13th century AD

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world, but on

it depends the fact that man has a world at all.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

As for my Epitaph when I am gone,

I'll trust no poet but will write my own.

Nelly Gwynn as Valeria in Dryden's Tyrannick Love

The Nun Abutsu was angry, and nearly eight hundred years before it became fashionable to do so, she determined that she would not take it any more. She had a story to tell, and she was going to tell it.(1)

Widely renowned for some forty-eight poems included in the imperial anthologies, and a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Kuniko, the young poet had met and fallen in love with the elderly Fujiwara Tameie. Theirs had been a passionate affair (as a series of poetic exchanges in the Gyokuyoshu and the Fugashu attest), and after some time she consented to become his wife. So strong were their physical desires that even the tonsure and his Buddhist vows could not keep them apart; she subsequently bore him two sons, Tamesuke (1263-1328) and Tamemori (1265-1328). And while not her equal as a poet, Tameie was nonetheless the titular head of the Mikohidari house, a long line of poets of court rank who had single-handedly shaped the world of Japanese poetry.(2) But together, their marital bliss would be relatively short-lived: he died on the first day of the fifth moon of 1275, at which time she shaved her head and came to be called Abutsu-ni, the Nun Abutsu.

Prior to his death, in the seventh moon of 1273, and again in the sixth moon of 1274, Tameie had issued legal documents that bequeathed the Hosokawa Estate, a property of little cosequence, to Tamesuke. The central incident and impetus of the Izayoi nikki, the travel diary of Abutsu-ni, is a journey to Kamakura occasioned precisely by a lawsuit over its ownership: she claimed the Hosokawa for her son Tamesuke against the opposition of Tameuji, one of Tameie's sons by a previous wife and some forty years Tamesuke's senior.(3) But at stake in her writings is a property far more valuable--and she knew this. What she wanted, indeed what she intended to secure for her son as his rightful inheritance, was his "birthright" as she saw it, as the authoritative and absolute arbiter of taste in court poetry. But just how would she get people to listen to her side of the story?

What is evident is that people did listen and continued to do so long after the lawsuit had been settled in Tamesuke's favor.(4) Down through the ages, the Izayoi nikki has enjoyed a wide readership, and Tamesuke's line as the Reizei branch of the family, a certain marked influence in the world of court poetry. Recently, however, the so-called teisetsu, or accepted interpretations, glibly pronounce that the diary, however insignificant as a work of art in its own right, remains somewhat important as an historical artifact for two reasons: as an educational guide, the purpose of which was to instruct Abutsu-ni's sons in the art of poetic composition, and as an exemplary tale of filial piety.(5) Ironically, these interpretations all but ignore the tone of overwhelming "paternal benevolence" in Tameie's poetic treatise, the Yakumo kuden ("Secret Teachings on the Art of the Eightfold Clouds"), expressly written in his final years as just such a poetic primer for Tamesuke.(6) Worse, the two lines of thinking can be traced directly back to (but no further than) the writings of a few prewar critics--Fujimura Saku and Kamazaki Keijiro, for example--who, without further examination, attached tremendous importance to the notion of filial piety alluded to in the opening line from the diary in support of their conclusion:(7)

Mukashi, kabe no naka yori, motomeide tari kemu fumi no mei wo ba,

ima no yo no hito no ko wa, yume bakari no, Karada no ue no koto to

shirazari ken na.

Children nowadays would not even dream that the name of the book

discovered long, long ago within a crack in a wall has anything to do

with them.

The concrete relationship of the allusion to the whole of the text, however, was summarily overlooked, primarily, I suspect, because the critics could not account for the vast temporal and cultural distances between the moment of enunciation of these lines and their own readings of them. They wholly ignored that the Meiji Restoration had resulted in the installation of an emperor whose prestige and power served to legitimate a national image configured in patriarchal terms which grew increasingly stronger toward the eve of Japan's military involvement on the Asian continent in 1931. Caught within the very weave of such a State-sanctioned ideology, they failed to recognize how their own readings complicitly rearticulated--in fact, played into the hand of--a larger, deceptively ahistorical discourse of Japan as a patriarchally-aligned family, so painstakingly erected by post-Restoration authorities. At the moment, however, their interpretations prevail. The Izayoi nikki is now rarely, if ever, read.

Scholars outside of Japan have tended to problematize the issue of genre, disingenuously noting as it were that the Izayoi nikki appears at the end of a long tradition of nikki bungaku, or diary literature, bound up in a gender-based cultural code concerning women who write. Mention is invariably made of the facts that prose and poetry haphazardly interdigitate (if only from a non-Japanese perspective), and that the diary as a genre in medieval Japan is unified less by certain explicable rhetorical strategies than by an overt presence of author. As a literary travel diary, then, this text is expected to bear some resemblance to prosaic truth, although discerning between fact and fiction is difficult if not impossible at times. Author and homodiegetic narrator are by convention one and the same, provided there is no compelling evidence to the contrary. As Earl Miner concisely and succinctly summarizes this position, "[u]ltimately fictionality is not an interpretive option." Maggie Childs' conclusion that this work "almost certainly . . . [contains] . . . a therapeutic element" assumes and builds upon just such a critical stance.(8)