweeping away misfortune and raking in prosperity).59 This image seems to point the way toward accounting for the process whereby the suhama eventually morphed from its early role in utaawase and other deployments in the Heian and Kamakura periods to this apparently domestic but still festive lateEdo setting, and eventually onward to the contemporary wedding salon.60 We also come across images of them—more readily recognizable, perhaps, than this one, with their distinctive scalloped shape—in paintings showing both indoor and outdoor amusements of early modern urban townsmen.

21. The presentation of suhama at the “Moon-Viewing Banquet” in the imperial palace, 966—the same episode in Eiga monogatari seen in figure 18—here as portrayed by Kano Seisen’in Osanobu in sketches for decorations in the women’s quarters of Edo Castle (specifically, the Jōdan no ma, Taimendokoro, Ōoku, Honmaru Goden), early nineteenthcentury hand-scroll, ink and color on paper. Courtesy of Tokyo National Museum; reproduction provided by TNM Image Archives. See also Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, Edojō shōhekiga no shitae, 1:11.

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In these ­images, there is no apparent sign of the presence of poem texts or the intention of making them a part of the festivities; it is the suhama alone, it seems, that now stands for the elegance, accomplishment, and extravagance once associated with court culture (see fig. 5). But as the attention given to the suhama in the woodblock illustrations of the Eiga monogatari “Garden Contest” episode also suggested, the earlier place of the suhama in royal court culture was not entirely forgotten nor invisible in early modern Japan. There is such meaning, I think, in the fact that when the shogunal court painter Kanō Seisen’in Osanobu (1756– 1846) was commissioned to create a program of paintings to decorate the women’s quarters of Edo Castle, he planned to include—and completed a detailed sketch that survives in hand-scroll form (in the Tokyo National Museum)—his own version of the self-same Eiga monogatari scene, rendering both the figures of the utaawase participants, the gathering site, and the two festive suhama in a visual idiom quite different from that of the woodblock version. If, as intended, this image had been executed as a painting (shōhekiga) on a wall inside the shōgun’s dwelling (later, in Meiji and beyond, the royal palace), it would surely have been eye-catching, and it would have vividly conveyed to its viewers—the shōgun’s consorts and concubines and their daughters (and later, the women and other denizens of the “modern” court)—at least a hint toward the story of suhama and its role as one of the telling features of the by then increasingly remote traditions of classical waka culture and its modes of rendering and representing place and space and their embodiment in this unique thing. And perhaps it did just that, even, or especially, in the twilight years of what would soon become a Japan of the past.

F OUR

“Eight Views of Ōmi” Waka and the Translation of Place

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his is a(nother) story of the making and remaking of things through translation in several of its forms and manifestations, and with waka and pictorial images working together as a medium. The things in question are familiar to many who observe, study, or collect the artifacts of or in Japanese culture, but the example I situate at the forefront of the story is a scroll in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It is a version of the oft-made and oft-remade “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei ), a program of poems and paintings, a topic and topos with a trajectory that takes off relatively late in the time-span of “premodern Japan”—that is, in the late sixteenth century—but that has much earlier roots and precedents and that continues into early modern and modern times, morphing into many related iterations, imitations, parodies, and more.1 As with the stories of Daijōe waka and of suhama, this one has much to do with notions and celebrations and representations of specific places (and their names); also—and here is another resonance with a good part of Daijōe poesy—it happens to focus (in this case, exclusively) on a set of places (and their names and features) in the province of Ōmi. It also entails an account of precedents, practices, and tropes not only in earlier Japanese poetry and painting but, very much so, in Chinese traditions as well (which, as we have seen, is also true of aspects of the Daijōe and of the

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22. The Beinecke “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll, scene 4: “Evening Bell at Miidera.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

earliest forms of suhama). So a reading of the Beinecke scroll or just about any other version of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” might well be described with the figure of the palimpsest if, indeed, one could literally scrape the surface away to reveal what lies beneath (something we do not generally do to fragile works of art—and this one is actually quite fragile). But in this scroll, as in other renderings of the program, there is only one physical layer of painting and text to be seen, and much more of its story also lies at or close to the surface: it need not necessarily be excavated or teased out or revealed through some kind of exegetical infrared exposure, but with a little effort and assistance it can show and speak for itself to the attentive viewer or reader. (Please see appendix 4 for a full transcription, transliteration, and translation of the eight topic tags [dai, each made up of four Chinese characters] and eight poems as they appear in the Beinecke scroll—and in many other replications of the “Eight Views” set.)2 The eight sites named in these topics and elaborated on in the poems are all “poetic places” of note (meisho) in Ōmi, and were well established as such in waka practice by the time that these poems came into being, sometime late in the sixteenth century, although just four, or half, of them—Awazu, Seta, Hirayama, and Karasaki—appear in the extant corpus of Daijōe waka, where we find so many Ōmi place-names in use, often



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repeatedly (for reasons discussed in chapter 2 above). But the Beinecke scroll shares another perhaps more significant characteristic with Daijōe song and poem suites and screen paintings, and with suhama as well: it is a group production, made by several consulting and cooperative minds and hands. And in this instance we know all their names. The painter was Yamamoto Soken, a professional artist of the Kanō school active in Kyoto at the turn of the eighteenth century. The calligraphers who copied what were by this time well established as the “standard” “Eight Views of Ōmi” poems—one for each of eight sites in the southwestern part of the province, in and around the shores of Lake Biwa—onto the eight joined sections of the scroll on which Soken painted his depictions of those sites (and those poems) are named with their official court titles on the last section of the scroll, where they identify themselves collectively as a kugeshū, “a band of royal courtiers.” The term distinguishes them from bukeshū, members of the shōgun’s military (or quasi-military) court, which at this time was in Edo, and confirms their identity as hereditary members of the highestranking noble families. Those titles, in turn, allow us to come close to pinpointing the date of this joint project to the years 1691–93, which places this particular exercise in literary art (re-)production in the midst of the Genroku era (technically, 1688–1703), a high-water moment for cultural productions in many media, especially in the visual and performing arts, and a vibrant era in literary history as well.3 And it just so happens that another work by the same artist, Soken, in another Yale University collection (the Yale University Art Gallery)—a pair of screen paintings, “Fujiwara Teika’s Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months”—can be dated to the same period. What’s more, three of the twelve calligraphers who joined in the (re-)production of that work also were involved in the “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll project. This suggests that both works come out of a circle of like-minded men who engaged together more than once (if in somewhat different groupings) and at least on two occasions with Soken as a professional hired hand (he was an official court painter and eventually held the title hokkyō, a quasi-ecclesiastical designation for the most accomplished artists employed by the court and its affiliated houses) in the making of fine visual and textual artifacts, bringing contemporary taste and style to the rendering of subject matters that already had long histories but that had special appeal to those wishing to

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revisit and replicate them. Along with the virtuosic and often ostentatious flauntings of extravagance and high-fashionability that are frequently associated with Genroku arts, this particular brand of what might be called “classicism” in the arts is another hallmark of the time: the retrospective, revivalist posture of these two Soken works vis-à-vis the past marks them as particularly good examples of this somewhat less flashy but equally vibrant and productive aspect of that culturally (and sociopolitically) fertile era.4 In discussing this scroll and its content, I have already repeatedly used words that relate to repetition: remaking, (re-)production, and, just now, retrospective and revivalist to designate a posture that turns back in time to progenitors, precedents, roots, and subsequent growths and off-shoots. Soken and his kugeshū patrons and partners were not unique in their time in their interest in making and remaking a version of “Eight Views of Ōmi” (or, for that matter, “Teika’s Flowers and Birds”5) and similar works: one obvious comparison is to a slightly earlier scroll in the Freer Sackler museums in Washington, D.C., by Soken’s own teacher, Kanō Tan’yū, which is none too surprisingly quite similar both formally and stylistically.6 One difference, however, is that the calligraphers in the Freer Sackler “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll are not named (or do not name themselves), so, even if it was also a kind of “coterie” production, as I envision the Beinecke scroll to have been, we have no way of knowing whether there were any overlapping members of the two coproducing groups. But I hasten to suggest that the apparent frequency of productions of versions of the same subjects in the same period and within the same artistic circles, in this case as in so many others, in Japan and elsewhere, and not only in the visual arts but in such cultural fields as that of waka, among others, is one factor that enhances rather than dilutes the significance of each such reproduction, just as in such fields as religious art and iconography, much as in ritual practices, and in many genres of performance, of course. The traditions of grand opera come to mind: every new production, every performance of a classic or a more recent or contemporary piece in one way or another builds on or works against memories of earlier stagings starting with the debut performance: aficionados hold this in memory and see and hear the performance through this veil, artists perform with this sense of history, try not to be overcome by it, and may attempt to surpass or resist or differentiate themselves from it. And in the case of any given



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reproduction of something like the “Eight Views of Ōmi,” the repeating act entails (one might say behind the scenes, but not wholly invisibly or inaudibly) a recapitulation or reenactment of the process that built meaning into the topos in the first place.7 It is this process, or the building of this structure of meaning, that I want to identify and trace as a process of translation, but with that term I also want to signal other aspects of alteration, transfer, movement, redefinition, or what we often describe as a “mapping” of one thing or set of things or ideas or “stories” onto another or others. The already familiar story of translation in the case of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” is a story of the mapping of a particular set of Chinese images, tropes, and, quite literally, places— that is, the somewhat less fixedly delineated “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang” region (Shōshō hakkei, 瀟湘八景)—onto and into the Japanese setting, and that aspect of this process remains central to the version of the story I retell here. But there are other strata, other transformations and “mappings onto” one thing from another that are also part of this story, part of this build-up of layers of meaning into each instance of encounter with the “Eight Views” (of Ōmi and elsewhere). And, as I argue, the result is indeed a new map of meaning (and map for reading), but it is a map not simply of a set of places in a place called Ōmi but rather of another place that is Ōmi-and-not-Ōmi, a place neither precisely here nor there nor this nor that . . . but something somewhere else. Yes, we can certainly say that these eight places in Ōmi—not selected at random for this program, not accidentally tagged with the descriptors that also define the content and the image-vocabulary of the eight poems about them that we see traveling with them through time, from the late sixteenth century onward—are known, named places in the province (kuni ) of Ōmi. And yet it is in the nature and a result of the building and redefining, layering process (as I trace it here) that we, as observers and readers, find ourselves asking, “Just where are we? Is this a ‘real’ Ōmi or one that exists in the imagination, or somewhere in between, or both?” I want to suggest that, as a result of the layering of meanings that we see and read in this program, whether reproduced as poems and paintings together, or as images or poems alone, we are never quite sure: we waiver and oscillate, just as we do, for example, throughout a vast work of literary fiction such as The Tale of Genji. Once the narrator, in the very first words of the text,

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has said, “Now, in just which reign was it . . .” that the following events about which she wishes to tell (at great length) happened—and then, of course, never answers the question—we find ourselves, as readers, peering into and for a long spell drawn into and absorbed (much as in a dream) in a space in narrative time both nameable and unnameable, an era that can be vaguely identified yet one that never can be pinned down, though we are continuously tempted to do so throughout the ensuing tale by mirages of the quasi-historical, the dropping of what seem to be hints that never add up—nor are they meant to do so. I see the space created as “The Eight Views of Ōmi” as a similarly wavering, indeterminate space, temporally and also physically despite its seeming geographic, topographic, and nominal specificity. It is formed, then altered, then re-formed, as I have suggested, through many kinds of “translation,” and that is what I attempt to map out here. This “geographic, topographic, and nominal specificity” of the Ōmi “Eight Views” program is more than illusory, and it does establish a grid or superstructure based in “the real” upon which exercises of the poetic and visual imagination can then ensue. Ōmi is, of course, a “real” place, and part of my argument here is that its own particular histories (literary and otherwise) have much to do with the layering process that shapes this program. Likewise, the eight specific places named in the program can be located on maps and found in real space, tracing a curve along the southern and eastern shores of Lake Biwa in what is now Shiga Prefecture. But it is far more likely that Soken and the eight calligraphers who carried out this project (whatever its impetus or purpose may have been— something we cannot know8) were themselves working with a vision of an Ōmi of the mind, shaped by knowledge gained by seeing other reproductions of the poems and other pictorial representations of the sites they take as their topics. When we make our way back to the moment of the Ōmi “Eight Views” poem-and-picture program’s initial configuration and execution (or as close to it as we are likely to get), however, we find ourselves in the company of a poet and artist in Ōmi itself, at Enman’in (円満院), a subtemple of Onjōji (園城寺, also known as Miidera [三井寺], and in fact one of the eight named sites), or perhaps at another location nearby with none other than the distinguished calligrapher Konoe Nobutada (近衛信尹, 1565–1614).9 And we also see that Nobutada was not inventing



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23. The seventeenth-century “Ōmi no kuni ezu” (Map of Ōmi Province). 121 x 130 cm. South is at the top of this map, and the Seta Bridge is visible in the ­upper right quadrant. Map Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

this topic/topos de novo; he too was operating within a matrix of received templates, known or at least potentially known precedents and practices, and a clear awareness of just where he was—that is, what it meant, poetically and culturally, to be in Ōmi, near the shores of that storied lake, ­surrounded by sites long sung of in waka and other media. It does seem

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24. Schematic map showing locations of “Eight Views of Ōmi” sites. Drawn by Sydney Shea.

clear he was most likely the first “Eight Views of Ōmi” translator, that is, the first to map the “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” onto Ōmi scenes and spaces (and place-names). The eight calligraphers of the Beinecke scroll, and Soken, on the other hand, were just one of many groups among others, and other solo artists, who “translated” the program according to their own visions, in their own times.10 So just who were they? We can see the list of their names on that final segment of the scroll, apparently written there not by each one of them but by a single hand (see fig. 25).11 The four-character standard topic tags for each of the eight poems appear above each of their names, in one of the most commonly seen (but not the only) order for the eight poems and scenes of the program, and from right to left. Here is a vertically rearranged list: The Regent and Former Minister of the Left, Lord Motohiro The Cloistered Prince of the Second Rank Sonshō



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25. Topic and signature page in the Beinecke “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The General of the Left, Lord Sukezane The Acting Major Counselor, Lord Sanenari The Minister of the Right, Lord Iehiro The Major Counselor, Lord Tsunahira The Former Regent and Current Minister of the Right, Lord Fuyutsune The Minister of the Left, Lord Kanehiro The full names of these men, with their surnames (if they had one; members of the royal family did not) are (in the same order): Konoe Motohiro, Prince Sonshō, Kujō Sukezane, Shimizudani Sanenari, Konoe Iehiro, Nijō Tsunahira, Ichijō Fuyutsune (also known as Kaneteru), and Taka­tsu­ kasa Kanehiro. They were the crème de la crème of Kyoto court society at the time (the reigning emperor was Higashiyama). Motohiro (Nobutada’s grandson), the leadoff calligrapher at the opening of the scroll, was regent at the time, but five of the others (Sukezane, Motohiro’s son Iehiro, ­Tsunahira, Fuyutsune/Kaneteru, and Kanehiro) would eventually serve as either Kanpaku (regent) or Sesshō (chancellor), the highest posts that courtiers could attain. Those who at the time of this inscription or had formerly held the office of minister (Daijin) are denoted with the ­honorific

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suffix -kō; those who have yet to serve in that high a post are denoted with the honorific kyō. Tsunahira and Sukezane were half-brothers; they were both sons (by different mothers) of Kujō Kaneharu, but Tsunahira was adopted by Nijō Mitsuhira, a cousin. Sonshō, one of the sons of the late Emperor GoMizuno’o, was a truly distinguished calligrapher; like many such royal scions, he eventually served as abbot of Enryakuji, the headquarters of the Tendai school (Tendai zasu). The reputation of Sanenari, on the other hand, rests on his accomplishments as scholar and poet: he descended on his mother’s side from the Sanjōnishi family, which claimed a distinguished heritage in literary accomplishments, and was adopted into the equally high-ranking Shimizudani line at the age of twenty-five. These affiliations and links among these men, along with the fact that three of them (Kanehiro, Sukezane, and Sanenari) also participated in the Soken “Teika’s Flowers and Birds” project, make it clear these were coterie activities, likely engaged in not simply for the amusement of the group but to commemorate some occasion, to produce something elegant and fine for someone else of similar stature in their world, something quite precious for having been executed by men of such distinguished birth and fine pedigree and with material—the “Eight Views of Ōmi” topos—that also had a pedigree, a rich history, and a favored status. Two members of the group—Motohiro and Kaneteru—kept diaries that have survived.12 I wish I could say that one or another of them gives us details of this particular project, but neither of them do (and neither makes any mention of Soken). Perhaps this is not all that surprising. Although the scroll seems precious to us today, and may also have been so in the 1690s, it was perhaps just one of many such projects and activities that occupied these courtiers’ time. It may indeed be a fine thing, but to these men it may have been something close to ordinary—“all in a day’s work,” such as it was, amid their none too onerous (if time-consuming) palace duties and their social and family interactions—even if the occasion for its creation and presentation were special or auspicious. Where “poems of the Eight Views” (hakkei waka) are mentioned in these diaries—and they are mentioned a few times in both, in entries that date from 1660 (in Moto­ hiro’s) and 1690 (twice in the sixth month of that year in Kaneteru’s)—it is unclear if the reference is to waka on the subject of the Xiao and Xiang or the Ōmi sets. (We do know that by this time Shōshō hakkei had also



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become a waka topic alongside its prominence in kanshi composition.13) In each case, however, these poems are being sent from one courtier to another as congratulatory messages along with other gifts.14 Another early to mid-eighteenth-century document, Kaiki—more a miscellaneous memoir than a journal, assembled by Iehiro’s personal physician, Yamashina Dōan (山科道安) as a record of his patient’s notable activities and utterances—contains one tantalizing entry for the twenty-fourth day of the second month of Kyōhō 16 (1731). Iehiro had received a request from the then Minister of the Right, Ichijō Kaneyoshi, for some calligraphy in his hand, and when pressed in person by the minister, Iehiro took out a sheaf of papers and wrote out on three separate pages the titles of three items he would copy: “The Poems Written for the Celebration of the Eightieth Birthday of Lord Shunzei” (Shunzei kyō hachijū no ga), “Eight Views of Ōmi” (our Ōmi hakkei), and “Eight Views of the West Lake” (Saikō hakkei, 西湖八景), another (originally Chinese) topos closely related to the Xiao and Xiang configuration but focused exclusively on features in and around the scenic and storied West Lake in Hangzhou. This seems to have led to further discussion about the merits of the West Lake versus the Xiao and Xiang topics and the general “popularity” and fashionability (ryūkō) of “Eight Views” (hakkei) programs, but no further mention is made specifically of the Ōmi variant.15 If nothing else, these tidbits of data remind us that the “Eight Views of Ōmi” phenomenon was part of a larger one—a proliferation in Japan from the late sixteenth century onward of “Eight Views” variants on a template form that poets and artists found attractive and amenable, and that had not only gained currency but was most likely in demand with those who might receive or acquire their works, perhaps particularly because it inherently involved or suggested a certain kind of intercultural dynamic: renderings of Xiao and Xiang or the West Lake, in poems (in Chinese or Japanese) or pictures (in any contemporary style), brought a “China of the mind” into settings for consumption and appreciation in Japan; renderings of “Eight Views of Ōmi” in any format or period would never shed but rather, through their quasi-Chinese topic tags and their image content, would always display themselves as mirror-images or clones of their d ­ oppelgangers on the continent, for that was in great part their raison d’être (or something like it).

26. “Eight Views of Ōmi” panels with poems and paintings by Konoe Nobutada, circa 1590–1600. Originally installed at Enman’in but the present whereabouts are unknown. Photograph courtesy of Ōtsu-shi Rekishi Hakubutsukan.



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And that is perhaps one good way to imagine (since we cannot do otherwise) what was transpiring when Konoe Nobutada devised an “Eight Views of Ōmi” program for the decoration of a screen or perhaps a pair of sliding-door paintings that were originally made for an interior space in the Enman’in monastery within the Onjōji (Miidera) complex, not far from the shores of the lake and thus not far from the scenes depicted in the program, of which “Miidera” is, of course, one.16 It was this program, this formulation of the topics, these poems, and the iconography of the paintings on this screen that subsequently (though we do not know exactly how) became the template for this variant of the larger template—and it is possible that this rendering was modeled on others, though they cannot be identified per se. We also do not know when this occurred nor what Nobutada’s affiliation with the Enman’in may have been; no mention is made of such matters in any of the extant portions of Nobutada’s diary, Sanmyaku’in ki.17 What comes closest is a passage in the essay collection (zuihitsu) Kanden kōhitsu (published ca. 1805) by the scholar Ban Kōkei in which he writes of having seen an Ōmi hakkei scroll, authenticated as Nobutada’s work, as well as a colophon in the scroll, also in Nobutada’s hand, attesting to last-minute changes he made in his configuration of his eight Ōmi sites. The results were Nobutada’s use of Ishiyama in place of another mountain place-name, “Mikamiyama,” because the Emperor GoYōzei, who was also composing an Ōmi hakkei sequence on the same occasion, wanted to write (or copy) a poem about “the moon of Mikamiyama.” Kōkei also reports Nobutada’s transfer of the figure of the “evening bells” from Ishiyama to Miidera and the assignment of “descending geese” to Katada.18 This now widely noted citation does not confirm that Nobutada was the original or the sole creator of what came to be the “standard” set of “Eight Views of Ōmi” topics or the poems about them, but it does confirm his active engagement on more than one occasion with the configuration and replication of the program—and that on this occasion, an artistically active sovereign, GoYōzei (who ruled 1586–1611, and whose consort, Sakiko, was Nobutada’s sister), was also working with the same materials, and perhaps other members of his court were doing so as well.19 Again, neither the episode nor the colophon are dated by Kōkei, nor can we learn anything about what prompted the occasion. We are left to assume that it was a gathering for the mutual enjoyment of and productive engagement in an

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au ­courant literary and visual exercise, focused on one of the favored topics of the day.20 For a number of reasons, there are many scholars who have explained the circa 1600 (and later) florescence of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” topos and who have read the program as configured by Nobutada as an elaboration of themes of exile. The model Xiao and Xiang “Eight Views” configuration, Chinese renderings of which were highly prized and which, as I discuss hereafter, had been long since adopted and “naturalized” as a topos in domestic Japanese arts, certainly can be understood to invoke such themes and associations.21 The mythology and the literary heritage of the site are replete with exile narratives: among them, the legends of “the daughters of Yao,” who were believed to have dwelt, died in, and haunted the vicinity, as related in the Shanhai jing [Japanese Sengaikyō]; the heroic exile-poet Qu Yuan, who also dwelt and died there (in the third and second centuries B.C.E), as did the poet-essayist Liu Zhongyuan (773–819); and the poet Du Fu, who was celebrated in later times for having sought refuge there during the Anlushan Rebellion (in 755).22 Many courtiers and Ashikaga bakufu officials likewise sought refuge from upheaval, and especially the destruction of much of the capital city, Kyoto, in the relative safety and calm of Ōmi during the Ōnin Wars in the 1470s.23 Nobutada himself was exiled (for behavior that gravely displeased the shōgun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, as well as GoYōzei) from 1594 to 1596 in southern Kyūshū. Against this background, some readers have seen figural details in many of the large number of Xiao and Xiang poems (in the Chinese and the domestic tradition) and in the standard Ōmi set as encoded emblems of exile per se (the geese returning from the north in autumn, like homecoming exiles, in the Katada poem) or of war’s destruction (at least one interpreter sees the sunset glow on the Seta Bridge as a reminder of its burning by Oda Nobunaga’s assassin, Akechi Mitsuhide, in 1582).24 Furthermore, there is also more than enough of a prompt in the Ishiyama poem, the last in most versions of the Ōmi sequence, as it is in the Soken scroll, for the reader to have reason to recall the episode of exile (to Suma and Akashi) in The Tale of Genji—an episode that is itself rife with reference to yet other exile legends and narratives, both fictional and historical, Chinese and Japanese (and their blends). Such readings are plausible enough if one accepts such circumstantial arguments, but interpretations of this kind should not be taken (at least not



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alone) as full or verifiable explanations of the coming-into-being of poems of this (or most any other) kind. I identified the mirroring, disorienting, and reorienting (or remapping) work or effect of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” above as a raison d’être, which is likewise risky, but I did so in large part because the story of its coming-into-being conforms to an oft-repeated pattern of such transplantation from “China” to “Japan” through translation (in its broadest sense), whereby all manner of phenomena (texts and their tropes; principles of urban design; architectural, sculptural, and painting styles; and the like) are “naturalized” or domesticated so that they retain certain of their continental (Chinese) structural features or characteristics while taking and retaining thereafter their altered shape at home in the Japanese setting.25 The Ōmi hakkei phenomenon and each of its iterations inherently demand to be seen in such light, and have almost always been seen that way. But to avoid generalization that can lead too easily to essentialization of this pattern, as if it were something inherent and persistent in the Japanese cultural genome (there is no such thing), a better approach is to document the history of the thing itself (that is, the “Eight Views of Ōmi” phenomenon). The aim is not to trace a genealogy or teleology evolving inevitably toward Nobutada’s moment at Enman’in or Soken’s moment with his eight kugeshū patrons and beyond, but rather to lay out what would seem to be the relevant and resonant pieces of this story of making and remaking, translation and retranslation, so that these key moments emerge in relief against this longer ongoing story, the whole of which cannot possibly be told because there are too many gaps that cannot be filled, too many connections that we ought not attempt to make without better documentation. Still, by telling this story in this episodic way, I hope to show how what I have called the build-up and layering of meanings in this program can be at least partially parsed. Once again, this is a story that involves the work of many contributing hands and minds, with no single individual making an isolated transformative move or intervention—not even Nobutada, the individual who seems to be at the fulcrum of the process. Rather, like most practitioners of waka (for example), his moment or moments of engagement with the “Eight Views of Ōmi” were stages in an unfolding continuum of acts and events in all of which either poem texts or paintings or both were consistently the media through which these engagements

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took ­material form, as they did again in the last decade of the seventeenth century when those eight kuge and Soken came together to make a scroll (that now happens to make its home in a library vault in New Haven, Connecticut). The arc of this continuum initiates, of course, in China. We have already seen what some of the Xiao-Xiang region’s mythological, legendary, literary, and historical associations were. All accounts trace the moment at which these came together and gelled as an “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang” subject (with variations) in painting to the Northern Song period (960–1127) and specifically to the “amateur” artist (and official) Song Di (宋迪, 1015–86).26 His contemporary Shen Gua (沈括) praised Song Di in a passage in his memoir, Mengxi bitan (夢溪筆談), that provides the basis for attributing the configuration of its themes and figures to him. This text is widely cited, but reproducing it again here helps us see how the program’s eight template topics came to be fixed as they are: 度支員外朗宋迪工 尤善為平遠山水 其得意者有 平沙雁落 遠浦帆歸 山市晴嵐 江天暮雪 洞庭秋月 瀟湘夜雨 煙寺晩鐘 漁村落照 謂之八景 好事者多傳之

Assistant Secretary Song Di was a competent painter. He was especially good at level-distance landscapes. The ones that are truly masterful, are Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar Sail Returns from Distant Shore Mountain Market Clearing Mist River and Sky in Evening Snow Autumn Moon over Dongting27 Night Rain on Xiao-Xiang Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple Fishing Village in Evening Glow He calls them Eight Views. Connoisseurs are talking about them.28

Song-period texts of this kind flowed into Japan along with the establishment and growth, under shōgunal and aristocratic patronage, of the Zen schools of Buddhism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But many of the texts—especially poems—that had long since enriched and energized



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the imagery, figures, place-names, and ambiences that Song Di painted, as described by Shen Gua, had been in Japan since much earlier times: prominent among these were the works of the aforementioned Tang poet Du Fu (712–70), which had been studied, admired, and imitated in Japan since early in the Heian period.29 Song-period paintings and painting styles also gained admirers as the Zen schools prospered, especially in Kyoto and Kamakura but in many other parts of Japan as well, as did trade with the continent (particularly through ports in Kyūshū). Records of paintings displayed by the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1437 on the occasion of a visit by the Emperor Gohanazono to his residence include “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” sets by four thirteenth-century Chinese painters. These were inherited and preserved by later bakufu rulers in the prized “Higashiyama Collection” (Higashiyama gyobutsu, named in reference to the location of

27. Kanō Motonobu, “Eight Views of the Xiao-Xiang Region” (Shōshō hakkei). First half of the sixteenth century. Yale University Art Gallery; Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund. The attribution to Motonobu is tentative, but the painting may be the earliest to show all eight Xiao-Xiang sites in a single composition.

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the Ashikaga mansions) but were eventually dispersed; today, fragments of the complete “Xiao and Xiang” sets by two of the painters, Mu Qi and Yujian, remain in Japanese museum collections.30 The importation of these Chinese works of art on this rich, evocative, and pedigreed theme soon led Japanese artists working in the Song-­influenced ink painting style to create their own versions of it, or variants of it. Examples by the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters Tōshun, Sesson, and Sōami are among the best known, and there are also many extant examples from Kanō school painters. (See fig. 27 for an example attributed to Kanō Motonobu [1476?-1559], now in the Yale University Art Gallery.)31 Simultaneously, and often in tandem with painting production or in admiration of it, poet-monks affiliated with the Gozan (“Five Mountains”) Zen monasteries (and others) likewise composed numerous kanshi (Chinese-form poems) on the same topic or in reference to it.32 One such monk, Ōsen Keisan of the Shōkokuji monastery in Kyoto (where he spent his entire life starting at the age of four, eventually rising to the post of abbot and provost of the subtemple33), was among the many city dwellers who fled to Ōmi during the Ōnin conflict. This was in the eighth month of Ōnin 1 (1467), and Ōsen hoped to take refuge in a minor temple in the home village of his colleague and companion Tōgen Zuisen (桃源瑞仙). Against the advice of members of their party, Ōsen and Tōgen insisted on traveling across Lake Biwa from Sakamoto on the southwestern shore to reach their destination. Just as their companions had feared, they were overtaken by pirates, who robbed them of all their possessions and then put them ashore again near Katada. There, as Ōsen recorded in his kanshi journal (Shōho tōyū shū), as they gazed up toward the “immeasurably vast” slopes of Hira on one side and to Mount Hiei with its “three-thousand sanctuaries” on the other, all memory of their tribulations were quickly erased. But what memory did supply was a way of interpreting the sights before their eyes: 既而夕陽西下、 人影在地、 雁陣落而沙平、 魚市散而風腥、

The evening glow shone to the west, our shadows were cast upon the ground; a flock of geese descended to the bank of sand; fishmongers’ stalls closed in the village ­market, winds abated;



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疎鐘之出遠寺、 長笛之起漁村也、 雖瀟湘八境、 不能過焉、

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distant bells were heard from a far-off temple; songs from flutes echoed from fishing hamlets: we all speak in praise of the eight precincts of Xiao and Xiang, but they can scarcely match these.34

Ōsen may not have been the first writer to match the two locales and “read” the Ōmi sites through the filter of Xiao and Xiang, but this is one of the earliest surviving texts in which we see this articulated. Meanwhile, in other cultural practices, admiration for Ōmi landscapes and panoramas was articulated in several distinctive ways. For example, when the imayō song collection Ryōjin hishō was assembled by (or under the auspices of) Cloistered Emperor GoShirakawa in the late twelfth century, two of its consecutive entries, which look (and would sound) like compact mnemonic lists that might serve as aids to memorization of such “factoids,” naming “the most charming utamakura of Ōmi” (Ōmi ni wokashiki utamakura) and querying “what have we got out there to the east of here?” (kore yori hingashi to nani to ka ya, that is, east of the capital), included, among other things, “storm winds on Mii’s slopes [Mii no oroshi, 三井の颪], Awazu, Ishiyama . . . [and] the Seta Bridge.”35 Mnemonics and catalogs of this kind may have been a resource for the anonymous late medieval or early modern composer of a short yōkyoku (or kusemai) libretto for live musical performance entitled, simply, Ōmi hakkei (undated but long in the performance repertoire); almost eerily, it reads like an elaboration of Ōsen’s paean to the sights he could take in from his spot on the shores of the lake, and shares its tones of awe: [sashi: overture] Visible in the distance is the Hira Peak. The winds that rustle the young pines there in Komatsugahara: they immediately call to mind those gales that cleared the skies of the mountain market-town. On the shoals in Mano Cove, not sand, no— none other than evening now in the river and sky. A true pleasure; to gaze on it clears all anguish from the heart.

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[kuse: development] The fishing boats on the waters off Katada, bound swiftly on their homeward way, so like the sails of craft returning from distant shores, and the lingering clouds at which I gaze are vestiges of those night-time rains. [ageuta: presto] And now, in the tolling of bells on Mount Hiei, I hear echoes of the evening bells of a faraway temple; The gulls that come to rest on the banks at Karasaki are kin to the geese descending to those sand bars, and the moon over Dongting’s waters is reflected here on Kagamiyama, “Mirror Mountain.” Now who might this be: the angler who casts a line in the dusk glimmer in the fishing village? Just who is he?36

This short performance text, which suggests a dancer slowly and gracefully turning to act out the shifting of his (or her) gaze toward each imagined and named site, also enacts the act of translation itself, articulating in word and physical movement the process of mapping the Xiao and Xiang formulations onto those in Ōmi, or rather, enacting the state of confusion and wonder as this process unfolds, as if (though clearly not) for the first time in the perception of the beholder. You will notice, however, that there is not a perfect match in this kusemai’s set of eight Ōmi sites and those of Nobutada and, later, the kugeshū and Soken version, and most others: Komatsugahara, Mano, Hiei, Kagamiyama, and other scenes have claimed the roles of Awazu, Seta, Mii, Yabase, and Ishiyama. This probably reflects a configuration still in the gelling stages: the Xiao and Xiang model is likewise fluid and never becomes as fixed as did the Ōmi set after Nobutada’s time.37 One telling moment early on in that process takes us back to a transitional stage of waka history, to the early Kamakura period, when the descendants of Shunzei and Teika were striving to consolidate their central role as inheritors of their authority. In the twelfth month of 1249, Fujiwara no Tameie (1198–1275)—Teika’s son and direct poetic heir—was one of sev-



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Table 4.1 “Eight Views” Sites in Tameie’s Program for Shigenari’s 70th Birthday (1249) (Ōmi sites in common with the later “Eight Views” configuration are in bold capital letters)

春 Spring

夏 Summer

秋 Autumn

冬 Winter

打出浜 氷解 UCHIDE SHORE: melting ice

唐崎 当社祭 KARASAKI: the Summer Festivala

真野入江 秋風 Mano Cove: autumn wind

方田浦 千鳥 KATADA BAY: plovers _______________

粟津野 若菜 AWAZU FIELDS: harvesting shoots

勝野腹 夏草 Kachino Plain: summer grasses

八洲河 霧 Yasukawa: fog

長柄山 霞 Mount Nagara: mist

勢多橋 納涼 SETA BRIDGE: cooling comfort

三津浜 擣衣 Mitsu Shore:b fulling silk robes

_______________ 志賀花園 花 Shiga Gardens: cherry blossoms

a. This festival, in which portable shrines were borne over the lake from Karasaki to Hie, is discussed further below. b. Mitsu Shore (Mitsu no hama) is also featured in another poem discussed below.

eral high-ranking contributors (his title at the time was Dainagon, “Major Counselor”) who participated in the planning, design, and presentation of a byōbu depicting “famous places in Ōmi along the [Biwa] Lakeshore in the four seasons” as a seventieth birthday gift for a distant relative, Hōribe Narishige, an officiating priest (negi) of the Hie (Hiyoshi) Shrine.38 Given the location of the Hie sanctuary (known today as Hie or Hiyoshi Taisha; hereafter “Hie Shrine”), on the western slopes of Mount Hiei in the Sakamoto district and thus a short distance from the lake, the choice of Ōmi

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meisho and their arrangement into a seasonal series of paintings and poems could hardly have been more resonant. As shown in table 4.1, only four of the sites that would be incorporated in the “Eight Views of Ōmi” in Nobutada’s and most later configurations were among these meisho—Awazu, Karasaki, Seta, and Katada—although “Mano Cove,” which was named in the Ōmi hakkei kusemai, is included here, and so is the Hie Shrine itself, as the setting for a royal visit (miyuki, gyokō) in the late spring section of the program. Furthermore, the scenes and figural schemes built onto and around Awazu, Karasaki, Seta, and Katada (here spelled 方田) in this much earlier program differ distinctly from the way they would come to be treated in the post-Nobutada tradition: Awazu is a spring topic associated with the early New Year harvest of spring shoots (wakana); Karasaki is treated as a subsite of Hie Shrine and celebrated for its role in the sanctuary’s summer festival (matsuri); Seta Bridge is also a summer site, a place to seek relief from the season’s heat (nōryō—a common trope in seasonal and twelve-month sequential screen-painting programs, seen often in Daijōe screens, which share the twelve-part structure, as well39); and Katada is a place where plovers (chidori), not geese, gather on the shore. But these birds, too, have long been part of the Ōmi/Biwa poetic landscape—from as early, at least, as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s late seventh- or early eighthcentury apostrophic tanka prompted by nostalgic memory of the Ōtsu Palace that once, but only briefly, stood upon these same shores: 近江の海夕波千鳥汝が鳴けば心もしのに古へ思ほゆ Ōmi no umi yūhunami chidori na ga nakeba kokoro mo shino ni inishihe omohoyu Oh plovers out there among the evening waves on the Ōmi Sea! when you cry my heart cannot help but fill with thoughts of long ago.40

This is without doubt the most prominent and frequently referenced “Ōmi Sea” (i.e., Lake Biwa) chidori poem among the many in the canon, or something close to it: none too surprisingly, Tameie’s Katada poem explicitly echoes Hitomaro’s (with the distinctive phrase yūhunami chidori, “plovers in the evening waves,” in the fourth of its five ku): いりひさすおなじかただのうら風にゆふなみちどりまつしたふなり irihi sasu onaji Katada no urakaze ni yūhunami chidori matsu shitafu nari



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In the rays of the setting sun, as always, at Katada, the pines wait for the plovers in the evening waves to come ashore on the inlet’s breeze.

Likewise, Tameie’s Awazu, Karasaki, and Seta Bridge poems are inevitably resettings of yet other tropes in and of the Ōmi scene that his poet-forebears had long ago constructed: that is, there is snow, of course, at Awazu, ancient pines are witnesses at Karasaki, and weary travelers rest at the bridge: いざけふはころもでぬれてふるゆきのあはづのをのにわかなつみてん iza kefu ha koromode nurete furuyuki no Awazu no wono ni wakana tsumiten Let us seize this day, wetting the tips of our sleeves in the snows that fall as we gather new shoots here in the Awazu fields. あまくだろあとをわかれずけふごとに神代しらるるからさきのまつ Amakudaru ato wo wakarezu kefugotoni kamiyo shiraruru Karasaki no matsu In no departure from their ways since they descended from the heavens today, just as on other festival days each year, the kami reign, as witnessed by the Karasaki pines. かち人のにほてりわたるなつのひをわすれてくらすせたのながはし kachibito no niho teriwataru natsu no hi wo wasurete kurasu Seta no nagahashi Forgetting the sun that glared down on them and their burdens at this storied spot, these footsore travelers take their comfort all day long here at the Seta Bridge.41

What we see here, at a moment that might be thought of, roughly, as just beyond an apogee in the trajectory of waka history, with the Mikohidari poets ascendant but still striving to consolidate the authoritative roles achieved by Shunzei and then Teika, is an apt demonstration of how high classical poem-making was done: deliberately, with knowledge, care, and purpose pervading every move that a skilled poet might make. Tameie’s 1249 poems for Narishige (and many others that we might examine in the same light) reveal a perception of how mobility and substitution

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within a delimited set of preassociated elements could be maximized so as to ring changes on hoary tropes (here, within the evolving repertoire of Ōmi meisho). This is precisely how classical waka made use of its assembled building blocks and cultivated properties to reconstruct itself ad infinitum. Generations later, in 1501, another master of such cultivation and guardian of practical as well as arcane waka knowledge, Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537, descendant in a distinguished branch of the extended Fujiwara clan and the most eminent ancestor of the Beinecke scroll kugeshū member Sane­nari) was invited or rather beseeched by his senior literary associate Sōgi (1421–1502) to contribute to a program of replication of “The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” on a screen that would display both Chinese poems (shi) and Japanese poems (uta), perhaps with paintings or perhaps standing alone, on shikishi. (For a translation, see appendix 5.) This was surely not the first time that waka had been composed on this by-nownaturalized “Chinese” subject, but the occasion is one that is at least welldocumented and preserved in Sanetaka’s chronological anthology, Saishō.42 Sōgi’s precise motivation is not known, but it is notable that he was organizing the contributors in the year just prior to his death. The kanshi were the work of “the late Priest Ten’in” (i.e., Ten’in Ryūtaku), an eminent Rinzai Zen prelate who had died in the previous year (1500), so it also seems possible that this screen was planned as some sort of memorial for him.43 In this instance, too, the flexibility and permeability of the Xiao and Xiang topos (like many other “translated” or translated topoi) was manifest in its capacity to lend itself to dual, complementary articulation in the parallel kanshi and waka forms. It is hard not to see this as a condition that enabled the emergence about a hundred years later (give or take) of a “Xiao and Xiang” grafted to such a resonant and malleable repertoire of tropes of the kind that time-honored and time-honed Ōmi poesy offered to waka practitioners, in the creation, or invention, of Ōmi hakkei. As we have seen, it may not be possible to say just who the inventor or inventors of this old-new topos were, though the evidence points strongly toward Nobutada. One somewhat obscure document dated 1562 contains hints that Nobutada’s father, Sakihisa (1536–1612; still known as Harutsugu, 晴嗣, at the time), may also have had a hand in this. It is a preface (kotobagaki) to poems (which may or may not be extant but are not included in



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this text) reporting that in the autumn of that year—on the fifteenth night of the eighth month—he and some companions carried out a long-delayed plan to observe the full moon from Ishiyama and accepted an invitation to lodge with the currently serving shōgunal marshal (Shugo) of Ōmi, Rokkaku Takayori. Local officials, including the marshal, joined the party, and when poem-making ensued to commemorate the occasion, Sakihisa was specifically asked to inscribe a fan (ōgi) with verses on the “eight views of this province, Ōmi” (Ōmi no hachi no keshiki or kage). This item, created by such a high-ranking court official and noted poet-calligrapher, became the souvenir of the gathering of one Mabuchi Chiyo Kumamaru (otherwise completely unknown).44 If nothing else, this fragmentary text suggests that by the latter half of the sixteenth century, waka practice was ready to or perhaps already had embraced the notion of “Eight Views of Ōmi” as a fertile, elegant, and attractive topical space in which to make poems—poems that would in and of themselves display their classical continental roots while also providing a new way to celebrate the poetic landscape of that particular place, with its own particular and rich poetic history. Furthermore, the particular claim that Sakihisa was at Ishiyama when this moon-viewing and fan inscription occurred carries its own rich suggestions, not the least its resonance with another story about that place— the legend (widely believed for centuries and still treated as virtual fact by many) that Murasaki Shikibu conceived of Genji monogatari (to fulfill a request from her mistress and employer, the Empress Shōshi, for something especially interesting for her reading pleasure) while on a pilgrimage there in autumn, perhaps to seek the aid of the Ishiyama Kannon to meet this challenge. We are told that she was inspired by the sight of a full fifteenthnight moon reflected on the distant waters of Lake Biwa to initiate the writing of her tale in medias res, as it were, with the chapters that would become “Suma” and “Akashi,” where moonlight on the offshore waters of the Inland Sea, the coastline, and the dwellings and temples that Genji (the protagonist) visits is also a powerful motif, figuring prominently in several poems and other passages in those chapters.45 This intertext or paratext is woven explicitly into the Ishiyama poem in the post-1600 “standard” Ōmi hakkei sequence, and I will make my way back to that poem shortly. But first, there is one more near-contemporary account that dovetails with the story of the Enman’in door-panel or screen program in placing

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28. Panoramic view of Zeze Castle. Reproduced from Hata Sekiden, Akisato Ritō, et al., Ōmi meisho zue (1797 edition). Courtesy of the National Institute of Japanese Literature.

Nobutada in just the right part of Ōmi at just about the right time but at ­another important location nearby: Zeze Castle. This keep was erected right at the shore of Lake Biwa in 1601 by the first lords of the Zeze domain (a significant portion of the Shiga region), the Toda daimyō, at this most strategic location along the Tōkaidō road in times of both warfare and peace. Relatively recently, an unpublished document held in the Ise Shrine Archives (Jingū Bunko, 神宮文庫) entitled Hakkei waka: Biwako, dated 1624 and authenticated as having been written by the Confucian scholar Kan Tokuan (1581–1628), has been cited as especially strong evidence of Nobutada’s role. It includes a set of “Ōmi Eight Views” waka attributed to him along with Tokuan’s own kanshi on the same, with a colophon/postscript (in kanbun) describing the circumstances: Nobutada was visiting the Lord of Zeze Castle (on the shores of Lake Biwa, in sight of Karasaki and other famous Ōmi locations) and, inspired by what he saw, made paintings of them and poems as well, copied these onto eight leaves of fine paper (kenshi, made from silk fibers), and gave them as a memento of the visit to the castellan. Based on the document’s date and the date of Nobutada’s death, 1614, it is almost certain that this would have been the first lord of Zeze,



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Toda Kazuaki, or his son Ujikane, who succeeded him in 1603. Tokuan is said to have been Ujikane’s tutor (here, the source is the biographical inscription on his gravestone, authored by the noted scholar Hayashi Razan; Ujikane also is known to have received instruction from Fujiwara Seika, Tokuan’s own teacher).46 A final detail that adds plausibility is that all of the eight Ōmi sites in the configuration of the program as we have it from Nobutada are ostensibly visible from the grounds of the castle. Nobutada could indeed have made sketches or paintings of them, and added poems, “on site,” while Zeze itself was too new to be among them, even if its inclusion might have flattered the Toda lord. One facet that stands out in this alternative (and quite plausible) story of the program’s coming-into-being is the pairing at the outset of kanshi and waka as dual accompaniments to pictorial representations of the selected Ōmi scenes. In fact, as scholars such as Horikawa, Kaji, and others have amply shown, the Ōmi hakkei kanshi tradition throve in early modern Japan to just as great a degree as it did in waka culture, and there are fine extant examples of eighteenth-century publications in various formats in which the two continue to appear together—suggesting, as elsewhere, that these are coordinate, not separate, literary florescences.47 And yet, while the great Chinese “Xiao and Xiang” visual and literary tradition is the fundament and the framework for the Ōmi “Eight Views,” which never shrugs off that translated identity—quite the contrary—domestic and local literary landmarks and lore also had roles just as important in shaping the program as we see it throughout most of its iterations, including the Beinecke scroll and other renderings that are contemporary with it. In other words, it is not only “Xiao and Xiang” that is translated into and onto Ōmi: vestiges of Ōmi’s own past are also brought forward and given new settings in this textual and visual space. In chapter 2, I explored the history of Ōmi’s role, more prominent than that of any other single province, in the protocols, performance, and poesy of the Daijōe and sampled a fraction of the wealth of evocative and malleable place-names, figures, forms of rhetorical celebrations of the land and of its resources, and the like that characterizes the corpus of resulting songs and poems, and which remains durable throughout that history. The precise reasons for Ōmi’s privilege (or burden) as the most frequently named Yuki province remain obscure (just as do the meanings of Yuki

29. A section of Dōshū kyōkun manpuku ōrai, an instructional text for youths first published in Kyoto in 1727. In the upper registers of pages shown here are reproductions of a set of Ōmi hakkei shi composed by the monk Gyokushitsu Sōbo in 1689 and included in his kanshi anthology Kenroshō, together with illustrations by Shimokōbe Jusui that contain, in kana, the standard Ōmi hakkei waka attributed to Nobutada. This detail shows the “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” and “Night Rain at Karasaki” scenes. (Note interlineal kana glosses for the kanshi texts.) By permission of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Fuzoku Toshokan. 30. The “Returning Sails at Yabase” and “Evening Bell at Mii” scenes, as in fig. 29.

31. The “Dusk Glowing at Seta” and “Storm Clearing at Awazu” scenes, as in fig. 29. 32. The “Geese Descending at Katada” and “Evening Snow at Mount Hira” scenes, as in fig. 29.

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and Suki—still subjects of debate), but this probably had much to do with its physical proximity to the capital and the resulting links between and among institutions in the metropole and its provincial neighbor, as well as its consistent agricultural productivity and its strategic location on major transportation routes, among other factors. Long before Zeze Castle was raised beside the lakeshore, to command both lake and land routes of travel and commerce—and the movements of military forces—that southwestern corner of the province, closest to the portals to the capital itself, was a locus in which numerous political, religious, and economic dynamics came together. When in the sixth year of his reign (667), the Emperor Tenji (or Tenchi) relocated his capital from its time-honored home base in the valleys of what is now the Nara region to Ōtsu, on these same southwestern shores of the lake, he almost certainly was motivated by strategic considerations, and also possibly by fear of certain occult conditions suggesting peril for his court unless moved to a more favorable location. Hitomaro is by far the most famous literary commemorator on this event (after the fact) and on the desolation left behind when, almost immediately after Tenji’s death and the resolution of the violent succession dispute that followed (known as the Jinshin War, Jinshin no ran) in 672, the new emperor, Temmu, returned his court to Asuka. We have no idea when it was that the poet (who is believed to have died in about 700) viewed the ruins of the capital at Ōmi, or exactly what took him there, but the chōka suite with two hanka (envoys) presented in the first book of the Man’yōshū as his response to and record of that viewing have long since imprinted themselves in cultural memories of the place and shaped the way that many topoi related to it have been treated in waka and other genres. To begin with, Hitomaro made a point of eschewing any attempt to fathom Tenji’s purpose in leaving behind the place where his ancestors had ruled for long: Yet from sky-seen Yamato did one depart— Whatever may have been The secret of his sage intent— And passed across The slopes of blue-earth Nara Mountain



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To a land, remote Beyond the distant heaven, The land of Ōmi Where water dashed on the rocks, To the palace of Ōtsu In Sasanami of the gently lapping waves.48

Hitomaro’s use at this key moment in the unfolding of the chōka of the place-name/makurakotoba “Sasanami,” literally translated here as “of the gently lapping waves,” is but one example of this imprint (I show some examples of its use elsewhere, hereafter49), but so is the poem’s deeply nostalgic and mournful portrait of the ruined palace itself: His great palace stood Upon this spot, as I have heard; Its mighty halls Rose here, so all men say; Where now spring grasses Choke the earth in their rife growth, And mists rise up To hide the dazzling springtime sun; Now I view this site Where once the mighty palace stood And it is sad to see.50

Even so, and in a way that seems to be in keeping with the waka tradition’s eventual turn away from the extended chōka form to the shorter tanka, it is Hitomaro’s two hanka—their sentiments, tones, and figures—that have had the most lasting resonance for later poets: 楽波の志賀の唐崎幸くあれど大宮人の船待ちかねつ Sasanami no Shiga no Karasaki sakiku aredo Ōmiyahito no fune machikanetsu. Still Cape Kara stands In Shiga of the gently lapping waves, Changeless from of old;

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But it will wait in vain to see The courtiers’ boats row back. 楽波の志賀の大わだ淀むとも昔の人にまたも逢はめやも Sasanami no Shiga no ohowada yodomu to mo Mukashi no hito ni mata mo ahame ya mo Broad the waters stand By Shiga of the gently lapping waves: The lake is still; But how can it ever meet again The men of long ago?51

As with many poems in the Man’yōshū attributed to early poets such as Hitomaro, there is a second version for the second hanka, incorporated into the text as it has been transmitted since the Heian period, that offers two alternative phrases: Hira no ohowada (比良の大わだ) in place of Shiga no, and ahamu to omoheya (逢はむと思へや) as a slight variant of the final ku, that is, “Broad the waters stand by Hira” and “how can it possibly meet again with them?”52 This version moves the scene observed (in reality or in imagination or memory) northwestward up the coast to Mount Hira and farther from the site of Tenji’s palace, but keeps the eulogy as a whole fixed in its concentration on the recent, irrevocably irreversible past.53 A slightly less melancholy sighting from Hira (again, perhaps observed, perhaps imagined) is sketched in another poem that may or may not be Hitomaro’s, included in a “miscellaneous” section of book 9 of the Man’yōshū: 楽波の比良山風の海吹けば釣りする海人の袖返る見ゆ Sasanami no Hirayama kaze no umi fukeba tsuri suru ama no sode kaheru miyu When the winds blow across the lake, coming down from Mount Hira “of the gently lapping waves,” we catch glimpses of anglers’ sleeves flaring wide in the gale.54

This cluster of poems that perform these observations of sights and sounds (of the lapping waves and the wind—and perhaps also the “sound of silence”) at Karasaki, Hira, Shiga, and the vicinity sets up paradigms and of-



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fers properties that would be taken up by many a later poet, creating echoes and effects of déjà vu and déjà lu much like others already encountered in this study. Perhaps the best-known example episode is the poem that is at the core of a tale told with strong measures of irony, reverence, and nostalgia in Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, which came together as a written text in the form we know in the mid-fourteenth century).55 The story goes that the courtier-warrior Taira no Tadanori (Kiyomori’s younger brother) left the poem in question in the care of his teacher Shunzei, in hopes that Shunzei would include it in the Senzai wakashū, as he fled the besieged capital city in 1183: さゞなみや志賀のみやこはあれにしをむかしながらの山ざくらかな Sazanami ya Shiga no miyako ha arenishi wo mukashinagara no yamazakura ka na56 The capital that stood at Shiga “of the gently lapping waves” has fallen into ruin, and yet the cherry blossoms here at Mount Nagara, “Steadfast Peak,” are just as they have always been.

Tadanori died along with many of the other Taira nobles in the following year at the battle of Ichinotani, and Heike monogatari devotes another sympathetic episode to the circumstances that led up to his beheading, followed by the discovery of his death poem, concealed in his quiver. But the earlier episode about his leave-taking from the capital flashes forward to reveal that when Shunzei did include the poem in the official submission version of the Senzai wakashū (toward the end of that decade), he felt compelled to omit the defeated and by that time deceased Tadanori’s name as its author.57 He therefore labeled it “On the topic ‘blossoms in the old village’— composer unknown” (kokyō no hana to iheru kokoro wo yomi haberikeru—­ yomibito shirazu).58 And it is this, as with a number of other such episodes, that the Heike narrator treats as especially ironic, pathetic, and ennobling of the defeated and otherwise ignominious Taira.59 There is no reason to think that Tadanori’s “Sazanami ya” poem was an “onsite” composition: rather, it is a composition out of memory—memory of hearing or seeing or being taught about poems like Hitomaro’s or perhaps, just possibly, this one, composed by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke for an ­utaawase held in 1149 and thus a topical performance piece rather than

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a poem of “observation” as such (yet one that does perform a kind of observation): さざ波や志賀の都は荒れにしをまだ澄むものは秋の夜の月 Sazanami ya Shiga no miyako ha arenishi wo mada sumu mono ha aki no yo no tsuki The capital that stood at Shiga “of the gently lapping waves” has fallen into ruin, and yet there is one thing that remains shining clearly: the moon on this autumn night.

Hitomaro’s first hanka in his suite “On Viewing the Ruins of the Capital at Ōmi,” which opens with that now familiar “Sasanami no” refrain, claims that Karasaki is just as always, “changeless from of old” (sakiku aredo— there is a deliberate sonic play in Karasaki sakiku, an almost facetious suggestion that the name of the place contains the notion of survival intact despite the ravages of time), and that the waters at the lakeshore at Shiga are calm despite the upheavals that have transpired around them. Tadanori opens with that same refrain but proceeds to celebrate cherries blooming on Mount Nagara (another Ōmi utamakura meisho, so in keeping with the associations that flow from that opening phrase) just as of old (mukashinagara) despite the desolation of the old capital, and he also repeats the formula used by Kiyosuke in his claim (with that same refrain in its opening bar) that it is the autumn moon that shines at Shiga as always while all else has changed. What we are hearing and seeing here are poems that strove to latch on to memories of others, through form and sound as well as rhetoric: the claim that “all has changed, but then again it has not” is a waka-wide trope par excellence, made more rhetorically potent because it is almost always a paradox.60 Hitomaro’s hanka follows a chōka in which he laments the paradox of the coming-into-being of the Ōmi capital at Shiga itself, and then describes its ruined state, another paradox in light of its momentary grandeur. Kiyosuke’s and Tadanori’s poems likewise counterpose things that they insist (quixotically and pathetically) are unchanged and unchanging (seasonal blossoms, autumn moonlight) against the same potent image of the abandoned palace complex, and do so with that same opening refrain evoking (and invoking) “Sasanami’s” rhythmically lapping waters. The repetition of that phrase, archaic and instantly nostalgic in



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Kiyo­suke’s and Tadanori’s usage, adds further to the paradoxical and disorienting interplay of past-ness and present-ness in their poems.61 But is there not a similar dynamic likewise constantly at work in any iteration of the Xiao and Xiang “Eight Views” or the “Ōmi Eight Views,” and in many other such poetic and visual phenomena that invite, as these do, such faithful and productive revisitations over time? Every return to the Xiao and Xiang or Ōmi scenes, in one or another medium or in merged media, is at once a journey into the past—historical, literary, imaginary— and a drawing forward into the present of perceptions of those places, based on “real” or more likely imagined viewings and encounters. In this sense, although the reference or echo is indirect, perhaps muted, one might say that each and every “Eight Views of Ōmi” re-presentation also re­occu­pies that pose or perspective adopted by Hitomaro as he gazes (as the speaker of his poem; “he” might also be a collective “they” who gaze) at the Shiga shore and at Karasaki (“Cape Kara”), eyes taking in a present scene while memory matches or blurs it in the mind with visions of the past. And just how deep is that past? How far can memory reach? “Karasaki sakiku aredo”: “Cape Kara stands . . . changeless from of old.” But just how old? It would be difficult to say, though for Hitomaro in the late seventh century, it already seemed an ancient place, an apt focus for his meditation on time, kingly power, and caprice. The origin of its name (like that of many sites) is obscure, although its most common orthographic form suggests some association with early immigrants from the continent (“Karasaki,” 唐崎, also 韓崎: the two characters used interchangeably here have long been associated with “China” and “Korea”), but (also like many placenames) it often appears in early texts written in yet other ways (for example, 辛崎).62 Throughout much of its history, Karasaki Shrine’s most important role was to serve as the destination for royal and aristocratic pilgrims who would perform sacred purifying rituals (harae, 祓; misogi, 禊; or mitarashi, 御手洗) at its shoreline sanctuary; the origins of that practice cannot be decisively traced either, but some archaeological evidence suggests that it may date to the latter years of the Nara period (i.e., eighth century).63 Emperor Kammu and his son Emperor Saga both made official excursions (miyuki) to Karasaki in the first decades of the ninth century— the father did so several times, and the son’s experience included an extended pleasure cruise on the lake.64 Later in the Heian period, Fujiwara no

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Kaneie, his son Michigana, and many other powerful courtiers performed harae at Karasaki, but it was not only a site for male ablutions: a misogi as a rite of release, when a high priestess of the Kamo Shrine (Saiin—an office established in 810 during Saga’s reign and held first by his daughter, Princess Uchiko) retired from that office, was also normally performed at Karasaki.65 To this day, a version of such purification rites is observed as a major annual festival of the shrine (Mitarashi-Sai) on the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth days of July. All this adds to the thickness of an invocation of the name “Karasaki,” very much so in the Ōmi hakkei sequence but also in the many other contexts in which it may appear, and when it does so it is without question a figure and avatar of great age, antiquity, and memories of an archaic past with continuity in the present. And then there is the cult of the Karasaki pine—a dominant figure in many poems about the site, including the “standard” Ōmi hakkei Karasaki verse, where it “stands silent and firm” amid night rains and winds, and likewise almost always features in any pictorial representation of that place (as in the Soken scroll scene). Any pine, in any poem and in many a painting as well, is a figure for age or agelessness, endurance, and durable vitality. But legend has it that this particular tree was transplanted to the site from the great Kashima Shrine (in old Hitachi, now Tochigi Prefecture) in antiquity by an officiating priest of the nearby Hie Shrine.66 There, it would seem, it has stood witness to the ages, to the comings and goings of kings and lords, travelers high and low, and withstood many gales and storms, patient, steadfast on its promontory, and of course ever-green. How could it not be part of the Ōmi Eight Views program, even if no pine is to be found in the Xiao and Xiang template topics? Here is an instance in which the strength of local tradition and lore trumps the demands or expectations of the formally imposed precedent or grid, previously imported and then “nativized” or integrated into a domestic matrix. The origin-story of the Karasaki pine links the shrine to the larger and more powerful Hie Shrine complex; so did the 1249 byōbu project (discussed previously) for Hōribe Narishige, in which both Karasaki and Hie itself were among the Ōmi meisho selected for inclusion in that program. In fact, from early times the Karasaki Shrine functioned as a subsidiary or branch (sessha) of Hie, and many of the ancient customs of both sanctuaries were closely linked. For example, during the Hie annual festival in the



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(traditional lunar) fourth month (early summer), a fleet of boats bearing seven portable shrines (mikoshi) from Karasaki made their way over the lake and the inland along an estuary to Hie. Along the way they took offerings from Hie devotees at Awazu on board as well. (On more than one occasion, fights broke out among the various local parties involved in carrying out these rituals, reflecting local rivalries.)67 Despite their long, close association, and in contrast to their relatively equal treatment in the 1249 program, Karasaki has a place in the “Ōmi Eight Views” program while Hie does not, or perhaps Karasaki and its ancient pine, which so readily lends itself to poetic and pictorial treatment, stand for both. Besides Hie, the other very old and (at least at one time) immensely powerful religious complex in the Ōmi/Shiga southwestern region was Onjōji (Miidera). The bitterness of its long-lasting and frequently destructive rivalry with Enryakuji stemmed from the year 863, when the monk Enchin (円珍; 814–91, who had been abbot of Enryakuji and had revived the nearly abandoned Miidera, which had prospered during the reigns of Tenji, Temmu, and Jitō but had later suffered neglect while Enryakuji prospered) set up a Tendai ordination platform there and thus boldly challenged the authority of the older establishment on Mount Hiei.68 But none of this surfaces in or shapes the profile of “Miidera” in the “Eight Views of Ōmi”; rather, the focus is on its bell, the property that makes it a match for the “Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple” Xiao and Xiang template topic. And therein lies a story of its own—in this case, not a story that flows along the lines of waka tropes and their transmission but rather from another register, where history and legend meet in the popular imagination. There is indeed a famous bell (bonshō, 梵鐘) in the belfry (Shōrō or Shurō, 鐘楼) of the Kondō (金堂), one of the main halls of the temple; the current bell was installed in 1602, so, perhaps, close to the time of Nobutada’s presence nearby—and the temple claims without any qualification (in its online presence, for example ) that this is the bell referred to in the Ōmi hakkei poem.69 But there is yet another bell housed in another nearby structure, the Reishōdō (霊鐘堂), and it is said to be one acquired by Fujiwara no Hidesato, better known in legends and lore as Tawara Tōda (俵藤太), a tenth-century figure whose exploits are said to include the eradication of a plague of centipedes on Mount Mikami (yet another prominent Ōmi site), for which he received the bell as a reward from a

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“Dragon-deity” (Ryūjin).70 At some point in the fourteenth century, this coveted treasure apparently was stolen from Onjōji by “soldier-monks” (so-called sōhei, 僧兵) and taken to Enryakuji. This much—the bell’s removal to Enryakuji, that is—can be verified in ecclesiastical records.71 But at this point, once again, legend takes over and holds that Benkei, the great culture-hero of the embroidered accounts of the Genpei Wars and their aftermath, was (according to Taiheiki and other largely fictional sources) at one point taking refuge on Mount Hiei when he heard a bell tolling in a way that he understood as an utterance, “Inō, inō . . . ,” or, in the dialect of the capital region, “I want to go home,” back to Miidera. With great effort and superhuman strength, Benkei supposedly hauled the bell down the mountain and returned it to the safekeeping of the Miidera monks.72 There are still more fabulous tales about this bell: one has it that at the height of strife between the Northern and Southern Courts in the Kemmu era (mid-1330s), the monks of Miidera buried it in order to hide it from marauding fighters, but it immediately began to emit peals of its own accord from underground. This was taken as a sign of what turned out to be Ashikaga Takauji’s victory in the conflict. And again, in 1592, it is said that for about a month the bell would not sound when struck; it was only the fervent prayers of the Miidera monks that restored its ring.73 To suggest that any of this had much to do with Miidera’s presence and profile in the Ōmi hakkei program is speculative, yet it seems plausible, at least, to posit a link between the prominence of legends about its bells and the imprinting of the Xiao and Xiang prototype’s “Evening Bell from MistShrouded Temple” on it, rather than on some other site, which is to say that the configurer(s) (Sakihisa? Nobutada? or . . . ?) had options—lots of them—but made choices based on what felt right to them. Like poets at an utaawase, they had created for themselves or accepted a topical opportunity or challenge, the task of filling in and filling out a programmatic grid. As they “translated” the Xiao and Xiang template into and onto their poetic map of Ōmi, it was these particular names, places, and what they knew of them (or could attribute to them) based on their knowledge of poetic convention and lore, folklore, local history, and more that came to the fore, availing of themselves for settings in this old-new thing. Just how, or why, this got sorted out as it did we cannot say: we have only what he can see and read, and what doing so in turn may cause us to remember, sense, imagine.



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Earlier, I mentioned that just four of the eight sites in the standard configuration of the Ōmi hakkei program were also Daijōe topic sites at one time or another in the history of that corpus. Clearly, then, that particular locus of precedent in and of itself was not a determining factor in the shaping of the sequence. Nevertheless, I suggested that Ōmi’s Daijōe prominence certainly was a factor in the growth of the rich store of figural and other poetic material—things that fill a kind of resonant echo-chamber, that operate like a subtle, almost inaudible but present basso continuo in the orchestration of the sequence as we see or hear it. I can demonstrate this by looking at two Ōmi place-names with strong Daijōe (and other) “pedigrees” that are interpolated into the sequence but are not main “topics.” One of these is Moruyama (守山), named in the Seta Bridge poem (tsu­ yu­shigure Moruyama tohoku sugiikitsutsu; “Passing Mount Moru where all around a thick dew drips fresh from autumn showers”). As encountered in these unfolding lines, moru first and most immediately suggests the “dripping” or seeping of moisture (tsuyushigure), but this instantly—and only for an instant as this unfolding transpires—metamorphoses into a homonymous verb, embedded in the place-name of which it then becomes a part where it means “to guard, protect.”74 So “Moruyama” is a guardian mountain in name and, perhaps, in location as well with respect to sites and sanctuaries at its foot. (In reality, it lies a few kilometers to the northwest of Seta, on the east bank of the southernmost section of the lake.) This multivalence thus lends itself to the several Daijōe poems that sing of its vigilance in protecting the sovereign and the realm.75 In the Ōmi hakkei “Seta” poem, however, it is a furnishing for orientation and atmospherics, an Ōmi touchstone that serves to amplify the “sense of place” conjured by the poem and the sequence as a whole. Another example of this interpolation effect is “Uchide Shore” (Uchide no hama): it does take its place in the Yabase poem (“the boats leaving Uchide Shore return [to Yabase] with the wind at their backs”) through the logic of geography in part, since Yabase (written 矢橋, “Arrow Bridge,” in the Beinecke scroll, ostensibly by Tsunahira; also often written 八橋, “Eight Bridges”) is on a section of the southwestern lakeshore directly opposite Uchide (written phonetically, うちて, in the Beinecke scroll), the name of which means “Departure Bay”—a place from which one sets forth across the waters, sails unfurled. Since its name thus also suggests inceptions and

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auspicious initiations (of journeys, of reigns), it is no surprise that Uchide no hama appears in numerous Daijōe Ōmi (Yuki) songs and poems, both kagura uta and onbyōbuta.76 But it is also prominent as a waka place-name (utamakura meisho) in general.77 Given these and other background factors, it is not difficult to imagine how readily the Yabase and Uchide pairing presented itself as a nifty way to design an Ōmi hakkei poem conceived as a counterpart for the “Sail Returns from a Distant Shore” topic in the Xiao and Xiang template. Katada has a still less ancient and weaker pedigree in waka, per se, than many of the other names and sites in the Ōmi hakkei group. There are no examples of its use in Daijōe poesy (but neither are there any for Yabase). Still, by the early twelfth century, there was a least one poet, Minamoto no Nakamasa (1066?–1140?) to whom it seemed right to pair Katada with the seasonal (i.e., autumnal) figure of flocks of geese resting on a shoreline during their southward migration: 雲井よりくる初雁のいつの間に堅田の浦に並びゐるらん kumowi yori kuru hatsukari no itsu no ma ni Katada no ura ni narabi iruran78 It began with just one goose, the first, descending from the clouds, but suddenly—when did it happen?—so many are gathered in rows at the Bay of Katada.

There is something more here than might immediately meet the eye, though the ear may catch it: itsu no ma ni ka, an idiomatic rhetorical phrase embedded in the poem as it unfolds into Katada, asks, “when did it happen?” This kind of verbal gymnastic (kakekotoba, a pivot that entails a kind of pun), and the poem’s tracking of a seasonal phenomenon that gathers momentum almost too swiftly to be understood (or so the conceit of the poem would have it), are both standard fare in waka of Nakamasa’s time, and this may have had something to do with the poem’s preservation, though it is not to be found in any of the royal anthologies. There can be little point in wondering whether Nobutada or Sakihisa or some other composer knew this poem (or, for that matter, Tameie’s Katada poem from 1249, which, as we saw earlier, placed plovers [chidori] in the scene). Rather, we can at least say that such associations of the place, region, and fauna seasonally passing through might have been known to them, or seemed natural and



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plausible—as they did for Nakamasa—when they (or someone) reached this stage in the work (or play) of composition, considered the task of addressing the “Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar” template topic, assessed their options in the inventory of possibilities, and made their choices. In my discussion of Daijōe poesy, I characterized its vast store of figures, tropes, and poetic conventions as part of and akin to an inventory or economy of surplus and excess that was also manifest in the assemblage of material accouterments for the rite itself. The Ōmi hakkei phenomenon is another poetic space filled to overflowing with materials, memories, patterns, and paradigms; I might say that it is an overdetermined space were it not clear that poet-configurers working (that is, making poems) in that space, and their artist partners, had so many options and exercised such degrees of freedom in shaping that configuration. Indeed, one result of this is that not all “Eight Views of Ōmi” iterations have the same makeup: other sites, such as Uchide no hama, Mano no irie, and others come in as substitutes while the matching-up with the contours of the Xiao and Xiang descriptive topics is consistent.79 A dissection of the figures and tropes that are built into the program and a quasi-genomic tracing of their ancestries could go much farther and wider than what I have presented here. But perhaps it is best to think of the program as we see it in such iterations as the Beinecke scroll as a crystallization or concentration of this excess of materials in a manageable and, at least to some, attractive and beguiling form—captured in a malleable but stable vessel in which Ōmi’s past and present are configured as a translation and transfiguration of Xiao and Xiang’s poetic paradigm, preserved as are ancient once-living things in amber or as are artifacts in a time capsule, offering to later times a glimpse at what those artifacts once meant and may still mean. Ishiyama, the last site encountered by the reader-viewer of the Beinecke scroll, exemplifies this especially well because of the particular ways that its several layers of meaning and its prompts to preserved memories come together in its sector of the program’s delineated space. For one thing, there is that preserved document, reported by Ban Kōkei and believed to be in Nobutada’s hand, telling of his last-minute substitution of Ishiyama to match the “Autumn Moon over Dongting” template topic when he was composing a version of the program in a gathering that included Emperor GoYōzei. But the poem as we have it explicitly launches and propels the

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33. The Beinecke “Eight Views of Ōmi” scroll, scene 8, “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

reader through a condensed process of disorientation, reorientation, and redefinition, through additional translations and transfigurations, with the figure of a bright full autumn moon shining over a great expanse of water remaining as a constant even while its identity blurs or shifts and the coordinates of its location multiply. This creates a deliberate confusion that yields to a new, but poetically complicated, clarification. The poem itself alerts us to the process that it is about to unfold with its exclamatory (and semi-archaic) opening, “Ishiyama ya” (!), followed by its revelation: this moonlight shining down on “Nionoumi” (that archaic moniker for the lake) is none other than, no different from, inseparable from, or has merged with that of Akashi and Suma.80 So this is moonlight, reflected on the waters, that is thrice located, at least: it is in Xiao and Xiang, on the Dongting Lake; it is what can be seen from Ishiyama’s height, where its temple stands; and it is the moonlight seen in the imaginary world of The Tale of Genji, first at Suma, then at Akashi, where the protagonist, Prince Genji, lives in self-imposed exile for a spell. At Suma, he and his companions stare out over the nearby waters of the Inland Sea and wonder whether the moon they see is also being viewed by their loved ones in the capital.81 At Akashi, he makes his first conjugal visit to the woman he has courted there, “Akashi no ue” (“The Akashi Lady”—the monogatari gives her no other name), un-



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der an almost-full (thirteenth-night) autumn moon.82 Thus, the moonlight that makes its presence felt in and illuminates these chapters of the tale carries connotations of the dislocation and loneliness of travel and exile, the strangeness and difference, both troubling and beguiling, of regions at a distance from the metropole, and erotic longing and its anticipated consummation. All of that, and more, was already borne by and transmitted in the Xiao and Xiang tradition, and thus finds its way to be translated into and reshaped, once more, with Genji-esque nuance added, in the Ōmi hakkei iteration of “autumn moonlight” at Ishiyama. But there is yet more transpiring here: also folded into this concatenation is that memory, that story (also mentioned earlier) of the conception and initiation of the tale itself, which places Murasaki Shikibu, brush in hand, seated just inside the temple’s main hall (with its revered image of Kannon), gazing toward the lakeshore and the lake waters bathed in moonlight, on a full-moon autumn night, then beginning to write, first the “Suma” chapter, then (perhaps) “Akashi” (see fig. 7). And so, the Ōmi hakkei Ishiyama poem gives that moonlight yet another set of coordinates in time, layering and folding in the moment (almost certainly also fictional, but what does that matter?) that launched that vast, monumental, and revered literary project.83 Perhaps it was inevitable, in what has been called the “Genji-centric” cultural sphere of late Muromachi and early modern Japan, that these tropes, including the persona of the monogatari author—by then, and still, a cult figure forever to be associated with Ishiyama Temple—would work their way into the Ōmi hakkei configuration, giving it an even more complex construction and resonance than it might otherwise have had.84 That interpolation is a kind of coming-toterms with so much excess, if such a thing were possible. This is the point at which, if not elsewhere or sooner, signification spills over into (deliberate) confusion not unlike that voiced by the Ōmi hakkei kusemai performer at the end of that recitation: disorientation reasserts itself, and, like the kusemai persona, the reader/viewer—the visitor to this real-and-not-real space—must ask, “Now just where am I, in what kind of time and place?”85 Now imagine yourself in this place: the Shoin, a private reception room in the Kajūji monastery (勧修寺; also, sometimes, Kanjūji), in the Yama­ shina district of Kyoto. Surrounding you on every sliding-door (shōji) surface and in the room’s interior niches as well are painted scenes of meisho

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34. The “Descending Geese at Katada” scene from “Eight Views of Ōmi” in a panel at floor-level in the Shoin of Kajūji, Yamashina, Kyoto, by Tosa Mitsuoki, late seventeenth century. Photograph by the author.

of the entire region of the capital and its neighboring provinces (the Kinai, 機内; see figs. 6 and 34). They were made by the court painter Tosa Mi­ tsuoki in the late seventeenth century for the Empress Meishō, who used this room as a secluded retreat.86 Depictions of our familiar “Eight Views of Ōmi” are prominent here: we can scan them all across one side of the room, and as we turn toward niches it is as if we are surveying, in a quasi-linear trajectory, a panorama of this reconstructed real-and-not-real space. No poems are to be seen: the contours of these locations and the context of their presentation here readily identify them. The same effect is achieved in other early modern, post-1600 renderings, such as the Ōmi hakkei scroll, again sans poems or any text save the signature of the artist, Kaihō Yūshō, dated circa 1670 and held in the Tokiwayama Bunko collection.87 Poems may be absent, but these versions are not wholly silent: they are accompanied by murmured echoes of the ageless process that constructed this imaginary, or rather imagination-altered, space, a space in which acts of translation recur in the eyes of the viewer, reestablishing his or her position in time, space,



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and memory. In the three-dimensional space of the Kajūji Shoin, with its shōji paintings as the frame, or in the Yūshō scroll (which is, after all, also a three-dimensional thing) and the space that its painted images define, this Ōmi that is and is not Ōmi materializes anew, and both forms also suggest movement: the eyes of the visitor seated in the Shoin travel through the space that surrounds him or her, the viewer of the scroll does the same as he or she gradually “reads” through it, turning its axles to reveal scene after scene, creating an experience that a real traveler could never have. And now imagine holding this thing in your hands or admiring it as it sits on a tatami floor or low table in front of you: it is a beautiful lacquered box, less than half a meter in length, about one quarter of a meter in height, roughly the size of a toaster. (The box I am describing is in the Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo; see figs. 8 and 9.) On its lid and exterior front surface, right side, and back panels, the unmistakable “Eight Views of Ōmi” “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” scene is depicted in rich, gold-toned hues, and “Dusk Glowing at Seta” materializes on the panel on the left. It is another “song without words.” Now, if you open the golden clasp and lift the cover, you will find inside three layers in two rows of drawers, the surfaces of which are decorated in the same manner with the remaining, wellknown scenes (one of them, “A Storm Clearing at Ōtsu,” is a variant of the usual setting at Awazu). And here you will find plenty of words: a complete, hand-copied text of all fifty-four chapters of The Tale of Genji, which has been identified as the work of the Kyoto courtier Higashizono Motokata (1626–1704), and has an internal dating of 1660 (Manji 3). So now another reorientation occurs and new coordinates must be sought: Suma, Akashi, and all of the contents, themes, motifs, and memories of The Tale of Genji are contained within the “Eight Views of Ōmi.” Interior and exterior: now, which is which? And just where are we? This is not a story with an ending. Things got made and remade, again and again, and still they do; images of places and spaces came and went before our eyes, and so many poems—too many, perhaps—came before us, rising out of memory, enabling others, as they are wont to do. The “Eight Views” conception or phenomenon was translated, or translated itself, time and again, and it continued to do so, in myriad forms, especially in the era in which woodblock printed images dominated the visual arts. There is an “Eight Views of Kanazawa” and of the Ryūkyūs; there are “Eight Views” of

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many aspects of the early modern urban demimonde and its denizens and their patrons, including a “Genji Disguised in Modern Dress” print series (Fūryū yatsushi Genji, 風流やつし源氏), which delights in the anachronism of turning the monogatari hero into an Edo-style playboy and fashion-plate, and an Edo-period (undated) banzuke—a mock sumō broadside (one of many such tongue-in-cheek banzuke that substitute catalogs of famous this-and-that for the names of star wrestlers in their elaborately distinguished teams and rankings), in this case, setting up a countrywide ranking of “famous places and historical sites” (Dai nihon meisho kyūseki mitate sumō) in which “Ōmi hakkei” is cast in the role of kanjin no moto (勧進元), a sort of promotions manager for the imaginary match.88 There is an early nineteenth-century libretto for singing with samisen accompaniment (tokiwazubushi) called “Eight Views of the Demimonde” (Kuruwa hakkei, 廓八景) that gives the audience a lively tour of Yoshiwara, the Edo licensed quarter . . . and so many more. Transfigurations follow one upon the other, registers shift from poetic arts to goods designed for popular consumption and commercial appeal. The excess and overflow of things continues unabated in the realm of the real and in the realms that imaginations shape and constantly reshape . . . into all kinds of things.

F I V E

A Lotus Sutra Offering Waka on the Threshold, Waka as Seal

菩提といふ寺に、結縁の八講せしに詣でたるに、人のもとより、「と く帰りたまひぬ。いとさうざうし」と言ひたれば、蓮の葉の裏に、 もとめてもかかる蓮の葉をおきて憂き世にまたは帰るものかは と書きてやりつ。まことに、いとたうふとくあはれなれば、やがて 泊まりぬべくおぼゆるに While I was in retreat at Bodaiji, where Eight Lectures on the Lotus Sutra to inspire the faithful were being conducted, I received a message from someone of importance to me saying, “Please come back right away. It’s lonely ­without you.” So, on the back of a lotus leaf, I wrote, You may seek me out, but how can I forsake the dew that has come to rest on the Lotus and make my way back into the unstable world of sorrow? and sent this. Truly, my experience there was so inspiring and moving that I simply wanted to stay as long as I could.1

I

n a brief episode in her Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon tells this story about herself. Here she writes in her memoirist mode (elsewhere in the Pillow Book she shares lists or “catalogs” or writes in a more essayistic mode), sketching a compact account of the coming-intobeing of a poem of her own making.2 At the time, she was doing what many women (and men) of her time and class did quite often, and there are

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s­ everal other episodes in the Pillow Book—some much longer and much more detailed—in which she writes from her personal recollections of such pilgrimages. (Murasaki Shikibu’s putative excursion to Ishiyamadera would fit the same pattern if it were true.) The particular program of activity at the Bodaiji (a sanctuary believed to have been located in the Higashiyama district of the capital, on Amidanomine) was also one of particular appeal to many Heian-period laywomen and -men: a multiday series of readings and sermons on each of the eight major sections (fascicles or volumes, maki) of the Lotus Sutra, itself the single Buddhist scripture of greatest appeal to the laity and the foundation as well as pinnacle of the Tendai School canon, liturgy, and ideology. In this case, it was specifically a kechien hakkō, which offered those in attendance the promise of spiritual bonding and the lasting benefits of such contact with and absorption of the sutra’s powers and promises of salvation—benefits they could expect to reap in the next life and possibly in this one as well. Shōnagon avoids identifying the person who asked her to cut her stay short; she simply refers to her or him as hito, “a certain person.”3 But what intrigues me here is the medium that Shōnagon says she chose for conveying her poem, and the spatial detail: the poem is on the ura, the underside of the lotus leaf, which may be real or artificial. The poem, and the means by which it was communicated, are characteristic—both playful and serious, or some admixture of the two, in keeping with the persona that Shōnagon projects throughout the text we read as hers. This lotus leaf materializes from the occasion and setting but it also materializes the purport of the “Eight Lectures” program itself: the “dew” it is collecting here is not the erotic dew of intimacy nor the dew of sorrowful tears but the first sign of spiritual transformation toward a purified ideal state, a first step toward or harbinger of the prospect of rebirth on a lotus in an eternal paradise. And at the same time it is the surface on which Shōnagon communicates with her poem, a surface just slightly concealed, needing to be manipulated in order to reveal its message.4 Perhaps one should not make too much of ura here—but I am going to do so. Poems—and not just waka poems—do sometimes seem to come from or are the inward, inverse, flip-side, or mirror of other experiences, utterances, encounters, perceptions. Perhaps that is why we care for them,

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interrogate them, remember them, and reproduce them as we do. And precisely because they often seem to come from some such otherwise undiscoverable or inaccessible and protected or even hidden interior place or space, poems can also present themselves as if coming to us as or presenting to us a threshold, an invitation to enter into another (or another’s) world: what was otherwise undiscoverable or inaccessible opens itself to us, or makes itself perceptible to us in some new way. It is no doubt possible to say this of all poems, and of many other kinds of texts and constructs in many arts and media; here I suggest in particular that this is one thing that poems in the waka tradition that treat Buddhist ideas, texts, and tropes (often categorized as Shakkyōka) do, in particular ways, especially when they are made to be presented in or on material things and thus, in their integrated role as devout offerings, themselves are or become sacred or semisacred things. In Sei Shōnagon’s Bodaiji story these things are a lotus leaf and the poem on its reverse surface, which may also recall (for us, at least) the not so sacred leaf on a stalk of late-season chrysanthemum that bore a poem for the team of the left at that utaawase at the palace in 953.5 We will also encounter here some poems written on the reverse side of precious heirloom papers as a memorial for the departed person who once wrote on and kept them—an instance of repurposing and redirecting in multiple ways. My main focus, however, is on a single set of Buddhist memorial offering poems that are both reformulations of things already or about to be seen and heard, and thresholds at the portals to yet other “worlds.” They are to be found in Shūi gusō, Fujiwara no Teika’s self-designed collection of his poetic oeuvres, in a section with other poems of a somewhat similar kind that he categorized as Shakkyō (釈教), with this kotobagaki introduction: 母の周忌に、法華経六部みづからかきたてまつりて供養せし一部の 表紙に、ゑにかかせし歌 haha no shūki ni, Hokkekefu rokubu mizukara kakitatematsurite kuyau seshi ichibu no hyōshi ni, we ni kakaseshi uta. On the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I wrote out and offered six copies of the Lotus Sutra, and on the outer covers for one of these copies I had these [poems] written on the pictures.6

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One year had passed since the death of the woman we know as Bifukumon’in no Kaga, Shunzei’s second wife, mother of two of his sons including Teika.7 She died in the second month of Kenkyū 4, 1193, so we can date these poems to approximately the same month and season, early spring, in 1194. Teika says he made six copies of the Lotus Sutra himself as a memorial offering (mizukara kakitatematsurite). For inscription on the outer covers of one of these copies (ichibu no hyōshi ni), he composed eight poems that correspond to passages and topoi in the chapters of the sutra as conventionally grouped in their eight fascicles, plus three more on additional sutras conventionally associated with the Lotus, which were then transcribed for him (kakaseshi), presumably by another calligrapher.8 (See appendix 6 for a transcription, transliteration, and translation of the entire set of poems.) As has been pointed out by others, the eight poems that form the core of the sequence (three more, on three sutras often liturgically grouped with the Lotus, follow these eight) are also a seasonal cycle, two poems per season, marked as such by their dominant figures and indeed by explicit mention of haru, aki, fuyu (spring, autumn, winter) in several instances. A year of mourning, a full turn of the seasons, has passed; more are to come, now with these poems and these sutra copies among the material artifacts of commemoration.9 And though these are not poems for a set of screens pictorializing the seasons, nor for the seasonal section of a series of an utaawase or a one-hundred-poem cycle (hyakushu uta), this structure allies this memorial composition with those formations that lie at the very heart of classical waka conceptualization and practice—including, of course, the traditions of Daijōe waka. We know that Kaga’s death profoundly moved both father and son, Shunzei and Teika, resulting in quite a few poems that are to be found in both their collected works. Several of these appear as a sustained sequence in Chōshū eisō, Shunzei’s personal anthology, including a sympathetic exchange with his longtime patron and student Princess Shikishi, sharing his grief; poems written on visits to her gravesite at Hosshōji not long after her interment and to mark several visits in subsequent years; and, in both Chōshū eisō and Teika’s Shūi gusō, an exchange between the two of them that took place in the autumn following her death. According to the kotobagaki in both anthologies, the night of the ninth day of the seventh month—early autumn—was disturbed by a wild windstorm (akikaze

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araku in Chōshū eisō; nowaki seshi in Shūi gusō), so the next morning Teika paid a call on his father to see how he was faring and offered this poem as he was taking his leave: たまゆらの露も涙もとゞまらずなきひとこふる宿の秋風 tamayura no tsuyu mo namida mo todomarazu naki hito kofuru yado no akikaze Tears, strings of beads of dew, fall without pause as the autumn wind wafts through this house of yearning for the one who no longer dwells here.

Shunzei sent this poem in reply after his son had already left the premises: 秋になり風の涼しくかはるにも涙の露ぞしのに散りける aki ni nari kaze no suzushiku kaharu ni mo namida no tsuyu zo shino ni chirikeru Autumn has come and the wind has changed and cooled, but our tears of longing, like beads of dew, fall more freely than before.10

Kubota Jun is one of several commentators who have made note of the resonance of Genji monogatari motifs and figures in these poems: he reads them as a reenactment of three especially memorable occasions in that tale. In the first, on the morning after a similar autumn storm (nowaki), Genji’s father, the Kiritsubo Emperor, is moved to send his personal envoy Yugei no Myōbu to inquire after the comfort of Genji’s grandmother, who has been taking care of the infant prince since his mother’s tragic early death. In the second, in the chapter that takes its name from another such storm that is its central event, “Nowaki,” Genji’s own young-adult son, Yūgiri, makes his way to Genji’s mansion at Rokujō to find out how his father and the women of his household, and their gardens, have fared in the tempest, and finds himself with unexpected opportunities to look into the private living quarters of many of the women residing there who are, in various ways, so important to both his father and to him. Third, there is yet another windy and stormy autumn night in the “Minori” chapter, following Genji’s beloved Murasaki no ue’s death in autumn, that instantly causes Yūgiri to recall how the disarray at the Rokujō on that earlier occasion had

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allowed him to catch otherwise forbidden glimpses of her person, twice— once alone with her other female attendants, once in intimate conversation with Genji—and to reflect now, after her death, how deeply disturbed and forever altered he had been by what he saw on both occasions.11 In this last episode, the narrative tells us, たへがたく悲しければ、人目にはさしも見えじとつつみて、「阿弥 陀仏、阿弥陀仏」とひきたまふ数珠の数に紛ぎらはしてぞ、涙の玉 をばも て消ちたまいひける いにしへの秋の夕の恋ひしきに いまはと見えしあけぐれの夢ぞなごりさへうかりける。 tahegataku kanashikereba, hitomi ni ha sa shi mo mieji to tsutsumite, Amida Butsu, Amida Butsu, to hikitamafu juzu no kazu ni magirahashite zo, namida no tama wo ba mote kechitamahikeru inishihe no aki no yuhube no kohishiki ni ima ha to mieshi akegure no yume zo nagori sahe ukarikeru

He was so overcome with grief that, with an effort to conceal what he was ­doing from observers, he let his tears fall and become confused with the beads of his rosary as he chanted, “Amida Butsu, Amida Butsu,” but could not help it when his lingering feelings welled up as Now, together with my yearning for that long-ago autumn evening, here is the dream I saw in that dawn that was to be her last.12 It is perhaps a sign of his overwhelming grief that Genji himself is not shown as having the inclination or capacity to articulate his sorrow in verse until almost the end of the chapter, while it is Yūgiri whose poem is the first to appear in the narrative after Murasaki’s death. As suggested above, Shunzei— a real, living mourner rather than a fictitious one—appears to have been much readier to use poetry to communicate his grief and to share it with others. And it is hardly a surprise that when that sharing was between father and son, the two would construct their communication through this kind of reference to and reuse of the poetics of Genji monogatari, not only because such allusive poem-building was a mode in which they were naturally con-

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versant and of which they were in masterly control, but also because doing so could serve as a way to contain, convey, and manage their grief. It has long been my view of the long and fundamental tradition of funerary songs and laments (banka in the Man’yōshū, aishō no uta in the Kokin wakashū and later anthologies ) that it reveals the many ways whereby uncontrollable grief could be accessed and exposed but also contained and thus controlled and assuaged in the vessel or form of the poem, particularly in the extended form of the chōka (for example, Hitomaro’s two suites on the death of his wife and his several chōka sets on the deaths of members of the ruling house, and Yamanoue no Okura’s on the death of his son).13 So many other communications, and especially waka exchanges between and among the bereaved such as this instance involving Shunzei and Teika (and Shunzei’s other correspondents) can also be seen in this light. But it is important to note that sometime after the fact, when he was compiling and organizing his oeuvres, Teika placed this exchange with his father and his other poems of mourning for his mother in the section of his personal anthology labeled not Aishō (poems of grief, laments) but rather, in the manner of what had come to be common in the topical sequencing in utaawase and in solo or collective one-hundred-poem programs, under the heading of Mujō, that is, impermanence, nonsubstantiality, the most fundamental of Buddhist tenets, and one that had been and would c­ ontinue to be treated poetically in any number of ways. It is in the cluster of poems Teika exchanges with others condoling with him (the accomplished court poet Inpumon’in no Taifu, 殷富門院大輔; his cousin Fujiwara no Yoshi­ tsune, 良経; his more distant Rokujō relative Fujiwara no Suetsune, 季経; and then with his father) that opens the section. This is followed by a tenpoem series composed in the ninth month of the year of his mother’s death while on a retreat given over to thoughts of her (haha no omohi nite komori witaru, 母の思ひにてこもりゐたる) and to condole, in addition, with another cousin, Jien, the abbot of Enryakuji (Yama no zasu, 山座主), over the more recent death of Fujiwara no Kinhira (公衡), yet another member of their circle of poets. Jien’s ten poems in reply are also included. All of these poems—no matter how classified or categorized by their makers or subsequent readers—can be seen as containers for grief, a space in which it is captured and held (ostensibly, in perpetuity). Grief ’s baleful impact is thus, in a sense, tethered, but its rendering in poem is also a

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means and medium for sharing it and thus confronting it, taking control of it, subjecting it to a kind of discipline while at the same time making use of the waka form to exorcise it but in a manner that also ensures or at least assumes its preservation in that contained state. In this respect these waka are akin, to say the least, to elegies of every kind, in verse or otherwise— including the banka of that earlier time in waka’s story. The paper or silk or other surface on which they were written are also such physical containers, spaces in which these outpourings and containments of grief are stabilized in their final form. The enacting of this containing function is one of several ways in which I read Teika’s 1194 memorial poems for his mother. They were not meant to be nor were they in fact written where they might need to searched out, on a significant underside, ura, as was the poem in Sei Shōnagon’s Bodaiji missive, but rather at the omote, the threshold, the entry point to each scroll, ushering the reader into the scriptural text and its space but, in contrast to the content to be found there (in the liturgically orthodox translation into Chinese), in the idiom and form of the uta (and, presumably, in the conventional mixed script in which we also encounter them in modern printed editions). In a more material sense, and in a metaphysical one as well, the poems are also seals: they “seal” the enacted (and quite genuine) emotions that are their occasion, but they also cover and secure the powerful content that is within the scroll on which they are inscribed (all of which takes the form of words)—like sealing wax on a precious document, emplaced in a final gesture of completion, at the moment that the document is about to leave the possession of its maker.14 Teika put these poems on the outer covers of one of the copies of the Lotus made on this occasion as a parting gesture in the fullest sense: their inscription was the last step in the production of the devotional object, and their composition and consignment was the final ave atque vale, requiescat in pace, and kaddish for his late mother’s departed soul. Although he does not say so, it seems likely to me that the six copies of the Lotus he had made on that first anniversary were offered for her sake at Hosshōji, where her remains were interred and which both Shunzei and Teika visited on later anniversaries. What might have become of them after that—if they were ever seen again, if those sutra scrolls had any subsequent use or function, other than to exist as vestiges of their originating occasion and its devotional objectives—we cannot know. But still I want

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to emphasize the importance of the way that Teika situated those poems, on those outer covers of one of the devotional copies of the Lotus Sutra to be offered for his mother’s sake—at one and the same time leading the reader or viewer into what follows (quite literally) and sealing, enclosing, and encapsulating what is held inside each scroll (again quite literally), and also within a long tradition of similar Lotus-related devotional poem-making, which rhetorically, by various means, addresses and encapsulates that text. Such siting offers yet another telling opportunity to think about how such poems work as poems and how they work with, in, and as things, and to ponder the extent to which the functions, conditions, and potentials of these “Buddhist poems” are not in fact shared with many other or most or all other waka and other poetries. We may find them placed with others that appear to be of their kind, as Shakkyōka or as poems of and about mujō, but that should not prevent us from reading them at the same time as poems qua poems. But just what does it mean to say that? I try to answer that question here. By “address” in the foregoing description of the rhetorical function of these “Buddhist poems,” I mean both “speak to” and “direct”: Lotus Sutra waka and other so-called Shakkyōka almost always, in one way or another, engage in a kind of dialogue or interlocutory discourse with the words—the claims, promises, warnings, assurances—of the scripture. They embody an extraction, and sometimes a refraction, of a message articulated in a moment (sometimes also a verse) in the referent text, absorbed, “translated,” sometimes inverted, or reshaped as that message is appropriated, digested, and then re-presented in altered form.15 Teika’s hyōshi poems, in particular, are positioned at and act as the threshold to what lies within (the sutra text itself, its language, its message), but physically and rhetorically they are also positioned, and position themselves, outside that scripture yet in a stance or posture that directs the reader’s attention or memory back toward or into the scripture, back toward the point of reference, while, at the same time, charting the trajectory whereby the poem-speaker has arrived at the state of comprehension, acceptance, guarded embrace, or doubt about the message in that point of reference that is articulated in the poem. It might be possible to suggest that virtually any poem that in some way refers to or addresses itself to another or other texts (and what poem does not?) shares some such qualities, but my point in claiming this would not be to flatten

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the field of “the poem” but rather to emphasize what it is that the seemingly un- or antipoetic Shakkyōka actually shares with and perhaps typifies in that which we consider to be “poem.” Another perhaps too obvious respect in which Teika’s poems in this instance would have identified themselves as such if they were indeed inscribed on those omote threshold covers of the sutra copy was the fact that they would have been spelled out and brushed there in the recognizably domestic mixed script used at the time for almost all waka (which is also the form in which we encounter them today in a modern printed edition that adopts fidelity to the earliest available manuscripts), in contrast to the form and content to be found beyond them, in the texts of the sutra itself (in the liturgically orthodox translation into Chinese). How unusual was this? A search in the waka corpus for other poems explicitly identified in kotobagaki (prose prefaces) or otherwise as having been composed for placement in or on hyōshi or as hyōshi no (w)e (or mikaeshi or mikaeshi no e— frontispieces with illustrations) and in other records and studies of the offering of purposefully decorated or illustrated sutra copies (sōshokukyō) does not yield more than a handful of examples.16 In particular, I have not found any examples of extant sutra copies with poems (of any kind) on their hyōshi (or mikaeshi): the evidence for this practice seems to reside only in textual records, but several of them are intriguing and suggestive in their own ways.17 Together with Teika’s 1194 Lotus poems, I believe they do give us a sense of a kind of tradition, or better a practice in which he, and others, consciously and purposefully took part, that is, a particular way of using poems together with paintings when the task was specifically that of memorializing and generating blessings for a departed loved one. One such example is in Minamoto no Toshiyori’s (or Shunrai’s) Sanboku kikashū, which happens to be the earliest of the shikashū (personal anthologies) to have a specifically entitled Shakkyōka (“Buddhist Poems”) section. But this poem is in the preceding “Laments” (Hitan) section, near the end of a sequence of poems from the period of mourning for Toshiyori’s father, Tsunenobu, who died at Dazaifu in 1097. One might speculate that this placement, by Toshiyori himself, suggests that he viewed this as a somewhat more personal or intimate composition than otherwise. The kotobagaki preface to this poem has some particularly notable details about the occasion and the process of making a memorial offering:

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35. Drawing based on the hyōshie for chapter 28, “[Fugen Bosatsu] ­Kanbotsu hon,” in the Heike nōkyō. The original is the property of ­Itsukushima Shrine, Hiroshima. The short version of the chapter title is embossed in the cartouche at the upper left. Drawing by Sydney Shea.

いみの程に結縁供養しけるに、四巻をあたりたりけるに、みづから 書きて、表紙に服なる男の泣きたるを書きて、尼の向ひたるに、 経の文字より光を ささせて、尼の頂にかけたる、かたはらにあしで にて書ける歌 君こふる涙の瀧おぼほれてふりさけさけぶ聲きこゆや imi no hodo ni kechien kuyō shikeru ni, yon no maki wo ataritarikeru ni, mizukara kakite, hyōshi ni buku naru otoko no nakitaru wo kakite, ama no mukahitaru ni, kehu no moji yori hikari wo sasasete, ama no itadaki ni ­kaketaru, katahara ni ashide ni te kakeru uta

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kimi kofuru namida no taki obohorete furisake sakebu kowe kikoyu ya During the period of mourning for my father, we carried out a kechien kuyō, and as I was assigned the fourth scroll [of the Lotus Sutra], I wrote it out ­myself, and on the outer cover I also drew a man dressed in mourning, ­weeping, and facing him a nun, with rays of light streaming from the letters of the sutra text and falling upon her head; and to the side of this in ashide I wrote: When the cascade of my tears of yearning for you overflows can you, at such great distance, hear my cries?18

Once again, as in Shōnagon’s Bodaiji memoir, there is a kechien kuyō gathering, but here it is held specifically for those bereaved by the recent death of the paterfamilias. There is a division of labor in execution of their collective offering: Toshiyori’s task is to treat the fourth scroll (maki) of the sutra in both visual and textual media. In the most common grouping of chapters (hon, 品), this scroll or fascicle would contain the eighth through the eleventh chapters of the sutra: “Assurances for Five Hundred Arhats” (Gohyaku deshi juki bon), “Assurances for Trainess and Adepts” (Jugaku mugaku jinki bon), “The Teacher of the Dharma” (Hōshi bon), and “The Treasure Stupa” (Kenhōtō bon). It is clear, however, that in this instance, Toshiyori’s referent is something like his own experience of mourning rather than any particular passage or trope in these chapters. (Both approaches to devising devotional poems of this kind were common.) Furthermore, his description of the design for the painting (to be written in ashide, cryptographic script) that would contain his poem resonates with a mikaeshie that would be made many decades later in the Heike nōkyō (The Taira Family’s Sutra Offering, dedicated at Itsukushima in 1164), for an entirely different chapter (the seventeenth, “The Discrimination of Merits,” in the sixth scroll), but which shows an eerily similar scene: a gentleman in purple-hued mourning attire kneels before a nun. His posture suggests an attitude of awe, while hers is ecstatic; surrounded by lotuses and golden luminosity, she is perhaps already in paradise, and he is witnessing or perhaps even sharing her achievement.19 As with Teika’s Lotus project, we can only guess what the sutra copy that Toshiyori and his family members devised in mourning for his father

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36. Drawing based on the mikaeshie for chapter 17, “Funbetsu kudoku hon,” in the Heike nōkyō. Drawing by Sydney Shea.

may have looked like (again, more likely a konjikinjikyō, silver or gold ink on indigo background, rather than a production in the even more lavish format of the Heike scroll), but it appears that he was responsible for the entire hyōshie, poem and picture (perhaps a sketch or under-drawing for a more finished illustration), and that he chose or understood that he ought to make use of ashide—a mode of inscription that, given the sampling of extant Heian- and Kamakura-period works that also display such writing, we readily associate with sutra copying in particular.20 Teika’s kotobagaki makes no mention of how the poems he wrote for his project were to be incorporated in the paintings other than to say they would be “with” or “on” them (hyōshi ni we ni kakaseshi), though it does seem possible and plausible that some of his poems or parts thereof might have appeared in ashide, too, creating a word-puzzle of sorts for the reader/viewer to resolve before passing over the threshold to the sutra text that would follow. And, whether in 1097, in the Minamoto family instance, or in 1194, when Teika made his memorial, and in other similar examples of devotional

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s­ utra-copying of this kind and in these eras, we also have to wonder what then happened. Were such sutra copies “read,” chanted, handled, or just admiringly and reverently viewed, if that? As objects of offering (kuyō), their most important role may simply have been to be presented and then to exist, preserved, among the treasures of the institution to which they then belonged—perhaps brought out from storage on subsequent anniversaries, perhaps simply added to the institution’s store of precious possessions presented by donors and patrons and those who had entrusted the afterlife souls of their loved ones to its care. Certainly, given the Lotus Sutra’s own claims for the merits of making and remaking copies of itself, the object itself was the important thing, whatever its uses or functions may otherwise have been.21 If, as in Toshiyori’s and Teika’s projects, the offering included poems, then they too became items in the store of merit-generating treasures that the institution would maintain—texts embedded within texts among many others in stacks of other similarly precious sutras, the vast majority of which might rarely if ever be used or seen or “read” in any sense after their initial dedication.22 On the other hand, such specially made objects might be more likely to be seen subsequently if they were made or said to have been made by a person of note, particularly if notable as a revered ecclesiast or calligrapher, or both. An example of a hyōshi poem inscription that might be of this kind and that is not explicitly devotional in function, yet perhaps not entirely devoid of religious context, can be found in Myōe shōnin kashū, a posthumous memorial collection honoring Myōebō Kōben (1173–1232; usually referred to simply as Myōe, and admired for his influential ecclesiastic treatises as well as his poetry).23 Details in the kotobagaki place this instance in the same year as Teika’s memorial for his mother (Kenkyū 5, 1194). Myōe was at Jingōji (神護寺), the Shingon center in Takao in the mountains northwest of the capital (he had received his early training there with the monk Mongaku) when he copied a poem elsewhere attributed to then Cloistered Emperor Kazan (967–1008) on the hyōshi of “a certain [unspecified] book” (aru sho no hyōshi ni ki shite iwaku, 建久五年秋八月のころ、神護寺にして、或書表紙記云く). The poem is also to be found in several anthologies, including Shika wakashū (the sixth royal anthology, compiled in the 1150s), where it appears with the headnote, “[Composed] when he had cause to view the world as a source

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of disappointment” (yo no naka hakanaku oboesasetamaihikeru koro, 世の中はかなく覚えさせ給ひける比)—an apparent reference to the political and private circumstances that forced Kazan to abdicate after only two years of rule (984–86): かくしつついまはとならむときにこそくやしきことのかひもなからめ kaku shitsutsu ima ha to naramu toki ni koso kuyashiki koto no kahi mo nakarame We carry on this way and that, and on and on, but when comes that final moment: will having regrets then be of any use?24

The laconic kotobagaki in Myōe shōnin kashū (which misleadingly suggests, by omission, that the poem is Myōe’s) gives us nothing to go on so far as the nature of this unnamed book or its possible significance in association with Kazan or Myōe. Perhaps more pertinent, however, is the fact that Teika certainly knew this poem, perhaps in its Shika wakashū setting; he also included it in an anthology of his own—his Hachidai shō, a collection of his personally selected exemplars from the first eight royal anthologies (that is, the Kokin wakashū through the Senzai wakashū).25 Its kotobagaki there replicates that of the Shika wakashū, but while the earlier anthology placed it among “miscellaneous” poems, Teika cites it as model in the category of “Laments” (Aishō no uta), as befits the transmitted story of the emperor’s mood at the time of its making. Given the timing in the same year as his mother’s first memorial anniversary, it seems unlikely that Teika could have known of the use that Myōe made of Kazan’s poem when he was conceiving his own Lotus hyōshi poems, or, for that matter, when he put together his Hachidai shō. Still, this concurrence suggests that composing and placing poems on the outer covers of precious books and scrolls was indeed a contemporary practice, not a one-off occurrence, and that in addition to the inscription of original poems coordinated with the content of those media, the poem copied might well be another’s, recycled in this setting for one reason or another. There is some corroboration for this to be found if we move ahead some generations further on in the Mikohidari family—that is, Shunzei’s and Teika’s descendants—to a singular example of the inscription of a new

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poem on repurposed materials in Shinsenzai wakashū, the eighteenth royal anthology, compiled in 1359. Here, amid the poems included in the anthology’s Shakkyōka chapter, we read (again, in a kotobagaki) that Nijō Tamefuji, the head of that branch house in his generation, took up pages of poems left behind by his sister Tameko (who died in 1319 or thereabouts) and copied the Lotus Sutra on their reverse sides, ura: 贈従三位為子身まかりて後よみおきて侍りける歌のうらをひるがへ して 法花経を身づからかきて巻 巻の心をよみて表紙の絵にかかせ 侍りけるに、 二の巻のこころ 民部卿為藤 いつまでか我が身ひとつのいでがてに故郷かすむ月をみるべき Zō Jusanmi Tameko [Ishi] mimakarite nochi yomiokite haberikeru uta no ura wo hirugaheshite Hokkekyō wo mizukara kakite makimaki no kokoro wo yomite hyōshi no e ni kakase haberikeru ni, ni no maki no kokoro [Minbukyō Tamefuji] itsu made ka wa ga mi hitotsu no idegate ni furusato kasumu tsuki wo mirubeki After my late sister [who received the posthumous Third Rank] Tameko had died, I gathered poems that she had left behind, and on the reverse sides I copied the Lotus Sutra in my own hand, and I wrote poems on the essential message of each scroll and had these inscribed on the pictures on the outer covers. On the essential message of the fourth scroll, I wrote, For how long, I wonder, will it be so hard for me, alone, to take my leave? and yet I must go on gazing at the moon from our mist-filled home.26

This recasting and transforming of Tameko’s poetic traces—vestiges and remnants of the literary in her life, left in her family’ hands in what must otherwise have been a void—is amplified by the addition of frontispiece paintings and poems on the essential purport of each fascicle (maki maki no kokoro). The topos taken up in both was that which virtually by default would be the one selected to stand for this portion of the sutra throughout the history of such renderings (in both painting and poem) of essential teachings of the Lotus, at least in part because it is about how teaching works. This is, namely, the “Parable of the Burning House” from the “Para-

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bles” chapter (Hiyu bon, 比喩品, the third in the sutra and one of the two, along with the fourth, “Faith and Understanding,” or Shinge hon, 信解品, that make up the second scroll), which appears in Tamefuji’s poem in the phrase I have rendered as “finding it difficult to leave home” (idegate ni) and suggests both the intermediate step of leaving the world by taking up vows (shukke, i.e., ie wo izu, 出家) and the final step of leaving this life (implicitly, a burning house made only of illusion) behind altogether.27 Tamefuji’s poem in reference to this essential moment in the sutra speaks from the position of one who has been left behind in more ways than one—by those who have freed themselves of such illusions and gone ahead of him into lives of devotion, and now, by his sister, in death, and it does so with a considerable degree of dismay and doubt. But in doing so, it also speaks as if in response to the somewhat more confident poem that Teika wrote on the same topos and at the same juncture in his 1194 Lotus sequence: 二巻 The Second Scroll をしまずよあけぼのかすむ花のかげこれも思ひのしたの故郷 woshimazu yo akebono kasumu hana no kage kore mo omohi no shita no furusato I shall have no regrets—not even for the look of these flowers in a misty dawn, for these, I know, are the origin and home of all illusion.

In Teika’s poem, we have the same mist, now enshrouding flowers before it lifts at dawn (that is, before illusions are shed), adding to the attractions of the same beloved old home (furusato) in which that mist obscured the sight of the moon (which was, for Tamefuji, a sign of the goal of Buddhahood from which his earthly ties still held him back). Teika’s poem also works with a classic trope of poems that refer to the “Parable of the Burning House” that Tamefuji’s opts to omit: omohi, “thoughts, concerns, obsessions,” here translated as “the origin and home of all illusions,” also read as “great flames” (omo-hi), thus binding the figure of the alluring blossoms seen through dawn mists to the illusory “home” from which the deluded must be drawn out.28 Still, Tamefuji is openly gesturing to his forebear’s earlier poem in the crafting of his own. And yet that act of recasting and doubling

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is but one of several that are transpiring here. At the same time, in a metamorphosis somewhat analogous to the case of the well-known ­Heian-era Shitennōji fans, with their secular paintings suggesting m ­ onogatari scenes over which the Lotus Sutra text is inscribed, we also have, in Tamefuji’s case, an intentional exercise of devotional repurposing: what once were Tameko’s waka manuscripts are being remade, with the addition of both scripture text and their corresponding poems, into another thing of a different order, allowing the original “thing” to alter utterly. It “leaves its home” and is transformed, and now takes on additional meaning, function, character. Meanwhile, the purpose, frame, and mode exemplified in Teika’s earlier example are abiding constants: Tamefuji’s newly made thing is enabled and empowered precisely by being both like and unlike its predecessor.29 If there were yet one or two or three more examples of this kind to show here, I believe I would be on sufficiently firm ground to claim that such programs and projects for memorial occasions might constitute what we could call a practice, and one that may have had special significance in the extended Mikohidari lineage, perhaps even incumbent on family members in times of ritual mourning and its repeating cycles. But short of that, I do think it is possible to show that such clusters of poems, including Teika’s 1194 set for his mother, can indeed be read as performances of significant crosscanonical and intergenerational gestures in text, specifically occasioned by mourning and memorial rites, and, if so, can serve to support my notion that such linking gestures to, between, and among poems and parts of poems or even to historicized poem-making moments constitute yet another important example of a kind of capitalization on or realization of the thingness of waka poems. “Things . . . designate less the unalterably given material object world than that which becomes visible or palpable only in (or as) its alteration.” So wrote Bill Brown many years ago in his own fundamental alteration of the ways in which many scholars since have thought, spoken, and written about “things.”30 In what follows, I think it is clear that, although I place Teika’s 1194 Lotus sequence at the center of this discussion, I do so for the purpose of seeing it within a continuum of several kinds of alterations, of things becoming other things that in turn imbue those former things and also later things that may stem from them with still greater meaning, force, and, in many cases, poignancy than they might otherwise possess.

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In Teika’s 1194 sequence, in fact, it is possible to identify at least three intersecting registers of resonance that produce this kind of amplifying effect (and no doubt one might say much the same about any number of his works).31 Each of his poems, of course, engages in one way or another— through its figures, citations, allusive gestures to, or echoes of, and in its very form to other poems in the waka corpus—some specifically identifiable, some possessing more generalized features. (If this were not so, we might find it hard to believe that the poems are Teika’s or, for that matter, poems of his time.) A slightly narrower but nevertheless vast source of models, precedents, and touchstones, evident in their materializations in various forms in Teika’s sequence, is the corpus of “Buddhist poetry” within the waka tradition and, specifically, poems on passages in and the essential purports of the Lotus Sutra per se—the composition of which, as a practice, can be traced to early stages of waka history but with a notable crystallization and florescence in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.32 (In my discussion further on, I cite the most salient examples of such pattern- and precedent-defining earlier poems.) Finally, and in a sense most intimately, there is, as I show, a distinctive pattern of reference and gesture (though not of the most conventional kind) in Teika’s poems in this sequence to those of his father, Shunzei, and particularly to a twenty-eight-poem Lotus sequence (Nijūhappon no uta) he composed at the request of Taikenmon’in no Chūnagon no kimi, daughter of Fujiwara no Sadazane, in or around 1142 to 1144, and which forms the core of his Shakkyō chapter in Chōshū eisō, his personal anthology.33 Thus, as was the case with the Daijōe poesy I examined in chapter 2, it must be said that Lotus Sutra waka poesy too is an almost excessively overdetermined practice: the mass and weight of precedent on any individual poet who takes up the task of composing on or in response to passages or composites of the purport of this particular scripture are truly great, but they are also enabling and provide that poet with a rich and hallowed matrix in which to maneuver and with which to engage as he or she creates another distinctive old-new new-old extension of the chain of texts, each of which “speaks” for itself while speaking in the tongues of others. There are, of course, important differences between Shunzei’s and Teika’s two Lotus poem sets (as well there should be, since such cross-referencing in waka derives its vitality from the oscillation of sameness and difference),

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and indeed the extent of their resemblance is quite limited—almost to the point of being beyond notice. To begin with, Shunzei’s sequence conforms more closely to the core format of Lotus Sutra poetry in the waka tradition in that it is a full set of twenty-eight verses, each corresponding to an identified passage in each of the scripture’s twenty-eight chapters, and all of these twenty-eight passages are in fact integrated into the text as the dai or topic tags for each poem (creating a distinctive dialogue of texts in liturgical Chinese—the language of the translated sutra—and Japanese, the waka themselves). In contrast, these reference/topical texts are absent from the surface of Teika’s text, but not wholly so; they are a kind of opaque presence or murmur in the background, identifiable but not explicitly so. And Teika’s poems have a task that Shunzei’s do not in that they take up materials from one or another of the chapters in each scroll (maki) to stand for that scroll in its entirety, while Shunzei’s poems work with passages that stand for each chapter as a distinctive entity. Thus, in their absent but resonant presence in Teika’s sequence, the scriptural referent texts are rather like the “absent but present” honka in Teika’s sotoba kuyō sequence that follows in Shūi gusō (and about which I wrote some years ago34), which also have a memorial function (though of a rather different sort): the opaque scriptural passages in one case, the classic canonical poems to which allusion is made in the other, are ghosts summoned through echoes, gestures, fragmented citations that stimulate memory, or at least have the potential to do so. In this sense, all of these “absent but present” memory texts are also constituent “things” in the making of the new things that are Teika’s sequences of poems and part of their function as they become organic elements inserted into or onto the scrolls of the sutra copy (or on the surfaces of the sotoba placards, in that sequence), yet another set of physical and material things that contain them, activate them as they activate it, and “seal” them to ensure that their activated powers are also contained, preserved, and authorized.35 On the other hand, and unlike both the Lotus and the sotoba sequences of Teika, Shunzei’s 1140s sequence is not a memorial offering, though it is a devotional one—and there is no indication in any of the records of Taikenmon’in no Chūnagon’s project that it was intended for coordination with or inscription in a set of images. In fact, the resemblance or linkage between Shunzei’s sequence and Teika’s, as such, evinces itself for the

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most part in a limited way, in that several (not all) of Teika’s eleven poems for his mother’s memorial appear to take as their topic or referent texts the same scriptural passages as do Shunzei’s poems for the corresponding entries, and not in the treatment of those reference texts as such. In other words, the patterns of sameness and difference that become apparent here are themselves of several kinds, but they do not materialize in the form of one-to-one correspondences except in the sharing of some—not all—of their topics, and even in that respect the sharing is “hidden” (to the reader) somewhere behind or beneath the surface of the text as we find it in Shūi gusō. This pattern is also natural or virtually inevitable, since Lotus poemsequence composers, especially of nijūjappon no uta, generally tend to use many of the same frequently cited text clusters as their topics or referents, whether explicit or implied; they thereby create a kind of textual “iconography” for Lotus-based poesy.36 But I also show that Teika’s Lotus set finds other, yet more subtle ways to gesture toward Shunzei with signs of respect as this sequence for Kaga unfolds. How then should we understand the relationship between the two sequences of father and son, distinguished as they are in their occasions, time, and apparent function? We would certainly expect Teika to have been cognizant of and to have internalized most or all of his father’s works in this vein (and others), including this one, while at the same time he would be unlikely to make overt citational gestures toward them. In his so-called treatises, he advised that such direct citation—what we have come to call honka-dori—should draw on poems in the earliest three royal anthologies but not from more recent works.37 Yet gestures he does make, their meanings are multiple, and, as I have suggested, their making, and that to which gesture is made and the way the gesture is made, are aspects of thingness. Such poem-making entails the coming-into-being of a new thing that is in one way or another shaped by the way it positions itself with respect to, converses, or engages with another or others, and alters it or them. But, as I have also argued here, the dynamic of inheritance, imitation, and alteration that a reader may detect between Shunzei’s and Teika’s two Lotus sequences is only one of several such factors that to one extent or another predetermine, shape, and make their presence felt in Teika’s offering for his mother. The result, overall, is a sequence of poems in which the past comes alive again—much as her survivors hope that the departed Bikufumon’in

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Kaga will or has come alive again, as a Buddha in paradise, and, in a sense, much as the “ghosts” of poets of the past may seem to regain their voices in the sotoba poems—through the tones, forms, and figures shared with other Lotus Sutra poems. And yet it is also a suite of poems in which Teika’s present voice and persona, as a grieving but grateful son, confident in his dead parent’s assured salvation and metamorphosis but still doing what he can, and must, to abet it, can be distinctly heard and seen. Added to this are the gestures of yet another sort that he makes toward the memory of his father’s own 1140s Lotus sequence, which decades earlier had taken its place in the corpus of such devotional poetry. It is for these reasons that I have come to think of Teika’s Lotus sequence as a family memorial—for his mother, to be sure, but also a memorial to his father and, by extension through him, to the entire “family” of waka practitioners in which Shunzei was so exemplary and transformative a presence. Such characteristics of the sequence are apparent and palpable from its first entry onward. As one begins a sequential reading here, it may be beneficial to try to visualize the text not as one might find it on a modern page (which is pretty much the only place where one can see it) but rather on those outer decorated surfaces (hyōshi) of a set of Lotus Sutra scrolls, where each poem, along with visual designs, would invite the reader, viewer, or user in while also sealing, through summary, translation, alteration, and poeticization, the contents to be found within. 一巻 The First Scroll あはれしれ春のそなたをさす光わが身につらききさらぎの空 ahare shire haru no sonata wo sasu hikari waga mi ni tsuraki kisaragi no sora Ah, have pity on me! Skies of the second month full of that light from the east that heralds the spring to come: how hard you are for me to bear!

The phrase that opens this poem (and the sequence) is a plea for compassion, to the skies, to the strengthening spring sunlight (from the east, the cardinal direction traditionally treated as the locus of that season), to “know what I feel”—a sorrow that robs even the prospect of the peak of spring of its capacity to give joy, for the second month is, of course, the

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month of the anniversary of Kaga’s death, a time in which sorrow will naturally dim any seasonal pleasures.38 The imploring imperative ahare shire also announces that this poem and those to follow have a voice, a speaker, and identity that directly and intimately address another persona or interlocutor; the identity of that other will shift slightly hereafter in accommodation to the nature of the (absent, opaque) referent text and Teika’s mode of treating and engaging it, but the “speaking” voice is consistently that of a person (Teika) who feels the weight of the task of intervening on the deceased’s behalf, is burdened by sorrow, but will strive by this means to take measures that will have their desired effect. In this poem, as so often in so-called Shakkyōka, this stance is made evident through the way that it embraces, by translating and transforming, its referent text. Were its opacity reduced, what would materialize would be this, from the sutra’s “Preface” or “Introductory” chapter (序本): 仏放眉間光現諸稀有事 此光照東方万八千仏土 示一切衆生生死業報処 The Buddha emitted from between his brows a ray, Displaying various rare things. This ray illuminated to the east Eighteen thousand Buddha-lands Showing for all living beings The places of birth, death, and retribution for deeds.39

Necessarily altered (and personalized) in Teika’s reframed configuration, this miraculous light has become a beam of early spring sunlight illuminating a space “over there, on that other side” (sonata)—that is, the space in which his mother’s departed soul now dwells, though what it reveals is not yet a source of comfort: there is work still to be done on her behalf, and so . . . the sequence carries on. It does so, as we have already seen, with Teika’s rendering of the “Burning House” parable as a contemplation of the pleasures of springtime which may exemplify the illusions that the spiritual seeker must learn to shed. By the third verse, the seasonal trajectory has passed from spring to summer, and the tone has yielded to cautious affirmation of the comfort that

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the scripture itself can provide. The referent text comes from the “Parable of the Conjured City” chapter, which at one point tells how the Buddha provides seekers with “resting places” along the way to the ultimate understanding and insight necessary for Buddhahood, since that goal, like a vast metropolis, is too difficult to obtain all at once: 三巻 The Third Scroll 郭公たづぬる峯もまどはましかりねやすむるしるべならずは hototogisu tazunuru mine mo madohamashi karine yasumuru shirube narazu ha I would surely have gone astray when seeking out the cuckoo on the peak had I not been guided to this place to pause for rest along the way.

Teika’s rendering at this stage turns the quest into one for a mountain summit where summer’s harbinger sings its song, but, noticeably, it does so in a rhetorical structure that other eminent Lotus sequence composers have employed at this same juncture and in addressing the same materials: こしらへて仮の宿りに休めずは先の道にや猶惑はまし Koshirahete kari no yadori ni yasumezu ha Saki no michi ni ya naho madohamashi Had you not consoled us, and had we not stopped to rest at this temporary lodge, would we not have lost our way on the long road before us? Akazome Emon40 いにしへの契りもかひやななからましやすめて道にすすめざりせば inishihe no chigiri mo kai ya nakaramashi yasumete michi ni susumezariseba I would not have kept that promise I made long ago to reach my goal had I not rested by the road and continued on this way. Fujiwara no Kintō41

Akazome Emon (966–1041) and Fujiwara no Kintō (956–1041) stand together with Senshi, the Great Kamo Priestess, at the earliest stages of the development of a tradition and lineage of Lotus Sutra–based waka se-

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quences at the beginning of the eleventh century, and both of these poems may have been composed for nijūhappon no uta sequences on the same occasion as part of what is believed to have been a group project.42 Neither poem appears in anthologies other than in the collected works of each poet (i.e., Akazome Emon shū, Kintō shū43), but given the stature of both of them in waka history, it seems highly likely that Teika would have known their works in detail—and it may well be that the “if not . . . then how?” structure they both used in response to the same task of addressing this particular chapter (though ubiquitous, in general, in waka rhetoric) sets a precedent that Teika deliberately reworks here. His poem for the fourth scroll adopts yet another strategy of adaptation and reference:44 四巻 The Fourth Scroll 身をしぼる山井の清水音ちかしさきだつ人に風やすゞしき mi wo shiboru yamai no shimizu woto chikashi sakidatsu hito ni kaze ya suzushiki The sound of those waters in a mountain well that will quench my wearying thirst: close by! Are breezes already cooling the one who has gone before me?

This is a readily recognizable rearrangement of tropes from a verse (gātha) section of the “Teacher of Dharma” chapter and especially its final couplet, personalized in such a way as to refer in particular to his mother: 是經難得聞信受者亦難 如人渇須水穿鑿於高原 猶見乾燥土知去水尚遠 漸見濕土泥決定知近水 [This scripture may not be heard easily, And those who receive it in faith are also rare.] Suppose there is a man who is thirsty and in need of water, Who, though he digs on a high plain, Still sees only dry earth, And thus knows that the water is yet far off. At length he sees moist earth and mud,

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Thus knowing of a certainty that water is near. [In this way, men Who do not hear the Scripture of the Dharma Blossom Are very far removed from Buddha-knowledge. If they hear this profound scripture, Which determines precisely the dharma of the voice hearer, This king of scriptures, And, having heard it, think on it with understanding, Let it be known that these persons Are close to Buddha-wisdom.]45

When Teika here prays for a cool, refreshing breeze to bless the one who has “gone before” (sakidatsu hito) as she approaches the long-sought-for thirst-quenching waters that figure more metaphorically in the Hōshibon passage, he may be speaking not only for himself but for other mourners who wish the same for her. This is in fact a remarkable concoction of sameness and difference with respect to Shunzei’s earlier treatment, which in his sequence stands alongside the referent couplet. 漸見濕土泥決定知近水 武蔵野のほりかねの井もある物をうれしく水の近づきにけり Musashino no Horikane no i mo aru mono wo ureshiku mizu no chikadukinikeru At Musashino, the well of Horikane is difficult to dig, but what a joy it is to know that fresh water lies so close.46

Shunzei’s strategy involved the interpolation of an utamakura meisho, a poetic “famous place,” “the well of Horikane, in Musashino,” which instantly naturalized and refamiliarized the setting of this paradigmatic metaphorical scenario. For Teika, however, the more personal and intimate demands and expectations of the memorial occasion shaped a poem that is devoid of such features (his water source is instead a more general, nameless “mountain well”) and much more explicit in its indication of his mother’s departed spirit (sakidatsu hito) as the focus of concern. Teika’s poem for the fifth scroll, on the “Devadatta” chapter, looks to yet other precedents. It is inevitable, given the task of addressing his mother’s

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spiritual condition, that he should address the passage about the miracle of the Nāga Dragon-King’s daughter in the episode that occupies half of that chapter, 爾時竜女 有一宝珠 価値三千 大千世界 持以上仏 仏即受之 At that time, the dragon girl had a precious gem, whose value was the [whole] thousand-million-fold world, which she held up and gave to the Buddha. The Buddha straightway accepted it.47

but somewhat less inevitable, though perhaps highly likely, that he should introduce the figure of the ominaeshi, the maidenflower, as a stand-in for his mother: 五巻 The Fifth Scroll をみなへしうけける玉のあとしあればきえし上葉に露なみだれそ wominaheshi ukekeru tama no ato shi areba kieshi uhaba ni tsuyu na midare so Since the maidenflower has this legacy from the acceptance of the jewel, let me ask that the dew not disturb the departed sheltering leaves.

Years ago, when I wrote about this floral figure and its uses in Buddhist poetry, and particularly in relation to the status of women, I also discussed this slightly later poem of Jien’s, which is actually linked to another passage in a different chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the Yakuōbon, which is of equal ­importance to women as a promise of their eligibility for Buddhahood (see below): 夕づくよさすやをかべに露きえてにしにひらくる をみなへしかな yuhuzukuyo sasu ya wokabe ni tsuyu kihete nishi ni hirakuru wominaheshi ka na On the slope where the early moon shines down and dries the dew, the maidenflower blooms in the west.48

More recently, I came across this puzzling exchange of poems in Kintō shū (Kintō’s personal anthology), which, along with a well-known poem by Izumi Shikibu that uses the ominaeshi in yet another manner in relationship to the problem of women in Buddhism, may constitute one of

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the ­earliest linkages of this flower to that subject49—and yet the exchange seems to treat that connection as a given: 宮のすけの君といふ人、女郎花のわかきをなむ両ほうといふを聞きて 両ほうといかがいふべき女郎花 仏のたねをたつとこそきけ50 返し 女郎花種たえましや白露のなきころを世は本ノママ Miya no suke no kimi to ihu hito wominaheshi no wakaki namu ryauhou to ihu wo kikite ryauhou to ikaga ihubeki wominaheshi Hotoke no tane wo tatsu to koso kike kaheshi wominaheshi tane taemashiya shiratsuyu no naki koro wo yo ha hon no mama51

Commentators are at a loss as to what much of this means. Ryauhou (両方, “both sides” or “aspects”), as used here in both the kotobagaki and the first poem, apparently Miya no suke’s, is particularly obscure, as is the function of the verb tatsu. But perhaps it is something to this effect: “Why must it be said that the ominaeshi is both things at once [perhaps ‘both a feminine being and a Buddha’] for we hear that [even] she eschewed the seeds of Buddhahood.” Kintō’s response (kaheshi) is fragmentary and thus even more difficult to decode, but it seems to question whether the maidenflower (= Nāga Girl) “really did not possess the seed of Buddhahood” when she needed it. One way or another, we can sense that the exchange (between female and male interlocutors) engages with the ever-vexed question as to just how it was that the Nāga Girl accomplished what she did, and just what it means for other women. Teika’s matrix of reference may or may not reach to these precedents in Kintō shū per se, though certainly it embraces much of the long history of the presence of the Nāga Girl topos in waka discourse. In any case, in the poem he devises for this moment in the sequence, the figural scheme and the apostrophic posture of his poem once again speak quite directly and personally, though in poetic code, to his late mother’s particular spiritual needs: kieshi uhaba ni tsuyu na midare so—“let me ask that the dew not disturb the (recently) departed sheltering leaves.”

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Teika’s poem for the sixth scroll, on the Jūryōbon (“The Lifespan of the Thus Come One”), is yet another that works with the same passage in that chapter as does Shunzei’s in his 1140s sequence: 寿量品 時我及衆僧 倶出靈鷲山 我時語衆生 常在此不滅 以方便力故 現有滅不滅 [The beings, bowed down in faith, Straightforward and honest, their minds gentle and pliant, Single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha, Do not begrudge their own bodily lives.] At that time I, together with my multitudinous sam.gha Emerge on the Mount of the Numinous Eagle. I then tell the beings That I will ever be here, not becoming extinct, And that it was by resort to the power of an expedient device That I made a show of extinction or nonextinction.52

Teika seizes on the paradox of “extinction that is in fact nonextinction” (that is, eternal presence) in this passage and renders it in the figure of a (hypothetical) ever-visible full moon: 六巻 The Sixth Scroll てらさなん世々もかぎらぬ秋の月いる山のはにひかりかくさで terasanan yoyo mo kagiranu aki no tsuki iru yama no ha ni hikari kakusade That there may be no limits to the worlds [past, present, and future] illuminated by you, oh autumn moon: hide not your light behind the mountain’s ridge.

In its figural and rhetorical scheme, this poem bears a strong resemblance to one from an earlier period (ca. 1068) that Shunzei selected for inclusion in the Shakkyō section of Senzai wakashū. The occasion described in  the  kotobagaki there likewise bears a strong resemblance to that for

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which Shunzei wrote his own 1140s twenty-eight-poem Lotus poem ­sequence (and others composed for kuyō projects that we have encountered here): 後冷泉院時、皇后宮に一品経供養せられける時、寿量品の心をよめる 月影の常にすむなる山の端をへだつる雲のなからましかば53 藤原国房 GoReizei’in no toki, Kōgō no miya ni ippongyō kuyō serarekeru toki, Juryaubon no kokoro wo yomeru Tsukikage no tsune ni sumu naru yama no ha wo hedatsuru kumo no nakaramashikaba Fujiwara no Kunifusa During the reign of Goreizei, on an occasion when the empress organized an offering of a copy of the Lotus Sutra with each chapter copied by different hands, he composed this on the essential message of the chapter on “The Life of the Tathāgata”: Would that there might be no clouds to separate us from that mountain ridge on which, I hear, the moonlight always casts its rays.

As treated here, this constant moon that Kunifusa yearns for and that Teika exhorts to shine without cessation or impediment is a figure empowered with the capacity to activate certain especially resonant memories, in more than one context, in both visual and textual (poetic) registers. First, there are many evocative images of the full moon rising or resting beyond mountain ridges in Buddhist paintings, where the symbolic meaning of the image is all too clear—it stands for the full (or about to be full) attainment of Buddhahood, or the advent or approach of a saving Buddha or Bodhisattva (and his promised reappearance on Gr.dhrakūt.a, “The Mount of the Numinous Eagle”).54 This is especially so when the figure appears in mikaeshi and other illustrations for the Lotus Sutra per se, as in the painting in the opening section of this same Juryōbon chapter in the Heike nōkyō, where the text is literally superimposed over the image of a moon rising from—or sinking behind?—gently sloping hills (see fig. 37).

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37. Drawing based on the first section of chapter 16, “Nyorai juryō hon,” in the Heike nōkyō. Drawing by Sydney Shea.

At the same time, both poets—Kunifusa and Teika—naturalize and refamiliarize the same figure by invoking its alluring presence in the secular waka realm. I am thinking here of Ariwara no Narihira’s poem, attributed to his fictionalized alter ego (The Chief of the Horseguards of the Right, Migi no muma no kami) in section 82 of The Tales of Ise and to Narihira himself in Kokin wakashū, in which the moon is both itself and the radiant royal presence of his master and patron, Prince Koretaka (who is about to withdraw and retire from a night of outdoor drunken revelry): 飽かなくにまだきも隠るゝか山の端にげて入れずもあらなむ Akanaku ni madaki mo tsuki no kakururu ka yama no ha nigete irezu mo aranamu55 Must the moon hide from our sight so soon, before we have enjoyed it to the full? Oh mountain rim! Draw back, and refuse to let it set.56

The figures that are blended here are of almost equal resonance: the ­Buddha-moon that seems to disappear but in fact never does, the ­allegorical

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moon-prince of whose company his companions cannot get enough, in combination, are a dizzyingly disorienting and reorienting concatenation. All readers may not necessarily find it so, but Teika’s Juryōbon poem is for me one of those instances in which citational gestures across space and time make of this particular memorial exercise for a parent—Teika’s mother—also, at the same time, a memorial gesture of homage to the practice, the tradition, the textual and intertextual heritage, of waka itself— which is another way of saying that waka poems are always about waka poems. And through such a gesture, which almost explicitly overlays a Buddhist figure with a waka trope and vice-versa, to create an ever-oscillating sign (rather like the Buddha, who is both extinct and then again not really so, and like the moon in its comings and goings), Teika does homage and honor to Shunzei, the living keeper and embodiment of the waka tradition, its tools, its values, and its most profound articulator of the grounds for identifying it with and pursuing it in the same manner as Buddhist devotion and practice.57 If a devotional poem such as this and those with which it keeps company in this sequence are meant to have an effect, a positive consequence or outcome (kōka), is their efficacy not strengthened, made possible, ensured through such layering of meaning, and accentuated in the transfer or translation from a secular to a sacred setting, and back again and again, ad infinitum? Then again, is there really any kind of border between those two realms? I think Teika’s arrangement of figures suggests that if such a border exists, it is a porous one, and one that it is especially fitting to traverse or straddle on an occasion such as this. When Teika moves next to a poem for the seventh scroll, he once again takes up a topos (like that of the “Dragon King’s Daughter” in the “Devadatta” chapter), this time from the Yakuōbon (“The Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King”), that is explicitly relevant to women and, thus, to his mother’s condition. And once again, his “absent but present” referent text is exactly the same as that with which Shunzei worked at this juncture in his 1140s sequence: 七巻 薬王品 於此命終 即往安樂世界

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[If a woman, hearing this Chapter of the Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King can accept and keep it, she shall put an end to her female body, and shall never again receive one. If after the extinction of the Thus Come One, within the last five hundred years, there is then a women who, hearing this scriptural canon, practices it as preached,] at the end of this life she shall straightway go to the world-sphere Comfortable (Sukhāvatī) [to the dwelling place of the Buddha Amitāyus, where he is surrounded by a multitude of great bodhisattvas, there to be reborn on a jeweled throne among lotus blossoms.]58

As previously noted, this chapter was particularly important to women because it lays out a guaranteed path to salvation for them, albeit through

38. Drawing based on the mikaeshie for chapter 25, “Yakuō Bosatsu,” in the Heike nōkyō. The image contains embedded characters that reproduce a key verse of the sutra text (inochi owarite sunawachi anraku sekai, reading from lower center to upper left), which then gives way to pictorial elements to complete the embodiment of the Bodhisattva’s guarantee that women will be reborn in the Buddhist paradise. Drawing by Sydney Shea.

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gender transformation (as is also the case with the “Dragon King’s Daughter” episode). The famous Heike nōkyō frontispiece cues the viewer to this, too—and does so explicitly with its ashide inscription of the final words of this same topic text (即往安樂世界): “she shall immediately be reborn in Paradise.” But it is now a full year since Kaga’s death. What is her condition now—where is she—and how can this be addressed in a poem? I have described the effect of several of the poems in this sequence (and, by implication, the sequence as a whole) as a process in which “translation,” as a form of transformation or metamorphosis that yields a brief disorientation followed by reorientation, combines with a “naturalizing” effect in the figures and tropes in play as they find their new places and take on same-but-different altered identities in the waka resolution (which, in turn, offers new possibilities for variations and elaborations). The way that Teika works through this process, and the poem that results, is particularly striking and, I think, especially moving: he domesticates the message and the ambience in which it is conveyed, making it both quite personal and at the same time more broadly inclusive of human experience in the idealized setting of family and, especially, mother-son relations: 七巻 The Seventh Scroll 向はれよ木の葉しぐれし冬の夜をはぐくみたてし埋火の本 mukahareyo konoha shigureshi fuyu no yo wo hagukumitateshi uzumibi no moto Direct these blessings to her—the one who nurtured me, the source of enduring warmth on wintry nights of rustling fallen leaves.

Here, mother is figured as hagukumitateshi uzumibi no moto, “the one who nurtured and kept me [or us] warm, tending fires on winter nights of rustling, chilly showers,” that is, a source (moto) of sustaining protection and comfort whose own soul must now be comforted and sustained with the sutra’s redirected promised benefactions (mukawareyo) (“Direct these blessings [back on her]”). That is, it should do just exactly what such a memorial is supposed to do: transfer the merit earned through devout action to another (absent, departed) who is in need. The invocation of chilly and damp “nights of rustling fallen leaves” (konoha shigureshi fuyu no yo) also

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grounds that figure in its newfound waka home with its explicit seasonality. A great distance has been traveled from the absent but present and succinct sutra passage that exemplifies this section of the Lotus: in another context, this poem might be taken for one that has nothing to do with Buddhist scripture or devotion, but here it achieves another kind of fusion of those secular and nonsecular worlds that, in fact, may not be so remote or distinct from one another after all. That same fusion plays out in yet another manner in Teika’s poem for the eighth scroll, which is yet another that apparently shares the same topic text as Shunzei’s for the 1140s sequence—an extract from this lengthy verse passage in the Fumonbon (“The Gateway to Everywhere of the Bodhisattva He Who Observes the Sounds of the World”) describing the extraordinary ability of Avalokiteśvara (Kannon) to rescue those who find themselves in peril: 普門品 (八巻) 弘誓深如海 歴劫不思議 侍多千億佛 發大淸淨願 我為汝略説 聞名及見身 心念不空過 能滅諸有苦 假使興害意 推落大火坑 念彼觀音力 火坑變成池 或漂流巨海 龍魚諸鬼難 念彼觀音力 波浪不能没 His broad vows as deep as the ocean, Throughout kalpas beyond reckoning or discussion, He has served many thousands of millions of Buddhas, Uttering great and pure vows. I will tell it to you in brief. The hearing of his name, the sight of his body, And the recollection of him in thought do not pass away in vain, For he can extinguish the woes of existence. Even if someone whose thoughts are malicious Should push one into a great pit of fire, By virtue of constant mindfulness of Sound-Observer The pit of fire would turn into a pool. Or, one might be afloat in a great sea,

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In which are dragons, fish and sundry ghosts. By virtue of constant mindfulness of Sound-Observer The waves could not drown one.59

Given its colorful and dramatic examples of perilous situations and their immediacy to human experience and human fears, which the Bodhisattva has vowed to allay, it is no surprise that this passage was often the subject of pictorial depiction as well as reference in waka renderings. Shunzei’s 1140s poem on this passage is relatively simple, its links to the cited sutra passage quite transparent, and one might say that therein lies its power: ちかひける心のやがて海なれば人を渡すもわづらひもなし Chikahikeru kokoro no yagate umi nareba hito o watasu mo wazurai mo nashi Having made the vow his heart was like an ocean and because of this there was no hardship at all in taking people to the other side.60

Teika’s, on the other hand, startles us with his use of heavy, unaltered Buddhist terms (ryakkō, taken directly from the next line of the gātha, and shōji, “life and death,” the matter at hand): it seems to insist that these words too can be domesticated in the waka sphere, where once again the “scene” becomes a wintry one, as determined by the poem’s position as the sequence draws to its close. At the same time, and despite that striking difference from Shunzei’s rendering, it looks and sounds like a poem in which the son has purposefully and deliberately rearranged and revivified the figures and the scheme of the father’s earlier verse: 八巻 The Eighth Scroll 歴劫の弘誓の海に舟わたせ死生の波は冬あらくとも ryakkō no guzei no umi ni fune watase shisei no nami ha fuyu arakutomo Let her boat pass safely across the sea of eternal vows, rough though the wintry waves of life and death may be.

This relationship between Shunzei’s poem and Teika’s cannot be said to be one of honka and honka-dori, allusive variation on a classical precedent.

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But it is hard to miss the reverberations that signal how Teika is literally channeling his father’s poem. In my translation I have interpolated a possessive pronoun, “let her boat pass,” because I think context justifies it; like the desideratives and apostrophes we have seen elsewhere in the sequence. the petitioning form, watase, is surely for Kaga’s sake, or rather that of her departed soul, which may still be in transit from one condition or state to another. If so, surely a poem that combines the voice of her prayerful son with echoes of that of his father, her spouse, is a fitting way to close this main section of the sequence. But in fact the sequence has not yet come to its conclusion. As in Shunzei’s and many other Lotus Sutra poem suites, additional sutras that were often liturgically grouped with the Lotus remain to be treated here, and as is common in such configurations, the first of these is the Muryōgikyō, the “Sutra of Innumerable Meanings”:61 無量義經 Muryōgikyō: The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings たのもしな光さしそふさかづきを世をてらすべきはじめとや見ぬ tanomoshi na hikari sashisohu sakaduki wo yo wo terasubeki hajime to ya minu I am reassured! How can I take the sight of this wine cup catching rays of light as other than the dawn of the whole world’s illumination?

At first, a reader may wonder what a wine cup is doing in a memorial poem for a late mother and wife, but its role is to serve as the medium for yet another leger-de-main relocation of tropes: it finds its way here from a much anthologized and recontextualized poem by another woman, Murasaki Shikibu, written during the banqueting on the fifth night after the birth of a royal prince, as described so memorably in her diary. When urged by Michinaga—the royal infant’s exultant maternal grandfather—to compose during a round of celebratory sake toasts, she tells us, she composed this verse, which later also appears in the Eiga monogatari accounts of this occasion and also in the Goshūi wakashū, among other places: めづらしきひかりさしそふさかづきはもちながらこそ千代をめぐらめ mezurashiki hikari sashisohu sakazuki ha mochinagara koso chiyo wo megurame

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As we hand it round under a full moon, may this cup, shining with rare reflected light, bring everlasting blessings.62

Those “other places” where it can be found include Shunzei’s Korai fūteishō, where it appears among the exemplars of festive (ga no uta) poems he cites from the Goshūi wakashū, and in Teika’s Hachidai shō, also as a representative of the best that that same anthology has to offer. It is tempting to say, then, that it was a poem admired, perhaps even prized, by both father and son, and that they may well have known of their mutual regard for it—in which case Teika’s gesture toward it here is once again a move that may have had p ­ articular significance in the context of their nuclear family, and one that Kaga, were she alive, would surely have appreciated as well. In any case, as taken up by Teika here, Shikibu’s classicized poem of auspicious moonbeam reflection and sake toasting for Michinaga and his progeny (both the ­Empress and her newborn son, and their family as a whole, from whom Shunzei and Teika also descend) morphs, through Teika’s allusive alchemy, to an awed a­ nticipation of universal Buddhahood, for the late Kaga and for all. Teika’s next poem, on a brief verse passage in the Fugen Sutra, is another that reworks much of what Shunzei did in his earlier 1140s rendering, and thus it once again gestures to him while addressing itself to the late Kaga’s needs. Shunzei’s poem, with its referent text, is, 衆罪如霜露 恵日能消除 All crimes are but frost or dew, disappearing in the light of a benevolent sun. 露霜とむすべる罪のくやしきを思とくこそ朝日なりけれ tsuyushimo to musuberu tsumi no kuyashiki wo omohitoku koso asahi narikere It is the morning sun that unravels and disperses all anxiety from past crimes that lay upon us like dew and frost until just now.63

Yet Teika’s poem is also, once again, an exercise in the significance of sameness and difference: he retains the figure of the dazzling morning sun (which comes right out of the gātha couplet) at the core of his poem as well, but he takes his materials in another direction, to refer more intimately to memories of the time a year earlier, at his mother’s death:

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普賢經 Fugengyō: The Sutra of Bodhisattva Fugen 朝日かげおもへばおなじよるの夢わかれにしぼるしのゝめのつゆ asahi kage omoheba onaji yoru no yume wakare ni shiboru shinonome no tsuyu This morning sunlight: just as it was when that night of dreams ended in parting, a dawn of dew and tears.

As is sometimes the case in Shakkyōka, from the time of the Kamo Priestess Senshi onward, this is a poem that, in another context, might most readily be taken as an erotic verse (koi no uta): “nighttime dreams” (yoru no yume—that is, the otherworldly interval of lovers’ intimacies), “parting” (wakare), and the “dawn of dew and tears” (shiboru shinonome no tsuyu) would all unmistakably suggest as much were they not encountered here in reference to the (remote) Fugengyō couplet and framed within Teika’s full sequence, which utterly alters them while not quite completely effacing those erotic overtones, retained in poetic memory. The sutra’s morning sun is thus made to stand for many things at once: it is a sign of the power of Buddhism to cleanse and prepare the devotee or the departed soul for further and better transformations, but it also transforms into a figure for human emotional loss, separation, sorrow, and their residual weight, even through the passage of time and the gradual healing that it brings. It is also a respectful gesture to Shunzei, author of a poem that is its close kin, and sharer in that grief and in the mourning and healing process. Finally, to close and seal the sequence, Teika addresses the Heart Sutra. Both Shunzei in the 1140s and Teika in 1194 render the sutra’s famous conundrum couplet, 色即是空 空即是色 (shiki soku ze ku, ku soku ze shiki; “The phenomenal is all inherently empty, all emptiness is inherently phenomenal”), as does many another Shakkyōka poet,64 through translation and manipulation of its key terms—“color” (shiki, iro) and “emptiness, or ‘The Void’” (kū, munashi, but also the more poetic sora, “sky”)—embedded in poeticized variants of its paradoxical formulae. Shunzei’s poem is 春の花秋の紅葉の散るを見よ色はむなしき物にぞ有ける haru no hana aki no momiji no chiru wo miyo iro ha munashiki mono ni zo arikeru

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Behold, the scattering of the flowers in spring, the colored leaves in autumn: now we know that color, and desire, are but empty things.

And Teika’s is 心經 Shingyō: The Heart Sutra むなしさをみよのほとけのはゝならば心のやみをそらにはるけよ munashisa wo miyo no hotoke no haha naraba kokoro no yami wo sora ni harukeyo If the Buddhas of the Three Worlds who said “Behold: the Void” are as kind as Mother was, then let any darkness that may remain in her heart be cleared away!

Teika channels and amplifies Shunzei’s version through his recapitulation of the key term munashi (emptiness, The Void), but then he makes a couple of more complicated moves. First, he turns Shunzei’s miyo (“Behold!”) into another of those unfurling kakekotoba puns in which the first meaning, “Behold the Void!” yields to “the Buddhas of the Three Worlds” (miyo no hotoke). (The sequence of this unfolding is reversed in the syntax of my rendering.) Then he introduces a wholly new motif and ambience as he turns the hallowed secular waka figure of a parent’s “dark heart in anxiety for a child” (kokoro no yami), which stems from the tenth-century poet Kanesuke’s famous verse of anxiety for his daughter when he first placed her in court service, into a sign for his own mother’s former human state of illusion prior to enlightenment.65 The transformation from paternal anxiety (in the foundation poem) to maternal benevolence (in the present one) is also hard to miss. As I have suggested several times, such gestures, at just such a juncture, to a core canonical high-classical poem can also be read as gestures of respect to Shunzei himself, not just because it is about parental concerns but more so because of what the waka canon and its traditions meant to that particular parent, and to his son—and, surely, what they meant for Kaga as well. But look once more at Shunzei’s poem: haru no hana aki no momiji no chiru (春の花秋の紅葉の散る): “the scattering of the flowers in spring, the colored leaves in autumn.” Along with what has often been said about a famous poem of Teika’s and its roots, ostensibly, in a prose passage in The

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Tale of Genji (an instance of honzetsu—an allusive gesture to sources such as monogatari rather than to poems per se), I think this poem of Shunzei’s suggests yet an additional set of intertextual echoes to listen to and images to conjure when one hears or sees Teika’s indelible 見わたせば はなももみじも なかりけり浦のとまやの秋の夕暮 miwataseba hana mo momiji mo nakarikeri ura no tomoya no aki no yuhugure. As I gaze out over the scene, there are neither cherry blossoms nor colored leaves: autumn evening at a hut by a bay.

He first composed this work for an utaawase in 1200 and it was later included in Shin kokin wakashū. I now wonder if this famous “empty scene” (a rather special void that is not one) also has Shunzei’s ghost drifting

39. An imaginary portrait of Fujiwara no Teika with his “Miwataseba . . . aki no yūgure” poem, by Kanō Tan’yū (1602–74). Hanging scroll, ink and light color on silk. 28.0 x 39.6 cm. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

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­somewhere around its edges. If so, then might all this, too—the metamorphosed phrase, the shift of contextual frame that may or may not be one— be another form of familial bonding, here between the living but aged father and his son, forged on this occasion of their shared mourning for Kaga through the rearrangement of potent bits of poetic matter, just as are so many of the poems Teika composed for his mother’s sake, and just as are so many others as well? Teika’s Lotus Sutra poem sequence for Kaga ends here, but with the foregoing thoughts about familial gestures and their place in waka in mind, I want to conclude with one last poem: it is Teika’s memorial for the thirteenth anniversary of Shunzei’s death, so composed in 1216—but placed ahead of the 1194 memorial sequence for Kaga in Shūi gusō. Once again there is a kechien kuyō in which the extended family of mourners gathers and shares poems in accord with Shunzei’s explicit request (yuigon), and so, to a certain extent, it is an occasion not unlike that on which Toshiyori composed his poem for his own father’s sake. Teika records this in his anthology as follows: 亡父十三年の忌日に、遺言に侍りしかば、歌よむ人々すゝめて結縁 供養し 侍しに、嚴王品 Bōfu jūsannenn no kijitsu ni, yuigon ni haberishikaba, uta yomu hitobito susumete kechien kuyō shihaberishi ni, Gonnō-bon On the thirteenth anniversary of my father’s death, in accordance with instructions left by him, we who make poems held a kechien kuyō, and on the Gonnō-bon I wrote: この道をしるべとたのむあとしあらば迷ひしやみもけふははるけよ kono michi wo shirube to tanomu ato shi araba mayohi shi yami mo kefu ha haruke yo If there be some lasting mark of what we do here to guide him on his Way, then let any trace of confounding darkness clear away this very day!66

This poem and the act of its making and its inscription carry double meaning, as Kubota and others suggest: the Lotus teachings are the potent,

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everlasting heritage (ato) that show the way. So is the memory of Shunzei, whose traces and directives (yuigon, ato) are likewise a luminosity, a radiance that keeps the darkness—that “parental” darkness of anxiety that doubles as spiritual ignorance and confusion—at bay for the makers of uta, practitioners of and voyagers on its “way,” who now gather (as “we who make poems,” uta yomo hitobito) to fulfill his wish. But there is more: the central episode of the Gonnō-bon is a family drama in which the sons of “King Fine Adornment” (Shubhavyūha; Myōshōgonnō, 妙荘厳王) do all they can to convert and enlighten their father. They “dance in empty space to a height of seven tala-trees,” they “display a variety of magical feats in empty space.” “In this way, the two sons, by resort to the power of expedient devices [hōben no chikara], skillfully converted their father, causing his heart to believe and understand.”67 Teika’s poem of 1216 is not a hyōshi no e or frontispiece poem, but it is another feat, an act of paternal remembrance, an intervention of a child for a parent, binding the present and the absent through gestures of commemoration, recapitulation, and the perpetuation of a powerful practice. It realizes hōben no chikara as uta no chikara—the power of the poem. And how is this done? By making a poem that is not only about what the sutra teaches and how it helps the members of this family put their mourning in perspective; it is also a poem that, in its own becoming, speaks to what it means to make and perform a poem as such. Here, just as in Teika’s fervent wishes for his mother—inscribed at the portals or thresholds or as seals of those eight votive scrolls of the Lotus and integrated into the material and symbolic fabric of the holy text—Buddhist faith and faith in the power of the words of waka combine in a trusting prayer. And that is why these things made in a matrix of converging traditions and practices—these poems—might just possibly be the things that did, or will, dispel the darkness, once and for all.

SI X

Postscript Where Does the Poem Go?

O

nce made, what happens to a poem and how does it travel to reach us as readers? And by what paths do we find our ways to poems, and in what forms and by what means do we read them—especially when they come from a time and place remote from us? Where and how do poems live, and what directs or causes their movement? These are among the many questions I have considered while writing this book, prompted to do so in great part through conversations about such matters initiated by students and colleagues who share my abiding interest in waka, in poetry writ large, and, in particular, in the challenge of speaking and writing about this Japanese poetry in a vibrant and compelling mode that, while never giving short shrift to its particular or unique features, places it in conversation with other poetries, other traditions, conventions, and forms of poetry criticism and scholarship, so as to further the as yet incomplete task of fully integrating the study of Japan’s pre­modern literature in humanistic scholarship and discourse. I would like to close this volume with a few final thoughts about waka, the reading of waka, and the study of waka in this frame. In the preceding chapter, I invited the reader to envision the now longlost scrolls that Teika had decorated for his mother’s memorials with his poems and the paintings he commissioned for them on the outer surfaces 2 02

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of each of the scrolls in one set of a larger set of six that were offered on that occasion—perhaps, as I have suggested, at Hosshōji, the family temple, the site of the interment of Kaga’s remains. From the first pages of this book, I also urged readers to think about waka, where applicable, as parts of material things but also as material things themselves, at least insofar as the ways in which they are handled, manipulated, transported, and preserved in what I call “waka culture.” It can be challenging but still very useful to envision such poems on or in the surfaces or spaces for which they were first conceived and in which those readers who may first have encountered them would have found and read them—and here, as I have also suggested, “reading” poems could mean many things: voicing, viewing, parsing, decoding, or in some cases simply acknowledging their existence as precious, potent things that are part of other precious, potent things. None of us can see a Heian-period Daijōe waka screen or a suhama from that time or an “original” “Eight Views of Ōmi” rendering (unless we take the screens made for Enman’in to be those originals and can solve the mystery of their whereabouts), or Teika’s kechien kuyō scrolls (which, once presented to Hosshōji, may never have been meant to be seen, held, or read again). It is only because these poems found their ways into other places and spaces, through copying and transmission through the ages and eventually, in modern times, into print that we can encounter them, study them, ponder them, and reproduce them as I have done here. Twenty years ago, when I was conducting the research and writing that led to my book Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japa­nese Poetry, I carried out just about all of my work, and read just about all of the poems that I discussed there, in modern printed sources, some with extensive notation and commentary, some with little or none. To track networks of allusive reference and gesture I relied heavily on the index volumes of the Shinpen kokka taikan (in which one can search poems through any given five- or seven-morae “line” or ku of any of the hundreds of thousands of poems in that vast compendium). For one chapter, I focused in particular on waka that Teika and a group of his contemporaries wrote for inscription on the sliding doors of Emperor GoToba’s private quarters in a monastery called Saishōshitennōin, which also bore lavish landscape paintings of famous places in all the provinces of Japan—yet again, a set of poems meant to be seen, read, perceived as part of a visual program, one

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that would shift and rearrange itself as those sliding doors opened or closed or as the viewer scanned different parts of those rooms. In that instance, too, those paintings, those sliding doors, are things that have long since perished (the story goes that GoToba himself destroyed them): their physical presence is sustained only through subsequent copying and transmission, in Teika’s and the other poets’ personal anthologies, in many cases, and in other documents as well—including several royal anthologies in which selected poems from the set are included by admiring editors. Just as I was finishing that project, I learned that a CD-ROM searchable database version of the Shinpen kokka taikan (which was itself a modernized revision of a much earlier compendium, the original Kokka taikan) had been published. Suddenly, the research method I had been using in my work in and across the canon was obsolete: searches for strings of text, single words, names, phrases, or full ku that I had tracked across the corpus through a relatively slow and laborious process could now be accomplished, and with more comprehensive results, in a matter of minutes. More recently, this database has become available in a Web-based version, and its coverage, moving beyond waka to other forms and genres (such as haikai and haiku) has grown. The potential that it holds for many kinds of research in pursuit of many different kinds of questions about Japanese poetry has likewise expanded exponentially. But what does this mean so far as the question of “where, and in what form, and how” do we encounter these poems? The material substances and surfaces of which they were once a part and by means of which they have survived now are joined by media in which we find, peruse, and read them in yet new ways—aggregated in their original contexts, if we choose, or disaggregated as something more like data points, items in a survey or census, entries in a vast index. Are they then still poems? Perhaps in becoming parts of these new things—databases in a virtual network, stored in servers that share them across invisible Ethernets (literally “ethereal”)— they themselves have also become new things, with a new kind of materiality. Or have they? As I look back over the years in which I have been thinking and writing about waka, I recall that I began with yet another set that Teika composed to accompany paintings on yet another set of sliding doors: these

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were at Ninnaji, in Kyoto, and they were a sequence of poems designed in coordination with paintings about “the flowers and birds of the twelve months.” Those original sliding doors, first seen by Teika and his patron, a cloistered prince, in 1207, are also long, long gone, but later reproductions in both similar and different formats (screens, scrolls, even sets of ceramic dishes) allow us to encounter them again in physical spaces, as parts of things.1 I have also written about another sequence or cycle of poems that Teika wrote (date not known) for inscription on a set of sotoba (Buddhist memorial placards), for a very different kind of kuyō offering in memory of the dead—in this case, long-dead poets whose poems he alludes to in each of those new poems. It is difficult to know whether those sotoba ever existed. Most likely they did, but if, as seems probable, they were placards of wood onto which his poems were inked, they must surely have perished early on, first fading as do modern memorial sotoba in Japanese cemeteries, then rotting away—unless, perhaps, the unknown and unnamed patron who first suggested the making of this program to Teika, or someone else, gathered, preserved, and stored them. Again, we have only his poems, which, like his Saishōshitennōin and “flowers and birds of the twelve months” poems, and the Lotus Sutra sequence I have discussed here, all are to be found in his own anthology, Shūi gusō, where they stand alongside other records of his complete oeuvre as he assembled and organized it. There, we can read them as integrated sets and series, grouped with others of their kind, alongside almost all the rest of his literary output in poetic forms. Such reading can tell us a great deal about him as a poet, just as the arrangement of poems in selective, integrated anthologies can tell us much about the poetic values, fashions, and fads of the times in which they were both made and so collected and arranged, and perhaps even more about the values and preferences of the editors and arrangers of those collections. But we have no choice: we must read such poems in such settings in disaggregation from the spaces—in so many cases, physical spaces and surfaces that held much else to see and “read” besides—for which they were made and where they were most likely first seen, or were intended to be seen. There is little use in bemoaning these losses and transformations, and in any case that is not really the point I want to make here. Rather, it is

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simply to emphasize how important it is to remember that time and change have altered and will continue to alter the dynamics of each encounter we may have with a literary text—such as a waka poem, a group of poems, an ­anthology of poems, and writings about them. Of the poems I have written about here, I could only discuss those in the “Eight Views of Ōmi” with an extant, premodern (ca. 1690) version that fully integrates them in a single physical object (a scroll) with the images as (we believe) they were originally intended to be encountered. Almost every other poem I have discussed here has long since been disaggregated from its original place and space. They have all since then had long lives and will continue to do so, and they are no less poems for having been separated from their original frames, contexts, or “homes.” They present themselves to us now in altered forms and housings and in media that never existed when they first were made, but to fully appreciate them as poems and to get somewhere deeper into the question of what kind of poetry waka is, I have tried to do what I could here to reconstruct the fuller dimensions and textures of their onetime materialities and to suggest what some of the dynamics of reading them would have been when they were first made, presented, seen, and (in some cases, at least) heard. “How they were heard”: in fact I have said next to nothing about the sonic or musical aspects of the poems I have treated here because these elements of their poeticity are also, essentially, lost to us as well. It is still a risky business to try to reconstruct the audial qualities of Heian and other premodern stages of Japanese, especially with poems that we can only see as ex post facto texts. (What may look to us like alliteration or a pleasing pattern of repeated or blended or contrasting vowel or consonant effects as the beats of the poem unfold may have been nothing of the kind in the poem’s own time.) This means that an utterly essential characteristic of this poetry still cannot be accounted for. Perhaps, as historical linguistic research continues and matures, this aspect too can be restored to studies of waka and other Japanese poetries; until that happens, our studies in this field, in this respect at least, will always be severely limited in the attention that can be given to this key aspect, faute de mieux. On the other hand, scholars outside of Japan in recent years have begun to give far more attention than in the past to premodern and early modern handwritten print versions of many kinds of literary (and other) texts, and

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to the experience of reading them without recourse to the extensive annotations (often including modern Japanese translations or paraphrases) on which they might otherwise rely if reading those same texts in modern printed editions. Such “authentic” and primary reading practices have always been the starting point, or at least a required step, in reading and research in literary (and other) studies in Japanese scholarship. But while such bibliographic fidelity has long been held in the highest esteem in Japanese academe, outside Japan—especially in the United States—the field of Japanese literary studies, which grew out of the dual growth of scholarship within linguistics and philology, for one, and practical language study (first, in wartime, for intelligence, then for strategic defense, and then in so-called area studies) in its earliest stages placed the highest premium on translation as a demonstration of language proficiency and only gradually (in the late twentieth century) shifted its energies and affiliations toward literary criticism and engagement with literary theory (as such)—belatedly, compared to many other literary fields of much longer standing. The recent and current turn that some non-Japanese scholars of Japanese literature have made toward the study of primary, “authentic” texts and the acquisition of the skills necessary to read them is, in part, a course-correction following this belated period of critical ferment and maturation, though it also constitutes another way in which these scholars are aligning their work with one of the most longstanding and respected practices within Western literary studies—the close study and comparison of manuscripts (including holographs, where they can be found), early editions, archival materials, ephemera, and their transmission histories. So while some scholars of Japanese poetry (like me) are spending much of their time entering strings of text into database search windows to trace the transmissions of specific poems across times and contexts, or to track the use and reuse of specific tropes, phrases, figures, and configurations, others are pouring over scrolls, worn and often worm-eaten bound books, and inscriptions on works of art, some of which have long been in library collections, others that have only recently come to light. My argument here in this book has been to claim and to try to show that both of these modes of research (and others) are forms of attention to the materiality, the thingness of waka—and that consideration thereof offers new ways to read waka and to enter into conversations about it with scholars who think, work,

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teach, and write across the spectrum of contemporary literary and humanistic learning. Whenever I teach about The Tale of Genji, whether in the texts that have come down to us in Heian Japanese (their course, too, flows through the hands of Teika as editor and transmitter, as it happens) or in translation, there are a number of moments in the text and the opportunities to talk about them to which I look forward with particularly keen anticipation. One of these comes close to the end of the chapter called, in Japanese, Makibashira (it has been translated as “The Cypress Pillar,” “The Handsome Pillar,” and “A Beloved Pillar of Cypress”). An adolescent girl is being forced to leave her childhood home, the only one she has ever known: her father is displacing her mother with a younger woman, in part because his first and primary wife seems to have lost her mind—or, rather, it has been taken over by a demonic possessing spirit that has caused her to act irrationally and, on occasion, violently. On a snowy night, the girl’s father is pressing the retinue of his new wife to complete the move and at the same time pressuring his old wife and her daughters to vacate the house (their sons will stay with him). We then learn that this girl has been especially fond of leaning against a particular pillar (hashira) when seated in her favorite room in the house: it suddenly dawns on her that other occupants—strangers—will soon be taking her place there (hito ni yuzuru kokochi shitamahu mo ahare nite: she was literally moved—distressed and saddened—by this thought). She finds a scrap of deeply dark-red (almost black) paper (hihada iro—perhaps, as some commentators suggest, chosen to match the color of the wood of the pillar), almost frantically dashes off a poem on it, and then, using a hairpin, crams the paper into a crevice of the pillar (see fig. 11). The poem reads, 今はとて宿離れぬとも馴れきつる真木の柱はわれを忘るな ima ha to te yado karenu to mo narekitsuru maki no hashira ware wo wasuru na The moment is at hand and I must leave this house; but oh, you pillar —you who have so long given me comfort—forget me not!2

Chapters later, we meet this girl again, now a young woman. Her farewell to her home is so notable that this pillar not only gives its name to the

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chapter (as do other evocative figures in poems that occur in key moments in many other chapters) but also to this character herself: the text subsequently refers to her as “the women who engaged with that ‘cypress pillar,’” so “Makibashira” becomes the sobriquet by which she is known in Genji parlance. But we never learn what happened to her time capsule, her furtive, desperate “message in a bottle.” I admit that the episode is sentimental; still, it works every time, for me at least. It is a sort of inverse ubi sunt, a claim that “I was here, and my affections always will be, as long as or longer than this pillar stands, concealing what I have written as I go,” but it is also like the scratching of initials by a child in wet concrete, the making of a mark of presence, a kind of taking possession of the surface or space that contains it: an elegant graffito. I think now, as I look back on the many times I have read this passage, that it is one of the things that led me to the ideas I have tried to articulate in this book. Makibashira’s poem is written on a scrap of paper, perhaps the best or only thing she could lay her hands on amid the turmoil in her house, and then lodged inside another thing, the pillar to which it is so pleadingly addressed, perhaps even camouflaged by the paper’s matching color. Was it like that set of sutra copies with Teika’s poems on their covers—once deposited, sequestered, maybe never to be seen or touched again? Did anyone ever read it? In the medium of fiction, in the materiality of a text transmitted through many hands now for over a century (not without alterations and transformations, losses and gains as it passed through those hands), we are allowed to read it again and again. And so, like so many other poems, it is there if we will look for it, and if we are fortunate, it always will be.

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Appendix 1 Shunzei’s Yuki-Side Poem Sequence for the Daijōe of 1166 仁安元年悠紀方歌, Chōshu eisō, #285–312 (based on Kawamura and Kubota, Chōshu eisō, 61–67)

仁安元年悠紀方歌よみて奉べきよし宣旨ありしかば、先々常は儒者な どこそつかふまつるをいかゞと辞申を，猶よみて奉るべきよし御気色 あるよし行事弁俊経朝臣たび々示送しかば、よみて奉りし歌 Nin’an gannen yukigata no uta yomite tatematsurubeki yoshi senji arishikaba, sakizaki tsune ha jusha nado koso tsukahumatsuru wo ikaga to ji shi mawoseshi wo, naho yomite tatematsurubeki yoshi ohonkeshiki aru yoshi gyauji no ben Toshitsune no ason tabitabi shimeshiokurishikaba, yomite tatematsurishi uta In the first year of the Nin’an era [1166], I received a royal command to compose and submit the Yuki poems, and when I declined, pointing out that previously this has always been done by Confucian scholars and the like, I received repeated indications from the Ceremonial Coordinator Lord Toshitsune that I was expected to comply, so I composed and presented the following. 悠紀方 近江国 風俗和歌十首 Yuki-Side, Ōmi Province, Ten fuzoku waka (285) 稲舂歌 坂田郡 Inetsukia uta: Sakata no kōri

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あふみのや坂田の稲をかけつみて道ある御世の始にぞつく Ōmi no ya Sakata no ine wo kaketsumite michi aru miyo no hajime ni zo tsuku From the fields of Sakata in Ōmi we gather this rice and thresh it now at the outset of this righteous reign. (286) 神楽歌 長峰山 Kagura uta: Nagaminenoyama 万代を祈ぞかくる長峰の山の榊をさねこじにして yorozuyo wo inori zo kakuru Nagaminenoyama no sakaki wo sanekoji ni shite With prayers that you may flourish for ten thousand ages, we come with offerings of sakaki from Nagamine, “Long Peak,” roots, stems, and all. (287) 辰日参入音声 鏡山 Day of the Dragon, Introit: Kagaminoyama うれしくも鏡の山を立ておきてくもりなき世のかげを見る哉 ureshiku mo Kagaminoyama wo tateokite kumori naki yo no kage wo miru ka na Joyfully, we raise “a mountain of a mirror,” Kagaminoyama, and see in it a clear vision of an era without blemish. (288) 同日楽破 余吾海 Same Day, Accelerando: Yogo no umi 四方の海も風しづかにぞ成ぬらん声おさまれる余吾の浦波 yomo no umi mo kaze shizuka ni zo narinuran kowe osamareru Yogo no ura nami Breezes over the seas in every direction would seem to have quieted, for here at Yogo Pond the sound of the waves has calmed. (289) 同日楽急 真木村 Same Day, Presto: Makinomura 君が世はちへのなみくら隙もなくつくり重ねよ真木の村人 Kimi ga yo ha chihe no namikura hima mo naku tsukuri kasaneyo Maki no murahito May they raise storehouses shoulder to shoulder in endless rows for your eternal reign, those villagers of Maki, “of the stout trees.” (290) 同日退出音声 音高山 Same Day, Recessional: Wototakinoyama 吹風は枝もならさで万代とよばふこゑのみ音高の山 hukukaze ha eda mo narasade yorozuyo to yobahu kowe nomi Wototakanoyama The breeze does not disturb a single branch,



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and the only sounds heard at Wototakanoyama, “Booming Mountain,” are these calls that your reign may last ten thousand ages. (291) 巳日参入音声 岩根山 Day of the Snake, Introit: Ihaganeyama 行末を思ふもひさし君が世はいはがね山の嶺の若松 yukusuwe wo omofu mo hisashi Kimi ga yo ha Ihaganeyama no mine no wakamatsu We can predict a reign flourishing long into the future, like a young pine growing on the peak of Ihagane, “rooted firmly in rock.” (292) 同日楽破 安川 Same Day, Accelerando: Yasukawa 安川にむれゐて遊ぶ真鶴ものどかなる世を見する也けり Yasukawa ni murewite asobu manazuru mo nodokanaru yo wo misuru narikeri The cranes gathering and taking their pleasure in Yasukawa, “Serene River,” show us an era in which the world shall be at peace. (293) 同日楽急 木綿園 Same Day, Presto: Yuhusono 木綿園のひかげの葛かざしもて楽しくもあるか豊の明の Yuhusono no hikage no kazura kazashi mote tanoshiku mo aru ka Toyonoakari no Arraying ourselves in these cord pendants from Yuusono’s “Mulberry Gardens,” we know that we shall enjoy this Banquet of Myriad Lights. (294) 同日退出音声 高御倉山 Same Day, Recessional: Takamikurayama うごきなく高御倉山祈おきつをさめん御代はかみのまにまに ugokinaku Takamikurayama inori okitsu wosamen miyo ha kami no manima ni At Takamikurayama we pray that your vast storehouses may stand tall here for all time and in an orderly reign, as the kami would wish it to be. 同悠紀方御屛風六帖和歌十八首 For the same Yuki-side, eighteen screen poems on six panels 甲帖 正二月 First Panel: First and Second Months (295) 小松崎 子日有遊客眺望湖海

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[Komatsugusaki: On the First Day of the Rat, revelers gaze out over Lake Biwa] 子日して小松が崎をけふ見ればはるかに千世の影ぞうかべる Nenohi shite Komatsugasaki wo kefu mireba haruka ni chiyo no kage zo ukaberu As they gather seedlings today and gaze at Komatsugasaki, “Cape of Young Pines,” a distant image of a thousand ages floats into view. (296) 亀岡 有採若菜之女人 [Kameoka: Women harvest spring shoots] をとめらも君のためとや亀岡に万世かけて若菜つむらん wotomera mo Kimi no tame to ya Kameoka ni yorozuyo kakete wakana tsumuran These maidens, too, harvesting spring shoots on Kameoka, “Hill of the Tortoise,” to last ten thousand ages—all for your sake, is it not? (297) 梅原山 梅花多開敷 [Mumeharanoyama: Plums are blossoming in profusion] 春の日の光はきはもなけれどもまづ花さくは梅原の山 haru no hi no hikari ha kiha mo nakeredomo mazu hana saku ha Mumeharanoyama The sunlight of this spring day is shining everywhere, but it is on Mumeharanoyama, “Mountain of the Grove of Plums,” that blossoms open first. 乙帖 三四月 Second Panel: Third and Fourth Months (298) 桜山 桜花盛開松樹交枝 [Sakurayama: Cherry blossoms are at their height and intertwine with the branches of the pine] 松が枝も枝さしかはす桜山もちとせの春やにほはん matsu ga eda mo eda sashikahasu Sakurayama mo chitose no haru ya nihohan The branches of the pine mingle with the blossoms on Sakurayama, “Cherry Mountain,” where their beauty and scent shall pour forth for a thousand springs. (299) 山吹崎 款冬臨岸水 [Yamabukigasaki: Kerria flowers on a bank overlooking the lake] 水の色に花のにほひも一つにて八千世やすまん山吹が崎 mizu no iro ni hana no nihohi mo hitotsu nite yachiyo ya suman Yamabukigasaki The color of the water is that of the flowers, and it shares their scent as well—



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why should it not be this pure and clear for eight thousand ages to come at Yamabukigasaki, “Kerria Cape”? (300) 大滝山 卯花方開山脚民家多 [Ohotakinoyama: Deutzia flowers far and wide, and at the foot of the mountain villagers’ houses are numerous] 布さらすふもとの里の数そひて卯花さける大滝の山 nuno sarasu fumoto no sato no kazu sohite unohana sakeru Ohotakinoyama At the mountain’s foot where robes whiten in the sun, a new village is added to the count: deutzia flowers on Ohotakinoyama, “Mountain of the Great Cascade.” 丙帖五六月 Third Panel: Fifth and Sixth Months (301) 長沢池 端午日人採菖蒲 [Nagasawanoike: On Iris Festival Day, people are harvesting sweet flag roots] 長沢の池のあやめを尋てぞ千代のためしに引べかりける Nagasawanoike no ayame wo tazunete zo chiyo no tameshi ni hikubekarikeru Seeking out roots of sweet flags in Nagasawa no ike, “Long-Marsh Pond,” they take them to be signs of a reign to last a thousand ages. (302) 吉田郷 植田之所多 [Yoshida no sato: A place with numerous planted fields] せく水も吉田の里に植うる田はけねて年へん影ぞ見えける seku mizu mo Yoshida no sato ni uuru ta ha kanete toshi hen kage zo miekeru The dammed-up waters, too, are good in Yoshida, “Village of Good Fields,” and thus we can see a vision of the good that future years will yield. (303) 玉蔭井 水辺松蔭有納涼之人 [Tamakagenoi: In the shade of pines beside the lake, people seek cool comfort] 岩間もる玉蔭の井の涼しきにちとせの秋を松風ぞ吹 ihama moru Tamakagenoi no suzushiki ni chitose no aki wo matsukaze zo fuku In the coolness of Tamakagenoi, the “Well of Jeweled Shadows” that bubbles out of the rocks, the wind in the pines bears a hint of thousands of autumns to come. 丁帖七八月 Fourth Panel: Seventh and Eighth Months

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(304) 高宮郷 七夕有引糸家々 [Takamiyanosato: On Tanabata, seventh night of the seventh month, there are many houses offering wands decorated with five-colored threads] 七夕に今朝引糸のながかれと君をぞいのる高宮の里 Tanabata ni kesa hiku ito no nagakare to Kimi zo inoru Takamiya no sato In Takamiya, “Village of the Lofty Shrine,” prayers that your reign may be long are as lengthy as the threads stretched out this morning in offering to the Weaver Maid. (305) 志賀浦 月浮水上人見之 [Shiga no ura: People gaze on the reflection of the moon floating on the surface of the lake] 照月も光をそへて見ゆる哉玉よせかへす志賀の浦浪 teru tsuki mo hikari wo sohete miyuru ka na tama yosekahesu Shiga no ura nami It looks as if the shining moon is gathering yet more brilliance as wave upon wave carries glimmering jewels in and out of Shiga Bay. (306) 玉野原 秋花開散 [Tamano no hara: Autumn flowers bloom and scatter] 露しげき玉野の原の萩さかり風ものどかに見つる秋哉 tsuyu shigeki Tamano no hara no hagi sakari kaze mo nodoka ni mitsuru aki ka na In dew-drenched Tamano no hara, “Jewel Meadow,” the bush clover is at its height of bloom, and this looks to be an autumn of gentle breezes. 戊帖九十月 Fifth Panel: Ninth and Tenth Months (307) 吉水郷 多人家菊花臨水 [Yoshimizu no sato: In the houses of many of the people, chrysanthemums bloom near the water’s edge] 幾千世の秋かすむべき菊の花匂をうつす吉水の里 iku chiyo ni aki ka sumubeki kiku no hana nihohi wo utsusu Yoshimizu no sato For how many thousands of ages will autumns be as fine as this— with the scent of chrysanthemums perfuming all of Yoshimizu, the “Village of Good Waters”? (308) 大蔵山 山脚民家多積稲之所



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[Ohokurayama: At the foot of the mountain are many houses where harvested rice is plentiful] 数しらず秋の刈穂をつみてこそ大蔵山の名には負ひけれ kazu shirazu aki no kariho wo tsumite koso Ohokurayama no na ni ha ohikere In countless autumns they will gather all these sheaves of harvested rice, and thus Ohokurayama, “Mountain of the Great Storehouse,” will truly live up to its name! (309) 松賀江岸 松樹茂盛辺山有紅葉 [Matsugae no kishi: Pines grow in profusion, and on the mountain nearby there are momiji] 紅葉ばを染る時雨は降りくれど緑ぞまさる松賀江の岸 momijiba wo somuru shigure ha furikuredo midori zo masaru Matsugae no kishi Autumn showers that dye the colored maples have begun to fall, yet the green still gains in intensity on the banks of Matsugae, “Pine Estuary.” 己帖十一十二月 Sixth Panel: Eleventh and Twelfth Months (310) 千坂浦 千鳥群飛行客見之 [Chisaka no ura: A flock of plovers flies, and a group of travelers watches] いくちとせいくさかゆかむ御世なれや千坂の浦に千鳥鳴也 iku chitose iku sakayukamu miyo nareya Chisaka no ura ni chidori naku nari For how many thousands of ages, and how greatly will it prosper?—this new reign: the “thousand birds,” chidori, tell us in their cries at Chisaka no ura, “Bay of a Thousand Hills.” (311) 勢多橋 白雪積敷人馬過之 [Seta no hashi: Amidst drifts of white snow, men and horses cross the bridge] 東路やひつぎの御つきたゝじとて雪ふみ分くる勢多の長橋 Azumaji ya hitsugi no mitsuki tataji to te yuki fumiwakuru Seta no nagahashi The Eastern Sea Road! “Let there be no pause in the flow of goods, day after day, reign upon reign!”—so say those who make their way through the snow on the long bridge of Seta (312) 吉身村 人家盛多立松之所 [Yoshimi no mura: a profusion of prosperous dwellings, and a place where pine trees rise] 君が代は吉身の村の民もみな春を待とやいそぎたつ覧

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Kimi ga yo ha yoshimi no mura no tami mo mina haru wo matsu to ya isogitatsuran “Let his reign be a good one!” they say— all the folk of Yoshimi, “Good-life Village,” as they hasten to prepare wreaths of pine to welcome the coming of spring. 仁安元年十一月三日詠進之 Nin’an gannen jihuichigatsu mikka kore wo eishin su I submitted these poems on the third day of the eleventh month of the first year of Nin’an.

Appendix 2 Daijōe waka in the Senzai wakashū

(based on Katano and Matsuno, SNKBT, 10:195–97, 389–91)

Shunzei placed groups of Daijōe poems as the last seven in the tenth chapter, “Ga no uta” (Festive Songs), and the last eight in the twentieth chapter, “Jingika” (Songs of Kami Worship).1 Commentators suggest that this placement creates a kind of divine balance between these two chapters (middle and last) and an auspicious valediction for the anthology as a whole, which, it will be recalled, was compiled just as the conflicts of the 1180s were finally at an end. In each group, Shunzei arranges the poems chronologically, freely mixing Yuki and Suki poems and song types (inetsukiuta, fuzoku uta, byōbu uta); he includes no examples older than those from the early eleventh century, perhaps because preceding royal anthologies had included examples from pre-eleventh-century occasions. There is also some slight variation in the format of prefaces (kotobagaki), perhaps suggesting some similar variance in the formatting of the archival sources on which Shunzei drew. It is also notable that he includes multiple examples from relatively recent occasions (such as those of 1155 and 1184). Overall, his selections display a resonant consistency in their rhetorics of salutation and praise, their thematic insistence on and celebration of continuity, balance, and a cosmic but also earthly harmony in and between nature and the realm, their tone of exultation contained and constrained but also enabled by form and convention. In other words, Shunzei’s selections demonstrate just what Daijōe waka should

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be, while also finding their place along with other “Festive Songs” and “Songs of Kami Worship” with which they are brought together in the anthology as others of their kind.

Chapter 10, Festive Songs 巻第十 賀歌 (634) 後一条御時、長和五年大嘗会主基方屏風歌に、備中長田山のふも とに琴弾き遊びしたる所をよめる 善滋為政 千世とのみ同じことをぞしらぶなる長田の山の峰の松風 chiyo to nomi onaji koto wo zo shirabunaru Nagata no yama no mine no matsukaze During GoIchijō’s reign, as a Daijōe Suki byōbu poem in the fifth year of Chōwa [1016], on a scene of koto being played in a festive gathering at the foot of ­Nagata (“Long Fields”) Mountain in Bitchū: Yoshishige no Tamemasa The unchanging song says, over and over, “For a thousand years!”: that is what we can hear in the wind from the pines on the peak of Nagata.2 (635) 白川院御時、承保元年大嘗会主基方稲舂歌、神田郷をよめる 前中納言匡房 ちはやぶる神田のさとの稲なれば月日とともにひさしかるべし chihayaburu Kamita no sato no ine nareba tsukihi to tomo ni hisashikarubeshi During Shirakawa’s reign, as a Daijōe Suki inetsukiuta in the first year of Jōhō [1074], on Kamita no sato (“The Village of Sacred Fields”): Saki no Chūnagon Masafusa This is rice harvested from the sacred fields of Kamita, so it is sure to last for many months and days.3 (636) 院御時、久寿二年大嘗会悠紀方風俗歌、近江国若松の森をよめる 宮内卿永範 すべらぎの末さかゆべきしるしには木高くぞなる若松の森 suberagi no suwe sakayubeki shirushi ni ha kodakaku zo naru Wakamatsu no mori During the reign of the current Cloistered Emperor, GoShirakawa, as a Daijōe Yuki fuzoku song in the second year of Kyūju [1155], on Wakamatsu no mori (“Young Pine Forest”) in Ōmi: Kunaikyō Nagamori



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As a sign that Our Lord and his progeny will prosper far into the future: look! the young pines in this forest are already grown tall.4 (637) 平治元年大嘗会悠紀方風俗歌、近江国千坂の浦をよめる 参議俊憲 君が代の数にはしかじ限りなき千坂の浦の真砂なりとも Kimi ga yo no kazu ni ha shikaji kagirinaki Chisaka no ura no masago nari to mo In the first year of Heiji [1159], as a Daijōe fuzoku song, on Chisaka no ura (“Thousand-Hill Bay”) in Ōmi: Sangi Toshinori Their number is the same as that of the years of your reign —the uncountable thousands of grains of sand on the shores of Chisaka Bay. (638) 同じ大嘗会主基方稲舂歌、丹波国雲田村をよめる 刑部卿範兼 天地のきはめも知らぬ御世なれば雲田の村の稲をこそつけ ametsuchi no kihame mo shiranu miyo nareba Kumoda no mura no ine wo koso tsuke For the same, as a Daijōe Suki inetsukiuta, on Kumoda no mura (“Cloud-Field Village”): Gyōbukyō Norikane Like the heavens and the earth its extent cannot be known— this newly initiated reign: so do we sing as we pound the rice of Kumoda’s sacred fields. (639) 高倉院御時、仁安三年大嘗会悠紀方の御屏風歌 宮内卿永範 霜降れどさかへこそませ君が代に逢坂山の関の杉森 shimo furedo sakahe koso mase Kimi ga yo ni Afusakayama no seki no sugimori During the reign of Takakura, a Daijōe Yuki byōbu uta, in the third year of Jin’an [1168]: Kunaikyō Naganori Frost comes, yet they flourish all the more: the cedars in the grove at the checkpoint on Mount Afusaka, blessed in their encounter with this new reign.5 (640) 今上御時、元暦元年大嘗会悠紀方風俗歌、三神山をよめる 藤原季経朝臣 ときはなる三神の山の杉村ややを万世のしるしなる覧 tokihanaru Mikami no yama no sugimura ya yawo yorozu yo no shirushi naruran

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During the reign of the present sovereign,6 a Yuki fuzoku uta in the first year of [1184] Genrayku, on Mikamiyama: Lord Fujiwara no Suetsune The everlasting cedars in clusters on Mikami no yama, that divine mountain! Surely they are signs of an enduring reign of tens of thousands of years.7

Chapter 20, Songs of Kami Worship 巻第二十 神祇歌 (1281) 長元九年後朱雀院の御時、大嘗会の主基方の神遊の歌、丹波国神 南備山をよめる 藤原義忠朝臣 ときはなる神南備山のさか木葉をさしてぞ祈る万世のため tokihanaru Kamunabiyama no sakakiha wo sashite zo inoru yorozuyo no tame In the ninth year of Chōgen [1036], during the reign of GoSuzaku, as a Daijōe Suki kamiasobi no uta, on Kamunabiyama in Tamba: Lord Fujiwara no Yoshitada Brandishing leafed branches of sacred sakaki from everlasting Kamunabiyama: thus do we pray for your reign to last ten thousand years and more.8 (1282) 治暦四年後三条院御時、大嘗会主基方神楽の歌、岩屋山をよめる 藤原経衡 動きなく千世をぞ祈る岩屋山とる榊葉の色変えずして ugokinaku chiyo wo zo inoru Ihayayama toru sakakiha no iro kaezu shite In the fourth year of Jiryaku [1068], during the reign of GoSanjō, a Daijōe Suki kagura no uta, on Iwayayama: Fujiwara no Tsunehira We pray for a long and stable reign of a thousand years and more with these leafed branches of sakaki from Iwaya Mountain— their color as constant as is that peak of solid rock. (1283) 寛治元年堀河院の御時、大嘗会悠紀方神遊の歌、諸神郷をよめる 前中納言匡房 いにしへの神の御世より諸神の祈るいはゐは君が世のため inishihe no kami no miyo yori morokami no inoru ihawi ha Kimi ga yo no tame In the first year of Kanji [1087], during the reign of Horikawa, a Daijōe Yuki kamiasobi no uta, on Morokami no sato (“The Village of a Multitude of Kami”): Saki no chūnagon Masafusa



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The prayers offered in blessing by multitudes of kami in myriad ages in the past— all of these were for your sake!9 (1284) 久寿二年院の御時の大嘗会悠紀方の神楽の歌、近江国木綿園をよ み侍ける 宮内卿永範 神うくる豊の明りに木綿園の日陰かづらぞ映えまさりける kami ukuru Toyo no akari ni yuhusono no hikagekadura zo hahemasarikeru In the second year of Kyūju [115510], a Daijōe Yuki kagura no uta, on Yuhusono (“Mulberry Grove”) in Ōmi: Kunaikyō Naganori In the midst of this Feast of Myriad Lights, in which the kami graciously partake, our wreaths bedecked with pendant cords from Mulberry Grove look brighter than ever!11 (1285) 嘉応元年高倉院御時、大嘗会悠紀方の神遊の歌、近江国守山をよ める すべらきを八百万世の神もみなときはにまもる山の名ぞこれ [永範] suberaki wo yawo yorozuyo no kami mo mina tokiha ni Mamoruyama no na zo kore In the first year of the Kaō era [116812], during the reign of Takakura, a Daijōe Yuki kamiasobi no uta, on Mamoruyama (“Guardian Mountain”) in Ōmi: [Naganori] To ensure that Our Lord endures for eight hundred thousand years and more, all the kami are always on guard, and the name of “Guardian Mountain” proves that it does the same. (1286) 寿永元年大嘗会の主基方歌よみたてまつりける時、神楽の歌、 丹波国 神南備山をよめる 権中納言兼光 みしまゆふ肩にとりかけ神南備の山のさか木をかざしにぞする Mishima yufu kata ni torikake Kamunabi no yama no sakaki wo kazashi ni zo suru In the first year of Jūei [1182], when submitting Daijōe Suki poems, a kagura no uta on Kamunabiyama in Tamba: Gonchūnagon Kanemitsu Along with cords of Mishima mulberry cloth worn at our shoulders, we don wreaths of sakaki from Kamunabi Mountain.13

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(1287) 元暦元年今上御時、大嘗会悠紀方歌たてまつりける神遊の歌、 近江国諸神郷をよめる 藤原季経朝臣 諸神の心に今ぞかなふらし神を八千世と祈るよごとは Morokami no kokoro ni ima zo kanafurashi kimi wo yachiyo to inoru yogoto ha In the first year of Genryaku [1184], during the reign of the present sovereign,14 in submitting Daijōe Yuki poems, a kamiasobi no uta on Morokami no sato in Ōmi: Lord Fujiwara no Suetsune It seems we are at one with the hearts of multitudes of kami in these sacred songs offered in prayer that you may reign a thousand years and more.15 (1288) 同じ大嘗会の主基方歌よみてたてまつりける神楽の歌、丹波国千 年山をよめる 藤原光範朝臣 千年山神の世させるさか木葉のさかへまさるは君がためとか Chitoseyama kami no yo saseru sakakiha no sakahemasaru ha Kimi ga tame to ka In submitting Daijōe Yuki poems for the same occasion, a kagura no uta on Chitoseyama (“Thousand-Year Mountain”) in Tamba: Lord Fujiwara no Mitsunori Sakaki from eternal Chitoseyama, with which the kami adorned themselves in ancient times, flourishing and multiplying now: surely this must be for our Lord’s sake!16

Appendix 3 Fujiwara no Kiyosuke on “Details of the Procedure for Daijōe no uta,” in Fukuro zōshi (based on Fujioka, SNKBT, 29:27–31)

Item: Details of the Procedure for Daijōe no uta (Daijōe no uta no shidai, 大嘗会の歌の次第) First, lists of the names of places are sent from the provinces to the responsible officials [gyōji, 行事], and these are in turn transmitted to the designated composers [sakusha, 作者]. The composer makes a selection from among these names according to his judgment (he must in every case avoid words prohibited on the basis of taboo [kinki wo sakubeshi, 禁忌を避くべし]). He then composes his poems and presents these to the head of the ­Office of Ceremonials [Gyōjidokoro no ben, 行事所の弁]. The fuzoku uta are presented to the Office of Music [Gakudokoro, 学所] on the basis of which the staff prepares the scores for performance. The byōbu uta are presented to Office of Painting [Edokoro 絵所] on the basis of which the staff executes the paintings. If there is a delay in the presentation of the waka, notes about the various selected place-names may be presented in the interim, and the waka may follow when completed. The composers devise the topic tags [kudan no kotoba, 件の詞] for each painting topic.1 It is standard practice for the fuzoku uta to be presented without any such additional text.

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As far as the composition of the waka is concerned, each house of poets differs in its approach. Sukechika,2 Kanezumi,3 and the like wrote in kana, and they placed their fuzoku uta as well as their byōbu uta all on a single sheet of paper. Noritada4 wrote his in kana, but on separate sheets. Sukenari5 and his successors wrote in mana, and on separate sheets. Ietsune6 and his successors wrote their poems in kana, but their topic tags are in mana, and they wrote both groups of poems on a single sheet. (Also, he began with kagura uta, whereas others begin the series with a rice-threshing song [inetsukiuta].) Masafusa7 wrote in mana, on a single sheet. (However, for the Tennin occasion8 he wrote in kana.) Thereafter, all composers wrote in mana and used separate sheets. However, the Late Lord of the Right Ward (Ko Sakyō, 故左京) [my father, Akisuke] wrote topic tags in mana and poems in kana, all on a single sheet. It is not certain how any of this was done prior to the Chōwa occasion.9 When the poems are submitted for formal perusal, they should be covered in formal white paper. Assistant Director of Palace Administration Koreyuki10 has written, “The assembled poems are transmitted to the archival copyists [Seishodokoro, 清書所], and in addition three documents are submitted to the Master of Ceremonies [ben, 弁]. In one of these, the Rice-Threshing Song and Kagura Song are written on a single sheet. The remaining fuzoku songs are written on another single sheet. In an additional document, the eighteen byōbu uta are written on two sheets. The Master of Ceremonies transmits the Rice-Threshing Song and Kagura Song [to their performers], the fuzoku uta to the Office of Music, and the byōbu uta to the Office of Painting.” He also states, “There are secret writings by both Yukinari and Korefusa.11 Under the title ‘Notes from Calligraphers of the Right,’ these contain their instructions regarding the procedures for copying and transmitting these documents. The topic tags and Yuki poems are to be written in kana, the Suki poems in mana. The composers all do so; the archival copyists must do so as well.” However, recently some have not complied with this. The first Daijōe took place during the reign of Emperor Temmu in the eleventh month of the second year of the Hakuhō era (Mizunoto-tori, 癸酉 = 673).12 However, no songs are to be found in the record of that occasion. We see them first in the records of the occasion in the Jōwa era.13 But it seems that the number of songs composed then was few. The first provinces designated as Yuki and Suki were Tamba and Harima. Subsequently, Inaba, Mino, Owari, Tōtōmi, Tajima, Ōmi, Bizen, Mimasaka, Echizen, Mikawa, Ise, and Bitchū have been selected by augury, and accordingly districts [kōri, gun, 郡] in each of these provinces have



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been tasked. On each occasion, two sets [Yuki and Suki] of districts with auspicious names have been selected, and this has been the basis for what has been recorded. In recent times the Yuki province has consistently been Ōmi, while the Suki role has alternated between Tamba and Bitchū.14 However, on the occasion during the reign of Reizei, Harima was the Suki province.15

Item: The Composers of Waka (Waka no sakusha, 和歌の作者)16 On the occasion of Kōkō’s rite, the composer was Ōtomo no Kuronushi. In the Kokinshū that poem is identified as one “composed for the Great Harvest Festival for the current sovereign [ohonbe no uta, 贄の歌].” This is strange. The poem in question is about Nagahama in the province of Ise. However, on the occasion in the Engi era [for Daigo], Ise was not the designated province.17 [Yuki-side] [Suki-side] [Sovereign] Sukechika Kanezumi Sanjō’in Sukechika Tamemasa18 GoIchijō’in Confucian scholars [jusha, 儒者] first served beginning on this occasion.19 Sukechika Noritada* GoSuzaku’in Sukenari* Ietsune* GoReizei’in Sanemasa Tsunehira*20 GoSanjō’in Sanemasa Masafusa* Shirakawa’in Masafusa* Yukiie* Horikawa’in Masafusa* Masaie*21 Toba’in Atsumitsu*22 Yukimori*23 Shin’in24 Atsumitsu served after Akisue took Buddhist vows.25 26 Akisuke Atsumitsu* Konoe’in Naganori*27 Shigeaki*28 Ichi no in29 Toshinori*30 Norikane*31 Nijō’in 32 33 Akihiro Naganori Shin’in34 Naganori Kiyosuke Takakura’in35 36 37 Kanemitsu* Suetsune Tōgin Sutoku’in38 Kanemitsu Suetsune Kinjō39

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Item: A Royal Order to Compose Daijōe waka (Daijōe waka senge no jō, 大嘗会宣下の状)40 To Administrator of the East Capital District Lord Fujiwara no Akisuke This message has been transmitted by the Aide of the Right Lord Minamoto Masa­tsuna for Provisional Grand Counselor Lord Fujiwara no Munesuke to deliver as the command of the Sovereign, to wit, that the person herein named shall undertake to provide the Yuki poems for the Daijōe. First Year of Kōji, Eighth Month, Fifteenth Day Vice-Minister of the Right for Palace Maintenance, Archivist, and Professor of Mathematics Governor of Settu Lord Wotsuki received the message for transmission. This was Masashige.41

Item: A Template Letter of Acceptance of the Royal Order Prepared by Senior Scholar Moromitsu42 [Rank] [Office] [Surname] Lord [Name]. A letter of response.43 Acknowledgment of receipt of an order. Reproduction of the order received. Here the writer reiterates the command to submit Daijōe Yuki poems. I, the person named above, am in receipt of your command of [date] received by me on [date]. It was transmitted to me by [name of messenger] at the direction of [name of his superior]. As I, the person named therein, am in receipt of your command to submit the Daijōe Yuki poems, I undertake to do so with all due respect. Having perused those documents, I hereby respectfully submit this Response. In the [ ] year of [ ], [ ] month, [ ] day. [rank and title] This is the form letter that a person of the lower court ranks44 would use. I humbly accept: the task of composing the Daijoe poems for [fill in: Yuki or Suki]. As stated above, regarding the command as stated in the order I have received, I accept as previously stated. [ ] year [ ] month [ ] day This is the form letter that a person of the higher court ranks45 would use. If the order comes from the Regent, one refers to it as “your honor’s wishes.”



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Item: A Template Letter to Accompany the Submission of Poems to the Office of Ceremonials46 Herewith delivered: Suki poems, two sets. The person named herein, having lived through eighty full turns of the seasons, has had the honor of providing loyal services on many occasions. I hope that my efforts on this occasion will be received with appropriate recognition. I beg that my hopes will be communicated to His Majesty. I, Atsumitsu, wrote this. Tenth month, eighth day. Royal Secretary Atsumitsu. The delivery of this letter is entrusted to the Acting Aide of the Right.47

Appendix 4 The Ōmi hakkei Poems in the Beinecke Scroll

(translations by Riley Soles)

SCENE 1. A Storm Clearing at Awazu (Awazu no seiran, 粟津晴嵐) 雲はらふあらしにつれてもも舟も 千船もなみの あはつにそよる kumo harahu arashi ni tsurete momofune mo chifune mo nami no Ahazu ni so yoru As the storm clears and the clouds fade all away, a hundred ships—a thousand ships—ride in on foamy waves to Awazu. Calligrapher: Konoe Motohiro, 1648–1722 [関白前左大臣基煕公] SCENE 2. Dusk Glowing at Seta (Seta no sekishō, 瀬田夕照) 露しぐれもるやま遠く過きつゝ ゆふひのわたる せたのなかはし tsuyushigure moruyama tohoku sugikitsutsu yufuhi no wataru Seta no nagahashi Passing Mount Moru where all around a thick dew drips fresh from autumn showers, the setting sun makes its way across the long bridge at Seta. Calligrapher: Sonshō Nyūdō Shinnō, 1651–94 [二品入道尊證親王] SCENE 3. Evening Snow at Mount Hira (Hira no bōsetsu, 比良暮雪) 雪はるゝ比良の高ねのゆふくれハ 花のさかりのすくるはるかな

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yuki haruru Hira no takane no yuhugure wa hana no sakari no suguru haru ka na As evening falls on the melting snow cap of Mount Hira, the spring now hastens past the blossoms in their fullest bloom. Calligrapher: Kujō Sukezane, 1669–1730 [左大将輔実卿] SCENE 4. Evening Bell at Miidera (Mii no banshō, 三井晩鐘) おもふそのあかつき契るはしめそと まつきく三井の 入あひのかね1 omohu sono akatsuki chigiru hajime zo to mazu kiku Mii no iriahi no kane One can hear the vows we first made to each other on that longed-for dawn echoing in the temple bells that ring in the sunset at Mii. Calligrapher: Shimizudani Sanenari, 1648–1709 [権大納言実業卿] SCENE 5. Descending Geese at Katada (Katada no rakugan, 堅田落雁) 峯あまたこえて越路に先近き かたゝになひき おつるかり金 mine amata koete koshiji ni saki chikaki Katada ni nabiki otsuru karigane Past the mountain peaks and along the road to Koshi, so close to their goal, the geese cry out at Katada and there in a line descend. Calligrapher: Konoe Iehiro, 1667–1736 [右大臣家煕公] SCENE 6. Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase no kihan, 矢橋帰帆) 真帆ひきて やはせにかへる船は今 うちてのはまを あとの追風 maho hikite Yabase ni kaeru fune wa ima uchite no hama wo ato no oikaze With sails hoisted up and billowing at full mast, straight to Yabase the boats leaving Uchide Shore return with the wind at their backs. Calligrapher: Nijō Tsunahira, 1672–1732 [大納言綱平] SCENE 7. Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki no ya’u, 唐崎夜雨) 夜の雨に 音をゆつりて 夕風を よそにそたてる からさきの松 yo no ame ni oto wo yudurite yuhukaze wo yoso ni zo tateru Karasaki no matsu Silent for the song of a chorus of raindrops falling in the night the Karasaki Pine defies the wind and firmly stands its ground. Calligrapher: Ichijō Fuyutsune (Kaneteru), 1652–1705 [前関白大臣冬経卿] (兼輝）

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SCENE 8. Autumn Moon at Ishiyama (Ishiyama no shūgetsu, 石山秋月) 石山や鳰のうみてる月かけは あかしもすまも 外ならぬかな Ishiyama ya Nio no umi teru tsukikage wa Akashi mo Suma mo hoka naranu kana From Ishiyama, the tremulous glow of the moon cast on Nionoumi can be no other than the light that fell on Akashi and Suma. Calligrapher: Takatsukasa Kanehiro, 1660–1725 [左大臣兼煕卿]

Appendix 5 Sanjōnishi Sanetaka’s Poems on “The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” (Saishō [再昌], #19–26) (based on Itō and Itō, Saishō, in Waka bungaku taikei, 66:135–36)

宗祇法師、屏風に押すべしとて、瀟湘八景の歌[み]づからよみて、則ち 色紙に書きてと申しのぼせたりし、たび／＼否びしかども、しひて申 せしかば、よみて書きて贈し侍りし、詩は天隠和尚の詩をなむ書き加 へ侍りし Sōgi Hōshi, byōbu ni osubeshi to te, Shōshō hakkei no uta [mi]zukara yomite, sunahachi shikishi ni kakite to mawoshinobosetari, tabitabi inabishikadomo, shihite mawoseshikaba, yomite kakite okurishaberishi, shi wa Ten’in Oshō no shi wo namu saki kuwahehaberishi Sōgi asked me to compose [Japanese] poems on “The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” and inscribe them on shikishi for inclusion on a screen. I declined a number of times, but since he was persistent in his requests, I complied and sent them to him. I also included inscriptions of the late Priest Ten’in’s Chinese poems [on the same topic]. 山市晴嵐 Mountain Market Clearing Mist 山風の立つにまかせて春秋の錦は惜しむ市人もなし yamakaze no tatsu ni makasete haru aki no nishiki ha oshimu ichibito mo nashi

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When the brocades of flowers in spring and leaves in autumn fall prey to the mountain winds, there is no one in the market town that does not feel their loss. 漁村落照 Fishing Village in Evening Glow あまの家のむらむら見えて蘆の葉に入日すくなく夕霧の空 ama no ie no muramura miete ashi no ha ni irishi sukunaku yuhugiri no sora Fisherfolk’s huts are thrown into relief, while the leaves of marsh reeds filter the rays of dwindling sunlight beneath a mist-filled sky. 烟寺晩鐘 Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple ながめ侘びぬ尾上の鐘の夕煙霜夜はまれの夢もありしを nagame wabinu wonohe no kane no yuhukeburi shimoyo ha mare no yume mo arishi wo I gazed in melancholy toward the peals of bells upon the peak in evening mist, a rare dream on a night of frost—interrupted. 瀟湘夜雨 Night Rain on Xiao-Xiang 竹の葉の色そめかへし涙をも夜ながき雨の枕にぞ知る take no ha no iro somekaheshi namida wo mo yo nagaki ame no makura ni zo shiru Night rains have begun to alter the color of the leaves of the bamboo— and now I see upon my pillow that a long night’s tears do much the same. 遠浦帆歸 Sail Returns from Distant Shore はるかにも漕かへるかな蜑小舟猶この岸を思ふかたとて haruka ni mo kogikaheru ka na amakobune kono kishi wo omohu kata to te From far out on the lake they row back toward this shore: somehow the small boat of the fisherman yearns to come this way. 洞庭秋月 Autumn Moon over Dongting 月影の夜のさゞなみしづかにて氷の千里秋風ぞ吹く



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tsukikage no yoru no sazanami shizuka ni te kohori no chisato akikaze zo fuku Seen beneath the light of the moon, the riplets on the lake are calm; for many leagues across its surface, a sheet of ice, the autumn wind is blowing. 平沙雁落 Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar 等閑に帰らむ波のみぎはかは友呼ぶ雁も心ありけり nahozari ni kaheramu nami no migiha tomo yobu kari mo kokoro arikeri They have been to have a look at the shore where waves break, and now return: these geese that call to their companions do have feelings after all. 江天暮雪 River and Sky in Evening Snow いつも見る入江の松の群立もたゞ夕波の薄雪の空 itsumo miru irie no matsu no muradachi tada yuhunami no usuyuki no sora The grove of pines in the cove upon which we always gaze is lost from view as thin snow falls from the sky to the evening waves below.

Appendix 6 Teika’s Lotus Sutra Offering Poems

(based on Kubota, Yakuchū Fujiwara Teika zenkashū, 1:468–70, poems 2754–64)

母の週忌に、法華經六部みづからかきたてまつりて供養せし一部の表 紙に、ゑにかゝせし歌 haha no shūki ni, Hokkekefu rokubu midukara kakitatematsurite kuyau seshi ichibu no hyōshi ni, we ni kakaseshi uta On the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I wrote out and offered six copies of the Lotus Sutra, and on the outer covers for one of these copies I had these poems written on the pictures: 一巻 The First Scroll あはれしれ春のそなたをさす光わが身につらききさらぎの空 ahare shire haru no sonata wo sasu hikari waga mi ni tsuraki kisaragi no sora Ah, have pity on me! Skies of the second month full of that light from the east that heralds the spring to come: how hard you are for me to bear! 二巻 The Second Scroll をしまずよあけぼのかすむ花のかげこれも思ひのしたの故郷 woshimazu yo akebono no kasumu hana no kage kore mo omohi no shita no furusato

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I shall have no regrets—not even for the look of these flowers in a misty dawn, for these, I know, are the origin and home of all illusion. 三巻 The Third Scroll 郭公たづぬる峯もまどはましかりねやすむるしるべならずは hototogisu tazunuru mine mo madohamashi karine yasumuru shirube narazu ha I would surely have gone astray when seeking out the cuckoo on the peak had I not been guided to this place to pause for rest along the way. 四巻 The Fourth Scroll 身をしぼる山井の清水音ちかしさきだつ人に風やすゞしき mi wo shiboru yamai no shimizu woto chikashi sakidatsu hito ni kaze ya suzushiki The sound of those waters in a mountain well that will quench my wearying thirst: close by! Are breezes already cooling the one who has gone before me? 五巻 The Fifth Scroll をみなへしうけける玉のあとしあればきえし上葉に露なみだれそ wominaheshi ukekeru tama no ato shi areba kieshi uhaba ni tsuyu na midare so Since the maidenflower has this legacy from the acceptance of the jewel, let me ask that the dew not disturb the departed sheltering leaves. 六巻 The Sixth Scroll てらさなん世々もかぎらぬ秋の月いる山のはにひかりかくさで terasanan yoyo mo kagiranu aki no tsuki iru yama no ha ni hikari kakusade That there may be no limits to the worlds [past, present, and future] illuminated by you, oh autumn moon: hide not your light behind the mountain’s ridge. 七巻 The Seventh Scroll 向はれよ木の葉しぐれし冬の夜をはぐくみたてし埋火の本 mukahareyo konoha shigureshi fuyu no yo wo hagukumitateshi uzumibi no moto Direct these blessings to her—the one who nurtured me, the source of enduring warmth on wintry nights of rustling fallen leaves.

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八巻 The Eighth Scroll 歴劫の弘誓の海に舟わたせ死生の波は冬あらくとも ryakkō no guzei no umi ni fune watase shisei no nami ha fuyu arakutomo Let her boat pass safely across the sea of eternal vows, rough though the wintry waves of life and death may be. 無量義經 Muryōgikyō: The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings たのもしな光さしそふさかづきを世をてらすべきはじめとや見ぬ tanomoshi na hikari sashisohu sakaduki wo yo yo terasubeki hajime to ya minu I am reassured! How can I take the sight of this wine cup catching rays of light as other than the dawn of the whole world’s illumination? 普賢經 Fugengyō: The Sutra of Bodhisattva Fugen 朝日かげおもへばおなじよるの夢わかれにしぼるしのゝめのつゆ asahi kage omoheba onaji yoru no yume wakare ni shiboru shinonome no tsuyu This morning sunlight: just as it was when that night of dreams ended in parting, a dawn of dew and tears. 心經 Shingyō: The Heart Sutra むなしさをみよのほとけのはゝならば心のやみをそらにはるけよ munashisa wo miyo no hotoke no haha naraba kokoro no yami wo sora ni harukeyo If the Buddhas of the Three Worlds who said “Behold: the Void” are as kind as Mother was, then let any darkness that may remain in her heart be cleared away!

Notes

ONE   Introduction 1. Takahashi, Kanemori shū chūshaku, 292–93. See also Yagi, Daijōe waka no sekai, 7–8. 2. This term appears as both fūzoku and fuzoku in a variety of contexts, in literature, history, enthnology, and so on. The latter form is understood to be a slight contraction of the former, and it is the form I use in this study. In general I use Yagi’s overarching term fuzoku waka for these songs, except where translating those texts that specifically use the essentially cognate term fuzoku uta. 3. Further details of the Daijōe structure and proceedings are discussed in the following chapter. 4. Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony, 143–44, 256. 5. For a summary of the development of “material culture” as a methodology in the humanities and social sciences, see the first chapter of Miller, Material Culture. The contemporary classic articulation of “thing theory” is the eponymous essay by Bill Brown. 6. Martin Heidegger’s writings on such matters—especially “The Thing” (1951) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1956)—are foundational and indispensable. See Heidegger, ­Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–86, 161–84. 7. For an argument regarding this concept from a perspective rather different from my own, see Mitchell, “Word and Image.” 8. For example, Brisset used the term in a paper entitled “From Text to Painting, and Vice-Versa in Minamoto no Toshiyori’s Poetry,” delivered in a panel on “Word and Image in Japanese Poetry” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Philadelphia, March 28, 2014. 9. Rajewsky, “Intermediality.” The term has come into use in Japanese scholarship in the translated form (or calque) kantekisutosei.

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10. See Kamens, “Waking the Dead.” Riley Soles has suggested that perhaps what I have called a “mausoleum”—an imaginary space in which waka’s past accomplishments are preserved and accessed—might also be thought of as an ossuary, a storehouse of its physical remains, the “bones” from which poems have been made and from which they can and will be built again. My reference to “noise” in this chamber is inspired, in part, by John Hollander’s resonant and passionate study The Figure of Echo. 11. For those who are new to these concepts and terms, see the opening sections of the kana preface to the Kokin wakashū, primarily attributed to the poet and anthologist Ki no Tsurayuki, ca. 905. For a study of this preface’s classical Chinese roots, see Wixted, “The Kokinshū Prefaces.” For a more recent analysis in a larger framework, see Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony, 191–240. 12. Conventionally, in orthography where kanji are in use, there is a distinction between mono as persons (者) and mono as other kinds of animate and inanimate “things” (物); it is, however, the same word. 13. At a symposium at Harvard University (“Buddhist Temples and Their Contributions to Japanese Cultural History,” November 2–3, 2008), Niki Natsumi and Unno Keisuke both gave presentations based on newly identified documents that give details of the protocols, seating, decoration, and other arrangements in rooms in which gatherings of coterie poets paid homage to waka’s traditions in the presence of a portrait of the ancient sage-poet Hitomaro. Niki’s and Unno’s work in turn draws on the extensive recent research on this waka coterie practice (Hitomaro eigu) by such scholars at Sasaki Takahiro, Kikuchi Hitoshi, and others. The most extensive treatment in English is by Anne Commons; see “Worshipping Hitomaro: From Text to Image,” in Commons, Hitomaro: Poet as God, 91–125. 14. See Mostow, “Painted Poems”; LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan; Brisset, À la croisée, and “Insei jidai ni okeru shūkyōteki, shiteki kuriputogurafii”; Sorensen, Optical Allusions; and Sakomura, Poetry as Image. 15. Some of the best-known examples of karon that fit this description are Fujiwara no Kintō’s Shinsen zuinō and Waka kuhon (early eleventh century); major portions of Minamoto no Toshiyori’s Zuinō and of Fujiwara no Shunzei’s Korai fūteishō; and Fujiwara no Teika’s Kindai shūka, Eiga no taigai, and Maigetsushō. All are available in full or partial English translations. 16. See Mostow, Courtly Visions. 17. There is an important but somewhat different aspect of “waka and things” that I cannot adequately treat in this study: the rhetorical pattern identified by the editors of the Man’yōshū, through their categorizing strategies, as kibutsu chinshi (something of a subcategory within the larger set of hiyuka 比喩歌, metaphorical or figurative poems), in which a thing—a body of water or other topographical feature, a plant or bird or animal, and so on—is deployed as metaphor (sometimes literally as simile, in a construction comparable to English “as,” and sometimes not) in order to convey a specific human emotion or psychological state—often love and longing, in their many shades. The rhetorical strategy so named of course predates that naming, and I think of the hundreds of poems of this kind that one finds in the Man’yōshū (both those that are so categorized and those that are not) as a key site for exploring the foundations and paradigms of figural rhetoric in the Japa-



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nese poem. While this aspect of early song and poetics clearly indicates an awareness of the symbolic and metaphorical potential of reference to “things” and their relationship to sense and psyche, which is akin to many of my concerns in the present study, the subject deserves independent and full exploration elsewhere. There is plenty of work on the subject in Japanese; see, for example, a classic study by Suzuki Hideo, “Kodai waka ni okeru shinbutsu taiō kōzō.” In English, see Yiu, “The Category of Metaphorical Poems,” and the explanatory comments on many poems in Edwin Cranston’s translations of the Man’yōshū, Kokin wakashū, and so on. Cranston, A Waka Anthology. 18. This aspect of waka has been the subject of much of my previously published work, particularly in Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality, and, from a somewhat different perspective, in the aforementioned article “Waking the Dead.” 19. This relationship has, however, been of much interest to Japanese scholars. One excellent study of the ways in which certain rhetorical and figural elements of some of the very earliest Daijōe songs (kayō) lead to later usages and developments in subsequent Daijōe uta and in waka in general is Iguchi, “Daijōsai to kayō oyobi waka,” in whch he focuses on records of such early songs found in the section of Kinkafu, a court music anthology and catalog compiled in 891, that is devoted to information about songs for those festivals, including both the Niinamesai and the Daijōsai. 20. For similar reasons—with all due respect to its practitioners, from Ishihara Kiyoshi to Stephen D. Miller—I have strong reservations about chokusenshū-focused or delimited studies of “Buddhist poetry,” or Shakkyōka. Such studies tell us about which poems are in these privileged anthologies, sometimes why, and also sometimes what the subsequent impact of their appearances there may have been, but they do not provide a sufficiently sound basis for characterizations of the poem-type or of this mode of compositional practice as a whole. 21. My consideration of the suhama as a miniature has benefited from Susan Stewart, “The Miniature,” in her On Longing, 65–67. I thank Robert Nelson for bringing Stewart’s work to my attention.

T WO  Daijōe waka 1. Kawamura and Kubota, Chōshu eisō, 61. 2. Ibid., 66. This edition is based on a version in the National Diet Library, with additional reference to an edition in the collection of Senshū University. The National Diet Library copy is believed to date to the late Muromachi or early Edo period; it reproduces a notation inserted in 1229 by Shunzei’s son Teika, which suggests that its lineage is at least that ancient. See Kawamura and Kubota’s “Kaisetsu,” in ibid., 219–20. 3. The Ōmi place-name “Seta” appears in many graphic forms in poems and elsewhere, more often 瀬田 than 勢多. It is best to understand these as equally well-attested renderings of “Seta,” but a calligrapher or copyist might well be free to choose one form or another, with or without additional signifying intentions, or might do so at random or simply by following an earlier model, and may not necessarily expect that one graphic version or another might be “unpacked” as I have suggested here.

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4. Fujiwara no Kiyosuke makes this claim in Fukuro zōshi, SNKBT, 29:27. See appendix 3 herein for a translation of Kiyosuke’s entries on the Daijōe. 5. One of the very few accounts of a Daijōe as observed by a woman is to be found in Hino Meiko’s court diary Takemukigaki; she describes many phases of the rite held in 1332 (Shōkyō 1) for Emperor Kōgon (the first of the “northern” court rulers during the Nambokuchō period). Meiko does not include any Daijōe poems per se, but she inserts poems of her own, presented as reactions to and recollections of the festivities, and describes many details of attire and furnishings. See Mizukawa, Takemukigaki zenshaku, 85–102. In Kanmon gyoki, Prince Sadafusa gives an account of the Daijōe of 1430 (Eikyō 2) for his son Emperor GoHanazono; he includes the inetsukiuta (rice-pounding songs) from the Yuki (Ōmi) and Suki (Tamba) provinces. See Zoku gunsho ruijū kanseikai, ed., Kanmon gyoki, 561–64. 6. See Watanabe, “Tennō no miyo wo kotohogu”; Sasaki, “Sugawara no Tamenaga”; and Fujita, “Daijōe byōbuuta.” For the Heisei Daijōe for Emperor Akihito, the Yuki and Suki prefectures were Akita and Ōita. The Yuki poet was Kubota Shōichirō (1908–2001), and the painter was Higashiyama Kai’i (1908–99). The Suki poet was Kagawa Susumu (1910–98), and the painter was Takayama Tatsuo (1916–2007). Watanabe, “Tennō no miyo wo kotohogu,” 137. For an archive of photographs of the Heisei Daijōe, see Mainichi gurafu bessatsu henshūbu, ed., Heisei no tairei. 7. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, is an extremely thorough study; my description of this facet of the Daijōe is largely indebted to this source. 8. See Steininger, Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan; Smits, “The Way of the Literati”; and Ury, “Chinese Learning and Intellectual Life.” 9. The most complete record of Daijōe waka, the eighteenth-century Daijōe yuki suki waka collection (in the Kunaichō Shoryōbu library; discussed further hereafter), in fact reproduces a number of Yuki-side poem sets as well as most Suki-side poems in mana. Some Suki-side poems are reproduced in kanamajiri—indicating, at the very least, that these versions were based on intermediary transmission texts rather than on “original” records. In a kanamajiri text, kanji are used for their kun-yomi, that is, for readings as words of Japanese origin, rather than for their phonetic values as they are in mana or so-called man’yōgana. 10. Yagi, in Daijōe waka no sekai; Watanabe, in “Tennō no miyo wo kotohogu”; and others also use the terms kara e (“Chinese painting”) and yamato e (“Japanese painting”) to distinguish the types of images that appeared, respectively, on the honmon byōbu and uta byōbu. Although these distinguishing terms were widely used in the Heian period and later, art historians have shown that the styles of the paintings so identified differ widely: the categories are not firmly fixed, but generally the terms seem to be used to refer to content— paintings that depict Chinese personae, landscapes, and the like are kara e, and those that depict Japanese scenes, activities, and locales are yamato e. Likewise, I identify the various textual and other elements discussed here as “Chinese” or “Japanese” (“vernacular”) with trepidation and reserve. As has been amply shown in recent scholarship by David Lurie, Wiebke Denecke, Brian Steininger, and many others, the classifiers “Chinese” and “Japanese” misrepresent what was, from the late sixth century onward, a multiscript, fluid culture of letters and literacy in which writers, readers, chanters, scribes, and others shifted (if not



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always seamlessly) between and among these interacting and mutually informing registers. On the other hand, an inscription on Daijōe byōbu shikishi (the papers attached to the surface of the screen for the inscription of texts) would inherently (perhaps emphatically) display this multiplicity of language registers, with topic tags (dai) written only in “Chinese characters” (mana, kanji) followed (to the left) by uta written in “vernacular characters” (kana) and/or in mixed script (kanamajiri)—but also, as noted above, with all inscribed Suki-side byōbu poems in mana. It is probably an error to overemphasize difference in this description: better to think in terms of complementary, oscillating functions of letters as signs and as cues to sense (visual and aural) and signification when we imagine how a Daijōe byōbu shikishi (for example) would have been read. 11. SKT, 5:868. See also Akiyama, “Daijōe Yuki Suki byōbu.” 12. See Kamens, “Terrains,” and Yoda, “Literary History.” 13. The title jusha was earned only by a very select few among the graduates of the royal university upon success in examinations administered over a period of close to a decade (see glossary). Satō Michio estimates that in the year 1166, when Shunzei was commanded to serve as Yuki poet, there were perhaps ten bona fide jusha available for court service. 14. For a detailed chronology of Shunzei’s life compiled from such sources, see Taniyama, Fujiwara no Toshinari, 282–436 (which includes extensive supplementary notes and emendations by Matsuno Yōichi). 15. Kawamura and Kubota, Chōshū eisō, 61; appendix 1 herein. 16. Naganori (1100–1180) also served as tutor in Chinese classics (jito) to three sovereigns, GoShirakawa, Nijō, and Takakura. Nihon jinmei daijiten, in Japan Knowledge, www​ .japanknowledge.com/contents/jinmei/index.html. He was thus truly a jusha and, in contrast to Shunzei, the very model of the scholar-bureaucrat Daijōe poet. Toshitsune (1113–91), the coordinator of ceremonies (Gyōji no ben) who communicated the royal command to Shunzei, was likewise a hereditary scholar and tutor to Nijō and Takakura, and thus well suited to the task of overseeing preparations for a rite of this kind. 17. Inoue, “Daijōe to Rokujō ke.” See also Watanabe, “Tennō no miyo wo kotohogu,” 41. An entry in Teika’s diary Meigetsuki for the twenty-first day of the fifth month in 1233 (Tenpuku 1) sheds some additional light on these precedents, practices, and preferences. Teika received a letter, quoted in full in the entry, from the Regent Kujō Norizane seeking his insights on the appointment of poets for the forthcoming Daijōe for the new emperor, Shijō. Norizane specifically asked whether both Yuki and Suki poets should be jusha, whether it would be acceptable under the circumstances to appoint one poet rather than two, and to what extent it might be appropriate to consider men who had not yet achieved the higher court ranks. With the letter came an attached list of all those who had been appointed to direct the production of paintings (Edokoro); the preparation and presentation of the fuzoku songs and dances (Fuzokudokoro); and the poems (Wakadokoro) for the Daijōe of Shirakawa, Horikawa, Toba, and Takakura in the mid- to late twelfth century. Not surprisingly, in his letter in reply, which Teika also reproduced in full in the diary entry, he advised Norizane to follow precedent, but he also recommended two courtiers for consideration: Fujiwara (later Hirohashi) Yorisuke, who had good Confucian scholarly credentials and had been the Suki poet for the Daijōe of GoHorikawa in 1222, and Fujiwara no Tomoie, who was

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something of a protégé of Teika’s at the time. Teika observed, “For a great rite of this kind, is it not important both for the sake of the event itself and for the way of poetry that you select someone who can exercise good judgment in the matter of these verses?” As an additional comment on this exchange, Teika predicted that even if Norizane were to follow his advice and issue a command to Tomoie, it was certain that Tomoie would decline due to a lingering illness (which was in fact what led to Tomoie’s retirement and taking of the precepts in 1238). In the event, for the Daijōe for Shijō that eventually took place in 1235, the Yuki poet was Fujiwara no Iemitsu and the Suki poet was Sugawara no Tamenaga—the latter most definitely a bona fide jusha (i.e., monjō hakase) as dictated by precedent. It is nevertheless interesting to note that the consideration of candidates took place at the level of the regent himself, and that it was to the seventy-two-year-old Teika—who had never served and never would serve as a Daijōe poet—to whom he turned for advice, no doubt because of Teika’s supreme stature in the waka world of the time. In his letter, Teika referred to the “superb results” produced by Daijōe poets on the Nin’an 3 (1168, for Takakura) and Teiō 1 (1222, for GoHorikawa) occasions (given the right mix of jusha and non-jusha poets), but he made no mention of his own father’s service in Nin’an 1 (1166). Imagawa, Kundoku Meigetsuki, 6:51. 18. The diary title is sometimes rendered Hyōhanki. Quoted in Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 150. 19. In the Heian period, the linear measurement shaku varied in equivalence from approximately 33 to 38 centimeters. 20. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 128. See also discussion hereafter for further details of the entire four-day ritual. As can be seen in the schematic figure, Yagi identifies a third type of screen, Taisō onbyōbu, four of which, in two pairs, were set up around ancillary enclosures or daises for additional observers or participants. The deployment of such screens is also mentioned in a description of the decoration of the Naden, another ceremonial hall in the palace, for New Year’s Day audiences, in Gōke shidai. See Koji ruien, 20:507. According to Teijō zakki (a mid-eighteenth century glossary of court ritual practices compiled by Ise Sadatake), these screens depicted “men of the Tang dynasty playing polo” [Karabito no dakyū no e nari]. Koji ruien, 20:911. 21. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 77–78, 96ff. Yagi also shows how the rhetorics and figural schemes of the honmon corpuses guided many aspects of the design (and hence the message and meaning) of other key appurtenances of the Daijōe, including the contents of the shime no yama models and the related suhama and kazashi no dai, in addition to the waka byōbu. See chapter 3 on suhama for further discussion. 22. SKT, 5:893 (#1118). 23. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 20. 24. SKT, 5:881 (#659). 25. SKT, 5:882 (#683). 26. SKT, 5:900 (#908). Note that the inscription is in mana, as recorded in the Shoryōbu Daijōe yukisuki waka text cited here. See also Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 65, 77–78, 96. Yagi explains that, if the selector or editor of the honmon on this occasion doubled, as on others, as the waka composer, then it was most likely Ōnakatomi no Sukechika or Yoshitada; Yakaku teikinshō identifies the calligrapher on this occasion as Taira (?) no Sadayori.



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27. The function of 如 in the Sino-Japanese daishi text implies an observer who perceives likeness (e.g., of waves of golden grain to clouds) but does not specify the sensory or cognitive process whereby that likeness is perceived—nor the actor or entity that “perceives.” Still, the use of verbs of seeing or being seen (miru, miyu) in the Japanese poem makes the sensory function explicit, and the identity of those who perceive, see, and articulate is implied by context and circumstance: in this case, they can be identified as the tami, the “folk” who “see” that which is described in the poem and rendered pictorially in the adjacent painting, and, secondarily, any other observer of the painting, allowing his or her identity to overlap with those who more figuratively articulate “seeing” in the poem, or with those whose figures may actually be depicted there. (On these dynamics in byōbu uta, see Sorensen, Optical Allusions.) I think it is fortunate that these rhetorical maneuvers can be rendered in English without the use of the often unavoidable “as” but with expressions that come closer to something like the mathematical concept of that which is “somewhat equal” but not entirely so (≅ or ≈). 28. The cogenerating relationship among Daijōe poetry, the uses of place-names that would come to be regarded as utamakura, and utamakura cataloging traditions has been of particular interest to a number of Japanese scholars, including Suzuki Hideo, “Utamakura no honsei”; Nishimura Tōru, “Ga no uta no seiritsu,” in his Uta to minzokugaku; Sasaki Tadasato, “Utamakura no seiritsu katei”; and Yagi, “Sobyō.” See also Kamens, Utamakura, as well as chapters 3 on suhama and utaawase and 4 on “Eight Views of Ōmi” for discussion of further manifestations of meisho waka (“famous places”) poetics in practice. At this juncture, however—and pending further investigation along these lines—I am inclined to suggest that utamakura, or perhaps more broadly speaking topoynms used repeatedly and consistently in Japanese verse—a practice that has just as long a history as Daijōe poetry itself, if not longer, and a more continuous history as well—also always carry and invoke a memory of the function and place of place-names in these all-important rituals, even when those toponyms are not used in what seems to be a ritual setting: their utterance or inscription or deployment in a poem may always be, in some way, about the relationship of the land to the divine and royal powers that hold sway over it, the place and role of the people who occupy those lands, and the dimly remembered origins of song itself. 29. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 94–95. It should also be noted that these Japanese toponyms were used in Daijōe waka for fuzoku uta as well: for example, the Ōmi place-name “Ogoto no sato” also appears in a Yukigata mi no hi gakuha composed by Fujiwara no Atsu­ mi­tsu for the 1123 Daijōe (for Sutoku: SKT, 5:866 [#32]; also Kin’yō wakashū [SNKBT, 9:88 (#317)]), and the Bitchū “Tsuzumi no yama” was similarly used by Fujiwara no Yukimori for a Suki-side Day of the Dragon Introit (mairi onjō) on the same occasion (SKT, 5:866 [#30]; Kin’yō wakashū, SNKBT, 9:88 [#315]). Yagi’s point, however, is that there was topical crossfeeding from one type of Daijōe screen to the other. In his summary of the salient characteristics of the exemplary 1036 (Chōgen 1) honmon program, Yagi emphasizes (1) that the “classic” texts on which they are based are not cited verbatim but subjected to editing; (2) that this editing often involves the blending of more than one classic text source; (3) that virtually all honmon texts feature traditionally felicitous signs (嘉祥), (4) seasonal emblems, and (5) toponyms; and (6) that particularly a­ uspicious

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signs or omens (祥瑞) are deployed to accentuate the overall thematic message of predicting and ensuring peace and tranquility in the realm (平安). He conducts a similarly close analysis of the honmon screens for the Daijōe of 1781 (Tenmei 7), for Emperor Kōkaku, and finds that the greatest difference is that in that instance, far less emphasis was placed on the symbolic deployment of toponyms and much greater effort was made to use seasonal figures and tropes in close coordination with the seasonal format of the four-seasons screen (tsukinami byōbu). Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 125–26. 30. My discussions of the depiction of Chinese-style utopias in suhama (in chapter 3) and of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” phenomenon (in chapter 4) provide further examples of this “translation” and transmutation process. 31. See Liscutin, “Daijōsai.” On the other hand, mass media records of the 1990 Daijōe reveal many other nonsecret features: see, for example, Mainichi gurafu bessatsu henshūbu, ed., Heisei no tairei for aerial views of the Daijōkyū compound constructed within the royal palace grounds. 32. Kokin wakashū, poems 1082–86, in SNKBT, 5:328–29. Poem 1082 is a Kibi (i.e., Bitchū, Suki) song from the Daijōe of 893 (Ninmyō Tennō); #1083, a Mimasaka (Suki) song from the Daijōe of 859 (Seiwa Tennō); #1084 is a Mino (Yuki) song for the Daijōe of 876 (Yōzei Tennō); #1085 is an Ise (Yuki) song from the Daijōe of 884 (Kōkō Tennō); and #1086 is an Ōmi (Yuki) song from the Daijōe of 894 (Daigo Tennō, who is referred to as “the present sovereign, kinjō [今上] in its kotobagaki because he was on the throne at the time of the anthology’s compilation and dedication). All five of these songs appear to be fuzoku uta of various but unspecified kinds. In some manuscript lineages of Kokin wakashū, the 897 Ōmi song (#1086) is attributed to Ōtomo Kuronushi; no indication of composer is given for any of the others, which is also true of all but one (#1100) of the festive songs included in this section of the anthology. Poem 1083 (“Mimasaka ya . . .”) is a Suki fuzoku uta from the same occasion as #1082, and both songs are also to be found in the saibara (#31 and 35), which suggests at least a partial common ground between these two categorizations of early uta. Although the term saibara appears in sources as early as the mid-ninth century, the earliest texts of versions of the songs so identified date to the twelfth century. See Usuda Jingorō, “Kaisetsu,” in SNKBZ, 42:97–99, and see pp. 141 and 144 for the two songs. 33. See Yagi, Daijōe waka no sekai, 291–337, for details. 34. For the former, see SKT, 5:866–900; for the latter, see Hashimoto and Sōma, Shintō taikei, 397–532. The same volume of Shintō taikei augments the archive with printed versions of the poems composed for the sporadic revivals of the rite in 1375 (Eiwa 1), 1394 (Ōei 1), 1764 (Meiwa 1), 1771 (Meiwa 8), 1781 (Tenmei 1), 1818 (Bunsei 1), and 1848 (Kaei 1), as well as those from the revivals in the modern era—1871 (Meiji 4), 1915 (Taishō 4), and 1928 (Shōwa 3) (pp. 533–609)—and additional related documents (pp. 610–79). On the sporadic revival of the rite in the Tokugawa period, see Webb, Japanese Imperial Institution, 108–11; see also Nakazawa, “Daijōe waka no chūzetsu.” 35. Following that publication, the most important contributions to the study of Daijōe waka were those of Fujita, “Daijōe byōbu uta no seikaku”; Sōma, “Daijōe waka ni tsuite”; and Yagi’s numerous articles and books. Fujita, among others, addressed and to some extent challenged the earlier work of Origuchi Shinobu on the nature of the Daijōe itself, especially



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in his seminal study Daijōsai no hongi (1963, 1965). My study has also been inspired by more recent work by Sasaki Takahiro (“Rokujō-ke kara Kujō-ke e,” “Sugawara no Tamenaga”) on specific Daijōe poets and by Watanabe Yumiko’s analysis in the larger context of her studies of byōbu uta in court ritual and their political dimensions (“Tennō no miyo wo kotohogu”). 36. On the general subject of the canonization of the classics and for studies of specific genres and categories, see Shirane and Suzuki, Inventing the Classics. 37. This is a condensed and necessarily oversimplified account of the history of modern Daijōe scholarship. Fujita and, later, Sasaki and Watanabe exemplify the most traditional, close-to-the text methodologies and their adaptations to more recent scholarly concerns such as patronage and political motivations in the production of cultural artifacts; Nishimura and Nishtsunoi are more closely allied with the minzokugaku school; Yagi bridges the kokubungaku and Shintōgaku sectors, while Mayumi takes a more conservative approach to the religious aspects of the Daijōsai as a whole. 38. The main entry is entitled Daijōe no uta no shidai. Kiyosuke also offered a list of Daijōe poets (beginning with the traditional attribution of the “Kagamiyama” song [KKS #1086] from the 884 ceremony for Emperor Kōkō to Ōtomo no Kuronushi) as well as samples of formal letters of command, acceptance, and submission between court officials and designated poets. See Fukuro zōshi, SNKBT, 29:27–31, and appendix 3 herein for a translation. 39. An entry in Sankaiki (山槐記), the journal of the courtier Nakayama Tadachika (1131–95), reproduces the lists of place-names submitted from or for Ōmi for consideration for use in the 1184 ceremony of GoToba. Tadachika’s account of the 1184 event is one of the most complete and detailed of all eyewitness Daijōe records, and this place-name list is also the earliest extant example of a so-called chūshin fudoki or kochi kōmyō, lists said to figure in or reflect the later stages of the development of utamakura poetics. Yagi, Daijōe waka no sekai, makes extensive use of this and other examples in his study of the stages of Daijōe waka production and its fine-tuning over time. For the pertinent Sankaiki entries, see Zōho shiryo taisei, 28:178–226. Yakumo mishō, a compendium of historical data and lore concerning waka assembled by Emperor Juntoku in two periods before and after the Jōkyū disturbance (1221, 1234), also contains one of the earliest accounts of the history of Daijōe waka. See Katagiri, Yakumo mishō no kenkyū, 91–112. 40. There is variance among texts of Fukuro zōshi for this passage, but Fujioka Tadaharu suggests that a version including the phrase for “late in coming” (遅々) is most likely to be correct. SNKBT, 29:27n37. 41. Liscutin, “Daijōsai,” translates Daijōsai, also Ohonihe matsuri, as “The Great or August Festival of Tasting the First Fruits,” and Shinjōsai, or Niiname matsuri, as “Festival of Tasting the First Fruits.” See her article for many other important details of the rite as specified in the Jōgan gishiki, a ceremonial code promulgated in 872, with supplements from the Engi shiki, another set of codes promulgated in 927. 42. Usuda, “Kaisetsu,” in SNKBZ, 42:97–99. What follows is my paraphrase/translation of Usuda’s outline. His primary sources are the Jōgan gishiki and Engi shiki materials, which he employs to track the phases of the rite specifically as conducted in 859 (the eleventh month of Jōgan 1) for the Emperor Seiwa, but he posits this as a paradigm. See also Liscutin, “Daijōsai” and Bock and Teeuwen, “The Great Feast.” Masafusa’s Gōke shidai

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(江家次第), the aforementioned Yakumo mishō, and Ichijō Kaneyoshi (or Kanera)’s Godai hajime shō (御代始鈔) are other sources for the specifics of the ritual as observed from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The relevant passages from these works and others can be found in Koji ruien (Jingi bu 20): see pp. 1240–1614. 43. Much has been said although little is really known about what the emperor actually did or does inside the Yukiden and Sukiden. See further discussion hereafter regarding the kokugakusha Kada no Arimaro’s abrogation of this secrecy. 44. The Mimasaka song noted above as Kokin wakashū, #1083, was performed during this phase of the activities on the night of the seventeenth day of the eleventh month in the 859 Daijōe. Both it and the preceding #1082, recorded as having been performed in the rites held in 833, also appear as #31 and 35 in the earliest collections of saibara, which date from the eleventh century but are believed to represent much earlier practices and collections. Usuda sees this concurrence as an indication that by the mid-ninth century this category of performed songs, the saibara, may already have been a coherent set and one that was intermingling with or being adapted for the purposes of designing musical programs for the Daijōe. Usuda, “Kaisetsu,” in SNKBZ, 42:49. 45. Liscutin, “Daijōsai,” 30. Arimaro’s exhaustive accounts, with illustrations, are reproduced in Inari Jinja, Kada zenshū, 7:1–200. See also figures 13 and 16 herein. 46. The Kuji roku images are reproduced in Tsugunaga et al., Zusetsu kyūchū gyōji. See also figures 2, 3, and 4 herein. 47. Yagi devotes a chapter to a close analysis of the chūshin fudōki for Ōmi place-names submitted at the outset of the preparation of the poems for the Daijōe of 1184, for GoToba (preserved within Sankaiki; see note 39, above). Yagi, Daijōe waka no sekai, 25–54. His studies of the figural and rhetorical schemes of fuzoku and byōbu waka for various occasions on which Tamba or Bitchū were the designated Suki provinces is informed by similar materials. Ibid., 55–226. None too surprisingly, he finds very consistent patterns in the use of felicitous words and figures as well as scrupulous avoidance of the inauspicious sign. 48. Yagi’s comparative and collated analyses of selected Daijōe waka suites from various periods identify these and a number of other recurring signs as a standard repertoire mined consistently throughout the history of this practice. Other very common quantitative elements include man/yorozu, “tens of thousands,” and ta/ohoshi, “many, plenty.” Yama, mountain, is the single topographic element that occurs far more frequently than any other: it suggests both size and scale but also divine presence, an immensity held in awe toward which the viewer must cast an upward gaze. Ibid., 30ff. And it may also refer to the shime no yama, as discussed hereafter and in Iguchi, “Daijōsai to kayō,” 16. 49. Katagiri, Utamakura utakotoba jiten, 423. 50. SKT, 5:#223, 474, 581; the last of these is also Senzai wakashū, #1284, and is discussed again hereafter. 51. Hashimoto and Sōma, Shintō taikei, 482, a poem by Ōe Masafusa for the otsu (second, third–fourth month, third poem) Yuki screen panel; SKT, 5:#654, a poem by Fuiwara no Toshinoi for the ki (third, fifth–sixth month panel, second poem). 52. Katagiri, Utamakura utakotoba jiten, 423



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53. SNKBT, 7:172 (#576). Komachiya (the editor of this volume) notes that as a kayō, a more informal performance form in which this uta also appears, this song has for its fourth ku the words kami no mimuro to (神の御室と) in place of kami no mimae ni: thus, the sakaki branch is addressed as the temporary dwelling of the kami itself. 54. “Toyo no miakari no omo[shiroki] . . .” plays with the idea that the celebrants’ faces are lit up by festive torches but also glow due to the sake they have consumed. Chapter  10 of Eiga monogatari, which recounts the accession and Daijōe of Emperor Sanjō in 1012, takes its title, “Hikage no kazura,” from this poem, which is reproduced there along with the other fuzoku waka from that year’s rite. (The McCulloughs’ translation of the title is “Cord Pendants.”) See SNKBZ, 31:499–517, and McCullough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 337–41. The monogatari narrator, who self-identifies as an insider-observer of such palace events, cuts her report short with this explanation: “There were screen poems [onbyōbu uta] on this occasion, too, but they were pretty much the same as these others, so I shan’t bother to include them here [kono onaji wori no onbyōbu no uta nado aredo, onaji suji nareba kakazu].” But in chapter 12, “Tama no muragiku,” which recounts the rite for GoIchijō in 1016, three selected Daijōe byōbu waka do appear, and once again the chapter title (“Clustered Chrysanthemums”) is derived from one of them. SNKBZ, 32:88; McCullough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 450. I think it is worth noting that the creator(s) of Eiga monogatari chose these particular figures, which accentuate the material culture aspect of these events, as chapter titles. Most chapter titles in the tale, however, derive from figures in poems included in those chapters. 55. SKKS, #175. See SNKBT, 11:67. 56. KKS, #926: 裁ち縫はぬ衣きし人もなき物をなに山姫の布さらすらむ tachinuhanu kinu kishi hito mo naki monowo nani yamahime no nuno sarasuramu No divine being such as those who wear robes neither woven nor sewn by mortals is hereabouts, yet surely some mountain goddess has laid out garments here to dry. SNKBT, 5:278. See also Kawamura and Kubota, Chōshū eisō, 64. Jitō’s poem is included by Shunzei in his Korai fūteishō exemplary selections of poems from the core anthologies, again in a slightly different form; Ise’s is not included. 57. See Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, 236–69ff; Shirane, “Lyricism”; and ­Bialock, “Voice, Text.” 58. Iguchi, “Daijōsai to kayō,” 16ff. For further discussion of shime no yama and their relationship to suhama and other large and small landscape models, see the following chapter. 59. KKS, #1086, in SNKBT, 5:329. 60. SKT, 5:872 (#230). 61. To give a sense of how large and extensive this corpus is, it may be helpful to note that the Daijōe yuki suki waka document reproduced in SKT, 5:866–900, contains 1,335 individual items, 119 of which (those listed first) are those Daijōe waka found in chokusenshū

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and thus in many (but not all) cases duplicated in the lists of 46 dated occasions (from that of Ninmyō in 833 to that of Momozono in 1748). Thus the total of unique examples in this collection is approximately 1,200-plus poems. Somewhat different total numbers would be found in the Daijōe waka burui in the Hashimoto and Sōma, Shintō taikei edition, since it includes poems from a few additional and later occasions. 62. The first ku of Senzai wakashū, #1282, a Suki kagura uta by Fujiwara no Tsunehira for the Daijōe of GoSanjō in 1068, is also ugokinaku. See appendix 3 for transcription and transliteration. 63. Katō et al., Yakaku, 18–19, 55. For a translation of the complete text, see De Coker and Kerr, “Yakaku.” 64. As noted above, these distinctions are not wholly preserved in the Shoryōbu collections of Daijōe waka, but this is most likely due to the vagaries of transmission of written versions over time. 65. Katō et al., Yakaku, 31–34. 66. SNKBT, 29:27–31. See also appendix 3 herein for a full translation with additional annotation. 67. Kiyosuke names Daijōe poets from throughout the eleventh century. For further details, see appendix 3. 68. This refers to the Daijōe of 1012, for Emperor Sanjō. (In fact there are no known indications of the production of Daijōe onbyōbu uta prior to that occasion.) 69. SNKBT, 29:27–31. The sections described here are also translated in appendix 3. 70. In English, see, for example, Piggot and Yoshida, Teishinkōki. 71. The following account of Shunzei’s work as compiler of the Senzai wakashū is based on the kaisetsu (explanatory foreword) by Matsuno Yōichi in SNKBT, 10:425–41. 72. Matsuno, in SNKBT, 10:433, suggests that Shunzei also made reference to Kamo no Shigeyasu’s Tsukimōde wakashū compiled in 1182 as one of his models. That collection includes a small group of Daijōe uta (poems 64, 65, 66). See Sugiyama, Tsukimōde, 37–38. 73. Inamura, Kunchū Meigetsuki, 1:25. 74. She was his granddaughter, the Princess Kesshi or Kiyoko, daughter of the recently deceased Emperor Takakura, seven years old at the time of her selection. 75. Matsuno, in SNKBT, 10:441, also suggests that in planning the Senzai wakashū’s structure, GoShirakawa and Shunzei were intent on outdoing the immediately previous two chokusenshū, the Kin’yo wakashū (1124) and Shika wakashū (1151), which had fallen short of fulfilling the precedented twenty-chapter format exemplified in the Kokin wakashū and Goshūishū. 76. SNKBT, 10:30. The poem happens to be one that invokes the name of a famous place in Ōmi, “Shiga no ura,” that is in fact the topic of Shunzei’s 1166 fourth-panel poem Chōshū eisō, #305 (see appendix 1). I discuss both poems in chapter 4. For the Heike monogatari episode (“Tadanori no miyako ochi”) describing Tadanori’s final encounter with Shunzei, his poetry master, and the handling of his poem posthumously in Senzai wakashu, see SNKBZ, 46:74–77; for a translation, see Tyler, Tale of the Heike, 389–91. The episode is also the central subject of the Noh play Tadanori, by Zeami; see SNKBZ, 58:146–59; for a translation, see Tyler, Japanese Nō Dramas, 264–76.



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TH REE   Suhama 1. The event is recorded in the court history Nihon kiryaku; see Kuroita, Kokushi taikei, 11:96. The Daijōe for Murakami took place the eleventh month of 946 (Tengyō 9). Murakami died in the fifth month of 967, at age forty-two. For those sovereigns who lived to this relatively advanced age, ceremonies of this kind were regularly performed; see, for example, Heldt’s description of rites very similar in detail, including the location and the sutra copied and given to the monastery, for Emperor Ninmyō in 849. Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony, 60. And in the fictional Genji monogatari, the fortieth birthday of the protagonist is an occasion for many celebrations and a watershed moment in the plot; this occurs in the chapter entitled “Wakana jō.” See SNKBZ, 23:54–61, and Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, 657–660. 2. Shūi wakashū, #273–74 (Ga no uta), in SNKBT, 7:78. 3. SNKBT, 7:78. See also Sima Qian, Shiki, 1:295; and Watson, Records, 2:57. 4. SNKBZ, 26:126–7; Murasaki Shikibu, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, trans. Bowring, Diary, 5. 5. The similarity is noted by Yamamoto Ritatsu (Murasaki Shikibu nikki, 14), where it is also mentioned that very fashionable and elaborately decorated fans were also given out as favors at the earlier occasion; see also Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:552, for the poem, reproduced as found in the fragmentary text of the 973 (Tenroku 4) En’yūin Shishi Naishinnō rango utaawase. 6. Sano, Fūryū, 101, notes that in the Kamo Festival procession scene depicted in scroll 16 of Nenjū gyōji emaki (originally a mid-twelfth-century work, extant in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies), parade participants are shown carrying large parasols (ōgasa) topped with suhama that are decorated with yamabuki and other flowers, and another suhama that depicts the festival horse-race (kurabeuma) in miniature. See also Sano’s figures 21, 22, and 23, p. 99. Both Inagi, in “Tsukurimono no keifu,” 84–93, especially 86, and Sano, Fūryū, 72 and figure 3, also identify the model of a sacred mountain (yamagata) on an altar depicted in the Kanbutsu section of the beppon version of the same emaki as a type of suhama. (For reproductions, see Komatsu, Nenjū gyōji emaki, 83–84, 94.) In addition, Sano, p. 72 and figure 4, idenitifes a suhama displayed outdoors with a large pine as its central feature in a vignette in the Higashiyama yūraku zu (a large early seventeenth-century screen painting depicting “pleasurable pursuits in the Higashiyama district,” now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). There are in fact two contrasting types of suhama (or shimadai) in the screen; see figure 5 herein. 7. See Inagi, “Tsukurimono no keifu,” 84–85. According to Inagi’s report, the Shōsōin “lotus pond” (hasuike or renchi) and “magical island” (kazan) measure from 32.4–33 centimeters wide by 30 centimeters high and 45–87 centimeters wide by 31 centimeters high, respectively. They had not been noted as objects of importance in the history of material culture among the many such artifacts in the Shōsōin collection until 1952. 8. Many scholars point to early tray-sized models of the mythical Chinese paradiseisland Penglai/Hōrai as formative stages of the development of suhama. See Sano, Fūryū, 73–82; Nishiki, “Waka ni okeru suhama to teien,” 81; and Koizumi, “Suhama ni tsuite,” 40.

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9. Mikasayama appears many times in poems in the Man’yōshū; Shirara no hama is named in a saibara, an ancient form of ceremonial song. See Kubota and Baba, Utakotoba utamakura daijiten, 443, 819–20. 10. Both Minegishi (in sections of Utaawase no kenkyū) and Hagitani (in Heianchō utaawase gaisetsu; see note 5, above) use the concept of fūryū to frame their detailed accounts of the textual and material culture of poetry contests, and both give particular attention within these discussions to suhama and their design and functions. 11. For my earlier treatment of fūryū, see Kamens, Utamakura, 116–67. The connotations of fūryū emphasized here should be understood as the medieval (chūsei) fūryū/feng-liu; the term and concept become something quite different—more virtuosic but also less elite and exclusive—in early modern Japan (kindai), and again quite something else in modern usage. This concept or quality, like so many other “Japanese things,” has a Chinese name but needs to be defined through description of examples of its specifically Japanese manifestations. An appreciation of fūryū is key to gaining an understanding of objects such as suhama and their role in cultural productions; the study of suhama and of the milieus in which they appeared also contributes to an undertanding of fūryū and its diverse manifestations. 12. The only extant example of Heian-period landscape screen painting (senzui byōbu) is the so-called Tōji senzui byōbu in the Kyoto National Museum, and it is thought to have been made in the latter half of the eleventh century. It has one affixed but blank paper square (shikishi) that may have been reserved for the inscription of verses. For a recent study, see Yang, “The Tōji Screen.” Earlier instances of the composition of poems in conjunction with byōbu production and presentation (byōbu uta) date to the end of the latter part of the ninth century, but none of the paintings mentioned in such sources (for example Tsurayuki shū, the collected poetic works of the poet Ki no Tsurayuki, which contain many series of byōbu uta) has survived. For a recent study of byōbu uta in English, see Sorensen, Optical Allusions. 13. This approach is suggested in Origuchi Shinobu’s discussion of a variety of ritual objects—models, miniatures, and replications of sacred places of many sizes—including the huge portable yama (“mountains” on wheels), also called dashi (山車), that are the most conspicuous feature of the Gion Festival as observed in the city of Kyoto at least since early modern times. See Origuchi, “Higeko no hanashi,” 176–202, especially 190. Origuchi’s critics have debated the question of whether these portable entities, and also the ritually delimited spaces within the sanctuary (shime), are temporarily occupied by divine spirits or deities (kami), as he claimed, or are or were understood to be those spirits and divinities temporarily incorporated in those constructions. Some, including Yagi, have also questioned his implication that Daijōe appurtenances such as suhama are the direct forebears of later portable shrines, floats, and other models of divine locales and spaces. 14. See, for example, Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony, 112–15, and McCullough, Brocade by Night, 243. 15. Minegishi Yoshiaki and Hagitani Boku were the two Japanese scholars of the postwar period who produced the monographs and authoritative text editions of utaawase and related aspects of waka culture that have formed the basis for most subsequent studies in this field. See Minegishi, Utaawase no kenkyū, 51–52, 75–98; Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase gaisetsu, especially 165–175; and Hagitani’s magnum opus, Heianchō utaawase taisei, an ex-



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haustive compendium of extant contest records with extensive commentary first published 1957–69 and reprinted in expanded and revised form as [Zōho shintei] Heianchō utaawase taisei in 1995. For more recent studies of utaawase in English, see Huey, The Making of Shinkokinshū; Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony; Sorensen, Optical Allusions; and Bundy, “Court Women in Poetry Contests” and “Men and Women at Play,” among others. 16. Suhama are encountered in Japan today in the relatively simplified and conventionalized form of the shima dai—trays that decorate the sites of traditional wedding ceremonies, invoking felicitous associations but with no specific relationship to literary traditions, though their imagery—usually including figures of cranes, elderly sages, pines, and the like—may in fact descend from the ancient Penglai (Hōrai) depictions mentioned above. See Shirahata, “Shimadai kō,” 311–21. In addition to texts themselves, other items used in utaawase were prized by later generations of poets and collectors, especially when they were themselves made from poetically prized materials; see, for example, my discussion of a lectern or “poem reader’s desk” (bundai) made from parts of the Nagara Bridge and in use at poetry gatherings hosted by Cloistered Emperor GoToba in the early thirteenth century, in Kamens, Utamakura, 129–31, 136–39. 17. Ibid., especially chapter 1, “Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality,” 23–62. 18. See, for example, Tamamushi, “Concepts of ‘Decoration’ in Early Modern Japan,” especially 84–85, and Sano, Fūryū, 55–104. 19. Susan Stewart writes, “The miniature does not attach itself to lived historical time. Unlike the metonymic world of realism, which attempts to erase the break between the time of everyday life and the time of narrative by mapping one perfectly upon the other, the metaphoric world of the miniature makes everyday life absolutely anterior and exterior to itself. The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its ‘use value’ transformed into the infinite time of reverie.  .  .  . The miniature always tends toward tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure. Whereas speech unfolds in time, the miniature unfolds in space. The observer is offered a transcendent and simultaneous view of the miniature, yet is trapped outside the possibility of a lived reality of the miniature.” Stewart, “The Miniature,” in On Longing, 65–67. I find these passages deeply resonant with what I imagine as a viewer’s encounter with a suhama, but there are some key distinctions to be made: to begin with, poets encountering suhama do seem to extrapolate something like narrative or a “story” about an imagined experience of being in or seeing the represented space, and by this means they suggest a kind of commerce or transportation of consciousness between the imagining, observing faculties and the imaginary embodied in the world of the suhama. They are not utterly “trapped outside” it but create a sense of movement in and out of it. 20. See Zōtei Kojitsu sōsho henshūbu, Zōtei kojitsu sōsho dai rokkai, 85–90. 21. Quoted in Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 151. 22. These works are quoted in ibid., 4, 26, 65, 132, 151. Shime no yama are the structures that Origuchi and his followers identified as forerunners of the dashi (山車) that are borne in procession in many Japanese festivals. Ibid., 14, 26; see also Nishimura, Origuchi ­Shinobu jiten, 48–49. Iguchi, “Daijōsai to kayō,” 14–16, cites records in Nihon kiryaku

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and Ruiju kokushi tracking significant shifts in the materials used in shime no yama, the earliest mention of which in such chronicles dates to 823. At that time, in preparation for the Daijōe for Emperor Junna, Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu and Otsugu directed that hence­ forward, shime no yama should be made of sakaki wood and decorated only with branches of tachibana (orange) and yuhu and labeled simply with the names of the respective Yuki and Suki t­ ribute-offering provinces, and said that such simplicity would be most pleasing to the kami. By 833, these strictures were being ignored: the shime no yama presented in that year by Ōmi as the Yuki province had a type of paulownia (aogiri) planted at its peak, in the branches of which sat a pair of phoenixes surrounded by clouds of five colors, with the label “Yuki Ōmi” rising above them along with three-dimensional presentations of the sun and a half-moon, with figures of elderly sages and a rin (Chinese lin, a fantastic giraffe-life creature) and a pair of auspicious black bamboos in the background as well. The Suki shime no yama, provided by Bitchū, was concomitantly lavish. Iguchi proceeds to show that in many cases in which Daijōe waka refer to yama (mountains), they are very likely referring not to actual mountains in the provinces themselves but rather to shime no yama installed in the Daijōe enclosure. Likely examples include the “Ōmi no ya kagami no yama” (Mirror Mountain), “Kibi no nakayama,” and “Kume no Sarayama” Daijōe poems found in the Kokin wakashū (KKS, #1086, 1082, 1083). The role of shime no yama in the Daijōe and such aspects of their design clearly suggest analogies—and perhaps genealogical links—to the role, placement, function, and design of the far more miniature but often equally lavish suhama in their utaawase and other more secular settings. See Tōno, “Daijōe no tsukurimono.” 23. Records of Daijōe procedures and protocols assembled in Koji ruien specify that the emperor’s mikazashi for this ceremony would be made of wisteria (fuji, most likely artificial, since normally it would not be in flower in the eleventh month, early winter), then cherry (sakura) in later periods (also surely artificial). Headdresses for other participants (designated kazashi, a slight downgrade without the honorific prefix) were red plum (kōbai) for princes of the blood (shinnō), wisteria for ministers (daijin), and cherry for counselors (nagon). There were yet other protocols for other major rituals and occasions. And when the new sovereign was a child—as was often the case—he wore no headdress. See the entry on mikazashi in Tsunoda et al., Heian jidai shijiten, 1:475. 24. Yagi, Daijōe honmon no sekai, 26–61, on shime no yama; 130–47 on mikazashi; 150–69 on suhama. 25. Ibid., 163. The official record, entitled Onkazashi hanasuhama ukagaiegata (御挿頭花 洲浜伺絵形), is in the collection of the Kunaichō Shoryōbu. 26. This technique, familiar to viewers of early twelfth-century illustrated scrolls such as Genji monogatari emaki, is often called fukinuki yatai (“blown-away roof ” style); the use of cloud shapes to frame and reveal the scene is also conventional and similarly “classic.” The first run of Ozasa’s edition is dated 1665. A copy held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, is undated but could be from that initial printing or as late as 1700. 27. See McCullough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 92–94; see also SNKBZ, 31:56– 57, and Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:493–500. The event is also recorded in three



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chronicles covering court events of this period: Nihon kiryaku, Fusō ryakki, and Ichidai yōki. Yamanaka et al., Nenpyō, in SNKBZ, 31:570. 28. Nishiki Hitoshi sees the role of suhama in utaawase and other gatherings as a counterpoint or variant of the role that garden-viewing also served, providing another source of perspectives and topic treatments that shaped poetic composition in the time before, during, and after the heyday of suhama. See Nishiki, “Chūsei bungaku,” 52–68, and “Waka ni okeru suhama to teien,” 79–94; see also Hirakawa, “Heianchō bungaku,” 11–20. My reservation about these genealogies is that “viewing” is a very broad category, an experience in real and imaginary spaces that is either explicit or implicit in thousands of poems. It is true, however, that the “thingness” of a viewing or strolling garden, or its materiality, invites analogy to the “thingness” of, say, a landscape screen painting or, for that matter, a suhama, at least insofar as the way that they may invite, incite, or support (or simply provide an occasion or opportunity for) poem-making. 29. The left/right two-sided (Yuki/Suki) format of the Daijōe and the two-team structure of monoawase and utaawase are structurally analogous, but the former is not the template for the latter. The “left/right” organization of court, civil, and military organizations was fundamental in both China and Japan, and may in turn be thought of as structurally related to the yin/yang conception of cosmic order. These structures should probably not all be lumped together as manifestations of a single principle, though they do certainly share this distinctive and consistent structural feature. 30. See Kamens, Utamakura, 189–93, 189–207. 31. McCullough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 93–94 (translation slightly modified); SNKBZ, 31:56–57. It was not at all unusual for poems to be addressed to or refer to exalted persons (including sovereigns) using the word kimi, “my lord,” as a second-person pronoun (here, the possessive “for your sake”: the usage is both familiar but also respectful and occurs in hundreds of poems). In other contexts, such as love poetry, however, kimi is used as an address or referent to a person who is the object of the poem-speaker’s desire or deep affection; that aspect is not entirely absent from this particular poem, which rhetorically redefines the motifs in the suhama as charms for the emperor’s long life. 32. See Kamens, “Dragon-Girl, Maidenflower,” especially 41–43. 33. McCulllough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 88–89; SNKBZ, 31:49–50. 34. “The suhama seems to be a sign that attracts other signs and objects, artificial and natural, and even living things such as insects, which thereby become signs.  .  .  . In the utaawase or poetry contest, inscribed and pictured objects like sliding doors, screens, and scrolls can readily shift from sign to referent, and the trope of ‘mitate,’ or ‘setting up on thing to be seen as another,’ essentially renders all signs, material or otherwise, fungible.” David Bialock, unpublished panel comments at the “Representing Things” symposium, Yale University, April 24, 2009. I thank Professor Bialock for permission to quote him here. 35. See Kamens, Utamakura, 142–48. See also Frank, “Rapports.” 36. Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:498–99. Hagitani refers to the suhama as the medium and locus of fūryū in this event (“fūryū no baishitsu taru suhama wo mo fūryū no taishō . . .”) and as evidence of the achievement of a new level of sophistication in the

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­performance aesthetics in utaawase of its time (“fūryū mo itareri . . .”); he also notes that this is the only known example of a suhama design with “sound effects” (onkyō kōka). 37. Ibid., 1:498. 38. These are poems 3, 17, 29, 29, and 30 in the Kunaichō text of the 966 Dairi senzai awase reproduced by Hagitani (ibid., 493–94). Hagitani identifies “Ukon no myōbu” as a participant in the Dairi utaawase of Tentoku 4.3.30 (dated 966; Hagitani, #55) and the Ōwa 2.5.4 Kōshin Dairi utaawase (dated 962; Hagitani, #60), and “Suke no myōbu” as the same person named as “Suke no kimi” in the Tenryaku 10.8.11 Bōjō Udaijin Morosuke senzai awase (dated 956; Hagitani, #55) and as “Suke” in the 962 Kōshin contest. They were among a favored group of repeat participants in the utaawase of Murakami’s long reign. Ibid., 498. 39. Nishio and Kobayashi, Kokon chomonjū, 2:332–35. See also Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:316–24. 40. See the previous chapter, where I noted that she is the only woman to whom a Daijōe waka is attributed. 41. See Koizumi, “Suhama ni tsuite,” 35–52. 42. Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:159–92. This utaawase text has a lengthy, detailed nikki (here, the terms idenitifies a prefatory essay about the occasion and the playing out of the contest itself) by the poet Ise, who was a leading participant for the team of the left; see Heldt, Pursuit of Harmony, 319–20, for a translation. A number of poems from this contest appear in the Kokin wakashū, Gosen wakashū, and other later royal anthologies. 43. Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 1:370–450. Texts of this contest incorporate some lengthy accounts, in kana, of various details and phases of the proceedings. The journal of Emperor Uda (Kanpyō gyoki) and the fragmentary Tenjō nikki both contain fairly lengthy accounts of the event, in kanbun. Several poems from this contest appear in Shūi wakashū and other later royal anthologies. 44. Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 2:832–67. This contest’s records open with a lengthy kana nikki by Fujiwara no Sukenari, a participant on the left. 45. Ibid., 174–76. The kazusashi (員刺, 員指, 員差, 籌刺) should not be confused with the kazashi (挿頭, flowered headdress) of the Daijōe. 46. Ibid., 2:884–93. 47. Translation adapted from Ito, Anthology, 96–99. See also Hagitani, Heianchō utaawase taisei, 2: 884–85. “Nagahama,” “Futami no ura,” “Shirora [also Shirara] no hama” (as in the Murasaki Shikibu episode, above), and Fujigata were all, to a greater or lesser degree, well-established Ise-area utamakura meisho by this time. 48. The phrase comes from John Frow, quoted by Bill Brown in his landmark essay “Thing Theory,” 12. 49. Many sources suggest that Taira no Kanemori was Emon’s biological father, as he was the first husband of her mother, but she was raised as the daughter of the courtier Akazome Tokimochi. 50. See Sekine et al., Akazome, 15–16. The poem appears in slightly different form as Shūi wakashū, #316, where the kotobagaki makes no mention of its connection to a suhama. 51. Nakatsukasa shū, #29; see SKT, 3:82. 52. Sekine et al., Akazome, 14–21.



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53. I mentioned Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu in the previous chapter as the likely addressee of her father Koreyuki’s Yakaku teikinshō. For this passage in her diary, see Itoga, Kenreimon’in, 40–41; see also Harries, Poetic Memoirs, 119–21. 54. Yoshinobu is credited with one poem used at Reizei’s Daijōe in 968, and was the Yuki poet in both 970 (for En’yū) and, along with Kiyohara no Motosuke (Sei Shōnagon’s father), in 985 (for Kazan). 55. Yoshinobu shū, #40; see Masuda, Yoshinobu, 73–74. 56. Masuda, Yoshinobu, 418–21. 57. Ibid., 526–27. 58. I think here of passages in John Frow’s 2001 essay, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” where he builds on Michel Foucault’s “conception of discourse (or rather the discursive formation) as a matter not of language alone but of a complex of talk, texts, rules, bodies, authorisations, things, architectures, and so on” to observe that “things, in this model, never stand alone: they are bits of associative chains which form and reform the hybrids of nature and culture of which our world is composed” (280–81). I hope it is clear that this model is an apt one for waka culture, as for other cultures. 59. Banmin kokoro no kagami has a preface by Yanada Mosui and an afterword by the Aizu domain physician Ishida Ryūgen; the illustrations are by Ōsuga Seikō. An 1854 version of the book is held in the Special Collections of the East Asia Library of Yale University. See also Drixler et al., Samurai, 77. 60. Shirahata, in Shimadai kō, also discusses and reproduces some similar images including selections from illustrated versions of Ihara Saikaku’s Buke giri monogatari (1688) and several other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books, and by this means posits a fairly strong lineage from the classical suhama to the early modern (and contemporary) shimadai (島台).

F OU R   “Eight Views of Ōmi” 1. The entire scroll may be viewed at http://orbis.library.yale.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo ?searchId=8808&recCount=50&recPointer=1&bibId=9416882. It was exhibited in 2015 in “Treasures from Japan in the Yale University Library” at the Beinecke Library; see Botsman et al., “Treasures,” 37–39. The scroll was acquired for the university as part of the Yale Association of Japan collection by the historian and curator Asakawa Kan’ichi, but the date and circumstances of its purchase are not known. 2. Translations by Riley Soles, used with permission. A few explanatory notes may be helpful. In traditional waka terminology, these “topic tags” are musubidai, or “compound topics,” in that they combine a two-character place-name with two characters that specify a time of day and/or season and certain other phenomena or activities associated with them. Even where the musubidai names no explicit season, certain figures are ipso facto understood to be seasonal. For example, the southward flight of geese in autumn: in the Katada poem, they are traveling in that direction toward Ōmi from “Koshi,” the region to the north and east of the capital along the Sea of Japan coast. In the Ishiyama poem, “Nionoumi” is an archaic/poetic name for Lake Biwa; Suma and Akashi refer to the settings of famous

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­episodes (and the names of chapters) in The Tale of Genji, discussed hereafter, as are additional sites named in the poem (Mount Moru, Uchide Shore). 3. The classic and foundational study is Hibbett, Floating World; see also Haft, Aesthetic Strategies. 4. In a catalog entry on the Soken “Teika’s Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months” screens, which were a centerpiece of the 1986 Yale University Art Gallery exhibition “Word in Flower: The Visualization of Classical Literature in Seventeenth-Century Japan,” I briefly mentioned its relationship to the Beinecke “Eight Views of Ōmi Scroll,” which is my focus here. My engagement with the scroll dates to the period of research leading up to that exhibition and publication, and I remain grateful to James Ulak and the late Carolyn Wheelwright for that experience. See Wheelwright, Word in Flower, 110. 5. See Brown, “Re-presenting Teika’s Flowers and Birds.” 6. The Freer Sackler scroll is dated 1670. See http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/edan/ object.cfm?q=fsg_F1904.390. Similar stylistic and formal resemblances, with some variations (including the inclusion or omission of the poem texts—not so slight a variation), can be seen in other renderings of “Teika’s Flowers and Birds,” including Tan’yū’s, in the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and other versions by later members of the Tosa school. See Brown, “Re-presenting Teika’s Flowers and Birds.” 7. In one mark of the continuity of this practice, another early nineteenth-century coterie of courtiers (kuge) produced another rendering of Ōmi hakkei in an album of shikishi poem inscriptions and paintings. See Henderson, Imperial Album Painting. 8. Fumiko Cranston has suggested, in private communication, that Ōmi hakkei scroll reproductions may have been made as gifts for high-ranking travelers making their way between the Kyoto and Edo metropoles along the Tōkaidō, which passes directly through the area at the southern tip of Lake Biwa in which several of the “Eight Views” sites are located. The Soken scroll may well have been created to be given to someone as a memento of such a journey. See hereafter for further discussion of the very scant documentary evidence relating the Beinecke scroll calligraphers to this possibility. 9. Throughout much of its reception history, it was frequently asserted that members of an earlier generation of the Konoe family, Masaie and his son Hisamichi, were the first authors of an “Eight Views of Ōmi” set of poems, since they are known to have been in the area ca. 1500, but this attribution (along with some others) was definitively debunked in the mid-twentieth century with the publication of a careful study by a Shiga-ken based local historian, Shibata Minoru. See Shibata, “Ōmi hakkei,” especially 8–11. 10. Lee Bruschke-Johnson puts this more definitively: “In all likelihood Nobutada was the author of the waka poems that became the standard for Ōmi hakkei works.” She supports this, as have others, by adding that “a note in the diary Rokuon nichiroku dating to Tenshō 17 (1589) states that Nobutada asked the author to make three copies of a painting with inscriptions for scrolls with a Lake Biwa theme.” She also suggests for a variety of reasons that the “theme probably was meant to honour Nobunaga.” Bruschke-Johnson, Dismissed, 115–16; see also 58. Rokuon nichiroku is a chronicle of cultural affairs recorded by the provosts of the Zen monastery Rokuon’in (a subtemple in the Shōkokuji complex in Kyoto) covering the years 1487 to 1651.



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11. This is in contrast to the Yale University Art Gallery’s “Teika’s Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months” screens: on each panel of the screens, each of the twelve calligraphers wrote one pair of poems—Teika’s original early thirteenth-century poems on flower and bird emblems of each month of the year—in his own hand on a shikishi that appears above the corresponding painting by Soken; the name of each calligrapher appears on an additional small cartouche attached to the upper section of each panel just to the right of each of these shikishi. For digital images of the screens, see http://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/ objects/57644. 12. These are, respectively, Motohiro kō ki and Kaneteru kō ki. Manuscripts of both can be searched in the database of the Tokyo Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjō (University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute); see http://wwwap.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ships/shipscontroller. 13. Horikawa surveys and lists Shōshō hakkei waka texts dating from ca. 1300, beginning with a sequence attributed to Reizei Tamesuke, followed by additional examples attributed to Reizei, Kyōgoku, and Asukai poets Ton’a, Shinkei, Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (about whom more hereafter), and Kitabatake Kuninaga (Keiyū) in 1571. See Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: Shiika to kaiga, 56–60, and “Shōshō hakkei zu to waka,” 161–82. 14. See http://wwwap.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ships/db.html. The entry in Motohiro kō ki may be located in the Shiryo Hensanjo “Hennen Database” for Manji 3.12.18. The entries in Kaneteru kō ki are for the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month of Genroku 3 and the sixth day of the seventh month of the same year (images 131 and 161 in section 22, ID00007711). The recipient in the second instance was Kan’o Morimasa (1622?–98?). There may or may not be some significance in the fact that in 1673 he was granted a five hundred koku property in Ōmi province. It should also be noted here that titles by which Kaneteru refers to Sanenari and Kanehiro in diary entries for 1689, 1690, and 1691 (Genroku 2, 3, and 4) differ from the titles attached to their names in the calligraphers’ list at the end of the scroll, and in no instance is Sanenari referred to as “Gondainagon” as he is in the scroll. Further research of this kind may assist in any attempt to narrow the dating for the scroll. 15. This entry is in the first volume of the zoku hen (“Kaiki, continued”) section in the Shiryō Taikan edition. Kurokawa, Kaiki, 8–9. 16. Technically, as discussed by Lee Bruschke-Johnson in Dismissed, 115, the paintings are oshie—first painted on paper or other materials, then attached to the screens or door panels. 17. See Shibata, “Ōmi hakkei”; Haga, “Landscape,” 181–82; and Bruschke-Johnson, Dismissed, 116–21. The current whereabouts of these oshie are unknown, even to the current staff of the monastery. 18. Stubbs “Ōmi Hakkei,” 69–70, quoted in Bruschke-Johnson, Dismissed, 117 and note 15. See also Shibata, “Ōmi hakkei,” 10. 19. For an account of Nobutada’s often troubled relationship with GoYōzei, see BruschkeJohnson, Dismissed, 65–66. 20. Kaji, “Ōmi hakkei shiika no tanjō,” traces additional attributions of the composition to Nobutada in documents that predate Ban Kōkei’s Shigi no hanegaki, published in 1691. 21. Haga, “Landscape”; Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: Shiika to kaiga, and “Shōshō hakkei zu to waka.” 22. Murck, “‘Eight Views,’” especially 114–17.

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23. Berry describes the formation of rival military “governments in exile” in 1527–28 in Ōmi and Sakai. See Berry, Culture of Civil War, 139–41. Kaji, “Ōmi hakkei shiika no tanjō,” also provides documentation in support of a similar argument but in a later period, placing the florescence as rooted in “salons” formed by Kyoto exiles and Gozan Zen monks who encountered one another in Ōmi in the early seventeenth century. 24. Bruschke-Johnson, Dismissed, 118–19. 25. David Pollack’s The Fracture of Meaning: The Synthesis of China from the Eighth to the Thirteenth Centuries (1986) was one of the first studies to treat this subject in English and in an explicitly theoretical frame. Smits’s The Pursuit of Loneliness (1995) addresses this ­subject in the realm of mid-Heian poetics. Brian Steininger’s Chinese Literary Forms in Heian ­Japan: Poetics and Practice treats related issues in the study of Heian education and literacy. 26. Stubbs, “Ōmi Hakkei,” 74–79; Murck, “‘Eight Views,’” 117–21. 27. Dongting (Japanese: Dōtei; Murck, “‘Eight Views,’” 114, translates the name as “Grotto Court”) is the name of a lake in the same district under which was believed to be a huge cavern; it was, among other things, believed to be the haunt of the Yao sisters. 28. Ibid., 120–21. 29. Murck traces the literary prehistory of every element of the Xiao-Xiang program as identified by Shen Gua; Du Fu’s works figure more prominently in that account than those of any other individual. Ibid. For a more recent account, see Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: shiika to kaiga, 3–14. 30. Stubbs, “Ōmi Hakkei,” 87–88; Stanley-Baker, Mid-Muromachi Painting, 18–45. Mu Qi’s “Fishing Village at Twilight” is in the Nezu Museum, Tokyo: http://www.nezu-muse.or.jp/ jp/collection/detail.php?id=10390. His “Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar” and ­Yujian’s “Mountain Market Clearing Mist” are in the Idemitsu Museum of Art, Tokyo. See http:// www.idemitsu.co.jp/museum/collection/introduction/painting/chinese/chinese01.html; http://www.idemitsu.co.jp/museum/collection/introduction/painting/​chinese​/c­ hinese​02​ .html. 31. One of the most famous examples is Kanō Shōei’s set of fusuma’e (paintings on sliding-door panels) at Jukōin, Daitokuji, Kyoto, ca. 1566. See Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan et al., Kokuhō Daitokuji Jukōin, 18–21. 32. Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: Shiika to kaiga, chapters 2, 3. 33. Kumakura and Kitagawa, “Fūkō to bungei,” 503–6. See also note 10, above, regarding Rokuon’in documents. 34. Ibid., 505. See also Tamamura, Gozan bungaku shinshū, 1:41–44 (especially 43 for these lines). To balance the phrases that refer to Hira and Hiei, the text has 平野方丈の山 . . . 比叡三千の院. I believe this “Hirano” refers to Hira (比良), which, as shown in figure 24, lies to the north of what would have been Ōsen’s location near Katada, with Mount Hiei to the south. 35. Other items in these imayō patter songs: “Oiso, Todoroki, Gamō Meadows, Fuse Pond, Aki Bridge, Ikago Meadows, Yogo Lagoon, Shiga Bay, the golden pillar in the Buddha Hall built by ‘Silla’ [Yoshimitsu]” and “Mount Seki, Sekidera . . . the Ishida Hall . . . Kokubunji . . . The Thousand-Tree Pine Grove [Sen no Matsubara], Chikubushima.” “Todoroki” may be



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another name for the Seta Bridge. Minamoto no Yoshimitsu (1045–1127) had his comingof-age ceremony (genpuku) performed at the Shinra Myōjin Shrine (in the precincts of the Onjōji complex), so was known as “Shinra” (Silla) Yoshimitsu. He was responsible for the construction of a monastery called Konkōin and the hall referred to here would have been his private chapel. “Mount Seki” and Sekidera were in the vicinity of Afusaka no seki, the main checkpoint on the Tōkaidō for travelers leaving and entering the capital on journeys to and from the east. “The Ishida Hall” was constructed by Fujiwara no Yasunori (1007–81) while he was serving as governor of Ōmi; according to Imakagami, he bequeathed it to the monk Kakuen (1031–98), one of the sons of Fujiwara no Yorimichi. The remains of the Kokubunji were established in the eighth century on the Seta River plain near modern Ōtsu-shi. SNKBZ, 42:271–72 (imayō, #325, 326). 36. The kusemai is known simply as “Hakkei” in the Hōsei school. Sanari Kentarō, Yōkyoku taikan: Bekkan, 11–12. Translation by Adam Haliburton and the author. 37. This fluidity is also evident in the visual tradition of “famous places in Ōmi.” A pair of sixteenth-century screens entitled “Ōmi meishozu byōbu” in the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, shows the Katada and Sakamoto areas (but not, for example, Seta Bridge). See Miho Museum, Kazari, 200–201, 302, 323 (catalogue entry 125). This would seem to indicate a stage of development of the cluster of Ōmi meisho prior to or paralleling the crystallization of the “Eight Views.” Variant and more inclusive Ōmi meisho images that do and do not include the “Eight Views” cluster continued to be made throughout the early modern period. 38. The screen poems are identified thus in Tameie’s personal anthology: Hiesha negi Hōribe no sukune shichijyū no ga kōhen meisho dai shiki byōbu (日吉社禰宜祝部成茂宿 禰七十賀湖辺名所題四屏風和歌). See Satō, Fujiwara Tameie zenkashū, 337–38, poems 2635–47. The preceding poems, 2633–34, were also sent by Tameie to congratulate Narishige on this important anniversary, and the second of these was attached to a decorated walking stick made of sakaki wood—a very fitting present for a shrine officiant of such advanced age. The poem that Tameie sent with the walking stick, as well as one sent to Narishige by the Cloistered Emperor GoSaga, are reproduced in Kokon chomonjū (section 452), where the rapporteur Tachibana Narisue says that the head of the walking stick was carved in the figure of a dove. See Nishio and Kobayashi, Kokon chomonjū, 2:117–18. 39. See, for example, Shunzei’s 1166 “Tamakage no i” poem (#303) in appendix 1 herein. 40. MYS, 3:266, in SNKBZ, 6:180. The richly pedigreed figure of flocks of plovers that make the shores of Biwa their home finds its way into Shunzei’s winter (eleventh/twelfth month) poem of the 1166 Daijōe screen, where the place-name Chisaka no ura (“Bay of a Thousand Hills”) sets up an interplay with the same chi-, suggesting “thousands,” in chidori. Such mobility and substitution within a delimited set of preassociated elements so as to ring changes on such tropes (here, within the evolving repertoire of Ōmi meisho) provides yet another illustration of how the classical waka practice uses these building blocks or properties to reconstruct itself ad infinitum. The same might be said of the shuffling of tropes demonstrated in three more of Tameie’s poems for Narishige, discussed hereafter. 41. Satō, Fujiwara Tameie zenkashū, poems 2636, 2641, 2643. In the Karasaki poem, shiraruru (from the verb shiru) suggests both the governance of the realm by the deities and the idea that they “know” (shiru) that the pines expect them to continue to do so. In the Seta

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poem, niho teriwataru is devised to contain a fragmentary version of nihoteru ya, a makurakotoba (fixed poetic epithet or guide-phrase) associated through consistent use with Shiga, Yabase, and other Ōmi toponyms; it is sometimes written 鳰照るや, which formulation suggests some further association with ducks (niho) caught in the light of the sun and also, aurally, an association with Niho no umi, one of the archaic poetic names of Lake Biwa. 42. See Itō and Itō, Saishō, 135–36. The anthology is also known as Saishōsō (再昌草). After a fire at his residence in 1500, Sanetaka began a systematic assembling and cataloging of his literary manuscripts and poem drafts for transmission to his descendants, and continued doing so for the next twenty years until just before his death in 1536; this became the basis of the anthology. 43. Ten’in’s Shōshō hakkei suite is included in his anthology Moku’unkō: see Tamamura, Gozan bungaku shinshū, 5:1173–74. His affiliations were with the Kyoto Gozan monasteries Shinnyoji, Kenninji, and Nanzenji. For additional details of Sōgi’s project and Sanetaka’s role in it, see Horikawa, “Sanjōnishi Sanetaka.” 44. A copy of this text, formerly held in the private collection of Kurokawa Mamichi, is preserved in a booklet with other miscellaneous waka-related documents held in the library of Notre Dame Seishin Joshi Daigaku, Okayama, box D42, item 1–1. Many passages in the short document are illegible, so Sakihisa’s companions are, for the present, difficult to identify. I thank my colleague William Fleming for his assistance in examining this document. Horikawa raises questions about the document based on problems in the identities of Sakihisa’s putative companions: the names and titles that appear in the document do not match other records. On the other hand, Horikawa notes that Sakihisa had returned to the capital from an extended stay in Echigo on the second day of the same month, so his presence in Ōmi at the stated date is plausible. See Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: shiika to kaiga, 86–87. 45. This account of the origins of the tale appears in many medieval commentaries on the text, including Kakaishō (by Yotsutsuji Yoshinari, ca. 1367), which would have been quite likely to be well known to Sakihisa, Nobutada, and their contemporaries. 46. Kaji, “Ōmi hakkei shiika no tanjō,” 2–5. 47. Horikawa, Shōshō hakkei: shiika to kaiga; Kaji, “Ōmi hakkei shiika no tanjō,” 4–11. 48. MYS, 1:29, in SNKBZ, 6:42–44. Excerpted from the translation by Edwin Cranston (A Waka Anthology, 1:190). Duthie devotes a chapter (“The Memory of the Ōmi Capital”) to detailed analysis of these and other related poems. See Duthie, Man’yōshū, 321–52. 49. This is one excellent illustration of how (so-called) makurakotoba are deployed in the poetry of Hitomaro (and many others) as what Edwin Cranston has called “guide phrases” that lead, inexorably, to the lines, phrases, and turns that follow as the poem threads its path. The term makurakotoba suggests this in that it figures a cushioning or pillowing of one word or words in or by adjacent words. Since certain words (such as Sasanami ya/­ Sasanami no) are repeatedly so deployed, or observed to do so, the structural feature seems to have earned an early identification with makurakotoba, but the origin of the term, like that of many of the words used in the manner so named, is not known. For further discussion, see, for example, Watanabe, Waka to wa nani ka, 24–38. 50. For the full text of the chōka, see SNKBZ, 6:42–44. This translation is excerpted from Cranston, A Waka Anthology, 1:190–92 (with lineation preserved).



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51. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, 1:191–92. Hitomaro’s poem on the plovers in the “evening waves” of Ōmi is read by many as one from the same occasion, but the editors of the Man’yōshū placed it elsewhere, in book 3 of the anthology. 52. See MYS, 1:#30–31, in SNKBZ, 6:44. 53. Many commentators read the full suite of three poems as an exorcism, or as a charm to calm the spirits of the absent and the dead, or chinkon. See, for example, Ebersole, Ritual Poetry, 65–72, and Duthie, Man’yōshū, 321–52. 54. MYS, 2:#1715, in SNKBZ, 7:405. “Sode kaheru” literally suggests that the anglers’ sleeves (of a light color visible from a distance, perhaps) are “blown backward,” laying bare their arms—or at least this is what the viewer/speaker believes these conditions allow him to see (miyu). 55. Earlier forms of the elements of what became Heike monogatari existed in written, oral, and musical-performance forms, and the musical-performance tradition (Heike biwa, Heikyoku) survived well into the early modern period. Many episodes, including this one concerning Tadanori’s interaction with Shunzei and the destiny of his poem, were adapted and elaborated as plays of the Noh theater. (The play “Tadanori” is attributed to Zeami. See SNKBZ, 59:146–59.) Cultured men of Sakihisa’s and Nobutada’s time would have been familiar with or exposed to any or all of these forms. 56. SNKBT, 10:30 (#66). Glosses on these poems in modern editions indicate both readings, Sasanami and Sazanami; I am reproducing these glosses as they appear in the cited sources. 57. See the discussion of Shunzei’s work on the anthology in chapter 2 herein. 58. For the episode in Heike monogatari (chapter 7, section 16, “Tadanori no miyako ochi”), see SNKBZ, 46:74–77; for a translation, see Tyler, Tale of the Heike, 389–91. In addition to Tadanori’s poem, Shunzei included four others in the anthology that begin with Sazanami ya: two of these (#67, immediately following Tadanori’s, and 981) also mention “the old capital” (furuki miyako) or “the men of long ago” (mukashi no hito), and the other two (#75 and 366) name “Mount Nagara” and its blossoms and “Mount Hira” and its storm winds (yama oroshi). He also included this poem, by his slightly younger contemporary Fujiwara no Akiie (藤原顕家, 1153–1223), among the poems in the Senzaishū, book 4 (Autumn 1), with the kotobagaki “on the essence of the dai ‘the moon shining over the lake’” (湖上ノ月といへる心をよめる): 月かげは消えぬこほりと見えながらさゞなみよする志賀の唐崎 tsukikage ha kienu kohori to mienagara Sazanami yosuru Shiga no Karasaki The moon still shines, looking like a sheet of not yet melted ice, and yet the gentle Sazanami waters come in to the shore of Cape Kara in Shiga. SNKBT, 10:93 (#294) 59. Tadanori’s “death poem” does not appear in any other major anthology, but it figures very prominently in Zeami’s play about his ghost’s return to Ichinotani, which is adapted

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for the most part from the two relevant Heike monogatari episodes. The scene of Tadanori’s visit to Shunzei’s residence prior to fleeing the capital is also treated as a memorable event in the history of the capital city itself in Ōmi meisho zue, although the episode took place in the city (Miyako). 60. For other examples of this trope in association with other sites (it is by no means unique in its association with any one place), see my discussion of the poesy of “Nagisa Villa” (Nagisa no in) and Ōigawa in Kamens, Utamakura, 60–61, 198–206. 61. This is comparable in rhetorical effect to Shunzei’s “Azumaji ya” in the first ku of his Seta Bridge poem for the 1166 Daijōe program; see chapter 2. 62. In the Man’yōgana text reproduced in the SNKBZ edition of Man’yōshū, Hitomaro’s hanka (30) spells Karasaki 辛崎 and saki(ku) (“it is well, as always”) 幸 (i.e., 雖幸有, sakiku aredo); the result, possibly, is a kind of visual play between the two quite similar graphs appearing in quick succession. See SNKBZ, 6:44. 63. A late Nara period doba (土馬), a simple clay figurine of a horse of a kind also found in ancient tombs, has been found at the site, supporting this early dating. Nihon rekishi chimei taikei, in Japan Knowledge, http://japanknowledge.com/lib/ display/?lid=30020250000065300. Shūi wakashū, poem 595, classified as a Kagura-uta, is identified in its kotobagaki as intended to be paired on a sliding-screen painting (shōji) that depicted a purification rite (harae, misogi) at Karasaki as well as fishermen’s nets (ami) being pulled into the shore, by Taira no Suketaka (平祐挙; ?–?): the shōji were in the house of “The Awata Minister of the Right,” that is, Fujiwara no Michikane (961–95): みそぎする今日唐崎におろす網は神のうけひくしるしなりけり misogi suru kefu Karasaki ni orosu ami ha kami no ukehiku shirushi narikeri On this day for sacred cleansing, as the nets cast out at Karasaki are taken in, we take that as a sign that the Kami have taken in our prayers. The poem turns on a very transparent pun: the verb hiku doubles as “pull in the nets” and “accept.” It is cited in various sources as evidence for the establishment of harae/misogi as a trope or motif for Karasaki poesy from at least this time, but it is also notable here as a poem written for integration with a visual program. SNKBT, 7:177. 64. Kanmu’s excursions in the early summer of 803 and 804 are recorded in the official court history Nihon kiryaku (where the name of his destination is spelled 可楽崎, ka-rasaki); Saga’s took place in the same season in 815 and is recorded in a subsequent chronicle, Nihon kōki (where “Karasaki” appears as 韓崎). 65. The office of Saiin was usually held by daughters or sisters of reigning emperors and was usually vacated by them when that emperor died or abdicated, or if another close family member were to die. 66. See http://hiyoshitaisha.jp/karasaki/matsu/. 67. “Karasaki,” in Nihon rekishi chimei taikei, in Japan Knowledge, http://­japanknowledge​ .com/lib/display/?lid=30020250000065300.



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68. Adolphson, Gates of Power, 42–44. 69. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/園城寺. 70. This tale is the subject of a superb seventeenth-century hand-scroll (emaki) in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (CBL 1164.1–2). 71. 寺門伝記補録; http://www.shiga-miidera.or.jp/treasure/craft/01.htm 7.22.15. 72. In a variant of this legend, Benkei was annoyed by the bell’s apparent ingratitude at being housed at Enryakuji, so he hauled it to a cliff and threw it back down the mountainside toward Miidera. The resulting damage is visible in Kuniyoshi’s well-known print illustrating this episode; see http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/objects/2006.81. 73. The source cited for this last legend, at http://www.shiga-miidera.or.jp/about/​­legend​ 01.htm, is a temple document entitled Onjōji koki (園城寺古記). 74. This shift around the word moru is an example of the well-known construction known as kakekotoba in waka parlance (somewhat similar to the zeugma or syllepsis in European rhetoric). In this case, the shift leads onward to the verb’s embedding in the place-name, which then becomes the topic of the remainder of the clause (literally, “coming and going from and to afar to pass Mount Moru”). The function of the kakekotoba in the unfolding of the linear trajectory of the poem is not unlike the function of the makurakotoba, discussed above, and many so-called makurakotoba (and other similar “guide phrases”) also have elements that work as kakekotoba-like shifts. See Watanabe, Waka to wa nani ka, 59–79. It should also be noted that a number of Ōmi Daijōe waka deploy the related place-name Mamoruyama, “Guardian Mountain.” Senzai wakashū, #1285, translated in appendix 2 herein, is a representative example. 75. A Daijōe kagura no uta included by Shunzei in the Senzai wakashū Jingi no uta section, from the 1169 Daijōe for Takakura, is one example; see appendix 2 herein. “Moruyama” also is the topic site in Daijōe yuki suki waka poems 273, 382, and 658 (all onbyōbu uta) and 587 (a Mi no hi gakuha song). The name of the mountain appears in some poems and elsewhere as Moriyama (森山, 社山), and the modern city at this location is called Moriyama (守山). For a listing of the very substantial corpus of “Moruyama” poems, see Morimoto, Utamakura taikan, 373–77. 76. I have identified at least ten examples in the SKT edition of Daijōe yuki suki waka, that is, #164, 209, 221, 257, 376, 752, 807, 1177, 1233, and 1289, ranging in period from the midtenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. 77. See Morimoto, Utamakura taikan, 294–98. 78. Fuboku waka shō, book 12, poem 4981 (SKT, 2:576). Another twelfth-century poet, Fujiwara no Suketaka (active ca. 1180; also known by his religious name, Jakue), devised an utaawase entry for the assigned topic “Over the Lake, Leaves Descend” (kōjō rakuyō) that names both Hirayama and Katada: 吹きおろす比良の山風なかりせば堅田の沖にもみぢ見ましや fukiorosu Hira no yamakaze nakariseba Katada no oki ni momiji mimashiya Were there no wind blowing down the slopes of Mount Hira,

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not e s to pag e s 153–154 Would we have been able to see the colored leaves in the offshore waters of Katada? From Zenrin oyōshū, poem #54, in Waka shi kenkyūkai, ed., Shikashū taisei, chūko, 2:746

This poem channels many others with a similar structure and rhetoric (“if there were or had been no X, how could we have Y?”), the most famous of which is Narihira’s poem positing how “hearts would be calm if there were no cherry blossoms in this world” (KKS, #53); but it also bears a strong resemblance to a poem composed by Shunzei for an offering to five major shrines (Gosha hyakushu, 五社百首, ca. 1190; SKT, 10:95 [#451]) including Hie Shrine, and thus making the use of multiple Ōmi place-names a given: 吹きおろす比良の山風夜やさむきみつの浜人衣うつなり fukiorosu Hira no yamakaze yo ya samuki mitsu no hamabito koromo utsu nari How cold the wind that blows down the slopes of Mount Hira, chilling the night! But is that not how it is possible to hear the folk who dwell at Mitsu Shore pounding silken cloth? That is, the wind-and-cold-chilled air enables the sound from Mitsu no hama (at the southwestern corner of the lake) to travel across the waters. Another topical composition from the year 1356, by Cloistered Prince Son’in (in Enbun hyakushu, a project overseen by Emperor GoKōgon and Nijō Tametada in preparation for the compilation of the Shin senzai wakashū), rearranges and rings changes on these materials: ふきおろすひらの山風さむきよはまのの入江まづこほるらん fukiorosu Hira no yamakaze samuki yoha Mano no irie madu kohoruran The wind that blows down the slopes of Mount Hira—so cold that in the bitterness of one night the whole of Mano Cove has turned to ice. The existence of such clusters of poems surely shaped the ways that each poet over time met the opportunity or challenge of composing on such topics. Fuboku waka shō, edited by Fujiwara no Nagakiyo ca. 1310, is an assemblage of a very large number of poems from private, family anthologies (ie no shū, kashū, 家集) not included in any of the chokusenshū that had been compiled prior to that time. Nakamasa’s own personal anthology has not survived. 79. Haga, “Landscape,” 181–82. 80. Comparison of this opening ku might be made to the opening of Shunzei’s 1166 Seta poem—Azuma no michi ya—discussed in chapter 2, and to the many Ōmi poems from many periods that open with Sasanami ya, including several discussed in the present chapter.



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81. This scene becomes standard in the iconography of Genji illustration, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see, for example, “Suma” album leaves and paintings in other formats in the Tosa school or the “Suma” scene in the Genji screens by Iwasa Matabei (in the Fukui Prefectural Museum of Art). 82. This moment is captured pictorially in a seventeenth-century rendering by Kanō Kyūhaku and in an illustration for the “Akashi” chapter in the woodblock-printed edition “An Illustrated Tale of Genji” (E’iri Genji monogatari). The word Akashi itself may be under­ stood to mean “bright” or “luminous” as an adjective and to mean a “torch” or “flare” as a noun; the former valence, in particular, is often manipulated in poems in the “Akashi” chapter of Genji and elsewhere. 83. The print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi included an image of Murasaki Shikibu gazing at the Ōmi moon from Ishiyamadera in his series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” (1889). Its cartouche gives it the simple title “The Moon at Ishiyama,” but, just in case, the author is depicted in billowing purple (murasaki) robes. See http://artgallery.yale.edu/collection/ search/Ishiyama. 84. Andrew Watsky referred to “Genji-centrism” in this context in his commentary on a version of this chapter that I presented at a conference at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, on March 5–6, 2015. 85. For a very different perspective on the reception of the Ōmi hakkei phenomenon as reflected in patterns of tourism as well as in a variety of popular literary forms, see Aoyagi, “Ōmi hakkei no tenkai.” 86. The paintings may be the joint work of Mitsuoki and his son Mitsunari; some art historians believe they are the work of Kanō painters. Like many monasteries in the area, some of the buildings in the Kajūji complex are said to be structures removed from the Kyoto Gosho (royal palace) and reassembled on the monastery grounds at various periods. Onsite conversation with the present Gomonzen, Reverend Tsukuba Jōhen. 87. See Nezu and Bunko, Tokiwayama Bunko meihin sen, plate 137. 88. Katō, “Kōraku to shinkō,” 193–200 (example 4). This amusing example is one of several banzuke discussed by Katō that pit, as competitors in renown and importance, famous places, famous local products (meibutsu), sites famous for flower-viewing, and the like in exhaustive lists of items representing all of the provinces of Japan, ranked in the manner of sumō competitors: the form mimics the broadsides that would actually announce and advertise a grand sumō match. In the cited example, “Ōmi hakkei” as kanjin no moto is placed in an administrative role comparable to that of “Mutsu Tamagawa,” “the six Tamagawa [Jewel Rivers],” so named in various parts of Japan (and thus a well-known utamakura grouping), which is cast as sashizoenin (差添人), a touring facilities manager. The highestranking competitor (ōzeki) on the right is Mount Fuji (“of Suruga”), and on the left, Lake Biwa (in “Ōmi”). The locations of all the meisho listed are given above the name of the meisho itself, much in the manner of the identification of the home province of actual sumō competitors.

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F IVE   A Lotus Sutra Offering 1. Sei Shōnagon, Makura no sōshi, dan, #32. See SNKBZ, 16:76, and McKinney’s translation, Pillow Book, 33–34. 2. The episode has much the look of many sections of kana dairies (nikki) of the time (for example, Kagerō nikki), centered around a poem or poems, and also resembles the short fictional or fictionalized narratives, or utagatari, that make up the composite content of classical texts such as Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise) and similar collections. 3. Such evasive circumlocutions are not at all unusual or even remarkable in Shōnagon’s style or in any prose writing of the period. Had she used an honorific form of the verb ifu, meaning “a certain person said such and such . . . ,” the subject might be construed as Teishi, the royal consort and first senior wife of Emperor Ichijō, in whose retinue Sei Shōnagon served at court—but that assumption can be ruled out precisely because she did not (elsewhere, she uses highly honorific verbs and other respectful forms when Teishi is the subject or referent). The editors of the SNKBZ edition (Matsuo and Nagai) note that a husband, lover, or friend are all among the possibilities. 4. In Senzai wakashū, where this poem appears as a Shakkyōka—a poem conveying or engaging with the teachings and scriptures of Buddhism—the kotobagaki omits the detail of the hachisu no ha no ura, the underside of the lotus leaf. SNKBT, 10:366 (#1206). Perhaps by doing so Shunzei, the compiler, directs our attention to other things about the poem, such as the implied intensity of Shōnagon’s religious inspiration. 5. See chapter 3. 6. Kubota, Yakuchū, 1:468–70, 512. 7. Her father was Fujiwara no Chikatada, whose highest office was that of governor of Wakasa. Her first marriage, to Fujiwara no Tametsune, produced a son, Takanobu; she married Shunzei after Tametsune took vows. Her personal name is not known; her appellation derives from her court service in the retinue of Bifukumon’in, that is, Fujiwara no Nariko (1117–60), empress-consort to Emperor Toba, to whom she was married after his abdication, and mother of Emperor Konoe. 8. Although Teika does not use the term here, this type of kuyō can be considered a form of tsuizen kuyō, a devout offering service that transfers the merit generated thereby to the benefit of deceased family members or associates of the recent or the more remote past, and also imparts that merit to those making the offering. Tsuizen kuyō were often occasions that generated important works of art as the media of sacred offering; for a sixteenth-century example described by Sanjōnishi Sanetaka in his diary, see McCormick, Tosa Mitsunobu, 100–101, 244n97. 9. Teika’s grouping appends poems in reference to the Muryōgikyō (“Sutra of Innumerable Meanings”), Fugengyō (“Sutra of the Boddhisattva Fugen”), and Shingyō (“The Heart Sutra”); see appendix 6. Conventionally, a fourth sutra, the Amidakyō (“The Amitabha Sutra”), is also included in such an extended configuration; its absence from Teika’s grouping is something of a puzzle. For a comparable configuration, see Ishikawa, “Jien”; see also Ma­ tsu­mura, “Fujiwara Shunzei to Hokkekyō” and Nishiki, “Hokkekyō nijūhappon waka.”



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10. Chōshu eisō, #699–700, in Kawamura and Kubota, Chōshu eisō, 173; Shūi gusō, #2617, in Kubota, Yakuchū, 442. Teika’s poem is included among the “Laments” (Aishō no uta) in Shin kokin wakashū, in SNKBT, 11:235 (#788), without Shunzei’s reply; the reply would appear in the much-later Gyokuyō wakashū, in Iwasa, Zenchūshaku, 3:383 (#2405). 11. See Kubota, Fujiwara no Teika, 86–92. 12. SNKBZ, 23:512. 13. See Man’yōshū, #207–12 (Hitomaro) and 904–6 (Okura), in SNKBZ, 6:138–42; 7:92–95. 14. I thank Caroline Hirasawa for suggesting the idea of the “seal” in this context. 15. My ideas about how Shakkyōka “work” have been influenced by approaches taken by Jean-Nöel Robert. See, for example, Robert, “Shakkyōka as Religious Experience.” 16. This search in the waka corpus was carried out (as were other phases of my research for this entire project) in the Shinpen kokka taikan database. I also discuss this technologybased resource in the postscript. 17. The term hyōshie specifically refers to decorations on the outermost surface of a scroll, which can only be seen when the scroll is initially opened and held in such a way that this surface, which then becomes a verso or underside of the scroll, is visible. A mikaeshie (見返し絵), on the other hand, is an illustration on the first section of the main (interior) surface of the scroll—a second threshold beyond the first, as it were, both of which are likely to display the title and/or subtitles of the text to follow. The hyōshie and mikaeshie in the Heike family’s devotional copy of the Lotus, dedicated in 1184, are by far the best known, and like some other examples contain additional text in the cryptographic form known as ashide (about which further discussion hereafter). Most scholars whom I have consulted suggest that Teika’s 1194 sutra copies are much more likely to have been of the type called konjikinjikyō—sutras copied on indigo-dyed paper in gold and/or silver ink. There are many resources for the study of such illustration; see, for example, Tanabe, Paintings, and Yoritomi and Akao, Shakyō. 18. Sekine and Ōi, Sanboku kikashū, 114. 19. See also Brisset, “Ashide,” 260–61, and “Insei,” 227–50. The Heike nōkyō is the best known example of a lavishly decorated Lotus Sutra copy from the late Heian period. It is still housed at the Itsukushima Shrine near Hiroshima; there are many reproductions and detailed studies. 20. Brisset, “Insei”; Mostow, “Painted Poems.” 21. See, for example, in chapter 17, “Distinction of Merits”: “If there is anyone who, hearing of the great length of the Buddha’s life-span, understands the import of the words, the merit gained by that man shall have no limit or measure, for he shall be able to produce the unexcelled knowledge of the Thus Come One. How much the truer shall this be of one who broadly hears this scripture, or causes others to hear it or holds it himself, or causes others to hold, or writes it down himself, or causes others to write it. . . . For this man’s merit shall be incalculable and limitless, able to produce knowledge of all modes.” Hurvitz, Scripture, 251–52. 22. Moerman, “Archaeology”; see also Blair, Real and Imagined.

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23. Hirano, Myōe. 24. Emperor Kazan, Shika wakashū, #356, etc., in SNKBT, 9:33. 25. Higuchi, Teika hachidai shō, poem 714 26. Shin senzai wakashū, #879, in SKT, 1:618. 27. In the well-known “Parable of the Burning House” section of the sutra, the Buddha explains his strategy in imparting the teachings of the Lotus: he says he has proceeded as would a father who, in order to entice his children out of their home when it catches on fire, offers them three different attractive toy “vehicles” in which to make their escape, but that once they are outside the house (which stands here for the state of illusion to which humans cling as to their natal home), he presents them with the truth—that there is but one “great vehicle” (the Mahāyāna teachings, embodied in the Lotus). 28. This pun is ubiquitous, almost de rigueur, in poems treating the “Parable of the Burning House” topos in waka. One of its earliest appearances is in an anonymous poem in the Shūi wakashū (#1331), classified as a lament (aishō no uta); see SNKBT, 7:390, and Miller, Wind from Vulture Peak, 94, 101. 29. There can be little doubt that Tamefuji would have had access to texts of Teika’s oeuvre and thus have known Teika’s 1194 poems in detail. The Nijō and Reizei houses took pride in their inherited collections of the holograph and transcribed manuscripts of the works of their esteemed forebears, especially those of Shunzei and Teika. 30. Brown, “How to Do Things with Things,” 936. 31. See Kamens, “Waking the Dead.” 32. Twenty-eight-poem sets (nijūhappon no uta) addressing passages and/or themes in each of the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra are among the most common forms of such poems; poems on additional related scriptures are also added to some such sets. See, for example, Senshi’s Hossin wakashū, which embeds a nijūhappon no uta sequence within a larger cycle. See also Nishiki, “Hokkekyo nijūhappon waka”; Kamens, Buddhist Poetry, 36–37; Robert, “Shakkyōka as Religious Experience”; Miller, Wind from Vulture Peak; and Hirano, “Chūsei kōki.” I tend to avoid referring to this corpus in its entirety here as Shakkyōka because it consists of many poems not necessarily to be found in the so-named sections of royal and other anthologies, or, for that matter, in those sections of utaawase and hyakushu programs designated by that topical rubric. Of course, if the need arose for Teika to search out examples of the treatment of any given “Buddhist” topos, and if it were a need that memory alone could not meet, he would have known where to look. 33. Himeno, “Fujiwara Shunzei no Hokkekyō nijūhapponka”; Matsumura, “Fujiwara Shun­ zei to ‘Hokkekyo.’” 34. See Kamens, “Waking the Dead.” 35. Decades ago, Gregory Schopen argued that the veneration of Buddhist scriptures as such in early Indian Mahāyana monastic communities derived from their function in place of the veneration of the Buddhist stupa, which was essentially a container of holy relics: the scripture, as container of the Buddha’s word, was a physical structure tantamount to the massive architecture of the stupa mound but portable, reproducible, transmittable; thus, the  scripture became a kind of surrogate for the container of the original holy physical



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vestige or remnant and as worthy of reverence, as demonstrated in circumambulatory rituals and the like. Schopen, Figures and Fragments, 25–62. Charlotte Eubanks’s more recent study of Japanese sutra culture also treats the Buddhist text as a sacred “body” and examines how this concept was realized in form and practice in medieval Japanese culture. Eubanks, Miracles. To a considerable extent, Eubanks builds on Schopen’s insights as well as David Max Moerman’s thoughtful studies of the Heian-period practice of sutra burial in preserving metal capsules—again, surrogates of the stupa as reliquary. Moerman, “Archaeology of Anxiety”; “Materiality of the Lotus Sutra”; “Death of the Dharma.” In this light, Teika’s sotoba (“stupa”) poems, written on the flattened form of a placard that not only suggests and is modeled on but also fulfills the function of the relic-container, and the memorial Lotus poems discussed here, might also be seen as variant recapitulations and realizations of these same mediated but recognizable devotional and ritual functions. 36. This was a matter much discussed at a workshop on Shakkyōka held at Yale University in March 2013. See http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/waka2013/. 37. See Teika’s Eiga no taigai, in SNKBT, 87, Karon shū, 473–74. Shunzei said much the same thing in a passage in Korai fūteishō. Ibid., 177. 38. I cannot say what contemporaries of Teika’s might have said about it, but the juncture of tsuraki/kisaragi (crossing the intersection of the fourth and fifth ku of the poem) has a rather powerful and almost eerie audial effect as I hear it in modern pronunciation. The first of these words is an adjective and the predicate of waga mi ni—thus “harsh and hard for me to bear”—but as it crosses this intersection it also seems to function as a modifier of the following noun, suggesting that “the second month itself is harsh and hard to bear [in these circumstances].” 39. Hurvitz, Scripture, 16. 40. Akazome Emon shū, #433. See Takeda et al., Akazome Emon shū, 155. Translation by Riley Soles. 41. Kintō shū, #265. See Ii et al., Kintō shū zenshaku, 241. Translation by Riley Soles. 42. See Kamens, Buddhist Poetry, 36. 43. Takeda et al., Akazome Emon shū, 154 (#43); Ii et al., Kintō shū zenshaku, 241 (#265). 44. When the art of composing renga sequences developed to its most refined stages in the fourteenth century, one of its cardinal principles would be that links should be formed in continuously shifting and varying patterns of sameness and difference with respect to preceding and subsequent links; one of the most basic of these dynamics is identified as “ground” and “design” (ji and mon). See Horton, Linking Cultures. While the structure of a sequence such as Shunzei’s or Teika’s Lotus Sutra suites, for example, is in most respects wholly different from that of a renga sequence, or for that matter from the patterning of shifts seen in topical sequences within categories of poems in the royal anthologies (often said to reach its acme in the Shin kokin wakashū, of which Teika was one among several editors, and which often, following the work of Konishi Jin’ichi, is described as a program of “association and progression”), it may yet be the case that a similar preference for leavening a sequence through one strategy of variation or another may be at work here as well. 45. Hurvitz, Scripture, 180–81. 46. Translation by Riley Soles.

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47. Hurvitz, Scripture, 201. 48. Jien, Shūgyokushū, #2520, in SKT, 3:692. 49. For the Izumi Shikibu poem, see Shin senzai wakashū, # 894, in SKT, 1: 618; Kamens, “Dragon-Girl,” 425–29. 50. Kintō shū, #420; Ii et al., Kintō shū zenshaku, 335. 51. The notation after the second poem, “hon no mama,” indicates that a copyist was perplexed by and dubious about the poem as transmitted in the text he or she was copying from but nevertheless reproduced it faithfully. In the text of Kintō shū on which the Ii et al. edition is based, a version known as the Yanagihara Masaharu-shi zō hon, there is an additional note prior to the kotobagaki preceding the first poem, stating that “this poem, and the preceding one, are difficult to understand, but they appear thus in the manuscript and so are reproduced here accordingly” (kono utadomo kokoroenedo, hon no mama to hon ni). Ii et al., Kintō shū zenshaku, 335. 52. Hurvitz, Scripture, 242. 53. Fujiwara no Kunifusa, Senzai wakashū, #1207; SNKBT, 10:367. GoReizei’s empress was Kanshi (or Hiroko, 寛子; 1036–1127), daughter of Fujiwara no Yorimichi. She took vows after GoReizei’s death in 1068. Her salon included a number of accomplished women, and she was the host of several notable poetry contests. SNKBT, 10:appendix, 37. Rather little is known about Kunifusa, though he also took vows in 1077 and, according to Fukuro zōshi, is said to have written a poetry manual of some kind for his descendants. Ibid., 10:appendix, 21. 54. Often translated at “Vulture Peak,” it is the location in which the Buddha preached the Lotus Sutra itself. 55. Ise monogatari dan, 82; SNKBZ, 2:169; Kokin wakashū, #884, in SNKBT, 5:267. 56. Translation adapted from that of Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry, 81. 57. I refer to Shunzei’s frequently cited statements in the first general section of his treatise/handbook Korai fūteishō (古来風体抄, ca. 1197; translation from Bushelle, “Joy of the Dharma,” 16–17): しかるに天台止観と申す文のはじめのことばに、「止観の明静なること、 前代も未だ聞かず」と章安大師と申す人の書き給へるが、まずうち聞く より、ことの深さも限りなく、奥の義も推し量られて、尊くいみじく聞 ゆる。この歌の善き、悪しき、深き心を知らむことも、ことばを以て述べ難 きを、これによそへてぞ同じく思ひやるべき事なりける。 Thus, in the opening words of a text called Tendai Calm-and-Contemplation, a person called Great Teacher Zhang’an wrote, “The clarity and tranquility of calm-andcontemplation is beyond anything known to previous generations.” Just by hearing it, the limitless depth of things and their inner significance is surmised and we feel most reverent. In the same way, we may come to know the good, the bad, and the deep mind ( fukaki kokoro 深き心) of waka poetry (uta 歌), which, though difficult to describe in words, is something that, I believe, can be compared to this.



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While this is Shunzei’s most explicit statement of such views, it is without doubt the case that this was a set of ideas that permeated his waka practice and teaching and was shared by many of his contemporaries and followers, as many (such as William LaFleur) have suggested; for more recent scholarship on this topic, see the recent dissertation by Bushelle (“Joy of the Dharma”) and the forthcoming dissertation (“Yūgen and the Sublime,” Yale University) by Riley Soles. 58. Hurvitz, Scripture, 300. 59. Ibid., 316. 60. Translation by Riley Soles. 61. Senshi’s Hosshin wakashū, which contains a full nijūhappon no uta set at its core, begins and ends with poems on several other sutras including some that were often grouped with the Lotus and others that are not. Kamens, Buddhist Poetry, 76–134. A mid-twelfthcentury set of illustrated scrolls of the Lotus now in the British Library continues with the Tennyo jōbutsu kyō, the sutra for the transformation of women into Buddhas, and then the Amidakyō (both of which are also included in Hosshin wakashū). The “Heart Sutra,” “Fugen Sutra,” “Sutra of Innumerable Meanings,” and “Sutra of Long Life” are among the sutras most commonly grouped with the Lotus as a liturgical set. The fact that Teika appends passages and poems on them from just three of these, yielding a total of eleven poems, seems somewhat anomalous. 62. Yamamoto, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, 33; Murasaki Shikibu, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, trans. Bowring, 18; Eiga monogatari, “Hatsuhana” chapter, SNKBZ, 31:408; McCullough and McCullough, Flowering Fortunes, 1:279. The poem includes a rather transparent pun spun out of a kakekotoba: mochi refers to a full moon, and mochinagara means “as we hold aloft [the cup].” Likewise, the verb meguru suggests both “passing round the cup” and the cycling of years—here, it is hoped, to yield a thousand years or more of Fujiwara family preeminence. 63. Translation by Riley Soles. 64. See, for example, Senshi’s “Heart Sutra” poem in Kamens, Buddhist Poetry, 82–83. 65. 人の親の心は闇にあらねども子を思ふ道に惑ひぬるかな Hito no oya no kokoro ha yami ni aranedomo ko wo omohu michi ni madohinuru kana A parent’s heart is not a place of darkness, and yet I have truly lost my way in my anxiety for my child. Gosen wakashū, #11012, SNKBT, 6:327 66. Shūi gusō, #2752; Kubota, Yakuchū, 1:468. 67. Hurvitz, Scripture, 328.

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SIX   Postscript

1. Brown, “Re-Presenting Teika’s Flowers and Birds.” 2. SNKBZ, 22:372.

Appendix 2   Daijōe waka in the Senzai wakashū 1. SNKBT, 10:195–97, 389–91. 2. Naga-, in Nagata, amplifies the notion of the length of uninterrupted sovereignty, in combination with chiyo (a thousand years) and the notion of the unaltered content (koto— that is, what the song is saying) and form of the musical tune (shirab[e]); koto also doubles as the name of the festive musical instrument. 3. Tsuki- pivots to mean both “pound [rice]” and “months” in tsukihi (“months and days”). 4. Suwe refers to the new emperor’s descendants in the royal line but is associated with the roots and tips of pines, sakayu suggests the prosperity of the lineage as well as the pine forest, and ko- doubles as progeny (子) and as trees (木) in the compound kodakaku. 5. Afu, “to meet or encounter,” and part of the name of the famous checkpoint or barrier between the capital and Ōmi, here carries the additional idea of the concurrence of the lifespan of long-lived things (the cedars) with the auspicious aura of a new reign. 6. Emperor GoToba. 7. Mikami no yama, spelled in this instance as “Three-kami Mountain,” is here treated as a divine peak on which evergreen cedars flourish. Mi- can also be understood as a prefix signifying sacredness and/or as an honorific: there is really no distinction. 8. The name of the mountain itself means “a mountain where kami dwell in happiness and comfort,” and a kamiasobi no uta is, of course, a song sung for the pleasure of the kami. The waving of sakaki branches in the scheme of the poem suggests the characteristics of a traditional torimono no uta as well. 9. The poem deliberately repeats the word kami, as if to augment the idea of timeless repetition of the rite itself. 10. This was during the reign of GoShirakawa. 11. This poem and several related examples, including Shunzei’s own Yufusono poem for 1166, are discussed above. 12. The correct date is Nin’an 3, 1168. The era name changed in the following year. 13. See the note on poem 1281, above, regarding Kamunabiyama and sakaki. Katano and Matsuno, in their notes on Senzai wakashū in the SNKBZ edition, point out the similarity to a non-Daijōe kagura uta (which also appears in the nineteenth-century commentary Ryōjin kōshō in a slightly different version): Mishima yuhu/kata ni torikake, ware Karakami ha karawogi semu ya (“With Mishima mulberry cloth cords at my shoulder, I, Karakami, beckon the kami from afar”). Kagura uta, in SNKBZ, 42:42–43. 14. Emperor GoToba, as in the case of poem 640, above. 15. See the note on poem 1283, above, regarding Morokami no sato. 16. Commentators suggest that this poem may allude to a kamiasobi no uta/torimono no uta in Kokin wakashū (#1075) that sings of many generations of kami decorating their



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attire with sakaki, which, despite many frosts, still flourishes (as in poem 639, above), thus indicating that the present performance, replete with the brandishing of sakaki branches, ­reenacts  the ancient behaviors of the sovereign’s divine ancestors and is in continuity with them.

Appendix 3   Fujiwara no Kiyosuke on “Details of the Procedure for Daijōe no uta” 1. Fujioka takes kudan no kotoba to refer to kotobagaki, by which he means the descriptions of the topics of the paintings and the poems that accompany them and are also recorded as part of the byōbu uta text. 2. Ōnakatomi no Sukechika (大中臣輔親, 954–1038) was the Yuki poet for Sanjō, GoIchijō, and GoSuzaku (in 1012, 1016, and 1028). 3. Minamoto no Kanezumi (源兼澄, 955?–?) was the Suki poet for Sanjō (1012). 4. Fujiwara no Noritada (藤原業忠, ?–1041) was the Suki poet for GoSuzaku (1028). 5. Fujiwara no Sukenari (資業, 954–1038) was the Yuki poet for GoReizei (1046). His son (“successor”) Sanemasa (実政, 1018–1093) was the Yuki poet for GoSanjō and Shirakawa (1068, 1074). 6. Fujiwara no Ietsune (家経, 992–1058) was the Suki poet for GoReizei (1046). His son Yukiie (行家, 1029–1106) was the Suki poet for Horikawa (1087). 7. Ōe no Masafusa (大江匡房, 1041–1111) was the Suki poet for Shirakawa (1068) and Yuki poet for Horikawa and Toba (1087, 1108). 8. This refers to the Daijōe for Toba (1108). 9. This refers to the Daijōe for Sanjō (1012), which was in fact the first for which there is any record of the production of Daijōe byobu uta. 10. Koreyuki, the author of Yakaku teikinshō (from which Kiyosuke is quoting), is named here with the title Kunai shōyū (宮内少輔, Assistant Director of Palace Administration). 11. Fujiwara no Yukinari (行成, 972–1027) and his grandson Korefusa (伊房, 1031–96) are the patriarchs of the Sesonji-ryū calligraphers. The documents to which Kiyosuke alludes are otherwise unknown. 12. This claim is accurate to the extent that it accords with mention of the rite in the Nihon shoki. See Kuroita et al., Kokushi taikei, 1b:3335. 13. This refers to the Daijōe of Ninmyō in 833; Kokin wakashū, poem 1082, is identified as one from this occasion. 14. This pattern began with the Daijōe of Uda (888) and Daigo (897). 15. Reizei’s Daijōe took place in 968. 16. In the following list—except for the first entry, which names only Kurunoshi (in­ accurately; see the following note)—the Yuki poet is named first, followed by the Suki poet, and the name of the sovereign whose new reign was celebrated on these occasions (read left to right). An asterisk beside the names of those in the list indicates those Daijōe poets identified by Fujioka as jusha. 17. Ohonbe is a term referring to the Daijōe that is used in the Kokin wakashū kotobagaki for poems included in the kamiasobi no uta section of book 20. KKS, #1085, is identified

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there by date as having been composed for Kōkō’s rite in 884, while #1086 is identified as having been composed for the rite for the “current sovereign,” Daigo, which took place in 897. Neither kotobagaki identifies Kuronushi as the composer. Thus, the interlinear note only partially sorts out the confusion on this point. 18. Yoshishige no Tamemasa (his original surname was Kamo). 19. See the discussion in chapter 2 regarding Shunzei’s reluctance to fill a role that had conventionally been assigned to jusha. 20. Fujiwara no Tsunehira (1005–72). 21. Fujiwara no Masaie (1026–1111). He was the eldest son of Ietsune. 22. Fujiwara no Atsumitsu (1063–1144). 23. Fujiwara no Yukimori (?–1153). 24. A euphemistic term of respect, Shin’in, is used here to refer to Emperor Sutoku, who died in exile and disgrace; Kiyosuke avoids using his official appellation as sovereign. 25. Apparently, it was inappropriate for Fujiwara no Akisue (1055–1123) to serve in this capacity after taking the Buddhist precepts. Akisue was the progenitor of the Rokujō lineage (and “school”) of poets. 26. Fujiwara no Akisuke (1090–1155). He was the third son of Akisue. 27. Fujiwara no Naganori (1100–1180). 28. Fujiwara no Shigeaki (dates unknown). 29. Emperor GoShirakawa is identified as Ichi no in, “the senior current Cloistered (Retired) Emperor.” 30. Fujiwara no Toshinori (1122–67). 31. Fujiwara no Norikane (1107–65). 32. Fujiwara no Akihiro (1114–1204), later Shunzei. See chapter 2. 33. Fujiwara no Naganori (1100–1180). 34. Emperor Rokujō is identified here as Shin’in, the same term as that used above for Sutoku, who had died by the time that Kiyosuke was writing. Here the term distinguishes Rokujō as the more recent or “junior” Cloistered Sovereign in contrast to GoShirakawa. 35. Fujioka (30) suggests that Kiyosuke would not have used his own name here, and that he formally presented Fukuro zōshi to Nijō in 1159, while Takakura’s Daijōe took place in 1168; he therefore concludes that this entry and those that follow have been added in later versions of the text. Also, since Kiyosuke died in 1177, he could not possibly have included the following entries for Daijōe that took place after that. 36. Fujiwara no Kanemitsu (1145–96). 37. Fujiwara no Suetsune (1131–1221). He was the son of Akisuke and the author Kiyosuke’s brother. 38. The notation in the list reads Tōgin Sutoku’in. Tōgin, “the current Sovereign,” should refer to Antoku, based on reliable records that identify Kanemitsu and Suetsune as the poets for his Daijōe in 1182. 39. Here again the notation “the Present Sovereign,” Kinjō, referring to Emperor GoToba, indicates that this section of the list is the work of later hands. GoToba’s Daijōe took place in 1182.



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40. The sample is the order given to Akisuke (the author’s father) in 1142 to compose the Yuki poems for Konoe’s Daijōe. 41. Otsuki no Masashige (?–?). 42. The title Daihakase (or Daigaku hakase) was an alternate for Myōgyō hakase, designating a senior scholar of the Myōgyō division of the academy, devoted to the study of the five core Confucian classics. 43. Ge: an epistolary form deployed by officials in response to orders received from superiors in the ministry or bureau in which they served. 44. That is, Jige. 45. That is, Tenjōbito. 46. That is, Gyōjidokoro. 47. Gon uchū no ben dono, identified by Fujioka as Fujiwara no Yoritaka (1097–1159).

Appe n dix 4   The Ōmi hakkei Poems in the Beinecke Scroll

1. In most versions, the second ku is chigiru hajime to so (or zo; 契るはしめとそ／ぞ).

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Character List for Japanese and Chinese Names and Special Terms

(items not listed here may be found in the following Glossary of Terms and Titles) Abe 阿倍 aishō no uta 哀傷の歌 Akashi 明石 Akazome Emon 赤染衛門 Akazome Tokimochi 赤染時用 Akechi Mitsuhide 明智光秀 Akihiro. See Fujiwara no Akihiro = Shunzei Akisue. See Fujiwara no Akisue Akisuke. See Fujiwara no Akisuke Akita 秋田 Amida Butsu 阿弥陀仏 Amidakyō 阿弥陀経 Amidanomine 阿弥陀峰 Anlinzhishan 安林之山 Anlushan Rebellion 安史之乱 Anshi 安子 aogiri 梧桐 ashide 葦手 Ashikaga bakufu足利幕府 Ashikaga Takauji 足利尊氏 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 義満 Asukai 飛鳥井

Atsumitsu. See Fujiwara no Atsumitsu Awazu 粟津 Ban (clan) 伴 Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊 Banmin kokoro no kagami 万民こころの かがみ banzuke 番付 ben 弁 Benkei 坊弁 beppon 別本 Bifukumon’in 美福門院 Bifukumon’in no Kaga 美福門院加賀 Bitchū 備中 Biwa, Lake 琵琶湖 Bizen 備前 Bodaiji 菩提寺 Bohai Sea 渤海 Bōjō Udaijin Morosuke senzai awase 房城 右大臣師輔前栽合 bonshō 梵鐘 Buke giri monogatari 武家義理物語 bundai 文台

27 9

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c ha rac t e r l i st

Bunsei 文政 Burakuin 豊楽院 byōbu 屏風 byōbu uta 屏風歌 Chang-an 長安 Chinkonsai 鎮魂祭 Chōdōin 朝堂院 Chōdōin Saiden 朝堂院斎殿 Chōgen 長元 chōka 長歌 chokusenshū 勅撰集 Chōshū eisō 長秋詠藻 Chōwa 長和 Chūsan 中算 chūshin fudōki 註進風土記 chūshinki 註進記 daibu 大夫 Daidairi 大内裏 daigaku hakase 大学博士 daigaku no tō monjō hakase 大学頭文章 博士 Daigokuden 大極殿 daihakase 大博士 daijin 大臣 Daijōe byōbu shikishigata 大嘗会屏風色 紙形 Daijōe byōbu waka 大嘗会屏風和歌 Daijōe no uta no shidai 大嘗会の歌の 次第 Daijōe uta 大嘗会歌 Daijōkyū 大嘗宮 Daijōsai 大嘗祭 daimyō 大名 dainagon 大納言 Dairi senzai awase 内裏前栽合 Dairi utaawase 内裏歌合 Daitokuji 大徳寺 darani 陀羅尼 dashi 山車 Dazaifu 太宰府 doba 土馬

Dongting 洞庭 Du Fu 杜甫 E’iri Genji monogatari 絵入り源氏物語 Echigo 越後 Echizen 越前 Edo 江戸 Edokoro 絵所 Edo period 江戸時代 Eiga monogatari 栄花物語 Eiga no taigai 詠歌大概 Eiwa 永和 Eizō hōshiki 営造法式. See also Yingzao fashi emaki 絵巻 Emperor Akihito 昭仁 Emperor Antoku 安徳天皇 Emperor Daigo 醍醐天皇 Emperor En’yū 円融天皇 Emperor GoHanazono 後花園天皇 Emperor GoHorikawa 後堀河天皇 Emperor GoIchijō 後一条天皇 Emperor GoKōgon 後光厳天皇 Emperor GoMizuno’o 後水尾天皇 Emperor GoReizei 後冷泉天皇 Emperor GoShirakawa 後白河天皇 Emperor GoSuzaku 後朱雀天皇 Emperor GoToba 後鳥羽天皇 Emperor GoYōzei 後陽成天皇 Emperor Heisei 平成天皇. See also Emperor Akihito Emperor Higashiyama 東山天皇 Emperor Horikawa 堀河天皇 Emperor Junna 淳和天皇 Emperor Juntoku 順徳天皇 Emperor Kazan 花山天皇 Emperor Kōgon 光厳天皇 Emperor Kōkaku 光格天皇 Emperor Kōkō 光孝天皇 Emperor Konoe 近衛天皇 Emperor Murakami 村上天皇 Emperor Nijō 二条天皇 Emperor Ninkō 仁孝天皇



c ha rac t e r li st

Emperor Ninmyō 仁明天皇 Emperor Reizei 冷泉天皇 Emperor Rokujō 六条天皇 Emperor Saga 嵯峨天皇 Emperor Sakuramachi 桜町天皇 Emperor Sanjō 三条天皇 Emperor Shijō 四条天皇 Emperor Sutoku 崇徳天皇 Emperor Suzaku 朱雀天皇 Emperor Takakura 高倉天皇 Emperor Temmu 天武天皇 Emperor Tenji 天智天皇 Emperor Toba 鳥羽天皇 Emperor Uda 宇多天皇 Emperor Wu 漢武帝 Emperor Xuanzong 唐玄宗 Emperor Yōzei 陽成天皇 Empress GoSakuramachi 後桜町天皇 Empress Jitō 持統天皇 Empress Meishō 明正天皇 Enbun Hyakushu 延文百首 Enchin 円珍 Engi shiki 延喜式 Enman’in 円満院 Fuboku waka shō 夫木和歌抄 Fugengyō 普賢經 fuji 藤 Fujigata 藤潟 Fujiwara-kyō 藤原京 Fujiwara no Akihiro 藤原顕広 = Shunzei Fujiwara no Akiie 顕家 Fujiwara no Akisuke 顕輔 Fujiwara no Arikuni 有国 Fujiwara no Asataka 朝隆 Fujiwara no Atsumitsu 敦光 Fujiwara no Chikatada 懐忠 Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu 冬嗣 Fujiwara no Hidesato 秀郷 Fujiwara no Iemitsu 家光 Fujiwara no Ietsune 家経 Fujiwara no Kanemitsu 兼光 Fujiwara no Kinhira 公衡

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Fujiwara no Kintō 公任 Fujiwara no Kiyosuke 清輔 Fujiwara no Korefusa 伊房 Fujiwara no Koreyuki 伊行 Fujiwara no Kunifusa 国房 Fujiwara no Masaie 正家 Fujiwara no Michikane 道兼 Fujiwara no Michinaga 道長 Fujiwara no Morosuke 師輔 Fujiwara no Morotsugu 緒嗣 Fujiwara no Munesuke 宗輔 Fujiwara no Nagaie 長家 Fujiwara no Naganori 永範 Fujiwara no Nariie 成家 Fujiwara no Nariko 得子 Fujiwara no Naritoki 済時 Fujiwara no Norikane 範兼 Fujiwara no Noritada 業忠 Fujiwara no Sadazane 定実 Fujiwara no Sanemasa 実政 Fujiwara no Seika 惺窩 Fujiwara no Shigeaki 茂明 Fujiwara no Shunzei 俊成 Fujiwara no Suetsune 季経 Fujiwara no Sukenari 資業 Fujiwara no Takanobu 隆信 Fujiwara no Tameie 為家 Fujiwara no Tameko 為子 Fujiwara no Tamemitsu 為光 Fujiwara no Tametsune 為経 Fujiwara no Teika 定家 Fujiwara no Tomoie 知家 Fujiwara no Toshinori 俊憲 Fujiwara no Toshitsune 俊経 Fujiwara no Tsunehira 経平 Fujiwara no Yorisuke 頼経. Also known as Kujō Yorisuke. Fujiwara no Yoshitada 義忠 Fujiwara no Yoshitsune良経 Fujiwara no Yukiie 行家 Fujiwara no Yukimori 行盛 Fujiwara no Yukinari 行成 fukinuki yatai 吹抜屋台

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Fukuro zōshi 袋草紙 Fumonbon 普門品 funagai 舟貝 furukoto 古事 fūryū 風流 fusuma襖 fusuma’e 襖絵 Futami, Bay of 二見浦 fuzoku/fūzoku 風俗 Fuzokudokoro 風俗所 fuzoku kabu 風俗歌舞 fuzoku waka 風俗和歌 Gakudokoro 学所 gaku no ha 楽破 gaku no kyū 楽急 ga no uta 賀歌 Gaomixian 高密縣 ge 解 Geibun ruiju. See Yiwenleiju Genji mongatari 源氏物語 Genpei Wars 源平合戦 Genroku 元禄 Genryaku 元暦 Godai hajime shō 御代始鈔 Gohyaku deshi juki bon 五百弟子受記品 gokei 御禊 Gōke shidai 江家次第 Gonnō-bon 嚴王品 Gosechi-mai 五節舞 Gosha hyakushu 五社百首 Goshūi wakashū 後拾遺和歌集 Gozan 五山 gyōji 行事 Gyōjidokoro 行事所 Gyōjidokoro no ben 行事所の弁, also Gyōji no ben 行事の弁 Gyokuyō wakashū 玉葉和歌集 Hachidai shō 八代抄 haikai 俳諧 haiku 俳句 hakkei 八景

Hakuhō period 白鳳時代 Hamuro 葉室 hanka 反歌 harae 祓 Harima 播磨 Hatsuhana 初花 Hayashi Razan 林羅山 Hayato 隼人 Heian 平安 Heian-kyō 平安京 Heihanki 兵範記 Heike biwa 平家琵琶 Heike monogatari 平家物語 Heike nōkyō 平家納経 Heikyoku 平曲 Henan 河南 Hie, Shrine 日枝神社 Hiei, Mount 比叡山 Higashiyama 東山 Higashiyama gyobutsu 東山御物 Higashiyama Kai’i 東山魁夷 Higashiyama yūraku zu 東山遊楽図 Higashizono Motokata 東園基賢 Hino Meiko 日野名子 Hira 比良 hiragana 平仮名 Hiratani 平谷 Hirayama 平山 Hitachi 常陸 hitan 悲嘆 Hitomaro. See Kakinomoto no Hitomaro Hitomaro eigu 人麻呂影供 Hiyu bon 比喩品 hiyuka 譬喩歌 Hōgen no ran (Hōgen Disturbance) 保元 の乱 Hokkyō 法橋 honka 本歌 honka-dori 本歌取り honmon 本文 honzetsu 本説 Hōrai 蓬莱 Hōribe Narishige 祝部成茂



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Hōsei school 宝生流 Hōshi 芳子 Hōshibon 法師品 Hosshōji 法勝寺 Hyōhanki. See Heihanki hyō no yama 標山 hyōshi 表紙 hyōshi’e 表紙絵 Ichijō Fuyutsune 一条冬経. See also Kaneteru Ichijō Kaneteru 兼輝. See also Fuyutsune Ichijō Kaneyoshi 兼良 Ichinoin 一の院 Ichinotani, Battle of 一ノ谷の戦い Iehiro. See Konoe Iehiro ie no shū 家の集 Ietsune. See Fujiwara no Ietsune Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴 Inaba 因幡 Inpumon’in no Taifu 殷富門院大輔 inuboe 犬吠 Ise 伊勢 Ise Monogatari 伊勢物語 Ise Sadatake 伊勢貞丈 Ishiyama 石山 Ishiyama Kannon 石山観音 Ishiyama Temple 石山寺 Iwakura Tomomi 岩倉具視 Iwasa Matabei 岩佐又兵衛 Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部 Jien 慈円 jige 地下 Jingika (Jingi no uta) 神祇歌 Jingikan 神祇官 Jingōji 神護寺 Jingū Bunko 神宮文庫 Jinshin, War 壬申の乱 Jiryaku 治暦 Jōgan 貞観 Jōgan gishiki 貞観式 Jōkyū no ran (Jōkyū Disturbance) 承久の乱

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Jōwa 承和 Jūei 寿永 Jugaku mugaku jinki bon 授学無学人記品 Jukōin 聚光院 Jumyōkyō 寿命経 Jūryōbon 寿量品 Kada no Arimaro 荷田在満 Kaei 嘉永 Kagamiyama 鏡山 Kagawa Susumu 香川進 Kaihō Yūshō 海北友松 Kaiki 槐記. See Yamashina Dōan kaisetsu 解説 Kajūji 勧修寺 Kakaishō 河海抄 Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本人麻呂 Kamakura 鎌倉 Kamo no Shigeyasu 賀茂重保 kan 漢 kana nikki 仮名日記 Kanden kōhitsu 閑田耕筆 Kanemitsu. See Fujiwara no Kanemitsu Kaneteru kō ki 兼輝公記 Kanezumi. See Minamoto no Kanezumi Kanō Kyūhaku 狩野休伯 Kanō Motonobu 狩野元信 Kanō school 狩野派 Kanō Seisen’in Osanobu 狩野晴川院養信 Kanō Tan’yū 狩野探幽 Kanpaku 関白 Kanpaku no Sadaijin Yorimichi no uta­ awase 関白左大臣頼通歌合 Kanpyō gyoki 寛平御記 kantekisutosei 間テクスト性 Kan Tokuan 菅得庵 Kaō 嘉応 kara e 唐会 Karasaki 辛崎, 唐崎, 韓崎 Kashima Shrine 鹿島神宮 kashū 家集 Katada 堅田 Kataribe 語り部

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katsuji 活字 katsura 桂 Kawara no in 河原院 kazashi 挿頭 kazusashi 員刺, 員指, 員差, 籌刺 Keiyū 桂優. See Kitabatake Kuninaga Kenhōtō bon 見宝塔品 Kenninji 建仁寺 Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu 建礼門院右 京大夫集 Kibi 吉備 kibutsu chinshi 寄物陳思 kiku 菊 Kinai 機内 kindai 近代 Kindai shūka 近代秀歌 Kinjō 今上 Kinkafu 琴歌譜 Ki no Tsurayuki 紀貫之 Kintō shū 公任集 Kin’yō wakashū 金葉和歌集 Kiritsubo Emperor 桐壺帝 Kishimai 吉志舞 Kiso Yoshinaka 木曾義仲 (i.e., Minamoto no Yoshinaka 源義仲) Kitabatake Kuninaga 北畠国永 Kiyohara no Motosuke 清原元輔 Kiyosuke. See Fujiwara no Kiyosuke kō 公 kōbai 紅梅 Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師 kochi kōmyō 古地交名 Kōfukuji 興福寺 Kōji 弘治 Koji ruien 古事類苑 Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 Kokon chomonjū 古今著聞集 kokonohe 九重 kokubungaku 国文学 kokugakusha 国学者 Komatsugahara 小松原 Kondō 金堂 konjikinjikyō 紺地金地經

Konoe Iehiro 近衛家熈 Konoe Motohiro 近衛基熈 Konoe Nobutada 近衛信尹 Konoe Sakihisa 近衛前久 Konoe Sakiko 近衛前子 Korai fūteishō 古来風体抄 Koreyuki. See Fujiwara no Koreyuki kōri 郡 Kōshin Dairi utaawase 内裏歌合 Kōya, Mount 高野山 Kubota Shōichirō 窪田章一郎 kudan no kotoba 件の詞 kuge 公家 Kuji roku fuzu 公事録付図 Kujō Kaneharu 九条兼晴 Kujō Norizane 教実 Kujō Sukezane 九条輔実 Kūkai 空海 Kume mai 久米舞 Kunaichō Shoryōbu 宮内庁書陵部 Kunai shōyū 宮内少輔 kuniburi 国風 Kunifusa. See Fujiwara no Kunifusa kurabeuma 競べ馬 Kurokawa Mamichi 黒川真道 Kuronushi. See Ōtomo no Kuronushi Kuzu clan 国栖, 国巣, 国樔 kyō 卿 Kyōgoku 京極 Kyoto 京都 Kyoto Gosho 京都御所 Kyūan hyakushu 久安百首 Kyūshū 九州 Liu Zhongyuan 柳宗元 Mabuchi Chiyo Kumamaru 馬渕千世熊丸 Maigetsushō 毎月抄 mairi onjō 参入音声 makade onjō 退出音声 maki 巻 Makibashira 真木柱 Makura no sōshi 枕草子



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Manji 万治 Man’yōshū 万葉集 Masafusa. See Ōe no Masafusa Masaie. See Fujiwara no Masaie matsuri 祭 meibutsu 名物 Meigetsuki 明月記 Meiji 明治 meishoe 名所絵 Meiwa 明和 Mengxi bitan 夢溪筆談 Michikaze. See Ono no Michikaze Michinaga. See Fujiwara no Michinaga Migi no muma no kami 右の馬の頭 Mii 三井 Miidera 三井寺 mikaeshie 見返し絵 Mikami, Mount 三神山 Mikasa, Mount 三笠山 Mikawa 三河 mikazashi 御挿頭 Mikohidari family 御子左家 Mimasaka 美作 Minamoto Kanezumi 兼澄 Minamoto Masatsuna 源政綱 Minamoto Nakamasa 仲政 Minamoto Tōru 融 Minamoto Toshiyori (Shunrai) 俊頼 Minamoto Tsunenobu 経信 Mino 美濃 Mi no hi 巳の日 Minori 御法 minzokugaku 民俗学 mitarashi 御手洗 mitate 見立て mitsugimono 貢物 mitsuki 貢 Mitsunari. See Tosa Mitsunari Mitsuoki. See Tosa Mitsuoki Miya no suke no kimi 宮のすけの君 Mizunoto-tori 癸酉 Moku’unkō 黙雲藁 Mongaku 文覚

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monjō hakase 文章博士 Moromitsu. See Otsuki no Moromitsu Moru, Mount 守山 Motohiro kō ki 基煕公記 mujō 無常 Mu Qi 牧谿 Murasaki no ue 紫の上 Murasaki Shikibu Ishiyama mōde zufuku 紫式部石山詣図幅 Murasaki Shikibu nikki 紫式部日記 Muromachi 室町 Muryōgikyō 無量義經 musubidai 結題 Myōe 明恵 Myōebō Kōben 明恵房高弁 Myōe shōnin kashū 明惠上人歌集 Myōgyō 明経 Myōgyō hakase 明経博士 Myōshōgonnō 妙荘厳王 Naden 南殿 nadeshikogai 撫子貝 Nagahama 長浜 Nagaie. See Fujiwara no Nagaie Naganori. See Fujiwara no Naganori Nagara, Mount 長等山 Nagisa no in 渚院 nagon 納言 Naishi 内侍 Nakatsukasa 中務 Nakayama Tadachika 中山忠親 Nambokuchō period 南北朝時代 Nanzenji 南禅寺 Nara 奈良 Nariie. See Fujiwara no Nariie Narishige. See Hōribe Narishige Narisue. See Tachibana no Narisue Naritoki. See Fujiwara no Naritoki negi 禰宜 Nenjū gyōji emaki 年中行事絵巻 Ne no hi 子の日 Nihon kiryaku 日本紀略 Nihon kōki 日本後紀

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Nihon shoki 日本書紀 Nijō Mitsuhira 二条光平 Nijō Tamefuji 二条為藤. Also known as Fujiwara no Tamefuji. Nijō Tametada 為忠 Nin’an 仁安 Ninnaji 仁和寺 Nobunori. See Taira no Nobunori Norikane. See Fujiwara no Norikane Noritada. See Fujiwara no Noritada Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 Ōei 応永 Ōe Masafusa 匡房 Ōe Masahira 大江匡衡 Ōe Michimasa 通雅 Ōe Tadamitsu 斎光 Ōe Tamemoto 為基 Ogoto no sato 雄琴郷 Ogura hyakunin isshu 小倉百人一首 ohonbe 贄 ohonbe no uta 贄の歌 Ohonihe matsuri. See Daijōsai Ōi River 大井川 Oita 大分 Okura. See Yamanoue no Okura Ōmi 近江 Ōmi hakkei 近江八景 omote 表 Ōnakatomi 大中臣 Ōnakatomi no Sukechika 大中臣輔親 Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu 能宣 onbyōbu 御屏風 Ōnin War 応仁の乱 Onjōji 園城寺 Onjōji koki 園城寺古記 Ono no Michikaze 小野道風. Also called Tōfū Ono no Yoshiki 美材 Origuchi Shinobu 折口信夫 Ōsen. See Ōsen Keisan Ōsen Keisan 橫川景三 oshie 押絵

Ōtomo no Kuronushi 大友 / 大伴黒主 otsu 乙 Ōtsu 大津 Otsuki no Masashige 小槻政重 Ōwa 応和 Owari 尾張 Ozasa Tokugorō 小笹得五郎 Penglai 蓬莱 Pingheshan 平蓋山 Prince Koretaka 惟喬親王 Prince Sadafusa 貞成親王 Prince Sonshō 尊證親王 Princess Kesshi (Kiyoko) 潔子内親王 Princess Senshi 選子内親王 Princess Shikishi 式子内親王 Princess Uchiko 有智子内親王 Princess Yoshiko 娟子内親王 Qingguizhishan 琴皷之山 Qu Yuan 屈原 Reishōdō 霊鐘堂 Reizei 冷泉 rekishi monogatari 歴史物語 Rinzai school 臨濟宗 Rokkaku Takayori 六角高頼 Rokujō 六条 Rokuon’in 鹿苑院 Rokuon nichiroku 鹿苑日録 Ryōjin hishō 梁塵秘抄 Ryōjin kōshō 梁塵後抄 Ryūjin 龍神 Saeki clan 佐伯 saiden 斎田 Saigū 斎宮 Saiin 斎院 Saikō hakkei 西湖八景 Saikoku 西国 Saishō 再昌 Saishōshitennōin 最勝四天王院 Saishōsō 再昌草



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Sakai 堺 sakaki 榊 Sakamoto 坂本 sakatsuko 造酒児 Sakihisa. See Konoe Sakihisa (Harutsugu 晴嗣) Sakiko (consort). See Konoe Sakiko sakura 桜 sakusha 作者 samisen 三味線 Sanboku kikashū 散木奇歌集 Sanemasa. See Fujiwara no Sanemasa Sangi 参議 Sanjōnishi Sanetaka 三条西実隆 Sankaiki 山槐記 Sanmyaku’in ki 三藐院記 sashizoenin 差添人 Seiryōden 清涼殿 Seishodokoro 清書所 Sei Shōnagon 清少納言 Seiwa Tennō 清和天皇 semigai 蝉貝 Sengaikyō. See Shanhai jing senzai/sezai 前裁 Senzaishū 千載集 Senzai wakashū 千載和歌集 senzui byōbu 山水屏風 Sesonji-ryu 世尊寺流 sessha 摂社 Sesshō 摂政 Sesson 雪村 Seta 瀬田 / 勢多 Shakkyō 釈教 shaku 尺 Shaku’a 釈阿. See Fujiwara no Shunzei. Shanhai jing 山海経 Shantung province 山東省 Shen Gua 沈括 shen xian 神仙 Shiga 滋賀 Shigeaki. See Fujiwara no Shigeaki Shigi no hanegaki 鴫の羽根掻き Shiji 史記

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Shikibu no suke 式部の次官 shikishi 色紙 shima dai 島台 shime no yama 標山. Also known as hyō no yama. Shimizudani Sanenari 清水谷実業 Shinge hon 信解品 Shingon 真言 Shingyō 心經 Shin’ in 新院 Shinkei 心敬 Shin kokin wakashū 新古今和歌集 Shinnō 親王 Shinnyoji 真如寺 Shinpen kokka taikan 新編国歌大観 shinsen 神仙 Shinsenzai wakashū 新千載和歌集 Shinsen zuinō 新撰髄脳 Shintō 神道 Shintōgaku 神道学 Shiogama 塩竈 Shishinden 紫宸殿 Shōho tōyū shū 小輔東遊集 Shoin 書院 shōji 障子 Shōkokuji 相国寺 Shōrō/Shurō 鐘楼 Shōshō hakkei 瀟湘八景 Shōsōin 正倉院 Shōwa 昭和 shugo 守護 Shugyokushū 拾玉集 Shūi gusō 拾遺愚草 Shūi wakashū 拾遺和歌集 Shunzei. See Fujiwara no Shunzei Shunzeikyō no musume 俊成卿女 Sōami 相阿弥 sodegai 袖貝 Sōgi 宗祇 sōhei 僧兵 sōjō 奏上 Song, Mount 嵩山 Song Di 宋迪

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Son’in, Cloistered Prince Son’in 尊胤法親王 Sonshō. See Prince Sonshō sōshokukyō 装飾経 sotoba 卒塔婆, 卒婆 Suetsune. See Fujiwara no Suetsune Sugawara no Tamenaga 菅原為長 Suke 助, 介, 佐 Sukechika. See Ōnakatomi no Sukechika Sukenari. See Fujiwara no Sukenari Suke no kimi すけの君 Suke no myōbu 介の命婦 Suki 主基 Sukiden 主基殿 Suma 須磨 Sumiyoshi 住吉 sumō 相撲 Sutoku’in 崇徳院 Suzaku Ōdori 朱雀大通り tachibana 橘 Tachibana no Narisue 橘成季 Taiheiki 太平記 Taikenmon’in no Chūnagon no kimi 待賢 門院中納言君 Taira no Kanemori 平兼盛 Taira no Narimasa 平生昌 Taira no Nobunori 平信範 Taira no Suketaka 平祐挙 Taishō 大正 Taji 多治 Tajima 但馬 Takamiya 高宮 Takaoka 高岡 Takashima no kōri 高嶋郡 Takatsukasa Kanehiro 鷹司 兼熙 Takayama Tatsuo 高山辰雄 Takaya Tōtōmi no Kami Yasuhide 高屋遠 江守康昆 Takemukigaki 竹むきが記 Tales of Ise. See Ise Monogatari tamai/denbu 田舞 Tamba Province 丹波

Tameko. See Fujiwara no Tameko. Also known as Kyōgoku Tameko Tamemasa. See Yoshishige no Tamemasa Tanabata festival 七夕 tanka 短歌 Tatsu no hi 辰の日 Tawara Tōda 俵藤太. See Fujiwara no Hidesato Teiji’in utaawase 亭子院歌合 Teijō zakki 貞丈雑記 Tendai zasu 天台座主 Ten’in Ryūtaku 天隠竜沢 tenjōbito 殿上人 Tenjō nikki 殿上日記 Tenjō zangiku awase no koto 天上残菊合 の事 Tenmei 天明 Tennin 天仁 Tennō 天皇 Tennyo jōbutsu kyō 天女成仏経 Tenpuku 天福 Tenryaku 天暦 Tenshō 天正 Tentoku 天徳 Tochigi 栃木 Toda Kazuaki 戸田一西 Toda Ujikane 氏鉄 Tōgen Zuisen 桃源瑞仙 Tōgin 当今 Tōji senzui byōbu 東寺山水屏風 Tōkaidō 東海道 Tōkyō 東京 Ton’a 頓阿 Tora no hi 寅の日 Tosa Mitsunari 土佐光成 Tosa Mitsunobu 光信 Tosa Mitsuoki 光起 Tosa Takumi no Taijō, i.e., Tosa Fujiwara no Mitsusada 土佐内匠大允藤原光貞 Tōshi 登子 Toshinari. See Fujiwara no Shunzei Toshinori. See Fujiwara no Toshinori Toshitsune. See Fujiwara no Toshitsune



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Toshoryō. See Zushoryō Tōshun 等春 Tōtōmi 遠江 Toyo no akari 豊明 Toyo no akari no sechie 豊明節会 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 tsuizen kuyō 追善供養 Tsukimōde wakashū 月詣和歌集 tsukinami byōbu 月並み屏風 Tsuki no en 月の宴 Tsuki no utage 月の宴 Tsukumodokoro 作物所 Tsunehira. See Fujiwara no Tsunehira Tsunenobu. See Minamoto no Tsunenobu Tsurayuki shū 貫之集 Tsuzumi no yama 鼓山 Uchide no hama 打出の浜 Udoneri 内舎人 Ueda Akinari 上田秋成 Ugetsu monogatari 雨月物語 Ukishima 浮島 Uma no hi 午の日 u no hi 卯の日 ura 裏 uta 歌 utagatari 歌語り utage 宴 utamakura 歌枕 utamakura meisho 歌枕名所 uta monogatari 歌物語 wa 和 waka 和歌 waka byōbu 和歌屏風 Wakadokoro 和歌所 Waka kuhon 和歌九品 Wakana jō 若菜上 Xutanzhu 続談助 Yabase 矢橋, often 八橋 Yakaku teikinshō 夜鶴庭訓抄

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Yakumo misho 八雲御抄 Yakuōbon 薬王品 yama 山 yamabuki 山吹 yamagata 山形 Yamamoto Soken 山本素軒 Yamanoue no Okura 山上憶良 Yama no zasu 山座主 Yamashina 山階 Yamashinadera 山階寺 Yamashina Dōan 山科道安 yamato e 大和絵 Yamatomai 倭舞 yang 陽 Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 Yasura no mura 安良村 Yasuyoshikawa 安吉川 yin 陰 Yingzao fashi 営造法式 Yiwenleiju 芸文類聚 yogoto 奏寿言 Yoshino 吉野 Yoshishige no Tamemasa 慶滋為政 (also Kamo no Tamemasa 加茂為政) Yotsutsuji Yoshinari 四辻善成 yufu 木綿 Yugei no Myōbu 靫負命婦 Yūgiri 夕霧 Yujian 玉澗 Yuki 悠紀 Yukiden 悠紀殿 Yukiie. See Fujiwara no Yukiie Yukimori. See Fujiwara no Yukimori Yukinari. See Fujiwara no Yukinari Zen 禪 Zenrin oyōshū 禅林瘀葉集 Zeze Castle 膳所城 Zokudanjo. See Xutanzhu zuihitsu 随筆 zuinō 髄脳 Zushoryō 図書寮

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Glossary of Terms and Titles

(compiled by Ryan Hintzman and the author) (asterisks mark terms that have their own entry in this glossary) ashide 葦手 : cryptographic “reed-grass” script associated with sutra copying. Ashide script must be sought-out and deciphered if it is to be read. byōbu 屏風 : Folding screens, which serve as a surface for decorative painting and calligraphic inscription. Within the context of the Daijōe, byōbu are referred to with the honorific term onbyōbu 御屏風. chōka 長歌 : An extended form of poetry found primarily in the Man’yōshū and the *kayō of the Kojiki 古事記 and Nihon Shoki 日本書紀. Chōka from the earliest periods of the Man’yōshū display a variety of rhythmic patterns, but the chōka of later periods consist of alternating five- and seven-morae *ku, concluding with a seven-morae. Chōka are often followed by *hanka, creating a poem suite on a single topic, such as Hitomaro’s chōka and two hanka on the Ruined Palace at Ōmi (Man’yōshū, 1:29–31). chokusenshū 勅撰集 : Twenty-one royally commissioned anthologies of waka poetry, beginning with the Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 (905). dai 題 : “Topic tags” placed before *uta, often providing the theme, place, time, or season for the poem. Dai were often inscribed in the *mana style, and were frequently written in literary Chinese. Daiei 題詠 refers to the practice of topic-driven poem composition. Daishi 題詞 are also “topic tags,” usually written in *kanbun, and resemble *kotobagaki. Daijōe 大嘗会 : The “Great Tasting Banquet.” A series of banquets, feasts, and ritual practices celebrating the ascension and enthronement of the new sovereign. Daijōsai 大嘗祭 : The “Great Tasting Ritual.” Daijōsai properly refers to the multiphased enthronement ceremony, while *Daijōe refers more narrowly to the four consecutive days of feasts and banquets that are central to the program.

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fūryū 風流 : From the Chinese feng liu, fūryū denotes a range of objects and practices that are artful, extravagant, knowingly made, and knowingly displayed to evince a mastery for or an aspiration to au courant fashionability and consummate taste. fuzoku 風俗 : A term generally used for cultural practices and artifacts of popular or “folk” origin. Sometimes used synonymously with kuniburiuta, songs that originate in or are composed in the manner of authentic local, regional songs. fuzoku waka 風俗和歌 : In the Daijōe program, this term designates the ten fuzoku songs that, along with the screen poems, make up the full suite of waka composed by or for the *Yuki and *Suki side for each occasion. gun 群 : In the Ritsuryō system, an administrative unit just below that of the province (*kuni), roughly corresponding to a county. hanka 反歌 : A short poetic form (*tanka) that follows and accompanies long-form poems (*chōka) in the Man’yōshū. harae 祓 : Lustration rites, performed by the emperor and other aristocrats prior to the *Daijōsai. See also misogi. hiragana 平仮名 : One variety of *kana. Hiragana refers to the smooth, cursive characters that constitute one of the syllabaries used to write Japanese. honka-dori 本歌取り : An allusive technique that gestures toward, “takes up” (-dori), and recollects elements of a foundational poem or poems (honka) from the waka corpus. These referent texts provide a foundation for poetic techniques of imitation, alternation, and variation. honmon 本文 : Auspicious passages of literary Chinese drawn from a broad range of classics inscribed on screens (*byōbu) and displayed during the Daijōsai rites. Sometimes glossed as honbun. hyōshi 表紙 : The outermost surface or cover of a scroll, sometimes decorated with images (hyōshie) and poems. When a scroll is opened, the hyōshi becomes the verso, or underside, of the scroll. imayō 今様 : “Popular Songs in the Contemporary Style.” Imayō as a musical genre emerged in the middle to late Heian period, and were performed at court to instrumental accompaniment. Imayō songs are distinct from waka in both form and diction. inetsukiuta 稲舂き歌 : A rice-threshing and pounding song performed on the first day of the *Daijōe as an offering to the kami. By custom, Daijōe *waka sequences begin with inetsukiuta. jusha 儒者： Jusha, who were often professional academics first and only secondarily waka practitioners, were by the early eleventh century the preferred composers for *Daijōe texts. They were in fact a very exclusive group, the highest-ranking scholars of the Confucian classics. For graduates of the Kidendō (紀伝道) division of the royal university (Daigakuryō 大学寮), in which the curriculum focused on the Records of the Grand Historian (史記), the Han Chronicles and Later Han Chronicles (漢書, 後漢書), and the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen-xuan 文選), success in the first-stage examination (Ryōshi 寮試 ) was rewarded with the title “Candidate-Scholar of Letters” (Gimonjōsei 擬文章生). Only the two top scorers in the subsequent examination (Seigō or Jōgō 成業)



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were then named Scholars of Letters (文章生), and only they were entitled, seven years thereafter, to take the final examination (Taisaku or Hōryakushi 対策, 方略試 ). If successful, they were then entitled to the use of the term jusha and held the equivalent of sixth rank in the court service hierarchy. Only two scholars were allowed to pass every five years, and they were usually in their twenties or thirties by the time they did so. (Source: Satō Michio, Wa/Kan Literacy and the Anthology Workshop, Yale University, July 2016.) kagura uta 神楽歌 : “Kami-pleasing Songs.” An integral part of the Daijōsai rites, kagura uta have their basis in ritual practices and performances intended to give pleasure to the *kami. kajin 歌人 : Professional poet-courtiers serving in the official bureaucracy with experience in and extensive knowledge of the art of composing waka. In the *Daijōe, kajin were tasked with composing uta that spoke or sang as the surrogate voice of the tami, the imaginary collective “folk” invoked in the *Daijōsai rites. kakekotoba 掛詞 : “Pivot-word.” A fundamental rhetorical technique of waka poetry in which a word or string of *kana (or morae) suggests multiple, overlapping figural schemes within a single poem. Waka techniques involving “guide phrases” (*makurakotoba) or place-names (*utamakura) often rely on similar turns of phrase and superimpositions of meaning. To give but one example, the place-name Mount Moru (moruyama) evokes a sense of dripping (moru) and a homophonous verb meaning “to guard or protect.” kami 神: Local deities. Pleasing the kami and securing their blessings through worship, offerings, and performances of song (*kagura uta, *kamiasobi uta) is one of the goals of the *Daijōsai and other ritual practices. kamiasobi uta 神遊歌 : Songs for divine performance. Sung for the pleasure of the *kami. Examples included in Kokin wakashū, book 20. See also kagura uta. kana 仮名: In the broadest sense, kana designates the usage of Chinese characters as phonetic graphs to write the Japanese language, instead of reading the graphs for their meaning. In a narrower sense, kana are abbreviated or shortened forms of Chinese characters (*hiragana) used to write vernacular Japanese phonetically, often associated with Heian-period prose or *waka. In this second sense, kana stands in contrast to *mana, full Chinese graphs that bear a visual similarity to formal Chinese texts. kanamajiri 仮名混じり : A mixed style of inscription, deploying mostly *hiragana and the sparse use of *kanji, often used for writing *uta. kanbun 漢文 : Sino-Japanese prose written in Japan, similar to but not fully identical to literary Chinese written on the continent. Male courtiers often kept journals (*nikki) in kanbun. Kanbun can also refer to a method of annotating and transforming literary Chinese texts such that they can be read in Japanese syntax. kanji 漢字 : Chinese graphs or characters variously deployed in writing the Japanese language. Kanji preserve Chinese graphs in their full form, in contrast to some varieties of *kana that shorten or abbreviate Chinese graphs. kanshi 漢詩 : Chinese-form verse. The tradition of kanshi composition in Japan extends from the poems collected in the Kaifūsō 懐風藻 (751) through the early twentieth

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­century. Kanshi composition existed alongside and intersected with *waka composition. See also shi. karon 歌論 : A loosely grouped set of texts—including prefaces, handbooks, treatises, and commentaries—written by waka practitioners about the theory and practice of waka. Karon represents the waka tradition’s own critical discourse. kayō 歌謡 : A general term for early songs in a variety of forms. Kiki kayō 記紀歌謡 refers in particular to those songs that appear in the Kojiki 古事記, Nihon shoki 日本書紀, and surviving provincial gazeteers (fudoki 風土記). kechien kuyō 結縁供養 : A Buddhist offering service performed with the intent of sharing or transferring the merit gained thereby to others, particularly the recently deceased. See also kuyō. kokoro 心 : Within the expressive or lyrical paradigm of *waka promulgated by *karon and traditional Japanese discourse, kokoro is the affective or emotionally generative source that provides the initial impetus for the composition of a poem. According to this conception of waka, kokoro finds its expression in *kotoba. Kokugaku 国学 : The subject matter studied by a group of “nativist” scholars, active in the early modern period (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), whose philological work on early Japanese texts laid the groundwork for the study of “National Literature” (kokubungaku 国文学) in Japan. kotoba 言葉 : the articulating medium—poetic language—through which *kokoro finds its expression. Kokoro and kotoba together form the central elements of the traditional Japanese conception of the waka as lyric or expressive poetry. kotobagaki 詞書 : A prose preface or “foretext” placed before a *waka poem, providing the purported or real circumstances of the poem’s composition. ku 句 : A five- or seven-morae formal unit of *waka. kugeshū 公家衆 : “A band (or coterie) of royal courtiers.” Yamamoto Soken and his collaborators identify themselves as kugeshū, marking them as hereditary members of the highest-ranking noble lineages, in contrast to bukeshū (武家衆), members of the Shōgun’s (quasi-)military court. kuni 国 : In the *Ritsuryō system, an administrative unit headed by a provincial governor. Translated as “province.” kusemai 曲舞 : A genre of live musical performance with sung text, originating in the Muromachi period. Used also to categorize the libretti for such performances. See also yōkyoku. kuyō 供養 : A Buddhist rite of offering, of sutra copies, prayers, votive lights, and so on. Often associated with funerary or memorial rites. makurakotoba 枕詞 : The term suggests “pillow word,” though the term’s origin is not known. Makurakotoba are fixed epithets, or “guide phrases,” that inexorably lead to associated words or phrases. Chihayaburu is always followed by *kami; awoniyoshi is associated with the Nara capital. mana 真名 : A style of inscription that deploys Chinese characters as phonetic graphs in writing Japanese. *Waka inscribed in the mana style bear a visual and formal similarity to texts written in literary Chinese. In the context of *Daijōe rites, mana are associated with *Suki-side poems.



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meisho 名所 : “Famous places” that become distinctive topoi for poetry and painting. Along with *utamakura, meisho is a key term used to describe a poetics built around places or place-names. Meishoe 名所会 are pictorial images of famous places. mikaeshi 見返 : The first interior section of a scroll, often displaying the title and subtitles of the text to follow, paintings or illustrations (mikaeshie 見返絵), and perhaps inscribed with poems. Sometimes used in confusion with *hyōshi, which designates the outermost surface of the scroll. misogi 禊 : Rites of ablution performed to cleanse and purify participants prior to the commencement of ceremonies, such as the *Daijōsai. See also harae. mono 物/者/もの : In Japanese, mono can refer to just about any thing. When *kanji orthography is in use, mono 者 refers to people and mono 物 to goods or things. Mono もの written in *hiragana can function, among other possibilities, as a nominalizer. Orthographic distinctions notwithstanding, the three are essentially the same word. monogatari 物語 : Taken literally, monogatari means “telling about things.” Monogatari describes a range of narrative prose forms, encompassing fictional works, quasi-historical tales (rekishi monogatari 歴史物語), and prose works that contain poems, and are structured around and through them (uta monogatari 歌物語). mujō 無常: The Buddhist tenet of impermanence and nonsubstantiality. By the twelfth century, when Shunzei and Teika were active as poets, mujō had become a common topic and organizing device for *waka composition, appearing regularly in *utaawase and individual hundred-poem sequences. Niinamesai 新嘗祭 : “First Tasting Festival.” The Niinamesai was the court’s “normal” annual harvest festival; in the first year (or close to it) of a new reign, the *Daijōsai—also a festival concerned with the cultivation, transportation, and consumption of rice—subsumes the Niinamesai. nijūhappon no uta 二十八品の歌 : Lotus Sutra-based waka compositions often took the form of nijūhappon no uta, in which each *uta addresses themes or passages from one of the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra. nikki 日記 : Diaries and journals kept by courtiers, written in *kanbun or vernacular Japanese (*kana). In the context of *utaawase, nikki is a technical term that refers to an eyewitness prose account of the event’s proceedings. Ōmi hakkei 近江八景 : “Eight Views of Ōmi.” The Ōmi hakkei were a Japanese naturalization of the Chinese *Shōshō hakkei (“Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang”) program. The Ōmi hakkei flourished as a topical program in painting and poetry, both *kanshi and *waka. The “standard” Ōmi hakkei treated eight sites in and around the shores of Lake Biwa, in the southwestern part of Ōmi province: Mount Hira, Katada, Karasaki, Mii, Seta, Awazu, Yabase, and Ishiyama. onbyōbu 御屏風 : An honorific term for the painted screens used in the Daijōsai rites. See also byōbu. Ritsuryō system 律令制 : An administrative and penal code derived from Chinese precedent, first implemented in Japan in the seventh century. The Ritsuryō system provided the basis for a centralized and hierarchical bureaucracy and allowed for the consolidation and centralization of power in the Ritsuryō state.

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saibara 催馬楽 : A category of ceremonial songs performed at the Heian court to the accompaniment of the reed flute, Japanese zither (koto 琴), and lute (biwa 琵琶). The earliest collections of saibara date to the eleventh century but are believed to have roots in much older folksongs, practices, and song collections. See also kagura uta. Shakkyōka 釈教歌 : Waka poems composed on Buddhist topics, often as renderings or responses to specific passages or verses in Buddhist scripture. In anthologies such as the *chokusenshū, a specific category of waka on Buddhist themes and topics to which designated chapters are devoted, designated Shakkyō and often paired with poems in so-called Shintō themes and topics (Jingi no uta). shi 詩 : Poems written in Chinese, often used in contrast to Japanese “songs” or poems (*uta). See also kanshi. shikashū 私家集 : A “personal” or “house” collection of the oeuvres of individual poets, generally organized chronologically. shisenshū 私撰集 : Anthologies compiled under private, unofficial, or informal auspices. The category of shisenshū, which begins with the Man’yōshū (759), stands in contrast to *chokusenshū, anthologies compiled by royal command. shōji 障子 : In traditional Japanese architecture, shōji are sliding doors that serve to divide rooms and articulate space. Shōji provide yet another surface for paintings. Shōshō hakkei 瀟湘八景 : “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang.” The Chinese Shōshō hakkei program served as a model for the development of the *Ōmi hakkei topical program in Japan. sotoba 卒塔婆 : Buddhist memorial wooden placards used in services for the dead. suhama 州浜 : A three-dimensional, miniature landscape model depicting imaginary or famous places (*meisho), often lavishly made with rare metals, shells, and jewels. Suki 主基 : In the structure of the *Daijōsai, Suki forms one half of the *Yuki-Suki, eastwest, left-right bilateralism that characterizes much of the ritual. The Suki province (*kuni) for the Daijōsai was selected by augury from among the provinces to the west of the capital and was responsible for providing an array of tribute goods for the rites. Suki-side poems were typically inscribed in *mana. tami 民 : The “people” or “folk.” The Daijōsai and other court rituals invoke the tami through the performance of folksongs (*kayō) and the offering of tribute goods from the provinces (*kuni). tanka 短歌 : A thirty-one-morae, nonrhyming poetic form consisting of five *ku with the rhythmic pattern 5–7–5–7–7. Tennō 天皇 : The traditional term for the Japanese sovereign. torimono no uta 採物の歌 : A variety of song within the *kagura uta in which the performers brandish aloft and sing about sacred objects, such as branches of the sakaki tree, bamboo, bows, staffs, swords, pikes, or wreaths of vine. uta 歌 : A Japanese song or poem. The term is often used interchangeably with *waka to refer to classical Japanese poems, though in some contexts the term uta emphasizes and recalls the sacral and incantatory functions of Japanese “song.” utaawase 歌合 : A “matching of poems.” Utaawase were poetry contests in which courtiers gathered and were divided into two teams, left and right. In each round of the utaawase,



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a member of each team would present a poem on a given topic; a poetry judge would evaluate the two poems and declare a winner. A number of other similarly structured awase (“matching”) events took place at the Heian court, such as monoawase (“matching things”) and eawase (“matching paintings”). utamakura 歌枕 : A class of conventionally deployed figures for *waka poetry, often placenames or associated with specific places. waka 和歌 : Classical Japanese poetry. Waka includes a number of poetic forms, such as the *tanka, *chōka, and *hanka, and is rhythmically marked by alternations of five- and seven-morae *ku. yōkyoku 謡曲 : A general term for the text or libretto of a Noh play or for a section thereof excerpted for separate performance. See also kusemai. Yuki 悠紀 : A representative eastern province (*kuni) selected to provide tribute for the *Daijōsai rites. In the bilateral structure of the Daijōsai, Yuki is associated with the left and the east, opposite *Suki. Yuki-side poems were associated with *kana inscriptions.

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Index

Italics indicate figures; page numbers followed by t refer to tables. Ban Kōkei, Kanden kōhitsu, 125–26, 153 Banmin kokoro no kagami (Mirror Visions of the Hearts of the People), 110–11, 110 banzuke, 158, 267n88 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. See “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Soken) Benkei, 150, 265n72 Bialock, David T., 74 Bifukumon’in no Kaga, 161–62, 166–67, 179–80, 192, 196. See also Fujiwara no Teika, Lotus Sutra offering poems birds. See cranes; plovers Biwa, Lake: famous places near, 2, 119; maps of, 119, 120; moon reflections on, 137; pirates on, 130; poetic references to, 134; travelers near, 258n8; Uchide Shore, 151–52; Zeze Castle, 138–39, 138. See also “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei) Bodaiji, 159–60, 161 Brisset, Claire Akiko, 6, 10

agriculture: metaphors, 64; nostalgia for rural life, 63; rice cultivation, 47–48, 64; tribute goods, 3, 40–41 Akazome Emon, 105–6, 182–83, 256n49 Akechi Mitsuhide, 126 Akihito, Emperor, 26, 242n6, 246n31 Akiyama Terukazu, 45 “Amusements at Higashiyama in Kyoto” (Kanō School), Figure 5 anthologies, 11–13, 44. See also chokusenshū; Man’yōshū Ariwara no Narihira, 189–90 ashide script, 77, 170, 171, 269n17 Ashikaga Takauji, 150 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, 129 “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama”: Hiroshige print, Figure 10; poems, 126, 137, 140, 153–54, 155, 257–58n2; in Soken’s “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 153, 154; on Suntory Museum lacquer box, 157, Figure 9 “Autumn Moon over Dongting,” 153, 154, 155 Awazu, 134, 141

311

312 i n de x Brown, Bill, 176 Buddhism. See Lotus Sutra; Shakkyōka; Tendai school; Zen Buddhism byōbu (screens): on “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang,” 136; landscape paintings, 252n12; Ōmi meishozu, 261n37, Figure 1; seasonal paintings, 134. See also Daijōe onbyōbu; honmon screens byōbu uta, 46, 56, 71, 106, 252n12 byōbu waka. See Daijōe onbyōbu waka calligraphers, 29, 65–68 chidori. See plovers China: cultural influences in Japan, 37, 39–40, 127, 128–30, 242–43n10; enthronement rituals of, 89. See also “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” Chinese-form verse. See kanshi chōka, 142, 143, 165 chokusenshū (royal anthologies): contents of, 11–12; Daijōe waka in, 43–44, 70–71, 72–74; formats of, 250n75; poems included in, 71–72; Shika wakashū, 172, 173; Shinsenzai wakashū, 174; Shūi wakashū, 55–56, 76–79. See also Senzai wakashū chrysanthemums (kiku), 54, 100–101 Chūsen, 77–79 court culture and waka culture, 42–43 court officials: calligraphy for “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 120–23; kugeshū (band), 115, 116; at poetry contests, 95; ritual preparations by, 69 court poets (kajin), 26, 28–29, 44, 46, 71, 99–100 cranes, 54, 65, 76–79, 89, 100–101, 103, 108 dai (topic tags), 22, 26, 35, 47, 59–60, 257–58n2 Daigō, Emperor, 67 Daijōe (Great Tasting Banquet): accouter­ ments, 26, 89, 90, 253–54nn22–23;

arrangement of screens at, 33–35, 34, 38, 244n20, Figure 4; bilateralism at, 28, 33, 38, 66; historical evolution of, 23, 26, 38; perfection theme, 61–63; performances at, 2, 23, 41, 43, 48, 49, 50, 65, 73, 248n44; pictorial representations of, 50–52, Figures 2–4; platforms (shime no yama), 62, 63, 89, 253–54n22; preparations for, 3, 46–47, 48, 66–69, 89; procedures, 32, 48–50; recent, 26, 242n6, 246n31; records of, 32–33, 43, 44, 50–52, 242n5; revival of, 26; as rite of renewal of rulership, 2, 3, 20, 21–23, 38, 41, 50; secret rites, 43, 48, 49; sites, 33, 48, 89; suhama, 16, 74, 82, 89–90; timing in new reigns, 26; tribute goods at, 1, 3, 40–41, 48, 49, 60; Yuki and Suki halls, 48, 49, 50, Figure 2. See also honmon screens Daijōe onbyōbu (tribute screens): arrangement of, 33–35, 38, Figure 4; calligraphers of, 66–68; displays of, 3–4, 28, 33; ephemerality of, 50; inscriptions on, 27–28, 242–43n10; paintings on, 40, 41, 242n10; sketch of, 51 Daijōe onbyōbu waka (tribute screen poems): format of, 25t, 63; honmon source texts of, 35; physical act of writing, 65; presentation of, 49; programs of, 24t, 26–27; in royal anthologies, 55–56, 70–71; “Seta Bridge” poem, 1–2, 3; voices of “folk,” 27, 28–29, 41, 43, 53, 245n27. See also Daijōe waka; Yukigata poems Daijōe waka: agricultural metaphors in, 64; aims of, 22–23, 38; composition of, 46–47, 52–55, 56–58, 60; corpus of, 42, 43–44, 53, 63, 249–50n61; dai (topic tags), 22, 35; fixedness theme, 64–65; format of, 25t; institutionalization, 23, 42; internal referentiality of corpus, 41, 42, 53, 61–63, 74; kagura uta, 47, 48, 55–56, 65, 71, 73, 152; material objects

i n de x 313 and, 22; poets, 2, 28–29, 44, 46–47, 68, 243–44n17; program structure, 24t; repetition of tropes and conventions, 22, 32, 35–37, 38, 41, 42, 53, 56–58, 60– 61, 248n48; rice-pounding songs, 48; in royal anthologies, 43–44, 70–71, 72–74; scholarship on, 15–16, 43–44, 45–46; in Senzai wakashū, 41, 44, 219–24; “Seta Bridge” theme, 1–2, 19–21, 58; thingness of, 74–75; as tribute goods, 3, 40–41; “viewers” of, 37, 245n27; wordplay in, 39, 40. See also fuzoku waka; Yukigata poems Daijōe waka, place-names in: effects of, 38–39; in fuzoku waka, 27, 39, 245n29; of Ōmi Province, 2, 32, 54, 55, 114–15, 151–52, 247n39; selection of, 44, 46–47, 247n39; in Yukigata poems of Shunzei (1166), 54, 261n40 Daijōe waka burui, 45 Daijōe yuki suki eiga, 45, 242n9, 249–50n61 Daijōkyū (Great Tasting Sacred Compound), 48, 49, 62, 82–83 Daijōsai (Great Tasting Ritual), 23, 49 Dairi utaawase, 102, 102 “Descending Geese at Katada,” 125, 126, 141, 156, 156, 257n2 Dōshū kyōkun manpuku ōrai, 140–41 Du Fu, 126, 129, 260n29 “Dusk Glowing at Seta,” 141, 151, 157 Eiga monogatari: account of Daijōe, 249n54; authorship of, 105; “Garden Contest” account, 93–97, 112; historic events recorded in, 90–94; illustrations of, 91–93, 92, 112; “Moon-Viewing Banquet,” 92, 93; poetry in, 44, 195 “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei): associated with “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang,” 117, 120, 131, 132, 139, 149, 150, 152, 153; early versions of, 133–34; evocations of past in, 147; exile theme

in, 126; history of program, 130–39; Kanō Tan’yū scroll, 116; kanshi, 136, 138, 139, 140–41; Konoe Nobutada’s version, 124, 125–26, 127, 153–54, 258n10; lacquer box, 157, Figures 8–9; map of sites, 120; place-names in, 125, 132, 150, 153; precedents of, 113–14, 120, 123–25, 127; in program for Shigenari’s birthday, 133–36, 133t, 148; repetition of theme, 115–17, 118–20, 125, 127–28; scrolls as gifts, 258n8; Tosa Mitsuoki painting of, 156–57, 267n86, Figure 6 “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Soken): “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama,” 153, 154; calligraphers of, 115, 120–23; creation as gift, 258n8; date of, 115; “Evening Bell at Miidera,” 114; poetry transcription and translations, 230–32; precedents for, 113–14, 123–25; topic and signature page of, 120–21, 121 “Eight Views of Ōmi” poems (Ōmi hakkei waka): “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama,” 126, 137, 140, 153–54, 155, 257–58n2; internal referentiality of corpus, 153; poets, 122–23, 137, 138–39, 258nn9–10 “Eight Views of Ōmi” scenes: “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama,” 126, 137, 140, 153–55, 154, 157, 257–58n2, Figures 9–10; “Descending Geese at Katada,” 125, 126, 141, 156, 156, 257n2; “Dusk Glowing at Seta,” 141, 151, 157; “Evening Bell at Miidera,” 114, 125, 140, 149–50; “Evening Snow at Mount Hira,” 141; Karasaki, 114, 132, 134, 135, 147–49, 264n63; “Night Rain at Karasaki,” 140; “Returning Sails at Yabase,” 140, 151–52; “A Storm Clearing at Awazu,” 134, 141; “A Storm Clearing at Ōtsu,” 157; “Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar,” 151–53 “Eight Views of the Demimonde” (Kuruwa hakkei), 158 “Eight Views of the West Lake” (Saikō hakkei), 123

314 i n de x “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” (Shōshō hakkei): associated with “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 117, 120, 131, 132, 139, 149, 150, 152, 153; “Autumn Moon over Dongting,” 153, 154, 155; Chinese paintings of, 126, 128, 129–30; “Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple,” 149, 150; evocations of past in, 147; exile theme of, 126; Japanese paintings of, 129, 130, 136; origins with Song Di, 128; poems on theme, 122–23, 126, 128–29, 130–31, 136, 233–35; “Sail Returns from a Distant Shore,” 152; topics of, 128 “Eight Views” theme: popularity of, 123; variations of, 157–58 Enchin, 149 Enman’in, 118–19, 125, 137–38, 203 Enryakuji, 122, 149, 150, 165, 265n72 En’yū, Emperor, 2, 77, 99 “Evening Bell at Miidera,” 114, 125, 140, 149–50 “Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple,” 149, 150 “Evening Snow at Mount Hira,” 141 famous places (meisho): images of (meishoe), 15, 45, 87; Ise as, 103; in Ōmi Province, 2, 114–15, 133–36, 261n37; rankings of, 158, 267n88; suhama representing, 82, 83, 84, 103–4. See also place-names feng liu. See fūryū flowers: chrysanthemums (kiku), 54, 100–101; feminine symbolism of, 96, 185–86; headdresses (mikazashi), 89, 90, 254n23; ominaeshi (maidenflower), 94, 96, 185–86; poems written on, 106–7 Freer Sackler museums, 116 Fuboku waka shō, 265–66n78 Fugengyō (Fugen sutra), 196–97, 273n61 Fujiwara Naritoki, 94, 95

Fujiwara no Arikuni, 80 Fujiwara no Hidesato (Tawara Tōda), 149–50 Fujiwara no Kaneie, 147–48 Fujiwara no Kinhira, 165 Fujiwara no Kintō, 182–83, 185–86 Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, 145–47; Fukuro zōshi, 46–47, 67–68, 225–29 Fujiwara no Koreyuki, Yakaku teikinshō, 65–67 Fujiwara no Kunifusa, 188, 189 Fujiwara no Michikane, 264n63 Fujiwara no Michinaga, 31, 195–96 Fujiwara no Mitsunori, 36 Fujiwara no Nagakiyo, Fuboku waka shō, 265–66n78 Fujiwara no Naganori, 31, 32, 57–58, 71, 243n16 Fujiwara no Norikane, 36, 71 Fujiwara no Noritada, 67 Fujiwara no Sanemasa, 56 Fujiwara no Shunzei: allusions in poetry of, 60; career of, 52; Chōshū eisō, 20, 30, 31, 162–63, 177; Gosha hyakushu, 265–66n78; influence of, 30, 135; Korai fūteishō, 52, 59, 196, 272–73n57; memorial poem for, 200–201; Nijūhappon no uta, 177–79, 180, 184, 187–88, 190, 194–95, 196, 197–200; status of, 29–30, 31–32; wife of, 268n7; wife’s death and, 161–63, 164–65. See also Senzai wakashū Fujiwara no Shunzei, Yukigata poems: agricultural metaphors in, 64; commission of, 29–32; composition, 52–55; composition of, 56–60; Day of the Dragon introit, 61–62, 63; fixedness theme in, 64–65; place-names in, 54, 261n40; recessional, 64–65; references to other Daijōe waka in, 56–58, 62–63; references to other poems in, 41, 58–60; “Seta Bridge” poem, 19–21;

i n de x 315 topic tags (dai) in, 21; transcription and translation of, 211–18; winter poem, 261n40 Fujiwara no Suetsune, 71, 165 Fujiwara no Sukenari, 68 Fujiwara no Suketaka, 265–66n78 Fujiwara no Tameie, 132–36, 261n38 Fujiwara no Teika: Hachidai shō, 173, 196; Meigetsuki, 69–70, 243–44n17; memorial poem for Shunzei, 200–201; ­Ninnaji poems of, 204–5; Ogura hyakunin isshu, 59; poetry of, 60, 135, 161–63, 164–66; poetry on sutras other than the Lotus Sutra, 195–200; portrait of, 199; Saishōshitennōin poems of, 203–4; Shakkyō of, 161–62; Shūi gusō, 161–63, 165–66, 178, 200, 205; son of, 132–33; sotoba poems of, 178, 180, 205; treatises on poetry by, 179 Fujiwara no Teika, Lotus Sutra offering poems: as family memorial, 180; images and, 171; individual poems by scroll, 175–76, 180–95; as memorial to mother, 161–62, 166–67, 179–80, 184–85, 195, 202–3; relationship to other poems, 176–77, 183, 190, 270n29; relationship to Shunzei’s Nijūhappon no uta, 177–79, 180, 184, 187–88, 190, 194–95, 196, 197–200; script used in, 168; seasonal cycle of, 162; thingness of, 166–67; transcription and translation of, 236–38 Fujiwara no Tomoie, 243–44n17 Fujiwara no Toshinori, 35–36, 57–58 Fujiwara no Toshitsune, 30, 243n16 Fujiwara no Tsunehira, 71, 73 Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, 165 Fujiwara no Yukinari (Kōzei), 67, 80 Fujiwara Seika, 139 Fujiwara Tamemitsu, 94, 95 Fukuro zōshi (Fujiwara no Kiyosuke), 46–47, 67–68, 225–29

funerary songs and laments, 165. See also mourning poems fūryū: evolving meanings of, 252n11; in gardens, 97; suhama as, 83, 87, 97, 100, 104, 252n11, 255–56n36 Fūryū yatsushi Genji (“Genji Disguised in Modern Dress”), 158 fuzoku uta (songs). See fuzoku waka fuzoku waka (song-texts): composition of, 3, 46, 47; format of, 25t, 63; honmon source texts of, 35; performances of, 3, 23, 48, 49, Figure 3; performers of, 41; place-names in, 27, 39, 245n29; programs, 24t, 26; in royal anthologies, 55–56; types of, 47. See also Daijōe waka; Yukigata poems gardens: fūryū in, 97; viewing, 255n28 “Genji Disguised in Modern Dress” (Fūryū yatsushi Genji), 158 Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji): “Akashi” chapter, 126, 137, 154–55, 267n82; beginning of, 117–18; court celebrations in, 251n1; episodes referenced in poems, 163–65; exile episode, 126, 154–55; illustrations of, 267nn81–82; inspiration for, 137, 155; “Makibashira” chapter, 208–9, Figure 11; “Minori” chapter, 163–64; moonlight over water in, 154–55; “Nowaki” chapter, 163; relationship to Ōmi hakkei, 155, 157; “Suma” chapter, 126, 137, 154, 155, 267n81; text contained in Suntory Museum lacquer box, 157 Genji monogatari tekagami, “Makibashira” scene, Figure 11 Genpei Wars, 150 Genroku era, 115–16 Gion Festival, 252n13 go boards, 79–81, 83 GoHanazono, Emperor, 129 GoIchijō, Emperor, 67, 71

316 i n de x GoReizei, Emperor, 188, 272n53 GoSakuramachi, Empress, 26 GoSanjō, Emperor, 73 GoShirakawa, Emperor, 31, 69–70, 72, 131, 243n16, 250n75 Goshūi wakashū, 195, 196 GoSuzaku, Emperor, 71 GoToba, Emperor, 36, 60, 70, 71, 203–4 GoYōzei, Emperor, 125, 153 Great Tasting Banquet. See Daijōe grief. See mourning poems Gyokushitsu Sōbo, Kenroshō, 140–41 Hagitani Boku, 97, 102 hakkei waka. See “Eight Views of Ōmi” poems Hakkei waka: Biwako, 138 Hayashi Razan, 139 Heart Sutra (Shingyō), 197–200, 273n61 Heihanki (Taira no Nobunori), 32 Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), 145, 263n55 Heike nōkyō (The Taira Family’s Sutra Offering), 169, 170, 171, 188, 189, 191, 192, 269n19 Hie Shrine, 133–34, 148–49, 265–66n78 Hiei, Mount, 130, 132, 133–34, 149, 150 Higashiyama, Emperor, 26, 121 “Higashiyama Collection” (Higashiyama gyobutsu), 129–30 Higashiyama Kai’i, 242n6 Higashizono Motokata, 157 Hino Meiko, Takemukigaki, 242n5 Hirayama, 114, 130, 144, 265–66n78 Hitomaro eigu, 10 honka-dori (allusive citation), 60, 179, 194–95 honmon (Chinese texts): suhama and, 89, 92; used in Daijōe, 2–3, 27, 89 honmon screens: arrangement of, 33–35, 38; calligraphers of, 66; displays of, 28, 33; ephemerality of, 50; images on, 27, 242n10; inscriptions on, 27–28, 244n26;

place-names on, 39–40; texts of, 2–3, 26–27, 35, 38, 66, 245–46n29 Horai. See Penglai Hōribe Narishige, 133–34, 148, 261n38 Hosshōji, 162, 166, 203 hyōshi, 172–73. See also Lotus Sutra scrolls hyōshie, 169, 171, 269n17 Ichijō, Emperor, 77, 109 Ichijō Fuyutsune/Kaneteru, 121, 122–23, 259n14 Ichijō Kaneyoshi, 89, 123 Iguchi Tatsuo, 61–62 imayō songs, 131, 260–61n35 Inoue Muneo, 31–32 Inpumon’in no Taifu, 165 Ise, “sea-shell matching utaawase” at, 103–4 Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise), 12, 189–90 Ishiyama: evening bells of, 125; Murasaki Shikibu at, 137, 155, 267n83, Figure 7; in Tale of Genji, 154. See also “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” Iwakura Tomomi, Kuji roku, 51, Figures 2–4 Iwasa Matabei, 267n81 Izumi Shikibu, 185 Jakobson, Roman, 6 Japanese written scripts, 27–28, 39–40, 66 Jien, 165, 185 Jinshin War, 142 Jitō, Empress, 59 Jumyōkyō (Sutra of Long Life), 76, 273n61 Junna, Emperor, 253–54n22 jusha (Confucian scholars), 29, 31, 71, 243n13 Kada no Arimaro: Daijōe zushiki, 50–51, 51; sketches, 90, 91 Kagawa Susumu, 242n6

i n de x 317 kagura uta (kami-pleasing songs), 47, 48, 55–56, 65, 71, 73, 152 Kaihō Yūshō, Ōmi hakkei scroll, 156–57 Kaiki (Yamashina Dōan), 123 kajin. See court poets Kajūji monastery: buildings, 267n86; Ōmi meisho paintings in Shoin of, 155–57, 156, Figure 6 kakekotoba (pivot-words), 152, 198, 265n74 Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, 134, 142–44, 146, 165 kami (deities), 53, 55–57, 62, 109. See also kagura uta Kammu, Emperor, 147 Kan Tokuan, 138, 139 Kanemitsu, 71 Kanesuke, 198 Kanō Kyūhaku, 267n82 Kanō Motonobu, “Eight Views of XiaoXiang Region” (Shōshō hakkei), 129, 130 Kanō School, “Amusements at Higashiyama in Kyoto,” Figure 5 Kano Seisen’in Osanobu, sketches for Edo Castle decoration, 111, 112 Kanō Tan’yū: “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 116; portrait of Fujiwara no Teika, 199 kanshi (Chinese-form verse): “Eight Views” topics in, 122–23, 130, 136, 138, 139, 140–41; poets, 29, 130, 136 Karasaki (Cape Kara), 114, 132, 134, 135, 146, 147, 264n63 Karasaki pine, 148–49 Karasaki Shrine, 147–49 Katada, 125, 126, 130, 134–35, 152–53, 257n2, 265–66n78 Kawara no in garden, 97 Kazan, Emperor, 76, 172–73 kazari (extravagant display), 87–88 kazusashi (score-pad suhama), 102–3 kechien kuyō services, 170, 200, 203 Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu, 65–66, 106–7

Ki no Tsurayuki, 252n12. See also Kokin wakashū kiku. See chrysanthemums Kintō shū (Kintō’s personal anthology), 182–83, 185–86 Kōbō Daishi (Kūkai), 67 Kokin wakashū, 40, 43, 44, 59, 62, 96, 165, 189, 246n32 Kokon chomonjū (Tachibana no Narisue), 100–101 Konoe Hisamichi, 258n9 Konoe Iehiro, 121, 123 Konoe Masaie, 258n9 Konoe Motohiro, 120, 121, 122–23 Konoe Nobutada: “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 118–19, 124, 125–26, 127, 153–54, 258n10; life of, 126, 138–39; paintings by, 138–39; poems attributed to, 138–39; Sanmyaku’in ki, 125 Konoe Sakihisa, 136–37 Koretaka, Prince, 189 Kubota Jun, 163, 200–201 Kubota Shōichirō, 242n6 kugeshū (band of royal courtiers), 115, 116 Kujō Norizane, 243n17 Kujō Sukezane, 121, 122 Kuruwa hakkei (“Eight Views of the Demimonde”), 158 LaMarre, Thomas, 10 landscape models, 81–82, 81, 82. See also suhama “Late-Season Chrysanthemum Matching Contest at the Palace” (Tenjō zangiku awase no koto), 100–101 Liu Zhongyuan, 126 lotus leaf, poem on back (ura) of, in Pillow Book episode, 160–61 Lotus Sutra: copies on reverse sides of poem sheets, 174; “Devadatta” chapter, 184–85, 190; “Dragon-King’s Daughter,” 185, 186, 190, 192; Fumonbon, 193–95; Gonnō-bon, 200–201; Heike nōkyō, 169,

318 i n de x Lotus Sutra (continued) 170, 171, 188, 189, 191, 192, 269n19; illustrations of, 169, 188, 189, 191; Jūryōbon (“The Lifespan of the Thus Come One”), 187–90; “Parable of the Burning House,” 174, 181, 270n27; “Parable of the Conjured City,” 182; “Preface” chapter, 181; “Teacher of Dharma” chapter, 183; waka related to, 177–80, 182–84, 186, 190, 200–201, 270n32; Yakuōbon (“The Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King”), 190–93 Lotus Sutra scrolls: as memorial offerings, 161–62; poetry on outer covers of, 162, 166–72, 174–76. See also Fujiwara no Teika, Lotus Sutra offering poems Mabuchi Chiyo Kumamaru, 137 maidenflower (ominaeshi), 94, 96, 185–86 makurakotoba (pillow-words), 143, 261–62n41, 262n49, 265n74 Man’yōshū, 10, 11, 12, 55, 59, 96, 142–44, 165, 240n17 material culture: Japanese, 6–7, 8–9, 18; scholarship on, 4–5, 10; and “things,” 176 materiality of waka. See waka, thingness of Matsuno Yōichi, 70, 72 meisho. See famous places Meishō, Empress, 156 meishoe (images of famous places), 15, 45, 87 memorial poems, 200–201, 205. See also Fujiwara no Teika, Lotus Sutra offering poems; mourning poems Mengxi bitan (Shen Gua), 128 Mibu no Tadami, 100 Miidera. See “Evening Bell at Miidera”; Onjōji mikaeshi and mikaeshie, 168, 170, 171, 188, 191, 269n17

Mikasa, Mount. See Yamashinadera Mikawa Province, 105–6 mikazashi (flowered headdresses), 89, 90, 254n23 Minamoto Kanezumi, 67 Minamoto no Nakamasa, 152–53 Minamoto no Tōru, 97 Minamoto no Toshiyori, Sanboku kikashū, 168–71, 200 Minamoto no Yoshimitsu, 260–61n35 minzokugaku (folklore studies), 15, 45 “Mirror Mountain,” 61–63, 253–54n22 mitate (metaphors), 96–97, 255n34 mono (thing), 9 monoawase (pairing matches), 86, 94, 255n29 moon: “Autumn Moon over Dongting,” 153, 154, 155; imagery in Buddhist illustrations, 188, 189; reflections on water, 137, 154–55; in royal allegory, 189–90. See also “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” “Moon-Viewing Banquet,” 92, 93, 111, 112 Moruyama, 151, 265n75 Mostow, Joshua S., 10 motherhood, 192, 198 mourning poems, 162–63, 164–66, 168–71, 176, 200–201. See also memorial poems Mu Qi, 130, 260n30 mujō (impermanence), 165 mulberry bark (yufu) and “Mulberry Grove” toponym, 54–58 Murakami, Emperor: Daijōe for, 67; death of, 99, 251n1; fortieth birthday of, 76–79, 83, 93, 251n1; “Garden Contest,” 93–99; “Late-Season Chrysanthemum Matching Contest,” 100–101; “MoonViewing Banquet,” 92, 93, 111, 112 Murasaki Shikibu: at Ishiyama, 137, 155, 267n83; Murasaki Shikibu nikki, 79–80, 83; poetry, 195–96, 273n62. See also Genji monogatari “Murasaki Shikibu’s Pilgrimage at Ishiyamadera” (Murasaki Shikibu Ishiyama

i n de x 319 mōde zufuku; Tosa Mitsumoto), Figure 7 Muryōgikyō (“Sutra of Innumerable Meanings”), 195, 273n61 Myōe (Myōebō Kōben), 172–73 Myōe shōnin kashū, 172–73 Nakatsukasa, 66, 101, 106 “Night Rain at Karasaki,” 140 Niinamesai (First Tasting Festival), 47, 64 Nijō, Emperor, 29, 35–36, 67, 243n16 Nijō Tamefuji, 174–76, 270n29 Nijō Tsunahira, 121, 122 nijūhappon no uta sequences, 177, 183, 270n32, 273n61 Ninkō, Emperor, 90 Ninmyō, Emperor, 23 Ninnaji, 204–5 nostalgia: Daijōe waka and, 63; suhama and, 88–89 Oda Nobunaga, 126 Ōe Masahira, 106 Ōe Michimasa, 98 Ōe no Masafusa, 57–58, 68, 71 Ōe no Tadamitsu/Narimitsu, 98 Ōe no Tamemoto, 105–6 Ōi River, 94, 95 Ōmi hakkei. See “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei) Ōmi hakkei kusemai (libretto), 131–32, 134, 155 Ōmi meisho zue, 138 Ōmi meishozu byōbu, Figure 1 ominaeshi (maidenflower), 94, 96, 185–86 “Ōmi no kuni ezu” (Map of Ōmi Province), 119 Ōmi Province: capital located in, 142–44, 146; exiles in, 126, 130–31, 260n23; map of, 119; role in Daijōe, 142, 151; strategic location of, 142; as Yuki province, 3–4, 19, 20, 32, 139, 142, 253–54n22

Ōmi Province place-names: as auspicious signs, 54; in Daijōe waka, 2, 32, 54, 55, 114–15, 151–52, 247n39; in “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 125, 132, 150, 153; famous places, 114–15, 133–36, 261n37; imaginary places, 117–18; Katada, 125, 152–53, 265–66n78; lists of, 131, 260–61n35; locations of, 118, 119, 120; Moruyama, 151, 265n75; selected for “Eight Views,” 117–18, 125, 150; “Uchide Shore,” 151–52. See also Biwa, Lake; and “Eight Views of Ōmi” entries Ōnakatomi no Sukechika, 55, 56, 57, 62, 63, 67, 244n26 Ōnakatomi Yoshinobu, 107–9, 257n54 onbyōbu waka. See Daijōe onbyōbu waka Ōnin Wars, 26, 126, 130 Onjōji (Miidera): bell of, 149–50, 265n72; Enman’in, 118–19, 125, 137–38, 203; “Evening Bell at Miidera,” 114, 140, 149–50; Shinra Myōjin Shrine, 260–61n35 Ono no Michikaze (Tōfū), 67 Ono no Yoshiki (Miyoshi/Yoshimura), 67 Origuchi Shinobu, 15 Ōsen Keisan, 130–31 Ōtomo no Kuronushi, 62, 68 Ōtsu, “A Storm Clearing at Ōtsu,” 157 Ōtsu Palace, 134 Ozasa Tokugorō, 90–91, 92–93 paintings: landscape screens, 252n12; ­poetry associated with, 1–2, 11, 12, 203–5. See also byōbu; honmon screens Penglai (Horai), 82–83, 103, 251n8 perfection and purity theme, in Daijōe, 61–63 Pillow Book (Sei Shōnagon), 159–60, 161 place-names: Chinese, 39–40, 150; in ­poetry, 38–39, 86–87, 88. See also Daijōe waka, place-names in; famous places; Ōmi Province place-names plovers (chidori), 54, 134–35, 152, 261n40

320 i n de x poetry: allusions in, 60–61, 179, 194–95; chōka, 142, 143, 165; mitate (metaphors), 96–97, 255n34; renga sequences, 271n44. See also anthologies; kanshi; waka poetry contests. See utaawase poets: jusha, 29, 31, 71, 243n13; kajin, 26, 28–29, 44, 46, 71, 99–100; women, 98–99 Qu Yuan, 126 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), 78–79 Reizei, Emperor, 99 renga sequences, 271n44 “Returning Sails at Yabase,” 140, 151–52 rice cultivation, Daijōe and, 47–48 Rokkaku Takayori, 137 Rokujō, Emperor, 19, 29, 32, 67 royal anthologies. See chokusenshū royal palace, 32–33 Ryōjin hishō, 131 Saga, Emperor, 67, 147 Saigū, 103 Saikō hakkei (“Eight Views of the West Lake”), 123 Saishōshitennōin, 203–4 Sakomura, Tomoko, 10 Sanjō, Emperor, 26, 249n54 Sanjōnishi Sanetaka: poems on the “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang,” 136, 233–35; Saishō, 136, 262n42 Sasaki Takahiro, 10 screens. See byōbu; Daijōe onbyōbu; honmon screens scroll covers. See hyōshi; Lotus Sutra scrolls Sei Shōnagon, Pillow Book, 159–60, 161 Senshi, 182, 197, 273n61 Senzai wakashū, 41, 44, 52, 69–74, 145, 187–88, 219–24, 250n75, 263n58, 265n75, 268n4

Seta Bridge: association with summer, 134; burning of, 126; “Dusk Glowing at Seta,” 141, 151, 157; Kanemori poem on, 1–2, 3, 19, 99; map of, 119; paintings of, 1–2, Figures 1, 6; poems on, 58, 135, 151; Shunzei poem on, 19–21, 58 Shakkyōka (Buddhist poems), 161–62, 167–68, 177–79, 190, 197, 241n20, 270n32 Shanhaijing (Sengaikyō), 35 Shen Gua, Mengxi bitan, 128 Shiga, 118, 138, 143–46, 149 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), 78–79 Shijō, Emperor, 35, 243–44n17 Shika wakashū, 172, 173 shime no yama (platforms), 62, 63, 89, 253–54n22 Shimizudani Sanenari, 121, 122 Shimokōbe Jusui, Ōmi hakkei shi, 140–41 Shin kokin wakashū, 59, 199 Shingyō (Heart Sutra), 197–200, 273n61 Shinpen kokka taikan, 203, 204 Shinsenzai wakashū, 174 Shiogama, 97 Shōkokuji, 130 Shōshi, Empress, 137 Shōshō hakkei. See “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang” Shōsōin collection, 81–82, 251n7 Shūi wakashū, 55–56, 76–79 Shunzei’s Daughter (Shunzeikyō no musume), 60 Sōgi, 136 Song Di, 128 songs. See fuzoku waka Son’in, Prince, 265–66n78 Sonshō, Prince, 120, 121, 122 Sorensen, Joseph T., 10 sotoba (Buddhist memorial placards), 178, 180, 205 “A Storm Clearing at Awazu,” 141

i n de x 321 “A Storm Clearing at Ōtsu,” 157 Sugawara no Tamenaga, 35 suhama (landscape models): coastline representations in, 101, 103–4, 108, 109, 110–11; with crane, 76–79; current forms of, 253n16; in Daijōe, 16, 74, 82, 89–90; in early modern period, 111; ephemerality of, 86, 110; of famous places, 82, 83, 84, 103–4; forms of, 81, 82, 89–90; functions, 84, 85, 86, 87, 96–97; as fūryū, 83, 87, 97, 100, 104, 252n11, 255–56n36; as gifts, 84, 105–8, 109; go boards and, 79–81, 83; illustrations of, 92–93, 92; imaginary subjects, 82–83, 84, 88; as kazari, 87–88; materials of, 101–2; meanings of, 79, 83, 88–89, 105; as miniatures, 88, 253n19; nostalgia and, 88–89; as objects in motion, 85; occasions of, 83–86; paintings depicting, 81, 111–12, 111, 251n6; physical conveyance of, 85, 88; poetry as inspiration for, 85, 86; poetry associated with, 77–81, 84, 95–97, 100–101, 104, 105–10; precursors of, 81–82, 251n8, 252n13; records of, 87, 94–97; at royal occasions, 100–101, 102, 102, 108–10; of sacred places, 79, 82–83, 84–85, 89–90; scalloped edges of, 82, 90, 101, 109; scholarship on, 85–86; score-pad, 102–3; in utaawase, 83–84, 85–86, 94–97, 102–4, 102, 255n28; in wedding ceremonies, 110–11, 110 Suki province: performances in name of, 3, 23, 49; poems of, 27–28, 71, 73; screens prepared on behalf of, 3, 26, 27–28, 33, 49, 51, 66; selection of, 3; Tamba as, 30–31, 32; tribute goods of, 3, 49 Sumiyoshi Jokei, “Makibashira” scene, Figure 11 Sumiyoshi Shrine, 106–7 sumō broadsides (banzuke), 158, 267n88

Suntory Museum of Art, lacquer box with “Eight Views of Ōmi” scenes, 157, Figures 8–9 sutras: poems related to, 162, 195–200, 273n61; relationship to stupas, 270–71n35. See also Lotus Sutra Suzaku, Emperor, 35 Tachibana no Narisue, Kokon chomonjū, 100–101 Taikenmon’in no Chūnagon no kimi, 177 The Taira Family’s Sutra Offering. See Heike nōkyō Taira no Kanemori, 22, 77–78, 256n49; “Seta Bridge” poem, 1–2, 3, 19, 99 Taira no Narimasa, 80 Taira no Nobunori, 89; Heihanki, 32 Taira no Tadanori, 71, 145, 146–47, 263n55, 263–64n59 Takakura, Emperor, 31, 46 Takamura, Emperor, 243n16 Takatsukasa Kanehiro, 121, 122 Takayama Tatsuo, 242n6 The Tale of Genji. See Genji monogatari The Tale of Heike. See Heike monogatari The Tales of Ise. See Ise monogatari tales with poetry (uta monogatari), 12 Tamba Province, 30–31, 32 tami (folk), voices of, 27, 28–29, 41, 43, 53, 245n27 Tawara Tōda, 149–50 Temmu, Emperor, 23, 142 Tendai school, 122, 149, 160 Ten’in Ryūtaku, 136, 262n43 Tenji, Emperor, 142–44 thing theory, 4–5 thingness, 9, 176. See also waka, thingness of Toda Kazuaki, 138–39 Toda Ujikane, 139 Tōgen Zuisen, 130 Tōkaidō road, 138, 258n8, 260–61n35 topic tags. See dai

322 i n de x toponyms. See place-names torimono (objects brandished in song performance), 40, 55, 56, 61, 73, 274n8, 274–75n16 Tosa Mitsumoto, “Murasaki Shikibu’s Pilgrimage at Ishiyamadera” (Murasaki Shikibu Ishiyama mōde zufuku), Figure 7 Tosa Mitsuoki: “Descending Geese at Katada,” 156, 156; “Eight Views of Ōmi,” 156–57, 267n86, Figure 6 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 126 translation: of Chinese place-names, 39–40, 150, 153; mappings of “Eight Views” place-names from China to Japan, 117, 120, 131, 132, 139, 149, 150, 152, 153; of messages of Lotus Sutra, 167, 180, 181; between sacred and secular settings, 190; as transformation, 192; of tropes, 117, 118, 155, 157, 192 tribute goods, 1, 3, 40–41, 48, 49, 60 tribute screens. See Daijōe onbyōbu tsuizen kuyō services, 268n8 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 267n83 tsukurimono (elaborately made objects), 82 “Uchide Shore” (Uchide no hama), 151–52 Ukishima, 108 Unno Keisuke, 10 ura (underside) of a lotus leaf, as surface for poem, 160–61 uta. See byōbu uta; waka utaawase (poetry contests): Dairi utaawase, 102; participants, 30; prefaces (nikki), 83, 256n42; records of, 86; in royal palace, 93–99; scholarship on, 86, 97; Shunzei as judge, 52; suhama in, 83–84, 85–86, 94–97, 102–4, 102, 255n28 Utagawa Hiroshige, “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama,” Figure 10 utamakura (conventionally deployed figures), place-names and, 39, 83, 87, 131, 152, 184, 245n28. See also place-names

waka: audial qualities of, 206; Buddhist poetry (Shakkyōka), 161–62, 167–68, 177–79, 190, 197, 241n20, 270n32; copying and transmission of, 12, 203, 204, 205–6, 207; cross-referentiality within corpus, 7, 13, 42, 60, 190; forms of, 13; generative process, 7–8; in high classical period, 135–36; inscriptions, 11; lineages, 29; of mourning, 162–63, 164–66, 168–71, 176, 200–201; in new media, 204; performances of, 11; poets, 29; repetition of tropes and conventions, 7, 135–36, 144–45, 146–47; scholarship on, 7–8, 10, 15–16, 45, 203, 204, 206–8; written scripts, 168. See also chokusenshū; Daijōe waka; “Eight Views of Ōmi” poems; utaawase waka, thingness of: characteristics, 13–14; creation of poem and, 7–9, 179; crossreferentiality and, 42, 176; cultural context and, 37–38; of Daijōe waka, 74–75; as objects in motion, 9–10, 11, 13; paintings associated with, 1–2, 203–5; as part of Japanese material culture, 6–7, 8–9, 18; physical objects associated with, 4, 5–6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 22, 40, 203, 209; as tribute goods, 3, 40–41. See also Daijōe onbyōbu waka waka culture, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 42–43, 83, 203 wedding ceremonies: shima dai (landscape models on trays), 253n16; suhama in, 110–11, 110 “Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar,” 151–53 wine cup image, in Murasaki Shikibu poem, 195–96 women: Buddhism and, 185–86, 191–92; calligraphers, 65–66; floral metaphors and, 96, 185–86; motherhood, 192, 198; poetry by court ladies, 98–99 Xiao-Xiang region. See “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang”

i n de x 323 Yagi Ichio, 33, 35, 37, 39, 43–44, 54, 89 Yakaku teikinshō (Fujiwara no Koreyuki), 65–67 Yale University Art Gallery, 115, 130, 259n11 Yamamoto Soken: as court painter, 115; “Fujiwara Teika’s Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months,” 115, 122, 259n11. See also “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Soken) Yamanoue no Okura, 165 Yamashina Dōan, Kaiki, 123 Yamashinadera (Kōfukuji), 76–79, 83, 109 Yingzao fashi (Eizō hōshiki), 32–33 Yiwenleiju (Geibun ruiju), 35 Yujian, 130, 260n30 yuki, meanings of, 20 Yuki province: Ōmi as, 19, 20, 32, 139, 142, 253–54n22; performances in name of, 3, 23; poems of, 25t, 27; screens

prepared by, 3–4, 20–21, 25t, 26, 27, 33, 51, 66; selection of, 3; tribute goods of, 3–4, 49 Yukigata poems (Shunzei): agricultural metaphors in, 64; commission of, 29–32; composition, 52–55; composition of, 56–60; Day of the Dragon introit, 61–62, 63; fixedness theme in, 64–65; place-names in, 54, 261n40; recessional, 64–65; references to other Daijōe waka in, 56–58, 62–63; references to other poems in, 41, 58–60; “Seta Bridge” poem, 19–21; topic tags (dai) in, 21; transcription and translation of, 211–18; winter poem, 261n40 Zen Buddhism: growth in Japan, 128, 129; monasteries, 130; Rinzai school, 136 Zeze Castle, 138–39, 138