13th century AD

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

However different these approaches may be, there are several fundamentally similar difficulties with their categorizations that limit--if not undermine--their value. Clearly, as a narrative about a writer, the Izayoi nikki invites interpretation as a text about writing and the nature of discourse. But none, for example, have paid attention to the cultural and social forces at work in shaping the text. Worse, critical interpretations have hindered us from appreciating the text as a field in which the past is reprocessed in a complex intertextual collision of words, voices, and conventions. We are prevented as it were from recognizing the poet's claims as well as the process by which her demands are advanced. More to the point, their interpretations dismiss, erase, or otherwise obliterate the role of language as it sets the exacting standard by which her claims were to be justified. Several lines later, for example, Abutsu-ni unambiguously links the abstract notion of filial piety with the concrete and active role of writing in general and later with yamato uta no michi ("the art of Japanese poetry") in particular. The groundwork properly laid, she vindicates her need to write:

. . . . . . azukari mo taru koto aredo, michi wo tasuke yo, ko wo

wagugume, ato no yo wo toe, tote, fakakichigiri wo musubi okareshi

Hosokawa no nagare mo, yue naku seki todo merareshi kaba, ato

too nori no tomoshi bi mo, michi wo mamori, ie wo tasukemu

oyako no inochi mo. . . . . .

. . . perhaps because of some Karma affinity, [I] have been entrusted

with . . . [two] . . . sons and hundreds and thousands of old sheets of

poems; but they have, without reason, damned even the flow of the

Hosokawa, which was left us with solemn pledges--"Support the art,

care for the children, and pray for my afterlife."(9)

Even a cursory reading of this introduction underscores that beyond her grievances and her apparent indignation is a lawsuit linked inextricably to three promises (i.e., art, children, afterlife). Put differently, the lawsuit is representative of the challenge to keep these "solemn pledges," but it is noteworthy that the sequence appears in inverse order from what we might expect of a dying man's wishes. More important even than karma and afterlife is Tameie's desire--twice mentioned, as miche wo tasuke yo and michi wo mamori--that the poetic lineage be preserved. For in medieval Japan, the world of the court mirrored--indeed, at times it seems to have been concerned with little else than--a complex but clearly recognizable politics mapping the separation of insider from outsider, the privileged from the less esteemed, the center from the marginalized and peripheral. Perhaps nowhere was this more in evidence than among the various political intrigues that contested, vied for their share in, the poetic inheritance.

My interest in the Izayoi nikki, however, lies not in its dramatization of a particular abstractable storyline but rather in exploring how, why, and to what extent rhetorical strategies are being used by its author to authorize as well as frame her argument. In a very real sense, the linkage of writing as act to larger questions of ownership is simultaneously a mark of the historical moment of enunciation inscribed within the text and an overt strategy of its figuration. Poetry and the creative process become in this sense tangible commodities, the ownership of which can legitimately be passed from one generation to the next. Furthermore, in opposing litigation and, when successful, transmitting the property comprising the poetic tradition, the poet commodifies the creative act, thereby justifying her belief less in rightful ownership than in her authority to ownership as the designated "keeper" of the tradition. As such, the Izayoi nikki presents us with an unusual figuration of the female as poet by building upon her unchallenged roles as wife and mother, positions widely respected as appropriate to women at court during the late Heian and emerging Kamakura periods, she constructs herself as poetic equal to Tameie and thereby proclaims herself the immediate overseer or protector of his poetic lineage. In doing so, she establishes for herself a position from which she may then pass the torch to her son. In this sense, the entire diary becomes both about how she does so and, as importantly, the very artifact by which she does so. If we accept John Frow's observation that the nature of textuality depends crucially not on the formal properties of the text in and of itself but even more so on the position that those properties establish within the matrices of the prevailing ideological field, a field of reading as it were, then we understand the process by which her particular strategies "worked their magic" and generated meaning from a myriad of possibilities.(10) What is obvious in the language of her travels, on the one hand, is a compliant deference to certain literary conventions; on the other, it is a defiant tempering of these very conventions to meet her own ends. She achieves the latter in at least three clearly discernible ways.