A Pair of Parables

chapter 1 Interlude: A Pair of Parables

“In the reign of a certain emperor, it matters not when,” His Majesty arose from his slumbers in the Pure Cool Pavilion (Seiryōden) and stepped out onto the verandah running under the eaves at the east side of the building.1 As the imperial gaze swept north along the verandah his eyes rested first on the Pond- of-Brilliance Screens (Konmei-chi no sōji, Fig. 1). The south face of the screen allowed the emperor to gaze across the seas and back a millennium or more, to look upon the Pond of Brilliance built at the command of the Chinese emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty (r. 140–86 BCE) on the outskirts of his capital city of Chang’an. Looking beyond the Pond-of-Brilliance Screens, he took in the Wild-Sea Screen (Ara-umi no sōji, Fig. 2), at the north end of the verandah, a painted screen that blocked the north end of the corridor from intrusive eyes. The Wild-Sea Screen presented to the emperor’s eyes yet another strange, but long-familiar vista of fantastic creatures on a rocky, storm-tossed shore.2

1 “In the reign …” (izure no o’on-toki ni ka) is, of course, the opening phrase of the Tale of Genji. 2 Some authorities read 障子 here as shōji; I follow Sei Shōnagon (late 10th c.), who writes it phonetically as sōji さうし. (Ikeda [1963, 43–44]) For placement of the Wild-Sea Screen, the Pond-of-Brilliance Screen in the Pure Cool Pavilion, and the bamboo plantings in the court- yard, Ōtsu (2001, 317); for the palace compound, ibid., p. 307, or Tyler, trans., (2001, p. 1122). The screens Sei Shōnagon describe, and several subsequent reiterations, were lost to fire; yet each time the imperial palace burned, painstaking efforts were made to reproduce the lost screens as faithfully as possible. The current iterations date from 1855. For a brief discussion of the Wild-Sea, Pond-of-Brilliance, and Sages and Worthies screens, see Chino (2003, pp. 23f; cf. Chino 1993, 6), who notes that many of the doors and screens surrounding the emperor’s quarters paired scenes of “Chinese subject matter” on the side facing the emperor’s living quarters, while the reverse sides presented depictions of “Japanese subjects.” These screen paintings, she argues, “were based on a double-layered structure of ‘Kara’ and ‘Yamato,’” i.e., China and Japan, that also characterized “Heian cultural identity” writ large. Ōtsu (2001, 323) sees both screens’ deployment of Chinese themes as evidence that the mid-Heian emperors were undergirded by a vague but ever-present “something Chinese” (Chūgoku-teki na mono). The screens are believed to date from 818 (Eiyū 1965, 185); Heldt (2008, 251) suggests that the subject matter of the Pond-of-Brilliance Screen may reflect emperor Saga’s (r. 809–823) “desire to see the new urban landscape of Heian-kyō as a modern equivalent to [capitals] of neighboring realms.” Chino and Heldt, that is, read the screens within the ambit of what Pollack (1984, 3) calls the “dialectic [of] wakan (Chinese-Japanese).” A desire to equate Heian- kyō with an ancient Chinese capital may have been a factor, but since the Pond-of-Brilliance Screen, like the Wild-Sea Screen, paired the foreign scene on its obverse with a domestic hunting scene on the reverse, one might suggest that the program was at least as concerned with the dichotomy of self and other as with claims to equivalence with the Han capital. These

figure 1 “Pond of Brilliance Screen,” as depicted in the Ban Dainagon emaki (color on paper, late 12th c., Idemitsu Museum), is visible behind the man on the veranda. It depicts a view of the “Pond of Brilliance: (J., Konmei-chi; C., Kunming-chi) in the Han Dynasty capital of Changan—a quintessentially alien scene—on the side facing us, and on the reverse side a scene of falconers at the hunting grounds of Saga, just west of the Heian capital. The screen was placed at one entrance to the Japanese emperor’s sleeping quarters, with the scene of Changan facing in toward the emperor’s quarters, and the domestic scene at Saga facing outward, where it greeted persons approaching the emperor’s presence.

These scenes were familiar, for Japanese emperors had gazed upon them daily for time out of mind, yet strange, for the screens were populated by creatures seen nowhere else. As the Emperor Juntoku (r. 1210–1221) wrote of the Wild-Sea Barrier he awoke to each day, “On the north [side of the Pure Cool Pavilion] are the Wild Sea Screens. On the south face is [toward the emperor’s cham- bers], a depiction of Long-arms and Long-legs (Tenaga; Ashinaga); on its north face, net-fishing at Uji. It is painted in ink on silken screens.”3 Two centuries earlier Sei Shōnagon, an attendant of the empress, had recorded her own and her peers’ response to the untamed scene of what Juntoku calls “Long-arms and Long-legs”: The south face of the screens presented, she wrote, “a scene of wild seas, and terrifying creatures, [one] long-legged, [the other] long-armed.

two readings are not, of course, mutually exclusive and—as Heldt aptly observes—Heian painting and poetry relied heavily on incorporating multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings. For further discussion of the screens, Ienaga (1966, 29–30). 3 Emperor Juntoku, Kinpishō (1213), quoted in Suzuki (1994, 20).