13th century AD

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

Second, behind the awesome power of silence lies ipso facto the voice of implication. Abutsu-ni's mention of certain male poets, all of whom are of marginal status (unless they belong to her family), strategically recovers the writings of their female counterparts. Without invoking their names directly, she restores to them the former power and position of their names, a practice the mirror image of which is the outcome she seeks in the lawsuit in the name of her son. Put differently, behind every named male poet there stands his equal or as likely his superior, a female poet whose accomplishments have held their own long after her name was forgotten (the only females directly named--though I must caution here that in medieval Japan names as such were far less frequently used than, say, in a modern Euro-American context--are an elder and younger sibling and the daughter of Tameuji's younger brother). When she alludes to the works of Funya no Yasuhide, she simultaneously acknowledges the power of his more famous relation, Ono no Komachi, the only female from among the "Six Poetic Geniuses." By alluding to the source of a poem on seaweed by her late husband, she insightfully reclaims the position of an all-but-neglected female poet known only by the appellation Suke. Ironically, however ideologically impure this strategy may appear on the surface, it does render her writings capable of combining three seemingly disparate promises and the motivations that underlie them in a singular and concise action. Our reading of the Izayoi nikki, then, cannot help but have a dual focus. Certainly, it calls our attention to the importance of component texts, as earlier critics have documented in detail, by insisting that the autonomy of individual texts--or the sedimentation that we apprehend as abstracted story--is a misleading notion (as earlier critics have not seen) and that a work, therefore, has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet, insofar as such component texts focus our attention on intelligibility--on meaning, the configuration of meaning, and the power behind such complicit acts--our readings of necessity require us to consider them as contributors to a composite code that makes possible the various effects of signification.

And third, the repeated reliance upon semiotic conventions, especially in the chains of signification built around seaweed-related imagery, both recalls Abutsu-ni's promises and facilitates her dual role as poet-protector. Her invocation is hardly new: writing and seaweed have long been associated.(16) But what is interesting about Abutsu-ni's usage is that it not only appropriates the familiar from her surroundings (along the road to Kamakura, she had frequent opportunities to view seaweed and its use in the production of salt), but also makes it bear the additional load of meaning of the three promises she had made to Tameie. Lest her audience fail to recognize the import of her references, she develops the image further and explicitly. To understand just how the sign participates in the production of her intended meaning, however, we must turn to the poems themselves.