13th century AD

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

First, as the keeper of tradition, she does just that: she invokes an historical memory in the form of prior texts, thereby demonstrating the encyclopedic breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her mastery of tradition. Obviously the use of Chinese allusions is implicated here. Her opening sentence (quoted above) recalls the Hsiao ching, a text by Confucius on the nature of filial piety, which according to legend had been discovered within a crack in a wall. While Sano Yasutaro and Edwin O. Reischauer have been quick to recognize the allusive nature of the reference itself, they fail to consider how this reference functions within this particular context.(11) Doubtless, it recalls the very struggle between father and elder son that had led to the lawsuit over the Hosokawa Estate in the first place. But we should not overlook who it is that activates the reference and sets its allusive powers into play. As a woman invoking a Chinese text, Abutsu-ni illustrates de facto from the very beginning her knowledge of the Chinese classics and, by association, openly challenges the world of the tradition-bound court (where such texts signaled the power of men) by proclaiming her right to be heard and to be heard on an equal footing in the arena of her choosing. However subtly, she demonstrates the requisite understanding of the minutia of the Chinese classical tradition largely seen by men as necessary to carry forward the Japanese poetic tradition. Her knowledge of this tradition is in a word nonpareil. More importantly, she simultaneously authorizes and appropriates the power of her invocation. In effect, she anticipates, defuses and summarily dismisses any opposing arguments based solely on gender before they have a chance to be voiced.

Playing an equally prominent role in her argument are what Japanese literary scholars recognize as katoku setsu,(12) a complex set of conventions set into motion by even so seemingly innocuous a term as yamato no uta ("the poetry of Japan").(13) Though brief, her mentions of yamato uta ("Japanese poetry") and yamato no kuni ("Japan") are sufficient to recall Ki no Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinwakashu, the first imperial anthology; they also locate her own writings squarely at the ideological center of the imperial tradition itself. Whereas the Heian period (794-1185) had consciously esteemed the contemporaneous above all else--indeed, the "here and now" served as a benchmark of culture--after a prolonged period of civil war that culminated with the emergence of the Kamakura period (1185-1333), the virtues of a literary past began to displace those of the present in a hierarchy of aesthetic values. But let us not be naive: the manipulation of tradition by Abutsu-ni is scarcely the innocent preservation of the past for whatever expressed reasons or the result of nostalgic longing elevated to the level of an aesthetic principle. It is instead more likely an openly ideological bid for power. How? Herman Meyer points to a unique tension between assimilation and dissimilation when traditional texts forge links with new environments while at the same time remaining detached from their own.(14) In such instances, other worlds of reading and understanding are permitted to radiate into the self-contained world of the "alluding text." Abutsu-ni's reference to the kagura, or sacred poems, for example, harks back to the foundation myth of the Japanese nation as recorded in the Kojiki and by doing so recalls the bond between the word and the creative act.(15) But rather than supressing the oral tradition behind the word as might be expected, "writing" as performance in this instance is liberating. It underscores, too, as Abutsu-ni shrewdly argues, that the very foundation of poetry is the goddess Amenouzume's kagura. By implicating its origins, she reiterates the importance of divine inspiration (a fact none at court would have dared question), and she demonstrates categorically that women actively created the very foundations of culture (in a world where male deities did no more than passively watch its performance).