13th century AD

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

keburi to mo smoke

tare ka wa mimashi who would notice

kaze ni kienaba (293) if they were to vanish in the wind?

Tameko resonds with similar eloquence:

kie mo seji seaweed salt fires

Wakanoura ji ni along the Wakanoura

toshi wo hete the years erased

hikari wo souru brilliantly ablaze

ama no moshiobi (294) fires of the fisherman.

In this final grouping, our focus is inevitably drawn to the moshiobi, the fires of briny seaweed. As we have seen earlier, they are but a part of a larger process by which salt is collected and purified for daily use. In line with Jonathan Culler's observation in general that a text can only be read in juxtaposition to context, we see that salt and seaweed provide a screen through which the elements of abstracted story are read and structured; the poet establishes expectations that enable readers to distinguish and thereby emphasize--give primacy to--some of their salient features; by association, we have followed Abutsu-ni on her arduous journey.(21) As we have read the Izayoi nikki, as we have traveled with the poet to Kamakura, we have also borne witness to a greater moshiobi as it were, a figurative burning away- of the grief and pain of loosing one's spouse, of having a child betray a parent, of having first to demonstrate one's worth and later repeatedly to defend that worth against would-be detractors. And what is left? Hope in a single verse:

nagakare to through the ages

asa yu inoru morning and night pray

kimi ga yo wo for my Lord's reign

yamato kotoba ni Japanese poetry

kyo zo nobetsuru. (302) today spoken of.

And if there could be any doubt as to the nature of the figural salts left after the burning, this verse sounds their end. Certainly, the phrase kimi ga yo is most frequently used in reference to the Emperor, but a second level of meaning co-exists within the context of the poem itself. Linked inextricably to yo, a humble first-person pronoun used exclusively by an author in deprecating self-reference, is the nuance-laden second-person pronoun kimi, a term of intimacy spoken, for example, to an addressee who is younger than the addresser. Read in this light, kimi can have but one antecedent: Tamesuke, Abutsu-ni's son.

That the Edo-period poet Matsuo Basho remarks in his own travel diary, the Oku no hosomichi, that the writings of Abutsu-ni are among the most important coming out of the long medieval period underscores that gender was not an overriding factor,in his estimation. Modern scholars and readers alike, however, have been somewhat less than perceptive. Reischauer--and he is by no means in the minority, although he is one of the last to comment extensively on the work--confidently pronounces that the "reliance upon literary allusion, on timeworn cliches, and on verbal tricks in the nature of puns shows how far formalism had taken the place of real emotion in the composition of poetry." His comment obscures the fluidity of the historical context within which Abutsu-ni wrote, namely the aftermath of a lengthy civil war. She wrote at a time when the social values of the past seemed in imminent danger of slipping forever out of reach, so that the literary past took on the additional burden of providing a semblance of continuity in a world characterized by upheaval and ominous change. Moreover, Reischauer fails to note how the text "makes work of language," as Julia Kristeva might say, by going back to what precedes it to promote a network of multiple connections with variable heirarchies of meaning.(22) Hence, his reflections do little more than strip her poetry of its worth. Failing to understand the rhetorical import and the nature of its composition, his criticism relegates her to the position of a woman who as a secondary concern happens to write--as opposed to a writer who is simultaneously a woman. Doing so he pushes her to the periphery of the canon and takes her out of circulation as a serious writer.