Optical Allusions Brill’S Japanese Studies Library

Optical Allusions Brill’s Japanese Studies Library

Edited by Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor) Caroline Rose Kate Wildman Nakai

VOLUME 40

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/bjsl Optical Allusions

Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800–1200)

By Joseph T. Sorensen

Leiden • boston 2012 Cover illustration: Detail of Tōji Mountains and Waters screen, 11th c., Kyoto National Museum.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sorensen, Joseph T. Optical allusions : screens, paintings, and poetry in classical Japan (ca. 800-1200) / by Joseph T. Sorensen. p. cm. — (Brill’s Japanese studies library ; 40) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-21931-1 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23151-1 (e-book) 1. Japanese poetry—Heian period, 792–1185—History and criticism. 2. Literature in art. 3. Screen painting, Japanese—History. I. Title.

PL733.1186.A65S67 2012 895.6’1009—dc23 2012014310

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ISSN 0925-6512 ISBN 978-90-04-21931-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-23151-1 (e-book)

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. For Fred Romagnolo

Mentor, Teacher, Friend

Contents

List of Figures and Tables ...... ix Acknowledgements ...... xi

Introduction: Thinking with Pictures ...... 1 The Image and the Origins of Poetry ...... 2 Experience and Ekphrasis ...... 6 Painting and Poetic Essence ...... 13 Optical Allusions: Image and Code ...... 17 The Paths of Japanese Screen Poetry ...... 22

1. Screens and Poems, Contexts and Images...... 31 . Folding Screens in Japan ...... 31 . Screens and Their Contexts ...... 40 . Early Painting-Poems in Chinese ...... 45 . Early Poems on Paintings in Japanese ...... 63

2. The Efflorescence of Screen Poetry...... 79 inscription and Perspective ...... 79 . Tsurayuki and Screen Poetry: Layered Perspective and Ekphrasis ...... 90 . Mitsune and Screen Poetry: Sense and Sensibility ...... 107 . Lady Ise and Screen Poetry: Persona and Narrative ...... 123 . Reading, Viewing, Composing ...... 140

3. The Dai Is Cast ...... 149 . Topical Convention vs. Lyric Expression ...... 149 . Early Dai: Visual Perception and Direct Experience ...... 154 . Folding Screens and Visual Topics ...... 173 . Screen Painting and Poetic Topic Development ...... 182 . Visual Thinking and Perceptual Cycles ...... 192

4. Politics and Precedence ...... 201 . Screen Poetry and Shōshi’s Court Entrance of 999 ...... 202 . Screen Poetry and Ninshi’s Court Entrance of 1190 ...... 222 viii contents

Conclusion: Poetic Conception, Poetic Vision ...... 239 Appendix A: Screen Poems Predating Kokinshū (905) ...... 255 Appendix B: Translation from Tales of Times Now Past ...... 257

Bibliography ...... 263 Index ...... 281 list of Figures and Tables

Figures

1a: Tōji Mountains and Waters screen (Senzui byōbu), 11th c., Kyoto National Museum ...... 34 1b: Detail of Tōji Mountains and Waters screen ...... 35 2: Jingoji Mountains and Waters screen, 13th-c. copy of 11th-c. original, Tokyo National Museum ...... 35 3: Frequency of screen poem composition, ca. 870–1170 ...... 80 4: Seaside dioramas (suhama) from a 17th-c. wood-block print ...... 167 5: Perceptual cycle with poetic topics ...... 194 6: The Fujiwara House (abbreviated) ...... 203 7a and b: Participants in the 1190 Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court Entrance ...... 227

Tables

1: Best-represented Poets in Kokinshū (ca. 905) ...... 108 2: Topics in The Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities (Engi rokunen dairi tsukinami byōbu uta; 906) ...... 183 3: Timeline for the court entrance of Shōshi (999 [Chōhō 1]) ...... 207 4: Timeline for the court entrance of Ninshi (from Kanezane’s diary Jade Leaves for the years 1189–1190 [Bunji 5–6]) ...... 229

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes to H. Mack Horton, Gregory Levine, and Susan Matisoff for their guidance, both academic and personal, during my years at the University of California at Berkeley and in the many years since. I am grateful to Watanabe Yasuaki and Kimishima Aki for steering my research at an early stage during my time at the University of Tokyo. I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of California at Davis who commented on portions of the manuscript: Robert Borgen, Michelle Yeh, and Mark Halperin. I also received valuable feedback from Miriam Wattles of the University of California at Santa Barbara and several other participants at a workshop of the Japanese Arts and Globalization multi- campus research group. The Japan Foundation generously funded my initial research in Japan, and my department, dean’s office, and committee on research at U.C. Davis have supported me with the time and funding necessary to see this book through to press. I am especially indebted to Joshua Mostow of the University of British Columbia who not only commented on the entire manuscript, but also saw me through a number of difficult junctures since this project began. Melissa McCormick of Harvard University offered much needed advice and direction for which I am grateful. The manuscript is greatly improved thanks to the painstaking efforts of my editors Katherine Lawn Chouta and Patricia Radder, as well as several anonymous press readers. In the end, nothing would have been possible if not for my wife Miki, my daughters Maia and Emi, and family friend Fred Romagnolo.

Introduction

Thinking with Pictures

What is ‘screen poetry’ (byōbu uta 屏風歌)? Screen poetry is best understood as the product of a performative and cooperative event that involves poetic composition, a painted image, and the calligraphy that binds them together. Throughout most of the Heian period (794–1185), there were strong ties among the three arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting, just as in Tang China (618–907), where they were collectively known as the ‘three perfections’ (Ch. sanjue, J. sansetsu, 三絶).1 Japanese poets of the classical period generally regarded their screen compositions as their most prestigious commissions, as evidenced by the prominent placement of those poems in personal collections (shikashū 私家集). Moreover, the reception and appreciation of screen poems show their significant role in the lives of Heian nobility. Milestone events for important members of court society—coming-of-age rituals, birthdays, weddings, enthronement rites, and court entrance ceremonies—were commemorated with screen poems. Screens were kept as mementos of these events and were also used to adorn and divide the interior space of the imperial palace, as well as domestic residences within the capital. As a reflection of the artistic and poetic sensibilities of the nobility, screen paintings and the poems inscribed upon them in some ways represent the quintessence of Heian aristocratic culture. This books offers a way of interpreting the work of screen poets as part of larger developments in Japanese court poetry. The relationship between the visual and verbal arts was a significant consideration for poets of the classical period as they developed certain basic rhetorical techniques. These poets responded to visual prompts that were singular objects early on and expanded to a range of simulacra later. Garden contests (senzai awase 前栽合) from the tenth century provide a concrete example of this practice: early poets composed while viewing particular blossoms

1 See Michael Sullivan, The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), for a basic discussion of the principles relating to the three arts in China. For one theory on collaborative form in the West, and significant examples, see Thomas Jensen Hines, Collaborative Form: Studies in the Relations of the Arts (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 164–174. 2 introduction in their host’s garden, but later poets composed based on objects in an artificial-landscape diorama (suhama 州浜). The process of visualizing poetry in tandem with painting and other art forms helped define some of the fundamental parameters of traditional poetry, especially in the establishment of poetic topics (dai 題). In the tenth and eleventh centuries, poets helped formulate these topics and their conventional associations, often through their engagement with visual art objects. Later poets were obliged to demonstrate a mastery of those conventions, even as they refined the poetic essence (hon’i 本意) of the topics they were assigned. Painted screens and other visual centerpieces were frequently showcased at venues where such topical composition occurred. The way early poets responded to these visual stimuli by referring to the image and integrating sensory aspects into their works suggests that many poems can be thought of as works of ekphrasis, that is, literary descriptions of visual representations. Theories on the origins of poetry in thought-images reflect these compositional practices as they describe the tendency of Japanese poetry to imagistically capture a fleeting moment in time. Such brief verbal encapsulation is most associated with the haiku that matured in the seventeenth century and became an internationally popular poetic form, but, as will be seen in the pages that follow, the same is true of a good portion of early waka poetry as well. This book, then, is not just about the important genre later known as ‘screen poetry,’ but also about the larger role of visuality in literary production.

The Image and the Origins of Poetry

The “Kana Preface” to Kokinshū (Collection of ancient and modern times; ca. 905) is generally regarded as the fountainhead of Japanese poetics. As the first imperially commissioned anthology of Japanese verse, Kokinshū established the standards of style and diction for centuries of aspiring poets. The “Kana Preface,” written by one of the main compilers, Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 872–945), is the earliest expression of the origin and purpose of Japanese poetry. The preface begins: Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives. The song of the warbler among the blossoms, the voice of the frog dwelling in the water—these teach us that every living creature sings. It is song that moves heaven and earth without effort, stirs emotions in the invisible spirits and thinking with pictures 3

gods, brings harmony to the relations between men and women, and calms the hearts of fierce warriors.2 Tsurayuki points to direct experience as the external stimulus that gives rise to the feelings that burgeon forth as the words of poetry. The poet then uses “the seen and the heard” as a tool to give voice to and provide a form for his ideas, concepts, or feelings. In other words, the visual and the aural are key components in the production of poetry. Kokinshū also includes a preface in Chinese, known as the “Mana Preface,” written by Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), and while in many ways the Japanese preface reads like a translation or a parallel exposition of the Chinese, the particular passage on “the seen and the heard” does not have a direct corresponding passage in the Chinese version. Both Tsurayuki and Yoshimochi borrow themes and structures from Chinese sources, most notably the “Great Preface” to The Book of Songs (Shi jing; sixth century b.c.e.). All three prefaces posit the public role of poetic composition and compilation as tools of statecraft. It is Tsurayuki’s minor modifications in the Japanese version, however, that shift the emphasis toward the private role of poetry as a lyric expression based on direct experience.3 According to Tsurayuki, our sensation of the natural world is what gives rise to the emotions that come out as poetry. Both the “Great Preface” and the “Kana Preface” clearly state that poetry springs from the mind and that the words of poetry do not describe nature, but rather a mental process initiated by the human perception of nature. Thus, as the poet proceeds from the affective (what he perceives) to the expressive (what he composes), his ideas are filtered through a cognitive system defined in part by collective memory and experience. Although Tsurayuki in particular affirms the lyric nature of poetry, comparing it to the song of the warbler and the voice of the frog, there is no doubt that

2 Translation from Helen Craig McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthol- ogy of Japanese Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 3. Japanese text in Kojima Noriyuki and Arai Eizō, eds., Kokin wakashū, SNKT 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), p. 4. 3 See Helen Craig McCullough, Brocade by Night (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 291–367, on the Kokinshū prefaces and their Chinese and Japanese precedents. Also see Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 143–160, and Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power and Early Heian Japan, Cornell East Asia Series 139 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2008), pp. 191–240. Which of the two Kokinshū prefaces had primacy cannot be determined, though the Japanese version has garnered much more attention as a defense of the native language. 4 introduction both the composition and comprehension of poetry ultimately derive from an accepted cultural code of understanding. Later in the “Kana Preface,” Tsurayuki refers to several tropes that draw their significance from their usage in previous poetry: Men found comfort in composing poems in which they expressed wishes for a lord’s long life or for patronage through comparisons with pebbles or allusions to Mount Tsukuba, or in which they gave voice to gratitude for favors beyond their station or for benefactions that filled their hearts to overflowing, or in which they compared romantic passion to Mount Fuji’s smoke, or yearned for friends at the sound of waiting-insects, or in which they thought of growing old in the company of the Takasago and Suminoe pines, or recalled past days when they were like Man Mountain, or sighed over the brief blossoming of the maidenflower.4 Unlike early defenses of poetry in the West, where mimesis and truthful representation were seen as the measuring stick for the value of language, the “Kana Preface” exhibits no preoccupation with realistic portrayal, nor is there any anxiety over the capacity of words to represent objects in reality. Tsurayuki instead emphasizes a mutually recognized code, based on culture and custom, for the reading and writing of poetry. His examples show that he assumes that language can and will be used metaphorically, and that the purpose of poetry is more expressive than descriptive. In the “Kana Preface,” and in the Chinese sources from which it draws, the vivid image is only the beginning of the compositional process, not the end product. Given that the language of official documents in classical Japan was Chinese, it is not surprising that the first imperial anthology of Japanese verse would include a Chinese preface. Still, the fact that Tsurayuki would use Chinese models as his precedent as he argues for the parity, or even primacy, of Japanese poetry over Chinese poetry is more than a little ironic. His seminal theory on how poetry comes into being when kokoro 心 (heart, mind, soul; also: feelings, thoughts) find embodiment in kotoba 詞 (words, form) borrows directly from the “Great Preface” to The Book of Songs, generally attributed to Wei Hong (first century c.e.): “Poetry is the outcome of intent. In the mind, it is intent; expressed in words, it becomes poetry” (詩者志之所之也。在心為志。發言為詩。 ).5 Due in part to its

4 Translation from McCullough, Kokin Wakashū, p. 5. Japanese text in Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 10–11. 5 John Timothy Wixted, “The Kokinshū Prefaces: Another Perspective,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (June 1983): 215–238. Also see Wixted, “Chinese Influences on the thinking with pictures 5 traditional association with Confucius (551–479 b.c.e.), The Book of Songs has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese literary thought. Tsurayuki’s “Kana Preface” occupies a similar position in Japanese poetic history, and the direct modeling on the classic Chinese collection no doubt contributed to its stature. Both the “Great Preface” and the “Kana Preface” initiated an exegetical tradition in which the pithy and sweeping statements contained in each are expanded, reworded, exemplified, and explained by a host of later commentators. Both works had far-reaching effects in raising questions about the function of language and literature that later critics attempted to address. The idea that “poetry is the outcome of intent,” or that “poetry has the human heart as seed,” prompted later theorists to further analyze the process by which ideas, concepts, and feelings find their form in language. For Tsurayuki, the poet took his inspiration from the “innumerable events” in his life and used “the seen and the heard” to give voice to his thoughts. The Chinese philosopher Wang Bi (226–249), in his commentary on The Book of Changes (Yi jing), pointed to the central importance of the image (xiang 象), in other words, ‘the seen,’ as the channel through which an internal concept ( yi 意) or intent (zhi 志) is transformed into verbal expression. He elucidated the image as follows: The image is what brings out concept; language is what clarifies the image. Nothing can equal the image in giving the fullness of concept; nothing can equal language in giving the fullness of image. Language was born of the image, thus we seek in language in order to observe the image. Image was born of concept, thus we seek in image in order to observe the concept. Concept is fully given in image; image is overt in language. 夫象者出意者也。言者明象者也。盡意莫若象。盡象莫若言。言生於象。故可尋言以觀象。象生於意。故可尋象以觀意。意以象盡。象以言著。 6 To say that “language is born of the image” is to say that all literature is a form of ekphrasis—a verbal elaboration of a visual representation. Although this may be an overstatement, the role of the image in literary production has been, in general, underappreciated. The chapters that

Kokinshū Prefaces,” in Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Henkenius, trans., Kokinshū (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 387–400, for further comparisons. 6 Wang Bi, “The Elucidation of the Image” (“Ming xiang”). Translation (modified slightly) from Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 1992), p. 33. 6 introduction

follow trace the ways that literary language has often been dependent on visual representation, both in the context of Japanese screen poetry and in the Japanese poetic tradition as a whole.

Experience and Ekphrasis

What are the defining features of ekphrasis and why is it a useful tool in analyzing Japanese poetry? Given the rise of screen painting and court poetry in the years leading up to the compilation of the first imperial anthology, the ubiquity of painted screens and other visual art objects at venues of poetic composition at the time, Tsurayuki’s theories on how the external world compels internal emotion toward outward expression, and the proclivity of Japanese poetry to capture a fleeting moment in time, I would argue that Japanese poetry is, on a fundamental level, ekphrastic in nature. The term ‘ekphrasis’ generally denotes a literary description of a visual work of art. The word derives from the Greek ekphrazein (ek, ‘out’ + phra- sein, ‘explain’), which refers to any rhetorical description of a person, place, object, or event. The first recorded use of the term occurs in the histories of Dionysius of Helicarnassus (first century b.c.e.). Ekphrasis, as vivid narrative description, came to be part of the progymnasmata elemen- tary curriculum in rhetoric and was considered by Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) and Quintilian (first century c.e.) to be an essential subject in the preparation for oratory.7 Effective public speaking was based, at least in part, on one’s skill at such verbal description. In a work titled Ekphraseis, Callistratus (fl. third to fourth centuries c.e.) describes in detail fourteen statues. This is the first time the term is used to directly connect verbal description with visual art objects. The Oxford English Dictionary has the term ekphrasis entering the English language in 1715. In modern scholarship, the concept of ekphrasis has contributed significantly to ongoing studies in ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”), which itself is a part of representational theory more generally. Scholars still debate some aspects of the term’s definition and how it functions, but they generally agree with W. J. T. Mitchell, who described ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a graphic representation.”8

7 Judith Dundas, Sidney and Junius on Poetry and Painting: From the Margins to the Cen- ter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), p. 234. 8 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–82. thinking with pictures 7

Ekphrasis in the West is as old as writing itself. The earliest example of ekphrasis in Western literature is also one of the most famous: Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII (lines 478–608) of The Iliad, which dates to the eighth century b.c.e. As James Heffernan has noted, the epic was told and transcribed at about the same time that writing in Greece originated, and the extended passage “invites us to measure the newborn powers of writing itself against those of a much older mode of representation.”9 Of course Homer’s rich description was originally performed orally, and since Achilles’ shield does not really exist, at least not now, the only comparisons we can draw are between the imaginary images on the shield and Homer’s now-written words that evoke them, a process that constitutes what John Hollander has called ‘notional ekphrasis’ (as opposed to ‘actual ekphrasis,’ in which the extant object and the words that describe it can be appreciated together).10 In these terms, the Japanese screen poem is generally a work of actual ekphrasis that has been rendered into a work of notional ekphrasis because the image or images it was based on no longer exist. The 130 lines that describe the shield of Achilles form an interlude that is separable from the main narrative of The Iliad. Early lines describe the process of forging the shield, but then the focus turns to the images depicted on it, calling attention to the opposition of movement and stasis. . . . The oxen turned in the furrows, straining to come to the end of the new-ploughed land; all lay black behind them, and looked like ploughed soil, yet it was gold; indeed, a very wonder was wrought. The oxen seem to move, and yet they do not, eternally straining to plough to the end of their row. Homer marvels at how the gold has been darkened to look like the ploughed soil, and he uses poetic language to expose the difference between the forged images and what they represent. In other words, by noting the sculptural motionlessness of the images, he calls attention to the artifice of the craftsman and implicitly to his own ekphrastic endeavor to conjure up the images in the minds of his readers/ listeners.

Ekphrasis as a historical phenomenon was the subject of major conferences in the 1980s, and in 1983 it earned its own subject heading in the MLA International Bibliography. 9 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 9. The following observations on the shield of Achilles are indebted in part to his discussion on pp. 10–22. 10 John Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word & Image 4 (1988): 209–219. 8 introduction

Japanese poets made similar observations, both in the Chinese shi form and in Japanese waka. The focus on stasis is clearly exhibited in the line “Years pass, and the dangling hook never catches a fish” from a kanshi (Chinese-style poem) by Emperor Saga (786–842, r. 809–823), which will be discussed in chapter 1.11 Likewise, the earliest Japanese poems based on painted screens show similar traits. For example, Emperor Montoku (827–858, r. 850–858) was once enthralled by a painting of a waterfall and asked his ladies-in-waiting to compose poems about it. Sanjō no Machi responded with the following verse: Kokinshū 930 (Book 17: Miscellaneous 1) omoiseku / kokoro no uchi no / taki nare ya / otsu to wa miredo / oto no kikoenu Could this be the waterfall of the feelings stopped up in my heart? Though I can see it fall, I cannot hear its sound.12 Sanjō no Machi calls attention to the discrepancy between the image and what it represents. The waterfall emits no sound, even though the water appears to be tumbling down before the speaker’s eyes. The ‘falling’ (otsu) of the water is itself an illusion created by the static picture. The disparity between what can be seen (miredo) and what can or cannot be heard (kokoenu) is a familiar aspect of ekphrastic poetry in the Western tradition. Noting that the image lacks the ability to ‘speak,’ Sanjō no Machi compares the silent waterfall to the speaker’s feelings, presumably of secret love, which she cannot express openly. Both the speaker’s emotions and the painted waterfall are powerful outpourings that cannot find voice. Insofar as pictures formed the cues or prompts for classical poets, such ekphrastic characteristics remained in the resulting poems. The following episode from the poetic collection of Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (fl. early tenth century) is a case in point. On the twenty-second day of the ninth month of 917, the well-known poet Mitsune was at his home in the capital when

11 Keikokushū 184 (Book 14); see Nakayama Yasumasa, ed., Kaifūsō, Ryōunshū, Bunka shūrei shū, Keikokushū, Honchō monzui, Kōchū Nihon bungaku taikei 24 (Tokyo: Seibundō, 1932), pp. 340–342. Translations from the Chinese and Japanese are by the author unless otherwise noted. 12 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 280. thinking with pictures 9 he received an urgent letter containing the following message from the vice-governor of Ōmi: It is certain that the retired emperor will be coming here, to Ishiyama, tomorrow. If you are able, you are to come today and compose something appropriate for my screens before nightfall. As for the topics, you must come up with them yourself.13 It was very late notice for such an important task, and the eight-mile trek over the eastern hills to the vice-governor’s villa was not easily done in half a day. Nonetheless, Mitsune’s status was such that he could not easily refuse the request to provide the poems for Retired Emperor Uda’s (867–931, r. 887–897) lodgings for the night. Upon arriving, Mitsune was instructed to derive appropriate poetic topics from the scenes painted on the sliding doors and folding screens, and he completed his task that very evening. The following morning, the vice-governor asked him to inscribe the poems as well. The Mitsune Collection includes ten poems from the occasion, beginning with the following. Mitsune shū 168 ashihiki no / yamabe no michi wa / ika nare ya / yuku to miredomo / sugikate ni suru What has happened to the foot-wearying mountain path? Though it appears I could go on, hard now is the passage through. A point of interest here is the ambiguity of the speaker’s position. The poem can be read both as the declaration of someone within the painted landscape (the leaves covering the path has made the passage through difficult to discern) and as the observation of an external viewer of the painted scene (though I can make out the path, because it is in a painting, I cannot pass through). This particular strain of screen poetry soon drops out of the poetic tradition in favor of composition exclusively from the perspective of someone within the painted scene. Skillful poets, however,

13 Headnote preceding poem 168 in Mitsune shū (Nishi Honganji manuscript), as cited in Tamagami Takuya, “Byōbu-e to uta to monogatari to,” Kokugo kokubungaku 22, no. 1 (1953): 1–20. A slightly different version of the headnote (Kasen kashū manuscript) appears in Hirasawa Ryūsuke, ed., Mitsune shū (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 207–208, and in Fujioka Tadaharu and Tokuhara Shigemi, eds., Mitsune shū chūshaku (Tokyo: Kichō hon kankōkai, 2003), pp. 125–129. The subsequent poem, however, is identical. 10 introduction continued to inject their compositions with perspectival ambiguity that could at once entertain but also subvert the patrons that commissioned such poetry. This array of compositional approaches is the subject of chapter 2. Poems like Sanjō no Machi’s that call attention to the painter’s artifice likewise vanish from the public, canonical waka tradition. Part of the reason for this shift is the growing sentiment that the kinds of poems included in imperial collections should not be overly tied to their particular circumstances of composition. Instead, poetry should rely on a balance between individual expression and meanings derived from earlier poems. Nevertheless, other ekphrastic elements continue to inhere in Japanese screen poetry, whether the speaker’s point of view is internal or external to the painted scene. A brief analysis of the techniques used in the single most famous example of ekphrasis in the West, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) by John Keats (1795–1821), will assist in drawing out comparable qualities in Japanese screen poetry. In describing the urn and what the pictures on it can and cannot articulate, the Ode is in fact a commentary on the ekphrastic relationship itself. Like many Japanese screen poems, the rendering of the pictures into words releases the narrative impulse of the painting—the before and after that the so-called pregnant moment suggests—but, in this instance, the rendering paradoxically freezes the scene anew in the act of description. The discrepancy between words and images, especially in relation to the passage of time, is often the crux of ekphrastic poetry. Keats presents the urn verbally, but his narrative notes only the passage of time outside the depicted scenes. As a re-presentation of the urn, the Ode alludes to the images painted on the object and what they represent. This relationship contributes to the formation of what Tamar Yacobi has called the “ekphrastic chain of mimesis.”14 Yacobi, following Meir Sternberg’s theory about quotation as essentially a kind of metadiscourse, emphasizes the allusive and intertextual nature of ekphrasis as a type of quotation. Throughout, the poem includes verbal citations of the visual representation, or, in other words, ‘optical allusions.’ Ode on a Grecian Urn begins with the poet addressing the urn in an extended apostrophe: Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

14 Tamar Yacobi, “The Ekphrastic Model: Forms and Functions,” in Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel, eds., Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), pp. 21–34. thinking with pictures 11

Sylvan historian, who canst thou express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: Keats’s first lines present the unseen urn to his readers. The urn cannot speak (that is, until the end of the Ode) because it has been fashioned from marble. In the process, time has slowed to a standstill for the images that decorate its surface. Through the images, the urn becomes a historian (a rustic and primal one of the forest) who tells a story in pictures rather than words. Ironically, because we cannot see the images directly, it is only through Keats’s words that the pictures can deliver any message at all. Keats goes on to ask the urn questions that it cannot answer, except through its images that introduce a series of paradoxes: songs that cannot be heard, motion portrayed in stasis, actions that will never be completed, liveliness that is simultaneously lifeless. Instead of narrating the progress of the events represented on the urn, the poem tells the story of how the images do not and will not change with time. Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! The lover must forever be frustrated, never able to consummate the kiss he is about to give. The instruction to the lover not to grieve is contradictory, as Keats has already made clear that the people depicted on the urn can only go on doing what they are doing already. By telling the lover not to grieve, Keats has portrayed him as in the midst of grief over his inability to achieve his goal, and because of the stasis of the images, the lover can do nothing except go on grieving. In almost mocking fashion, Keats declares that the object of the lover’s desire will always be fair, her beauty will not fade, but at the same time the lovers will never succeed in satisfying their love. Like the lovers stirred into action by passion, but arrested by the visual and verbal arts that depict them, the paradox of changelessness continues in the succeeding stanzas. Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; As we shall see, the image of the tree that will never shed its leaves and will always remain in spring finds parallels in a few early examples of Japanese screen poetry in which the poet marvels at painted trees that 12 introduction will be forever green or wonders at painted blossoms that will never fade and scatter. Subsequent lines of the Ode conjure up a procession of worshippers and other figures frozen in both time and space. Keats also introduces an image only implied by the spectacle of people when he wonders about where they came from: the empty and silent town, silent not because it is a painted image, but because all of the townsfolk have left to join the scene portrayed on the urn. And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. The way the poem extends the visual space beyond what is depicted on the urn, into the realm of the poet’s imagination, find parallels in Japanese poems we will encounter in the chapters that follow. For example, Tsurayuki’s famous poem on tribute horses, discussed in chapter 2, contains a scene reflected in the waters in front of the speaker of the poem. The scene prompts him to wonder about the horses in far-off Mochizuki. Similarly, in one of Lady Ise’s poems, also discussed in chapter 2, the speaker wanders along a mountain path and wonders aloud about the status of the blossoms in her hometown far away. All three poets proceed from one visual scene to a dependent, but undepicted, second one. Because the people captured on the urn will never return to the imaginary town, its streets shall forever be silent. In the end, change is characteristic of life, thus the lovers, the trees, the musicians, and the townsfolk are lifeless to the extent that the images render them changeless. But in a final paradox, it is because the urn also remains changeless that it will live on to succeeding generations, to deliver the same cryptic message, and the same history through images, that Keats has put into words: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. In the end, the truth of the urn will also change depending on the viewer or on the poet who describes it for us. As with Japanese screen poetry, in reading this poem about a scene on an urn, we are charged with finding meaning in what is already an interpretation of an interpretation, at the end of the “ekphrastic chain of mimesis.” thinking with pictures 13

Painting and Poetic Essence

The concluding equation of beauty and truth in Keats’s Ode is a citation of an idea prevalent in the lectures and writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), renowned portrait painter and first president of London’s Royal Academy of Art. In his Discourses on Art, a collection of lectures he delivered at the academy, Reynolds notes that both painting and poetry are arts of the heart and mind, recalling Tsurayuki’s description of Japanese poetry as having “the human heart as seed” in the “Kana Preface” to Kokinshū. In Discourse III, Reynolds recommends a “nobleness of conception which goes beyond anything in the mere exhibition of perfect form.” A painter can develop this ‘nobleness of conception’ by “warming his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry.”15 Reynolds thus argues that both painting and poetry can express a truth higher than that mere mimetic representation can capture. He goes on to associate beauty and truth (Discourse VII), but he warns that painters should not imitate nature, because to do so would relegate painting to a servile function. Painters should instead imitate poets in their use of imagination (Discourse XIII). Reynolds reminds his readers that poets did not describe things as they are, but rather commented on how they are and how they should be. He clarifies that imagination here is not fantasy, but an idealized form of nature as conceived by the poet and expressed through his words, words that often conjure up an imagined picture in the minds of his readers and listeners. For Reynolds, ‘nobleness of conception’ was an ideal, based on poetic imagination, whereby the artist captures the essence of an object or experience. As the art historian Renssalear W. Lee explains: To Reynolds, the most significant aspect of painting, as of poetry, was its capacity to reveal and interpret the element of dignity in human life. Painting, he believed, is never merely an art of the eye, but it is the mind whose servant the eye is that the painter of genius, like the poet, desires to address.16 Reynolds’s recommendation that painters look to poets for inspiration was based on his conviction that poets actively translate, interpret, and

15 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Reynolds’ Discourses (London: Walter Scott, 1887), cited in Rens- selaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Nor- ton and Company, 1967), p. 69. 16 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, p. 69. 14 introduction distill their conception of the world to better convey an essential truth of human experience, one that does not necessarily conform to faithful or factual representation. Whether for religious or secular purposes, one of the aesthetics that underlies both painting and poetry for Reynolds is the function of art to order perception and content for the mind. The idea parallels what Cleanth Brooks has said of Keats’s urn: the sylvan historian “takes a few details and so orders them that we have not only beauty but insight into essential truth.”17 In the composition of classical Japanese poetry, the term hon’i refers to the cluster of core meanings and associations that pertain to a given topic or theme. These associations were based in part on empirical experience, and in part on previous poems, some of which, as we shall see in the following chapters, were inspired by paintings or other artistic representations. As the ‘poetic essence’ of an assigned topic, hon’i encompassed a range of conventions based on the truth of experience, but also on truths about the ideals of beauty as expressed in art. Like the sylvan historian, hon’i in the Japanese poetic tradition served to order details from life to form beauty and essential truth. On the one hand, hon’i can simply mean the correct handling, based on precedent and convention, of an assigned topic for composition, the dai. On the other hand, the term can imply, as Brower and Miner described it early on, the fundamental truth or “real significance of a phenomenon or experience . . . the quasi-Platonic ‘thingness’ of an event or experience.”18 For Japanese poets, hon’i was a means to filter perception, through reference to literary works of the past, into a poetic essence that gave rise to new composition. For painters who subscribed to Reynolds’s advice, ‘nobleness of conception’ worked the same way. Implicit in the two contrasting aspects of hon’i described here is the distinction between surface and interior, between outward form and internal content. As a corollary to Platonic and Aristotelian notions of mimesis, our sense of what is ‘real’ has two qualities that are in some ways diametri- cally opposed. Platonic Form transcends outer appearance and exists only as an ideal in the mind. The Aristotelian ‘object,’ by contrast, is defined by our empirical experience of it. The critic Raymond Williams has clarified

17 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), pp. 151–166. 18 Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1961), p. 505. thinking with pictures 15 these two complementary but at times contradictory notions of ‘the real’ as follows: 1) in opposition to the false and imaginary—in other words, what is concrete and knowable through direct experience; and 2) in opposition to outer appearance—in other words, what we cannot know through material objects and our direct sensing of them.19 In these terms, ‘reality’ is a paradox: it is what can only be known through direct experience, but it is also precisely that which cannot be known through direct experience. The concept of hon’i in Japanese poetry, as well as Tsurayuki’s ideas about lyricism mentioned earlier, reaffirm this paradox, implying that a poem can bring to the fore an essential nature that is not necessarily obvious from outer appearance. The very fact that Sei Shōnagon (ca. 966–1017), in her Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi; early eleventh century), created a list of “Things that Gain by Being Painted” implies that an artist can produce representations that are subjectively better than the things themselves. When subjective perceptions, like Sei’s, are collected, reproduced, and disseminated, they help form the code through which we understand and take pleasure in the arts. Sei includes the following in her category of “Things that Gain by Being Painted: Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene.”20 With the last items in particular, the paintings improve upon reality in that a viewer can take pleasure in the scenes without any of the possible negative effects of actually having to experience them. The painter has not merely reflected reality but has engaged in a code of representation that is mutually and positively understood by the artist and his audience. The artist has captured an aesthetic aspect of an object or scene and has successfully relayed that experience to the viewer. This mastery of hon’i is exactly the characteristic the Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) points to when he states that an artist is not an imitator, but one who understands the essence of things.21

19 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 258. 20 Ivan Morris, trans., The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 138. The list of “Things that Lose by Being Painted” suggests that there are also, at least in Sei’s opinion, certain hon’i that are beyond the grasp of artistic rendering. 21 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928), pp. 79–82. 16 introduction

Whatever essence hon’i captured conceptually, in practical terms, hon’i in the Japanese poetic tradition operated as a set of literary conventions that circumscribed a poet’s handling of certain themes. Regardless of their source, the conventions themselves were fundamentally artificial, based largely on previous poetry, and they obliged the poet to make connections that at times contradicted observed reality. In Japanese poetry, passing through Sano Crossing, for instance, must be a difficult and lonely experience, even if the poet happens to be there on a pleasant day with plenty of company. Take, for example, the following two poems, separated by about five hundred years. Man’yōshū 265 (Book 3) kurushiku mo / furikuru ame ka / miwa no saki / sano no watari ni / ie mo aranaku ni How painful is the falling rain here at Sano Crossing, on the Cape of Miwa, where there is no house for shelter. Naga no Okimaro (late seventh century)

Shinkokinshū 671 (Book 6: Winter) koma tomete / sode uchi harau / kage mo nashi Sano no watari no / yuki no yūgure Not even the cover of a tree where I might stop my horse and brush off my sleeves: A twilight of snow here at Sano Crossing.22 Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) Okimaro’s poem helped establish Sano Crossing as a place of inclement weather with little or no refuge. The circumstances for the traveler in Teika’s poem are even more dire: rain has been replaced by snow, he cannot find even a tree for shelter, and the setting sun portends only a night of bitter cold. Teika is able to impart to his poem a heightened sense of severity precisely because he invokes and builds upon the previous poem. The ‘allusive variation’ (honkadori) technique of borrowing from

22 Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Akihiro, eds., Man’yōshū, NKBZ 2 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1971), 1:210, and Tanaka Yutaka and Akase Shingō, eds., Shinkokin wakashū, SNKT 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), p. 199. thinking with pictures 17 an older poem gives weight to Teika’s brief but evocative description and also points to the intertextual nature of the waka tradition. In short, Teika has shown his grasp of the hon’i for Sano Crossing. Half a millennium of poetry has reinforced the associations of the place, adding to the traveler’s heavy burden of snow. Teika was addressing a topic for a hundred-poem sequence and was not at Sano Crossing when he composed the verse quoted here. But examples of poets placing convention above observation abound in literature from the classical period into early modern times. The composition of poetry, especially at poetry contests where topics were assigned, was often an exercise in the manipulation of conventions, a demonstration of one’s understanding of a code. Wins and losses at such venues were determined by how well each poet could show his or her knowledge of precedent. When a judge commented on a poet’s success or failure at capturing the poetic essence of the topic at hand, he was referring to characteristics defined by precedent and convention. This highly constructed and codi- fied dimension of hon’i is almost the antithesis of the kind of lyricism, the natural outpouring of emotion, that Tsurayuki described in his “Kana Preface.”

Optical Allusions: Image and Code

I employ the term ‘optical allusion’ in this book as the core concept that describes the way Japanese classical poets incorporated visual source materials into their creative process. Their reference to the deceptive nature of paintings in early poems, as well as their continued use of double meanings based on objects depicted in visual art forms, coincide with the earliest usages of the term ‘allusion,’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as illusion and wordplay. The poet who points to the silence, stasis, material surface, or depth portrayed in a painted image alludes to illusory pictorial qualities in his handling of the painted image as poetic subject matter. The poet who feigns a visual confusion over whether snow or flower petals are falling through the sky employs allusion in a similar manner. Moreover, the poet who uses words that can describe more than one element of a painted scene, or can apply equally to elements within and outside of the image, introduces into his poem additional aspects of allusion as wordplay. In more critical terms, the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory defines allusion as an indirect reference to (as opposed to a full 18 introduction citation or explicit recalling of ) another work of literature or art. Such allusions “appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer” and “enrich the work by association.”23 When a poet uses allusions, he assumes that he shares a body of common knowledge with his audience, and that his audience will be able to recognize his reference. With literary allusions, the body of common knowledge is an established literary tradition. With optical allusions, the body of common knowledge is a visual referent, extant or not, that works to connect the poem or text to the external factors of conception, appreciation, and transmission. When a text refers to a specific work of representational art, a famous painting, for example, the allusion helps the reader visualize something in the text by evoking a mental picture. In what I have termed an ‘ekphrastic mode of composition,’ a poet’s brief reference to the contents of a painting can draw into a reader’s mind additional descriptive details that have been left unstated. Given the brevity of the Japanese waka form, the evocation of visual elements through allusion was a strategy that enabled the poet to focus on other sensory details. Thus, optical allusions encompass more than the poet’s engagement on various levels with his or her visual source materials. The term describes a specific approach whereby the poet evokes an image and builds upon the reader’s knowledge of or assumptions about that image in order to compose a poem that includes metaphorical meanings, is more rhetorically complex, or addresses external issues such as the circumstances of composition or the celebratory occasion for which the verse was commissioned. Indeed, the way screen poems evoke and then expand upon a visual source parallels in many ways the technique of allusive variation, or honkadori, whereby a poet builds upon the meaning of a poem from earlier in the tradition, the Teika poem on Sano Crossing given previously being an excellent example. Both kinds of allusion use language to recall a model or antecedent. Both also invite the reader to take the meaning of the original model and to apply that meaning to a new context. The allusion may work in a way that moves beyond, or even negates, the model it recalls. Or, it may draw together multiple referents in an act that fuses and transforms elements of the cultural tradition.24 In the case of a honkadori poem, the model is a foundation poem, evoked through brief citation.

23 J. A. Cuddon, ed., Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (New York: Pen- guin Books, 1999), p. 27. 24 These categories of allusion and the observation on the transformative function of allusions of ‘multiple reference’ are indebted to R. F. Thomas’s typology. See R. F. Thomas, thinking with pictures 19

In the case of a screen poem, the model is a foundation picture, evoked through a brief description. Since screen poems were appreciated, for most of their history, without the benefit of looking at screens, for readers of both kinds of poems, the model itself is not actually present—it is called to mind through the allusive process. Key to this definition of allusion is reciprocality: because there is an assumption of shared knowledge, the meanings infused into a poem or text, through the use of allusion, can and will be recovered by the audience. Tsurayuki assumes as much when he cites the shared cultural meanings of Mount Tsukuba, the Suminoe pines, and maidenflowers in the portion of the “Kana Preface” cited earlier. A painted image may mean very different things to the painter, the poet, and any particular observer, but the cultural context that produces a system of correspondence is the common ground on which they all begin. Consider the ways in which allusion functions in the following poem, based on a painted scene, by the monk Sosei (d. ca. 910). The context from his personal collection reads, “Written on the part of a picture where someone is making his way through the chrysanthemums to the dwelling of a sage.” Kokinshū 273 (Book V: Autumn 2) nurete hosu / yamaji no kiku no / tsuyu no ma ni / itsu ka chitose o / ware wa henikemu As I dried my sleeves, wet with dew from the chrysanthemums on the mountain path— did a thousand years pass me by in that fleeting span?25 In the poem, a traveler through the mountains has brushed against some roadside chrysanthemums and gotten his sleeves wet with dew. Enchanted by the natural beauty, he is unsure of how much time went by as he was drying out his sleeves. The scene Sosei describes triggers a number of associations. Drinking the dew off chrysanthemums was thought to bring long life, and thus the flowers were often connected to recluse immortals.26

“Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 90 (1986): 171–198. 25 Headnote from The Sosei Collection (Sosei shū) noted in Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 93–94. 26 These connections appear in Bungei ruijū (Classified encyclopedia of the literary arts) as well as in the Chinese poems collected in two early Japanese anthologies of Chi- nese poetry, Ryōunshū (814) and Keikokushū (827). 20 introduction

Sosei’s poem evokes a legend from China about a woodcutter who happened upon a pair of Daoist immortals playing a game of Go. He watched for a while, but when he turned to leave, he found that his ax was rusted and the handle had rotted away. In this and other stories, one day in the fantastic realm of the immortals is equal to a thousand years in the real world, and the poem captures the moment of discovering that fact. Sosei employs a pivot on the word ‘dew’ (tsuyu): kiku no tsuyu is ‘the dew on the chrysanthemum’ and tsuyu no ma is ‘in the span of a dewdrop.’ The latter phrase evokes the illusory world of Daoist legend and adds a narrative context to Sosei’s traveler on the mountain path. The allusion is effective, of course, only to the extent that a reader recognizes it. As with Mitsune’s poem presented earlier about the difficulty of following the mountain path, Sosei’s poem begins to conflate the viewer’s space with the pictorial space by having the reader of the poem imagine a passage into the painting. In reading or reciting the poem, the viewer becomes the traveler making his way through the chrysanthemums. The way the poem involves the viewer, and the idea that a poet outside the painting can speak for the figure within the painting, through an act of prosopopoeia, generates an ambiguity or superimposition of subject and object that knowledgeable readers likely found interesting and engaging. Literary allusion relies on detection and recovery, participation in a system of signs that in many ways parallel the act of visual recognition. This perceptual cycle, further described later, goes far in explaining how poetic topics developed in the Japanese literary tradition and how the poetic essence of such topics came to be isolated and defined. Furthermore, Sosei’s poem and other examples based on painted images present excellent case studies for theories that explain how images and allusions work in acts of composition and comprehension. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and other phenomenologists have termed the act of mental anticipation based on visual cues and contexts ‘protention,’ in contrast to the short-term ‘retention’ that provides such contexts. Visual apprehension occurs not instantaneously but only when retention and protention resolve into an act of recognition. Visual literacy, or ‘picturacy’ as Heffernan has termed it, provides rules for understanding and interpreting the system of signs upon which visual representations are based so that such a resolution can occur.27 As part of a ‘perceptual

27 See James A. W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Arts and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006). See also René Descartes, “Optics,” in Selected thinking with pictures 21 cycle,’ the configuration of an image calls attention to itself and triggers an effort at recognition, which results in a transformation of the image. In essence, the cognitive process entails an ‘effort after meaning,’ followed by a ‘meaning after effort,’ which occurs in stages, over time, and in a cycle.28 Building upon this concept, the art historian E. H. Gombrich stresses ‘beholder’s share,’ his term for the viewer’s responsibility in reconstructing the artist’s coded view of the world, and argues that the act of seeing is itself a process heavily influenced by sociohistorical context, based on habit and the expectations born from personal experience and social conditioning.29 As Tsurayuki’s observations in the “Kana Preface” make clear, the same can be said of the relationship between the poet, especially the screen poet, and his audience in the Japanese tradition. Because the artist already has a coded way of viewing the world, he begins not with a visual impression, but with an idea that is then modified by “rhythms of schema and correction.” Thus, artists tend to see what they paint, rather than paint what they see, a view nicely summed up by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): “All nature faithfully”—But by what feint Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint? Her smallest fragment is still infinite! And so he paints but what he likes in it. What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!30 The process has direct bearing on Japanese screen poetry in the way verbal and visual conventions worked in tandem to condition what poets and

Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 57–63. On ‘haptics’ (visual scanning and apprehension with the eye), see Claude Gandleman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–14. One major difference between the temporal apprehension of images on the one hand, and words on the other, is that a viewer can look over parts of an object in no particular order (though certain internal elements may direct one’s gaze in a certain direction temporarily), while words are generally only comprehensible when read or heard in one order. See Rudolf Arnheim, “The Unity of the Arts: Time, Space, and Distance,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 25 (1976): 7–14. 28 Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychol- ogy (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). The application of this idea to Japanese poetry is further discussed toward the end of chapter 3. 29 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960). See also Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982), esp. “Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye,” pp. 244–277, and “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation,” pp. 278–298. 30 Cited in Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 86. 22 introduction painters alike saw and described in their works. These artists tended not so much to depict what they saw in nature, but saw in nature what they depicted. In other words, as poetic and pictorial conventions stabilized, later poets and painters internalized the hon’i of their subject matter, and this coded and modified image was consequently included in their artistic vision from the outset. The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the development of Japanese screen poetry offers insight into the composition and comprehension of classical Japanese poetry as a whole.

The Paths of Japanese Screen Poetry

Until now, Japanese screen poetry has remained on the periphery of schol- arly attention in the West, and only in recent years has it has become the focus of extended research even in Japan.31 The main reasons for this long neglect are twofold. First, the lack of extant screens from the Heian period poses a formidable obstacle to any study of that era’s practice of poetry composition based on visual stimuli. Second, screen poetry is largely seen as an interdisciplinary genre that lies somewhere between art history and the study of literature, and its research is therefore difficult to undertake for those without expertise in both areas. Scholars have long acknowledged the significance of the genre and have often paired it with poetry contests (uta awase), another source of the event-based poetry that helped refine poetic topics and conventions. In contrast to the large store of poetry contest records, however, there is little documentation that indicates how screen poems were composed and presented. Because almost all of the paintings that inspired the poems no longer exist, the images, as well as the compositional process, must often be consigned to the realm of imagination. Still, the abundance of extant screen poetry, and the details in headnotes (kotobagaki) and other sources about what the pictures on the screens may have looked like, provide a fertile ground for analysis. Such analysis assists in our understanding of how poetry worked, how aesthetic ideals were formed, and how visual depictions were a significant part of the way literary meanings were negotiated in the formative Heian era. Screens were first imported from the Asian continent during the Nara period (710–784). Blank squares for calligraphic inscription on some of the earliest extant screens suggest that the paintings adorning their

31 The first book-length treatment of the genre in Japanese appeared in 2007. See Tajima Tomoko, Byōbu uta no kenkyū (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2007). thinking with pictures 23 surfaces were meant to be appreciated with poetry attached to them. Regrettably, not a single example survives from the Nara or the Heian periods of the two arts appearing together. It is an irony of history that, despite the importance of screen poetry throughout the classical period, the extant screens from this five-hundred-year span have no poems and the extant screen poems have no screens. The genre itself developed in such a way that there was no set term for it until after the period of its greatest efflorescence in the eleventh century. This is due in part to the fact that it grew out of a few distinct compositional practices. The visual stimuli for some of the earliest poems were not limited to painted images but included other representational objects as well. Moreover, the earliest examples of poetry based on painted screens are not in Japanese but in Chinese, although composed by Japanese poets. Referred to as ‘Chinese screen poems’ (byōbu shi), some of their main characteristics can be found in early examples of Japanese screen poems as well. The Japanese screen poems that came to the fore in the ninth century were almost exclusively the thirty-one-syllable waka, the predominant form of court poetry from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries. No intrinsic trait identifies them specifically as ‘screen poems.’ In fact, the most basic defining characteristic of a poem labeled a byōbu uta is linked to the singular, wholly external aspect of transmission. Any poem composed for a screen, whether inscribed or not, is considered a screen poem, and any poem inscribed onto a screen, regardless of its original compositional circumstances, is de facto a screen poem as well. In other words, the connectivity between the poem and the visual depiction, although typically generated by the poet upon seeing the depiction or being given a description of it, could also be generated by a later juxtaposition of two originally separate works. Studies of literature tend to focus on the written word as a matter of course. Even though some studies of Heian literature direct our attention to the vocal and aural qualities of poems as they were once recited, and songs as they were once sung, we seldom think about their visual qualities, especially in terms of their relationship to painted depictions. One example of the reciprocal flow between text and image is the genre of ‘reed-script pictures’ (ashide-e 葦手絵), wherein a stylized calligraphy is incorporated into a painted image. In a reed-script picture, the Japanese kana characters forming a word or poem are also used for their formal qualities and thus become part of a painting’s composition. The resemblance of such written characters to elements in a depicted landscape imparts to 24 introduction them a visual value in addition to their aural and semantic ones. Certain kana characters that provide phonetic or semantic values could also, for example, pictorially represent a rock, a flower, or a bird in flight within the composition of the landscape. Joshua Mostow and Thomas LaMarre have taken valuable steps toward uncovering the range of ways Heian readers and writers proceeded from the signifier to the signified, that is, from that which was ‘seen’ to that which was ‘meant.’32 In some ways, screen poetry can be understood in this light, for an analysis of the social and aesthetic contexts in which composition took place reveals a similar privileging of the visual and thus provides valuable clues about how to read such poetry. What remains to us today are only the poems and prose that resignify and reconfigure the no-longer-extant visual images. As core research material, they represent only part of the equation, for there are numerous references in Heian literature to the conveyance of meaning through visual imagery either independently or in tandem with accompanying text. An examination of the process by which Heian literati rendered that which was ‘seen’ into that which was ‘meant’ reveals just how central a position the image occupied in the cyclical and mutually constituting process of literary production and appreciation. This book is an attempt to explain these workings of word and image in the development of Japanese court poetry. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the study of screen poetry through a history of early screens and their material, cultural, and architectural contexts. In this chapter, I trace the roots of early painting-based poetry in Japanese to Chinese models that were available at the time, and I analyze the features that were maintained in the genre. Of special significance is the fact that Japanese poets at first adopted the same point of view exhibited in Tang painting-poems (Ch. tihua shi, J. daiga shi 題詩)—from a perspective external to the painting. It was not long, however, before this viewpoint was abandoned in favor of composing in the guise of a figure within the painting. This rhetorical shift was due in part to the first- person lyrical approach often taken by Japanese court poets, as well as to the ambiguities of perspective inherent in the Japanese language itself, wherein the subject of a sentence need not even be marked. Such compositional practices helped bring about a separation between the poet and

32 Joshua Mostow, “Painted Poems/Forgotten Words: Poem-Pictures and Classical Japa- nese Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 3 (1992): 323–346, and LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan. thinking with pictures 25 the speaker and in this way imparted to screen poetry dramatic attributes usually associated with fictional narratives (tsukuri monogatari). Chapter 2 explains the central issues of inscription and perspective as they relate to the composition and appreciation of screen poetry. As poets came to treat landscapes in paintings as being no different from landscapes in nature, at least for the purposes of poetic composition, there developed a fundamental shift in the relationship between poem and image: rather than praise the painting externally, screen poets begin to show an awareness of the finished product that included their poetry. Consideration for the inscription process and the resulting combination of the visual and verbal underscored for poets both the limitations and the possibilities of the genre. In this chapter, I single out the techniques of three poets in particular who, through their innovative uses of optical allusions, helped institute new standards in screen poetry composition: Ki no Tsurayuki, Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, and Lady Ise (d. ca. 939). Tsurayuki’s use of reflected surfaces and indeterminate speakers, along with his cunningly indirect reference to the artifice of painted images, engage and implicate the readers/viewers of his poems. Mitsune’s offerings worked on multiple levels to enhance both the painted screens that his poems accompanied and the occasions for which he composed. His screen poems combine appropriate sentiments with a sensitivity to the aural, olfactory, tactile, and dynamic concerns that added to the visual qualities of the screen painting. Ise’s ability to adopt convincing personas in her screen poetry allowed her to create ‘characters’ that invoke the qualities of dramatic narrative. An analysis of her corpus leads to a reevaluation of the related practices of reading texts, viewing pictures, and composing poetry. Chapter 3 delineates the interrelationship, on theoretical and practical levels, between painting and poetry around the time of the compilation of the first imperial anthology of Japanese verse, Kokinshū. These were formative years in the establishment of convention, in terms of both poetic meanings and compositional practices. Visual stimuli, such as painted screens, decorative centerpieces, or items in carefully manicured gardens, contributed to determining the poetic topics through which all later poets understood their art. For early poets, direct experience and objects at hand appear to have been paramount considerations, but, for later poets who relied on the aesthetic associations implied by a poetic topic, direct experience already included a degree of conformity to poetic visions from the past. The art that was once a conscious imitation of life became the vehicle by which poets and painters alike understood their direct experience. 26 introduction

The process was by no means linear but was instead both gradual and cyclical in nature. Records from the eighth and ninth centuries refer to compositions on ‘objects at hand.’ This term designates a physical object offered as a manifestation of an assigned poetic topic at what was typically a group setting, such as an outdoor banquet or a gathering at court. As examples of what I have termed ‘proximate physical reality,’ these prompts included real or artificial flora and fauna that were understood to be representative of a human-centered view of nature. These objects at hand were not necessarily limited in space or size, for a waterfall at a famous site visited while on a journey could also become an object upon which a poet might be directed to compose. Descriptions of compositional practices from this era display a strong impetus to include examples of proximate physical reality at venues of composition. Gradually, these prompts shift toward large-scale artistically constructed media, such as painted screens, seaside dioramas, and carefully landscaped gardens. These artistic representations formed an ‘approximate physical reality’ that facilitated the poets’ engagement with certain topics. The fact that paintings were inspired in part by ideas expressed in verse is evidence of an integrated process whereby poetic and pictorial conventions were mutually reinforced. The kind of visual thinking stimulated by screen poetry composition fostered a different way of interpreting the various simulacra that were presented as prompts. As mediations of direct experience, painted screens and other forms of visual representation became crucial to the development of the assigned topics that predominated formal composition from the tenth century onward. The myriad poetic associations that provide the contours for these topics in particular, and for the aesthetics of classical Japanese literature in general, derive in part from the work of the poets who brought verbal and visual meanings together in their screen poetry. Chapter 4 turns to two events for which there are uncommonly detailed records concerning the process of commissioning, composing, selecting, presenting, and inscribing poems for painted screens. These records provide concrete details about how screen poems were produced and the uses to which they were put—details sorely lacking from earlier periods. In 999, Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027) made elaborate plans for the court entrance ( judai) ceremony of his daughter Shōshi. Michinaga’s skillful management of the preparations, which included displaying painted screens and commissioning new poetry, helped suppress a rival consort and elevate his own daughter’s position at court. About two centuries later, in 1190, Kujō Kanezane (1149–1207) introduced his daughter Ninshi into the thinking with pictures 27 court of Emperor Gotoba (1180–1230, r. 1183–1198) with a similar deploy- ment of screen paintings and poems. Hoping for similar results, Kanezane conspicuously patterned his preparations on the Michinaga model, but the kind of political success enjoyed by his Fujiwara forebear remained, for him, elusive. Michinaga and Kanezane both attempted to parlay cultural capital into political gain through the medium of screen poetry. In both cases, the poets’ and patrons’ use of optical allusions affirmed existing or potential political connections and social hierarchies. The conclusion of this book reconsiders the relationship between poetic production and artistic representation through the eyes of medieval poets, who felt an impetus to reexamine the conventions of poetic topics. These poets not only understood but celebrated the disjunction between the literary and visual arts, producing poems that call attention to the illusory and allusory nature of their subjects. Thus, whereas earlier poets had drawn upon visual representations to mediate their experience in order to compose poetry and develop their art, by the late twelfth century, those conventions came to mediate what the poet experienced from the start. In essence, later poets were aware of how poetry and painting helped establish the parameters of their own experience of the world. As mentioned at the outset, Tsurayuki’s “Kana Preface” asserts that humans compose poetry when they express their kokoro (feelings or thoughts) in terms of kotoba (words). On the path from kokoro to kotoba, however, was often an interceding visual image that became as much a part of the resulting poetic expression as the original feeling itself. Tsurayuki, the consummate screen poet, would probably have agreed with Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), who once said, “The soul never thinks without an image.”33 The composition of screen poetry reflects this idea in the way that it encouraged and demanded a kind of visual thinking, or ‘pictorial perception,’ that linked word and image.34 This approach had a profound impact not only on Japanese poetry, but also on Japanese aesthetics in general, precisely because it was so fully enmeshed in the production and consumption of literature throughout the classical period. The chapters that follow are, to borrow Tsurayuki’s schema once again, an attempt to explain how poets of classical Japan proceeded from ‘heart

33 Aristotle, De Anima / On the Soul, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tangred (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 173. 34 On pictorial perception, see Joshua Mostow, “ ‘Picturing’ in The Tale of Genji,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 33, no. 1 (1999): 5, as well as my discussion in chapter 3 herein. 28 introduction as seed’ to ‘words as leaves.’ The process, as Tsurayuki knew firsthand, was not as straightforward and effortless as the “Kana Preface” seems to suggest. The poets’ training, their coded experience of the world, and the resulting perceptual cycle meant that poets often saw what they composed, rather than composed on what they saw. Poetic consciousness was not formed through the observation of the natural world, but rather the natural world, through the act of composition, was made to conform to a collective poetic consciousness. This study explores how that poetic consciousness was formed, through visual stimuli, and through the way hon’i functioned as a filter for culturally prescribed experience and observation. As artists abstracted nature into visual art forms, poets abstracted nature into verbal ones, and screen poetry often occasioned a rich and complex interplay between the two. One of the intriguing points of the poem-painting relationship in general, and ekphrasis in particular, is how the poem translates a visual system of signs into a verbal system of signs to produce an effective means of expression. For poets of classical Japan especially, acts of perception were always acts of apperception—both in the epistemological sense of “the introspective or reflective apprehension by the mind of its own inner states” and in the psychological sense of “the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole.”35 In short, poets perceived new experience as an internal projection and always in relation to a past, culturally defined experience. This ‘past experience’ largely consisted of the previous poems in the tradition, and sociohistorical contexts furnished the codes through which poets understood the world around them. The composition of poetry can be seen as the attempt to make sense of something new by rationalizing and rearranging it in terms of something old. Composition entailed discovering and identifying previous and essential patterns within any new empirical experience. The process is precisely how poetic topics were formed, and how the essence or conventions of those topics came to be defined. As Roland Barthes has argued, the act of participating in language means that writing cannot be purely creative but is instead a means of appealing to and deploying conventions.36 Writing is a re-creative process where the margin of unique creativity lies in the manipulation of

35 Dagobert D. Runes, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983). 36 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Noonday Press, 1968). thinking with pictures 29

previous styles, the reorganization of previous expression, for a desired effect. This description of what it means to write can be discerned in the practice of waka composition perhaps more readily than in any other literary tradition. The task of the critic in some ways appropriately mirrors the endeavors of the artist, particularly the activity of the screen poet. As Nelson Goodman explains in his Languages of Art: We have read the painting as well as the poem . . . and aesthetic experience is dynamic rather than static. It involves making delicate discriminations and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems and characters within these systems and what these characters denote and exemplify, interpreting works and reorganizing the world in terms of works and works in terms of the world. . . . The aesthetic attitude is restless, searching, testing—it is less attitude than action: creation and recreation.37 Though not necessarily always on equal footing, the artist and viewer, the author and reader, both reorganize the world in their own way. The critic can offer a common ground by identifying why and how this reorganization occurs. The paths in the various Japanese poems quoted earlier—the path through the mountains in Mitsune’s poem, the snow-covered path of Teika’s traveler at Sano Crossing, the path through the dew-laden chrysanthemums in Sosei’s poem—can be seen as a metaphor for the poet’s creative process. They are the indirect and sometimes concealed links between poems, between perception and expression, between the image and the text. As Harold Bloom observed, “Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.”38 Those hidden roads that link poems, through visual media, to a poetic consciousness are what I hope to bring to light in the following chapters.

37 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapo- lis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 241–242. 38 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 96.

Chapter One

Screens and Poems, Contexts and Images

Screens and screen paintings have been a part of Japan’s interior architecture for over a thousand years. From the start, the physical objects and their decorated surfaces appeared in a variety of formats and served a range of purposes. The foundation for the investigation into screen poetry and other visually based compositions is laid here through a summary of the history of screens in Japan, an explanation of their uses, and a comparison of the earliest Japanese screen poems to known Chinese models. These early screen poems reveal a rhetorical inquiry into the disparity between the limits of both painted depictions and poetic descriptions and the infinite possibilities inherent in the objective reality that ostensibly formed their subject matter. As screen poets reflected upon the relationship between objects and their artistic representations, they developed a multitude of compositional approaches that would only later be tempered by conventions of genre. This chapter analyzes the most important aspects of those compositional approaches.

Folding Screens in Japan

The oldest reference to folding screens in Japan is found in an inventory compiled by court scribes upon the return of one of several envoys to the continent during the reign of Emperor Tenmu (d. 686, r. 673–686).1 Dated the nineteenth day of the fourth month of 686, the catalog of treasures brought back from the Korean kingdom of Silla includes such goods as precious metals, bolts of cloth, saddles, mirrors, vessels of varying size and function, as well as an indeterminate number of folding screens (byōbu 屏風). Due to the absence of detail in the descriptions for each object, it is impossible to ascertain whether any of the forty or so individual panels

1 The incident is described in The Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki; ca. 720). See Saka- moto Tarō et al., eds., Nihon shoki, NKBT 68 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), p. 476. See also W. G. Aston, Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), 2:376. Subsequent information on early screens is based on Ienaga Saburō, Jōdai yamato-e zenshi (Tokyo: Bokusui shobō, 1966), and Takeda Tsuneo et al., eds., Byōbu e no seiritsu to tenkai, Nihon byōbu e shūsei 1 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978). 32 chapter one and fragments preserved in the Shōsōin imperial repository in Nara were once part of this initial inventory. The screen fragments and other artifacts extant from the period suggest that the screens brought over from Silla had ornamented surfaces. The oldest extant painted screen dates from about a half century later. Preserved in the Shōsōin collection, it is the only relatively intact screen that predates the Heian period. Referred to as the Beauties under the Trees (Ki no shita bijin zu 木下美人図), the screen is made up of six panels, each displaying a large-scale female figure clothed in simple Chinese robes.2 Each of the panels also depicts elements of natural landscape, such as trees and rock formations, with recognizable precedents in Tang dynasty painting.3 Careful analysis has led to the understanding that feathers were once affixed to the painted robes, lending a third dimension to the surface ornamentation. Because of these features, and because of the close likeness of the female figures to Chinese models from the same period, scholars once thought that the screen was imported from the continent during the reign of Emperor Shōmu (701–756, r. 724–749). Further comparisons with paintings produced in Japan, however, have led at least one expert to reevaluate this stance and argue that later Japanese artists are responsible for the screen, having copied Tang models some time around the year 752.4 No poems accompany this screen, and whereas there is no evidence to suggest that poems were ever meant to accompany it, the very same theme is addressed in two poems included in the eighth-century anthology Man’yōshū (ca. 759). Discussed later in this chapter, the thematic coincidence represents an early intersection of the visual and the verbal within a Tang-inspired Japanese tradition.

2 Reproductions of the Beauties under the Trees screen and the Tōji Mountains and Waters screen, discussed later, can be found in Takeda et al., Byōbu e no seiritsu to tenkai. 3 Here and in subsequent notes about precedents in Tang painting, I refer to typologies of plants and rocks referenced in, for instance, Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 140–153, and James Cahill, “Some Rocks in Early Chinese Painting,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 16 (1962): 77–87. 4 The Shōsōin collection also contains several partial panels and screens, some completely unadorned, as well as fragments with only dyed silk or paper surfaces. See the following note on Shōsōin holdings. Shimada Shūjirō has argued convincingly that many of the screens and screen fragments, including the Beauties under the Trees, have been heavily repainted, perhaps decades after they were first produced, and that such screens should be regarded as Japanese works of the eighth century rather than merely copies of Tang models. See Shimada Shūjirō, Nihon kaigashi kenkyū (Tokyo: Chūo kōron bijitsu shuppan, 1987), pp. 3–69. screens and poems, contexts and images 33

According to temple inventory records such as The Documented Offerings at Tōdaiji (Tōdaiji kenmotsu chō 東大寺献物長) and The Illustrated Record of Imperial Objects at the Shōsōin (Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku 正倉院図録), there were over one hundred screens in Japan by the beginning of the Heian period.5 These records also indicate that painted screens adorned the imperial palace by the time of Emperor Saga’s reign (809–823). As is well known, many of the formal features of the new Heian capital were based on the Tang capital of Chang’an, including the layout of the streets and the location and design of the imperial palace. The borrowing extended beyond institutional structures and imperial holdings. Historical records indicate that by the beginning of the Heian period, folding screens had also made their way into the private mansions of the nobility, who looked to the Tang court in planning their interior spaces as well. These screens were undoubtedly important both as functional furniture and as displays of personal artistic sensibilities, but documentary details about them are extremely scarce. Although screens and poems for them were produced in great numbers in the Heian period, only one screen survives from this era. Known as the Tōji Mountains and Waters screen (Senzui byōbu 山水屏風), because it formerly belonged to the temple Tōji in Kyoto, it is now housed at the Kyoto National Museum.6 The screen depicts a quasi-Japanese landscape across six panels and has long been considered a landmark in Japanese art history (see figure 1a). Whereas the screen and its paintings were likely produced by Japanese craftsmen and artists in the late eleventh century, the human figures and certain elements of the natural landscape clearly exhibit patterns and techniques that are distinctively Chinese. For instance, the horsemen and the standing figures are portrayed in Tang court dress. As can be seen in the detail (see figure 1b), the craggy rocks near the hermitage occupying the center two panels are based on Chinese models. The mountain ascetic is also a common motif in Chinese painting. This particular depiction may be of the famous Tang poet Bai Juyi

5 Tōkyō teishitsu hakubutsukan, ed., Tōdaiji kenmotsu chō (Tokyo: Tōkyō teishitsu hakubutsukan, 1921). Although published, this inventory has no page numbers. Also see Tōkyō teishitsu hakubutsukan, ed., Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku (Tokyo: Tōkyō teishitsu hakubutsukan, 1928). Volume 3 of this eighteen-volume series includes items of furniture such as cabinets, storage boxes, and folding screens. Single-panel paintings and other smaller items of furniture are catalogued in other volumes. 6 Senzui (or sansui, both written with the characters 山水) later becomes a generic term to describe secular landscape painting, but its early use suggests the more literal meaning of ‘mountains and waters,’ specifically those in temple environs. 34 chapter one M useum. N ational Mountains and Waters screen ( Senzui byōbu ), 11th c., Kyoto Figure 1a: T ōji screens and poems, contexts and images 35

Figure 1b: Detail of Tōji Mountains and Waters screen.

Figure 2: Jingoji Mountains and Waters screen, 13th-c. copy of 11th-c. original, Tokyo National Museum. 36 chapter one

( J. Haku Kyoi or, more popularly, Haku Rakuten; 772–846), who was highly celebrated among the Heian literati. Notwithstanding this screen’s numerous connections to the Chinese tradition, some scholars see it as an example of a ‘transitional’ stage in the development of Japanese painting because the flowering trees and low-rolling hills in the background have an affinity with later Japanese landscape paintings.7 One of the most intriguing features of the Tōji screen is the evidence that suggests that poems were meant to be inscribed upon it. There are poem- squares (shikishi 色紙/shikishigata 色紙形) located on the upper corners, from right to left, of the second, third, and sixth panels. Shikishigata (literally, ‘colored paper forms’) are the designated areas on the painted surface of a screen reserved for the inscription of poetry. The poetry would be transcribed either directly onto the screen in these spaces or on a separate sheet of paper, called shikishi, that would be affixed to the screen later. At times the terms are used interchangeably, partly due to changing inscription practices. Masuda Shigeo has shown that for most of the Heian period, poems were inscribed directly onto the screen, whereas in later Heian and Kamakura period (1185–1333) records, transcription onto separate sheets of paper to be affixed later appears to have been the more common practice.8 Both kinds of calligraphic surfaces could have background motifs that would often echo the imagery of the painting on the screen. The poem-squares on the Tōji screen are blank, inviting present-

7 By ‘Japanese painting,’ I mean painting executed in Japan, regardless of the style or of the origins of the painter. I avoid the terms kara-e and yamato-e, which from the Heian period have designated ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ painting, because those terms tend to oversimplify the division. Earlier scholars have used the yamato-e to suggest that a native Japanese painting tradition developed independently or in contradistinction to the Chi- nese paintings imported from the continent. The terms do not designate so much the style as much as the subjective content of the painting, Louisa McDonald Read argues in “The Masculine and Feminine Modes of Heian Secular Painting and Their Relationship to Chinese Painting—A Redefinition of Yamato-e” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1976). The Tōji screen, for instance, incorporates both Chinese and Japanese elements, but one cannot describe the painting as a whole as being in either of the two ‘styles.’ For a brief discussion, see Takeda and Yamane, Byōbu e no seiritsu to tenkai, pp. 106–112. 8 Masuda Shigeo, “Byōbu to byōbu uta: Byōbu uta ron,” Bungaku shi kenkyū (Ōsaka shiritsu daigaku kokugo kokubungaku kenkyūshitsunai bungakushi kenkyūkai) 20 (1980): 1–12. Masuda argues that the decline in the number of celebratory events at court from the middle of the eleventh century, and the related decline in screen production, made the practice of affixing finished poems on shikishi to the screen more practical than risking any calligraphic mistakes by writing directly on the screen surface. Inscription practices had an effect on the way poets composed for screens, as I discuss in chapter 2. At some events, such as the court entrance ceremonies described in chapter 4, preexisting screens were ‘recycled’ for multiple occasions, and new poetry would be written on poem-squares and affixed to the screens. screens and poems, contexts and images 37 day viewers to imagine what kinds of poems might have accompanied the scene depicted on the six panels. Because so few screens survive from the Heian and Kamakura periods, modern scholars are often tempted to reconstruct paintings from various poems and their headnotes. Ironically, the reverse is the case with the Tōji Mountains and Waters screen—the painting exists, but there are no external clues as to what was intended for the blank poem-squares. Various Japanese art historians have hypothesized about ‘missing’ poems. Among the most perceptive is Takeda Tsuneo, who argues convincingly that the figure in the hermitage is indeed Bai Juyi, and that the others are his visitors, that is, young Tang courtiers who have come hoping to receive a poetry lesson. This theory gives rise to an association with certain topics in the Chinese tradition, such as ‘indulging in pleasures in the mountains’ (sanchū jiteki 山中自適) or ‘visiting friends in a grove’ (rinkan hōyū 林間訪友).9 Based on contemporaneous poetic practices, and the combination of Chinese and Japanese visual topics and techniques in the painting, the poems could have been Japanese (waka 和歌), Chinese (kanshi 漢詩), or both. The genre known as kudai waka 句題和歌, wherein Japanese poems were composed either on Chinese topics or on lines from Chinese verse, offers another intriguing possibility for the blank poem-squares. The practice of incorporating Japanese poetry, Chinese poetry, and painting in the production of screens can be seen in several entries by Fujiwara no Sanesuke (957–1046) in his court diary, Record of the Ononomiya Minister of the Right (Shōyūki 小右記). For example, in an entry for the tenth month of 1018, Sanesuke states that a congratulatory screen presented at a Great Thanksgiving service (daijōe 大嘗会, or daijōsai 嘗会祭) had both Chinese and Japanese poems inscribed on its poem-squares.10 The Tōji Mountains and Waters screen was produced at roughly the same time as the congratulatory screen described by Sanesuke. This coincidence has led some scholars to speculate that Sanesuke’s entry referred to the extant

9 Takeda Tsuneo et al., eds., Byōbu e ni okeru issō hōshiki no seiritsu, Nihon byōbu e shūsei 1 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1981). 10 See Tōkyō daigaku shiryō hensanjo, ed., Dai Nihon kokiroku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1969), pt. 10, vol. 5 (Shōyūki 5), p. 55 (tenth month of Kannin 2), for Sanesuke’s brief description of the event. Great Thanksgiving feasts were services held at court in the autumn of the first year after the ascension of a new emperor as a kind of harvest and enthronement rite. Noted in Fujioka Tadaharu, “Byōbu uta to byōbu e,” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 63, no. 8 (August 1998): 55–60. The ensuing speculation about the screen is also indebted to Fujioka’s discussion. 38 chapter one

Tōji screen. Further analysis of the content of the Tōji screen, and investigation into its known history, however, confirm that Sanesuke’s reference is to a screen that is now lost. Because the Tōji screen is the sole extant example from the nearly four centuries of the Heian period, an in-depth analysis of the intersection between the poetic and the visual must necessarily rely on other sources as well. One such source is the only other fully preserved screen from this early period. This screen, once housed at Jingoji Temple in Kyoto, and now part of the Tokyo National Museum collection, is also known as a Mountains and Waters screen (see figure 2). Understood to be a thirteenth-century copy of what was probably an eleventh-century original, its history reveals a degree of confused interpretation, for its six panels were, for an extended period, remounted out of their original sequence.11 Despite this confusion, the Jingoji screen adds to our knowledge about screens of this era in its points of contrast with the Tōji screen. Unlike the earlier example, the Jingoji screen has few obvious Chinese elements. The buildings nestled in the hillsides are in the native shinden architectural style (discussed later), and the male figures are clothed in Heian court dress. Perhaps the most striking difference between the two screens is that the flora, fauna, and human activities depicted on each of the panels of the Jingoji screen match themes in Japanese rather than Chinese poetry. That is, while both screens equally depict a ‘mountains and waters’ landscape, the Tōji screen suggests Chinese poetic topics whereas the Jingoji screen includes scenes of ‘autumn leaves’ (momijiba), ‘hunting with small falcons’ (kotakagari), and other topics found more specifically in Japanese poetry. Like the Tōji screen, the Jingoji screen also has designated spaces for poetry: viewing the panels from right to left, two poem-squares appear in the upper right corners of the second and fifth panels, and one appears in the upper portion of the fourth panel. Depicted on each of the poem- squares is a background motif of autumn grasses. Although the location of the poem-squares toward the top of the panels is the same in the Tōji and Jingoji screens, contemporary sources show that it could vary. Poem-squares could be placed in a lower corner or even directly next to

11 A full reproduction of the Jingoji Mountains and Waters screen can be found in volume 9 of Takeda et al., Nihon byōbu e shūsei. Chino Kaori, “Jingoji zō senzui byōbu no kōsei to kaigashiteki ichi,” Bijutsu shi 106 (February 1979): 146–162, includes a detailed discussion of the Jingoji Mountains and Waters screen, including the remounting process. Yoshiaki Shimizu, “Seasons and Places in Yamato Landscape and Poetry,” Ars Orientalis 12 (1984): 2–4, briefly addresses the same screen. Depending on the event or the specific purpose, folding screens could be disassembled and have their panels rearranged. screens and poems, contexts and images 39 a specific figure or object in the depicted scene. In addition, the numbers of poem-squares on each panel was also not uniform. Neither the Tōji nor the Jingoji screen has a poem extant on it. The absence of a poetic complement in the presence of its designated space suggests that a screen was either left unfinished or, perhaps, that it functioned as a backdrop against which poems befitting a specific occasion could be written on separate sheets of paper and affixed to the screen. Like the earlier screen, the Jingoji screen has tempted twentieth-century scholars to guess what kinds of poems its paintings may have elicited. A frequently noted characteristic of this screen is that all three panels that include poem-squares depict not only the most human activity, but also the greatest concentration of identifiable themes from contemporary waka poetry. The level of detail has led art historians to focus on the content of the poetry that could have accompanied these scenes. For example, Kobayashi Taichirō has identified certain poetic topics (dai) that correspond directly with the screen’s visual motifs, whereas Yoshiaki Shimizu has schematically diagrammed the location of these topics on each of the panels.12 Their endeavors to ‘fill in the blanks’ are indicative of how the association between painting and poetry is taken for granted, and how a correspondence between them is assumed. The rich interplay between poetry and painting opens the door to a myriad of possibilities, not only for artistic expression, but also for ordering the outside world, the natural phenomena and human activity that find representation in word and in image. On the surface, it would seem that themes in poetry highly influenced subject matter in painting, but the reverse is also true. I return to this central issue in chapter 3, which details the relationship among empirical experience, artistic representation, and the formation of poetic topics. The Tōji and Jingoji Mountains and Waters screens are, unfortunately, the only artifacts that remain today that give us a concrete idea of what Heian-period screens were like.

12 The poetic topics suggested by the screen painting include autumn leaves (momijiba), maidenflowers (ominaeshi), pampas grass (susuki), waterfalls (taki), deer (shika), the bringing of tribute horses (koma mukae), hunting (kari), and travel (kiryo). Of course, some of these ultimately derive from Chinese poetry but had taken hold as topics for Japanese poetry by the time the original screen was produced. See Kobayashi Taichirō, Yamato-e shi ron (Osaka: Zenkoku shobō, 1946), pp. 24–31. Kobayashi identifies these topics and notes the close alignment of the scenes in the Jingoji screen with waka topics from the same period. Shimizu, “Seasons and Places in Yamato Landscape and Poetry,” p. 15, includes a schematic diagram of the location of the poetic motifs in the Jingoji screen. 40 chapter one

Screens and Their Contexts

There were three basic types of screens that divided and adorned the interior spaces of imperial palaces and aristocratic residences alike in the Heian and Kamakura periods. Referred to generically as shōji, all three types of screen could and often were embellished with painting, calligraphy, and poetry. Another common characteristic is their base material: they were composed of panels of solid wood covered with a layer of thick paper or woven silk, and, in this respect, they are distinct from modern shōji, which are constructed of light, latticed wood frames covered with a layer of thin, usually white, paper.13 Another important characteristic is that each type of screen was portable to some extent and thus served the functional purpose of converting the size and shape of a room depending on the wants and needs of the resident. As for the individual types, one was the tsuitate. Free-standing and single-paneled, it was supported by bracketed feet. Another type was the fusuma, a sliding screen mounted in grooves on the floor and ceiling. The third type was the byōbu, a folding screen that usually came in sets of two or four, which could have anywhere from two to ten, and sometimes even twelve, hinged panels per screen. Extant records show that the most common configuration in the Heian period was a set of four six- paneled screens, one screen for each of the four seasons.14 Records also indicate that byōbu were more often presented as formal gifts and were on display more often during formal occasions than either of the two other types of screen. As the most common type of screen that received poetic inscription, byōbu are a fertile source for analyzing the interplay between the poetic and the visual in the Heian and Kamakura periods and are thus one of the main objects of study in this book. The dimensions of a byōbu screen panel were, typically, a little over 5 feet in height (160 cm.) and about 2 feet in width (60 cm.). Therefore, a six-paneled screen, like the ones associated with Tōji and Jingoji, measured about twelve feet (360 cm.) across, depending on how wide the screen was opened. Despite

13 For more on the physical nature (support, hinges, bracketing, etc.) of these screens and their history beyond the Heian period, see Miyeko Murase, Masterpieces of Japanese Screen Painting (New York: George Brazillier, 1990), pp. 7–15, and Oliver Impey, The Art of the Japanese Folding Screen (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), pp. 9–23. 14 Tokuhara Shigemi, “Byōbu uta no gutaisō,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 55, no. 6 (June 1978): 24–36, documents the preparations for several sets of these four-season screens from the middle of the Heian period. screens and poems, contexts and images 41 such screens’ rather large size, they could be and often were moved about to suit both the spatial needs and aesthetic sensibilities of their owners. All three extant screens discussed thus far, that is, the Beauties under the Trees screen and the two Mountains and Waters screens, were folding screens preserved in temple settings. They were not initially created for use in temples but were most likely personal possessions donated at a later date. There is a general absence of religious imagery on the screens, though records indicate that the Tōji screen, at least, was used as a ritual object in esoteric initiation ceremonies, an indication of the layered meanings that secular objects could achieve in certain religious settings. More important, perhaps, is the strengthening in later eras of the unspo- ken association between the temple and its natural setting. Namely, the concept of a ‘mountains and waters’ screen (senzui byōbu) implied a landscape that integrated images of all three—the temple, the mountains, and the waters—into a single composition.15 Temples were not, however, the most common architectural context for these kinds of screens. Folding screens were most typically found in the domestic residence of the Heian courtier.16 The configuration of such a residence is referred to as shinden zukuri or shinden architecture. Its central feature was an expansive, south-facing building called the moya, which was typically flanked by two or three side buildings called tainoya. The moya and tainoya were connected by covered corridors. Wide pillars supported the roof of the moya, which had few outer walls separating the interior from the exterior. Typically incorporated into the residential design were a set of inner and outer gates and a central garden. Gardens are of particular interest because they were often maintained in such a way as to suggest poetic motifs. Moreover, some gardens were also inten- tionally constructed to represent, in miniature form, specific poetic sites. The way paintings on folding screens could evoke the geography of far-off places in many ways parallels such garden design. The treatment of gardens as an appropriate source for poetic inspiration in the Heian period is part of the larger practice of weaving together visual and verbal representations of objective reality. The implications of this practice in the development of poetic topics is addressed in chapter 3.

15 Tokuhara, “Byōbu uta no gutaisō,” pp. 12–13. 16 The discussion on paintings in their architectural context is based in part on Chino Kaori, “Kodai bungaku to kaiga,” in Kubota Jun et al., eds., Jūichi, jūni seiki no bungaku, Iwanami kōza Nihon bungaku shi 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996). 42 chapter one

The moya, the main building of the shinden residence, was essentially one very large room that was divided into smaller living spaces by the aforementioned three kinds of screen. The screens not only divided space within the rooms and provided aesthetic pleasure, but also offered a degree of shelter from the elements. In fact, the Chinese characters for byōbu (屏風) imply that the large folding screens could protect against the light winds that would otherwise blow through such rooms. In addition to this function, screens were moved or folded in such a way as to create different-sized enclosures within the moya and in that way provided a greater or lesser degree of intimacy. Within the areas defined by the folding screens, space was often further divided by the smaller, more portable tsuitate screen, as well as another item, the kichō, or ‘curtain stand’ (also sometimes referred to as ‘curtain of state’), which was composed of a free- standing frame from which were hung wide lengths of woven silk cloth. A resident could have these items moved around an interior to suit his or her needs on any given day. During formal ceremonies and auspicious events, the ability to control the dimensions of a room through the placement of screens and curtains became a much more important consideration. The following passage from The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu (Murasaki Shikibu nikki; 1008–1010) demonstrates how, on the occasion of an imperial childbirth, such objects were manipulated to control interior space: At dawn on the eleventh, two sets of sliding screens on the north side were taken away and Her Majesty was moved into the back gallery. As it was not possible to hang up blinds, she was surrounded by a series of overlapping curtains.17 The incident described took place in the ninth month of 1008, when Empress Shōshi (988–1074) gave birth at the Tsuchimikado Mansion, the primary residence of her father, Fujiwara no Michinaga. Here, Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014) describes the way the screens and curtains were carefully manipulated in such a way as to control not just the dimensions of an interior space, but also, as a function of that, to limit the gaze of others. This latter aspect was of particular importance because of the lofty status of the woman giving birth. For this event, the sliding screens were

17 Translation by Richard Bowring, Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. Princeton Library of Asian Translations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 53. Japanese text in Fujioka Tadaharu, ed., Izumi Shikibu nikki, NKBZ 18 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), p. 169. screens and poems, contexts and images 43 removed to make space for the empress’s caregivers, while at the same time the empress herself was relocated to the back gallery so as to avoid being seen by those not permitted in her presence. The open space in the back gallery did not lend itself to hanging blinds, so portable curtain stands were employed to afford Shōshi a smaller, more private space. It is clear from this and other passages like it that screens (and curtains) played an important role in the alterable configuration of interior spaces in the Heian period. If screens could be used to subdivide an interior space, they could also be used to enclose that space and literally envelop its occupant. Moreover, if screens could be used to control what could be seen from without, as in the case of Shōshi, then they could also be used to control what could be seen from within. As we shall see, early poets frequently commented on how, surrounded by images painted on screens, one is transported to other places. Distant vistas, streams and cascades, inland mountains and scenic shorelines, could all be portrayed on the moveable interior walls that were the painted screens. The artists provided a ‘window’ to the outside world, at once a representation and an interpretation, for the viewer to enjoy. In much the same way, poets also provided a window to the natural world through their representations and interpretations. Documentary evidence and a few extant examples show that artists, depending on the occasion and purpose, addressed a wide range of thematic material when they painted on folding screens: episodes in the life of Buddha, specific geographic locations in Japan and China, and even scenes depicting the torments of hell. Screens displayed at private residences, however, most often depicted Japanese landscapes infused with visual representations of poetic motifs. The pines of Suminoe, for instance, were a felicitous symbol of longevity that was often incorporated into screens for informal events, such as birthday celebrations, and for more formal events as well, such as the ceremony for the Great Thanksgiving. Other screens might include representations of seasonal flora or fauna, which could then serve as topics for commissioned poetry. Conversely, a series of seasonal poems could provide the motifs for a screen to be painted later.18 The screens themselves would sometimes find their way into the residences of the guests of honor and would become part of the household’s

18 The mutual influence of painting and poetry on the development of thematic material is a topic addressed in chapter 3. 44 chapter one permanent furnishings. Some folding screens were displayed only on special occasions, such as religious ceremonies or seasonal banquets. In many cases, they were commissioned for milestone events such as birthdays and weddings, and they featured auspicious poetry inscribed directly on the screen as part of the event itself. In fact, screen poems are probably best understood as the vestiges of the events for which they were composed, similar to the way records of poetry contests (uta awase) are the written remnants of what was most often a poetic gathering that occurred on a specific date. Produced under such social circumstances, screens and their poems served as an affirmation of the participants’ social and political status. As Gustav Heldt has argued, these events substantiated social hierarchies and furthermore harmonized human actions with cosmological cycles.19 The ownership of such large-scale works of art was thus a demonstration of the material wealth required to produce such objects, as well as the implied authority to commission artists and poets to create them. The display of screens at aristocratic residences was an indication, for better or for worse, of their owner’s status as well as his discrimination in the arts. As Yoshida Kenkō (ca. 1283–1352) observes in his Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa; ca. 1330): When the painting or calligraphy on a folding screen or sliding door is done in an unattractive style, one senses the poor taste of the master of the house much more than the ugliness of the work itself. It is certainly the case that the furnishings a person owns will often betray his inferior sensibility.20 Expressing an early appreciation of folding screens is the statesman and scholar Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), who, in the following kanshi, summarizes their functions and attributes: The Sugawara Collection 409 (Book 5): “Folding Screens” In unfolding them, one begins to know their function; When one has them, one need not fear the wind. Their quality is fine, like the lining of a thin robe;

19 Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan, Cor- nell East Asia Series 139 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2008), esp. pp. 241–284, where he discusses screen poetry in the context of political harmonizing. 20 Kanda Hideo, Nakazumi Yasuaki, and Yasuraoka Kōsaku, eds., Hōjōki, Tsurezuregusa, Shōbo Genzō zuimonki, Tannishō, NKBT 27 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1971), p. 157. Also see Don- ald Keene, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 70, and Helen Craig McCullough, Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 406, for alternate translations. The quotation is from section 81 of most texts. screens and poems, contexts and images 45

Their worth is apparent, as with a jewel-strewn mat. Their people and horses do not come and go; Their smoke and mists have no beginning or end. One senses the skill in the use of color; Folding and unfolding, they can go anywhere.21 Michizane notes screens’ utility in protecting from the wind, as well as their material aspects and visual appeal. He then moves on to the static quality of the images depicted on them, a favorite topos among Japanese screen poets. These lines in particular are also an early example of ekphrastic poetry, here in the kanshi rather than the waka form. Michizane clearly appreciates how the artist’s manipulation of colored paints created the landscape and its inhabitants. The fact that the landscape can be folded up and taken elsewhere inspires the sense of wonder found in the final line. In sum, screens served several important functions with regard to the living spaces of the Heian aristocrat. As furniture, screens divided space and created ‘rooms’ within the mansions laid out in the shinden architectural style. Screens helped divide indoor and outdoor space and offered shelter from the elements in these buildings, which were often more per- meable than the inhabitants found comfortable. In addition, the screens used to create intimate spaces indoors could simultaneously create the illusion of the vast outdoors through their depictions of famous landscapes or local sites. Screens also served as objects of art, and the paintings and the poems on them were, to a certain degree, a reflection of the tastes of their owners. As a prevalent piece of functional furniture, and as a display of artistic sensibilities, the folding screen was an indispensable part of the households of Heian aristocrats, and it fundamentally shaped the interior spaces in which they lived their lives.

Early Painting-Poems in Chinese

‘Caption’ and ‘illustration’ are two of the fundamental ways text and image relate. Eighth-century Japan provides a concrete example of each.

21 Kawaguchi Hisao, ed., Kanke bunsō, Kanke kōshū, NKBT 72 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), pp. 424–425. See also Elise Grilli, The Art of the Japanese Screen (New York: Weath- erhill, 1970), p. 153. She is apparently referring to this passage when she notes Michizane’s observation: The distinctive feature of the byōbu lies in its flexibility of opening and folding. If you sit surrounded by the byōbu, immediately new worlds emerge around you, and you can enjoy their lasting pleasure. 46 chapter one

An illustrated map preserved in the Shōsōin collection is one of the oldest extant examples in Japan of text and image appearing together. Dated 756, it depicts the grounds of Tōdaiji, its outlying buildings, and the surrounding areas.22 The orientation of the map is reminiscent of mandala compositions in that it is neither north-south nor east-west, but rather is based on Tōdaiji as a focal point of reference for every other feature on the map. That is, its depicted landscape and temple structures seem to radiate from a central point such that, regardless of the perspective from which the viewer looks at the map, at least some of its elements will be sideways or upside down. In addition to indicating boundaries and land- holdings, the map’s layout suggests that it may have served a religious function as well. More important for the purposes of this book is the fact that many of the map’s features are labeled in writing, and the text direction exactly matches the orientation of the object being identified. The caption or labeling technique shown in these maps is one of the ways text relates to image and exemplifies an early propensity to integrate the visual and the verbal within a single shared space. The eighth-century scroll referred to as The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect (E inga kyō or, more formally, Kako genzai inga kyō) provides a contrasting example of the nascent text-image relationship in early Japan. Scholars believe it to be a copy of an early Tang-period work that no longer exists. Of the several extant fragments of copies made in Japan, the oldest dates to 735. Like the Tōdaiji map, the Cause and Effect scroll may also have had a religious impetus, but it differs fundamentally in the nature of the relationship between the text and image. The painted images are illustrations of the events narrated in the text. The scroll portrays the life and former incarnations of Prince Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha. It is horizontally oriented and divided spatially into upper and lower registers: polychrome paintings depicting scenes from the sutra run along the upper portion while a fifth-century Chinese translation of the sutra runs along the lower portion. The similarity between the illustrated scroll and the map lies in the basic assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the text and the painted depiction. The difference is that in the case of the scroll, understanding the text-image relationship requires a greater degree of participation on the part of the viewer because the text is a narration and

22 Reproduced in Shōsōin jimusho, ed., Shōsōin no kaiga (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1968), plates 41–43. screens and poems, contexts and images 47 not simply a label. In fact, it can be argued that in the case of the map, the labels indicate what is visually depicted, and conversely, in the case of the scrolls, the visual depictions are indicators of what is in the text.23 There is relatively little interdependence in these two examples, which together demonstrate the two basic categories of the text-image relationship, namely, caption and illustration. In Japan, the earliest instances of paintings and poems working in tandem are screen poems composed in Chinese in the mid-ninth century. These were composed by Japanese literati and were based on either imported paintings or domestic paintings that were copied from conti- nental models. The screen poems typically comprised several pairs of five- or seven-character rhyming couplets and were likely treated in one of two ways: as inscriptions on the poem-squares on the screen or as separate appreciations of the painting. Unfortunately, none of the screens on which these poems were based survive today. Judging from the relationship between the text and image in the case of the map and the illustrated scroll, we can surmise that there was a correspondence between the content of these poems and the images in the paintings. This working assumption is what has driven scholars to formulate poetic topics for the late eleventh-century Tōji screen and the thirteenth-century Jingoji screen mentioned earlier. Needless to say, the relationship between text and image has a rich history in China. As is the case in Japan, however, descriptions of paintings abound, as do poems based on paintings, but few works survive in which the painting and the poetry were preserved together. It is not until the early Song dynasty (960–1279) that a genre integrating poetry and painting becomes clear. A handful of written accounts that predate the Song hint at the relationship between text and image. The earliest is a reference to an extended inscription on a landscape painting, found in The Record of Famous Painters from the Tang (Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫録; ca. 840). It mentions that Zhang Zao 張藻 (fl. 766–778) painted “mountain and river, pine and rock” on a wall and that “there was also an inscribed account” (亦有題記).24 What the account was about, however,

23 The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect is reproduced in Kameda Tsutomu, ed., E inga kyō, Shinshū Nihon emakimono zenshū 1 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1977). Kameda’s introductory essay hints at some of the complexities involved in the relationship between text and image but concludes that the pictures were conceived long after the fifth-century text was in circulation. 24 Cited in Jonathan Chaves, “ ‘Meaning beyond the Painting’: The Chinese Painter as Poet,” in Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong, eds., Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, 48 chapter one is left unsaid, and we do not know whether the painter also wrote the inscription. The several other references in contemporary accounts are similarly enigmatic. Later in the Tang dynasty, there developed a custom of composing poetry based on painting, an inclusive genre known as ‘painting-poems’ (Ch. tihua shi, J. daiga shi, 題畫詩 or 題画詩). Some were inscribed on the painting that inspired them, whereas others were sent separately to the painter or owner of the painting. Certain key characteristics of Tang painting-poems were directly incorporated into Chinese screen poems composed in Japan and, subsequently, into the earliest Japanese screen poems as well. For a variety of linguistic, literary, and social reasons, later Japanese poets would develop conventions, techniques, and perspectives very different from those of the painting-poem model from which they originally took their inspiration. Nonetheless, early Chinese screen poems show how the practice of composing painting-poems was first translated into a Japanese context, and how the Tang painting-poem served as an important precursor to the Japanese screen poem. The earliest Chinese screen poems composed by Japanese poets date to the mid-ninth century. By then, Bai Juyi was the most popular Chinese poet among the Heian literati, and his poetry collection Hakushi monjū circulated widely in the Japanese capital. His masterful techniques influenced the way early Japanese poets approached painting as a topic for poetic composition. The following poem, composed by Bai in thanks for a painting given to him by Xiao Yue (fl. early ninth century; the ‘Master Hsiao’ in Irving Lo’s translation here), exhibits several key characteristics of Tang painting-poems: “Painting Bamboo: A Song” Of all the plants, bamboo is the most difficult to paint. Among ancient and modern painters, none has caught its likeness. Master Hsiao’s brush alone brings out the similitude— He’s the one supreme artist in the history of painting.

Others paint the bamboo thick and gnarled; Hsiao paints each spear lean and sturdy. Others paint the bamboo tufts lifeless, limp, and drooping; Hsiao paints the branches alive, as if each leaf were seen to move.

Calligraphy, and Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), p. 432. A portion of the following account of early Chinese poem-paintings is indebted to Chaves, pp. 431–452. screens and poems, contexts and images 49

Without roots, these bamboos grow from his mind; Without shoots, these bamboos are shaped by his brush. By a deserted creek, beside a winding bank, Two clusters, fifteen spears, dense and luxuriant. Pretty like a girl with a softly powdered face, Somber, summing up all the aura of wind and mist.

I look up and suddenly forget it is a painting; Inclined my ears to listen in quiet, I seem to hear their sounds. In the western corner, seven spears vigorous and strong— I clearly remember seeing them before a rock at T’ien-chu Monastery; In the eastern corner, eight spears sparse and lean— I recall having seen them in the rain at the Temple of the Goddess Hsiang.

Elegant airs, deep thoughts, are appreciated by few; We look at each other, and I sigh in vain. What a pity Master Hsiao is getting old, His hands tremble, his eyes dim, his head the color of snow! He says that this is his last painting; From now on such bamboos will be the hardest to find.25 This painting-poem, which Bai sent directly to his friend rather than inscribing it on the related painting, epitomizes many of the genre’s traits. One of the most common characteristics on display is Bai’s reference to the painter, with the implication that his skills are great because of his moral character. This reflects the prevailing Tang aesthetic wherein the artist’s ethical qualities and personal disposition are manifest in the finished product, such as in his calligraphy or his painting. The painter was said to impart a measure of his own essential nature to the work of art, and his morality and expertise are said to infuse it with verisimilitude and liveliness.26 In the poem quoted here, Bai begins his appreciation of the painting with a reference to the topic—bamboo—and then praises Xiao’s mastery with the brush. After specifically naming the artist in several of the lines, Bai goes on to describe the process of painting as an extension

25 Irving Lo, trans., in Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, ed., Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 207– 208. A partial translation can also be found in Ronald C. Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 288. 26 For more on the moral identification of a painter within his painting, see Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636), Harvard-Yenching Institute Series 27 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 1–82, and Ronald C. Egan, “Poems on Paintings: Su Shih and Huang T’ing-chien,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 2 (1983): 413–451. Both discuss Tang sources that associate calligraphy with character. 50 chapter one of the individual painter’s skill: “Without roots, these bamboos grow from his mind; / Without shoots, these bamboos are shaped by his brush.” The poem, which opens and closes with descriptions of how Xiao had mas- tered the skill of depicting bamboo, a notoriously difficult poetic subject, is in some ways more about the painter than the painting itself. In addition to naming the artist, some Tang painting-poems also mention the owner of the painting. Others also directly refer to the poet’s relationship with the artist, the owner, or both.27 Whereas the painter appears to be central to the interpersonal connections mentioned in Tang painting-poems, in the Japanese tradition, painters are rarely mentioned. The most likely reason is that screen painters in Japan tended to be anonymous artisans who worked in groups, rather than individual mas- ters who worked alone. In the Chinese tradition, social connections were directly expressed in the form of poetry, whereas in the Japanese tradition, such connections can only be implied from the circumstances of composition. Japanese screen poems were usually composed for events that confirmed certain hierarchical relationships between the commissioners and the producers of the paintings and poems, but such relationships are never explicit in the poems themselves. The poet, painter, and patron or owner, all of whom exist outside the painted work, are often present in Chinese painting-poems but are largely absent from Japanese screen poems. This phenomenon is due in part to the anonymity of Japanese painters as well as the practice among Japanese nobility of presenting appropriate poems composed by those assigned to the task. A conspicuous point of intersection between Chinese painting-poems and Japanese screen poems lies in the way both address the relationship between the painted depiction and objective reality. Both move beyond a description of the visual—they appeal to the senses of taste, smell, touch, and hearing, and sometimes also refer to the passage of time. The visual verisimilitude of the painting inspires a nonvisual response and is precisely the reason that poets at times purport to be fooled or deluded into mistaking the painting for reality. Poets often marvel at how colors applied to a surface can almost magically create recognizable objects that seem to take on characteristics of the real thing. This element of the

27 Ronald C. Egan notes the continuing trend in his discussion of two poems by Su Shi (1037–1101), significantly later chronologically, that mention the relationship of the painter to the owner of the painting. He also cites examples in which the process of acquisition is discussed in the body of a poem inscribed on the picture. See Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, pp. 289–290 and 298. screens and poems, contexts and images 51 miraculous is featured in an anecdote from Notable Tales Old and New (Kokon chōmonjū; ca. 1254) that relates the lifelike qualities of a painting by Kose no Kanaoka (d. ca. 895), the founder of the Kose school of Heian- period court painters. Kanaoka painted a horse on a wall at the temple Ninnaji that was so real that it would leave the painted panel each night to graze on the fields painted on another panel nearby. The artist finally put a stop to the horse’s nocturnal wanderings by painting a halter on it.28 While the story praises Kanaoka’s skill in representing reality, it also lays bare the relationship between realism and deception. By erasing the lines between art and reality, the artist has captured something essential about the phenomenological object that, on one level, provides enough of a sense of reality as to have the kinds of consequences, or provoke the kind of human or animal reaction, that one would normally associate only with the object itself and not with a representation of it. In Bai’s poem on the bamboo, the painting has elicited the same type of response. The poet points to the evocative power of the painted depiction by stating that the images conjure for him the memory of seeing real bamboo shoots growing at Tianzhu Monastery. Looking at the picture, the poet thinks he detects movement in the leaves and seems to hear the plants rustling in the wind. Bai makes clear that the visual realism of the painted bamboo has the effect of creating an aural and dynamic realism as well. The artist’s skill is such that the painting does not at all compare unfavorably to the reality it depicts. The poetic conceit of comparing painting to reality pervades almost every line of the following poem by Du Fu ( J. To Ho; 712–770), an earlier Tang poet also well known among Heian literati. “Ten Rhymes Written upon Viewing a Painting of Min Mountain and T’o River in the Office of Yen, Duke of Cheng” T’o River draws near the central dais, Min Mountain enters the northern hall.

28 Nagasumi Yasuaki and Shimada Isao, eds., Kokon chōmonjū, NKBT 84 (Tokyo: Iwa- nami shoten, 1966), p. 310. Kokon chōmonjū is a thirteenth-century collection of short tales (setsuwa) compiled by Tachibana no Narusue (n.d.). Noted in Alexander Soper, “The Rise of Yamato-e,” The Art Bulletin 24, no. 4 (1942): 363, n. 34. See also Yoshiko K. Dykstra, “Notable Tales Old and New: Tachibana Narisue’s Kokon Chōmonjū,” Monumenta Nippon- ica 47, no. 4 (1992): 469–493. The story parallels one from Pliny the Elder’s (23–79) Natural History: In a competition, Zeuxis paints grapes so real that birds come to peck at them. He loses the contest, however, when he mistakes the curtains that his rival Parrhasius painted for real curtains and asks them to be drawn open. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 311, cited in Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 92. 52 chapter one

White waves blow against the painted wall, Green cliffs jut into the carved beams. One marvels at the coldness of the pines And seems to smell the water-chestnut’s scent. Snow and clouds decorate the sky to no purpose, Sand and grass fade into the distance. The Ling Range geese follow the brush tip, The river rainbow drinks the sheen of the silk. A mist of red: islet buds are profuse; A wash of black: the fennel grows tall. Darkness in the valley is not due to rain, The red of the maples does not come from frost. An autumn village beyond Mystery Garden, A landscape beside Tung-t’ing Lake. The skill of this painting is unexcelled, The quiet heart is stirred with feeling. Grand Preceptor Hsieh of olden times Never forgot the way of hills and valleys.29 The structural ingenuity of this poem, through which each odd-numbered line contains some aspect of ‘water’ and each even-numbered line contains some aspect of ‘land,’ is apparent in the English translation. Another technique, one highlighting witty contradictions, is employed throughout the poem. In every couplet, without exception, Du Fu illustrates some sort of paradox that derives from the disparity between the painted depiction and the reality supposedly represented therein. Thus, through the magic of painting, rivers and mountains appear within the architectural space of the grand hall, such that the ‘great outdoors’ is now contained within the ‘great indoors.’ Perhaps the greatest paradox lies in the depiction itself, for the painted surface remains close at hand while it simultaneously presents the illusion of distance through its portrayal of the depth of sky and the expanse of sand and grass that seems to extend toward the horizon. Du Fu, like Bai Juyi in the previous poem, alludes to the way the painted image seems to speak to senses other than sight: the viewer can feel the coldness of the pines and smell the fragrance of the water chestnuts. Another similarity between the two poems is that both end with an appreciation of the painting as a finished product (“The skill of

29 Translation Egan, “Poems on Paintings,” pp. 439–440. Part of the following is indebted to his analysis on p. 440. Andō Tarō points to similar characteristics, especially how painted landscapes do not change over time, in the poetry of Li Bo ( J. Ri Haku; 701– 762) and others. See Andō Tarō, “Daigashi to byōbu uta: Heian chō shoki no byōbu uta no ikkōsatsu,” Tōkyō seitoku tanki daigaku kiyō 11 (1978): 36–52. screens and poems, contexts and images 53 this painting is unexcelled”), as well as with an expression of admiration for the skills of the painter himself. The earlier poet by about one-half century, Du Fu is credited with the development of the painting-poem as a genre.30 One of his characteristic approaches was to use a depiction in a painting as a springboard for identifying and refining in verbal terms the essential nature of the object that the painting only visually portrays. This treatment of subject matter moves the poem beyond an aesthetic appreciation of the painting (Ch. hua zan 畫賛, J. gasan 画賛) and into a realm in which a rhetorical exploration of representational possibilities becomes the point. A poem on painted plum blossoms, for instance, may begin with praise for the vividness and clarity of the depiction, which in turn may lead to the evocation of a memory of having seen real plum blossoms in the past. This new image widens the basis for descriptive possibilities to the poet’s myriad encounters with real plum blossoms and thus leads to a range of poetic and worldly attributes that is distinct from the painter’s medium. Du Fu’s most famous poem about art is “Song of a Painting,” composed when the poet met the painter Cao Ba (fl. eighth century) in the western provinces many years after Cao’s glory days at court. The poem emphasizes the noble lineage of the painter, the prestige of his commissions, his disciples, and his latter days of adversity. It is, in fact, more of a panegyric that praises Cao’s career than it is, as the title might suggest, a ‘song of a painting.’31 In noting Cao’s skill, Du implies that the painter gave life to the figures in his depiction: “the portraits of founders / had little color left; / but where you, General, touched with your brush, / their living faces appeared.” Then, after associating masterful skill with high moral character, Du notes the strong connection between the lofty source of the commission and the energy that went into the creative process as reflected in the final product: Royal command bade you, General, spread the white silk—

30 On poem-paintings, the poet Shen Deqian 沈德潛 (1673–1769) observed, “Prior to the Tang dynasty, there did not appear poems inscribed on paintings. The one who initiated this genre was Old Tu.” Later, the scholar Chen Jin 陳僅 (fl. ca. 1840) stated, “Poems inscribed on paintings began with old Tu, and everybody reads these works of his,” cited in Chaves, “Meaning beyond the Painting,” pp. 437 and 435. 31 Translation of “Song of a Painting” from Stephen Owen, ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), pp. 429–431. The full title of the poem, “Preface on a Painting Presented to General Cao Ba,” perhaps better explains the relative emphasis on the painter as opposed to the painting. I am indebted to Mark Halperin for pointing this out. 54 chapter one

brooding art-thoughts struggled there, between plan and execution. It emerged in an instant—true dragon horse from Heaven’s nine tiers, wiping aside once and for all, common horses of all time. The poem ends with a sense of injustice over how low the painter has fallen in the world—sketching humble travelers on the road, when in times past he painted the portraits of exalted leaders in the capital. The greatest names in history, Du concludes, end up passing their days in hardship. While the disparity between the artist’s masterful skill and his fallen social status is an overriding theme of this particular poem, several of Du’s other poems focus on the effect of verisimilitude in painting. His comments on the intensity of visual representation emphasize the painter’s ability to manipulate the viewer’s sense of what is ‘real.’ A poem Du composed upon seeing a painted hawk, for instance, presents the very stasis of the physical image not as a limiting factor of painting in and of itself, but as a technique by which the artist is able to represent the single most powerful moment in time that precedes a transformative event: “Painted Hawk” Wind-blown frost rises from plain white silk, a gray falcon—paintwork’s wonder. Body strains, its thoughts on the cunning hare, its eyes turn sidelong like a Turk in despair. You could pinch the rays glinting on tie-ring, its stance, to be called to the column’s rail. When will it strike the common birds?— bloody feathers strewing the weed-covered plain.32 Like the most famous works of ekphrasis in the Western tradition (Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats being the prime example), Du’s poem transforms the stasis that is contradictory to the realism of the painting into a ‘pregnant moment’ that complements the painting’s realistic effect. The poem asserts that the falcon is so lifelike that it seems to struggle to break free from the painted surface. Lines later, a hare keeps still, for it knows that a single move will beckon its doom. The painter’s skill in illus- trating the tension of the hunter and the hunted was such that Du treated

32 Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, p. 428. screens and poems, contexts and images 55 the innate stillness of a painting as something that enhanced rather than hindered the realism of the painted scene. Du’s poetic skill here lies in his ability to underscore the anticipation of the viewer who awaits action that will never occur. Though he knows that there is no real answer to the question “When will it strike the common birds?” he is so overcome by the scene that he goes so far as to provide his own image of the gory aftermath in the last line of the poem. Like the lovers on Keats’s urn who will never consummate their kiss, the scene described in words of an imminent action frozen in time can be likened to a pregnant moment in painting that heightens expectations and implies the moments before and after what is depicted. Du’s contemporary Wang Wei (701–761) was also well known for the pictorial qualities of his verse. It was Wang’s artistry that the Song dynasty poet-painter Su Shi (1037–1101) was describing when he made what is perhaps the most famous comment in Chinese on the relationship between painting and poetry: “When one savors his poems, there are paintings in them, and when one looks at his paintings, there are poems in them.”33 Su’s recognition of the painterly qualities that could be included in a poem is easy to understand when one considers “Deer Enclosure,” a compact verbal illustration of a natural scene, and one of Wang’s most famous poems: Empty mountain, no man is seen. Only heard are echoes of men’s talk. Reflected light enters the deep wood And shines again on blue-green moss.34 The visual and spatial dimensions of the poem are striking and perhaps derive from the poet’s training in the art of painting. To the scenic image of mountains and forests, he adds a controlled gradation of light and color in the reflected sunlight that shines upon the green moss. The poem carefully constructs sight lines, redirecting us from mountain to forest, and then through a guiding light to a single patch of moss. The fading sounds of men’s voices parallel the fading light at the end of the day, creating an atmosphere of solitude within nature. The meticulous composition and

33 Zhiliu Xie, “Reflections on the Poetic Quality and Artistic Origins of Ch’ü Ting’s Sum- mer Mountains,” in Murck and Fong, Words and Images, p. 3 and passim. Su Shi would go on to say that with painting and poetry in general, one is contained within the other. 34 Translation from Pauline Yu, The Poetry of Wang Wei: New Translations and Com- mentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 202. 56 chapter one the relation of space, light, and color lend the poem the formal characteristics of a painting. Wang’s poem praising the painted landscape on a friend’s folding screen shows a similar preoccupation with visual and verbal representation. The poem is also a commentary on the relationship of art to reality. Take your mica screen, Set it up in your wild courtyard: Mountains and streams will merge with it naturally, Coming not on account of the brightly colored painting.35 The poem’s description of the way the real mountains and streams in the background flow seamlessly into the painting underscores the illusion of verisimilitude. Referring to the screen and its material makeup, the poem ironically emphasizes its artificiality while simultaneously asserting that it is indistinguishable from the natural landscape it depicts. The two examples by Wang demonstrate how, figuratively in the former and literally in the latter, “there are paintings in his poetry.” Of the three Tang poets just mentioned, Du Fu and Bai Juyi most inspired the literati of the early Heian period. Copies of their collected works circulated among the elite, and their poems were further accorded wide recognition through inclusion into Japanese anthologies of Chinese verse. Their poems were important sources for citation and allusion and also served as models for Japanese poets of the ninth and tenth centuries who took seriously the practice of composing Chinese verse. When Japanese poets turned to composing kanshi based specifically on paintings, they employed many of the same approaches seen in the painting- poems presented here. For better or for worse, these compositions are not easily distinguished from the Tang models upon which they were based. The judgment of such a poem’s worth may, in fact, have been based on its harmony with and affinity to the model itself. The oldest extant Chinese poem composed by a Japanese poet that takes a painting as its topic is included in the kanshi anthology titled The Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Flowers (Bunka shūrei shū; ca. 818).36 Like many of the poems in that collection, it has been identified as having transparent Tang

35 Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1977), p. 283. For another translation, see Yu, The Poetry of Wang Wei, p. 55. 36 Translations for the titles of Japanese anthologies of Chinese verse follow Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Cen- tury (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993). screens and poems, contexts and images 57

precedents. Poetic techniques that evoke a majestic landscape, highlight the interplay of light and color, and allude to movement and sound are all found, for example, in the following poem by Kuwabara no Haraaka (789–825), included in this collection: Bunka shūrei shū 124. Kuwabara no Haraaka. On being assigned “the waters of a cataract” when everyone composed poems on things at the Reizei-in by command. Folded hills soar, the palace park is steep; The long cascade opens, a length of white cloth. Startled cranes fly down in procession; Strung pearls break up in countercurrents. The sun shines on the cliffs, yet rain falls; No clouds hover over the rocks, yet thunder always sounds. Having heard of it for long, I see it now; Why bother with renouncing grain to visit Tiantai?37 According to the headnote, this is one of a series of poems composed “on things at the Reizei-in,” an imperial villa established west of the Horikawa River, by Emperor Saga. The vagueness of the description obfuscates the nature of the ‘things’ at hand but, upon examining Shōsōin inventories such as Records of Rare Treasures of the Nation (Kokka chinhōchō 国家珍反宝帳), Kuranaka Shinobu has concluded that the series of poems was based not on the villa’s waterfalls or landscapes but, rather, on screens that the emperor had removed from storage and put on display for the occasion.38 The fact affects the interpretation of this poem, for the white waters of a cascade mentioned in the second line, which are often compared to lengths of white cloth, may also literally refer to the very cloth surface of the folding screen itself. Such references to the textile quality

37 Mount Tiantai was the site of a famous cataract. The last line alludes to the rhapsody ( fu) “Wandering on Mount Tiantai” by Sun Chuo (320–377): Surely if one is not the kind who will abandon the world to amuse himself with the Way, who will give up grain to subsist on a diet of mushrooms, then how can he hope to clamber nimbly up its slopes and make his home there? Translation from Burton Watson, Chinese Rhyme-Prose: Poems in the fu Form from the Han and Six Dynasties Periods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 81. Note and translation of Bunka shūrei shū poem from Helen Craig McCullough, Brocade by Night: ‘Kokin Wakashū’ and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 167–168. 38 Kuranaka Shinobu, “Daigashi no hassei: Saga Tennō Shōsōin gyobutsu byōbu kokyaku to ‘Tendaizan’ no bungaku,” Kokugo to kokubungaku (December 1988): 17–36. She also notes the parallels to the “Wandering on Mount Tiantai” rhapsody found in the sixth- century collection Wen Xuan (Selections of Literature, J. Monzen). 58 chapter one of painted surfaces can be identified in a number of Tang painting-poems. For instance, in the first of Du’s poems quoted previously, a rainbow draws its colors from the painted surface as it drinks in “the sheen of silk.” Similarly, in the first line of his poem on the painted hawk, windblown frost “rises from plain white silk.” In addition, the paradoxical descriptions contained in Haraaka’s poem, such as the falling rain despite clear skies, and the clapping of thunder despite the absence of clouds, are in keeping with techniques used by Du in his poem, quoted earlier, that describes the painting of Min Mountain. Furthermore, the symmetry that associates the waterfall with rain and the sound of the cascades with thunder suggests Haraaka’s treatment of the depiction not as a two-dimensional image but as the multisensory landscape itself. The movement does not stop with the falling rain and waters, for Haraaka adds to his description the cranes that fly down the mountainside and the splashes of water that he compares to a string of pearls breaking up. These images, that are given even greater verisimilitude with other sensory information such as the added sound of clapping thunder, call attention to and reinforce what is already suggested in the painting. Another rhetorical technique adopted by Japanese poets is the appreciation expressed in Tang painting-poems of the way a painting’s verisimilitude begins to appeal to senses other than sight. Poets purport, for instance, to hear the rustle of bamboo or smell the fragrance of water chestnuts depicted in a painting. A poet’s wonder at why a visually realistic painting does not appeal to other senses is a counterpart or corollary to this poetic stance. By calling attention to the stasis and silence of the painting, the poet emphasizes the disparity between the painting and reality but makes these observations only because the painting is otherwise so convincing. This characteristic of Tang painting-poems can be seen in some ninth- century Japanese kanshi, such as the following by Saga. Anthologized in The Collection for Governing the Country (Keikokushū; 827), it is based not on a screen painting but on a wall painting in the Seiryōden hall of the Imperial Palace. Keikokushū 184 (Book 14). Emperor Saga. A poem on the mountains and waters painted on the walls of the Seiryōden. By the Retired Emperor, when still on the throne. Here an expert painter Has been able to picture the mystery and strangeness of mountains and waters. Before one’s eyes a great lake grows, a myriad li in breadth; Under the brush mountains are born, a thousand fathoms steep. screens and poems, contexts and images 59

Here the thick murk of shadowy clouds, long held from rain; There gossamer veils of smoke, not yet dispersed. Hōrai and Hōjō [the islands of bliss] are visible afar off; The Five Lakes and Three Rivers, with their sense of skirting and winding.

A boundless flood of billows seems to follow the wind’s caprice; Boats come and go on unexplained errands. From soaring walls and perilous steeps hang creepers; Where the cliffs meet, turning and impending, lichen grows.

Atop the range a cascade flows, with echoless voice; A rushing torrent strikes the rock, to fall into a deep-lying pool. The stillness of the airy hall is broken by few words of men; Mid the darkness of the forest dawn glimmers.

Under the pines, crowded together, are Immortals; Imparting thoughts too subtle for speech. Through the cycle of time someone is always playing a flat-laid ch’in; Years pass, and the dangling hook never catches a fish.

Thus directing his gaze one can study the marvels of red-and-blue; Facing this man’s world one senses the full measure of his inspiration. His painting outdoes real flowers in mocking at winter and spring alike; His is a world of men joyful through all seasons.39 As with the poems by Bai and Du quoted earlier, this poem begins and ends with references to the painter and his skill. A nod to the rhetorical technique of allowing oneself to be fooled by the visual perspective established in the painting can be seen in the poet’s admiration for the wide breadth of the lake, the height of the mountains, and the far-flung

39 Text for this and the following poem are found in Nakayama Yasumasa, ed., Kaifūsō, Ryōunshū, Bunka shūrei shū, Keikokushū, Honchō monzu, Kōchū Nihon bungaku taikei 24 (Tokyo: Seibundō, 1932), pp. 340–342. Translations for both poems (with minor modifications) from Alexander C. Soper, “A Ninth Century Landscape Painting in the Japa- nese Imperial Palace and Some Chinese Parallels,” Artibus Asiae 29 (1967): 335–337. The Seiryōden was the imperial reception chamber located in the imperial palace compound just to the northeast of the Shishinden, the central ceremonial Hall of State (or Enthrone- ment Hall). Saga was noted for his calligraphy and his composition of kanshi and was also a major sponsor of Chinese poetry at court, commissioning and coediting The Collection Soaring above the Clouds (Ryōunshū; 814) and the aforementioned Collection of Master- pieces of Literary Flowers. For more on his important role in the sponsorship of Chinese poetry and its effects, see McCullough, Brocade by Night, pp. 156–172, and Keene, Seeds in the Heart, pp. 189–195. Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, pp. 44–59 and 251, discuss Saga and the notion of ‘harmonizing,’ as in the subsequent poem by Sugawara no Kiyotada. 60 chapter one distance of the islands. This conceit can also be seen in the poet’s acceptance of the temporal expectations aroused by the painting: the clouds that might bring rain, and smoke that has not yet dispersed. A further sense of animation is lent to the scene with such verbs of motion as ‘skirting,’ ‘winding,’ ‘soaring,’ and ‘turning.’ The poet thus creates the impression that it is sheer distance that prevents him, the viewer, from hearing the cascade so vividly portrayed. But as the paradox of silence, the convincing reality minus sound, continues, the poem turns to the artificiality of the painted scene. In subsequent lines, Saga intriguingly suggests that the depicted Immortals are silent because they have “thoughts too subtle for speech,” but then he lays bare the fact that they are, after all, painted figures. By noting that the fishing hook will be forever barren, and that the blossoms will never fade, he calls attention to the painting as it portrays, in perpetuity, a single moment in time. Some kanshi poets note how normal cause-and-effect relationships do not hold precisely because time is arrested in the painting. Other poems from this collection note how, for instance, hermits partaking of wine in a painting will never get drunk, or clothes hanging out to dry will forever remain wet. In Saga’s poem, the description of the silent cascade and reticent immortals shifts from accentuating the vivid, multisensory experience created by the painting to accentuating its divergence from the very reality it depicts. As can be seen in Saga’s declaration that the painting “outdoes real flowers” since its beauty lasts throughout the year, this notable shift in focus to the artificiality of the painted depiction enhances rather than detracts from his adulation of the artist’s skill. His point brings to mind the scenes on the Grecian urn described by Keats in that the beauty of the painted scenes is not subject to the ravages of time. The ensuing poem in the collection, by Sugawara no Kiyotada (770–842), was composed in response to the previous one by Saga. The first part of the poem, quoted next, includes praise for the verisimilitude of the depictions. The poet’s subtle attention to the physical proximity between the painting and the viewer brings to mind Du’s sense of wonder at beholding a vast landscape within the walls of a room. Keikokushū 185 (Book 14). Sugawara no Kiyotada. A harmonizing poem, on the mountains and waters painted on the walls of the Seiryōden. Red and blue Fashion on a wall the shapes of mountains and waterways. Steep heights and perilous peaks that well-nigh mask the sun; Sheer walls and narrow gorges, with a file of wild geese drawn between. Vast, vast are the Three Rivers, yet one finds them close at hand; Far, far are the Five Mountains, now reborn within the palace. screens and poems, contexts and images 61

The motley blooms are not winter’s to destroy; Those drifts of snow will survive the summer. Unearthly creatures in a multitude of forms have emerged from the turnings of one mind; Exotic trees with a myriad of names have risen from his brush tip . . .40 As with many Tang painting-poems, there is an understanding in these lines that whatever is depicted in the painting will not change from season to season and is not susceptible to the effects of time. The static per- manence of the painted image generates the paradox of snow that will not melt in summer and flowers that will continue to bloom through winter. Time will not diminish the beauty of the scene. By the same token, a painting can also capture an otherwise fleeting moment in time: a bird in midflight, falling leaves frozen in midair, a never-ending flurry of snow. Later in Kiyotada’s poem, for example, animals about to take a drink of water are stopped in time, and a traveler’s brief respite becomes permanent: “Reaching down to drink, a line of apes forever extend their arms; / Travelers halted for a meal rest eternally from their burdens.” Thus, whereas poets may highlight the artifice inherent to the transformation of a living or moving three-dimensional object into a motionless and silent two-dimensional image, they can also celebrate the way paintings provide a perpetual and enduring image of beauty and truth.41 This phenomenon is precisely what Keats expresses in the final lines of his Ode on a Grecian Urn: “ ‘Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Like Keats’s Ode, Kiyotada’s poem is a commentary on the tension between artifice and truth inherent in a realistically portrayed scene. The enduring beauty of a painted scene offers a vision of eternal truth, while at the same time the perpetually static nature of the image is acknowledged to be untruthful. Kiyotada and a number of other

40 Sugawara no Kiyotada was a poet and scholar of Chinese. He traveled as a diplomat to China in the early ninth century, and upon his return he played a large role in standard- izing court titles, dress, and ceremonies along the lines of the Tang court and was one of the first to receive the title ‘doctor of letters’ (monjōshō). He was also a compiler and editor of the Japanese anthologies of Chinese verse The Collection Soaring above the Clouds and The Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Flowers (see previous note). Other poems by Du and Li that exhibit similar characteristics are cited and discussed briefly in Ienaga Saburō, Jōdai yamato-e nenpyō (Tokyo: Bokusui shobō, 1966), pp. 21–22, and in Ienaga, Jōdai yamato-e zenshi (Tokyo: Bokusui shobō, 1966), pp. 51–53. 41 Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and other painters of his era admired precisely this shared aspect of painting and poetry. See Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), esp. pp. 151–166, and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 416–420. 62 chapter one early Heian kanshi poets juxtaposed and attempted to reconcile these opposing views within a single poem. Another link to Tang painting-poems can be found in the closing lines of Kiyotada’s poem, in which he draws parallels between the painted depiction and the moral character of the artist: Here the [artist’s] roving mind has fulfilled itself In the savor of mystery and stillness; An attentive eye has been enriched by the justness Of wisdom and benevolence. This artist in red-and-blue Had consummate success In using his inspiration to stir the soul. With these lines, the poem has come full circle. By first alluding to the walls on which the images are painted, and then to the palace in which those walls are contained, and finally to the artist himself, Kiyotada calls attention throughout the poem to factors outside the painted picture. In doing so, the poet emphasizes the harmony between himself as a subject and his sovereign and links the artist’s depiction to the grandeur of Saga’s palace and, by extension, his realm. These are some of the hallmarks of the gasan ‘picture-appreciation’ poetry that was often composed for celebratory occasions and subsequently kept as a memento of the event by the host or guest of honor. A number of such poems from roughly this period can be found in The Sugawara Collection (Kanke bunsō; late ninth century), a collection of kanshi by the statesman and scholar Sugawara no Michizane. Of relevance to this discussion is a set of five Chinese poems based on screen paintings. Composed for a banquet celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the regent Fujiwara no Mototsune (836–891) in the twelfth month of 885, the poems contain pairs of seven-character rhyming couplets that reveal Michizane’s skillful use of precedents in the Chinese tradition.42 Michizane calls attention to factors outside the paintings such as the banquet participants’ roles as spectators looking upon the screens. In his “Gazing at the Garden Ponds at Dusk” (Kanke bunsō 2: 178), Michizane ponts to the way time is arrested in the pictures, in a manner similar to the Seiryōden poems by Saga and Kiyotada quoted previously. Michizane’s expressed appreciation for the

42 The Chinese screen poems by Michizane are included in Kawaguchi, Kanke bunsō, Kanke kōshū, pp. 240–245. The editors point out clear Chinese precedents in all five poems. Fujiwara no Mototsune served as regent (sesshō) to Emperor Yōzei (868–949, r. 876–884). screens and poems, contexts and images 63 artistry and artifice of the painting, his reference to the auspicious occasion, and his assertion of the immutability of the depicted images are what characterize this set of poems as being in the picture appreciation mode. To conclude this section, the attributes of Tang painting-poems and early Japanese kanshi based on pictures can be summarized as follows.

1) they praise the painter and his mastery of the painted subject, and they sometimes also comment on his moral character. 2) they praise the painting, usually for its verisimilitude, while also calling attention to its artifice. 3) they call attention to the painted medium, be it woven textile or plas- tered wall. 4) they call attention to the process of painting in terms of its unfolding within the artist’s mind and materializing from his brush. 5) they compare the painting to objective reality and to the paradoxes involved, such as: a) the unchanging seasons and immutability of the objects depicted. b) the depiction of two or more seasons at the same time. c) the stoppage of time, sometimes portrayed as a moment caught in perpetuity. d) the disregard of normal cause-and-effect relationships. e) the portrayal of great size and distance on a limited two-dimensional surface. f ) the depiction of specific faraway places as close at hand. g) the appeal to senses other than sight, such as hearing, smell, and touch, or the sense that they should, but do not have, sound, scent, or motion. 6) they allude to the relationship between the poet and either the painter or the owner of the painting.

A few of these characteristics are exhibited in early Japanese screen poems. However, as will be discussed in the following chapter, not a single one of these characteristics can be seen in mainstream Japanese screen poetry by the time it becomes a standard poetic genre in the tenth century.

Early Poems on Paintings in Japanese

The oldest Japanese poem based on a visual depiction is included in the eighth-century Man’yōshū. The word kata (form/shape) in the headnote 64 chapter one to the poem is understood to be a drawing of some kind, though whether it was rendered on a wall, screen, scroll, or other medium is unknown. Composed some time in the seventh century by an anonymous author, the poem clearly points to the unchanging nature of the image in a manner similar to the poems by Du and Bai quoted earlier. Man’yōshū 1682 (Book 9) Osakabe no Miko ni tatematsuru uta isshu, yamabito no kata o yomu. A poem offered to Prince Osakabe, composed on a picture of a mountain sage. tokoshie ni / natsu fuyu yuke ya / kawagoromo / ōgi hanatanu / yama ni sumu hito Eternally summers and winters pass— is this the reason why the mountain dweller never parts from his fur robe and his fan?43 In the realm of Daoist immortals evoked by the picture of the mountain sage, the perception of time is such that one day in the immortals’ world is equivalent to a thousand years in the world of men. For the immortal, summers and winters leave almost as soon as they arrive, and the poem embodies the idea that time is relative and opposites can be seen as equiv- alents. The ever-changing seasonal cycle is, for the mountain dweller, part of the unchanging world, which he greets with both his winter clothing and his summer accessory. The immortal will never put down his fan or cast off his fur robe, even if he were not a figure in a painting, but the fact that the poem is based on a static depiction underscores the conflation of the seasons and explains the otherwise curious behavior of the sage. Composed about one hundred years later is a pair of poems also included in Man’yōshū, by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (717?–785). According to the headnote, he composed them while looking out on his garden, but scholars have long pointed to the formal similarities between these poems and others that were based on painted screens. In fact, some have tried to link the poems to the scenes depicted on the Beauties under the Trees screen in the Shōsōin collection. Yakamochi’s poems, however, predate the extant screens and, at least according to the headnote, were composed based on direct observation.

43 Kojima Noriyuki et al., eds., Man’yōshū 2, NKBZ 3 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1973), pp. 390–391. screens and poems, contexts and images 65

Man’yōshū 4139–4140 (Book 19) Tenpyō Shōhō ninen sangatsu tsuitachi no yūbe ni, shun’en no tōri no hana o chōshoku shite tsukuri nishu. Two poems composed while gazing out at the peach and plum blossoms in his spring garden on the evening of the first day of the third month of Tenpyō Shōho 2 [750]. haru no sono / kurenai niou / momo no hana / shitaderu michi ni / idetatsu otome In the spring garden, the peach blossoms glow a crimson hue, and on the illumined path beneath a maiden appears.

waga sono no / sumomo no hana ka / niwa ni chiru / hadare no imada / nokoritaru kamo Could it be that the peach blossoms from my garden have fallen, or do thin patches of snow still remain out in the yard?44 The persuasive visual imagery of the first poem has convinced some that, whether or not Yakamochi actually saw a painting like the one in the Shōsōin collection, he was likely inspired by the Beauties under the Trees theme from Tang painting and poetry. Given the poetic precedents, the coincidental appearance of an actual maiden in his garden seems highly unlikely, unless she was invited there for the specific purpose of acting out the well-known scene. The second poem includes the common Heian poetic conceit of confusing blossoms with snow, or vice versa. Such poetic conceits, called mitate (見立), were often based on visual confusion. As will be seen in a few of the examples that follow, these mitate were common in Heian screen paintings as well. Whereas these early examples were composed in a private setting, references to similar poems composed for public gatherings began to appear not long after. Records show that in the early ninth century, Chinese poems based on paintings were composed for the Great Thanksgiving ceremony at the palace. The ceremony was generally held in autumn of the first year after the ascension of a new emperor, as a harvest and enthronement

44 Kojima, ed., Man’yōshū 3, NKBZ 4, p. 297. Yakamochi’s compositions are the first two poems of Book 19. 66 chapter one rite. In addition to its religious and political significance, it was also an important site for artistic production. As Heldt has noted, the conspicuous consumption and appreciation of the arts during these services were symbolic of the newly enthroned emperor’s authority.45 Records for events like these are the earliest mentions of poetry based on paintings as part of an official court ceremony, and, of these, the account in the Chinese-style official court history, The Continued Later Records of Japan (Shoku Nihon kōki; ca. 869), is the earliest.46 For the Great Thanksgiving ceremony held for Emperor Ninmyō (810–850, r. 833–850) in the eleventh month of 834, the record mentions the presentation of painted screens as well as the composition of Chinese poems. Since Great Thanksgiving services for later emperors always included the presentation of both Chinese and Japanese poems, Hirano Takakuni hypothesizes that such may have been the case with Ninmyō as well, despite the lack of evidence.47 Unfortunately, none of the poems nor the paintings remain, obliging us to rely on later examples for clues. By the mid-tenth century, the inscription process became an important part of the ceremony itself, such that the paintings on the screen and the poems composed for the event became integrated through the medium of performed calligraphy. The Great Thanksgiving services for Emperor Murakami (926–967, r. 946–967), for instance, included the ceremonial inscription of both Chinese and Japanese poetry, as noted by Fujiwara no Koreyuki (1123–1175) in his calligraphy treatise Yakaku teikin shō.48 According to Koreyuki, there were two sets of screens for the occasion: one depicted Chinese scenes and were inscribed with kanshi, and the other, with smaller screens, depicted Japanese scenes and were inscribed with waka. The artistic and linguistic division between the two sets and their parallel presentation in the ceremony are interesting details, but,

45 Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, p. 256. 46 The twenty-volume Shoku Nihon kōki is the fourth of the so-called Six National His- tories (Rikkokushi) and is devoted solely to Emperor Ninmyō’s reign (833–850). See Saeki Ariyoshi, ed., Shoku Nihon kōki (Osaka: Asahi shinbunsha, 1930). 47 For more on the religious and political aspects of the Great Thanksgiving feasts, see Hirano Takakuni, Daijōsai no kōzō (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1986). See also William H. and Helen Craig McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 1:375–378 (supplemental note 18), which provides detailed information about the preparations for such events. 48 Yakaku teikin shō, GSRJ 21, pp. 505–508, cited in Fujita Yuriko, “Daijōe byōbu uta no seikaku o megutte,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 55, no. 4 (April 1978): 47–60. Fujiwara no Koreyuki was the father of Lady Daibu (Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu) and a noted calligrapher. screens and poems, contexts and images 67 again, without the screens or the poems extant, there is very little to be gleaned about the relationship between text and image. The practice of integrating painting, poetry, and calligraphy on folding screens continued throughout the Heian period in both private and public settings. The oldest extant Japanese example from this era was composed during the reign of Emperor Montoku (850–858) by a lady-in- waiting known as Sanjō no Machi. The poem is included in the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, Kokinshū. Kokinshū 930 (Book 17: Miscellaneous 1) Tamura no ōntoki ni, nyōbō no saburai nite, ōnbyōbu no e goranjikeru ni, taki ochitarikeru tokoro omoshiroshi, kore o dai nite uta yome to, saburau hito ni ōserarekereba. During the reign of Emperor Montoku, when ladies-in-waiting were in service to the emperor, he looked upon a folding screen and said to those in attendance, “The part where the waterfall is cascading down is quite enchanting. Take this as a topic and compose some poems on it.” omoiseku / kokoro no uchi no / taki nare ya / otsu to wa miredo / oto no kikoenu Could this be the waterfall of the feelings stopped up in my heart? Though I can see it fall, I cannot hear its sound.49 The poet compares the silent waterfall to unexpressed feelings, presumably of love that cannot be revealed. Where previous poets called attention to the paradox of silent thunder, Sanjō no Machi internalizes it. This kind of metaphor, that rationalizes a perceived similarity or disparity, is referred to as mitate, and was a key characteristic of many poems included in Kokinshū.50 Poems that employ mitate usually begin with the witty observation of a similarity or difference between two things and then present the thought process that in some way brings them together. In the previous poem, Sanjō no Machi reconciles the disparity between sight

49 Kojima Noriyuki and Arai Eizō, eds., Kokin wakashū, SNKT 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), p. 280. Sanjō no Machi (n.d.) was Seishi (Shizuko), daughter of Ki no Natora and a minor consort of Montoku. 50 Imperial anthologies were the most important means of preserving poems and poetic reputations; however, they were not necessarily the principal means by which a poem became widely known, nor were they the original or the intended contexts for the poems they contained. Inclusion in an imperial anthology was the most prestigious status a poem could achieve, and such poems served as important models for later poets. 68 chapter one and sound by comparing the muted waterfall to feelings of inexpressible love, feelings that have now flowed forth in her poem. A mitate based on visual imagery is one of the most basic techniques used to express the kind of elegant confusion for which Kokinshū is so well known. Take, for instance, its use in the following poem by Ki no Tsurayuki, the most important screen poet of his day: Kokinshū 363 (Book 7: Felicitations) Naishi no kami no, Udaishō Fujiwara ason no yosoji no ga shikeru toki ni, shiki no e kakeru ushiro no byōbu ni kakitarikeru uta. When the principal handmaid held the fortieth-year celebration for the Fujiwara major captain of the right, these were the poems written on the screen depicting the four seasons that served as the backdrop. shirayuki no / furishiku toki wa / miyoshino no / yama shita kaze ni / hana zo chirikeru One sees the white flakes of snow falling in torrents, but they are actually the blossoms that scatter in the winds that blow down the mountains of fair Yoshino.51 The pretense of visual confusion, what one might call a ‘visual mitate,’ is a common feature that appears in several Kokinshū poems. In this poem, Tsurayuki takes advantage of the visual similarity between snowflakes and blossoms and thereby rationalizes mistaking one for the other. What looks like heavy snowfall to the viewer is actually a wave of airborne white petals carried by the mountain winds from Yoshino, an area famous for its blossoms. As has been discussed, the particular pose of mistaking blossoms for snow, or vice versa, had earlier precedents in Chinese poetry. The practice of composing verse specifically for painted screens, however, played a key role in reinforcing the technique of visual mitate in the Japanese poetic tradition.52 It was not always the case that Tsurayuki and other screen poets of his time saw the images that accompanied the poems. The painting and the poetry for a set of screens were sometimes commissioned and produced

51 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 119. Seven poems from the same event, the last of which is Tsurayuki’s, are included in sequence in the “Felicitations” section of Kokinshū. The headnote precedes poem 357 on p. 117. The principal handmaid was Fujiwara no Man- shi (Mitsuko; n.d.). The Fujiwara captain was Sadakuni (857–906), an uncle to Emperor Daigo (885–930, r. 897–930) and an important patron of poetry at court. 52 For more on this process, see the section on Tsurayuki’s screen poetry in chapter 2 herein. screens and poems, contexts and images 69 separately as a matter of course. Moreover, the poets’ relatively low rank prevented them from attending the exalted venues at which their poems were presented. In such cases, the poets composed their verses based on general descriptions of the paintings and took advantage of the visual component that they knew would be present when their poems were offered. Tsurayuki and other screen poets could build upon the visual representation of snow and blossoms as identical flecks of white on a folding screen and employ a similar ambiguity in their poems. In the following, for example, the poet notes how plum blossoms are visually indistinguishable from the snow that has fallen on them. Kokinshū 336 (Book 6: Winter) Yuki no uchi no mume no hana o, yomeru. Composed on plum blossoms in the snow. ume no ka no / furi okeru yuki ni / magaiseba / tare ka kotogoto / wakite oramashi If the scent of the plum blossoms were to fuse with the snow fallen on them, who would be able to choose which branch to break?53 In this poem, Tsurayuki implies that the only way the plums can be distinguished from the snow is by their scent, a feature that cannot be represented in a painting. As will be discussed in the following chapter, this kind of mitate is one of the strengths of the poetry composed by Tsurayuki, who often used visual and perspectival ambiguity to introduce allegorical or metaphorical meanings. The fact that Tsurayuki’s screen poems make up more than half of his extant poetic output is indicative of both the requirements of his patrons and the important role that this kind of composition must have played in his overall rhetorical approach. That is, it can be said with relative certainty that his development of techniques based on visual mitate and elegant confusion are strongly tied to the composition of screen poetry.54

53 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 110–111. 54 Konishi Jin’ichi, “The Genesis of the Kokinshū Style,” trans. Helen C. McCullough, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38, no. 1 (June 1978): 61–170, discusses some of the precedents for the phenomenon of ‘elegant confusion’ in Chinese poetry, particularly the visual analogies in Six Dynasties (220–529) shi poetry. These precedents do not, however, detract from the significance of screen poetry techniques on Tsurayuki’s style and on Kokinshū poetry in general. 70 chapter one

An examination of works by Tsurayuki and other prominent poets of his day shows that events that included screen poetry became much more prevalent only after the first waka anthology was completed. Still, the numbers leading up to its compilation are significant. As can be seen in appendix A, which lists the screen poem events predating the completion of Kokinshū, there are forty-eight extant screen poems from nine events that took place in 905 or earlier. Nearly half of these contain strong visual elements that might be attributable to the fact that they were composed on or for painted screens. Of them, eighteen are included in Kokinshū, seven of which were composed for a single event in the second month of 905. Katagiri Yōichi and Takano Haruyo have argued that several more of the poems in Kokinshū are screen poems, though they are not labeled as such.55 The poems on the whole employ a wide variety of compositional approaches, as the following examples will show. The complexity of the cross-fertilization of techniques between screen poetry and court poetry in general is evidenced by the fact that visual mitate was not limited to screen poetry. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two kinds of compositions has to do with the speaker’s perceived physical standpoint in relation to what is described in the poem. Compare, for example, the following poem by Ariwara no Motokata (888– 953) to the poem by Sanjō no Machi cited previously. Note especially how the visual and olfactory senses seem to contradict each other. Kokinshū 103 (Book 2: Spring 2) Kanpyō ōntoki, kisai no miya no uta awase no uta. A poem from the empress’s poetry contest during the Kanpyō era [889–898]. kasumi tatsu / haru no yamabe wa / tōkeredo / fukikuru kaze wa / hana no ka zo suru Though distant are the springtime mountains and hazy is the sky, the breezes that come blowing in bring the scent of blossoms with them.56 As the headnote states, Motokata composed this poem for a poetry contest. At such venues, there was often a visual referent for the poetic topics, such

55 See Katagiri Yōichi, “Ki no Tsurayuki uta no hōhō: Byōbue to utazukuri,” Kansai Daigaku Bungaku Ronshū 44 (March 1995): 115–137, and Takano Haruyo, “Byōbu uta to fūkei: Kajin Ise no kokoromi,” in Watanabe Yasuaki and Kawamura Teruo, eds., Utawareta fūkei (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 2000), pp. 65–90. 56 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 47. Mototaka was the grandson of Ariwara no Narihira (825–880). screens and poems, contexts and images 71 as an object, a garden, a diorama, or sometimes even a painting—a phenomenon discussed in chapter 3. Although it appears that he did not compose specifically for a painted screen, Motokata, like Sanjō no Machi, used a contradiction in sensory evidence as a springboard for a witty expression of elegant confusion—another example of mitate. The poet contrasts the senses of sight and smell: he can readily detect the fragrance of the blossoms, but he cannot see them through the spring haze that obscures the far-off mountainsides. Sanjō no Machi, however, contrasts the senses of sight and sound: she can see the waterfall, but cannot hear it, thereby calling attention to the painted, and therefore artificial, nature of the image. Like the painted cascade on the walls of the Seiryōden hall described by Saga, Sanjō no Machi’s waterfall also “flows, with echoless voice.” The single most important respect in which the poems by Sanjō no Machi and Mototaka differ has to do with the speaker’s perspective. Whereas her speaker clearly stands outside the landscape representation, and therefore cannot hear the waterfall in front of her, his speaker stands fully within the imagined landscape, and therefore senses the mountain breeze that carries the blossoms’ fragrance. This difference in perspective would become the key characteristic that early on distinguished screen poems from poems based on objects at hand. However, some poets obscured even this difference by purposefully employing an ambiguity of perspective in their screen poems. At about the same time that Sanjō no Machi composed her poem on the silent waterfall, two major poets of Kokinshū, the monk Sosei (lay name Yoshimine no Harutoshi; d. ca. 910) and the courtier Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), were given the task of composing upon on an autumn scene. The scene itself was painted on a folding screen to be presented to one of Montoku’s consorts, Empress Kōshi (Fujiwara no Takaiko; d. 858). Although it is not known whether Sosei and Narihira viewed the painting directly, or were simply given a description of the work’s contents, it is clear that both knew the painting included autumn leaves floating down- river. They also knew that the image was specifically of the Tatsuta River. The headnote to their poems in Kokinshū contains the earliest direct reference to a painting of a specific Japanese location.57

57 The name of the river does not appear in some versions of The Collected Works of Sosei (Sosei shū; early tenth century), and Tsurayuki or another compiler may have crafted the Kokinshū headnote well after the fact. Still, the headnote is an important starting point for scholars tracing the origins of Japanese painting. See Ienaga, Jōdai yamato-e zenshi, p. 109. 72 chapter one

Kokinshū 293 (Book 5: Autumn 2) Nijō no kisaki, tōgū no miyasudokoro to mōshikeru toki, ōnbyōbu ni, tatsutagawa ni momiji nagaretaru kata o kakerikeru o dai nite, yomeru. When the Nijō Empress was still called the Mother of the Crown Prince, on her screen was a picture of autumn leaves flowing down the Tatsuta River. The following were composed taking this as the topic. momijiba no / nagarete tomaru / minato ni wa / kurenai fukaki / nami ya tatsuramu Down at the harbor where the flow of autumn leaves reaches its end, could there be a deep crimson tide that crests upon the waters? Sosei

Kokinshū 294 (Book 5: Autumn 2) chihayaburu / kamiyo mo kikazu / tatsutagawa / karakurenai ni/ mizu kukuru to wa Unheard of even in the age of the all-powerful gods— The Tatsuta River, its waters dyed in patterns of deep crimson. Narihira58 The single image that appears in both poems is of water flowing crimson due to the autumn leaves floating upon the river’s surface. The dual reference suggests that the landscape depiction itself must have included this striking image. Sosei’s poem is a hyperbolic conjecture of what the scene might look like further downstream: since the stream of water runs a deep red, perhaps crimson waves rise at the mouth of the river where it flows into the harbor. Based on the crimson-running river that the speaker can see, he speculates about the scene he cannot see, either because it is too far downstream, or because it is not depicted in the picture, or both. The speaker in Narihira’s poem appears to be a figure on the riverbank, within the painted landscape, who compares the autumnal leaves on the Tatsuta River to a pattern tie-dyed in cloth. But on another level, he could also be an observer outside the landscape, looking at the painted surface of

58 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 99. Sosei was a major Kokinshū poet active at poetry contests and at screen poem events into the early tenth century. Ariwara no Narihira is one of the Six Poetic Immortals (rokkasen) as defined by the Kana Preface to Kokinshū and is the main character in several of the episodes contained in The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari; late ninth century). screens and poems, contexts and images 73 the screen. By calling attention to the manufactured nature of the screen, Narihira constructs a mutually reflective relationship between the image of the landscape and the landscape itself. That is, the surface of the water he compares to dyed cloth is in fact a decorated fabric surface, which in turn depicts an autumn scene at Tatsuta River. In the way Narihira turns a familiar trope on its head through reference to the materiality of the painting, the poem is similar to Kuwabara no Haraaka’s kanshi that compared a vigorous cascade to a length of white cloth. Narihira’s poem thus describes a fusion of surfaces in and of the painting—an effective portrayal of colored fabric as autumn foliage as colored fabric. The ambiguity of perspective means that the speaker of the poem may be a figure appreciating the patterned landscape from within or a figure appreciating the patterned depiction of landscape from without. The layering of meanings makes both interpretations possible simultaneously: the speaker is both inside and outside the painting. The dual perspective may also be a function of Narihira’s compositional circumstances: he is composing for the Nijō Empress and part of his task is to compose an appreciation of the painting. The fusing of perspectives, combined with the allusion to the materiality of the painted surface, are what allow witty secondary meanings to emerge in screen poems such as Narihira’s. This development in screen poetry finds its roots in the painting-poem technique, discussed earlier, wherein the poet calls direct attention to the artifice of the painted image. Like Narihira, other poets included in Kokinshū employed a similar, but more subtle approach to their compositions based on painted screens. The possibility that the poem referred to a painting was a supplemental, but not intrinsic part of the poem’s meaning. Take, for example, the following poem by Sakanoue no Korenori (fl. early tenth century), composed for the same birthday celebration that occasioned Tsurayuki’s verse on the snow-blossoms of Yoshino. Kokinshū 362 (Book 7: Felicitations) aki kuredo / iro mo kawaranu / tokiwa yama / yoso no momiji o / kaze zo kashikeru Though autumn has come, the colors do not change on Evergreen Mountain— crimson leaves from elsewhere have been lent there by the winds.59

59 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 118–119. Korenori was a prominent composer for screens and poetry contests at the court of Daigo. He is the father of the poet Sakanoue 74 chapter one

Because the name ‘Evergreen Mountain’ (Tokiwayama) suggests timeless- ness and constancy, it was a commonly invoked image in congratulatory poems during the Heian period. It is therefore not surprising that Korenori notes the unchanging nature of the landscape. What is clever is that his description is also entirely appropriate for the screen painting for which he was asked to compose. In citing Evergreen Mountain as an auspicious symbol for longevity, the poem reads as a straightforward paean for the guest of honor. The fact that it accompanies a screen painting allows for a further interpretation, for in addition to describing the mountain, the poem also describes the painting in which “the colors do not change.” Other early examples of Japanese verse composed on paintings are preserved not in Kokinshū, but Shūishū (ca. 1007), the third imperial anthology of Japanese verse. Shūishū in fact contains the highest proportion of screen poems of all the imperial anthologies, and though most of the screen poems postdate Kokinshū, the two anthologies draw from a few of the same events.60 For example, the screens for Fujiwara no Sadakuni’s fortieth birthday celebrations that took place in the second month of 905 were the impetus for seven poems in Kokinshū, and Shūishū includes five more from the same event. Shūishū provides a few examples from significantly earlier that display some of the hallmarks of early Japanese screen poetry, such as the allusion to a textile medium. Taira no Sadafun (d. 923) composed the following on the day of the Tanabata festival some time during the reign of Emperor Kōkō (830–887, r. 884–887). Its skillful amalgamation of water imagery with weaving terminology brings to mind the otherworldly nature of the Tanabata story itself. Shūishū 1091 (Book 17: Miscellaneous Autumn) Ninna no ōnbyōbu ni, shichigatsu nanoka, onna no kawa amitaru tokoro. On the seventh day of the seventh month, the following poem was composed on the scene where a woman was bathing in a river, as depicted on the screen belonging to the Ninna Emperor. mizu no aya o / oritachite kimu / nugichirashi / tanabata tsume ni / koromo kasu yo wa I shall wear the clothes I weave from the patterns on these waters,

Mochiki and is one of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals, as defined in the early eleventh century by the poet and scholar Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041). 60 The higher proportion of screen poems in Shūishū reflects the vogue for such poems during the time of its compilation (1005–1007), as well as the individual tastes of the compilers. Similarly, the relative dearth of screen poems in the second imperial anthology, Gosenshū (ca. 951), reflects the opinions of its editors, who had different priorities. screens and poems, contexts and images 75

so that on this night, I may take off my robe and offer it to the Tanabata Maiden.61 The reference in the headnote to the seventh day of the seventh month automatically brings to mind the Tanabata festival and has led scholars to interpret a double meaning in the verb amu. Here, in a relatively rare instance of a double meaning within a headnote, the verb is understood to mean both ‘to bathe’ in the river and ‘to knit together’ the river itself. The wordplay continues into the poem, in which Sadafun’s engagement with the subject matter can be discerned on both the verbal and visual levels. Through his use of the verb oritatsu, meaning ‘to weave’ cloth or ‘to fashion’ clothes as well as ‘to wade’ into the water, Sadafun connects textile imagery with the occasion. Thus, with a single verb, he likens the patterns on the water to cloth, similar to the way Narihira likened the leaf-covered surface of Tatsuta River to tie-dyed cloth. The association is particularly suitable in Sadafun’s poem, for in the Japanese version of the Tanabata legend, the weaver-girl is often depicted waiting by the side of a river for her lover, the cowherd-boy, whom she can meet only once a year. Sadafun further strengthens this association by imagining that the female bather depicted in the painting is weaving the water patterns into a garment so that she may lend her own robe to the Tanabata weaver-girl on this rare occasion when the maiden is to meet with her cowherd-boy lover. Although it appears that Sadafun was not asked to compose specifically on the Tanabata theme, the significance of the date prompted him to make a connection between that legend and what may have been a generic scene of a female bather painted on the emperor’s screen. With this poems as well, the speaker can be interpreted as standing either inside or outside the painting. The ambiguity, or dual interpretation, is a consequence of the fact that in Japanese court poetry, the subject is generally unstated. This phenomenon may stem from the general assumption that the first person lyrical mode is the default form of poetic expression in the Japanese tradition. While grammar and context usually provide clues about the speaker’s perspective, ambiguities often remain. The previous poem, for instance, could be interpreted as the observations

61 Komachiya Teruhiko, ed., Shūi wakashū, SNKT 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 313. Ninna is the name of the era (spanning the second month of 885 to the fourth month of 889) that roughly coincides with Kōkō’s reign. Well-known for love poetry, Taira no Sadafun and his romantic adventures are fictionalized and narrated in Tales of Heichū (Heichū monogatari; ca. 965). See Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichū, Harvard East Asian Monograph 137 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 1989). 76 chapter one of an outside speaker looking at the painted scene. In translation, this version would replace the instances of the first person ‘I’ with the third person ‘she.’ The poem would thus read: Will she wear clothes she weaves from the patterns on the waters? So on this night, she may take off her robe and offer it to the Tanabata Maiden. The auxiliary suffix mu, in kimu (to wear), generally expresses first person will or intention, as in the phrase, “I will wear the clothes.” However, the same auxiliary suffix may also express first person conjecture about someone or something else, as in the phrase, “Will she wear the clothes?” Grammatical possibilities like this are what lead to the ambiguities that often enrich a poem’s potential interpretations. For the most part, however, the speaker’s standpoint in screen poetry is discernible. In Sanjō no Machi’s poem, for example, that calls attention to the silence of the painted waterfall, the perspective of the speaker is clearly from outside the depicted scene—she would otherwise be able to hear the falling water. Other poems, like the following by Ōnakatomi no Yorimoto (b. ca. 886), unmistakably adopt the viewpoint of a figure within the painting. Shūishū 1247 (Book 19: Miscellaneous Love) Ninna no ōnbyōbu ni ama shiotaruru tokoro ni tsuru naku. On a screen for the Ninna Emperor, cranes cry out where a female diver is soaked with sea water. shiotaruru / mi wa ware to nomi / omoedomo / yoso naru tazu mo / ne o zo nakunaru Though I thought that I alone was drenched in brinelike tears of grief— the far-off cranes let out their cries as well.62 Yorimoto’s use of the first person term ware makes the perspective clear: the speaker is the female diver depicted in the painting. The fact that

62 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 362. The second ku (line) reads “mi wa ware nomi to” in a variant text. The meaning is essentially the same. The verb shiotaru means ‘soaked with salt water’ and was commonly extended to sleeves soaked with tears. Ōnakatomi no Yori- tomo was a minor court poet. He was the father of Yoshinobu, one of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals and a compiler of the second imperial anthology of Japanese verse, Gosenshū. screens and poems, contexts and images 77 the speaker hears the cries of the cranes depicted in the screen painting is further evidence that the standpoint is from within the landscape. Composing in the guise of the opposite sex was a fairly common practice in the Japanese tradition, and in this particular case, the visual cue, or the verbal description of it, likely facilitated Yorimoto’s adoption of the female voice. Tamagami Takuya has noted that the poet’s adoption of the point of view of a figure within the painted scene, regardless of the gender of that figure, helped effect a differentiation between poet and speaker. He further argues that the position of the speaker, and how to assume that speaker’s voice, were two of the primary considerations of the screen poet. Eventually, the adoption of the painted figure’s point of view became all but standard procedure in the composition of screen poetry by the middle of the tenth century.63 Unfortunately, the headnotes to many of these early poems provide very few details. We do not know, for instance, whether the poems by Sadafun and Yorimoto discussed here were inscribed onto the screen or were simply inspired by the painting. Nor do we know whether the poets saw the screen directly or were merely provided with verbal descriptions. Contemporary records are likewise unclear about inscription protocols during this early period, suggesting that the integration of Japanese painting, waka poetry, and calligraphy developed only after these late ninth- century examples. The number and variety of events that included screen poetry markedly increase in the mid-tenth century, and the historical details for these events, as well as the poems themselves, show a gradual homogenization of compositional approach, as we shall see in the next chapter. The analysis in this chapter, which focused on pre-Kokinshū Japanese poems that were either inscribed upon or inspired by painted scenes, shows that visual depictions presented both a challenge and an opportunity for poets to engage their subject matter on a number of different levels. Among the variety of rhetorical techniques early Japanese poets employed, some had roots in painting-poems from Tang China. These Chinese precedents called attention to the stasis and silence of painted scenes and exhibited a responsiveness to other sensory detail as well. Japanese poets applied these methods to their own poetry, in both Chinese and Japanese,

63 Tamagami Takuya, “Byōbu-e to uta to monogatari to,” Kokugo kokubungaku 22, no. 1 (January 1953): 1–20. He also suggests connections between screen poetry composition and the development of monogatari narrative fiction, a topic taken up with the discussion of Lady Ise’s poetry in the next chapter. 78 chapter one at times employing a visual mitate to express a kind of elegant confusion about the scene they were describing. Furthermore, the way poets used optical allusions to engage with the painted images, all the while assuming that their readers would participate in a similar appreciation, allowed poets to seek out additional meanings in the visual elements portrayed on painted screens. In part because waka poems generally lack explicit subject markers, the viewpoint (as well as the gender) of the speaker can remain ambiguous. The poems thus often resonate with multiple interpretations. In the years leading up to the compilation of Kokinshū, poets seemed to be exploring the expressive and descriptive possibilities of screen poetry through a range of approaches, but in the decades immediately following Kokinshū, they began to follow more limited formulas in terms of content and perspective. As will be discussed in the following chapter, it was in this new environment that poets like Ki no Tsurayuki, Ōshikōchi no Mistune, and Lady Ise earned their status as coveted screen poets through their ability to express appropriate sentiments and display their creativity at the same time, all within much stricter bounds. Chapter Two

The Efflorescence of Screen Poetry

The vitality of screen poetry composition in the late ninth and early tenth centuries was due in large part to the skillful compositional styles of three poets: Ki no Tsurayuki, Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, and Lady Ise. Together, they helped establish the criteria by which this relatively new genre was to be judged in their generation and beyond. Of fundamental concern to the analysis of screen poetry is the speaker’s position vis-à-vis the painted landscape. Inscription practices played a role in the way poets thought about the position of the speaker in their screen compositions, and the way the written words appeared on the screen helped link the painted figure, the poet as speaker, and the viewer of the painted scene. Tsurayuki in particular took advantage of the ambiguity of perspective to provide depth and complexity to his screen poems. Visual depictions and their implied or accompanying narratives also had a profound effect on the way screen poets approached their subject matter. Ise’s gift for dramatic context and Mitsune’s balanced sense of the apposite demonstrated how screen poetry could relate to and enhance important occasions. Not only did these three poets establish new conventions for the composition of screen poetry, but they also provided later counterparts with essential strategies for incorporating visual images into their poems. These techniques helped later poets create rhetorically complex poems that both specified the contents of the picture and also expressed sentiments appropriate to the occasion for which they were commissioned.

Inscription and Perspective

Screen poetry as a genre flourished for about a hundred years, beginning in the late ninth century. Great Thanksgiving services and other gatherings held for or at the behest of members of the imperial family continued to be the most typical and consistent venues for screen poetry, but, beginning with the accession of Emperor Uda in 887, the number as well as the kinds of events at which screen poetry was composed increase 80 chapter two

240 220 200 180 160 140 120 100

number of poems 80 60 40 20 0 0 0 0 70 910 87 97 0 93 1110 950 890 990 11 1130 1150 101 0 107 1030 1050 1090 year

Figure 3: Frequency of screen poem composition, ca. 870–1170. dramatically.1 Uda himself sponsored a number of events that included screen poetry, but the genre was by no means an imperial prerogative. For important nobles with means, coming-of-age observances, birthday celebrations, and court entrance ceremonies were also occasions that commonly called for the composition of new screen poems. The sheer numbers indicate their rise in popularity, and their prominent inclusion in personal poetry collections and imperial anthologies (chokusenshū) shows the esteem in which they were held. Though the numbers do not rise consistently from one year to the next, the overall increase through the tenth century is unmistakable (see Figure 3).2 With this increase comes a general trend in the manipulation of subject matter that hinges on whether the poem was inscribed onto the screen. Inscription and perspective become linked in tenth-century screen poetry as poets began to explore elements in the painted world as topics for

1 Some of the reasons behind this increase are outlined in Helen Craig McCullough, Brocade by Night: ‘Kokin Wakashū’ and the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry (Stan- ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 231–292, and in Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan, Cornell East Asia Series 139 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2008), pp. 241–284. 2 Figure 3 is based on the chart in Katano Tatsurō, Nihon bungei to kaiga no sōkansei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1975), p. 168, and on data in Fujita Kazutaka, “Heian chō byōbu uta no shiteki kōsatsu: Jusseiki ni okeru meisho e byōbu no tenkai,” Nihon bungaku kenkyū 36 (1997): 93–102. the efflorescence of screen poetry 81 composition. Yoshikawa Eiji has divided headnote descriptions from this time period into two types: those that use the verb ‘compose’ ( yomeru 詠める) and those that use the verb ‘write’ (kaku 書く).3 The editors responsible for the headnotes generally distinguish between poems “composed about the painted picture” and those “written on the painted screen.” The former implies that the poem is an external commentary on the picture as an object, while in the latter case the poem addresses the content of the picture from within. Furthermore, ‘composed’ poems bear some sort of connection with people and circumstances outside the painting, while ‘written’ poems have a direct, physical connection to the painting through the medium of calligraphy. The fundamental difference between the two types of poems is one of perspective. Poems that were ‘composed’ take the picture, the physical object, as the topic of the poem. These poems tend to have speakers whose viewpoints are outside the picture and who in some way call attention to the painted nature of the image. Poems that were ‘written’ take the depicted scene as the topic of the poem and have speakers whose viewpoints are within the painting, and thus the poems do not call attention to the artifice of the painted image. Taking a waterfall on a folding screen as a simple example, the speaker of a composed poem would not hear the sound of falling water, but the speaker of a written poem would. Put another way, in the former, the painting itself becomes the topic, and in the latter, the content of the painting becomes the topic. Two consecutive poems from Kokinshū illustrate this division, the first by Tsurayuki, and the second by Sakanoue Korenori. Kokinshū 931 (Book 18: Miscellaneous 2) Byōbu no e naru hana o, yomeru. Composed on flowers in a screen painting. sakisomeshi / toki yori nochi wa / uchihaete / yo wa haru nare ya / iro no tsune naru Since the time that they first began to bloom, they have lingered on— Is this a world of lasting spring, that their colors never change?

3 Yoshikawa Eiji, “Byōbu uta no seisei to Kokinshū,” Chūko bungaku 26 (1980): 12–24, and “Kokinshū izen no byōbu uta,” in Byōbu uta to uta awase, Waka bungaku ronshū 5, ed. Waka bungaku ronshū iinkai (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1990), pp. 51–80. 82 chapter two

Kokinshū 932 (Book 18: Miscellaneous 2) Byōbu no e ni, yomiawasete, kakikeru. A poem composed to accompany the picture on a folding screen and then inscribed. karite hosu / yamada no ine no / kokitarete / naki koso watare / aki no ukereba Rice plants from the mountain paddies are cut down to dry, fallen like the tears of the wild geese that cry while crossing through the sadness of autumn.4 The speaker in Tsurayuki’s poem notes that the flowers in the painting will not fade as real ones do, a sentiment that echoes Saga’s Seiryōden poem, cited in the previous chapter, in which the “painting outdoes real flowers in mocking at winter and spring alike.” The flowers in Tsurayuki’s poem began to bloom with the artist’s brush, and their lasting quality delivers a felicitous image of eternal spring. The headnote makes clear that the poem was ‘composed’ (yomeru) about the “flowers in a screen painting,” rather than specifically for inscription onto the screen itself. By contrast, Korenori composed his poem to match the content of the painting, and then the poem was written (kakikeru) onto the screen. Instead of referring to the artificiality of the picture, the poet provides a lyric description of the autumn scene. The specificity of the verb ‘composed to match’ (yomiawasete) and the implication that the poem was subsequently inscribed suggests that Korenori directly saw the picture that formed the basis of his poem. Presumably, because of the practice of placing poem-squares on the screen before the addition of the poem, Korenori knew that his composition would appear written on the screen, a fact that permitted him a greater degree of rhetorical complexity than would normally be suitable were it not attached to a picture. At venues, such as poetry contests, where aural comprehensibility was important, overly intricate poems would not have been appropriate. Here, reference to the image enables the poet to elide certain descriptive elements in favor a more oblique form of expression. Though the picture that inspired Korenori’s poem is no longer extant, the fact that one existed assists in our understanding of the relationship

4 Kojima Noriyuki and Arai Eizō, eds., Kokin wakashū, SNKT 5 (Tokyō: Iwanami shoten, 1989), p. 280. the efflorescence of screen poetry 83 between the poem and the putative image. The multiple meanings and layered syntax of the poem make much more sense when we imagine the painting that accompanied it. The word kari in the first ku (line) works grammatically as the verb ‘cut’ or ‘reap’ but is homophonous with the word for ‘geese.’ When we arrive at the verb ‘cry,’ the implied subject up to that point in the poem is the farmers or field workers who have cut the rice plants to put them out to dry, and it is perhaps from their perspective that the poet has composed his description of the autumn scene. The verbs ‘cry’ and ‘cross’ (naki koso watare) poetically link with the ‘geese,’ which have been introduced only indirectly through homophone. The geese, as well as the field workers who share the same sentiments of autumnal grief, ‘cry’ in both senses of the word: they cry tears, and they cry out. The second ku, “yamada no ine no” (rice plants from the mountain paddies) serves as a ‘literary preface’ for the following ku (the jokotoba 序詞, or ‘literary preface,’ is a rhetorical device used to simultaneously introduce and modify what comes after it). The ensuing ku contains the word kokitarete, which refers both to the rice plants that have ‘fallen’ to cover the fields and to the ‘falling’ tears of the geese, which accounts for the rainy skies that are also only implied. The final ku on the sadness of autumn (aki no ukereba) provides an encompassing description but also turns the reader back to the elements that contributed to the scene. Such multiple meanings are easier to grasp when the reader can see the written poem, as well as the painted scene, which probably included geese flying through rainy skies above farmers in mountain paddies where cut rice plants lay. The poet could assume that his poem would be read and appreciated in conjunction with the screen painting and was thus able to create a textured and lyrical description within the confines of the brief waka form. Because the final product is not extant, we can only imagine how the component parts—the painting, the poem, the calligraphy—contributed to the whole. Later readers of Kokinshū who likewise did not have the benefit of experiencing the finished product must have done the same. We know from later practices that part of the meaning of a poem can be conveyed through the way the calligrapher arranges the characters of the poem on the screen: the characters for ‘rice plants’ (ine) could be placed within the painted depiction of the mountain fields, or certain kana characters in the poem might be placed to represent geese in the sky. These visual elements could have played a significant role in the way Korenori’s verbally complex poem was interpreted by later audiences, if not the original ones. It is difficult to determine how early such practices 84 chapter two began, but in any case, the painted landscape would have provided a common ground for the poet and his audience to express and appreciate the sadness of the autumn scene. Korenori’s poem is the last of three screen poems listed consecutively in the “Miscellaneous” section of Kokinshū (after Sanjō no Machi’s poem on the silent waterfall and Tsurayuki’s poem on the lasting blossoms). Whereas scholars now generally agree that poets of Tsurayuki’s generation did not usually see the screen paintings they composed for, the contexts for each of these three poems, at least, suggest that the poet composed only after a direct viewing of the screen. The prominence of these three examples in premodern commentaries and in modern scholarship might mislead us into thinking that standard compositional procedure entailed a viewing of the painted screens before composing appropriate poems for them, but this was not generally the case. In a pioneering study of screen poetry, Tamagami Takuya used the terms ‘screen poems’ (byōbu uta) and ‘screen painting poems’ (byōbu-e uta) to distinguish between those compositions that had speakers internal and external to the picture—what Yoshikawa has called ‘written’ and ‘composed’ poems in his attempt to use contemporary terminology. Tamagami’s influential study makes the assumption that when the speaker’s perspective was within the picture, the screen poet was identifying with a figure he or she directly observed in the painting.5 Shimizu Yoshiko has pointed out, however, that more often than not, screen poets did not see the screens for which they were asked to compose poetry.6 The composers of screen poetry during the tenth and eleventh centuries were generally vocational poets who served as officials of lower station. As office-holders, they did not rely on poetry for their income, but when an occasion called for congratulatory verse, they were recognized as specialists. These poets were usually too low in rank to attend the coming- of-age ceremonies, birthday felicitations, Great Thanksgiving services, and other events for which they were asked to compose. Their poems would be presented by a proxy, usually someone of high rank or closely related to the guest of honor. When the poems were eventually written on the screen, the final product became a felicitous combination of auspicious images and verbal wishes for good fortune. The fact that certain highly

5 Tamagami Takuya, “Byōbu-e to uta to monogatari to,” Kokugo kokubungaku 22, no. 1 (1953): 1–20. 6 Shimizu Yoshiko, “Byōbu uta seisaku ni tsuite no kōsatsu,” Kansai daigaku kokubungaku 53, no. 12 (1976): 1–9. the efflorescence of screen poetry 85 regarded poets were commissioned time and again for these kinds of events indicates that the guest of honor and other attendees knew who the authors of the poems were, even if the poets themselves were not present and their names were not inscribed along with their poems. The act of inscribing, usually by a calligrapher of high repute, imbued the finished product with a sense of unity and completion, even if the painter, poet, and calligrapher were almost always three separate artists. In this respect, Japanese screen poetry differed from the Chinese painting-poem, which was a genre in which two or even all three of these roles would be taken up by one artist. In addition to the Chinese poems based on paintings discussed in the previous chapter, Tang examples of poems inscribed directly onto walls or screens were also likely known in Japan. The act of inscription in these cases, however, is qualitatively different from Chinese painting-poems and Japanese screen poems precisely because the poet usually acted alone. Screen poetry in Japan always served a social function and was always presented in conjunction with some event. As in the previous examples in this chapter, the poet fulfilled a professional obligation and composed for a public audience. By contrast, early Chinese examples of inscribed poetry show the poet in lyric contemplation, as in the following poem by Bai Juyi, “Written in Spring on a Wall at Flowering Brightness Monastery”: A princess who played her flute here followed the sage phoenix away, leaving this refuge of immortals for what? Its Flowering Brightness, but is there anywhere all this falling-blossom sorrow can be endured? In the meditation hall: an old white-haired monk sweeping the shadows.7 Whereas the act of inscription may indicate that the poem was intended for posterity, the poet’s immediate audience is himself alone. This poem is a record of the poet’s own experiences and observations, based on what he saw, not in a painting, but at the monastery itself. What might be thought of as a location-specific act of graffiti was then copied and preserved in a more portable manuscript form. Acts of inscription, like Bai’s, find some parallels in certain waka poems composed as votive offerings, but in general the approach does not appear to have affected the way Japanese screen poems were composed. Integrated poem-paintings executed by one artist would not flourish in China until the Song, too

7 David Hinton, trans., The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I (New York: New Directions, 1999), p. 10. 86 chapter two late to have a formative influence on the way early Japanese screen poets approached their art. Thus we return to the early dichotomy between poems that call attention to painted artifice and those that do not, and the related issue of inscription and whether or not poets saw the painted screens before composing their poems. The three Kokinshū examples appear to be exceptions in that the poets ostensibly composed their poems in the immediate vicin- ity of the screen on which they were based. If the vocational poets who were responsible for the bulk of extant screen poetry tended to work on their compositions sight unseen, how were such poems commissioned? Part of the answer lies in other headnotes for screen poems in Kokinshū, which provide a description of what was depicted on the screen. Often, paintings, too, were commissioned specifically for an event, and the host most likely provided written instructions for both the painter and the poet. The majority of the poems in Kokinshū have little or no detail about the circumstances of composition. The editors and compilers (Ki no Tsurayuki, Ki no Tomonori, Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine, all noted screen poets of their day) drew upon available sources when they elected to provide information about the circumstances of a poem’s composition, and they were ultimately responsible for what went into the headnote, if any, for each poem in the anthology. The headnote for the following poem by Fujiwara no Okikaze (fl. early tenth century) states that Prince Sadayasu (870–924) was in charge of the planning for Empress Kōshi’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. The ensuing description may have been based on Sadayasu’s original instructions to the painters and poets for the event. Kokinshū 351 (Book 7: Felicitations) Sadayasu no miko no, kisai no miya no isoji no ga tatematsurikeru onbyōbu ni, sakura no hana no chiru shita ni, hito no hana mitaru kata kakeru o, yomeru. Prince Sadayasu held the fiftieth-year celebrations for the empress, and on the folding screen for the event there was painted a picture of a person, under the scattering cherries, watching the blossoms fall. The following poem was composed for the scene. itazura ni / sugusu tsukihi wa / omōede / hana mite kurasu / haru zo sukunaki Completely unaware am I of the days and months that idly pass me by, the efflorescence of screen poetry 87

but the spring days spent looking at blossoms seem few indeed!8 The location and circumstance of the person (hito), the fact that the figure was painted in the picture (kata kakeru), and the use of the verb ‘composed’ ( yomeru), signal, in Yoshikawa’s schema, that the image preceded the poem, and that the poet may have even seen the picture beforehand. Yet in the poem, the speaker seems to be the figure specified in the headnote, speaking from within the painted landscape. At the same time, for the speaker to say that he does not experience (omōede) the idle passing of days and months can be read as a commentary on the timeless quality of the painting from a standpoint outside the screen. The perspective is certainly not as clear as in Tsurayuki’s poem on the never-changing blossoms, and the ambiguity may derive from the fact that a verbal description of the scene served as the de facto ‘topic’ from which the poet worked. The uncertainty of perspective also calls into question how conscientious the Kokinshū compilers were in making the distinction between poems that were composed and those that were written for folding screens. Whereas Okikaze’s poem was ostensibly composed on the painted image, the subsequent poem in Kokinshū, by Tsurayuki, was written on the screen and thus supposedly addresses the content of the painting. Kokinshū 352 (Book 7: Felicitations) Motoyasu no miko no nanasoji no ga no ushiro no byōbu ni, yomite kakeru. Composed and inscribed on the screen that was to serve as the backdrop for Prince Motoyasu’s seventieth birthday celebrations. haru kureba / yado ni mazu saku / ume no hana kimi ga chitose no / kazashi to zo miru When spring arrives in the garden, the first to flower of the plum blossoms can be seen as the ornamental sprays for our master’s thousand years.9 The speaker does not call attention to the painted nature of the image, taking the painted blossoms as real and subject to the changes brought

8 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 115–116. 9 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 116. 88 chapter two by the seasons. But by suggesting that the sprigs of flowers can be used for the guest of honor, the poet has subtly crossed the line from the two- dimensional painted surface into the three-dimensional space of the event. The wording in the headnotes for the two pairs of poems is parallel, but while the contrast in perspective between Kokinshū 931 (composed) and Kokinshū 932 (written) is relatively clear, the difference between Kokinshū 351 (composed) and Kokinshū 352 (written) is much more ambiguous. Cross-referencing the circumstances of composition with personal poetry collections and other contexts in which the same poem appears further blurs Yoshikawa’s dichotomy between poems that were composed and those that were written. Often, the wording in headnotes is inconsis- tent or shows signs of having been reworked based on the way the poem appears in Kokinshū or elsewhere. Questions about dating, editing, and manuscript lineages for personal collections contribute to the difficulty in discerning the original wording—and whether, or to what extent, the two compositional stances were differentiated. For example, one of the most important sources for the screen poetry of this period is the collected works of Tsurayuki, a text known as The Tsurayuki Collection (Tsurayuki shū). Discerning the provenance of the text is extremely problematic. Scholars surmise that the poet’s son, Tokifumi (922?–996?), probably put together an early version, based perhaps on a preliminary collection by Tsurayuki himself, some years after the poet’s death.10 Prominent poets acquainted with Tokifumi most likely edited the headnotes and the arrangement of poems, and we cannot determine how mindful the editors were of the correlation between headnote wording and compositional stance. The overall evidence points to the limited conclusion that in the majority of cases, composed poems speak from a perspective outside the picture, and written poems speak from a perspective inside the picture. Such distinctions mattered to those early poets who had to adjust their compositional stance depending on the occasion and the immediate audience, but the point becomes moot after the mid-tenth century, when screen poetry composed from the viewpoint solely outside the screen was completely abandoned. Poems of the ‘composed’ variety, which exhibit

10 A second, less thematically organized textual lineage suggests that there may have been an entirely separate set of compilation circumstances for a second collection of Tsurayuki’s poems. See Tanaka Kimiharu, Hirasawa Ryūsuke, and Kikuchi Yasuhiko eds., Tsurayuki shū, Mitsune shū, Tomonori shū, Tadamine shū, Waka bunganku taikei 19 (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 348–356. the efflorescence of screen poetry 89 the approach most common in Chinese painting-poems, give way to a harmony of painting and poetry that derives from the two genres contributing to a shared form of expression. Poet and artist, even when working separately, come to be aware of the conglomerate art form that would result. Rather than having the words describe the picture, both the poem and the painting come to mutually describe elements in nature. This represents an important shift in compositional approach as screen poetry matured as a genre and came to be included more regularly in the annual rites and ceremonies at court from the 930s until the end of the century (again, see figure 3). Even though the verb yomeru (composed) continues to be used in anthology headnotes, public screen poetry would no longer call attention to painted artifice and would, from the mid-tenth century on, be composed solely from the viewpoint of a figure within a painted landscape. Still, as we shall see later, some exemplary screen poems exhibit an ambiguity of perspective that allows for multiple interpretations. Tsurayuki, the consummate screen poet of his day, has his 539 screen compositions spanning his entire career at the beginning of The Tsurayuki Collection. The fact that his poem, quoted previously, on the never-changing blossoms (Kokinshū 931) is not included in the screen poem section of his collection suggests that, by the time of the collection at least, focusing on the artificial nature of a painting was not considered appropriate in formal screen poetry. The act of inscription also became related to the prestige of selection as screen poetry events increasingly turned into displays of wealth and man- ifestations of political and cultural authority (see chapter 4). One event could serve as the impetus for multiple poems from several poets. Instead of requesting a handful of appropriate poems from a single poet, powerful patrons would commission sets of poems from a number of poets, producing an indirect competition. The process of selecting poems for inscription from the pool requested or commissioned varied from event to event, but the criteria for a poem’s selection always included some combination of auspiciousness of imagery, appropriateness to the occasion, and correspondence to the picture, as well as the status and reputation, poetic or otherwise, of the composer. Subject matter, selection criteria, and inscription practices continued to vary into the middle of the tenth century. Poetic perspective, however, became more uniform in public screen poetry as poets shunned the external perspective that pointed out the artifice of the painted image. 90 chapter two

Tsurayuki and Screen Poetry: Layered Perspective and Ekphrasis

More than half of the nearly one thousand extant compositions by Tsurayuki are poems composed for screens, and, of those, the following is perhaps the poem most admired by later poets and critics. The Tsurayuki Collection 338 Onaji rokunen no haru, Saemon no kami dono no byōbu no uta. In the spring of the sixth year of the same reign [Jōhei], a poem for the folding screen of the captain of the Left Palace Guards. omoikane / imogari yukeba / fuyu no yo no / kawakaze samumi / chidori naku nari My longing unbearable, I go out to where she lives— In the cold river winds of the winter’s night, the plovers cry aloud.11 The headnote to the poem as it appears in the third imperial anthology, Shūishū, lists the circumstances of composition as unknown. Other sources, including The Tsurayuki Collection, tell us that the poet composed this poem in 936 for a screen belonging to the captain of the Left Palace Guards, Fujiwara no Yasutada (890–936), the eldest son of the powerful political figure Fujiwara no Tokihira (871–909). The relatively late screen poem shows the poet at the height of his powers. We do not know for certain if Tsurayuki saw the screen he composed for, but we can imagine how, for the observer, a viewing of the screen might have enhanced the narrative quality of the poem, and, conversely, how the poem allowed the painting to tell a unique story. Comprehension of the poem, however, in no way depends on having the image at hand. The poem is not merely a supplement to the picture—it is an independent expression unto itself. The contrast between the feelings of passion and the freezing winds, and the empathetic association of the speaker with the crying plovers, as well as unusual diction combine to create an especially striking poem. The most successful screen poems struck a delicate balance: they enhanced

11 Komachiya Teruhiko, ed., Shūi wakashū, SNKT 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 64. The poem also appears as Tsurayuki shū 338. See Tanaka Kimiharu and Tanaka Kyōko, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, Shikashū zenshaku sōsho 20 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1997), pp. 277–278. The poem is praised by the noted critics Shun’e (b. 1113), Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), his son Teika, who composed an allusive variation based on it (Shūi gusō 1339), and Kamo no Chōmei (1155?–1216) in his poetic treatise Mumyōshō. I discuss the poem in greater detail within the context of the formation of poetic conventions in chapter 3. the efflorescence of screen poetry 91 the painted image by including elements that could not be portrayed in the medium of painting (such as the wind, the cold, and the cries of plovers, as in the previous poem), but at the same time they in no way depended on that image, or even its existence, to be understood. Tsurayuki’s career as a screen poet spans over four decades, from a set of congratulatory poems for a birthday celebration for Fujiwara no Sadakuni in 905 to a sequence of seasonal poems for a set of palace screens in 946, a span roughly equivalent to the interval between the first and second imperial anthologies of waka, Kokinshū (ca. 905) and Gosenshū (ca. 951). The Tsurayuki Collection presents, in roughly chronological order, over five hundred representative samples of his screen poetry during that span, composed for at least forty distinct events.12 Tsurayuki, aside from his role as compiler of Kokinshū and his identity as the author of its “Kana Preface,” was one of the most influential and prolific poets of the first half of the tenth century. His post-Kokinshū career is dominated by screen poetry, and his many works helped define the genre through his exploration of perspective and through his introduction of new topics to waka composition via reference to painted screens. The structure and makeup of his collected works emphasize his position as the premier screen poet of his day. Whoever was responsible for the organization of The Tsurayuki Collection chose to open the personal poetry collection with the following two screen compositions from early in 905, the same year Tsurayuki and his committee completed the compilation of Kokinshū. The Tsurayuki Collection 1 Engi gonen no nigatsu, Izumi no taishō no yosoji no ga no byōbu no uta, ōseiinite kore o tatematsuru. In the second month of Engi 5 [905], there were to be poems for the screen for the fortieth-year celebrations of the Izumi major captain. Receiving an imperial commission, Tsurayuki offered these poems. natsuyama no / kage o shigemi ya / tamahoko no / michi yuki hito mo / tachidomaruran On Summer Hill the shade from the trees is dense— Is that the reason why even the travelers on the road stop here to rest a while?

12 Kikuchi Yasuhiko, Kokinshū igo no Tsurayuki (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1980), pp. 10–12, provides a table of screen poetry events for which Tsurayuki composed. 92 chapter two

The Tsurayuki Collection 2 shirayuki no / furishiku toki wa / miyoshino no / yamashitakaze ni / hana zo chirikeru One sees the white flakes of snow falling in torrents, but they are actually the blossoms that scatter in the winds that blow down the mountains of fair Yoshino.13 One of the primary reasons these poems open the collection is to highlight the fact that Tsurayuki’s services were often called for by the emperor himself. Later poets and critics do not remark extensively upon the two compositions, though the latter is included in Kokinshū. Nonetheless, they more than adequately serve their function as congratulatory verses. The first poem refers to travel and contains the kinds of felicitous words required of the occasion: shigemi, ‘grow thick,’ and tamahoko no, which might be translated as ‘straight as a jeweled spear.’ The latter is a pillow word (makura kotoba 枕詞), a poetic epithet that precedes and modifies the word michi (road). The second poem contains the auspicious place- name Yoshino, famous for its cherry blossoms, and the oft-used comparison of falling snowflakes to scattering petals—a comparison that would have been reinforced by the painting on the screen. This poem concludes a set of seven, included sequentially in Kokinshū (poems 357–363), which were composed by six different authors for the same event, the fortieth birthday of Fujiwara no Sadakuni (see appendix A). The emphasis on imperial patronage continues into the next group of poems in The Tsurayuki Collection. The ensuing twenty poems, commissioned by Emperor Daigo in 906, were all composed for an eight-panel screen with representations of activities from each of the twelve months of the year (tsukinami byōbu 月次屏風). Screens depicting monthly activities were a relatively new genre, and Tsurayuki would compose for several of these over the course of his career. In this specific instance, we know that Tsurayuki did not view the screen before composing his poems, because the headnote makes clear that the poems were to serve as the

13 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, pp. 73–74. Numeration and subsequent translations of headnotes and poems from The Tsurayuki Collection are based on the version in this edition. The first poem is also anthologized as Shūishū 130 (Book 3: Summer), and the second as Kokinshū 363 (Book 7: Felicitations). Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, pp. 260–261, discusses some of the felicitous symbolism and political implications of the first poem. the efflorescence of screen poetry 93 base material (ryō 料) for the screen paintings that were to be executed later. Instances like these, marked by the term ryō for base material, are clear examples of poetry propelling the subject matter of painting. The Tsurayuki Collection 3–22 Engi rokunen, tsukinami no byōbu hatchō ga ryō no uta, yonjū go shu, seji nite kore o tatematsuru nijisshu. In the sixth year of Engi [906], there were forty-five poems composed as the basis for an eight-panel screen of monthly activities, and, receiving an imperial order, Tsurayuki offered the following twenty poems.14 Tsurayuki proceeds to engage such subjects as planting the fields in the third month, the bringing of tribute horses in the eighth month, and the Naming of the Buddhas ceremony in the twelfth month. This set of poems brings to light an additional category of compositional circumstance— instances in which the paintings were based on a set of poems. In the majority of cases, the paintings came first. The poet would then compose based on a verbal description which for all practical purposes, was the assigned topic for both the painter and the poet. More rarely, the poet would base his composition on his direct observation of the painted scene. With this set of poems from 906, Tsurayuki appears to have had the freedom to compose on themes of his own choosing, and he in fact introduces several topics that do not appear in Kokinshū, which was completed just the year before (as will be discussed in conjunction with the development of poetic topics in chapter 3). Poems commissioned for later illustration included a degree of descriptive specificity not usually found in poems based on pictures already extant. The poet, keeping in mind that the painter or painters would later create the visual scenes based on his verbal descriptions, tended to include images and activities that could be readily illustrated. The process might be considered the inverse of ekphrasis—a verbal description for rather than of a graphic representation, with the words preceding the pictures. A prime example dates from the twelfth month of 914, when Tsurayuki composed a set of fifteen seasonal poems to serve as the basis for a painted screen for Princess Ichinomiya (the First Princess, Kanshi), a daughter of Daigo.

14 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, pp. 74–87. 94 chapter two

The Tsurayuki Collection 29–43 Engi jūyonen jūnigatsu, onna Ichinomiya onbyōbu no ryō no uta, Teiji-in no ōse ni yorite tatematsuru jūgoshu. In the twelfth month of Engi 14 [914], poems were composed as the basis for a screen for the First Princess. By order of the Teiji retired emperor [Uda], the following fifteen poems were offered. As with the 906 sequence, the term ryō signals the fact that the poems were to serve as the base material for the illustrations, which were to come later. Note the descriptive nature of the opening poems from the set: The Tsurayuki Collection 29 atarashiki / toshi wa iedomo / shikazuka ni / karaku furinuru / kyō ni zo arikeru Although we say the new year has come, nonetheless, how magnificently the snow falls on today of all days!

The Tsurayuki Collection 30 yama mireba / yuki zo mada furu / harugasumi / itsu to sadamete / tachi wataruran Looking at the mountains, the snow is still falling— when will the time come for the spring haze to rise and cover them? The arrival of the new year meant the end of winter and the beginning of spring, but snow on the first day of the year was considered auspicious. In the opening verse, Tsurayuki establishes the time of year and presents the image of falling snow that continues into the second verse. He specifically refers to the sense of sight (mireba), introducing mountains and spring haze in the second verse, and we can imagine how the painter might have taken these cues to produce a seasonal landscape that progressed from right to left from early spring through the four seasons. In the third verse, the mountain winds bring the fragrance of plum down to a dwelling, and the next poem has trailing white clouds that look like cherry trees flowering on the distant mountainsides. The perspective subtly changes from a panoramic landscape to a more specific view of the far-off mountains, perhaps from the point of view of the figure in or next to a dwelling in the foreground. From cuckoos, irises, and ‘forgetting grass’ in the summer, to the efflorescence of screen poetry 95 maidenflowers, deer, bush clovers, and chrysanthemums in the autumn, the poems from this brief set of fifteen are replete with concrete images of the seasons. Furthermore, the mountains, waterfalls, marshes, fields, and dwellings also included in the poems provide a convenient backdrop from which the painters could proceed. Some of these poems, especially toward the beginning of the set, provide a kind of diagram of backdrops and seasonal images, while others present more specific, visually striking motifs. Later editors must have appreciated the visual effect of the following poem from this same set when they included it in the third imperial anthology as Shūishū 439 (Book 8: Miscellaneous 1). The Tsurayuki Collection 40 tsune yori mo / terimasaru kana / yama no ha no / momiji o wakete / izuru tsukikage How extraordinarily bright it shines! The moonlight emerging through the red autumn leaves upon the mountain ridge.15 One could argue that such imagery was required of any poem with a seasonal topic. However, compared to a typical series of seasonal poems taken, for instance, from a hundred-poem sequence, the abundance of visual detail in these fifteen poems from 914 is exceptional and is likely connected to the fact that Tsurayuki was providing a kind of blueprint from which the painters would operate.16 Like the ‘pregnant moment’ captured in some paintings, many of these poems are a snapshot of a fleeting poetic instant, described in such a way as to facilitate its illustration. In The Tsurayuki Collection are several sets of poems composed for later pictures, and when we compare these to Tsurayuki’s other screen compositions, certain trends emerge. When the poems come first, elements of landscape and natural imagery come to the fore, serving as a guideline for the would-be painters of the scene. When the pictures come first (whether the poet saw them or not), the poet has the opportunity

15 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, p. 97. The Shūishū headnote reads “byōbu no e ni” (“for a screen painting” or “on a screen painting”). Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 124. 16 Because of the disparate sources from which imperial anthologies draw, including events at which painted screens provided the subject matter, the density of concrete imagery in seasonal sequences varies greatly. 96 chapter two to add a layer of meaning or an appreciation to the image and to call upon human faculties other than the sense of sight. The categorical details are, of course, not mutually exclusive, and we find similar poems in both types of circumstance. Still, while quantitative analysis has limitations of its own, poems based on already completed pictures tend to focus more on human activities, and those that served as the base material for later pictures tend to focus more on natural imagery.17 We can surmise that when poets knew their poems would later be illustrated, they must have felt obliged to include concrete images that could readily find representation in painted form. Poems composed on preexisting paintings show a somewhat different approach. The headnotes provide the reader with the pictorial context and may also have served as the topic for the poet, in those cases when the poet was not allowed or was otherwise unable see the screen itself. The third set of poems in The Tsurayuki Collection provides excellent examples: The Tsurayuki Collection 23–28 Engi jūsannen jūgatsu, naishi no byōbu no uta, uchi no ōse nite tatematsuru. In the tenth month of Engi 13 [913], there were to be poems for the screen of the principal handmaid, and by the emperor’s command Tsurayuki offered these. Other sources tell us that the principal handmaid mentioned here is the daughter of the important nobleman Fujiwara no Takafuji (838–900), and that for her fortieth birthday felicitations in 913, a four-panel folding screen depicting the four seasons was prepared. Tsurayuki’s first poem in this brief cluster of six begins with the following headnote: “There is a place where many people are gathered in a field in autumn” (no ni hito amata aru tokoro, aki). The remaining five poems follow the same pattern, pointing to “the place [in the picture] where . . .” (X-tokoro), which becomes the most common way of providing the pictorial context of a screen poem when it was included in various collections. Beginning with Shūishū, which contains the highest proportion of screen poetry of all the twenty-one imperial anthologies, the most prevalent formula for

17 Yoshiaki Shimizu comes to a similar conclusion in his analysis of a set of Tsurayuki poems in his “Seasons and Places in Yamato Landscape and Poetry,” Ars Orientalis 12 (1984): 4–7. Shimizu designates the two types of compositions as from a screen and for a screen, but his terminology is not always consistent. the efflorescence of screen poetry 97 signaling a screen poem in a headnote is “the place where . . .” (X-tokoro), precisely the formula used in this 916 set by Tsurayuki. The verb ‘composed’ is usually elided, and the headnote provides a basic description of what is depicted in the painting. Most of these descriptions are short, and they often seem to encourage the poet to add other dimensions, such as sound or movement, to the visual image. The headnotes to poems 2–5 of Tsurayuki’s set, for instance, read: Kari no naku o kikeru tokoro The place where one can hear the crying of the geese

Tsukiyo ni koromo utsu tokoro The place where clothes are fulled on a moonlit night

Kawa no hotori ni momiji aru tokoro The place where there are autumn leaves by the side of a river

Yama no momiji shiguretaru tokoro The place where autumn leaves have fallen from the mountains in a shower Note that most of these already include extrapictorial elements such as sound or motion. The last poem in the set presents an example of a longer, more narrative headnote: “The place where a traveler has gotten off his horse and is resting underneath a pine tree by the shore and looks out at the waves rolling in” (michi yuki hito no muma yori orite, kishi no hotori naru matsu no moto ni yasumite nami no yoru o mitaru tokoro). This headnote is reminiscent of certain episodes in The Tales of Ise that provide little more than a brief context for an ensuing poem. Here, the description of the picture invites the poet to speak for the traveler, which Tsurayuki does: The Tsurayuki Collection 28 ware nomi ya / kage to wa tanomu / shiranami mo / taezu tachi yoru / kishi no himematsu Am I the only one who gains respite here in the shade? The white waves also come rising ceaselessly to this lovely pine by the shore. The waves represent guests bringing their congratulatory wishes, and the pine is a felicitous symbol of longevity. Tsurayuki harmonizes the painted 98 chapter two content with the celebratory occasion. On the contrary, the combination of the prose context and the poem that speaks for the narrated (and pictorialized) figure creates something very reminiscent of an episode from a poem-tale (uta monogatari 歌物語). Tamagami Takuya points to these instances in claiming that the process of composing poetry from the perspective of figures within a screen painting contributed to the development of monogatari narratives.18 This particular characteristic of screen poetry is more pronounced in the oeuvre of Ise, discussed later. As was shown in the previous example, composing from the point of view of a figure within the painting was the dominant mode of composition for formal screen poetry, regardless of whether the pictures or the poems came first. Tsurayuki, however, at times subverts this paradigm by choosing to compose from the perspective of an observer within the scene, but not as the principal actor. Far from being limited by what is depicted, Tsurayuki seems to enjoy exploring the artificial realm created by paintings. A poem from the 906 set mentioned earlier illustrates this point. The Tsurayuki Collection 14 Hachi gatsu, koma mukae. The eighth month, bringing tribute horses. ōsaka no / seki no shimizu ni / kage miete / ima ya hikuran / mochizuki no koma At the Ōsaka Barrier, a reflection appears in the limpid waters— are they just now pulling through those horses from ‘Full Moon’? On the surface, the speaker of the poem has seen the reflection of the full moon of the eighth month in the waters at Ōsaka Barrier, and the sight of the moon reminds him that now is the time when tribute horses will be brought from the Mochizuki (literally, Full Moon) stables in Shinano (present-day Nagano Prefecture). These horses will eventually be brought through the Ōsaka Barrier for presentation to the emperor—the rite of receiving the tribute horses from Mochizuki usually occurred on the twenty-third of the eighth month.19

18 See Tamagami, “Byōbu-e to uta to monogatari to.” 19 See Kamishino Shōji, “Tsurayuki ‘Mochizuki no koma’ ei kō,” Bungaku 39, no. 10 (1971): 47–65. the efflorescence of screen poetry 99

An analysis of the grammatical structures that occur in this poem reveals what appears to be a purposefully injected sense of ambiguity. These forms trigger a number of secondary readings that pivot on the identity of the speaker, as well as the object that is reflected in the waters. Because of the interrogative marker ya and the suppositional auxiliary ran, the subject of the verb hiku, ‘to pull through’ or ‘to bring in,’ cannot be the speaker. Thus, the speaker is not one of the horsemen, but an observer of the scene, but what is it that he can or cannot see? Commentators disagree as to whether the horses are still in Mochizuki or whether they have just now arrived at the barrier.20 If the former is the case, the reflection is that of the full moon (mochizuki) that reminds the speaker of the tribute horses that will arrive later. If the latter is the case, the procession of horses is reflected in the water. Regardless of what is in the foreground, one can imagine that the full moon of the eighth month, the harvest moon, above the mountain pass would have been a stirring backdrop for the painters of the scene to depict. A key point of the poem is how, after admiring the beautiful scene reflected in the waters under the full moon, the speaker wonders aloud what the horsemen will do, or are doing, now. Katō Kōichi, expanding on the work of Katagiri Yōichi, points out that the bringing of tribute horses was an event involving spectators, and sometimes poems from the point of view of such spectators were specifically requested. A screen poem in the collection of Mibu no Tadami, for instance, has the following headnote: “For the eighth month, there are women’s carriages out for viewing the bringing of tribute horses” (hachi gatsu, koma mukae miru onna kuruma ari).21 The suppositional marker ran imbues Tsurayuki’s poem with a subtle beauty, implying that the speaker is not sure what is happening—he or she does not have a direct view of the scene (perhaps because of the

20 These interpretations are listed in Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, p. 82. The poem also appears as Shūishū 170 (Book 3: Autumn) with the following headnote: “During the Engi era, on a screen depicting the activities of the twelve months (Engi no ōntoki, tsukinami ōnbyōbu ni).” Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, pp. 49–50. Kokinshū 304 (Book 5: Autumn 2) by Mitsune exhibits a similar use of reflected surfaces that may in part derive from his extensive experience with composing for painted screens: The colored leaves that fall / when the wind blows— / the waters so clear that / the reflection of those yet to fall / still appear beneath. kaze fukeba / otsuru momijiba / mizu kiyomi / chiranu kage sae / soki ni mietsutsu (Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 102) 21 Noted in Katō Kōichi, “Tsurayuki shū chū to Tsurayuki no hyōgen,” in Waka kaishaku no paradaimu, ed. Suzuki Jun and Kashiwagi Yoshio (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1998), pp. 71–78. 100 chapter two crowd) but can only experience the scene indirectly through the reflection. The speaker’s speculation about horses that he or she cannot see directly (either because they are still in far-off Shinano or because they are only a reflection in the water) prompts the question, “Are they just now pulling through / those horses from ‘Full Moon’?” Ironically, this question can be asked both by a viewer of the screen (outside the picture) and by a spectator at the event (inside the picture), and the cleverness involved in the layering of speakers may have been precisely what contemporary viewers of the screen and readers of the poem appreciated. In some works of Western art, reflected surfaces implicate the viewer by defining the space outside the picture.22 In much the same way, Tsurayuki’s poem, when spoken by an external figure looking at the painting, compels the viewer to become more involved in the event portrayed in the picture. The painted scene expands into the viewer’s space, or, conversely, the external viewer and reciter of Tsurayuki’s poem becomes part of the painted scene. By engaging the viewer in this way, Tsurayuki promotes a kind of audience participation. The carefully cali- brated ambiguity that fuses the two perspectives invites the viewer/reader to share the space where the bringing of tribute horses occurs. One can furthermore interpret the externally speaking figure as a representation of the poet himself. Gustav Heldt argues persuasively that the layering of speakers was a technique the screen poet could use to insert his presence in absentia at those venues where his compositions were presented by proxy.23 Whereas the aristocrat in attendance could present the poem, the persistence of the poet’s voice is embedded in the ambiguity of perspective. The poet, who cannot experience what he describes directly, is much like the viewer of a painting. Sensitive to this fact, Tsurayuki employs expressions that allow for both readings, subtly dissolving the

22 In particular, the vast literature on The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas; 1656) by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) expands on the notion of reflected space outside what is depicted in the painting. Analyses of the painting have contributed to the development of theories about representational art. A frequently noted aspect of the painting is the depiction of a mirror on the back wall that appears to be reflecting the space where a viewer of the painting would be standing. Furthermore, the gaze of Velázquez’s self-portrait in the scene is directed out at the viewer but at the same time suggests that the space is occupied by the mirror that he would be using in order to paint himself. The multilayered engagement with the viewer parallels the way some of Tsurayuki’s poems invite the viewer/reciter to become part of the painted scene. 23 See Gustav Heldt, “Reflections in Tsurayuki’s Poetry,” in his Pursuit of Harmony, pp. 274–284. the efflorescence of screen poetry 101 barrier both between two- and three-dimensional spaces and between the place (ba) of composition and the place of presentation.24 The following poem has a similar effect. It comes from a set of seven poems composed for a screen belonging to Princess Kyōshi, a daughter of Daigo. The Tsurayuki Collection 46 Hito no ko no moto ni yasumite kawazura ni sakura no hana mitaru. Where there is a person resting under a tree, looking at the cherry blossoms on the other side of the river. ochikata no / hana mo midaruru / shiranami no / tomo ni ya ware wa / tachi wataramashi In the distance, the blossoms scatter in profusion— if only I could cross over to them along with the white-capped waves!25 The blossoms on the far side of the river fall to form a layer on the surface of the water. The petals on the river currents create the illusion of white-capped waves, making the speaker hesitate, unsure of whether he can cross to the other side. The implicit confusion is another example of the visual mitate discussed in the previous chapter. The first person speaker is the figure resting under a tree on the near bank of the river, as described in the headnote. At the same time, what the speaker of the poem expresses also holds true for the viewer of the screen who is outside the picture—a clever angle Tsurayuki introduces in a number of his screen compositions, achieved through his layering of speakers. One can imagine a patron or guest standing before the screen and reciting the poem, in essence becoming the figure within picture. Upon further consideration, the guest might realize how the words apply to himself as a viewer of the painting. The white-capped waves are a daunting obstacle for one who wishes to move closer to the flowering trees, but, at the same

24 The ba 場 (literally, ‘place’) of a poem generally refers to a poem’s circumstances of composition. The term can include its setting, and the physical context of its composition and presentation, as well as its social and political circumstances. 25 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, p. 101. The second line “hana mo midaruru” emphasizes how the scattering blossoms have made the waters white with their petals. The poem is also anthologized as Shūishū 1042 (Book 16: Miscellaneous Spring), where the headnote reads, “Circumstances unknown” (dai shirazu). The second line in the Shūishū version reads “hana mo mirubeku” (I am compelled to view / those blossoms [in the distance]). Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 298. 102 chapter two time, the two-dimensionality of the screen painting is what really prevents the spectator outside the screen from crossing over to the blossoms in the distance. The poem raises an awareness of ourselves as viewers but still treats the falling blossoms as real and in no way infringes upon the reality of the painted image. The reasoning process based on visual evidence applies to both the speaker within the painting and the viewer outside it, encouraging the active participation of the latter. Screen poems were at once occasional compositions, tied to specific events, and works of actual or notional ekphrasis—they described an extant or putative visual representation.26 The balance between congratulatory content and descriptive detail was often achieved through a series of poems, rather than embodied in a single verse. As we have seen, the opening poems of The Tsurayuki Collection first offer the felicitations of the new year and then go on to specifically describe the snowy landscape of Yoshino. Other examples from Tsurayuki’s oeuvre exhibit an acute awareness of what can and cannot be depicted in a painting. Regardless of whether the picture was in front of him, or would be painted later based on his verses, Tsurayuki often introduced a sense of visual obliqueness into his screen poems. Take, for example, this poem for an autumn scene that would be depicted on a screen presented at the coming-of-age ceremony (mogi) of Princess Kanshi, Daigo’s first daughter. The Tsurayuki Collection 38 kaze no oto / aki ni mo naru ka / hisakata no / amatsusora koso / kawaru beranare The sound of the wind: has autumn come already? It seems there is a change in the celestial realm far-off in the sky.27 As with the poem on tribute horses, Tsurayuki’s composition here served as the basis for later pictures. The poem, the first of six autumn verses within the set of fifteen seasonal poems, did not have to adhere to or ekphrastically describe the content of a picture, but rather provided a description from which a painter might work. Tsurayuki’s ingenuity is

26 John Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word & Image 4 (1988): 209–219. See my discussion of the term ekphrasis in the introduction herein. 27 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, p. 9. For the headnote, see Tsurayuki shū 29–43, previously presented. the efflorescence of screen poetry 103 apparent from the very first line: he chooses to compose about the autumn wind, something that cannot readily be perceived in a painted scene, but then takes the idea a step further by composing on the sound of the wind, an additional step removed from any painted surface. “The sound of the wind” is an expression particularly connected to the very beginning of the season, as exemplified in the following poem by Fujiwara no Toshiyuki (d. 901?) that opens the first “Autumn” section in Kokinshū: Kokinshū 169 (Book 4: Autumn 1) Aki tatsu hi, yomeru. Composed on the first day of autumn. aki kinu to / me ni wa sayaka ni / mienedomo / kaze no oto ni zo / odorokarenuru That autumn has come is not something I can discern clearly with my eyes, but I am suddenly aware of it through the sound of the wind.28 Toshiyuki’s poem calls attention to how sound trumps sight in sensing the beginning of autumn, and Tsurayuki employs the same trope, in a rather perverse manner, by introducing aural elements into his poem where one might expect visual ones. As we have seen in other poems from this set (poems 29, 30, and 40 from The Tsurayuki Collection, discussed earlier), concrete imagery is one of the outstanding qualities of poems he composed for later illustration, but Tsurayuki here offers only the vague and distant sky, leaving to the artist the selection of appropriate images associated with early autumn. There does, however, seem to be a visual aspect to the unspecified “change in the celestial realm.” The concluding conjectural marker beranari (it seems) is a suffix that is limited to Heian-period texts and usually suggests a reasoning process based on visual evidence at hand.29 Some scholars have suggested that the use of the conjectural marker is a direct by-product of the painted scenes and the assigned topics that meant that the poets were composing on indirect rather than direct experience.30

28 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 65. Toshiyuki was a famous calligrapher and the first important Fujiwara waka poet, with nineteen poems in Kokinshū. 29 Ōno Susumu, Satake Akihiro, and Maeda Kingorō, eds., Iwanami kogo jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), p. 1185. 30 See Nakano Masako, “Kokinshū ni okeru ‘beranari’: Yu ni shōsetsu suru jodōshi,” Kokubun (Ochanomizu joshi daigaku) 86 (January 1997): 20–33, and Kudō Shigenori, 104 chapter two

Whatever the cause for speculation was, the poems that include the beranari suffix often have strong visual components. In the following poem by Ariwara no Motokata, for instance, the immediate brightness of the moon allows the speaker to make a conjecture about possibilities elsewhere. Kokinshū 195 (Book 4: Autumn 1) Tsuki o, yomeru. Composed about the moon. aki no yo no / tsuki no hikarishi / akakereba / kurō no yama mo / koenu beranari Since the light of the moon on this autumn night is so bright, even over Dark Mountain I could cross, it seems.31 In Tsurayuki’s poem, the speaker guesses about the change in the sky based on an unspecified piece of visual evidence at hand. The poem is constructed as though the speaker is looking directly upon a landscape scene, or a picture of one, even though the paintings were to come after his poems were submitted. This mode of composition, which likely did not facilitate the painters’ task, may have developed from the poet’s extensive experience in composing for preexisting screens. Because other poems in the set provide ample imagery from which the artists could work, Tsurayuki could focus on aspects other than direct description. The final conjectural phrase “it seems there is a change” (kawaru beranare) has two meanings, one that refers generally to the season, and one that refers specifically to the event for which the poem was composed. On one level, the phrase refers to a “change in the air” that causes the first winds of autumn to blow through the sky, but on another level the ‘change’ refers to the coming-of-age of Kanshi and the beginning of her time in the ‘celestial realm’ (amatsusora), referring to the imperial palace. The congratulatory nature of this verse, as well as the penultimate verse of the set (The Tsurayuki Collection 42) that refers to the longevity of the princess, combine with the descriptive elements of the other poems to striking effect. The six autumn poems together form a composite sketch

“ ‘Beranari’ no waka—Kokin Gosen jidai no ba to hyōgen,” Bunken tankyū (Kyūshū Daigaku bungakubu kokugogaku kokubungaku kenkyūshitsu) 6 (1980): 1–9. 31 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 72. the efflorescence of screen poetry 105 of a moonlit mountain landscape, crying deer, bush clovers growing at a humble cottage, chrysanthemums (symbolizing longevity), and a waterfall with autumn leaves floating downstream. Even without the extant screen, we can visualize how, as a finished product, the inscribed poems brought together the painted image, the seasonal topic, and the celebratory occasion. One can imagine that Tsurayuki’s capacity as a low-ranking poet, who was often commissioned to produce verses for auspicious occasions, made him especially aware of issues of time and space. His rank prohibited him from entering the imperial palace to view painted screens there, and he was generally not allowed to attend the celebratory events for which he composed his poetry. The screen poetry that he was so often asked to compose offered him the perfect medium to explore representations of time and space. The descriptive nature and commemorative quality of many of his screen poems are like ekphrastic snapshots that capture the moment of the event while simultaneously capturing the moment that was depicted (or would later be depicted, based on his poems) on the screen painted for the event. Even in the minority of Tsurayuki’s poems that are unrelated to painted screens we find the same kind of sensitivity to the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In what I would call an ekphrastic mode of composition, these descriptive poems capture a fleeting moment in time in a manner similar to the way, for instance, falling blossoms in a painting will never come to rest on the ground. But rather than laying bare how time is frozen, these poems revisualize the scene for the reader, capturing a ‘pregnant moment’ that implies what comes chronologically before and after it. The pregnant moment in a work of art is often a paradox of motion and stasis—Bernini’s famous sculpture of the determined David just as he is about to sling his stone at Goliath being an excellent example. Works of ekphrasis similarly capture a crystallized moment that condenses a narrative, and screen poets often worked in this mode regardless of whether they were actually composing for a screen. An excellent example of Tsurayuki’s screen poet mentality at work is the following composition from a 913 poetry contest known as the Teiji-in uta awase. Kokinshū 89 (Book 2: Spring 2) Teiji-in uta awase no uta. A poem from the Teiji-in Poetry Contest. sakurabana / chirinuru kaze no / nagori ni wa / mizu naki sora ni / nami zo tachikeru 106 chapter two

In what lingers of the breeze that has scattered the blossoms of cherry— I see waves rising in a waterless sky.32 As with his screen poem that expresses hesitation over crossing a river to get a closer view of cherry trees (The Tsurayuki Collection 46, presented previously), Tsurayuki here makes use of the common conceit of visually confusing white blossoms with white-capped waves. The breeze lingers (nagori 名残), such that the scattered blossoms seem to linger in midair as well, producing an image of a wave cresting in the sky. The word nagori (written 余波) also implies the wake that follows the waves of blossoms that unfurl with each gust of wind. The imagery suggests that the speaker might be seeing the scene reflected in a river, where the blossoms have fallen on the water’s surface, adding to the mirrored image of the sky. Though the sky is ‘waterless,’ blossom-waves rise, just as they do in the river dusted with petals. The poem has captured a wave at its crest, a flurry of blossoms about to descend as the gust of wind dissipates into calm. The blossom-wave, when it finally tumbles down, will mark the passing of the peak of spring. Thomas LaMarre has astutely noted how the wave seems unwilling to break, how the movements in the poem halt at the point of transformation, and how the “superposition—or more precisely, resonance—of two images lets spring hover at the point of disap- pearance without disappearing.”33 The description corresponds well to the pregnant moment in famous works of ekphrastic poetry in the West, and the technique is one that Tsurayuki had abundant opportunities to develop in his position as the premier screen poet of his day. Many of Tsurayuki’s compositions for painted screens were exercises in description and implication. As a screen poet, Tsurayuki often referred to both what was in the painting and what was outside it and then cleverly connected the two. Because his rank obliged his absence at the celebratory venues where his poems were offered, Tsurayuki developed a heightened sense of time and place, contributing to his use of multiple, overlapping

32 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 90. The fact that this poem does not occur in either of the two main manuscript lineages of Tsurayuki shū further problematizes the provenance of the personal collection. 33 Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscrip- tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 176. the efflorescence of screen poetry 107 speakers and his proclivity for visual obliqueness. Acutely aware of the limitations of the painted medium, he often began with concrete imagery, either employing or providing visual description, but then built upon the optical allusion through an ekphrastic mode of composition that captured a suggestive moment in time.

Mitsune and Screen Poetry: Sense and Sensibility

In the decades leading up to and immediately following the compilation of Kokinshū in 905, the poet of greatest repute, after Tsurayuki, was Ōshikōchi no Mitsune. Like Tsurayuki, Mitsune was a renowned screen poet, and eminent patrons called upon his services time and again. The fact that he composed poetry for many of the important events of his day, including an imperial journey to Ōigawa in 907, Princess Kanshi’s coming-of-age ceremony in 914, and the presentations of a seasonal screen at the imperial palace and another for the Kamo Shrine Priestess in 915, to name but a few, attest to his reputation as a poet. In 917, the vice-governor of Ōmi summoned him on short notice to compose and inscribe poems for the quarters where the retired emperor Uda would stay on his way to Ishiyamadera. Mitsune was prized for his ability to respond—both to the paintings on the screens for which he composed and to the occasion at hand. Mitsune has a total of 195 poems in imperial collections, and his total of sixty poems in Kokinshū is the greatest for any poet except Tsurayuki (see table 1). Known for his use of witty reasoning and visual confusion, characteristics likely borrowed from Six Dynasties (220–589) shi poetry, Mitsune both represented and helped define what has been called the ‘Kokin style.’34 Compositions for screens reinforced aspects of this style, particularly in terms of speaker perspective, allusions to sight, and an attentiveness to tactile, auditory, and olfactory detail.

34 See Konishi Jin’ichi, “The Genesis of the Kokinshū Style,” trans. Helen C. McCullough, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37, no. 1 (June 1978): 61–170. Konishi discusses the ‘elegant confusion’ characteristic of Kokinshū poetry in terms of the visual analogies found in Six Dynasties shi poetry. 108 chapter two

Table 1: Best-represented Poets in Kokinshū (ca. 905) Poet Number of poems 1) Ki no Tsurayuki 102 2) Ōshikōchi no Mitsune 60 3) Ki no Tomonori 46 4) Mibu no Tadamine 36 5) Sosei 36 6) Ariwara no Narihira 30 7) Lady Ise 22 8) Fujiwara no Toshiyuki 19 9) Ono no Komachi 18

Representative of this strain of Mitsune’s poetry is the following, composed as part of a sequence of poems for a screen belonging to the Kamo Shrine Priestess. Shūishū 16 (Book 1: Spring 1) Saiin onbyōbu ni. On a screen for the Kamo Shrine Priestess. ka o tomete / tare orazaran / mume no hana / ayanashi kasumi / tachi na kakushi so Seeking their scent, who would not break off a branch of plum blossoms? Futile will it be, o haze of spring, so do not rise to hide them.35 The visual presence of the blossoms in the painting allows the poet to focus on other characteristics, in this case the fragrance emitted by the plum blossoms. The speaker in Mitsune’s poem implores the spring haze not to obscure the beauty of the blossoms, because their scent will give them away anyway. This sentiment is quite similar to that of another

35 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 8. The poem also appears, without a headnote, as poem 303 in the Nishihonganji manuscript of The Mitsune Collection (Mitsune shū). As with The Tsurayuki Collection, the provenance of the personal collection is uncertain. The various manuscripts have as few as 140 poems and as many 482, and the arrangement and cat- egorization of the poems also varies depending on the manuscript. I have relied on the version in Tanaka Kimiharu, Hirasawa Ryūsuke, and Kikuchi Yasuhiko, eds., Tsurayuki shū, Mitsune shū, Tomonori shū, Tadamine shū, Waka bungaku taikei 19 (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 179–262. For background on the textual lineages of The Mitsune Collection, see pp. 383–387. the efflorescence of screen poetry 109 poem by Mitsune, which may also have been composed for a screen, and was included in the first anthology of Japanese verse: Kokinshū 41 (Book 1: Spring 1) Haru no yo, mume no hana o, yomeru. Composed on the plum blossoms on a spring night. haru no yo no / yami wa ayanashi / mume no hana / iro koso miene / ka ya wa kakururu On this spring night, the darkness has no effect— for though the blooming of the plums might not be visible, can their scent be hidden?36 In the two poems, Mitsune appeals to both the sense of sight and the sense of smell, characterizing the visual obscurity as ineffective or useless (ayanashi), because the scent will inevitably give the blossoms away to anyone who seeks them out. Composing for a painted scene may have contributed to the poet’s responsiveness first to the sense of sight (as shown in the use of the verb kakuru, ‘hide,’ in both poems, and mieru, ‘appear,’ in the latter), but also to other senses that are not readily portrayed in the painted medium—in these cases, the sense of smell. Many poems in the tradition contain a conjecture or a lyric observation on the part of the speaker, but because screen poets often took into account what could and could not be portrayed in the painted medium, their poetry often made direct reference to the senses. The process of perception, in fact, became the crux of many of these poems. Mitsune’s first poem cited here was likely a composition requested by Daigo for his daughter Kyōshi, upon her assuming the position of Kamo Shrine Priestess in 915.37 As with most events involving screen poetry during this period, the process of commissioning, composing, and inscribing is not clear. The poem as it appears in The Mitsune Collection has no headnote, and the only context given in Shūishū is “on a screen” (or “for a screen,” onbyōbu ni), a common introduction for any screen poem included in an anthology. The following poem by Ise provides another example of the generic and indeterminate nature of screen poem headnotes.

36 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 30. 37 The Tsurayuki Collection mentions an imperial request for screen poems on the twenty-fifth day of the intercalary second month of 915. 110 chapter two

Shūishū 183 (Book 3: Autumn) Teiji-in ōnbyōbu ni. On a screen at the Teiji residence of Emperor Uda. utsurowamu / koto dani oshiki / aki hagi o / orenu bakari mo / okeru tsuyu kana The autumn bush clover, its fading color alone evokes such pity, and now the dew burdens it to where it will surely break.38 The headnote tells us only that the poem was ‘on’ or ‘for’ (ni) a screen. The particle ni can imply that the poet took what was depicted on the screen as the basis for his or her poems, or that the poet was given a topic, or instructions, separately and merely composed ‘for’ the screen. In fact, the poems may have been composed for later illustration, though, as we have seen, these cases are usually marked by the term ryō for ‘base material.’ The generic statement ‘on the screen’ can also imply that the poems, regardless of how they were composed, were inscribed on the surface of the screen. Because the circumstances of composition remain ambiguous, the nature of the connection between text and image, especially in terms of how poets went about composing for screens, is difficult to determine. What remains are the poems themselves, the mental images they produce, and the other senses they invoke. The appreciation of these poems does not, however, depend on having the visual image in sight. In Ise’s poem, which, according to other sources, was probably composed under the same circumstances and for the very same occasion as Mitsune’s first poem here, the bush clover is clearly being appreciated as if it were real. The fading color (utsurowamu) and the description of the bush clover about to break (orenu) under the weight of the dew capture a ‘pregnant moment’ that freezes the progression of time. Mitsune’s poem similarly hints at a future moment when the mists will rise and also presents another dimension not readily illustrated, that is, the scent of the blossoms. In both poems, the temporal and sensory implications go beyond whatever pictures may have accompanied them.

38 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 53. Komachiya notes that the Shūishō and The Ise Col- lection versions both state that the screen is for the Kamo Shrine Priestess rather than the Teiji Palace. the efflorescence of screen poetry 111

Reference to both sight and scent in the same poem, a characteristic that Komachiya Teruhiko notes is relatively rare, appears to be a product of composing for screens. As we have seen, early poems based on paintings often remarked on the paradoxical or contradictory nature of the image—how, for instance, the blossoms have no fragrance or the waterfall is silent. But as the rate of screen poetry composition increased toward the middle of the tenth century, poets no longer called attention to the difference between the image and reality, but they still maintained a sensitivity to how sight worked with scent, sound, and, to a lesser degree, touch and taste as well. Take, for example, the following screen poem by Tsurayuki, which appears in Shūishū immediately after Mitsune’s screen poem addressing the spring haze. Shūishū 17 (Book 1: Spring 1) Momozono ni sumi haberikeru saki no Saiin byōbu ni. On the screen of the former Kamo Shrine Priestess, when she lived at the Peach Gardens. shirotae no / imo ga koromo ni / mume no hana / iro o mo ka o mo / waki zo kanetsuru White as hemp are the robes of my wife— and from the plum blossoms, in color and in fragrance too, they cannot be distinguished.39 The Peach Gardens, in this case, refers to the detached residence of Minamoto no Yasumitsu (924–995), located in the southern part of the Sesonji temple grounds. Though the headnote presents the Peach Gardens setting, Tsurayuki composed for the shrine priestess’s painted screen, which evidently depicted plum and not peach blossoms. In addition to noting color and fragrance, the poet introduces a textile element in the pillow word ‘white hemp’ (shirotae) and in mentioning the wife’s robes. The incidence of cloth- and fabric-related words in screen poetry is also conspicuously high, perhaps because the silk surface of the screens suggested such analogies. Recall Haraaka’s Chinese poem (Bunka shūrei shū 124) that described a cataract as a length of white cloth, and Narihira’s

39 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 8. The identity of the Kamo Shrine Priestess is uncertain, though the same Kyōshi is a possible candidate. The poem does not appear in standard editions of The Tsurayuki Collection. 112 chapter two poem (Kokinshū 294) that compared the pattern of autumn leaves on the Tatsuta River to dyed cloth, both discussed in the previous chapter. While Tsurayuki’s poem here combines textile imagery and the sense of smell, the following poem joins an image of intricately woven fabric with the sense of sound. Shūishū 180 (Book 3: Autumn) Byōbu ni. On a screen. aki kureba / hata oru mushi no / aru nahe ni / kara nishiki ni mo / miyuru nobe kana When autumn comes, the crickets weave on their looms, and as they do— ah, how the fields I see look like Chinese brocade!40 Because their chirping sounds like a working loom, crickets are sometimes called ‘insects that weave on looms’ (hata oru mushi). In Tsurayuki’s poetic imagination, the fields of autumn flowers and grasses are the brocaded fabric created by the noisily working crickets, but the idea that the fields look like a raised weave design may have been suggested by the fact that the painting of the fields was a decoration on the textile surface of a folding screen. The connective nahe ni suggests that the observation is ongoing—that as the speaker hears the crickets and knows they are at work, he has realized that the product of their work is the autumn fields that grow more ornate as time passes. Mitsune, too, employs textile analogies, such as in this poem that may have been composed for a tsukinami screen depicting scenes from the twelve months: The Mitsune Collection 138 Jūgatusu taki no mizu. The tenth month, the waters of a cataract. momijiba no / ochikuru taki wa / kakete nomi / tatanu nishiki o / hosu ka to zo miru Crimson leaves come tumbling down, masking the waterfall,

40 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 52. the efflorescence of screen poetry 113

such that it looks like unmeasured brocade hanging out to dry.41 As the autumnal leaves that cover the water’s surface come down the waterfall, the speaker likens the cascade to lengths of brocaded cloth. Mitsune uses the verb tatsu (裁つ, in the negative form tatanu), a textile- specific term that refers to the measuring and cutting of fabric into pieces that will be sewn together to make a robe or belt. The woven fabric would be cleaned and dried prior to cutting, and Mitsune compares this image of drying cloth to the waterfall. The analogy in Mitsune’s poem is akin to the mitate of seeing one thing as another, the kind of ‘elegant confusion’ for which Kokinshū was so well known. Whereas the following was not composed for a screen, it employs the same kind of mitate one often sees in screen poetry of the period. Included in the collection One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets (Hyakunin isshu; early thirteenth century), it is perhaps Mitsune’s most famous composition. Kokinshū 277 (Book 5: Autumn 2) Shiragiku no hana o, yomeru. Composed on the white chrysanthemum flower. kokoro ate ni / oraba ya oramu / hatsu shimo no / oki madowaseru / shiragiku no hana Is it only by chance that I will break one off if I try? The first frost that lies upon it obscures the white chrysanthemum.42 Mitsune’s speaker purports to be confused by the first frost of the season. He is unable to discern what is a chrysanthemum and what is not, to the point where he can only guess when he attempts to pick a blossom. Precedents in Chinese poetry, including a poem in Bai’s collected works, liken frost to the color of chrysanthemums. The noted similarity

41 Numeration and notes for poems from The Mitsune Collection are based on the text edited by Hirasawa Ryūsuke in Waka bungaku taikei 19 (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 179–262. 42 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 94. The editors note that a poem in Bai Juyi’s collected works likens the color of chrysanthemums to frost. Joshua Mostow, Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin isshu in Word and Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), pp. 229–231, notes some of the interpretations of the poem and the pictorial traditions they generated. 114 chapter two perhaps prompted poets of Heian Japan to extend the analogy to the further pretense of visually mistaking one for the other. This kind of poetic posturing is particularly prevalent in the screen poetry of Tsurayuki and Mitsune, and because both were noted screen poets, it is reasonable to speculate that painting may have served as an intermediary in the extension of the analogy. To what extent painting shaped poetic content cannot be precisely determined, but the two genres clearly had a cross-fertilizing effect in Heian Japan, with the subject matter and conventions of one overlapping with and involving the other. What may have begun in Chinese poetry extended simultaneously to Japanese poetry and to paintings in which, for example, frost and chrysanthemums, or snow and blossoms, would look alike. Paintings could, then, reinforce the visual mitate employed in many a screen poem. The following by Mitsune points to the habitual nature of seeing one thing for another: The Mitsune Collection 147 Engi jūgonen, nigatsu jūsannichi, ōse ni yorite tatematsuru onbyōbu no uta mitsu. In the fifteenth year of Engi [915], on the twenty-third day of the second month, by imperial request, three poems offered for a screen. waga yado no / mume ni naraite / miyoshino no / yama no yuki o mo / hana to koso mire So accustomed am I to the view of the plums at my home that even the snows upon beautiful Mount Yoshino look like blossoms to me.43 This poem serves as a commentary on how artists tend to see what they want to see, how their artistic vision is filtered through their own experience. Instead of feigning confusion, the speaker shows an awareness of the rationalizing process that results in his seeing one thing as another. The stance is similar to the speaker in Wallace Stevens’s (1879–1955) poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” one of the more famous Western works of ekphrasis. In it, Stevens describes The Old Guitarist (1908), a painting by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and has the guitarist speak to us about his

43 The poem also appears with a more abbreviated headnote as poem 77 in The Mitsune Collection, one of a few instances of the same poem appearing twice in the collection. The poem also appears as Shūishū 9 (Book 1: Spring), but the composer and the circumstances are listed as unknown. the efflorescence of screen poetry 115 art: “Things as they are / Are changed upon a blue guitar.” Like Stevens, Mitsune speaks for a figure within the painting and also remarks on how ‘straightforward’ observation is inevitably transformed through the medium of expression. Mitsune’s screen poem demonstrates another common technique in Kokinshū poetry: the use of a nearby detail to draw inferences about something distant. We encountered earlier a similar reasoning process in Sosei’s screen poem in which the speaker sees the autumn leaves on the rippling surface of the river and imagines how red waves must be rising further downstream where the river flows into the sea. One can imagine how this process of raciocination, whereby distances are collapsed through observation and reasoned detail, may have been facilitated by the way three-dimensional space is portrayed in two dimensions on painted screens. Visual arts from later periods would often include an element of play, but the extant art-historical evidence from the Heian period is insufficient to draw any conclusions about how painters may have dissembled distance or represented elegant confusion in visual forms.44 The distant snowy mountains and the nearby blossoming plum tree of Mitsune’s poem may have been painted so as to suggest a spatial connection between the two, in much the same way that the spray from Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) famous wave in the foreground can be seen as snow falling on Mt. Fuji in the distance. The poetic stance that visually links the near and the far is one way the optical illusions that gave depth to paintings on screens may have contributed to the optical allusions that give screen poetry a different kind of depth. We can surmise that the speaker in Mitsune’s poem was a figure depicted on the screen in the foreground, next to his dwelling where the plums were in bloom, looking toward snow-capped mountains in the distance. Like Stevens’s poem that speaks for the guitarist in Picasso’s painting, screen poems were generally composed as the words of one of the figures depicted in the painting. Such poems invited the viewer to see details of the landscape through the painted figure’s eyes and adopt his point of view. We have very little contemporary information regarding how poets like Tsurayuki and Mitsune went about composing their screen poems.

44 Sakakibara Satoru, Nihon kaiga no asobi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998) includes a brief history of visual trickery and optical illusions in traditional painting, prints, and other visual media. 116 chapter two

The earliest explicit statement about screen poetry composition comes about two centuries later, in the Shūishō chū of Fujiwara no Kenshō (ca. 1130–ca. 1210). Kenshō describes what was already common practice in formal screen poetry composition when he states, “When you compose a poem for a picture on a folding or sliding screen, you compose precisely by adopting the feelings of the person drawn in the picture (byōbu, shōji nado no e o uta ni yomu wa, yagate e ni kakeru hito no kokoro ni narite yomu nari).”45 The poem Kenshō quotes to illustrate his point is another well-known piece by Mitsune. Shūishū 129 (Book 2: Summer) Onna Shinomiko no ie no byōbu ni. On the folding screen at the residence of the Fourth Princess. yuku sue wa / mada tōkeredo / natsu yama no / ko no shita kage zo / tachi ukarikeru Though I yet have far to go to reach my destination, how I regret leaving these summer hills and the shade beneath their trees!46 Here again the poet has entered into the painting and invites his readers to as well. He has in essence become the traveler who is loath to leave the cool shade on a hot summer day. The perspective is clearly from within the painting. Employing the traveler as his first person speaker, Mitsune brings the heat of the summer day to the fore, but he does so subtly, without explicitly mentioning the coolness of the shade or the heat of the day. The poem at once expresses the difficulty of travel and evokes the painted scene. Mitsune composed several screen poems, including the plum blossoms and the summer hills verses, at imperial behest. Though the organization of his personal collection does not emphasize screen poetry the way The Tsurayuki Collection does, imperial sponsorship and other important commissions are highlighted by their placement at the beginning of The Mitsune Collection. The immense differences in variant manuscripts of

45 Shūishō chū, in Sasaki Nobutsuna et al., eds., Nihon kagaku taikei, supplemental vol. 4, (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1956), p. 132. Shūishō chū is a commentary on Shūishō, a collection of poems compiled by Fujiwara no Kintō that formed the basis of the third imperial anthology of Japanese verse, Shūishū. 46 Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 38. The Fourth Princess was Kinshi, the fourth daughter of Daigo. the efflorescence of screen poetry 117

The Mitsune Collection problematize any attempt to draw conclusions from sequencing and overall organization, but we can still identify a significant portion of his output as occasional poetry composed for important events at court. Mitsune composed, for instance, for the fortieth-year celebrations (by traditional count) for Fujiwara no Sadakuni (867–906), the son of Chancellor (Fujiwara no) Takafuji. The gathering, which took place in the second month of 905, included a folding screen depicting scenes from the four seasons. Mitsune composed the following verse for one of the spring panels. The Mitsune Collection 4 yama takami / kumoi ni miyuru / sakurabana kokoro no yukite / oranu hi zo naki The mountains, so high that the cherry blossoms appear to dwell in the clouds— not a day goes by that I do not go there in spirit to break one off.47 The poem employs many of the tropes we have seen in other screen poems. The speaker notes the visual similarity (miyuru) between blossoms and clouds. As appropriate for a congratulatory verse, the reference to ‘cloud dwelling’ (kumoi) extols the loftiness of the venue, but if we read the poem allegorically, the speaker’s perspective begins to break down. As with a number of Tsurayuki’s screen poems, the ambiguity of the speaker’s point of view allows for the poetic statement to apply both to the figure within the painting and to a guest observing the painting from without. The speaker of Mitsune’s poem, because of the height of the mountain peak, but also because of the two-dimensionality of the painting, cannot go in body, but only in spirit (kokoro no yukite), to the blossoms in the distance. Mitsune, like Tsurayuki, was a respected poet who did not possess sufficient rank to be present at venues like Sadakuni’s gathering. Thus, the poem applies equally to Mitsune himself, who also could not go in body but only in spirit to the celebrations for which he composed many of his poems. One of the major functions of screen poetry was to serve as an expression of felicitation and good will. Whether as a paean for the current emperor’s reign or as a congratulatory vehicle for a coming-of-age or birthday ceremony, screen poetry came to be a standard part of both

47 The poem also appears as Kokinshū 358 (Book 7: Felicitations). 118 chapter two public and semiprivate gatherings where inscription of the poetry was often part of the event. The screens themselves were kept at private residences (or, if imperially commissioned, at the palace), sometimes put in storage and brought out only on special occasions. The screens and the poems inscribed on them had very limited audiences compared to, for example, an imperial anthology of poetry, partly due to their existence as unique physical objects. Screen poems were closely connected to their circumstances of composition. Furthermore, they were often little more than perfunctory toasts, or reworkings of previous congratulatory poems. Some were so specific that they were of little interest to those outside the honoree’s immediate circle. As a genre, screen poetry flourished in the decades after the compilation of Kokinshū (again, see figure 3), but the editors of the second imperial anthology, Gosenshū, generally shunned screen poetry for precisely these reasons. Those responsible for selecting the poems for inclusion in Gosenshū apparently shared the opinion that screen poetry was by and large “flawed by weaknesses related to its generic origins” and did not belong in an imperial anthology.48 The relative importance placed on rank and political clout in Gosenshū is, perhaps surprisingly, not manifest in congratulatory screen poems.49 Gosenshū is in fact unique among the twenty-one imperial anthologies in the absence of a book of “Felicitations.” Any qualms about including screen poems in an imperial anthology seem to have been overcome by the time Fujiwara no Kintō, Retired Emperor Kazan (968–1008, r. 984–986), and possibly others compiled the third anthology, Shūishū, around 1005. By then, the editors had nearly a century of the genre upon which they could draw, and they show no dis- criminatory bias against including poems that were composed for screens. Not only is the bulk of Book 19 (Miscellaneous Felicitations) made up of screen poetry, especially toward the beginning of the book, but we find poems for screens interspersed throughout the seasonal and love books as well. For example, Mitsune’s plum blossom poem cited previously is included in Book 1 (Spring), and his summer hills poem is included in

48 McCullough, Brocade by Night, p. 237. The observation does not, however, seem to apply to the subsequent anthology, Shūishū. Gosenshū was compiled by Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu (921–991), Kiyowara no Motosuke (908–990), Minamoto no Shitagō (911–983), Ki no Tokibumi (or Tokifumi; 922?–996?), and Sakanoue no Mochiki (n.d.). These scholars were collectively known as the ‘Five Men of the Pear Chamber’ (nashitsubo no gonin). 49 Richard Bowring, “The Ise monogatari: A Short Cultural History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52, no. 2 (1992): 417, notes some of the principles guiding the compilers of Gosenshū. the efflorescence of screen poetry 119

Book 2 (Summer). In fact, several of the screen poems in Shūishū are by poets of the Kokinshū era, most notably Tsurayuki and Mitsune. Some even come from the same events as those represented in the first anthology. Kokinshū includes seven poems from Sadakuni’s fortieth birthday celebrations, mentioned earlier, and Shūishū includes five additional poems composed on the same occasion. The range and frequency of screen poem events represented in Shūishū shows how the genre thrived throughout the eleventh century.50 Though congratulatory verse often lacked the literary interest of the seasonal screen poetry examined here, what mattered most to those at the venues where such poetry was presented were the appropriateness of sentiment and the invocative power of the verbal and written salutation. When the poem was recited aloud, the wish for good fortune and long life was delivered to the guest of honor, becoming part of the occasion, and when it was written on the screen, it became a permanent record and an auspicious and commemorative object for him or her. Regarding the strategies poets adopted for the composition of occasional verse, Helen McCullough notes: The appropriation of another poem’s basic conception, the extensive borrowing of lines, and even the reuse of an older poem were considered acceptable practice by screen poets and their aristocratic patrons, to whom an elegant tone and a close link with the picture was more important than freshness or substance.51 Tsurayuki’s previous verse on “the ornamental sprays / for our master’s thousand years” (Kokinshū 352) is a good example of such verse, as is the following by the monk Sosei, composed for the same event: Kokinshū 354 (Book 7: Felicitations) Motoyasu no miko no nanasoji no ga no ushiro no byōbu ni, yomite kakeru. Composed and inscribed on the screen that was to stand behind the guest of honor at Prince Motoyasu’s seventieth-birthday celebrations. fushite omoi / okite kazouru / yorozuyo wa / kami zo shiruramu / wa ga kimi no tame Asleep I think of them, awake I count them:

50 See the appendix on screen poems included in Shūishu in Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, pp. 58–59 from reverse. 51 McCullough, Brocade by Night, p. 238. For more on screen poems as felicitations, see the later note on Great Thanksgiving services. 120 chapter two

the ten-thousand years that the gods know are destined for our master.52 The poem succeeds as a simple wish for long life but lacks any concrete imagery and does not seem to supplement any imagined picture—an upright figure is unremarkable, and a reclining figure would not have been an appropriate image for a seventieth-birthday felicitation. The fact that several poets were commissioned to provide poetry for the event speaks to Motoyasu’s stature, but Sosei’s verse in particular, with no particular reference to the painting or the occasion, seems little more than an obligatory tribute. In the early tenth century, screens and screen poetry appeared with increasing frequency as part of the annual rites and ceremonies at court. The rise in demand for congratulatory verses not just for birthday felicitations of important aristocrats, but for more formal events at the imperial palace as well, meant that the composition and inscription of poetry became part of a spectacle shared by many. This was especially true at the Great Thanksgiving services held in the first year of each new emperor’s reign, a practice that dates back to at least 673. Paintings and poems for screens were produced for Ninmyō in 834 (see chapter 1), and, with the accession of Murakami in 946, screen poetry on landscape scenes became a standard part of the Great Thanksgiving rite for each new emperor. Heldt, who calls such rites ‘enthronement ceremonies,’ has noted the way ritual, season, and landscape combined to represent “the harmonious triad of Heaven, Earth, and humanity over which a Confucian monarch presided.” Screen paintings and poetry at these events foregrounded “the sovereign’s ‘consumption of the realm’ through the presentation of songs, people, and products from representative provinces,” providing both a ceremonial occasion and a lasting symbol for the harmony that was the product of the emperor’s rule.53 These poems point to the important functionality of screen poems, apart from any lyrical, emotional, or aesthetic response that one might ascribe to the composers of these verses. In essence, the requirement that poems be produced for these occasions, as well as the manner in which they were presented, mark them as imperial commodi- ties rather than expressions of an individual or even a group.

52 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 116. Headnote from Kokinshū 352. 53 Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, p. 256. the efflorescence of screen poetry 121

The Great Thanksgiving service was a prominent venue where court rites, screens, and poems came together.54 Typically, these poems would mention a natural feature or famous product from the different regions, as well the place-name itself. Although these poems served as offerings from various localities, they were frequently composed by noted poets at court. Some were labeled ‘composer unknown’ ( yomibito shirazu), suggesting that they may have come from the mentioned province. These poems, too, were often little more than perfunctory offerings, reworked or recycled from previous years. Because such poems were also tied to specific moments of accession, a later emperor commissioning an anthology of poetry to represent his own reign might not be interested in invoking a previous one through the inclusion of such verse. Nonetheless, several examples are preserved in imperial anthologies and in personal collections, and these serve as an important early intersection of painting, poetry, and court ritual. Screen poems for Great Thanksgiving services, along with those for coming-of-age ceremonies, birthday celebrations, and official presentations at court, continued to be an important part of mainstream waka production. The challenge for the screen poet in any of these settings was to offer an expression of congratulations that was generic enough to be communally acceptable while adhering to the content of the paintings that were presented, as well as the specific details of the occasion. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that, no matter how representational a screen painting might be, it was essentially a fictional construct with its own language, iconography, and conventions that were linked to the poetic tradition on several, sometimes contradictory, levels. The seasonal associations of certain flora and fauna in poetry, for instance, might be altered in a screen painting to accommodate the overall design. Yoshiaki Shimizu notes: The meaning of the painted image includes ideational and associative allusions to a vast and complex cultural tradition as well as visual perception of what is rendered in the painting. For painted landscapes, which were sometimes labeled to represent specific locales, such associative allusions were often “created by authors and

54 For more on the preparations and protocol at Great Thanksgiving services, as well as the production of screens and poems for the events, see Hirano Takakuni, Daijōsai no kōzō (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1986), and the aforementioned Fujita, “Daijōe byōbu uta no seikaku o megutte,” pp. 47–60. The genre merits greater attention than can be afforded here. 122 chapter two artists who had never journeyed to the site.”55 These landscapes based on previous models and modified by literature, rather than on direct observation, shaped the way poets described the natural world. Screen poets learned to address, from the viewpoint of a figure within the painting, a topic suggested by the picture, and yet they were also expected to refer, in some way, to the guest of honor as well as the felicitous circumstances that were clearly outside the scene. The best screen poems managed to do precisely that—they relied on the picture but used words to enable the reader to encounter a new realm of time and space. At the same time, these poems provided the reader with a sense of participation in the event at hand. The poem and the painting, each comprehensible on its own, complemented each other, presenting a conglomeration of meanings not possible through one medium alone. The craftsmanship of the wood and textile screen panels; the color, design, and execution of the painting; the poem; and the calligraphy with which it is inscribed all came together to form a composite work that was much more than the sum of its parts. Though the screens no longer exist, certain poems sum- mon a visual image in the reader’s mind and then add the requisite congratulatory sentiment. The following poem by Mitsune, also composed for Sadakuni’s fortieth-year celebrations, has been praised as a particularly effective congratulatory screen poem: The Mitsune Collection 6 suminoe no / matsu o akikaze / fuku kara ni / koe uchisouru / okitsu shiranami To the autumn winds that blow through the pines of Suminoe the white waves of the sea add their voices of praise.56 Mitsune fulfilled the requirements of the occasion commendably. To the painted pines of Suminoe, symbolic of the longevity of the guest of honor, he adds the sound of the rolling waves and the motion of the wind blowing through the pines, two elements that the painter could not have depicted. As McCullough has observed, the voices or sounds mentioned

55 Shimizu, “Seasons and Places in Yamato Landscape and Poetry,” p. 1. 56 The poem also appears as Kokinshū 360 (Book 7: Felicitations) and as Shūishū 1112 (Book 17: Miscellaneous Autumn), a rare instance of a poem appearing in more than one imperial anthology. Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 118, and Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 319. the efflorescence of screen poetry 123 in the poem refer to the “banquet music and the singing of the assembled company,” and the details Mitsune provides evoke the screen’s vivid colors, “blue autumn skies, green pine trees, and white waves.”57 The place- name Suminoe brings to mind Sumiyoshi, the god of good fortune, who is then linked to the pine trees as a symbol of longevity. The wind brings with it the advance of time that is celebrated on this occasion, as the waves, representing those in attendance, sing the praises of the guest of honor. Mitsune expertly addresses the event, the guest of honor, the audience, and the picture, all within a description of landscape that does not depend on the physical presence of the picture to be understood. Yet together, the poem and picture create a multisensory realm, and Mitsune’s words are at once a poetic appreciation of and an invitation into that world. Mitsune’s poem exhibits a responsiveness to the picture and to the occasion that no doubt grew over his career as a screen poetry special- ist. The techniques that he developed in approaching screen composition helped shape his poetic style, elements of which we now recognize as stylistic traits of Kokinshū as a whole. Mitsune’s screen poems explore what the mind can perceive, through the five senses, and often show the process of reconciling or rationalizing sensory evidence. Mitsune also sympathizes with and expresses the feelings of figures depicted in screen paintings, all the while maintaining a sensitivity to the external circumstances for which his poems were commissioned. The logical sense of his poems is balanced by an affective sensibility appropriate to the occasion.

Lady Ise and Screen Poetry: Persona and Narrative

One early twelfth-century appraisal of Ise states, “As far as waka composition was concerned, she was in no way inferior to her contemporaries Mitsune and Tsurayuki (Waka o yomu koto wa sono toki no Mitsune, Tsurayuki ni mo otorazarikeri).”58 The Nameless Book (Mumyōzōshi; ca. 1200), one of the earliest works of literary criticism in Japan, bestows even higher praise:

57 McCullough, Brocade by Night, p. 240. See also Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 212, for a further appreciation of this poem. 58 Mabuchi Kazuo et al., eds., Konjaku monogatari shū, NKBZ 23 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1974), 3:360. A full translation of the episode is included in appendix B herein. 124 chapter two

Truly, as an ideal example of someone of repute, elegance, and marvelous refinement, I wonder why, through the past and present, there has been no one on par with Lady Ise (makoto ni, na o ete, imijiku kokoro nikuku arama- hoshiki tameshi wa, ise no miyasudokoro bakari no hito wa, ikadeka mukashi mo ima mo haberamu).59 The fact that at important poetry contests of the day, Ise’s poems are pit- ted against those of Tsurayuki, Mitsune, and the other Kokinshū compilers is a testament to her reputation, as is the fact that she was chosen, probably by Uda, to record the proceedings of two poetry contests, one in 914 and another in 921. Joshua Mostow has noted how these records can be seen as the earliest ‘diaries’ (nikki) written in Japanese, preceding Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary (ca. 935), which has traditionally been seen as the beginning of Japanese ‘diary literature.’60 At a number of these poetry contests, Ise was the only female contribu- tor. She is not only the best-represented female poet in Kokinshū, but after the four compilers, she ranks third, after only Sosei and Narihira, for most compositions included in that anthology, with twenty-two (see table 1). Of the twenty-eight known female poets who contributed to Kokinshū, only Ise and Ono no Komachi (ca. 825–ca. 900) have more than four poems to their credit, and their combined forty poems are more than half the total number by female poets (seventy-four) in the entire anthology. As with Komachi, Ise’s poems and the few biographical details that can be confirmed have spawned numerous stories and legends about her life.61 Her father, Fujiwara no Tsugukage, sent her into the service of Empress Onshi (Atsuko; 872–907), and his position as governor of Ise Province at the time is where Ise derives her name. While at court, she apparently had a romantic relationship with Fujiwara no Nakahira, a member of the regential branch of the Fujiwara. A number of their poetic exchanges form the core of the so-called diary section that begins The Ise Collection. The first thirty-two poems of the collection have often been read as a

59 Kuwabara Hiroshi, ed., Mumyōzōshi, SNKS (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976), p. 116. See also Michele Marra, “Mumyōzōshi: Introduction and Translation,” Monumenta Nipponica 39, no. 4 (1984): 428. 60 See Joshua S. Mostow, At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 24–25. 61 Concerning the Komachi legends, see Roy E. Teele, Nicholas J. Teele, and H. Rebecca Teele, Ono no Komachi: Poems, Stories, Nō Plays (New York: Garland Publishers, 1993). See also Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan, Harvard East Asian Monograph 201 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), pp. 123–215. the efflorescence of screen poetry 125 biographical or autobiographical narrative recounting Ise’s affairs during her service at court.62 The inclusion of certain details in other collections, including imperial anthologies, contributed to her reputation as both poet and lover. Take, for example, the third poem in The Ise Collection. The Ise Collection 3 Kaku hito no muko ni narinikereba, ima wa towaji to omoite, arishi Yamato ni shibashi aramu to omoite, kaku iiyarikeru: Since he had become a certain person’s son-in-law, she thought that he would no longer visit. Thinking to stay a while in Yamato, where she used to live, she sent out this: miwa no yama / ikani machi mimu / toshi futomo / tazunuru hito mo / araji to omoeba At Miwa Mountain— how am I to wait and see through the passing years, since I think there will not be one who comes to visit?63 The complex and allusive poem is also anthologized as Kokinshū 780 (Book 15: Love 5), where the headnote states: She had a romance with the nobleman Nakahira, but they grew distant, and so [she] went to stay with her father who was serving as governor of Yamato. She composed and sent the following (Nakahira no ason, aishirite haberikeru o, karegata ni narinikereba, chichi ga, Yamato no kami ni haberikeru moto e makaru tote, yomite, tsukawashikeru).64 The editorial decision to include such detail in an imperial anthology was no doubt to impart a degree of biographical authenticity to what would otherwise be simply another example of the ‘waiting woman’ motif found in several Kokinshū poems and their Chinese precedents. By mentioning Miwa Mountain, which is in the province of her destination in Yamato, she alludes to an old legend, originating in an episode from The Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki; ca. 712), which tells of how the god enshrined at Miwa Mountain waited each night to secretly visit a certain young

62 See Mostow, At the House of Gathered Leaves, pp. 22–28 (on Ise and her service at court), and pp. 144–145 (on the biographical readings of the opening section of her collected works). Mostow provides a complete translation of the first thirty-two poems. 63 Sekine Yoshiko and Yamashita Michiyo, eds., Ise shū zenshaku, Shikashū zenshaku sōsho 16 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1996), pp. 69–71. Numeration and subsequent translations of headnotes and poems from The Ise Collection are based on the version in this edition. 64 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 236. 126 chapter two woman.65 His identity is revealed when her parents have a store of thread or yarn attached to his garment and then follow the strand back to the shrine at Miwa Mountain. The place-name Miwa, and the god enshrined there, became poetically associated with romantic trysts, waiting, and lovers with secret identities. Ise refers more specifically to the following poem by an unknown author: Kokinshū 982 (Book 18: Miscellaneous 2) waga io wa / miwa no yamamoto / koishiku wa / toburai kimase / sugi tateru kado My hut is at the foot of Miwa Mountain— If you yearn for me, do come and visit the gate where cedars stand.66 Ise’s poem, however, is not so much an invitation as an expression of utter dejection. The use of the rhetorical question is effective—how can she wait, in wretched forlornness, when she knows that no one will come for her? The impression is reinforced when one takes into account the information from The Ise Collection that Nakahira had married someone else. Both The Ise Collection and the imperial anthologies appear to have had considerable circulation among the educated elite, and the quality of Ise’s poetry as well as the inclusion of episodes like these added to her celebrity and renown. After her affair with Nakahira, she seems to have been pursued by his politically powerful brother, Tokihira, and then by the emperor Uda himself. She frequently composed at imperial request, sometimes for painted screens, until she temporarily went into retirement upon Uda’s abdication in 897. Her expression of regret over leaving court at the time, written directly on a wall (kabe) of the palace, forms the opening section of Tales of Yamato (Yamato monogatari; ca. 951). Teiji no mikado, ima wa oriisasetaminamu to suru koro, kokiden no kabe ni, Ise no go no kakitsukekeru: When Emperor Uda was about to abdicate, Lady Ise wrote on the wall of the Kokiden this poem:

65 See Yamaguchi Yoshinori and Kōnoshi Takamitsu, eds., Kojiki, SNKZ 1 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1997), pp. 185–188. An English version can be found in Donald L. Philippi, trans., Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 203–204. 66 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, pp. 294–295. the efflorescence of screen poetry 127

wakaruredo / ai mo oshimanu / momoshiki o / mizaran koto ya / nanika kanashiki Though I now depart, not a soul seems to care; why, then, does it grieve me to think I shall never see the palace again?

To arikereba, mikado, goranjite, sono katawara ni kakitsukesasetamōkeru: And when the emperor read her poem, he wrote beside it: mi hitotsu ni / aranu bakari o / oshinabete / yukikaeritemo / nadoka mizaran You must realize as well that I am not the only emperor; why should you not return to see the palace again?67 The act of inscribing a poem on a palace, temple, or hermitage wall in commemoration of a passing event was a well-established tradition among the poets of Tang China.68 In Heian Japan, however, such instances were rare, and this particular episode with Ise was highlighted by its prominent placement at the beginning of The Tales of Yamato, as well as its inclusion in other important texts, including her personal poetry collection, the imperial anthology Gosenshū, and the historical narrative The Great Mirror (Ōkagami; ca. 1119).69

67 Takahashi Shōji, ed., Yamato monogatari, NKBZ 8 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1972), p. 269. Translation (with minor modifications) from Mildred M. Tahara, Tales of Yamato: A Tenth- Century Poem-Tale (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), p. 3. Slight variations of this episode are also included in Ise’s personal poetry collection, The Ise Collection (poems 239–240), in the historical narrative The Great Mirror (Ōkagami; ca. 1119), and in the second imperial anthology of Japanese verse, Gosenshū, as poems 1322–1323 (Book 19: Parting and Travel). Sekine and Yamashita, Ise shū zenshaku, pp. 325–327, surmise that the poems were written on strips of paper and affixed to the palace walls. Katagiri Yōichi, ed., Gosen wakashū, SNKT 6 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 401, suggests that Uda refers to Onshi and not himself in the poem, implying that Ise could return to serve another empress. 68 In addition to Bai Juyi’s poem at Flowering Brightness Monastery cited previously, see also the political statement by Han Yu (768–824) titled “Inscribed at the Temple at Coal Valley Tarn” in Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 53–55, or “Written on a Wall at Summit-Top Tem- ple” and “Written on a Wall at Hsiu-Ching Monastery in Wu-Ch’ang” by Li Bo in David Hinton, trans., The Selected Poems of Li Po (New York: New Directions, 1996), pp. 11 and 95. There were also several instances in which Du Fu and Bai Juyi wrote commemorative poems on otherwise unadorned temple and hermitage walls. 69 See Mostow, At the House of Gathered Leaves, pp. 26–27, on the relationship between The Ise Collection and Tales of Yamato. 128 chapter two

Uda suggests in his poem that Ise could return to serve the new emperor, and she did indeed return to compose numerous screen poems for the next sovereign, Daigo. In fact, her service to Daigo and her reputation as a screen poet is nowhere better illustrated than in a detailed episode included in Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari shū; ca. 1252).70 The episode describes how Daigo had commissioned a screen for the coming-of-age ceremony for one of his sons. He distributed the scenes to several poets, including Tsurayuki and Mitsune, but just as the noted calligrapher Ono no Michikaze (893–966) was putting the finishing touches on the screen by inscribing the poems submitted, the emperor noticed that he had overlooked one scene, and there was a blank poem-square with no poem for it. Quite worried because the day of the ceremony had already arrived, the emperor dispatched a courtier to enlist Ise to compose a poem immediately. When Ise’s graceful impromptu composition was presented at the palace, it greatly impressed the emperor and all the court nobles in attendance. In The Ise Collection, the story is compressed into a headnote of one brief line. The Ise Collection 95 Ōnbyōbu uta, yama ni hanami ni isogiyuku tokoro. As a screen poem, where a person is hurrying through the mountains to view the blossoms. chiri chirazu / kikamahoshiki o / furusato no / hana mite kaeru / hito mo awanamu How I wish to hear whether they have fallen or not— Would that I could meet someone returning from my hometown who had seen the cherry blossoms there.71 The poem, included in several collections, employs a skillful indirect style while suggesting a narrative for the painted scene. The flowers of the poem are not pictorialized at all. Although blossoms may have been present in the painting, as some accounts suggest, the blossoms of the speaker’s hometown were certainly not depicted. Court and country are

70 The episode makes up Book 24, Story 31, of Tales of Times Now Past. Citation and full translation of the story is in appendix B herein. 71 Sekine and Yamashita, Ise shū zenshaku, pp. 185–186. The poem also appears as Shūishū 49 (Book 1: Spring 1), with a headnote reading “saiin byōbu ni, yama michi yuku hito aru tokoro” (on the screen of the Kamo Shrine Priestess, where there is a person traveling along a mountain path). Komachiya, Shūi wakashū, p. 16. the efflorescence of screen poetry 129 implicitly contrasted as Ise speaks for the mountain traveler who wonders aloud about the circumstances at his or her ‘native village’ (furusato). One can imagine the traveler to be a provincial governor’s daughter who had been serving at court. Regardless, the speaker’s speculation and anxiety over whether she will be in time, whether her journey back to see the blossoms will be in vain, creates a subtle disjunction between the court and home, between what is and is not depicted. By referring to something outside the scene, the lady invites the reader to imagine a narrative that is not limited to that figure’s immediate surroundings, although it is from the point of view of the painted figure. The poem captures the dramatic tension of the speaker’s present anxiety while alluding to the native village that embodies both her future (as her destination) and her past (as her hometown). Ise, like most other screen poets of her day, was not privy to the painting on which she was composing. Still, she was able to compose a poem that at once conforms to what was depicted and also expands the description to a scene outside the painting. The rhetorical technique is comparable to the way that Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn refers to the rural town where the streets must be empty because the inhabitants are all participating in the procession depicted on the urn. Both the ode and the screen poem describe a painted scene, but they also open up an imaginary visual space beyond what is strictly depicted. Both poets make inferences about a distant place based on the visual evidence at hand. By inviting the reader into a separate realm of time and space, Ise has used her visual referent (whether she actually saw it or not) as a springboard to tell a story that moves beyond the sentiment encapsulated in the short poem. Several of Ise’s poems exemplify this technique. Kikuchi Yasuhiko, following Tamagami Takuya, has described such poems as ‘narrative screen poems’—poems based on what Tamagami presumes were ‘narrative screens’ (monogatari byōbu 物語屏風).72 Though one does not find the term ‘narrative screen’ in Heian-period sources, there are several references in contemporary literature and in poem headnotes either to screens that portrayed a generic narrative context, such as a love affair taking place over the four seasons, or to paintings that depicted an already well-known story. The Ise Collection provides examples of both: an extended love narrative based on screen paintings is included as poems 34–51, which are immediately followed by a set of poems based on a screen that depicted “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.” Both are discussed later.

72 The ensuing discussion is indebted to Tamagami, “Byōbu-e to uta to monogatari to,” pp. 1–20, and Kikuchi, Kokinshū igo no Tsurayuki, pp. 7–73. 130 chapter two

It is important to note, however, that without extant screens to exam- ine, and without historical sources that describe the process of producing such narrative screens, it is difficult to determine the extent to which the pictures themselves told a story, through their own iconographic language. Some screens likely served as illustrations to specific texts, their interpretation heavily dependent on the viewer’s knowledge of the base story. In any case, the screens served as a kind of visual context for which poets could create or reinforce a narrative progression through original poems. Thus, while the pictures on narrative screens may have been based on an already well-known story, they also inspired new poems with strong storytelling qualities and offered another compositional stance for screen poets to adopt. Paintings on narrative screens enabled Japanese screen poets to bring certain historical or fictional characters to life, regardless of whether the stories were from the Chinese or the Japanese tradition. Contemporary sources show how the pictures and poems combined to serve as a foundation for abridged or enhanced retellings of the original narrative. For example, one of the most popular stories among the Heian elite was “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” a ballad by Bai Juyi. The long poem narrates the doomed love affair between Emperor Xuanzong and one of his consorts, Yang Guifei. Among the several paintings inspired by the story, the earliest reference is to a set painted on a screen belonging to Uda. At the emperor’s behest, Ise composed ten poems for the screen, the first five from the viewpoint of Xuanzong, and the last five from that of Lady Yang. The story of the infatuated emperor who loved his prized consort too well, such that he risked the downfall of the empire, was seen both as a morality tale concerning political responsibility and as a romantic tale of transcendent love. Ise’s set of poems focuses first on the unremit- ting sorrow of the emperor, who grieves over his consort who was put to death, and then on the longing of Lady Yang, who speaks from a realm beyond the clouds. The first poem establishes the motifs that continue through the remain- der of the poems. The Ise Collection 52 Chōgonka no byōbu o, Teiji-in no mikado kakasetamaite, sono tokorodokoro yomasetamaikeru. Mikado no ōn ni nashite: The Teiji Retired Emperor [Uda] commissioned a folding screen depicting “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” and ordered poems composed for the various scenes. Poems as Emperor Xuanzong: the efflorescence of screen poetry 131

momijiba ni / iro miewakazu / chiru mono wa / mono omou aki no / namida narikeri What scatters down with colors indistinguishable from the crimson leaves are my tears of sorrow, longing for you this autumn.73 The emperor’s unbearable grief is manifested, in Bai’s version of the story, in “blood and tears” flowing together.74 In Ise’s poem, the emperor compares his tears to the falling autumn leaves. The emperor and his consort made their vows to each other in the autumn, specifically on the seventh day of the seventh month, coinciding with the meeting of the cowherd- boy and the weaver-girl (represented by the stars Altair and Vega), who can see each other only once a year, a meeting celebrated as the Tanabata Festival in Japan.75 The tears of longing continue into the next poem, which alludes to the fact that death is what separates the two lovers. The Ise Collection 53 kaku bakari / otsuru namida no / tsutsumareba / kumo no tayori ni / misemashi mono o Falling this way, my tears, gathered up, would serve as a message into the realm of clouds, if only I could show them to you. Though his tears are like the rain that comes down from the clouds, he wishes he could instead go up into the clouds to let Yang know how much he misses her. The final poem from the emperor’s point of view presents his lonely garden covered in autumn leaves, an image that recalls the tears and blood from the first poem. The Ise Collection 56 kurenai ni / harawanu niwa wa / narinikeri / kanashiki koto no / ha nomi tsumorite

73 The first poem in the sequence is anthologized as Shoku gosenshū 911 (Book 14: Love 4). 74 For an English translation of the entire ballad, see Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), pp. 441–447. 75 Recall Taira no Sadafun’s poem (Shūishū 1091), discussed in chapter 1, that addressed the same topic. 132 chapter two

My garden, that has gone unraked, has turned a crimson hue— sad words of grief are all that have collected here. The promise the two had made to be together has been thwarted by death, and the grief-stricken emperor’s memories of their words are all that remain to him. As with most screen poetry from this era, the paintings can be reconstructed only in the imagination, using the images in the poems themselves, and through interpolating from the few contemporary descriptions and examples that remain. Ise’s poems, according to Sekine Yoshiko and Yamashita Michiyo, suggest that the screen may have had two facing panels, one depicting Xuanzong, and the other, the departed lady Yang.76 The emperor was probably portrayed at his Palace of Lasting Life (its name painfully ironic to those who knew the story), overlooking an autumnal garden scene. The mountainous backdrop may have continued across the panels, with clouds prominently placed to indicate the separation between this world and the island of immortals, where Yang would have been portrayed. After the five poems composed from the point of view of the emperor, Ise goes on to adopt the voice of Yang for the ensuing five poems. The Ise Collection 57 Kore wa kisaki no ōn’uta nite. These are poems as Lady Yang. shirube suru / kumo no fune dani / nakariseba / yo o umi naka ni / tare ka shiramashi If there were not this cloud-boat to serve as guide, who would know of this land amid the sea where I grow weary with sorrow? The poem employs a pivot on the word umi: yo o umi means ‘to grow weary of the world’ and umi no naka is ‘in the sea,’ referring to the afterlife realm where the speaker finds herself. Ise introduces the image of a boat making its way through the clouds, emphasizing its existence through the

76 Sekine and Yamashita, Ise shū zenshaku, pp. 140–149. the efflorescence of screen poetry 133 negative conditional (nakariseba)—if it were not for the boat that guides one through the clouds, no one would know of the speaker’s sorrow in the next world. But because the boat does indeed exist, and was most likely portrayed in the screen painting, the emperor can make his way to his consort in his thoughts. The subsequent poem refers to the night when Yang and the emperor exchanged vows. She expresses her undying love despite their final earthly separation through death. The Ise Collection 58 tsuki mo hi mo / nanuka no yoi no / chigiri o ba / kieshi hodo ni mo / mata zo wasurenu When both the month and day were sevens, that night we exchanged vows— and though that lifetime is no longer, I still do not forget them. In the lachrymose final poem, Yang bewails her separation from the world of men. The clouds form an implicit connection between tears and rain, as was the case in the emperor’s second poem, but instead of the intense tears of blood, Yang’s are of such volume that she compares them to a waterway (mio). The image binds the short set nicely: as a deep channel for the safe passage of boats, the term mio calls to mind the cloud-boat from Yang’s first poem. The Ise Collection 61 iru kumo no / hito waki mo senu / mono naraba namida wa mio to / nagarazaramashi If these spreading clouds did not separate me from the human realm, then my tears would not flow as they do like an open waterway. As with the poems in the emperor’s voice, tears here seem to be a conduit between the human and immortal realms. The grief the two lovers share, their ‘everlasting sorrow’ expressed through tears, is what binds them, in addition to the poems they address to each other. Scholars have surmised that this particular screen is the one Murasaki Shikibu is referring to when she mentions in the opening chapter of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari; ca. 1005) that the reigning emperor 134 chapter two is looking at pictures of “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.”77 The screen is identified in the tale as a treasure of the court, with poems by both Tsurayuki and Ise inscribed onto it. Grieving for Genji’s mother, who has passed away, the emperor likens himself to the Tang emperor who lost his prized consort, and he is similarly inconsolable. He calls into attendance his more gifted ladies-in-waiting, perhaps to compose, as Ise did, poems to accompany the paintings of Bai’s long poem—poems that would also express his own feelings of grief. The ten poems by Ise on “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” painted screen exhibit a clear separation of poet and speaker. She assumes the identity of each of the two main characters in turn, expressing feelings appropriate to each. The fact that the sentiments of these legendary Chinese figures were in the form of Japanese waka did not seem to be an issue for the poets and patrons of the Heian court, attesting to the naturalized biculturalism of the literati of the time. The sentiments were universal, regardless of the style of painting or the language in which they were ultimately expressed. Ise’s sequence of poems for the screen depicting “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” displays her skill in adopting distinct personae and in drawing inspiration from a visual stimulus and a background story. Her career as a poet, in fact, is largely defined by her ability to assume identities and create coherent characters through her lyric poetry. The Ise Collection begins with a sequence of thirty-two poems organized around Ise’s love affairs

77 The Tale of Genji reads: Myōbu felt a pang of sympathy when she found that His Majesty had not yet retired for the night. The garden court was in its autumn glory, and on the pretext of admiring it he had quietly called into attendance four or five of his most engaging gentle- women, with whom he was now conversing. Lately he had been spending all this time examining illustrations of “The Song of Unending Sorrow” commissioned by Emperor Uda, with poems by Ise and Tsurayuki; and other poems as well, in native speech or in Chinese, as long as they were on that theme, which was the constant topic of his conversation. See Royall Tyler, trans., The Tale of Genji (New York: Viking Press, 2001), p. 10, and Abe Akio, Akiyama Ken, and Imai Gen’e, eds., Genji monogatari, NKBZ 12 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan), 1:109. In “The Picture Contest” chapter, Genji has a set of pictures from “The Song of Ever- lasting Sorrow” among the old illustrated tales collected at his residence (Tyler, The Tale of Genji, p. 324; Abe, Akiyama, and Imai, Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13, 2:367). For more on the relationship between Ise’s poetry and the screen mentioned in The Tale of Genji, see Miya- gawa Yōko, “Kiritsubo no maki ni okeru Chōgonka no on’e: Ise shū to no kanren o kiten to shite,” Bungaku gogaku (Ōfūsha zenkoku daigaku kokugo kokubungakkai) 111 (December 1986): 47–56. the efflorescence of screen poetry 135 and her service at court.78 Though some read this section as a nonfiction autobiography or diary, Sekine Yoshiko and others have shown how a few of the poems have been recontextualized to form a more coherent narrative, essentially fictionalizing (monogatari-ka) the circumstances of composition and even the identities of some of those involved.79 A portion is devoted to an aestheticized courtship in episodic form, with brief prose contexts often highlighted by a closing poetic exchange. As a kind of poem-tale, the format is similar to The Tales of Ise, and The Tales of Heichū, which center, respectively, around poems by Ariwara no Narihira and Taira no Sadafun.80 In contrast to The Tales of Ise, which contains responses to the hero by mostly anonymous and pliant female characters, The Ise Collection puts forward the strong personality of Ise herself. And in contrast to The Tales of Heichū, which centers on Sadafun’s mostly unsuc- cessful overtures to women, The Ise Collection puts a focus on successful feminine response, either through clever rebuttal or through the eliciting of sympathy. Ise’s collection presents a sensitive female persona with superior poetic skills, and while the poems provide the core of this characterization, the organization of the poetic responses also suggests that this sympathetic persona was a conscious creation. The accretion of narrative context drawn from other sources is a crucial indication of the fictionalization of Ise’s persona and coincides with Sekine’s suggestion that this set of

78 The number of poems (between thirty-two and thirty-four) that comprise this opening sequence depends on the manuscript and on where scholars choose to separate the first narrative section from the rest of the collection. 79 The fictional aspects and the poem-tale form were first pointed out by Sometani Sususmu, “Ise shū no uta monogatari ni tsuite,” Tsuki no ki (September 1938): 18–29, and further developed by later scholars. See, for instance, Sekine Yoshiko, “Uta mongatari-ka no jidai to shikashū,” Kokubun (Ochanomizu daigaku kokugo kokubungakkai) 20 (Decem- ber 1963): pp. 1–11, and Yoshida Yukie, “Ise shū monogatari-ka no kōsetsu: Narazaka kara Ryūmonji e,” Kokubun (Ochanomizu daigaku kokugo kokubun gakkai) 69 (July 1988): 1–12. In English, Mostow, At the House of Gathered Leaves, pp. 144–163, and H. Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other Mid- Heian Texts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 112–130, have also commented on the connection between Ise’s biography and the opening sequence of poems in The Ise Collection. 80 A translation, as well as a discussion of the content and structure of these poem-tales, can be found in Helen Craig McCullough, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), and Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichū (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 1989). Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler, The Ise Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) provides a new translation of The Tales of Ise with detailed commentary about how each episode has been interpreted by scholars, both medieval and modern. 136 chapter two poems, often understood to be biographical in nature, includes elements of narrative fiction. Scholars have often examined the initial set of poems in isolation, but there are strong formal links between Ise’s portrayal of a woman in the various stages of courtship in the first thirty-three poems and the extended love affair that takes place over the four seasons in the subsequent set of seventeen poems. This second set of poems, which also reads like romance in the poem-tale genre, was composed at the empress Onshi’s request for a painted screen. This example shows that imperial sponsorship for such poetic sequences was not exclusively a male prerogative. Ise’s skill in creating a complex persona over a series of poems is even more apparent in the following sequence, in which she composes both the male and female sides of the dialogue. The sequence begins with a mention of the empress’s patronage. The Ise Collection 34–35 Kono chūgū, tōgū no nyōgō to kikoesasekeru toki, dai tamawasete, yomasetamaikeru ōnbyōbu no uta. Otoko no yuki aitsutsu mono iikeru e namu arikeru. Mume no hana no tayori ni, mono iisometaru onna ni, otoko. When the current empress was still known as the junior consort of the crown prince, she assigned topics for poems to be composed for a screen. There was a picture of a man who went to see a woman and repeatedly told her about his feelings. To the woman, when he began to court her, the man composed the following as he referred to a spray of plum blossoms. mishi hito ni / mata mo ya au to / mume no hana / sakishi atari ni / yukanu hi zo naki Not a day goes by without my coming here to where the plum once bloomed, all so that I might meet again the one I saw and loved.

Kaeshi: Her reply: hitotabi ni / korinishi mume no / hana nareba / chirinu to kikedo / mata mo minaku ni The blossoms of plum learned their mistake the first time they were cut— you might hear about their falling, but you will not see them again.81

81 Sekine and Yamashita, Ise shū zenshaku, pp. 124–126. The verb koru in the second poem means both ‘prune/cut [trees or shrubs]’ and ‘learn from experience.’ the efflorescence of screen poetry 137

The icy tone of the woman’s reply is typical for an initial response, especially from a woman who has already been slighted. In fact, such a refuta- tion in kind, utilizing the same imagery as the man’s poetic inquiry, was seen as the kind of skillful repartee that was all but required of women who expected to participate in the amorous amusements that seem, in literature at least, to have been a preoccupation of many members of the court. The male persona Ise constructs has persistence, a positive quality unless taken too far. The same man (onajiki otoko) redoubles his efforts later in the season, with the cherries instead of the plums now in blossom, but, again, the woman successfully rebuffs him: The Ise Collection 36–37 Sakura no hana sakari ni, onaji otoko: When the cherries were in bloom, the same man composed: waga yado ni / iza sasoware yo / sakurabana / nani yamazato ni / kakurete ka saku O cherry blossoms come to where you are invited, to my own home— why bloom hidden out here in this mountain village?

Kaeshi: Her reply: yo ni sakanu / mono ni ariseba / sakurabana / hito ni amaneku / tsugezaramashi o If the cherries were things that simply did not blossom in this world, you would not spread such words far and wide as you do. The man’s invitation is clear. The woman’s retort accuses him of being attracted only to exterior beauty. The final suffix mashi o indicates a condition contrary to fact: without outward signs, he would not make such proposals, but because cherries do in fact bloom (because women of outward beauty can be found), he spreads his words of invitation far and wide. The woman has again effectively turned the man’s analogy of women to flowers against him. As in The Tales of Heichū, the determination of the hero borders on the comical. After trying his luck with the plum and cherry blossoms, he returns to compose on the blooming wisteria of late spring, and then 138 chapter two on the orange blossoms of summer. Even his pledges of love on the day of the Tanabata Festival are quite literally cut down in her reply to him. Eventually he wears the woman down, and after he is caught in a sudden shower in early winter, she seems on the verge of accepting him. Following what would become a standard pattern in the literary portrayal of a love affair, any bliss that might have come out of the relationship is passed over, and the lovers soon find their relationship fraught with obstacles to their meeting again, obstacles that could include social censure, physical distance, or civic duty. In this case, the woman’s parents discover the affair and try to thwart it. Knowing that the affair is destined for failure, the woman manages a final liaison so that they may part ways. The sequence ends with winter imagery, a parting poem by the man, and the future of the relationship very much in doubt: The Ise Collection 49 Shiwasu ni, otoko kitari. Ainubeki yō naru o, oya kiki tsukete sei sureba, idete, onna: In the twelfth month, the man came. It seemed that at last she would meet with him. Hearing about this, her parents put her under strict observation, but when they did, she escaped. The woman composed: yoru koyu to / tare ka tsugekemu / ōsaka no / seki katamumeri / hayaku kaerinu I wonder who spread the word that you would cross over tonight? At Meeting Slope the barriers have been fortified, so please go back at once! The woman’s poem uses the conventional associations of crossing over (koyu) the pass at Osaka (literally, ‘Meeting Slope’) to indicate a lover’s tryst and also compares the barrier (seki) there to the prohibition put in place by her parents. Though she has come to warn him to turn back, the inclement weather ends up trapping them both. The Ise Collection 50 To iu ni, yuki no furikereba, But as she spoke, it began to snow [and he said], kaerusa no / michi yuku beku mo / omōezu / kōrite yuki no / furishi masareba I do not think that one can tread on the pathway back— for it is frozen and the snow is falling more and more. the efflorescence of screen poetry 139

The way back home for both of them will soon be blocked by snow, and they poignantly realize that this night may be their last together. In the final poem, the man notes the irony that their rendezvous was nothing like the meeting they had planned. Through a rhetorical question, a technique particularly prevalent in Ise’s compositions, the man pledges that though his body must go back to the capital, his heart will remain with the woman. The Ise Collection 51 To iu hodo ni, yo akenureba, otoko And as he spoke in this way, the night turned to dawn, and the man composed au koto no / awanu yo nagara / akenureba / ware koso kaere / kokoro ya wa yuku On this night we were to meet, but did not manage to— the dawn has broken, and I must go back, but does my heart go as well? The seventeen poems Ise composed at the empress’s behest for painted screens follow the progression of a love affair through the seasons and end with a parting poem in winter. The continuity of character, the narrative and episodic nature of the sequence, and the prominent role of poetry are all qualities that the set of poems shares with the opening ‘autobiographical’ section of The Ise Collection, as well as with works more traditionally associated with the poem-tale genre, such as The Tales of Ise and The Tales of Heichū. Regardless of the fact that the collection likely did not find its final form until well after Ise’s death, the sequence serves as an early embodiment of the poetic ideal of love’s progression, based on the Kokinshū model, which would later find multiple reiterations in works such as The Izumi Shikibu Diary (early eleventh century) and The Tale of Genji.82 That the poems were based on screen paintings is clear from the initial headnote, but whether the poems were meant for inscription is uncertain. It is possible that the poet composed simply for the empress’s amuse- ment, an exercise in making the painted figures ‘speak.’ Such an exercise

82 Janet A. Walker, “The Poetic Ideal and Fictional Reality in the Izumi Shikibu nikki,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 27 ( June 1977): 135–182, discusses the poetic conventions associated with the progress of a love affair. The Ise Collection and other works more traditionally categorized in the poem-tale genre helped elevate the conventions of poetry into an organizing principle for prose narrative as well. 140 chapter two would be consistent with contemporary practices that linked reading, viewing, appreciation, and composition. One can imagine a four-season screen, progressing from spring on the first panel on the right through to winter on the last panel on the left, with each panel replete with the appropriate seasonal imagery. The landscape would have been pocketed with male-female pairs, perhaps in carriages on the road, or in buildings in the shinden style, with the male in a solicitous pose offering a poem and the female feigning indifference or perhaps coyly backing away. Such a screen and the poems for it, whether actually inscribed or not, could have been a valuable part of the instruction of young court men and women on how to appropriately conduct an affair through poetry. Ise’s several screen compositions show that a consideration of visual narratives likely played a role in the development of her poetic persona. Furthermore, her gift for adopting different voices, as well as for developing a narrative through the sequencing of screen poems, elucidate new ways poets could approach composition on or for painted screens.

Reading, Viewing, Composing

Ise’s sequence was most likely based on a ‘narrative screen’ that depicted an unspecified story. As we have seen, some screens illustrated well- known narratives, such as “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” or, later, The Tales of Ise. Poem headnotes describe several screens that, on the contrary, had either generic or simply unidentified scenes. These served as the impetus for sequences of poems that read much like works now described as poem-tales. Tsurayuki, too, composed in this vein, adopting both the male’s and the female’s voice over consecutive poetic exchanges. A set commissioned by Emperor Suzaku (923–952, r. 930–946) provides a particularly good example: The Tsurayuki Collection 323 Jōhei gonen jūnigatsu, dairi onbyōbu no uta, ōse ni yorite tatematsuru. In the twelfth month of Jōhei 5 [935], the following were offered when the emperor ordered poems for a palace screen. Onna, sudare no moto ni itaru ni, otoko mono iu. Sakura no hana sakeri. There is a woman at the base of some hanging blinds, and a man is talking. The cherry blossoms are blooming. yoso nite wa / hana no tayori to / mienagara / kokoro no uchi ni / kokoro aru mono o the efflorescence of screen poetry 141

Though it may look to other people that I have come for the flowers, deep in my heart, I have other intentions! The initial poem does not elicit a response. The ensuing brief descriptions of the natural imagery depicted on the screen do not specify that the poems are by ‘the same man’ or ‘the same woman.’ Thus, the seasonal progression is emphasized over the narrative one. Note how the following exchange from the same set is similar to the kind of acerbic response found in some of the screen poems from The Ise Collection. The Tsurayuki Collection 329–330 Tsukuyo ni, onna no ie ni otoko itarite itari. On a moonlit night, there was a man who would not leave outside a woman’s house. yama no ha ni / irinan to omou / tsuki mitsutsu / ware wa to nagara / aran to ya suru I gaze out at the moon knowing it will find its home behind the mountain ridge— am I alone to go on to spend the night outside?

Onna, kaeshi. The woman’s reply. hisakata no / tsuki no tayori ni / kuru hito wa / itaranu tokoro / araji to omou He who comes comparing himself to the far-off moon— I do not think there is a place where he has not been.83 The man is obviously making an appeal for entry into the woman’s rooms. Like the man who used flower viewing only as a pretext to begin an affair with a woman, the speaker here attempts to draw sympathy from the

83 Tanaka and Tanaka, Tsurayuki shū, pp. 271–272. The poems are anthologized as Fūgashū 1572–1573 (Book 15: Miscellaneous 1). Tsurayuki composed the exchange in the eleventh month of Shōhei 5 (935). 142 chapter two woman through a shared moon-viewing experience. The woman, however, turns the metaphor back on the man: if he is like the moon, then he can be seen from anywhere and has probably found refuge at many a woman’s home. The use of the double negative is at once indirect and striking. The screen Tsurayuki saw may have generically resembled an illustration from The Tales of Ise, which was probably being put into its final form at around the time Tsurayuki composed this exchange. One can imagine in this case a screen with a house amid autumn grasses in the foreground, with the man outside on the veranda plying his poetic trade and bent on entering, and the woman inside fending him off with a poem of her own. The two poems, if inscribed and not composed only as extemporaneous examples, would have been on shikishigata, probably placed on the panel with the two figures, and in the background would be the moon sinking behind a mountain ridge. The scene might have served as an educational tool, a visual aid in teaching the process of courtship to young men and women of the court, and it could even have served as a backdrop in an oral reading of The Tales of Ise itself. A genre scene of an episode from The Tales of Ise spurring the creation of new prose and poetry would also be consistent with compositional practices of the time, as will be argued in the context of the Tales of Yamato discussion later. The role that these so-called narrative screens had, especially in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, in the reading and composing of poems and tales is not clear. Some scholars have suggested that even The Tales of Ise itself may have been originally composed based on pictures, but the case has probably been overstated.84 More likely, the compilation of the tale, the production of screen paintings and their poems, and the reading and the transfiguration of narrative tales were all part of a complex network of artistic production and consumption that the men and women of the court participated in to varying degrees. Deviations in the oral telling of stories, variations in narrative order, serial and episodic reading practices, the simultaneous appreciation of pictures on screens or in picture-scroll (emaki 絵巻) formats, and the production of new poems or pictures were all components of an evolving spectrum of reading

84 See Joshua Mostow, “Modern Constructions of Tales of Ise: Gender and Courtliness,” in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 96–119, and Mostow, “Byōbu uta to utagatari to Ise monogatari to,” in Heian bungaku to kaiga, Ronshū Heian bungaku 6, ed. Gotō Shōko et al. (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2001), pp. 100–114. the efflorescence of screen poetry 143 responses. The narrative screen, too, was a conglomerate art project that combined the visual and verbal arts, the creation and appreciation of which engaged the producers and consumers of those arts in a myriad of ways. The reading and writing of tales, as well as the production and the enjoyment of poems and illustrations based on them, were just a few of the artistic pursuits that bound the more literarily minded segments of court society. The multimedia nature of artistic production is exemplified in a scene from “The Picture Contest” (“E-awase”) chapter of The Tale of Genji. Murasaki Shikibu describes an event at which two sides presented paintings of tales in order to gain the favor of the reigning emperor. Although the pictures were the ostensible focus, the following passage reveals the meticulous attention each side devoted to details external to the actual paintings themselves. On the Left, the scrolls’ rosewood boxes, covered by grape-colored Chinese silk, rested on sappanwood stands placed on purple Chinese brocade. Six page girls wore cherry blossom dress gowns over red, and wisteria layerings over scarlet. They looked marvelous and seemed beautifully trained. The Right’s scrolls, in aloeswood boxes, rested on stands of fragrant wood set out on green Koma brocade; the design of the stands as well as the cords with which the brocade was secured to their legs was wonderfully stylish. The page girls were in dress gowns of willow and of kerria rose over green. They all went to place their stands and boxes before His Majesty.85 The ornamental paper, the design and execution of the painting, the poetry, and the calligraphy with which the poetry was inscribed were all only part of the exhibition of the scrolls. Each side also expended considerable resources for lacquered rollers, decorative covers, binding cords, ornately carved boxes, box stands, ornamental knots in silk outer ties, and lavish attire for serving girls who presented boxes. The picture contest itself, as a large-scale social event, was understandably the cause for a flurry of artistic production, but even the ensuing debate over the relative superiority of tales from the past takes place in the form of newly composed waka. When comparing The Tales of Ise to the more recent story Jōsanmi (not extant, but likely late tenth century), the two sides argue vehemently about the merits of each. A lady-in-waiting called Hei Naishi expresses in the form of a poem her objection to the dismissive attitude toward The Tales of Ise taken by the ladies on the opposing side.

85 Tyler, The Tale of Genji, p. 328; Abe, Akiyama, and Imai, Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13, pp. 365–366. 144 chapter two

ise no umi / fukaki kokoro o / tadorazute / furinishi ato to / nami ya ketsu beki Without even acknowledging the great depths of the Sea of Ise, should the waves of modernity simply wash away all traces of the past? Another lady-in-waiting, Daini, retorts that the heroine in Jōsanmi has nobler intentions than the reckless lover Narihira portrayed in The Tales of Ise. kumo no ue ni / omoi noboreru / kokoro ni wa / chihiro no soko mo / haruka ni zo miru To the heart of one who aspires to climb up above the clouds, the sea bottom a thousand fathoms deep seems far below indeed.86 In earlier screen poetry in the gasan mode, the poem served as an appreciation of the picture, an example of one art generating another. The process is taken to a step further removed in “The Picture Contest,” in which the appraisal of works of narrative fiction gives rise to new poems, exem- plifying the conflation of the consumption and production of literature. Another excellent example of the interrelationship of reading, picture viewing, and writing takes place in the “Legend of Ikuta River” (“Ikutagawa densetsu”), narrated in section 147 of Tales of Yamato. In a style reminiscent of The Tales of Ise, the narrator begins the story with a young maiden who is courted by two ardent admirers and cannot choose between them. The background and social status of the two men, and even the gifts they bring her, are almost identical. The two travel to her temporary residence near the bank of the Ikuta River, express their devotion, and patiently await her decision. When even the archery contest between the two suitors ends in a tie, the distraught maiden throws herself into the river. The two young men try to rescue her, but all three end up drowning. After recounting these main events, the narrator relates an earlier telling of the same story at which pictures were presented to the listening audience. Based

86 Abe, Akiyama, and Imai, Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13, p. 372; Tyler’s translation appears in The Tale of Genji, p. 326. the efflorescence of screen poetry 145 on these pictures, several of the ladies-in-waiting in attendance then composed poems from the viewpoint of one of the characters in the story: Tales of Yamato 147 . . . Someone depicted this tragic tale of long ago in a detailed painting and presented it to the late empress. Everyone present tried to imagine themselves in the place of one of the three tragic people and composed a number of poems. Lady Ise, expressing the feelings of one of the youths, composed this poem: kage to nomi / mizu no shita nite / aimiredo / tama naki kara wa / kai nakarikeri Our shadowy forms are now united at the river’s bottom, but what use to me is your body without a soul?

Onna Iichi no Miko, pretending to be the maiden, recited this poem: kagiri naku / fukaku shizumeru / waga tama wa / ukitaru hito ni / mien mono ka wa My soul, which has sunk deep beneath the river’s surface, will never be united with a drifting, faithless lover.

Onna Iichi no Miko also recited: izuku ni ka / tama o motomen / watatsu umi no / koko kashiko tomo / omōenaku ni Not even knowing whether it is here or there in the vast stretches of the sea, where shall I search for her soul?87 The narrator interrupted the reading process to incorporate later poems based on the legend, and these poems became part of the extended narrative. The pictures no doubt helped the ladies-in-waiting visualize themselves as the characters in the story and perhaps even prompted the extemporaneous composition session. The fact that the main characters of the “Legend of Ikuta River” had already drowned by this point in the

87 Takahashi, Yamato monogatari, pp. 382–388. Translation (with minor modifications) from Tahara, Tales of Yamato, pp. 93–98. 146 chapter two

Tales of Yamato episode gives the compositions an eerie sense of coming from beneath the waters and beyond the grave. Ise’s poem expresses the futility (kai nakarikeri) of the sacrifice paid by the young maiden and ultimately her two suitors as well. The poignant thoughts of a lover whose desires are thwarted are expressed in the translation through the use of the rhetorical question. The sentiments of the young woman expressed in the second poem are not a chastisement of either of the suitors for being unfaithful, but rather points to the inevita- bility of the union of the three beneath the water. Her heart would not go with someone who was ‘faithless’ (ukitaru) but also, literally, with someone who floated back to the surface—the only union that could occur would have to be with her soul “sunk deep beneath” the waters (kagiri naku / fukaku shizumeru). The third poem utilizes the water motif to conjure up the image of the legendary ill-starred lovers in the aforementioned “Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” known through Bai Juyi’s lyric adaptation. One of the young suitors is put in the position of Xuanzong, having to search for the soul of his deceased lover. After various ladies-in-waiting offer a total of ten poems, the narrator proceeds to describe how the father of one of the young suitors makes arrangements for the grave site, and then how a later traveler who lodges near the Ikuta River hears the spirits of the two men in heated argument. The traveler lends his sword to one of the rivals and then wakes, unsure whether he dreamt the whole dispute, first noticing his sword missing, and then later finding it stained with blood. Like the screen poems composed in the voices of the three drowned youths, these brief passages, too, may have been later accretions that became part of the narrative proper through repeated retellings of the tale. These examples from The Ise Collection and The Tales of Ise show that the line between fiction and nonfiction was often indistinct. As has often been said of monogatari narratives, the telling of the story brings that story into existence, and the overlap between the content of any particular story and the telling of it is precisely what allows for creative commentary to become part of the narrative. Passages in literature from the period that describe reading practices often highlight the fact that there were illustrations to facilitate the process of reading, comprehending, and learning from these tales and romances. Based on the ways the arts inter- relate during the period, an interruption in the narration of a tale for the extemporaneous composition of poetry may not have been an uncom- mon occurrence. The process described in The Tales of Yamato suggests the efflorescence of screen poetry 147 that there was a close connection between the reading, understanding and appreciation of a story and its pictures on the one hand, and the expression, versification, and even the new production of art on the other. As outlined in the previous chapter, Japanese verse based on paintings began in the mold of Tang painting poems, which called attention to the artifice of the image, yet praised its verisimilitude. By the early tenth century, however, composing from the point of view of a figure depicted in the painted scene was the only acceptable approach in formal screen poetry. Poets such as Tsurayuki, Mitsune, and Ise capitalized on such limitations by pointing to the content of the painted image while also expanding their descriptions beyond what was strictly depicted. Their keen uses of allusion tapped into a complex network of poetic associations that at once enriched the meanings of their poems and also helped them express sentiments appropriate to the occasion for which they composed. Just as the composition of screen poetry effected a separation of poet and speaker and may have had a significant impact on the way monogatari narratives were read and composed, such poetry also fundamentally shaped the way poetic topics were conceived. The relationship of painted screens, and visual images in general, to the formation of poetic topics and conventions is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter Three

The Dai Is Cast

As we have seen in the poems that served as the base materials for later paintings, themes in poetry had direct bearing on subject matter in painting. The reverse is also true: during the first half of the tenth century, when many of the standards and conventions of waka poetry were established, visual images were central to the development of topics in poetry (the aforementioned dai 題). Poems for painted screens and poems based on other visual prompts even helped define the poetic topic as a concept. Dai came to denote a network of associations ultimately derived from a range of sensory experiences and emotional responses that were filtered through the poetry of the past. Screen poetry specifically contributed to the formulation of the fundamental conventions associated with certain topics, their ‘poetic essence’ (the hon’i 本意 mentioned earlier). As objects at hand were abstracted into topics for composition, the presence of simulacra facilitated the poet’s ‘visual thinking’ about particular dai. Mastery of these topics, and the hon’i that defined them, were paramount to a poet’s success in the classical and medieval periods.

Topical Convention vs. Lyric Expression

In the oft-quoted preface to the first imperial anthology of Japanese verse, Kokinshū, Ki no Tsurayuki compares waka poetry to the songs that naturally spring forth from all living things: Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives. The song of the warbler among the blossoms, the voice of the frog dwelling in the water— these teach us that every living creature sings.1

1 Helen Craig McCullough, trans., Kokin wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japa- nese Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 3. Japanese text in Kojima Noriyuki and Arai Eizō, eds., Kokin wakashū, SNKT 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), p. 4. 150 chapter three

The lyricism Tsurayuki describes seems antithetical to the notion that poetry can be assigned and composed on set topics, each of which has an elaborate matrix of conventional associations that would-be composers had to study and practice in order to craft poems that their peers would deem appropriate. That is to say, the idea that poetry is an upwelling of one’s feelings seems counter to the idea of poetry as a learned art. Now, Tsurayuki himself was an expert poet who composed hundreds of poems on demand, and his career shows that he was able to cultivate his natural sensitivity while at the same time hone his compositional skills such that he could intuitively respond, in the form of a poem, to various external stimuli. For Tsurayuki and other poets who composed at their patron’s request, the composition of appropriate poetry based on sensory experience became ‘second nature.’ Though Tsurayuki seems to have negotiated a balance between lyricism and craft, later poets’ obsession with dai makes the lyric nature of waka poetry, as described in the Kokinshū preface, difficult to recognize. More and more dai come to be defined and confined by convention, and composing on set topics (daiei 題詠) becomes the dominant form of formal composition in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The treatise Toshiyori’s Poetic Essentials (Toshiyori zuinō; ca. 1115) advises, “In general, when you are to compose a poem, you must first fully grasp in your mind and heart the topic (ōkata, uta o yomamu ni wa, dai o yoku kokoro ubeki nari).”2 The instructional text A Primer for Japanese Poetry (Waka shogakushō; 1169), by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104–1177), says much the same thing: “When you are going to compose a poem, you must fully comprehend the topic (uta o yomamu ni wa dai o yoku omoitoki kokoro ubeshi).”3 By the late eleventh century, straying from the assigned topic (bōdai) or ignoring or leaving out the topic altogether (rakudai) become well-known defects or ‘illnesses’ (kabyō/uta no yamai) to avoid in one’s compositions. The power of dai in formal poetry was such that anyone who did not grasp the hon’i of a topic, or who showed an ignorance of certain fundamental poetic associations when submitting a verse, faced not only the disapproval of his peers, but outright condemnation. Modern scholars such as Kubota Jun and Ozawa Masao have argued that dai served to distance poetry from immediate experience and helped

2 See Toshiyori zuinō, in Hashimoto Fumio et al., eds., Karonshū, NKBZ 50 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1975), p. 83. 3 Sasaki Nobutsuna, ed., Waka shogakushō, Nihon kagaku taikei 2 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1956), p. 172. the dai is cast 151 raise literary awareness (bungakuteki ishiki) and place Japanese poetry in the realm of conceptual literature (kannenteki bungaku).4 In this early period when, through the composition, collection, and repetition of certain poetic tropes, topics develop into the core cluster of associations that would become essential knowledge for later poets, the visual arts played a pivotal role. The presence of a visual object, whether a painting, a diorama of the seaside, or another kind of representation in miniature, seems to have been required at venues where early dai were assigned. These representations directly influenced the way the poetic topics were perceived and handled and helped poets mediate the purported lyricism of direct experience and the learned techniques of poetry as a craft. The term dai has five distinguishable but sometimes overlapping usages. One early use of the term in Japan derives from ‘banquet poems’ from Tang China that were based on topics assigned extemporaneously. Impromptu versification was a common pastime at banquets, drinking parties, and poetry gatherings in China during the Tang, and aristocrats of Heian Japan emulated such elegant gatherings. The host of one of these events might ask one or several of his guests to compose a poem about, for instance, the orange blossoms that grew outside his house or the fish in his garden ponds. The assignment would come from something at hand, and the composition and recitation of the poems functioned as a kind of live entertainment. The resulting poems were often very much tied to the particular time and place of the event. These occasional poems can usually be described as yong wu 詠物, or ‘poems on things’ (eibutsu in Japanese), with the understanding that the subject matter would be something at hand, directly perceptible by the guests at the venue.5 Poets could also compose yong wu without being specifically assigned a topic by someone else. These privately composed yong wu form a second category of topic-based composition. Yong wu most often took objects immediately perceptible to the poet, such as wine cups, wild geese, or

4 The eminent scholar Kubota Jun, in his entry for dai in Nihon koten bugaku daijiten, goes so far as to say that the development of topics helped mature poetry into a conceptual literature that could be separated from reality. Ozawa Masao states that “the development of composition on topics occurred in tandem with the development of literary awareness with regard to poetry” in his Kokinshū no sekai (Tokyo: Hanawa shobō, 1976), p. 245. 5 The term eibutsu in Japanese usually denotes a kind of poem that takes the name of something as the topic of composition and was a general category used to contrast with eishi 詠史, compositions (usually in Chinese) on events from history. I continue to use the Chinese term yong wu because eibutsu as a category connotes something rather different from the idea of yong wu as ‘poems on things at hand.’ 152 chapter three the moon as their subject matter, and the object composed upon would be the dai. For instance, a poet might privately compose a poem on the fish in his garden ponds simply because the sight of the fish inspired him to do so. Thus, without further information, we cannot know if a heading that explains that a certain poem was “composed on the fish in the garden ponds” describes the poet’s own initiative or his assignment from someone else. Both of these uses of dai, as the topic of an ‘assigned poem’ and as the subject of a ‘poem on things,’ are connected to the compositional process. Another use of dai, by contrast, is the content-based descriptive title added to a poem long after its composition. When, for instance, an anonymous poem about snow comes to be preserved in an anthology, an editor might add the title “On Snow.” Konishi Jin’ichi has pointed out that the “title-like topic notes” in the collected poems of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (ca. 662–710) seem to replicate titles found in earlier collections of Chinese verse. We cannot know, however, whether such designations as “Composed on Flowers” or “Composed on Mountains” were added later, describe the immediate circumstances of composition, or both.6 These ‘circumstances of composition’ bring us to a fourth use of the term dai. A lengthy preface to a poem giving the reign name, date, and details about a gathering or a commission to compose poetry would not normally be considered a dai, but a short headnote such as “parting at dawn” (ariake no wakare 有明の別れ) certainly would be. In the ninth and early tenth centuries, such a label would more likely be a description of the compositional circumstances, whereas in later centuries, “parting at dawn” would designate a relatively clearly delineated poetic topic with its own set of conventional associations and images. In the thirteenth century, for instance, “parting at dawn” could be assigned as a topic during the course of a poetry competition and would not necessarily be based on the poet’s experience, but rather on the ‘poetic essence,’ as epitomized by previous verse on the same topic. The concept of hon’i as it developed in the eleventh century is fundamental to understanding this last meaning of dai. Early on, the term hon’i (also read hoi or moto no kokoro) referred to the original meaning or intent of a certain term or phrase, as determined by some of its earliest

6 See Konishi Jin’ichi, A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 1, The Archaic and Ancient Ages, trans. Aileen Gatten and Nicholas Teele, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 381. the dai is cast 153 usages. The cuckoo, for instance, was known from the seventh century on for its distinct call, conventionally heard on summer evenings by travelers through mountain fields. The plover, on the contrary, was not consistently associated with any particular season in early poetry; it had a wide range of connotations until later poets and theorists defined its hon’i, essentially prescribing the correct handling of the topic ‘plover.’ One of the earliest uses of hon’i occurs at the Palace Poetry Contest of 960 (Tentoku yonen dairi uta awase). In the eighth round, the judge, Fujiwara no Saneyori (900–970), criticizes one of the poems for its handing of ‘eightfold blossoms’ by stating, “If one says that the eightfold blossom does not bloom, does this not go against its essence ( yae sakazu ba, hoi naku ya aramu)?”7 By the time Fujiwara no Mototoshi (d. 1142) delivers his judgments at the Regent Tadamichi Poetry Contest of 1121 (Hōan ninen kugatsu jūninichi Kanpaku Naidaijin Tadamichi uta awase), the term hon’i is equated with the correct meaning or handling of a topic.8 All manner of poetic treatises from the eleventh century on, from Faulting the Goshūishū (Nan Goshūi; ca. 1090) of Minamoto no Tsunenobu (1016–1097) to Poetic Styles Past and Present (Korai fūtei shō; ca. 1200) by Fujiwara no Shunzei, are occupied with defining poetic topics and their core conventions, dai and hon’i. Eventually, the term dai comes to imply a set of conventions established by earlier poetry and prose, a body of literature that was constantly evolving and expanding with each new poem, citation, and commentary. Composition on any particular dai involved responding to the aggregate meanings that poets of the past attached to it. “Parting at dawn” must have, at one point, described a poem that was composed under the true circumstances of a man reluctantly taking his leave from a woman after their night together. As this poignant moment came to be recognized as a category or genre, and as poetry under these circumstances became established as decorous procedure, certain conventions developed. Gradually, by adopting these conventions, poets shifted “parting at dawn” from a term descriptive of actual circumstances into the realm of ‘conceptual literature,’ to use Kubota’s phrase once again. The result was a dai that was based not on direct experience but on previous poetry. Thus, a poem on the topic “parting at dawn” did not have to be based on any particular parting from any specific person, but could be composed extemporaneously,

7 Hagitani Boku and Taniyama Shigeru, eds., Uta awase shū, NKBT 74 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), p. 82. 8 See Hagitani Boku, ed., Heian chō uta awase taisei 3 (Kyoto: Dōhōsha shuppan, 1996), pp. 1907–1919. 154 chapter three and upon request, at a poetry party in the early evening. In lieu of the actual circumstances of composition (the poetry party), the dai puts forward a fictional one. In doing so, the dai necessarily brings about a disjunction between the poet and the speaker of the poem whose circumstances are obviously not the same. The assigned poem would be based on the poet’s knowledge of all the conventional connections the topic entailed, but would be composed from the fictional point of view of someone “parting at dawn.” The term dai, usually translated ‘poetic topic,’ has, as we have seen, a cluster of meanings: (1) the topic of an assigned poem, (2) the subject matter of a yong wu “composition on something at hand,” (3) a descriptive title later attached to a poem, based on its content, (4) the circumstances under which a poem was composed, and, finally, (5) the set of conventions associated with an assigned topic. While poets continued to emphasize the lyrical nature of waka as an outpouring of human feeling, the development of poetic topics, in all of their forms, and the refinement of their poetic essence had the effect of regulating individual expression into the coded language of traditional poetry. As will be argued next, painted screens and other visual objects contributed in vital ways to this process of casting the dai.

Early Dai: Visual Perception and Direct Experience

The first recorded examples of poetry on assigned topics in Japan are preserved in Nostalgic Recollections of Poetry (Kaifūsō; 751), an anthology of Chinese verse (kanshi) composed by Japanese poets. Consistent with the Tang banquet poems they emulated, the poems in Nostalgic Recollections were based on concrete topics—things that were at hand or immediately perceptible, rather than abstract, aesthetic, or associative images. For example, poem 15, by Emperor Monmu (683–707, r. 697–707), is labeled “eigetsu” (tsuki o eizu / tsuki o yomu, 詠月), or “composed about the moon.”9 The emperor’s toast to the occasion and his reference to the moon’s reflection in his wine cup show that his poem is not about the

9 Text of the Chinese poem can be found in Kojima Noriyuki, ed., Kaifūsō, Bunka shūreishū, Honchō monzui, NKBT 69 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964), pp. 86–87. See Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. Bradstock, Dance of the Butterflies: Chinese Poetry from the Japanese Court Tradition, Cornell East Asia Series 125 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cor- nell University, 2005), p. 40, for an English translation of the poem. the dai is cast 155 characteristics or poetic associations of the moon in general, or about the moon at an important point in the historical past, but the moon on the specific night of composition at a drinking party in the year 707. In other words, ‘the moon’ is treated as an ‘object at hand’ for the purposes of composing what amounts to a yong wu. There were no doubt already a number of communally accepted notions about what a moon composition would entail, but the poetic connections of ‘the moon’ and other celestial phenomena still appear to be rather murky—that is to say, ‘the moon’ was not a topic with an established poetic essence. Later poets would link the moon with the autumn season and feelings of loneliness, often while traveling outside the capital, but these are not the associations made by poets represented in Nostalgic Recollections. Instead, the primary consideration was the event itself, and the fact that the poems are tied to specific occasions is readily apparent in titles such as “At a Banquet at the Beginning of Spring” (“Shoshun no utage ni jisu 初春侍宴”) or “At a Banquet on a Spring Day” (“Haru no hi no utage ni jisu 春日侍宴”).10 At Monmu’s drinking party, the Chinese poems “composed about the moon” served as an appreciation of the moon’s appearance in the sky on the night of the gathering, an auspicious image through which poets could praise the occasion itself. In Book 7 of Man’yōshū, the oldest anthology of Japanese verse, we find the identical heading, “eigetsu/tsuki o yomu,” this time for a set of seventeen Japanese poems (poems 1069–1086).11 However, to say that the poems were “composed about the moon” here would be misleading. While the word ‘moon’ (tsuki) appears in each of these poems, we do not know the original circumstances under which these poems were composed. A few suggest a banquet atmosphere, others a palace or court context, and still others appear based on conceits in Chinese poems. What is relatively certain is that a later editor grouped these disparate poems together under a single categorical heading. The progression of categories in Book 7, Book 10, and elsewhere in Man’yōshū suggests that Ōtomo no Yakamochi or some other compiler organized the poems along the lines of Chinese topical concordances, or leiju 類聚 (J. ruijū). Tang encyclopedias such as The Literary Arts Classified

10 Preceding Kaifūsō 44 by Ōtomo no Tabito (665–731) and Kaifūsō 70 by Abe no Hironiwa (659–732). See Kojima, Kaifūsō, pp. 111 and 135. 11 Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Akihiro, eds., Man’yōshū 2, NKBZ 3 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1972), pp. 203–207. Translations for these poems can be found in Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, vol. 1, The Gem-Glistening Cup (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 1993), pp. 649–650. 156 chapter three

(Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚) were well known among Heian literati and likely influenced the editorial process of Man’yōshū as well. As Stephen Owen has explained, such encyclopedias would give something of the natural history of the chosen subject; its appearance in accounts of human history; famous anecdotes in which it appeared; and related poems, poetic exposition, and prose pieces about it. These served as models for treatment by later poets, who might be called on to write on a particular subject in an examination, at a party, or simply for pleasure.12 Like these works, some sections of Man’yōshū begin with atmospheric elements in an established order (the sky, the moon, clouds, rain), then progress to terrestrial features (mountains, hills, rivers), and finally on to an established progression of certain flora and fauna. A set of three poems labeled “tsuki o yomu” (poems 1874–1876) in Book 10 of Man’yōshū is part of a short series in which this organizational principle seems to be at work. These anonymously composed poems were not likely composed on ‘the moon’ as an assigned topic but appear under this heading because a later editor chose to organize and label them in such a way as to foreground their subject matter. The last poem in Book 7 of Man’yōshū has the descriptive title “a travel poem” (tabi no uta 旅歌). Modern annotators seem to agree that the poem is not, however, a poem composed on the assigned topic of travel but, rather, “a poem composed while on a journey” (tabi de no uta). In other words, the dai here purportedly describes the circumstances of composition. Man’yōshū 1417 (Book 7) Tabi no uta. A poem while on a journey. nago no umi o / asa kogi kureba / watanaka ni / kako so nakunaru / aware sono kako In the morning, as I row in at the Sea of Nago, in the waters the deer cry out— how my heart goes out to them!13

12 Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), p. 378. 13 Kojima, Kinoshita, and Satake, Man’yōshū 2, p. 283. Nago (or Nako) is an unidentified place that may have been along the Sumiyoshi coastline. The term kako 鹿子, for deer, the dai is cast 157

The poem and its hypothetical circumstances give rise to a number of unanswerable questions. How likely was it that the anonymous poet uttered these words or wrote them down just as, or soon after, he rowed in at the Sea of Nago at dawn? Is it more likely that at some point on his journey he recalled his experience that morning and composed a poem to encapsulate his feelings? From a practical standpoint, how was such a poem preserved in order to find its way into the anthology? By suggesting that the poem was actually composed while traveling, modern annotators assume that the poet and speaker are one and the same, and that the poem has some connection to direct experience. In Tsurayuki’s terms, the poet has used the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by an event in his life. Unfortunately, as with the bulk of the anonymous poems from Man’yōshū, no supplementary evidence about the circumstances of composition exists. As attractive as the straightforward lyrical interpretation might be, we cannot know whether this articulation of feelings was based on actual experience, or even whether the poet was at Nago at all. What we can say for certain is that geographic place-names did not yet have the force of tradition behind them—mentioning a place like Nago did not bring about automatic poetic associations. More generally, the accumulation of travel poems and citations to them had not yet achieved the critical mass necessary to prescribe the tone and thematic content a ‘travel poem.’ Later poets would have far greater incentive, and even the obligation, to compose on demand a poem about traveling to or being at famous geographic places (meisho, utamakura) based solely on conventions of the literary tradition, without ever having actually been to the named site. Whatever artifice the poem on rowing in at the Sea of Nago exhibits, the labeling of it as a ‘travel poem’ is nonetheless categorically different from the kind of assigned topics that were based on affirmed literary conventions. The late-Heian historical source The Abbreviated History of Japan (Fusō ryakki 扶桑略記; early twelfth century) contains a description of assigned poetry composed on location. The emphasis on immediate visual perception directly relates to how the subject matter for the Japanese poetry was derived. On the twenty-fifth day of the tenth month of 898, the retired emperor Uda and his entourage took a trip to Miyadaki, a site north of the capital famous for the rapidly flowing Yoshino River. The account states,

suggests an affinity with them. The term has also been interpreted as kako 水夫／水手, for sailors or fishermen. 158 chapter three in literary Chinese, “‘Seeing Miyadaki’ was taken to form the topic, and each person in attendance offered a poem (‘Miyadaki o miru’ o motte dai to nashi, ono ono waka o tatematsuriki).”14 Because the language and the date of The Abbreviated History are at quite a remove from the ninth-century poems composed at Miyadaki, the account only helps in the recovery of late-Heian and not early Heian definitions of dai. The process described, however, is revealing in the way sight (miru) is privileged—again, ‘the seen’ (not to mention the imperial request) gives rise to poetic composition. For Uda, the poetry was a kind of entertainment en route, an affirmation of his position of benign authority and, later, a commemoration of the journey. For those who offered poems, ‘the seen’ essentially became the assigned subject, and they celebrated the fact that they were at the site as they composed poems on “seeing Miyadaki.” Seasonal banquets known as sechien 節宴 offer another glimpse into how dai were conceived in the early ninth century. Again modeled on Tang precedents, these social gatherings included poetic offerings that helped regulate the relationship between the sovereign and his ministers. Emperor Saga appears to have inaugurated these events, and a number of poems composed for these occasions are preserved in The Collection Soaring above the Clouds, an imperial anthology of Japanese kanshi compiled under his auspices. The only sources for reconstructing the procedures at these banquets, however, date from considerably later: Seikyūki 西宮記 (late tenth century), a guide to court protocol by Minamoto no Takaakira (914–983), and Hokuzanshō 北山抄 (early eleventh century), a similar compendium by the poet and scholar Fujiwara no Kintō.15 According to these later sources, a list of topics, often comprising lines from famous Chinese poems, would be prepared ahead of time and then written on slips of paper that were distributed randomly to the participants, with the highest-ranking ministers receiving their topics first. The sovereign himself or the sponsor of the event, depending on his literary inclinations, would prepare the list of topics, or he might consign the duty to a trusted expert in poetic matters. The extemporized poems, under Saga

14 Noted in Ozawa, Kokinshū no sekai, p. 234. Fusō ryakki is a chronological history of Japan in some thirty volumes, written in literary Chinese (kanbun). It is believed to have been compiled by the Buddhist monk Kōen (b. ca. 1069). 15 Following Kurahayashi Shōji, Kyōen no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1969), pp. 558–583, Gustav Heldt delineates the procedures of these sechien banquets in Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan, Cornell East Asia Series 139 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2008), pp. 52–59. the dai is cast 159 at least, were almost always in Chinese. Over time, both the format of the poems and the procedures at the banquet became increasingly fixed. Details from a closer contemporary source, the brief headnotes in The Collection Soaring above the Clouds, suggest that, early on, topics were allotted in a more materially tangible manner. Saga hosted a number of high-ranking courtiers at a banquet that took place on the ninth day of the ninth month of 814 in the Shinsen’en gardens of the imperial compound, and all, including the emperor himself, participated in the composition of Chinese verse. The headnote to Saga’s poem states, “Each person composed a poem on one topic, and he [Saga] received the autumn chrysanthemum (ono ono ichibutsu o fushite aki no kiku o etari).”16 The phrase ichibutsu o fushite is usually glossed “composed a poem on a topic” with the verb fusu 賦す meaning ‘to compose.’ Another possible reading, perhaps reflecting an earlier practice, takes the phrase more literally as “one object was passed out [to each person],” with the verb fusu meaning ‘to distribute.’ If this was the case, appropriate topics, in the form of concrete objects, rather than written slips of paper, were prepared ahead of time and then given to the participants as visual stimuli to assist in the composition of Chinese poetry. At many of these gatherings, even topics that were written on slips of paper referred specifically to objects visible at the venue of composition. The Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Flowers, for instance, includes a series of poems “on things at the Reizei-in” (discussed later), which included various landscape features represented in miniature in the gardens. These poems are introduced with the same heading (ono ono ichibutsu o fushite), signaling that the poet was composing on something at hand. The existence of concrete, visual referents when topics were assigned suggests that such topics were still strongly attached to the poet’s physical reality and the immediate circumstances of composition. Whether the assignment took the form of an actual object or written words that referred to something in the poet’s visual field, these poems were essentially yong wu, ‘poems on things.’ While the poet no doubt kept in mind famous references to chrysanthemums in Bai Juyi’s poetry and other Tang sources, a chrysanthemum poem at one of these banquets would be prompted, and even inspired, by an actual chrysanthemum at hand, rather than an imaginary or conceptual one.

16 Nakayama Yasumasa, ed., Kaifūsō, Ryōunshū, Bunka shūreishū, Keikokushū, Honchō monzui, Kōchū Nihon bungaku taikei 24 (Tokyo: Seibundō, 1932), p. 103. 160 chapter three

Eventually, the balance tips in the other direction, toward the side of literary precedent, and these topics come to be formed of lines from famous Chinese verse rather than an object immediately perceptible by the poet. That is to say, a couplet or even just one line of poetry would serve as the topic for a new poem. Eventually, at sechien banquets, it would become normal practice for poets to receive by lottery slips of paper with lines of Chinese verse and then compose new poems based on these lines. When the new poem was to be in Japanese, it was often not much more than a translation of a line of a Chinese shi into waka form. Even so, as a demonstration of how to treat previous literature as source material, such compositions were important to the development of dai as a concept. A key text along these lines is Japanese Poems on Chinese Lines (Kudai waka; 894) by Ōe no Chisato (fl. late ninth century). The title of the collection itself is telling: a ku, or ‘line,’ becomes the dai, ‘topic,’ for the composition of poems in Japanese. In the most famous example from this collection, Chisato composes on a familiar topic, ‘the moon,’ but not as it appears in the sky, or in nature, but in a line from a poem by Bai Juyi: Shinkokinshū 55 (Book 1: Spring 1) [Kudai waka 71: Wind and Moon 4] Composed on the line “Not shining, not darkened by clouds, the misty moon” from poems on spring evenings in The Collected Works of Bai Juyi: teri mo sezu / kumori mo hatenu / haru no yo no / oborozukiyo zo / shiku mono zo naki Not shining brightly, nor fully clouded over; the misty moon on this spring night— nothing can compare to it!17 The moon above, or reflected in one’s wine cup, or a chrysanthemum at hand could serve as visual stimuli for composition, but when banquet poems were based on a line from a classic Chinese poem or prose text, the assignment was at a further literary remove, at once more abstract and more demanding of certain kinds of knowledge. Such kudai compositions might still be considered a kind of yong wu, with the ‘thing at hand’ being the line of poetry that was written on a slip of paper as a topic for the poet and later recited so that it was brought to the attention of everyone

17 The poem was much admired, though not anthologized until centuries later, in Shinkokinshū (ca. 1205). Headnote from Tanaka Yutaka and Akase Shingō, eds., Shinkokin wakashū, NKBT 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), p. 55. Earlier versions of the poem have the last line as “is delightful indeed (medetakarikeru).” the dai is cast 161 present. These kinds of composition were an important step in the abstraction of dai from concrete objects to written words that had a host of literary ramifications. With the practice of composing on objects at hand, it is clear that there was a strong impetus to have or provide concrete referents for assigned topics. A waterfall, however, could not be passed out in the same manner as, for instance, a chrysanthemum. Short of being on location during an imperial progress, as was the case above in “seeing Miyadaki,” a topic such as “waters of a cataract” could not readily be an ‘object at hand’ for composition. In these situations, an artistic representation played a major role in bringing together for the poet the visual reality of the topic. Elements of landscape—mountains, rivers, hills, streams, and waterfalls—could find representation in miniature in the meticulously constructed parks within the imperial compound or in the gardens of upper aristocrats. Tiny models of various flora, fauna, and even human beings found their way into these miniature landscapes. The Heian manual How to Construct a Garden (Sakuteiki; mid-eleventh century) includes sections on how, for example, to arrange streams and rocks to look like rivers and islands.18 Private gardens were a heightened and encapsulated form of nature that reflected the tastes of their owners. They included seasonal flora and even fauna, but the extent to which they were cultivated with specific poetic topics in mind varied greatly. The mother of the poet-priest Henjō (816–890) constructed her garden to look like autumn fields (niwa o aki no no ni tsukirite), presumably by planting the seasonal grasses that were a familiar image in autumn poetry.19 Some gardens were designed to look like specific geographic places. Minamoto no Tōru (822–895) was famous for having constructed the garden at his estate along the Kamo River, the Kawara-in, to look like Shiogama along the Michinoku coastline. The re-creation included a lake filled with saltwater laboriously brought in from the coast and the salt fires that locals burned to extract salt from seaweed. When Tsurayuki visited

18 See Mori Osamu, Heian jidai teien no kenkyū (Kyoto: Kuwana bunseidō, 1946), and “Sakuteiki” no sekai: Heian chō no teien bi (Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1986). Sakuteiki has been attributed to Tachibana no Toshitsuna (1028–1094). An edited text can be found in Hayashiya Tatsusaburō et al., eds., Kodai chūsei geijutsuron, Nihon shisō taikei 23 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973), pp. 223–248. See Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane, trans., Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), for an English translation. 19 Headnote to Kokinshū 248 (Book 4: Autumn 1). Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 86. 162 chapter three the garden in 895, shortly after Tōru’s death, he composed a poem that is preserved under the rubric “Laments” (“Aishō no uta”) in Kokinshū. Kokinshū 852 (Book 16: Laments) Kawara no Sadaijin no, mi makarite nochi, kano ie ni makarite arikeru ni, Shiogama to iu tokoro no sama o tsukurikeru o mite, yomeru. After the Kawara Minister of the Left passed away, Tsurayuki went to the minister’s residence, and upon seeing the re-creation of the place called Shiogama, composed this poem. kimi masade / keburi taenishi / shiogama no / urasabishiku mo / miewataru ka na With you now gone, the smoke no longer rises from the Shiogama shores— how lonely it is as I look out across the bay!20 Gazing out over the garden, Tsurayuki invokes the poetic associations of Shiogama in his expression of regret over the death of Tōru and treats the landscape as if it really were Shiogama. By doing so, he pays homage to Tōru’s efforts to recreate a far-off poetic site at his own estate within the capital. Some gardens were more like parks—vast expanses of land meant to be walked through. Poets could then literally enter into the landscape and compose poems on nature, travel, and even specific sites without ever leaving the capital. Smaller scale gardens could include models of certain geographic features, such as islands, cliffs, waterfalls, and the like in order to replicate a specific site. Tokuhara Shigemi argues that during the reign of Emperor Daigo, the pines in the eastern gardens of the Seiryōden were specifically sculpted to look like those at Urashima so that poets could compose as if they were there.21 These kinds of simulated landscape, whether at the imperial palace, at detached palaces, or at the residences of court nobles, helped poets visualize themselves at certain famous locales for the purposes of composing poetry. Such compositions were based on

20 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 256. There is a pivot on ura, which is both the ‘bay’ of Shiogama (Shiogama no ura 塩釜の浦) and the first part of urasabishi 心淋し (somehow sad). 21 Tokuhara Shigemi, “Seiryōden higashi niwa no matsu ga Urashima: Nishihonganji- bon Mitsune shū no honbun kōtei,” in Suzuki Jun and Kashiwagi Yoshio, eds., Waka kaishaku no paradaimu (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1998), pp. 47–60. the dai is cast 163 the indirect experience of seeing a representation of a famous site, rather than on the direct experience of being there. Replica versions of Shiogama and Urashima inspired the composition of poetry specific to those sites. Other gardens, such as those at the Reizei-in, served as the setting for banquets and drinking parties and often included, for poetic composition, a variety of concrete objects for reference. Another type of event that directly linked poetry and gardens were the ‘garden contests’ held at private residences. Many of the proceedings for these garden contests are fragmentary and the exact object of these gatherings is not always clear. Early records suggest that guests, who were expected to be poets as well, would take into consideration a variety flora and fauna in a particular garden and would compose poetry on ‘things at hand’ in a manner similar to one variety of sechien banquet. In the autumn of 905, Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Tokihira sponsored a garden contest at his primary residence. The record titled The Tokihira Garden Contest (Hon’in Sadaijin Tokihira senzai awase) includes familiar autumn topics such as bush clovers (hagi), pampas grass (susuki), and bellflowers (rindō), but also a few items that would later be appreciated exclusively as summer images, such as orange blossoms (tachibana) and wild pinks (nadeshiko).22 The appearance of flowers that would eventually be restricted to summer verse perhaps reflects the reality of lingering summer blossoms in Tokihira’s autumn garden. In other words, the poets seem to have composed on what they actually saw, regardless of the developing conventions about the season in which the event took place. Gardens provided a semicontrolled climate for the appreciation of seasonal blossoms, and the poetry composed at garden contests must have elevated the awareness of what flowers blossomed in which season. The garden contest at the residence of Fujiwara no Morosuke (908–960) followed much the same format at Tokihira’s contest. The preface to the record of Morosuke’s contest states: On the twenty-first day of the eighth month of Tenryaku 10 [956], when all were seated in the northern wing of his [Morosuke’s] residence in the capital, the men and women, thinking the moon enchanting, took topics from the garden in front of them and composed poems.23

22 Text in Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:143–147. 23 Tenryaku jūnen hachigatsu jūichinichi bōjō Udaijin Morosuke senzai awase. Moro- suke was minister of the right at the time. Text in Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:318–323. 164 chapter three

Poems on bush clovers, maidenflowers (ominaeshi), and the like follow, but unlike Tokihira’s contest, this record contains no topics that would conventionally fall outside the autumn season. As with many yong wu compositions, the men and women took topics that were inspired by the appearance of things in the garden in front of them (otokogata onna- gata omae no senzai o dai nite yomeru), and what they composed on was directly connected to what they saw. The Tokihira and Morosuke garden contests were an appraisal and appreciation of items found in one garden. Other contests involved the comparison of two or more gardens, but not the planted, outdoor variety. Artificial landscapes built on low trays called suhama 州浜 were the objects compared at some garden contests. These portable miniature gardens could be as large as eight feet by seven feet and were elaborate projects that consumed a great deal of time, energy, and resources. The competitive aspect of suhama construction led to increasingly ornate and painstakingly wrought three-dimensional dioramas that were keyed to specific poetic images. Participants at these contests were divided into left and right teams, and they competed to produce the most clever, most sophisticated, and most beautiful dioramas integrated with poetry. As suhama production reached its height toward the end of the tenth century, the inclusion of specific details seems to have been a collaborative decision made by the poets and the men and women responsible for craft- ing the suhama. In general, however, the poems for each side were composed first, and their content dictated the construction of the suhama.24 Some suhama contained actual insects and sprigs of real blossoms, others had man-made flowers with gold petals, and still others contained real sand and water. A poem for presentation would be written on a slip of paper attached to the decoration that represented that poetic topic. For example, early in the Kanpyō era, the eminent poet and statesman Sugawara no Michizane participated in a ‘chrysanthemum contest.’ Quite different from the contest on the same topic sponsored by Saga about a century earlier, at this event the members of each side vied to build the most elegant landscape setting in which to display chrysanthemums. A

24 William McCullough notes that suhama were the favored receptacles for competing entries in the elegant contests to which upper classes devoted much of their attention and wealth; and for important occasions their creation often required as much time and ingenuity as the selection of the contest [poem] entries. (William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980], pp. 374–375, supplemental n. 16). the dai is cast 165 brief description of the circumstances and Michizane’s poem is preserved in Kokinshū: Kokinshū 273 (Book 5: Autumn 2) Onaji ōntoki serarekeru kiku awase ni, suhama o tsukurite, kiku no hana uea- tarikeru ni kuwaetarikeru uta. Fukiage no hama no kata ni kiku uetarikeru ni yomeru. At a chrysanthemum contest during the same reign, suhama were constructed, and this poem was added to where the chrysanthemum flowers were planted. Composed on the chrysanthemum flowers planted on the model of Fukiage Beach. aki kaze no / fukiage ni tateru / shiragiku wa / hana ka aranu ka / nami no yosuru ka The autumn winds blow at Fukiage, where the white chrysanthemums stand— are they flowers, are they not, or are they waves coming in?25 The headnote suggests that Michizane composed the poem only after seeing the suhama diorama of Fukiage Beach; he affixed his poem later. He makes the classic connection between blossoms and whitecaps and further binds the two with his use of tateru, a verb often used with waves to mean ‘rise,’ but here used with the chrysanthemums that ‘stand.’ The double use of the verb tateru may have even been suggested by the way the flowers were artificially made to stand on the representation of the beach. Michizane also employs a pivot on fukiage, using the place-name Fukiage to also refer to the ‘blowing’ autumn winds. Though some suhama included elements of nature in rather ingenious ways, very rarely were there moving parts. Michizane’s poem complements what was probably a static landscape with his addition of the blowing wind and the rolling waves. Again, the poem is based on a direct visual stimulus, and, like the poems on Shiogama and Urashima, Michizane’s verse would have been an appropriate composition, depending on the presence or absence of shoreline chrysanthemums, for an actual visit to the site as well. The account in the historical narrative A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari; ca. 1092) of a moon-viewing banquet from 966 provides further detail as to how poetic topics and garden dioramas were linked, as well as how much time and effort were involved in producing such

25 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 93. 166 chapter three miniature landscapes. Though no suhama from the Heian period survive, a seventeenth-century wood-block illustration of the following episode (see figure 4), as well as the detailed descriptions given in the text, provide some idea of what they were like. Both sides worked furiously, determined not to be outdone. The contestants from the Office of Painting [the left team] submitted a painted landscape tray depicting flowering plants of heavenly beauty, a garden stream, and massive rocks. Various kinds of insects were lodged in a rustic fence made of silver foil. The artists had also painted a view of the Ōi River, showing figures strolling nearby and cormorant boats with basket fires. Near the insects there was a poem. The Office of Palace Works [the right team] presented an interesting tray, carved with great ingenuity to resemble a beach at high tide, which they had planted with artificial flowers and carved bamboo pines. Their poem was attached to a spray of fresh maidenflowers. The poem of the left: kimi ga tame / hana uesomu to / tsugenedomo / chiyo matsumushi no / ne ni zo nakinuru Though I did not tell them that the flowers were planted for our lord, “a thousand long years!” is the sound of the crickets’ cries.

The poem of the right: kokoro shite / kotoshi wa nioe / ominaeshi / sakanu hana to zo / hito wa miru tomo O maidenflower, strive to bloom bright this year, even though some see you as a flower that does not blossom.

There was music, and gifts were distributed among the many senior nobles in attendance.26 The aesthetic experience no doubt included the drinking of wine, men and women in elaborate court dress, and instrumental music, as well as

26 Translation based on McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, pp. 92–94; I have retranslated the two poems in the passage. Japanese text in Matsumura Hiroji and Yamanaka Yutaka, eds., Eiga monogatari 1, NKBT 75 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), pp. 50–51. the dai is cast 167

Figure 4: Seaside dioramas (suhama) from a 17th-c. wood-block print. 168 chapter three the recitation of poetry, all under the full harvest moon of the fifteenth night of the eighth month. Note that each suhama provided a number of potential waka topics, perhaps for later composition, and that the two poems quoted were attached to the physical representation of each poem’s respective topic. There was a direct connection between the visual referent, the poetic topic, and the poem, though the collaborative nature of each team’s projects makes it difficult to discern what came first. Topics were likely written down and delivered to both sides well ahead of time, and the poems were probably composed first, which then guided the suhama construction. Some screen paintings were produced with similar collaboration, though not in a competitive context. At the 966 event described in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, the members of each side seem to have regarded the poems as an intrinsic part of the miniature landscape, a multimedia art project that appealed to the mind as well as the eye. The poems supplied the auspicious import that the landscape alone could not, and the suhama provided a collaborative medium specifically designed for the collective appearance of the poem, the topic, and its physical representation.27 The splendor of the occasion is what is emphasized in the description, and we should not underestimate the importance of the event itself as the site of artistic production. While the description reveals an impetus to record the events as they were (or as the writer wishes to present them), there is an absence of background procedural detail, and whatever the final product may have been would have had an extremely limited circulation beyond the original attendees of the gathering. These kinds of events also took the hybrid form of the ‘garden poetry contest’ (senzai uta awase 前栽歌合), a kind of event distinct from the ‘garden contests’ mentioned previously. Garden poetry contests followed essentially the same format, but with more specific focus on the poems and their adherence to the conventional norms of the topics provided. Judging from the records of the garden poetry contest that took place on the twenty-ninth day of the eighth month of 973, the suhama were no less elaborate than the ones described earlier.28 The Princess Kishi

27 Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, p. 113, discusses how suhama “miniaturized the larger world in a controlled, harmonious arrangement of forms and movements presided over by its owner.” For more on the ritual and political significance of poetic composition on suhama landscapes, see Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, pp. 112–120. 28 Tenroku sannen hachigatsu nijūhachinichi Kishi Naishinnō senzai uta awase. Text in Hagitani and Taniyama, Uta awase shū, pp. 108–119. the dai is cast 169

Garden Poetry Contest, sponsored by Kishi (or Noriko), fourth daughter of Emperor Murakami, included one diorama of autumn fields that led to a rocky shoreline. Real crickets chirped in the grasses that were planted behind a model of a crane that was placed to look as if it had just landed in the reeds by a row of craggy rocks. The record states that the landscapes each side produced were so splendid that the winning team would have to be determined by the strength of its poetry—poetry based on topics inserted into the suhama in plentiful numbers. Serving as judge was the noted poet and scholar Minamoto no Shitagō, one of the compilers of the imperial anthology Gosenshū. The poems that follow adhere to what were, by then, customary autumn topics such as pampas grass, maidenflowers, and bush clovers. Shitagō’s comments show a critical eye and a consciousness of convention, a recognition of dai as poetic topics with established intrinsic meanings. In the written record for Kishi’s contest, once the progression of poems has commenced, the appreciation of the ingenious dioramas gives way to the more serious endeavor of judging the relative merits of the poems from each side, without reference to the simulacra that may have inspired them. As we have seen, visual objects played a central role in the competitions that included waka poetry based on poetic topics. In order to understand how these dai developed into the matrix of associated meanings understood by Shitagō as the judge of Kishi’s contest, we need to turn back about a century earlier to the first uses of dai in conjunction with waka composition. The earliest poetry contests, like the sechien banquets discussed previously, included assigned topics that were manifest in concrete visual referents. These contests established the format (left and right sides, presentation of centerpieces, comparisons made in rounds, procedural matters) that later chrysanthemum, iris, and garden contests would take.29 Though the term dai itself is not used, the first recorded examples of waka composed on assigned topics occur in the proceedings for the poetry contest held at the residence of Ariwara no Yukihira (818–893), when he served as the minister of popular affairs. The Yukihira Poetry Contest (Zai Minbukyō ke uta awase; ca. 885) is the first Japanese poetry contest with an extant written record, but it seems to follow an

29 ‘Iris contests’ were neawase, more literally ‘root contests,’ which occurred on the fifth day of the fifth month. Irises or ‘sweet flags’ would be hung from eaves to ward off malevo- lent spirits, and there were competitions to find the plant with the longest, and therefore most auspicious, root. The competitions also included poems on these plants (not necessarily limited to the root portions). 170 chapter three already set pattern of presentation, perhaps based in part on the sechien banquets from Saga’s reign.30 The fragmentary record indicates that both sides produced a suhama landscape tray. The one on the left included a villa in a mountain landscape, while the one on the right had a dilapi- dated shelter in the countryside. Apart from a few love poems toward the end of the record, almost all the extant poems are on the single topic ‘cuckoo’ (hototogisu). Izumi Noriko has suggested that a model of a cuckoo served as a place marker as the poems were composed and recited, and that it was moved about the two suhama not unlike a token on a game board.31 The controlled and organized miniature realms represented on the suhama perhaps helped poets focus on specific details when composing about the cuckoo’s appearance in a variety of contexts. The next oldest contest record, the Palace Chrysanthemum Contest from around 890, also featured suhama, these with chrysanthemums inserted at strategic spots so that the ‘object at hand’ also had scenic contexts that poets could work into their poems.32 These scenic contexts served as visual cues, and Michizane’s previous poem on the chrysanthemums at Fukiage Beach, composed for this event, is a perfect example of how the poet could take into consideration the diorama presentation but then add dynamic elements to imbue the landscape with more specific and more poetic details. The situation is analogous to that of Saga’s chrysanthemum poem from 814 in that the participants at the Palace Chrysanthemum Contest are ostensibly composing about the actual flowers in front of them. Other early examples of assigned topics for waka occur at competitive events where there was always a visual manifestation of the topics that would be assigned to the poets present. The records for these early contests suggest that although the coordination of topics may have occurred ahead of time, the actual composition and presentation of poetry took place only after the poets witnessed the scale-model landscapes built on the suhama. The poems, then, were not only inspired by, but were often descriptive of, the highly visual centerpieces at these

30 Zai Minbukyō ke uta awase, in Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:3–11. One earlier reference to waka composed on assigned topics concerns a series of lectures on Nihon shoki delivered in 882. The topics were the names of characters mentioned in the lectures, and, based on the accounts in Seikyūki and Nihon kiryaku, Ozawa Masao surmises that the compositions that were recited were songs set to the Japanese koto rather than the poetic form we are concerned with here (Kokinshū no sekai, p. 231). 31 Izumi Noriko, “Uta awase no seiritsu,” in Byōbu uta to uta awase, ed. Waka bungaku ronshū iinkai, Waka bungaku ronshū 5 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1995), pp. 135–162. 32 Dairi kiku awase, in Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:13–21. the dai is cast 171 events. As descriptions of representational art objects, Japanese poems exhibit an ekphrastic quality that goes back to the beginnings of assigned topics. The earliest poetry contest for which there are complete and detailed proceedings is the Teiji-in Poetry Contest (Teiji-in uta awase) from the third month of 913. The description shows a sophisticated coordination of the poetry and the suhama: a poem on ‘mist’ (kiri) was placed trailing from a miniature mountain built on one of the suhama, while another poem, on the topic ‘warbler’ (uguisu), was placed on a branch of blossoms inserted into the artificial landscape.33 In the case of the Teiji-in Poetry Contest, we know that the topics were assigned well before the event, and that the poems were presented attached to appropriate parts of the suhama. What contact the poets had with the suhama ahead of time is unclear from the contest record, but the details suggest that the various decorative and performative arts for the event were meticulously prepared in a manner similar to the one described in the excerpt from A Tale of Flowering Fortunes quoted earlier. The record shows the further connection between poetic topics and visual objects at these events, regardless of whether the poems were composed in advance or only after viewing the man-made landscape scenes. Taking these practices into consideration, Saga and his guests who composed Chinese ‘poems on things’ at the Reizei-in likely had either objects at hand or designated areas of the garden in front of them to aid in the visualization of their assigned topics. The poem on “the waters of a cataract” by Kuwabara no Haraaka, discussed in chapter 1, is generally interpreted as a composition based on a small garden cascade set up in such a way as to suggest a much grander waterfall. The poem is, as the headnote makes clear, a yong wu, with “the waters of a cataract” as the thing at hand, thanks to ingenious gardeners and landscapers. Kuranaka Shinobu, however, argues that the compositions on “things at the Reizei-in” were based on folding screens that Saga had taken out for the occasion, rather than on the sculpted landscape features in the gardens. Examining Shōsōin inventories such as The Records of Rare Treasures of the Nation, she notes the coinciding dates of his removal of painted landscape screens with the

33 Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:53–54. There is also a description of Teiji-in uta awase in Konishi Jin’ichi, A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 2, The Early Middle Ages, trans. Aileen Gatten, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 199–200. 172 chapter three composition of Chinese verse at the Reizei-in.34 Haraaka’s poem in fact makes more sense as a painting-poem, as was discussed in chapter 1. In the variety of circumstances under which poets composed on assigned topics, one consistent detail is the presence of objects for ekphrastic description, from garden features to diorama landscapes and scale models to screen paintings. Composing on a three-dimensional garden that was constructed to look like Shiogama is one step removed from the reality of actually composing at the site. Encountering the same landscape in the form of a two- dimensional painting is one more step removed. Functionally, the painting and the garden served the same purpose: they both provided a landscape for the poet to enter figuratively, explore, and compose upon. This is precisely Mitsune’s approach in the following poem, based on a painting of a traveler depicted on a folding screen at Uda’s Teiji-in retirement villa. Kokinshū 305 (Book 5: Autumn 2) Teiji-in no onbyōbu no e ni, kawa wataramu to suru hito no, momiji no chiru ko no moto ni, muma o hikaete tateru o, yomasetamaikereba, tsukōmatsurikeru: In a painting on a folding screen at the Teiji-in, there was a man who was thinking to cross a river and had pulled up his horse under a tree where autumn leaves were scattering. When the emperor ordered compositions, Mitsune offered up this poem: tachi tomari / mite o wataramu / momijiba wa / ame to furu tomo / mizu wa masaraji I shall stop to consider the view before crossing over— for though the autumn leaves fall like rain, the river’s waters will not rise.35 A much later treatise notes precisely the approach Mitsune has taken in this poem. The Ten Oral Commentaries ( Jikkōshō; ca. 1501) states, “He has composed by taking the place of the person painted in the picture (e ni kakeru hito ni kawarite yomeri).”36 The observation echoes Fujiwara no

34 Kuranaka Shinobu, “Daigashi no hassei: Saga Tennō Shōsōin gyobutsu byōbu kokyaku to ‘Tendaizan’ no bungaku,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 65 (December 1988): 17–36. She argues that other assigned topics that appear in Bunka shūrei shū such as baikaraku 梅花落 (falling plum blossoms) and kōjōsen 江上舟 (boats on the river) may have been based on painted screens as well. 35 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 102. 36 Jikkōshō was a commentary on Kokinshū, based on a series of lectures given by the scholar and linked-verse master Sōgi (1421–1502). Noted in Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 102. the dai is cast 173

Kenshō’s advice, noted earlier, about screen poetry composition in general: “When you compose a poem for a picture on a folding or sliding screen, you compose precisely by adopting the feelings of the person drawn in the picture.”37 Mitsune composes as the traveler, expressing his calm decision to take the time to appreciate the beauty of the scene. Actual rainfall would cause the river to swell, jeopardizing his attempt to cross, but since autumnal leaves are the only form of precipitation, the traveler feels no need to rush. The poem allows us to be privy to the traveler’s entire thought process, while adding motion (falling leaves) and a sense of time to the scene. The poet has, in his imagination, entered into the painting in much the same way as he could enter a garden or envision himself in the diorama scenes on a suhama, for the purpose of composing from the point of view of someone in the landscape. All of these media were visually perceived artistic constructs of nature meant to inspire poetic composition or at least to assist in the production of assigned or commissioned verse. Like Mitsune’s composition, the resulting poems often describe or allude to what is represented in these media. The process points to the ekphrastic nature of topical composition and the centrality of optical allusions in such assigned verse.

Folding Screens and Visual Topics

Poems for folding screens make up a large and important portion of the assigned and commissioned poetry of the ninth and tenth centuries. Japanese scholars have long acknowledged that the composition of screen poetry contributed directly to the formation of assigned topics in Japanese poetry.38 A close examination of the ways in which early poets approached screen composition reveals that visual images not only prompted, but in essence comprised some of the topics assigned. When the poet was able to see the paintings before composing poems for the scenes, which was not always the case, he would in effect choose appropriate images-as- topics for himself. He would craft poems that not only harmonized with the picture on the wall or screen, but also fulfilled the requirements of the commissioner, expressing sentiments suitable to the occasion.

37 Shūishō chū, in Sasaki Nobutsuna et al., eds., Nihon kagaku taikei, supplemental vol. 4, (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1956), p. 132. 38 One of the earliest to point out the connection between painted screens and poetic topics is Koyama Shin’ichi, “Daiei no hattatsu,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 5 (1928): 5–6. 174 chapter three

A passage from The Mitsune Collection, mentioned briefly in the introduction, elucidates the relationship between image and topic. On the twenty-second day of the ninth month of 917, Mitsune received an urgent message from the vice-governor of Ōmi that stated that the retired emperor Uda was scheduled to arrive on the following day. Mitsune was to come to the vice-governor’s residence that very day to compose poems for the folding and sliding screens that decorated the rooms in which Uda was to stay. As far as the topics were concerned, Mitsune notes, “There were folding and sliding screens, and I was to take the points of interest of the various places on them as the topics (byōbu shoji ari, kore ni tokoro dokoro no omobuki o dai subeshi).”39 Mitsune worked through the night composing verses based on the content of the painted pictures that were the de facto dai, and the next morning the vice-governor petitioned Mitsune to inscribe the verses onto the screens as well. The ten poems he composed on this occasion have an abundance of concrete images, no doubt referring to the content of the paintings, including blossoming plums, fisherfolk burning salt fires, and deer crying in the mountains. The topics he extrapolates from the pictures are all familiar images, but not all had been firmly established as topics in poetry by Mitsune’s time. What was depicted in the paintings was in part defined by earlier poetry, but it seems clear that painting and poetry, and the way in which they interacted, contributed not only to the production of this particular art project, but also to the gradual refinement of accepted topics in both genres. Furthermore, while the paintings Mitsune saw must have already had their own conventions, they were also meant to be representational of certain places or scenes in nature. What Mitsune chose to see and not to see in them was shaped by his own poetic sensibilities cultivated from years of composition. Unlike previous examples, the assigned topics are not directly perceptible animate or inanimate objects in a garden or on a decorative tray, but representations in painted form. Whether screen poets regularly saw the paintings before composing their poems on them is a matter of debate. As we have seen, a handful of Tsurayuki’s screen poems were unequivocally composed sight unseen, and others composed in advance in order to serve as a kind of blueprint

39 Tanaka Kimiharu, Hirasawa Ryūsuke, and Kikuchi Yasuhiko, eds., Tsurayuki shū, Mitsune shū, Tomonori shū, Tadamine shū, Waka bungaku taikei 19 (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 207–208. A variant text reads: “For the poems on the folding and sliding screens, I followed the topics suggested by the various places [in the painting] (sono byōbu, shōji, nado no uta, tokoro dokoro no dai ni shitagau).” the dai is cast 175 for the artists who would produce the painted screens at a later date, based on the content of the poems. By contrast, when Mitsune went out to Ōmi, the poet definitely saw the paintings there before deciding on his compositions. The poems Sosei and Narihira composed for Empress Kōshi’s screen, discussed in chapter 1, seem to form a parallel case. The headnote suggests that the picture on the folding screen literally forms the topic for the poets to follow. Kokinshū 293 (Book 5: Autumn 2) Nijō no kisaki, tōgū no miyasudokoro to mōshikeru toki, ōnbyōbu ni, tatsutagawa ni momiji nagaretaru kata o kakerikeru o dai nite, yomeru. When the Nijō Empress was still called Mother of the Crown Prince, on her screen was a picture of autumn leaves flowing down the Tatsuta River. The following were composed taking this as the topic.40 That which is painted in the picture (kata o kakikeru) forms the topic (dai nite) upon which the poets compose ( yomeru), essentially the same process that Mitsune’s Ōmi compositions follow. Although with Kōshi’s screen, the poems were probably not inscribed directly, the content of the poems (inference about what is further downstream in Sosei’s poem, and reference to textile qualities in Narihira’s) seems to indicate that they were composed based on the painted image itself, rather than any words describing it. The poets appear to be treating the painted landscape as a ‘thing at hand’ for immediate composition. In this case, as with most screen poems, however, we cannot be certain whether or when the poets were allowed to see the screen. Because a significant number of congratulatory screens were presented and displayed at venues where low-ranking screen poets were generally not permitted, Shimizu Yoshiko has suggested that these poets rarely saw the screens at all.41 The question, then, is how did these poets know what to compose on, or how were the dai, as topic or subject matter, delivered to the poets? Gustav Heldt, emphasizing aspects of submission and harmonization in the act of composition, suggests that social superiors conveyed their vision of painted landscapes in the form of words.42 When verbal descriptions of the pictures were de facto the assigned topics, the dai themselves, and not

40 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 99. 41 Shimizu Yoshiko, “Byōbu uta seisaku ni tsuite no kōsatsu,” Kansai daigaku kokubungaku 53, no. 12 (1976): 1–9. Shimizu early on called attention to Mitsune’s trip to Ōmi as an important event for reconstructing the compositional process for screen poetry. 42 Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony, p. 268. 176 chapter three just the resulting poems, were essentially ekphrastic in nature. In other words, the commissioner of the poem, or his representative, provided the screen poets with their assignment in the form of his own words that described the painted scene, and the duty of the poet was to correspond and harmonize with these words. The Gossamer Journal (Kagerō nikki; late tenth century) is a key text in understanding the way that dai were transmitted and the predominance of the visual image in the formation and comprehension of poetic topics. The author, known as Michitsuna’s Mother (Fujiwara no Michitsuna no haha; ca. 935–995), was a noted poet in her day, and she was occasionally called upon to compose screen poetry for events at court. Her perception of assigned topics, and the manner in which she received them, seem to indicate that such topics were still defined chiefly visually rather than verbally. Certain clues within The Gossamer Journal reveal, at least partially, the process by which Michitsuna’s Mother put together her diary. Because the first of the three books is the most cohesive, narrates a more distant past in a quasi-epistolary style, and covers a relatively longer span of time (about fourteen years), scholars have surmised that the author reconstructed the events with the aid of letters and poetry exchanges that she had kept from the early stages of her courtship and marriage to her husband, the powerful statesman Fujiwara no Kaneie (929–990). Taking into consideration her habit of drawing or sketching, as mentioned in her text, and her repeated mentions of painted scenes, Ii Haruki hypothesizes the existence of a picture-diary (e-nikki) upon which she later based at least part of the memoir. Michitsuna’s Mother’s pilgrimage to Karasaki in particular seems like a journey through a painted landscape, and in Ii’s estimation, her compositions seem to be in the style of screen poetry. The descriptions of travel in the diary, her pilgrimages to temples and shrines, may have been “a prose elaboration of a preponderantly visual text.”43 The proposition that parts of the text may have been produced as an extended narrative captioning of sketches made by the author is in accord

43 Ii Haruki, “E nikki no keifu: Kagerō nikki kara Sagoromo monogatari e,” in Genji monogatari to sono zengo 1, ed. Ii Haruki (Tokyo: Shintensha, 1990), as noted in Joshua Mos- tow, “Self and Landscape in Kagerō nikki,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Decem- ber 1993): 8–19. Also commenting on the same phenomenon are Sonja Arntzen, trans., The Kagerō Diary: A Woman’s Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, 1997), pp. 197–201, and Imanishi Yūichirō, ed., Kagerō nikki, in Hasegawa Masaharu et al., eds., Tosa nikki, Kagerō nikki, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, Sarashina nikki, SNKT 24 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), pp. 111–115. the dai is cast 177 with certain episodes within The Gossamer Journal that present concrete examples of poetic elaborations of visual texts. In Book 3, a minor court noble shows interest in courting Michitsuna’s Mother’s adopted daughter. When Michitsuna happens to show his mother a set of ‘women’s pictures,’ she takes the opportunity to compose poems that are, on the surface, about the pictures. The poems also express her concerns about the nobleman’s intentions. The assistant director is at the beck and call of the director, day or night; he is always over there. As there were some interestingly drawn women’s pictures over there, he took them, put them in his pocket and brought them home. I looked at them and saw that one was the painting of a woman lean- ing on the balustrade of a building called a fishing pavilion, gazing at the pines on the little islands in the middle of the pond. I wrote this on a strip of paper and stuck it to the painting: ika ni semu / ike no mizu nami / sawagite wa kokoro no uchi no / matsu ni kakaraba What would I do if the waves of the pond water were all stirred up and swept over the pines of pining within my heart.

On another picture, where a bachelor leaves off writing letters and with his chin resting on his hands seems sunk in brooding thoughts, I wrote this: sasagani ni / izuko to mo naku / fuku kaze wa kakute amata ni / nari zo sura shimo Like the spider’s thread cast upon the blowing wind, not sure where it will land, thus he sits and writes so much wondering what will become of it.

The assistant director took this back to the director.44 The assistant director in this passage refers to the author’s son, Michitsuna, who is serving as an intermediary between his direct superior at court and his mother. Michitsuna happens upon some narrative paintings, or ‘visual texts,’ at the director’s residence that he thinks his mother might be interested in seeing and takes them to her. The reference to ‘women’s pictures’

44 Imanishi, Kagerō nikki, pp. 221–222. Translation from Arntzen, The Kagerō Diary, pp. 349–351. See also Edward Seidensticker, trans., The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noble- woman of Heian Japan (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1964), p. 156. 178 chapter three

(onna-e) is one of the earliest occurrences of the term in literature. In contrast to the seasonal landscapes that were the favored subject matter for folding screens, these women’s pictures were smaller in scale and probably depicted, in a ‘Japanese-style’ ( yamato-e), scenes from monogatari narrative sequences, but likely without accompanying text.45 The descriptions Michitsuna’s Mother provides certainly invite imagining a dramatic context for the figures depicted, and her poems bring the scenes alive. The presence of a figure in the paintings facilitates the composition of poetry from a perspective from within—a process whereby Michitsuna’s Mother can give voice to the woman who is otherwise silent. She has furthermore added her own expression of concern for her adopted daughter’s welfare to the scenes. The first poem refers to a famous verse from Kokinshū in which a male lover claims that waves would rise up above a certain pine- crested peak before he was unfaithful.46 Michitsuna’s Mother speaks for the woman in the picture who sees the pines on an island in the pond and imagines how easily waves stirred up (sawagite) on the pond could sweep over (kakaraba) the pines—in other words, how easily the lover would be untrue if there were just a hint of commotion about his affair. The relationship, for the woman, is at a heightened stage of anxiety, and she is looking for further assurances from her male counterpart if the affair is to continue. The poem is an appropriate expression for the figure looking out from the fishing pavilion, but it also shows Michitsuna’s Mother’s suspicions about the nobleman’s faithfulness were he to begin a liaison with her daughter. Significantly, the second poem is not from the point of view of the man lost in thought as he is writing letters, but a cutting commentary on what he is doing. The poem suggests that the nobleman interested in Michitsuna’s Mother’s daughter, like the man represented in the picture, opportunistically sends his entreaties out to many women and is not particularly attached to any one of them. As we have seen with Lady Ise’s compositional approach, Michitsuna’s Mother has adopted the persona of the female figure in the painting, developing through her poem an implied narrative sequence. She does not, however, compose from the point of view of the man. Instead, as we have seen in many of Mitsune’s

45 Imanishi, Kagerō nikki, p. 221, n. 29. 46 Kokinshū 1093 (Book 20: Folk Music Office Songs). The poem reads, “If I were one / that had a heart that would cast you aside / and turn to someone else / then waves would rise up above / the pines of Suenomatsu Mountain” (kimi o okite / adashigokoro o / wag a motaba / sue no matsuyama / nami mo koenamu). the dai is cast 179 verses, the poem is based on the internal context of the painting that is simultaneously appropriate to the social context external to the picture. In affixing the poems and sending them back, we know that Michitsuna’s Mother meant for the poems to be appreciated with the pictures, and in fact her poems rely on the pictorial context to deliver her full meaning back to the director. While each poem works within the painted scenes and the narratives they imply, Michitsuna’s Mother manages to include as well her own feelings of concern about the proposed relationship between the director and her adopted daughter. Previously, in the eighth month of 969, Michitsuna’s Mother was called upon to compose poems for a congratulatory screen for the minister of the left. Her description of the request and her response, in a passage toward the beginning of Book 2, suggests that the assigned ‘topics’ were primarily visual rather than verbal. Just as Mitsune derived appropriate waka topics from the paintings he saw at Ōmi, Michitsuna’s Mother probably received her request in the form of pictures, perhaps with verbal descriptions, and not in the form of words alone. She describes the episode as follows: Saemon no kami no, mibyōbu no koto seraruru tote, esarumajiki tayori o hakaraite, semeraruru koto ari. E no tokoro dokoro kakiidashitaru nari. Ito shirajirashiki koto tote, amatatabi kaesu o, semete warinaku areba, yoi no hodo, tsuki miru aida nado ni, hitotsu futatsu nado omoite monoshikeri. We hear that the chief of the Left Guards is going to prepare a congratulatory screen. Using an intermediary difficult to refuse, he presses me to contribute some poems. It is to be a screen with pictures of various places painted on it. The request leaves me rather cold; I send it back many times, but, as he insists, there is no choice, so in the evenings and when gazing at the moon, I think up one or two poems.47 What follows are her descriptions of the various scenes, and her compositions. The phrase “e no tokoro dokoro kakiidashitaru nari” is ambiguous. The verb kakiidashitaru can refer to the fact that the scenes were ‘written out’ (in words), ‘drawn out’ (in pictures), or perhaps both.48 A close examination of the grammatical patterns used in the descriptions seems

47 Imanishi, Kagerō nikki, pp. 105–106. Translation from Arntzen, The Kagerō Diary, p. 187. See also Seidensticker, The Gossamer Years, pp. 78–79. 48 Although the SNKT editor (Imanishi) does not specifically comment on the phrase, the NKBZ editors suggest that the scenes were indeed drawn out for her to see. See Mat- sumura Seiichi, Kimura Masanori, and Imuta Tsunehisa, eds., Tosa nikki, Kagerō nikki, NKBZ 9 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1973), p. 217. On Michitsuna’s Mother’s approach to composing screen poetry, see also Takano Haruyo, “Michitsuna no Haha no kajin ishiki—Josei kajin ni okeru byōbu uta eishin no shiten kara—,” Kokubun mejiro 39 (2000): 61–69. 180 chapter three to support the notion that the request for poems included pictures. The descriptions have the phrase “there is a scene in which . . .” (. . . tokoro ari), or, as in the last example following, simply “there is/are” (ari), referring to the content of the painting. Tabi yuku hito no, hamazura ni muma tomete, chidori no koe kiku tokoro ari: [For] a scene in which a traveler halts his horse on a beach and listens to the voices of the plovers:

Awatayama yori koma hiku. Sono watari naru hito no ie ni, hikiirete miru tokoro ari: A scene of someone leading a colt through Awatayama, stopping at a house in the neighborhood and leading the horse in:

Hamabe ni, isaribi tomoshi, tsuribune nado aru tokoro ari: A scene of fishing boats along with a fisherman’s fires on the beach:

Inaka no ie no mae no hamazura ni matsubara ari. Tsuru murete asobu. In a pine grove on the shore in front of a rustic house, a flock of cranes is playing.49 Throughout the passage, whenever she directly or indirectly quotes the words of others, she uses the quotative marker to, as in the following: “Futatsu uta arubeshi” to ari. “Two poems for this one” are the instructions. Her descriptions of the painted scenes, however, do not contain quotative markers. Examining the sentence patterns that end with ari in this section, it seems likely that, for instance, the statement “In a pine grove on the shore in front of a rustic house, a flock of cranes is playing” is not a reproduction of the words she received upon which she should base her composition, but rather her own description of the picture she received. Michitsuna’s Mother professes that her poems are ‘uninteresting’ (ajik- inaku), but many show skillful manipulation of allusion, double meanings, and appropriate symbolism while maintaining the auspicious tone that was essential for the occasion. Her third poem is on “a scene of someone leading a colt through Awatayama, stopping at a house in the

49 Arntzen, The Kagerō Diary, pp. 187–189; Imanishi, Kagerō nikki, pp. 105–107. See also Seidensticker, The Gossamer Years, pp. 78–79, and Matsumura, Kimura, and Imuta, Kagerō nikki, pp. 217–220. The following quotations from the text also come from this section. the dai is cast 181 neighborhood and leading the horse in (Awatayama yori koma hiku. Sono watari naru hito no ie ni, hikiirete miru tokoro ari)”: amata toshi / koyuru yamabe ni / ie’i shite / tsuna hiku koma mo / omonare ni keri For so many years, I have lived by these mountains, crossing them time and time again; even the most stubborn colt is used to me. The headnote again appears to be her own description of what may have been a sketch or ‘underdrawing’ (shitagaki) that she received to give her some idea what the painted screen looked like. She uses the verb koyuru to mean both ‘to cross’ over the mountains and ‘to pass’ through the years, the latter being a propitious expression befitting what was essentially a birthday and longevity celebration for the minister of left. As with her poem from the point of view of the woman looking out from the fishing pavilion, Michitsuna’s Mother composes as the figure in the painting, but she also communicates meanings that pertain to the external circumstances—a compositional approach that makes sense only if one takes for granted that the poem and the picture are to be appreciated together. Whereas internal evidence may point to a process of verbal expan- sion based on a visual source, it is important to note that the author of The Gossamer Journal, and possibly later editors of the text as well, carefully constructed the poetic persona that we know now as the mother of Michitsuna. As with the poetic collections of Tsurayuki, Mitsune, and Lady Ise, the poems and their circumstances are ordered and presented in such as way as to foreground particular aspects of the composer’s literary persona. Details about the creative process, whether in diaries, in historical narratives, or in fictional works such as The Tale of Genji, cannot, of course, be taken at face value. Such details work to advance the agenda of the text, often serving to portray the poet or a main character in a certain light, whether as a trained expert, a sensitive storyteller, or, in the case of The Gossamer Journal, a gifted poet undeserving of the neglect she endures. Nevertheless, one can glean from passages such as these information about expectation and reception that coincide with historical practices. In other words, how authors and poets verbally describe pictures in their works is one of the few ways we can know about those no longer extant pictures and the effect they may have had on literary expression. By examining The Gossamer Journal and other texts that provide clues to 182 chapter three the relationship between pictorial and poetic composition, we can begin to identify tendencies and directions of influence that would otherwise remain unknown.50 In this instance, Michitsuna’s Mother claims that the repeated requests she receives for poetry are ‘tiresome’ (shirajirashiki), but in the end she was probably pleased to have been asked for the poems. She was certainly proud of her compositions, which she lists at length. While at times she does not succeed in winning her audience’s compassion, in this episode, a sympathetic reader might wonder along with her why only two of her poems were chosen for inscription. Because her compositions were likely facilitated by visual cues she received about the topics required, she was able to employ optical allusions to expand the meaning of her poems to include reference to both the internal content of the pictures and the external context of the event for which she was asked to compose.

Screen Painting and Poetic Topic Development

A certain image or idea in poetry only gradually coalesces into a recognized dai. An accretion of associated meanings comes to define the topic over time, and the conventions of a topic solidify over generations through a process of perpetual citation and reinforcement. Poets and theorists of the midclassical period (roughly 1100–1300) would often point to an early poem that captured the hon’i of a topic. That poem, often one given maxi- mum recognition and circulation by being included in an imperial anthology, would be cited in works on poetics, in judgments at poetry contests, in commentaries on poetry, and at other venues where the conventions of poetic topics were formed and refined. In a number of cases, the poem recognized as the locus classicus for the meaning of a topic was, in fact, a poem originally composed for a painted screen. The fact that poems inspired by paintings contributed to the hon’i of numerous topics underscores the formative importance of the visual image, or the visual-verbal complex, in determining the course of waka composition. In the year 906 (Engi 6), very shortly after the compilation of Kokinshū was finalized, Tsurayuki composed a series of poems for a set of multi- paneled screens in the imperial palace. The sequence of poems that has

50 Kawana Junko makes precisely this argument about literary expressions in Heian literature and their reliance on the pictorial in her Monogatari sekai ni okeru kaigateki ryōiki: Heian bungaku no hyōgen hōhō (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2005), esp. pp. 211–228 on the ‘women’s pictures’ referenced in The Gossamer Years. the dai is cast 183

Table 2: Topics in The Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities (Engi rokunen dairi tsukinami byōbu uta; 906) 1) Nenohi 子日 “Day of the Rat” 2) Inari mōde 稲荷詣 “Pilgrimage to Inari Shrine”* 3) Yumi no kechi 弓結 “Archery Contest”* 4) Tagaesu tokoro 田かへす所 “Tilling the Fields”* 5) Wasuregusa 忘草 “Forgetting Grass” 6) Yayoi tsugomori 三月晦/三月尽 “Last Day of Spring” 7) Tomoshi 照射 “Hunting Fires”* 8) Ukai 鵜飼 “Cormorant Fishing”* 9) Minazuki harae 六月祓 “Sixth Month’s Purifications”* 10) Tanabata 七夕 “Weaver-Star Festival” 11) Koma mukae 駒迎へ “Tribute Horses”* 12) Kotakagari 小鷹狩り “Hunting with Small Falcons”* 13) Shiga no yamagoe 志賀山越 “The Shiga Mountain Pass” 14) Koromo utsu 擣衣 “Fulling Clothes”* 15) Kagura 神楽 “Shinto Dance and Music”* 16) Ōtakagari 大鷹狩り “Hunting with Large Falcons”* 17) Rinjisai 臨時祭 “Winter Kamo Festival”* 18) Butsumyō 仏名 “Naming of the Buddhas”* Note: *Boldface indicates topics that do not appear in Kokinshū (905). Topics in table 2, as well as references to the poems for the Engi 6 screens, are based on the text reproduced in Tanaka Kimiharu, Hirasawa Ryūsuke, and Kikuchi Yasuhiko, eds., Tsurayuki shū, Mitsune shū, Tomonori shū, Tadamine shū, Waka bungaku taikei 19 (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1997), pp. 3–6. survived, known as The Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities (Engi rokunen dairi tsukinami byōbu uta), shows Tsurayuki tackling a series of seasonal topics based on the activities of the twelve months as depicted on the screens. While the compositional process is nowhere documented, the topics are clearly listed in The Tsurayuki Collection, and the implication is that his poems were inscribed onto the screens. What is immediately striking about the poems is the number of new topics introduced. Of the eighteen listed for the various months, thirteen are topics that are not present in Kokinshū, from just the previous year (see table 2). Taking into consideration this example, as well as other screen poems from The Tsurayuki Collection, Takano Haruyo has identified a ‘pattern’ by which a topic is originally introduced into the poetic vocabulary through a poem based on a visual image and then is solidified through a process of citation and modeling.51 Many of the topics that appear for the first

51 Takano Haruyo, “Yamatoe byōbu to kazai no kaitaku,” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 40, no. 10 (1995): 78–84. 184 chapter three time in The Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities, for instance, become catalogued in The Six Volumes of Old and New Japanese Poetry (Kokin waka rokujō 古今和歌六帖; late tenth century), a classified collection of poems divided into twenty-five categories and 517 topics. By the eleventh century, with the compilation of the third imperial anthology, Shūishū, most of the post-Kokinshū screen topics have been accepted into the realm of the imperial anthology, and those topics appear, in turn, at poetry contests, where their meanings are further refined through judgments and commentaries. Later poets understood the conventions and association of a given topic through such influential typologies as The Six Volumes of Old and New Japanese Poetry and would ardently debate the poetic essence of those topics at poetry contests and in their own poetic treatises. Though the end result may be an image with a cluster of meanings far removed from the original visual context, the pattern Takano outlines occurs with enough frequency that we must rethink the visual origins of poetic topics in general. Another set of screen poems by Tsurayuki, this one from 936 (Jōhei 6), provides a more specific example of how painted screens and screen poems could help define what the parameters of a poetic topic. The bird chidori 千鳥, commonly translated as ‘plover,’ occurs again and again as a winter image in court poetry, and seasonal almanacs include the plover as a winter bird.52 As will be outlined later, the association of the plover to the winter season is the direct result of a poem by Tsurayuki based on a painted screen that depicted the bird in a winter landscape. The screen, then, served as a catalyst, suggesting the image of the plover in winter to Tsurayuki. The subsequent reception and replication of his poem helped establish the convention linking the bird to a specific season. The earliest examples of chidori in Japanese poetry do not show any specific seasonal connection. Plovers today appear in Japan throughout the year, and chidori can and do appear in all four seasons in the poetry included in the eighth-century anthology Man’yōshū as well. Of the twenty-two poems in Man’yōshū that contain chidori, most are in fact connected with summer or autumn, as in the following two examples by anonymous poets.

52 Plovers of various kinds can be found throughout Japan in all four seasons, though it is possible that migration patterns near the capital were different in Heian times. See Wild Bird Society of Japan, ed., A Field Guide to the Birds of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha Inter- national, 1982), pp. 132–137. the dai is cast 185

Manyōshū 3872 (Book 16) waga kado no / e no mi morihamu / momochidori / chidori wa kuredo / kimi so kimasanu The many birds that come to pick at the hackberries at my gate— though the many thousand come, you, alas, do not.53

Manyōshū 4477 (Book 20) yūgiri ni / chidori no nakishi / saoji o ba / arashi ya shitemu / miru yoshi o nami In the evening mist the plovers were crying. Could the road through Sao have fallen into ruin? —there is no trace of it.54 The first poem refers to the Chinese nettle or hackberry, a tree related to the elm. Yellow blossoms appear on the tree in early summer, followed by a red berrylike fruit, and consequently the tree is often associated with the summer season. The context for the second poem, as well as the presence of ‘evening mist’ ( yūgiri), makes it clear that the season described in the poem is autumn. The place-name Sao, known in poetry mostly for the Sao River that runs through the northern part of present-day Nara, comes to be a place famous for plovers due in part to the Man’yōshū poems that connect the bird with the site. The Sao River is also a famous site for fireflies, predictably a summer image. Before the Heian period, chidori, often written with the characters for ‘a thousand birds,’ referred generically to a large flock of small birds, and it is unclear when chidori comes to specifically designate what we now know as a ‘plover’ (Eudromias morinel- lus). Regardless, the textual evidence shows that throughout this period, plovers, and Sao as a geographic location, are connected to no particular season of the year. Similarly in Kokinshū, the term chidori does not occur in any consistent season. Though chidori by this time seems to refer to a specific bird, poets

53 Kojima, Kinoshita, and Satake, Man’yōshū, 4:146–147. “E no mi 榎の実” refers to the fruit of the Chinese nettle or hackberry tree, Celtis sinensis, related to the elm. One variety bears a sweet berrylike fruit that is used both as a dye and as an herbal medicine. The tree and its blossoms appear as a summer image in poetry. 54 Kojima, Kinoshita, and Satake, Man’yōshū, 4:436. 186 chapter three in Kokinshū continue to make use of the chi 千, meaning ‘a thousand,’ embedded in the word chidori, especially in conjunction with congratulatory verses that pray for a “thousand long years” for the guest of honor. The following screen poem by Mibu no Tadamine (fl. ca. 890–920), composed for the same fortieth birthday celebrations for Fujiwara no Sadakuni discussed in the previous chapter, serves as an example. Kokinshū 361 (Book 7: Felicitations) chidori naku / sao no kawagiri / tachinurashi / yama no ko no ha mo / iro masariyuku The plovers call out at the Sao River, where the river mists rise— the colors of the leaves on the mountain trees grow ever deeper.55 Here again we have plovers associated with the Sao River, and as with the second Man’yōshū poem cited earlier, the season described is autumn. The painting on Sadakuni’s folding screen and Tadamine’s poem based on it solidify the link between the Sao River and plovers. The seasonal connection, however, has not yet been established. In fact, even when the place-name Sao is not involved, chidori seem to have been associated with the mists of autumn. The connection is explicit in this anonymous poem from a poetry contest that took place at the residence of Prince Koresada in around 892. Koresada Shinnō uta awase 3 (round 2, left) hama chidori / aki to shi nareba / asagiri ni kata madowashite / nakanu hi zo naki When autumn arrives, the plovers lose their way in the morning mist— not a day goes by that they do not cry aloud.56 The appearance of plovers in the poems, along with more familiar autumn images such as chrysanthemums and bush clovers, may be connected to their actual appearance in Koresada’s garden in the autumn, when the event took place. Autumnal images dominate the compositions from the poetry contest, and the chidori are among them.

55 Kojima and Arai, Kokinwakashū, p. 118. 56 Hagitani, Heian chō uta awase taisei, 1:24. Numbering based on the Hagitani text. the dai is cast 187

How, then, do plovers become a fixed winter image? We need look no further than a single screen poem by Tsurayuki, one of his most famous compositions, dated 936. The poem was commissioned for a screen belonging to Fujiwara no Saneyori that, apparently, depicted plovers in winter. After the inclusion of Tsurayuki’s poem in the imperial anthology Shūishū around 1005, plovers come to be connected, almost without exception, to the winter season. Tsurayuki shū 338 / SIS 224 (Book 6: Winter) omoikane / imogari yukeba / fuyu no yo no / kawakaze samumi / chidori naku nari My longing unbearable, I go out to where she lives— In the cold river winds of the winter’s night the plovers cry aloud.57 The final verb ending nari, which usually expresses hearsay, doubt, or something that is not known firsthand, imparts an elegant but untrans- latable subtlety to the poem as a whole. Brower and Miner point out how the ‘subjective indirection’ and understatement Tsurayuki employs in this screen poem are effects often emulated by other poets. They further note, “Such understatement stresses the presence of the speaker in the poem and makes it clear that the cries of the plover, the cold wind from the river, and the dark winter night are all tonal images and metaphors relating to the state of mind and feeling of the speaker of the poem.”58 The fact that Tsurayuki stresses the speaker is a direct result of his approach to screen poetry composition that emphasizes the point of view of the figure within the painting. The poem, like many other screen poems we have seen, makes explicit aspects of the painting that could only have been implied: the coldness of the winter night, the blowing wind, and the cries of the plovers, not to mention the emotive content of a man in desperate search for his wife. Furthermore, I would suggest that the ‘subjective indirection’ that Brower and Miner note is a function of the

57 Komachiya Teruhiko, ed., Shūi wakashū, SNKT 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 64. The poem also appears as Tsurayuki shū 338. See Tanaka Kimiharu and Tanaka Kyōko, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, Shikashū zenshaku sōsho 20 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1997), p. 277– 278. The poem is praised by the noted critics Shun’e, Fujiwara no Shunzei, his son Teika, who composed an allusive variation based on it (Shūi gusō 1339), and Kamo no Chōmei in his poetic treatise Mumyōshō. 58 Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1961), p. 191. 188 chapter three poem having been based on a screen painting. While the oblique and understated quality of the last line (chidori naku nari) does not necessarily point to a literal lack of firsthand knowledge, the means of expression Tsurayuki employs is intimately linked with his position as a subject experiencing the scene from outside the painting. The stance parallels that of the screen poets who generally did not attend the events for which they composed their commissioned verse. In describing the plovers in winter, as they were evidently depicted on Saneyori’s painted screen, Tsurayuki decisively shapes all subsequent poems about plovers. This is not to say that a pictorial convention helped establish a poetic one. Saneyori’s screen was but one example, and perhaps a coincidental one, of plovers depicted in a winter landscape. This particular visual prompt did, however, serve as a catalyst for Tsurayuki’s influential screen composition that permanently connected plovers to the winter season. Apart from the specific subject matter, composing for screens helped form one aspect of Tsurayuki’s style—his often emulated ‘subjective indirection’ that would go on to influence many a later poet. The handling of the famous place-name Shiga Mountain Pass (Shiga no yamagoe 志賀山越) as a poetic topic follows a similar trajectory. The pass appears in Kokinshū, but not in conjunction with any particular season. As seen in the topics for the 906 Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities (figure 6), the Shiga Mountain Pass was a topic for screen paintings as well. The term refers to a road that leads from Shirakawa in Kyoto eastward toward the Shiga region near Lake Biwa, a path frequently used by people traveling between the capital and two popular temples, Sūfukuji and Miidera. While many poems that refer to the mountain path do not specify a season, annual festivals at the two temples occur in the autumn, and it is not surprising that many of the early poems about the Shiga Mountain Pass have autumnal associations. Tsurayuki’s poem for the 906 palace screen has the topic listed under the ninth month, but no seasonal words appear in the poem to suggest an autumn scene. Tsurayuki shū 17 / SIS 492 (Book 8: Miscellaneous 1) hito shirezu / koyu to omourashi / ashihiki no / yama shita mizu ni / kage wa mietsutsu Though it thinks to cross the mountain pass without anyone knowing, I can see the reflection following in the waters below. the dai is cast 189

The reflection is, of course, the speaker’s own. The poem shows the ‘subjective indirection’ characteristic of many of Tsurayuki’s screen compositions in the phrase omourashi, a conjecture that cannot describe one’s own actions (“it must be what [my reflection] was thinking”). The speaker displaces his own feelings of wanting to avoid the eyes of others, presumably because he is on his way to visit a lover, onto his reflection, thereby generating a sense of uncertainty about the process of visual perception. Like the speaker, Tsurayuki can perceive the scene only through a reflection or representation, and though he takes on the point of view of the figure in the painting, there is a residual uncertainty that is a product of the lack of direct experience. Both this poem and the following more famous Shiga Mountain Pass poem from Kokinshū do not contain any imagery that would specify a season, though both contain the implications of a love affair. Kokinshū 404 (Book 8: Parting) Shiga no yamagoe nite, ijii no moto nite, mono iikeru hito no wakarekeru ori ni, yomeru. Composed at a rocky spring on the Shiga Mountain Pass, upon parting from someone with whom he spoke intimately. musubu te no / shizuku ni nigoru / yama no i no / akade mo hito ni / wakarenuru ka na This mountain spring, so meager that the drops that fall from my cupped hands cloud its waters, leave me all the more unsated as I take my leave from you.59 Neither of the Tsurayuki compositions cited here includes the place-name as part of the poem, but both have been closely connected to the site by later commentators because of the circumstances of their composition. The reflective pool of water and trickling spring Tsurayuki mentions in his two poems are consistent with the autumn season more specifically mentioned in other compositions on the Shiga Mountain Pass, but neither cements the site with a particular season. Rose Bundy, following Kamijō Shōji, argues that as the Shiga Mountain Pass was reconfigured as a poetic topic in the twelfth century by Fujiwara

59 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 132. 190 chapter three no Shunzei and others, the path gradually came to be associated with spring, due in large part to the following Tsurayuki poem in Kokinshū.60 Kokinshū 115 (Book 2: Spring 2) Shiga no yamagoe ni, omuna no ōku aerikeru ni, yomite, tsukawashikeru. Composed and sent out to a group of women on the Shiga Mountain Pass. azusa yumi / haru no yamabe o / koekureba / michi mo sariaezu / hana zo chirikeru I come to cross the mountains in spring (mindful of a drawn bow) and find the blossoms scattering, leaving no path to get by.61 The poem employs the pillow word ‘catalpa bow’ (azusa yumi), a word that by convention precedes the word haru and that can mean both the season ‘spring’ and ‘to pull a bow.’ Tsurayuki specifically mentions the spring season and furthermore compares the women he meets to blossoms that have scattered upon the pathway through the mountains. The speaker is loath to make his way through because he does not want to disturb his fellow travelers—the ‘blossoms’ on the road. The connection of the Shiga Mountain Pass with spring, Bundy notes, does not become fixed until the twelfth century, but when poets refer to a source for the connection in their commentaries and judgments, Tsurayuki’s Kokinshū composition is by far the most frequently cited. Inclusion in an imperial anthology gave the verse elevated status, but this exact poem is not found in Tsurayuki’s personal poetry collection. A close variation of the poem, however, appears near the beginning of The Tsurayuki Collection, in the sequence for the 906 palace screen mentioned previously.62 The headnote as it appears in Kokinshū asserts that Tsurayuki came across a group of women on the Shiga Mountain Pass, and no external evidence contradicts

60 Rose Bundy, “From Painting to Poetry: ‘Shiga no yamagoe’ Poems in the Roppyakuban uta awase,” Monumenta Serica 45 (1995): 365–379; Kamijō Shōji, “Shiga no yamagoe kō: Shunzei kakan e no hitotsu no apurōchi,” Kokugo kokubun 37 (1968): 30–52. 61 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 50. 62 Tsurayuki shū 5; Tanaka Kimiharu et al., Tsurayuki shū, p. 4. The poem runs “I enter into / the mountains in the spring / (mindful of a drawn bow), /and find the blossoms scattering, / providing adornments for the hair (azusa yumi / haru no hamabe ni / iru toki wa / kazashi ni nomi zo / hana wa chirikeru).” Note the similarities in the use of the pillow word ‘catalpa bow’ and the image of the scattering blossoms. The latter poem also contains the additional pivot word (kakekotoba) iru, which can mean both ‘enter [into the mountains]’ and ‘shoot [an arrow from a bow].’ the dai is cast 191 these circumstances. Still, the verse makes sense as one inspired by a painting, and it is revealing that a version of this same poem that connects the Shiga Mountain Pass to spring is, in fact, a screen poem in The Tsurayuki Collection. Though “Shiga no yamagoe” is a tidy seven-syllable line, the place-name itself does not commonly appear in poems until the twelfth century, at which point poets reevaluated the topic, with the judgments of Fujiwara Shunzei at various poetry contests playing a large role in the way it was conceived. Poets of Shunzei’s time often mention the place-name in their poems, but gradually, as the Shiga Mountain Pass becomes an established poetic topic, poets come to refrain from including the place-name itself in their poems, feeling it superfluous to mention the topic of a poem within the poem itself.63 Instead, poets include descriptions of travel, spring, and blossoms—the very associations that Tsurayuki helps set through his compositions cited earlier. As with the eventual fixed connection of plovers to winter, screen poetry plays a role in connecting the Shiga Mountain Pass to spring. The pattern of topic development, linked to screen poetry, involves an association tentatively established (here, in poems by Tsurayuki that do not include the actual place-name ‘Shiga Mountain Pass’), that association becoming fixed through poems that explicitly mention the place- name, and finally, the conventions being understood to the point where it would be redundant to mention the place-name in an assigned poem on the topic. Unlike the cuckoo, whose cries are heard almost exclusively in summer and have been consistently connected to that season in poetry since Man’yōshū, plovers appear in all four seasons and, only later, through centuries of poetic convention, become limited to winter. Similarly, the Shiga Mountain Pass, despite the autumn festivals at destinations along the road, only eventually becomes, by poetic convention, a place visited in spring. Such conventional associations are, of course, dependent upon specific poems in the poetic tradition and their replication rather than any observed reality. The poems that help establish that tradition are, however, often based on a certain representation of reality as portrayed on painted screens. The original picture that Tsurayuki saw that depicted winter plovers in perpetuity is, ironically, long gone, but his poem based on it has kept those plovers in winter for all time.

63 Again, see Kamijō, “Shiga no yamagoe kō,” and Bundy, “From Painting to Poetry.” 192 chapter three

Visual Thinking and Perceptual Cycles

“Seeing comes before words,” said John Berger in his influential book Ways of Seeing.64 Though some cognitive linguists have emphasized the way language structures our view of the world, almost arguing the inverse, most visual theorists would agree that visual apprehension, conceptual cognition, and language work in mutually constituting ways and are all highly dependent on cultural context. For the poets of classical Japan who composed when assigned poetic topics were beginning to take shape, the visual intake of an object or scene provided the initiative for the creative process that resulted in a poem. This is not to say that the primary object or scene was not already laden with communally understood meanings and restrictions, but rather that the physical proximity of an ‘object at hand’ contributed to the way artists and poets alike comprehended assigned topics as they expressed their interpretation of them in visual and verbal forms. In other words, poets used a ‘proximate physical reality’ as the basis for their compositions, just as Tsurayuki spoke of using “the seen and the heard” to give voice to one’s feelings in poetry. The practice of composing on things at hand, whether an object passed around, or the flora and fauna in a nobleman’s garden, was an important starting point in the development of dai as a concept. Poets, as well as painters, took the ‘proximate physical reality’ into consideration as they crafted their own verbal and visual compositions. These had a cross-fertilizing effect in that the way painters depicted an object or a scene affected how poets composed, and how poets composed affected what painters painted. In the screen poetry genre, the poem and the painting could work together to impart new meanings to whatever was depicted, but in a larger sense, the visual and verbal representations had the reflexive effect of shaping the way poets and painters viewed the original object. To give an example of this cognitive cycle, a chrysanthemum could serve as the basis for both a poem and a painting. Depending on which was executed first, there may be a stream of influence from one to the other—if a poem described dew on a chrysanthemum, the painter might depict dew, or vice versa. These compositions then affected how later poets and artists viewed actual chrysanthemums when they were asked to compose on an ‘object at hand.’ In other words, poets and painters

64 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 45–46. the dai is cast 193 saw these objects and scenes through a multifaceted lens of associations created by previous poems and pictures. What we have here are the beginnings of what E. H. Gombrich has called ‘image and code,’ a system of reinforced meanings that lead to the establishment of conventions. The process he describes parallels the development of dai in the Japanese literary tradition. Gombrich explains: The degree of cohesion, of mutual support of the features seen in the image, leads to the kind of transformation which always follows the detection of meaning and its subsequent confirmation.65 Though he is speaking specifically about the perceptual cycle by which pictorial conventions are established, much the same can be said of both painting and poetry in the Japanese tradition in the way visually and verbally reinforced meanings transform an ‘object’ into a ‘topic.’ Although the various dai, in the end, describe literary and not pictorial conventions, visual media play a defining role in this transformation. In some ways inspired by early poetry, artists took part in a growing range of art forms, such as painted screens, seaside dioramas, and gardens landscaped specifically to represent famous sites. These forms approximated the actual objects or scenes upon which poets composed, providing the poet with an ‘approximate physical reality’ such that the visual stimuli for poetic composition remained. The external world, then, was replaced by a representation of it as the initial inspiration for the poet. As we have seen with the plovers in winter, painting as an intermediary vehicle could have a defining role in the establishment of the conventions and core meanings of a poetic topic. In the way that poets, especially screen poets, described an artistic representation, they engaged in an ekphrastic mode of composition that was fundamental to the development of poetic meanings. Eventually, as these conventions become fixed through citation and reinforcement, the process again becomes reflexive. Whereas poems and paintings based on visual objects helped define the parameters of certain dai, in time, the dai themselves guided what could be represented, and how, in formal poetry. In essence, art helped define conventions, and conventions then defined art. The process was not linear, but rather gradual and cyclical. As schematically represented in figure 5, the development of poetic topics can be described as a perceptual cycle, an ongoing dialogue

65 E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982), p. 297. 194 chapter three

artist / poet artist / poet

visual-verbal object topic representation

artist / poet artist / poet

Figure 5: Perceptual cycle with poetic topics. between the artist/poet and representations of objects and ideas in the external world. What may have begun as an object in reality is interpreted and transformed by a painter or poet (or gardener, suhama craftsman, etc.) into a representation that then goes on to shape how other artists see that object. Through the creation of new representations, whether visual or verbal, the most critical details become refined to comprise the hon’i that defines that object as a poetic topic. This relationship among the external world, the poet’s perception of it, and his attempt to express, explain, or otherwise communicate his observations, then, is part of a cycle or dialogue that helps define objects and ideas for the poet and his audience. Let us return to Berger’s comments on this relationship: Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.66

66 Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp. 45–46. Berger further observes: If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And, often dialogue is an attempt to visualise this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, “you see things,” and an attempt to discover how “he sees things.” An awareness of the audience is an important part of how we express what we see. the dai is cast 195

The perceptual cycle that I have described as part of the development of topics in Japanese poetry is part of this larger, ongoing attempt to ‘settle’ what we see and what we know. Screen poets of classical Japan engaged in a form of ‘visual thinking,’ to borrow Rudolf Arnheim’s phrase, a process whereby visual images helped shape the way poetic language was used and understood.67 The process is coded and reciprocal in that what begins as a thought, feeling, or idea (often evoked by an object or its simulacra) is only later manifest in words and must then be decoded so that the thought, feeling, or idea can be recovered by the reader of the poem or the viewer of the work of art. We know that many creative geniuses, from René Magritte (1898–1967) to George Orwell (1903–1950) to Albert Einstein (1879–1955), worked by first transforming thoughts into images.68 Orwell felt that one should “get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations” before trying to put that meaning into words, and Einstein similarly worked out his ideas in images, stating, “Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage.”69 With regard to waka composition, the poet and theorist Kyōgoku Tamekane (1254–1332) advised much the same thing: Be it blossoms or moonlight, daybreak or the scene at dusk, whatever your subject may be, try to make yourself one with it and express its true essence; if you absorb its appearance and let the reactions that it evokes in your heart penetrate deeply, only then entrusting these feelings to words, these words will be captivating and attractive.70

67 See Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), especially chap. 13, “Words in Their Place,” pp. 226–254. 68 Magritte, in discussing his inspiration for one of his canvases, stated: The word idea is not the precise designation for what I thought when I united a locomotive and a fireplace. I didn’t have an idea; I only thought of an image. The power of thought or ‘presence of mind’ manifests itself in different ways: for the painter, thought becomes manifest in images; for Bergson, thought manifests itself in ideas; for Proust, it manifests itself in words . . . . After the image has been painted, we can think of the relation it may bear to ideas or words. This is not improper, since images, ideas, and words are different interpretations of the same thing: thought. (René Magritte, Magritte: The True Art of Painting, ed. Harry Torczyner, trans. Richard Miller [London: Thames and Hudson, 1979], pp. 60–61; emphasis in the original.) 69 Cited in Olive Holmes, “Thesis to Book: What To Get Rid of and What To Do with What Is Left,” in The Thesis and the Book, ed. Eleanor Harmon et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 67. 70 Tamekane kyō wakashō, pp. 160–161. Trans. Robert N. Huey, Kyōgoku Tamekane: Poetry and Politics in Late Kamakura Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 68. 196 chapter three

For all of these creative minds, then, “Seeing comes before words.” The process as described thus far has focused on the creativity of the artist, but the effect on the audience is also an important consideration. Tamekane’s observations, that visual input stirs the feelings that only later manifest in words, echoes writings on poetic composition that go back to Tsurayuki’s pronouncement that Japanese poetry begins when “the seen and the heard” plant in the human heart the seeds of emotion that burst forth as leaves of words. The way external stimuli give rise to the internal emotions that all but require outward expression can be described as the nexus that flows from the affective to the expressive. The cycle is not complete, however, until the poetry has its desired effect—what Tsurayuki described as stirring the feelings of the gods, softening the relations between men and women, or calming the hearts of fierce warriors. What begins as a feeling or idea in one person, through poetry, can be transmitted to another. Thus, there is not only a connection, but a causal link between the affective (the stimulus), the expressive (the poem), and the effective (the functional result of the poem). The cycle is remarkably similar to the process that the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) describes in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). As in Tsurayuki’s “Kana Preface,” what we have here is not a driving theory for interpretation, but an artist describing the workings of his art: A work of art consists of two elements, the inner and the outer. The inner is the emotion in the soul of the artist; this emotion has the capacity to evoke a similar emotion in the observer. Being connected with the body, the soul is affected through the medium of the senses—the felt. Emotions are aroused and stirred by what is sensed. Thus the sensed is the bridge, i.e., the physical relation, between the immaterial (which is the artist’s emotion) and the material, which results in the production of a work of art. And again, what is sensed is the bridge from the material (the artist and his work) to the immaterial (the emotion in the soul of the observer). The sequence is: emotion (in the artist) → the sensed → the artwork → the sensed → emotion (in the observer). The two emotions will be alike and equivalent to the extent that the work of art is successful. In this respect painting is no way different from a song: each is a communication. The successful singer arouses in listeners his emotions: the successful painter should do no less.71

71 James B. Hall and Barry Ulanov, eds., Modern Culture and the Arts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 135. the dai is cast 197

Kandinsky acknowledges that successful communication depends on a code mutually understood by the artist and the viewer, a code that is much like the web of associations that form poetic topics in the Japanese literary tradition. He goes on to talk about how the inner element, which at first exists only as an emotion, finds its form in the outer element. Tsurayuki’s suggestion that a good poem requires a balance between emotive content and the choice of words to embody them (kokoro and kotoba) is perfectly reflected in Kandinsky’s observation, “A beautiful work is the consequence of a harmonious cooperation of the inner and the outer.” The analogy between painting and song brings to the fore the many points of agreement shared by Tsurayuki and Kandinsky about the creative process. The development of poetic topics was of central importance not only in waka composition but in Japanese literary history as a whole. Visual perception was one of the keys in the transformation of dai from a description or assignment based on a specific, concrete object or circumstance to the conceptualized ideals embodied in the conventions of a poetic topic. Furthermore, as various dai coalesced into the set of conventions that we recognize today, and as the concept of dai itself came to have meaning, visual objects, whether actual flowers or painted scenes, played a central role. Though the end result may be a topic that is far removed from both reality and visuality, we must reconsider the visual origins of the verbal associations that form ‘poetic’ conventions. Konishi states in A History of Japanese Literature, “Because there was no separation between the human and the natural, there could be no conception that nature existed as something viewed objectively outside the poet.”72 This emphasis on perception meant that landscape really existed only in literary and poetic descriptions, or that our only means of recover- ing these poets’ conception of landscape is through their poetry. Dai, as a visually based concept, contributed to the idea that, for the purposes of composition at least, nature could exist in the mind’s eye and not only in the reality in front of the poet. Direct observation gave way to the appreciation of artistic representations, scale models, and other simulacra, and the production of these gave rise to a complex network of associated

72 Konishi, A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 1, The Archaic and Ancient Ages, p. 381. The idea dovetails with Karatani Kōjin’s controversial assertion that it is not until the modern period that landscape could be objectively, rather than subjectively, described. See his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 198 chapter three poetic images that were not necessarily connected to reality. Screen paintings, miniature gardens, and topical centerpieces at poetry parties served to domesticate, homogenize, and abstract flora and fauna into terms that poets could approach as conventional topics. The establishment of various dai furthermore marks a gradual acceptance of poetic composition as a creative, imaginative, and sometimes laborious process separate from the poet’s actual experience, a process that was facilitated by the existence of visual representations of topics. Composing on a representation, painted or otherwise, instead of the object itself introduced another interpretive layer. This separation of poetic composition from direct experience parallels what Owen has described as the formation of a ‘transmimetic’ aesthetic in China in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. We begin to see writers acknowledging a temporal disjunction between a putative experience that occasioned the poem and the act of composition, as well as the idea of ‘working on’ a poem. This points toward the idea of poetry as an art rather than a transparent adjunct to experience.73 This transmimetic aesthetic is the direct result of the perceptual cycle that served to separate the act of composition from the initial experience that may have inspired the poet to compose. The cycle brings painting and poetry into relation and implies that the process of composition is a significant part of the resulting poem. The image is an important part of the imaginative effort the poet puts in, and the poem is, in Wallace Stevens’s terms, a ‘consummation’ of this effort. Stevens notes: The point is that the poet does his job by virtue of an effort of the mind. In doing so, he is in rapport with the painter, who does his job, with respect to the problems of form and color, which confront him incessantly, not by inspiration, but by imagination or by the miraculous kind of reason that imagination sometimes promotes. In short, these two arts, poetry and painting, have in common a laborious element, which, when it is exercised, is not only a labor but a consummation as well.74 The effort and imagination that both Owen and Stevens describe is underscored in the Japanese case by the relationship of poetic composition to visual objects and conventional topics in the perceptual cycle. This view

73 Stephen Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Cul- ture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 108. 74 Wallace Stevens, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 274–285. the dai is cast 199 of the compositional process did not arise at one historical moment, nor through the genius of any individual poet, but occurred gradually over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries in Japan, as topics moved from concrete objects at hand to representational images. Compositions that were once based on a ‘proximate physical reality’ came to rely on artistic representations, or an ‘approximate physical reality’ instead, and, in the process, dai progressed from circumstances based in reality to imagined topics based on literary convention. As we have seen, poems composed on screen paintings can sometimes determine the literary conventions of specific dai. Though these images now exist only in the oblique descriptions provided in the poems they inspired, there is no doubt that screen paintings and other visual forms played a fundamental role in the way that dai were cast.

Chapter Four

Politics and Precedence

By pointing to the power of precedent, optical allusions could be employed at congratulatory events to drive the understanding of a current situation in terms of a glorious past. Very few records remain that specifically detail the manner in which poems were commissioned, composed, selected, and inscribed onto painted screens. For two specific events, however, a range of extant historical sources reveal the inner workings of the patrons and artists responsible for the production of commemorative screen poetry. Both events were occasions that marked the introduction of a powerful statesman’s daughter into the imperial court, and both can be described as determined attempts to transform, through screen poetry, cultural capital into political capital. In addition to the details they reveal about the process of producing screen poems, these cases also show how the poets’ and patrons’ use of optical allusions served to visually and poetically reinforce existing or proposed political connections and hierarchies of power. In 999, the ambitious statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga strategically staged the court entrance of his daughter Shōshi (Akiko) in order to eclipse a rival consort and strengthen his daughter’s and his own political alle- giances with important members at court. The ceremony was an unprecedented display of lavish material wealth that included, among other things, painted screens and newly commissioned poetry. Contemporary accounts heaped praise upon Shōshi, highlighting her sense of belonging. These flattering descriptions eased the acceptance of her elevation to new junior consort to Emperor Ichijō (980–1011, r. 986–1011), even as one prominent courtier fiercely objected to the lack of precedence and protocol. Ironically, the event would serve as a precedent for Kujō Kanezane two centuries later, when he introduced his daughter Ninshi (1173–1239) into the court of Emperor Gotoba. Looking upon Shōshi’s entrance ceremony as a model, Kanezane followed similar procedures, clearly hoping for similar success. Michinaga’s use of screen poetry affirmed his rising dominance at court. Kanezane, for a variety of circumstances beyond his control, was unable to translate his cultural capital into political gain. As a consequence, he did not enjoy the same success as his famous Fujiwara forebear. 202 chapter four

Screen Poetry and Shōshi’s Court Entrance of 999

By the middle of the year 999, Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Michinaga seemed to have little to worry about, at least on the surface. Through a combination of strategy and good fortune, the thirty-three-year-old fifth son of the former regent Kaneie had catapulted past his elder brothers into a position of power and authority. Michinaga, however, had his eyes on further political dominance, and his plans were not yet complete. Regential succession had become an even more complicated matter than it had been in the past due to the sheer number of sons and grandsons of Kaneie who aspired to accede to the position of regent. The latest round in the competition began when Kaneie’s eldest son, Michitaka (953–995), passed away in the fourth month of 995.1 Senshi (962–1001), the mother of the reigning emperor Ichijō, and herself a daughter of Kaneie, seems to have harbored personal resentment toward Korechika (974–1010), the politically ambitious second son of Michitaka, and lobbied against him (figure 6 shows the relationship of the major players mentioned here). With no decision forthcoming about which of Michitaka’s sons should succeed, his brother Michikane (961–995) was named the next regent. He died within a week of his designation, and he came to be known as the ‘Seven-Day Regent.’ Korechika was seeking support for his promotion to regent when Senshi had her son Ichijō issue an imperial edict in the fifth month of 995 granting nairan inspection powers to Michinaga. All political decisions would now pass through Michinaga, and he was not about to concede his newfound advantage to any of his brothers or nephews. In the fourth month of the following year (996), Michinaga managed to have both Korechika and another politically ambitious nephew, Takaie (979–1044), exiled over a much talked about incident that ended with an arrow being shot through the sleeve of Retired Emperor Kazan. This incident, combined with reports (or perhaps trumped-up charges) that Korechika was usurping imperial authority by performing esoteric rites that were reserved for imperial family members, bolstered Michinaga’s argument for banishing the two nephews from the capital. Michinaga,

1 Historical background from Donald Shively and William H. McCullough, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2, Heian Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Watanabe Minoru, Ōkagami no hitobito: Kōdō suru ichzoku (Tokyo: Chūo kōronsha, 1987); and Helen Craig McCullough, Ōkagami: The Great Mirror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). A version of a portion of this chapter appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of the Journal of Japanese Studies. politics and precedence 203 ) ’y û 2–1002) (959–991 Senshi == En (96 ) a 4) ) Shôshi a Michinag (966–1027 (988–107 == suhir oshi At (1008–1036 Michiy (n.d.) Ichijô Kaneie (929-990 ) (980–1011) asu == e tsuy (961–995 ) A Michikan e (999–1019) H ouse (abbreviated). eishi T (908-960) Morosuk (977–1001) ) (955–1020) Michitsuna a –1004) (925-977 akaie Kanemich i T (9 79 adahir Figure 6: Fujiwara T (880–949 ) (953–995) Michitaka e 4–1010) rechika Ko (97 7–1046) Sanesuk ori (95 ) ) a 7) ori oshi (971–995 ) Michiy adat Saney T (928–9 73 (900–9 70 Kanehir (953–101 ô akat T (949–1013) 204 chapter four however, had one remaining obstacle: Empress Teishi (or Sadako; 977– 1001), daughter of Michinaga’s late brother and rival Michitaka, was still the ruling emperor’s main consort, and she was pregnant with the emperor’s first child. Teishi had entered Ichijō’s court in 990, when she was fourteen and the young sovereign was ten. It was unfortunate timing for her that her brothers Korechika and Takaie were banished just as an imperial birth prom- ised to secure her position as senior consort. The two brothers seem to have conspired to derail Michinaga’s attempts to control the imperial line even as they were in exile, but their physical absence from the capital left the empress without support at court. Michinaga’s dominant and domi- neering presence prevented even Ichijō from celebrating, in late 996, the birth of his first child by Teishi, a daughter. The state of affairs compelled Teishi to go into religious seclusion (she had taken Buddhist vows upon her brothers’ banishment earlier in the year). Teishi returned to the palace the following year, and, at the same time, her brothers were permitted to return to the capital. Though their reputations were permanently besmirched by the disgrace of banishment, Michinaga still saw them as a threat to his plans. He no doubt detected the rising tide of opposition when, in the spring of 999, Teishi became pregnant with Ichijō’s second child. As the empress prepared to leave the palace to seclude herself for the birth of the child, Michinaga made extravagant plans for a personal excursion to Uji for that very same day, expending resources and intimi- dating the remaining palace attendants to the point that Teishi had no one to assist with her departure. Following this all too public slight against her, she quietly left for her private residence in the capital, without the dignity and ceremony usually accorded an empress. With the impending birth of Ichijō’s second child, Michinaga felt the time was ripe to introduce his eldest daughter, Shōshi, who was only eleven at the time, into Ichijō’s court. Michinaga had Shōshi’s coming-of- age ceremony moved up to the second month of 999, and, by the tenth month, he had preparations well under way for her court entrance ceremony. He could not have planned it better: the lavish event took place just days before Teishi’s son, Prince Atsuyasu (999–1019) was born, effectively obscuring, indeed almost nullifying, the birth of the potential crown prince. Not only did Michinaga insert Shōshi into Ichijō’s court at the very end of Teishi’s pregnancy, but he also had Shōshi officially designated a junior consort (nyōgo), which, by custom, entailed the emperor’s attendance. This event took place on the seventh day of the eleventh month, the exact day of Atsuyasu’s birth. politics and precedence 205

Contemporary records show that many members of the upper aristoc- racy participated in Shōshi’s court entrance, even while more conservative voices protested the unprecedented nature of the event. The banquet, the exchange of gifts, the ceremonial court dress, the procession of attendants, and notably the presentation and inscription of painted screens with newly composed verses all made Shōshi already appear to be a principal member of the imperial family rather than simply a newly added junior consort. The impression was, of course, intentional on Michinaga’s part. By bestowing the event with the trappings characteristic of annual rites and ceremonies (nenjū gyōji), Michinaga presented Shōshi’s entrance as part of established court tradition, effectively transforming financial and cultural capital into political capital. The intense but deliberate schedul- ing of both Shōshi’s court entrance and her designation as junior consort is a prime example of Michinaga’s career-long machinations to promote his own interests at the expense of potential rivals. To engineer such a spectacle took quick and careful planning. In particular, the flurry of activity involved in preparing the screen poems shows Michinaga racing to settle the arrangements before the birth of Teishi’s second child. The process of commissioning, composing, selecting, and inscribing the poems—a process that took, in total, just ten days—can be reconstructed from brief entries in Michinaga’s own diary, Record of the Midō Regent (Midō kanpaku ki), and in Fujiwara no Yukinari’s 藤原行成 (972–1027) Record of the Acting Grand Counselor (Gonki). The more extended criticisms in Fujiwara no Sanesuke’s diary, Record of the Ononomiya Minister of the Right, also contribute to the narrative of events. For a nonimperial lady making her first court entrance, the grand presentation of screen poetry was unprecedented. Michinaga was perhaps searching for ways to make his daughter’s entrance ceremony as extravagant an affair as possible, and he struck upon an event that combined newly composed poems and venerated art objects that together represented the amalgamation of political support for the union between his daughter and Ichijō. In the entry for the twenty-first day of the tenth month of 999, Michinaga reported in his diary, “I requested a number of people to compose waka poems for four-foot folding screens” (四尺屏風和歌令人々詠).2 Michinaga likely sent out feelers to prospective poets on this

2 ‘Foot’ translates shaku, a unit of measure roughly equivalent to a foot. Midō kanpaku ki quotations from Tōkyō daigaku shiryō hensajo, ed., Dai Nihon kokiroku (Tokyo: Iwanami 206 chapter four day and followed up two days later by sending out topics for the screen poems. Even though he did not receive a preliminary response from Sanesuke, Michinaga sent Minamoto no Toshikata (959–1027), himself a high-ranking aristocrat, out to Sanesuke’s residence with a handful of assigned waka topics. These topics were presumably derived by Michinaga himself from the paintings on a prized set of folding screens belonging to his wife Rinshi. The pressed schedule was such that Michinaga could not commission new screens, so he resourcefully utilized assets he had at his disposal. On the twenty-third, Sanesuke reported in his diary that Toshikata arrived at his residence (see table 3 for a timeline of events related to Shōshi’s court entrance). Sanesuke was informed that “the topics were divided up among the senior nobles (kandachime) and also given to those of lesser rank (hisangi) who were skilled at poetry.”3 Sanesuke demurred because, according to screen poetry precedents, lower-ranked poetry specialists were expected to compose the poems, and senior nobles were to present them on the day of the ceremony. As Sanesuke questioned the assignment of poetry to the highest ranked aristocrats, others began to work on their compositions right away. Just four days later, on the twenty- seventh, Michinaga recorded that the poets gathered at his Tsuchimikado Mansion, bringing their screen poems with them.4 Over much drinking and merriment, the selection process was completed by the end of the evening. Two days earlier, on the twenty-fifth, a directional taboo was lifted, enabling Michinaga to have Shōshi moved from Tsuchimikado Mansion to a residence in the western part of the capital so that she could later enter the palace from an auspicious direction. The screens do not seem to have been present at the gathering on the twenty-seventh and shoten, 1952–1999), vol. 2. Gonki and Shōyūki quotations are from the editions in Zōho shiryō taisei, vols. 4–5 and vols. 46–48, respectively (old kanji have been modernized in the quotations). For important citations and background information on Shōshi’s court entrance, I have relied on Tajima Tomoko, “Byōbu uta no seisaku hō: Chōhō gannen Shōshi judai byōbu o megutte,” Gobun (Ōsaka daigaku kokubungaku kenkyūshitsu) 47 (1986): 11–22; Ii Haruki, “Shōshi judai ryō byōbu e to waka,” in Waka shi no kōsō, ed. Shimazu Tadao (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 1990), pp. 103–120; Kawamura Yūko, “Michinaga, Yorimichi jidai no byōbu uta,” in Byōbu uta to uta awase, Waka bungaku ronshū 5, ed. Waka Bungaku ronshū iinkai (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1995); Yū Kyonmi, “Shōshi judai byōbu uta eishin ni tsuite: Sanesuke no kugyō ishiki o megutte,” Chūko bungaku 62 (1998): 11–19; and Tajima Tomoko, “Shūishū jidai ni okeru kugyō sanka no jitsujō: Chōhō gannen (999) jūichigatsu tsuitachi Fujiwara no Michinaga no musume Shōshi judai byōbu o megutte,” in Byōbu uta no kenkyū: Ronkō hen, by Tajima Tomoko (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2007). 3 Shōyūki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.23. 4 Midō kanpaku ki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.27. politics and precedence 207

Table 3: Timeline for the court entrance of Shōshi (999 [Chōhō 1]) 10.21 Michinaga requests poems for the painted screens to be used in Shōshi’s court entrance ceremony. 10.23 Toshikata, as a messenger from Michinaga, arrives at Sanesuke’s residence with a request for poems. Sanesuke finds out that topics for the poems have been distributed among upper aristocrats, as well as those of lower rank who are skilled at waka composition. 10.25 Shōshi moves to the residence of Uzumasa no Tsuremasa in the western part of the capital so she may enter the palace from an auspicious direction. 10.27 Poets arrive at Michinaga’s Tsuchimikado Mansion to submit their screen poems. Michinaga hosts a banquet, accepts the poems, and offers drink to his guests. Poems for inscription are decided. 10.28 There is a showing of the screens and possibly a reading of the chosen poems. 10.30 Yukinari completes the poem-square inscriptions for the screens. 11.1 Shōshi makes her court debut. Felicitations and a banquet ensue. 11.7 Shōshi is designated junior consort. Teishi gives birth to Atsuyasu. may have been transported to the Ichijō Palace at this time. If such was the case, the poems for the screens were chosen without the benefit of looking at the painted scenes that, indirectly at least, formed the topics for those poems. Sanesuke did not hear about the matter until the following day, while he was attending a sutra reading for Teishi. Perhaps a bit sheepish for having missed the deadline, and certainly indignant about the pressed schedule and lack of protocol, Sanesuke recorded in his diary the first of several criticisms about the unprecedented nature of the commission. Sanesuke also heard that contributors from the night before were invited to preview the screens at the palace that evening (the gathering may have also included a reading of the selected poems).5 Two days later, on the thirtieth, the renowned calligrapher Yukinari reported in his diary that he went to the palace to inscribe the selected poems on the poem-squares for the screens.6 Though these poem-squares were originally blank spaces on the screens reserved for poetic inscription, Yukinari likely executed his transcriptions onto small,

5 Ii, “Shōshi judai ryō byōbu e to waka,” suggests that the rather rare expression 催和歌 means that the poems were given a recitation. Tajima, “Shūishū jidai ni okeru kugyō sanka no jitsujō,” concurs and through a database search confirms the uniqueness of the expression (more common combinations for the presentation of poetry are with the characters 提, 進, or simply 有). 6 Gonki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.30. 208 chapter four decorative paper sheets and later affixed them to the screens—perhaps even over the poems that were already there. The preparations were then complete, and just in time: the very next day, the first day of the eleventh month of 999, Shōshi made her court debut to much fanfare. Meanwhile, just days later, Teishi gave birth to Atsuyasu at her private residence, where the fanfare was conspicuously wanting.7 The historical narrative A Tale of Flowering Fortunes describes Shōshi’s entrance ceremony as follows: Michinaga set about the preparations for her presentation. Nothing was left undone. Her ladies-in-waiting were more elegant than the attendants who flocked to serve the imperial consort in The Tale of the First Snow, and her folding screens and other furnishings were beyond comparison. The poems inscribed on the screens were composed by family connections and others of exalted status. As the saying goes, “The more important the poet, the more interesting the poem.” Michinaga himself contributed some lines, as did Retired Emperor Kazan and the Shijō consultant Kintō.8 Poems by Kintō and Kazan follow (discussed in detail later). Although the court entrance of the eleven-year-old Shōshi may have been considered dubiously early by some, the painted screens and the inscribed poetic offerings served to preempt such criticism by showing that she had the support of important personages. The screens themselves, an intrinsic part of the entrance ceremony, were also valuable as a kind of wedding gift that would later decorate Shōshi’s apartments in the Fujitsubo chambers of the imperial palace. The various furnishings, as well as her entourage of court servants, were critical to the development and display of Shōshi’s refinement and appropriateness as a consort—characteristics that may have been in question because of her youth.9 The description from A Tale of Flowering Fortunes continues:

7 Ii, “Shōshi judai ryō byōbu e to waka,” notes the paucity of celebrations in contemporary records of descriptions of Atsuyasu’s birth. 8 Matsumura Hiroji and Yamanaka Yutaka, eds., Eiga monogatari 1, NKBT 75 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), pp. 299–300. Translation, slightly modified, from William H. and Helen Craig McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), vol. 1, p. 217. Tale of the First Snow (Hatsuyuki monogatari) is the title of an early Heian narrative that is no longer extant. 9 A brief survey of court entrance ceremonies in the Heian period shows the age of the entering consort ranging from twelve to sixteen. Shōshi’s debut was decidedly on the early side, and Teishi’s at the age of fourteen was about average. politics and precedence 209

She entered the palace on the first day of the eleventh month, accompanied by forty ladies-in-waiting, six young girls, and six servants. Her attendants had been selected with utmost discrimination. It was not considered sufficient for a candidate to be personable and even-tempered: even if her father held Fourth or Fifth Rank, there was no hope for her if she was socially inept or lacking in the niceties of deportment, for only the most polished and elegant were accepted. . . . Although the reader will not need to be told that Shōshi was very lovely, I must mention her hair, which trailed on the floor five or six inches. And her face and figure were more beautiful than I can say. In spite of her youth, she was so far from childish that it would be impossible to do justice to her grace and elegance. Her maturity astonished those who had entered her service with the notion that one so young was bound to make a poor showing as an imperial consort. The presentation took place only after extraordinary attention to every detail of the preparations.10 Considering the bias in Flowering Fortunes toward glorifying all things associated with Michinaga, the praise of Shōshi as “astonishingly mature (asamashiki made otonabisasetamaeri)” is not surprising. Once she became an imperial consort, Michinaga’s next objective was for her to produce an heir. As if to address the matter directly, the next passage from Flowering Fortunes implies a direct correlation between Shōshi’s material attributes and her frequent invitations to Ichijō’s chambers. Shōshi took up residence in the Fujitsubo. Shall I compare the splendor of her furnishings to the radiance of a precious jewel? A jewel glows dimly when it lacks proper polish, but the apartments in the Fujitsubo sparkled and shone with dazzling beauty. No half-trained lady could have ventured to serve the mistress of such an establishment. Every object made of wood, even the merest curtain or screen frame, was covered with gold-lacquered designs and mother-of-pearl. To be sure, the bombycine jackets worn by all the ladies-in-waiting, and the trains with wave and shell patterns, conformed to styles prescribed since antiquity, but they somehow achieved a beauty so distinctive that one could only wonder at how it had been managed. And anything that Shōshi wore, no matter for how short a time, was so exqui- sitely colored and perfumed that it seemed to deserve public recognition as a masterpiece. Shōshi visited the Imperial Bedchamber time after time.11 The narrator here extols the exceptional elegance of Shōshi’s material belongings but at the same time emphasizes that the women’s attire all “conformed to styles prescribed since antiquity (mukashi yori ima ni

10 Matsumura and Yamanaka, Eiga monogatari 1, pp. 300–301; McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, p. 218. 11 Matsumura and Yamanaka, Eiga monogatari 1, pp. 302–303; McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, p. 219. 210 chapter four onaji yō naredomo).” To point out that matters in Shōshi’s apartments followed custom and precedence is significant precisely because her entrance ceremony did not. In other words, the narrator is suggesting that even though Shōshi’s prior promotion to elevated status may have been unprecedented, her current elevated status is not only well deserved, but also follows established standards. Yukinari, when he went to inscribe the selected poems onto the screens, similarly made note of how “the paintings follow the old customs” (書倭絵四尺屏風色紙形、故常則絵).12 Michinaga did not hesitate to flout convention when doing so helped him achieve his objectives, but he also had supporters who pointed to previously established patterns where they could. While Shōshi’s poise and exquisite taste earned her invitations to be at Ichijō’s side, her personal possessions drew the emperor to her chambers as well. A final quotation from Flowering Fortunes shows how the emperor, lured to Shōshi’s apartments by both her fragrance and her demeanor, is enticed into lingering there by her various treasures. When the Emperor went to visit Shōshi at the Fujitsubo, the rooms were of course appointed with the utmost magnificence, and he was charmed by her appearance and manner as she made him welcome . . . . The moment he crossed the Fujitsubo bridge, an ineffable fragrance penetrated deep into his robes. It was not the ordinary sort of concealed incense everyone burns nowadays, nor was it at all assertive, but it lingered in a manner that seemed to set it apart from the scents used by his other consorts. Even in the most trifling articles in Shōshi’s comb boxes and writing cases fascinated him by their elegance and novelty. His first act early in the morning was to visit her, and nothing he saw failed to interest him, not even the shelves of the chests. One of her treasures was a book of poems illustrated by Hirotaka, with verses in Yukinari’s hand, which he examined with infinite pleasure. “It’s much too amusing here; I am in danger of becoming a stupid fellow who knows nothing about the affairs of state,” he would say as he took his leave.13 Although Shōshi’s ceremonial screens are not described here, one of the items that entices the emperor is another combination of painting, poetry, and calligraphy, this one in booklet (sasshi 冊子) form. The illustrated booklet was, like the painted screens, likely an heirloom from her mother, Rinshi. Yukinari was the acknowledged master of calligraphy at the time, and Kose no Hirotaka (n.d.) was an artist with a similarly high reputation.

12 Gonki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.30. 13 Matsumura and Yamanaka, Eiga monogatari 1, pp. 304–305; McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering of Fortunes, p. 220. politics and precedence 211

Hirotaka was the grandson of Kose no Kanaoka, the founder of the Kose school of court painters, and would go on to be one of Ichijō’s favored artists. The Flowering Fortunes passage, written with the benefit of hind- sight, implies that Shōshi had a decisive influence on the emperor’s taste in painting. To have such famous artists at one’s disposal is a statement in itself. Ii Haruki describes the accoutrements, including the booklet and the screens, as “a manifestation of the way political authority was con- verted into aesthetic symbols.”14 The relationship, in fact, worked both ways: Michinaga used his authority and resources to commission works of art, and these aesthetic symbols, in turn, reinforced his political clout. Unfortunately, none of Shōshi’s belongings are extant. We can, however, reconstruct the scenes depicted on the screens for her court entrance, in order to better judge the congratulatory nature of the poems and the event as a whole, through the headnotes and poems in various personal collections. From these descriptions, scholars surmise that the screens Shōshi inherited for her court entrance ceremony were a set of two six-paneled screens depicting the beginning of the year and travel topics. The most common configuration for sets of screens included all four seasons and had four, six, or eight screens, each with four to eight panels. Shōshi’s screens were likely part of a larger set that had been divided up previously. The list of major contributors of poetry for Shōshi’s screens differs depending on the source. According to Michinaga (Midō kanpaku ki, 999.10.27), those who arrived at the Tsuchimikado Mansion with poems for the screens were Retired Emperor Kazan, Fujiwara no Kintō, Fujiwara no Tadanobu (967–1035), Fujiwara no Kanehira (953–1017), and Fujiwara no Takatō (949–1013). The same list of names appears in Sanesuke’s sec- ondhand information about the attendees (Shōyūki, 999.10.28), but with Minamoto no Toshikata’s name replacing Kanehira’s. In addition to these names, in an entry for the thirtieth of the month, Sanesuke lists Fujiwara no Michitsuna (955–1020) and Michinaga himself among those who had poems chosen for inscription. The entry for the same date in Yukinari’s diary mentions only that he inscribed poems by “the Minister of the Left [Michinaga] and others.” Extant poems from the event include the seventeen in The Takatō Collection (Daini Takatō shū, poems 25–41), and nine

14 Ii, “Shōshi judai ryō byōbu e to waka,” p. 105. Ii also cites a story from Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari shū, chapter 31, story 4) that praises Hirotaka’s work during Ichijō’s reign. See Mabuchi Kazuo et al., eds., Konjaku monogatari shū 4, NKBZ 24 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1974), pp. 481–488. 212 chapter four more in The Kintō Collection (Kintō shū, poems 299–307).15 Aside from Kintō’s own compositions, his collection also includes one poem by Kazan (which appears after the first Flowering Fortunes passage quoted earlier, and in other collections), and one poem by Tadanobu. There are no extant poems for any of the other listed participants. The headnotes to the poems, as they appear in various collections, provide a vivid picture of a seaside landscape progressing through the seasons. A rough composite from these sources yields the following description: Moving from right to left across the screen surface, we first encounter an evergreen pine, a symbol of winter. Next to the pine is a flowering plum, indicating the coming of spring. The plum and the pine grow beside a house that has a willow on the far side of it. On the veranda, outside the blinds, there is a figure playing the flute. In the background, fishermen pull in their nets. We then see a person coming to call (again, likely moving from right to left) at a humble home where the grounds open onto the bay. An old man and a young woman live there, and the old man has come out to greet the visitor. We can see that the old man raises cranes in his garden. A bit further along the shore, someone rakes together the pine needles beneath a large tree that stands on the edge of the beach. As a boat sets off from an island in the distance, the landscape in the foreground changes from the seaside to mountain fields, and we seem to have moved later into the season, and later in the day as well. There are travelers on the road—some are trying to get a closer look at the pheasants in the fields, while others appear on their way to the blossoms on the far-off mountainside. Smoke rises from the hearth fire of one of the mountain homes. On the roadside is a person making reed bundles to take away. Following the road, we then come across a tree with yellow kerria flowers blooming at its base. These face a rustic mansion where the master appears within. He gazes out, enraptured by the wisteria draping over the pines. A bit further on is a mountain stream, and the painted landscape ends with a figure looking up at the moon rising above the water.

15 Daini Takatō shū and Kintō shū base texts and numeration follow the editions in Wakashi kenkyūkai, ed., Shikashū taisei (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1973–1976), vol. 1 and vol. 2, respectively. Tajima Tomoko has argued persuasively that an extant poem by Fujiwara no Nagayoshi (949–1009) was composed for Michitsuna to present at this event. See Tajima Tomoko, “Nagayoshi to Chōhō gannen Shōshi judai byōbu: Un’yōshū happyaku hachijū go ban, Goshūishū yonjū nana ban o megutte,” in Kodai chūsei bungaku kenkyū ronshū 1, ed. Ii Haruki (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 1996), pp. 60–83. There is one additional poem by Kazan, discussed later, anthologized as Shokukokinshū 1865 (Book 20: Felicitations). politics and precedence 213

The densely populated landscape, replete with images of spring and of travel, provide ample opportunities for poetic composition. Some of the offerings are more general observations of the scenes, while others are composed from the viewpoint of one of the figures depicted in the paintings. Takatō prefaced his sequence with a reference to the occasion and Michinaga’s directive. He then provided brief descriptions of the scenes for each of the seventeen poems he composed. The first three scenes are plums blossoming next to a pine tree at the beginning of spring, a willow tree, and a person playing the flute. These three scenes are combined in The Kintō Collection, in which the sequence begins: Poems for the screens at the time when the empress first entered court. Near a person’s house stands a pine tree with plum blossoms, and a person plays the flute in front of the blinds. The first poem is by Kintō himself: Kintō shū 299 ume no hana / niou atari no / fue no oto wa fuku kaze yori mo / urameshiki kana More so than even the blustery winds, how lamentable is the sound of the flute that blows where plum blossoms perfume the air. In the poem, Kintō notes that the playing of the flute does not bring with it the scent of the plum, and in this way causes more disappointment than even the wind that would scatter the blossoms, but would at least pass on the plums’ fragrance. The next poem in The Kintō Collection, composed on the same scene, is an offering by Tadanobu. The poem is also included in the seventh imperial anthology, Senzaishū (1187), where the headnote highlights the context: Senzaishū 960 (Book 16: Miscellaneous 1) Composed for the court entrance of Jōtōmon’in [Shōshi], on a scene from a folding screen where there is a house with a pine tree, and someone is playing the flute. fuetake no / yo fukaki koe zo / kikoyu naru / mine no matsukaze / fuki ya sou ran As the night deepens, one can hear the sound of the bamboo flute— 214 chapter four

with accompaniment from the pine winds from the peaks. Major Counselor Tadanobu There is an affinity between the pines on the mountain peaks and the pine that stands next to the abode of the flautist. The pine winds (matsukaze), by convention, remind listeners of the sound of the koto, a zither- like instrument that here accompanies the sound of the flute. But why the focus on the flute? Such verses were motivated not solely by the painted screens. Of the many figures depicted, the poets gave particular attention to the figure with the flute because of Ichijō’s well-known interest in the instrument. In fact, a passage in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes praises Ichijō’s talent, stating that “his mastery of the flute never ceased to impress the people around him (onfue o e mo iwazu fukisumasaseta- maereba, saburō hitobito mo medetaku mitatematsuru).”16 At congratulatory events such as this, reference to the occasion and the guests of honor was a common practice, and the participating poets picked up on the figure playing the flute as a potential representation of the reigning sovereign. Kintō’s poem introduces the idea of fragrance wafting in from the blossoms, and both he and Tadanobu describe the blowing wind and the music of the flute, adding a sense of motion and sound—elements not readily expressed through the medium of painting. The pairing is derived in part from the verb fuku (to blow) which easily connects with both the wind and the flute. In the following poem, Takatō similarly takes advantage of the figure with the flute to add sound and motion to the scene. Daini Takatō shū 27 On a scene where a flute is being played. fue no ne wa / suminu naredomo / fuku kaze ni / nabetemo kasumu / haru no sora kana Even though the sound of the flute is bright and clear, how the haze spreads out with the blowing wind in the springtime sky!

16 See Matsumura and Yamanaka, Eiga monogatari 1, p. 306, which describes a conversation between Shōshi and Ichijō about his flute playing. See McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, pp. 220–221. politics and precedence 215

Note how Takatō contrasts the clarity of the tune on the flute with the haziness of the springtime sky. Kintō makes explicit reference to the circumstances of the celebration in a subsequent offering based on a scene with hanging wisteria blossoms. Though the poem is the first one mentioned in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, it is the last in the sequence of poems from this event in The Kintō Collection. The descriptions in The Takatō Collection corroborate the fact that the poem is based on a scene that comes toward the end of the landscape painted on the screens. Kintō shū 307 murasaki no / kumo to zo miyuru / fuji no hana / ika naru yado no / shirushi naruramu Looking indeed like purple clouds, the wisteria blossoms: Are they a symbol for the kind of place where you will live? Here, Kintō takes the color of the fuji wisteria (a symbol for the Fujiwara family) and connects the paradisal purple clouds to the imperial palace— Shōshi’s future home, and often thought of as a realm beyond the clouds. The skillful reference to both the painted scene and the specific occasion is echoed in the sequence of poems about an old man who raises cranes. Kintō’s poem cited earlier is followed in Flowering Fortunes by this offering by Retired Emperor Kazan: Kintō shū 304 hinazuru o / yashinai tatete / mutsu ga e no / kage ni sumasemu / koto o shi zo omou Having raised the young crane so carefully, I think now of how she will go off to live in the pine branch’s shade. Retired Emperor Kazan Kazan speaks for Michinaga as the crane keeper, who will now part with his prized young bird (symbolizing Shōshi), sending her to a place of pro- tection under the steadfast and evergreen pine (symbolizing Ichijō). The notion of raising cranes appears both in the poems and in the headnotes, with minor differences in detail. For example, Flowering Fortunes describes the scene as “an area by someone’s house, where many small cranes are 216 chapter four being raised (hito no ie ni chiisaki tsuru domo ōku kaitaru tokoro).”17 The headnote in The Kintō Collection simply states “where an old man is raising cranes (okina tsuru kaitaru tokoro).” Kintō offers sentiments similar to Kazan’s in his poem on the scene: Kintō shū 303 hinazuru wo / sudateshi hodo ni / oinikeri / kumoi no hodo o / omoi koso yare Now that the young crane has left the nest, I find I have grown old— my thoughts go with her as she rises into the clouds. Again, the poet takes the crane keeper, ever hopeful about the departure of his prized crane, as a representation of Michinaga. The records detailing the preparation of the screen poems give no detail about the way Michinaga parceled out the topics. The degree of specific detail, and the consistency of the detail in the various sources, make it likely that the assigned topics included extensive descriptions, if not sketches of the scenes themselves. The extant poems for Shōshi’s screens refer to elements within the painted scene but also connect those elements to the occasion, expressing appropriately auspicious sentiments. For a significant portion of extant screen poetry, the images on the screens as well as the circumstances of the event limited the poets’ range of expression, often resulting in routine and repetitive verse. Good screen poets were admired for how well their compositions handled these limitations. For Shōshi’s screens, good screen poets were also men of rank and station. In A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, a curious comment precedes the quoted poems. The author notes the adage, “The more important the poet, the more interesting the poem (waka wa nushi kara namu okashisa wa masaru to iu ramu).” The statement has the effect of focusing the readers’ attention more on who the poets are rather than on the meaning of the poems. Screen poems were at times somewhat perfunctory wishes for good fortune, and the poems by Kintō and Kazan are more clever than the standard fare. But the very fact that two such exalted personages would compose poems for Shōshi’s benefit shows the range and effectiveness of Michinaga’s influence. The comment also seems to respond to certain

17 Matsumura and Yamanaka, Eiga monogatari 1, p. 300. See also McCullough and McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, p. 217. politics and precedence 217 criticisms about the unprecedented nature of the event, specifically the misgivings Sanesuke mentioned in his court diary that culminated in his refusal to submit any poems at all for the occasion. As the adopted son and actual grandson of Fujiwara no Saneyori, Sanesuke considered himself the guardian of procedural matters at court. Sanesuke did not rise to his adoptive father’s political heights (Saneyori served as regent), but he took his role as heir of the Ononomiya school of court ritual (tenrei kojitsu) seriously. A testament of his dedication to upholding court ritual is his compilation of regulations and observances in a text known as Ononomiya nenjū gyōji. Michinaga, in fact, asked for his advice on numerous occasions on such matters as proper ceremonial attire, appropriate offerings for a Buddhist ritual, and the order of presentation at an archery contest. Thus, one might expect that when Sanesuke saw Michinaga’s request for poems, his first thoughts were about precedence and protocol. With an increasing sense of indignation, Sanesuke censured Michinaga’s entire enterprise of collecting poems from exalted individuals. In his diary entry for the twenty-third day of the tenth month, Sanesuke noted that Michinaga divided up the topics ahead of time and requested many of the senior nobles, as well as those of lesser rank who were skilled in waka poetry, to compose poems for the occasion (上達部多分得件題云々、又給非参議能歌者云々).18 Takatō’s preface to his sequence of poems for the event provides a glimpse into Michinaga’s deliberate selection of the people from whom he would request poems: For the screens that were prepared when Minister of the Left Michinaga’s daughter first entered court, Michinaga chose those who should offer poems and had them compose. Among those offered were the following poems.19 The requests indeed seem politically motivated, and, as self-appointed keeper of protocol, Sanesuke was not pleased with the turn of events. When Toshikata arrived as Michinaga’s messenger with the topics for composition, Sanesuke equivocated. Instead of a positive response, he sent back his concern that those of high office really should not be offering poems for this event—the compositions should be assigned to poetry

18 Shōyūki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.23. 19 “Sadaijin Michinaga no kyō no mimusume, uchi ni mairi tamō tote, byōbu chōzeraruru ni, uta domo sarubeki hito erabite, yomasetamō, uchi ni tatematsurishi uta” (Daini Takatō shū, headnote preceding poem 25). 218 chapter four specialists (senmon kajin), which generally held lower posts.20 Michinaga ignored the advice and again requested poems from Sanesuke, who again pressed his case: that having senior nobles compose for such an occasion is “unheard of even in the distant past” (往古不聞事也) and that Michinaga could not go on “without thinking about later censure” (不思後難).21 Sanesuke must have felt betrayed by the willing participation of his two full brothers, Takatō and Kanehira (again, see figure 6), not to mention his cousin Kintō. Hearing about these developments only after the fact must have aggravated him all the more. Yū Kyonmi has analyzed the frequency and usage of the phrases of censure in Sanesuke’s diary and has determined, as one might expect, that Sanesuke had a very strong sense of precedence and place and deplored court observances that did not follow established patterns.22 Later in the same entry for the thirtieth of the month, Sanesuke wrote that he had furthermore heard that the names of these high-ranking poets were inscribed onto the screens, and he was appalled. The retired emperor’s poems, at least, were properly left ‘anonymous’ (yomibito shirazu), even though everyone knew who the composer was. But placing the names on the screens, according to Sanesuke, was not only unprecedented, but downright ‘outrageous’ (奇恠事也). He went so far as to say, “Those whose names were written on the poem-squares, in later generations each and every one will lose face” over the matter (書色紙形皆書名後代已失面目). Sanesuke carefully chronicled his complaints for posterity, though in the end, his opinions did not hold sway with Michinaga. And Michinaga did not get as far as he did by adhering to precedence. The screen poetry for Shōshi’s court entrance was more than an extravagant display designed to eclipse a rival consort. As a proud father, it is natural that Michinaga would hope for a wide range of well-wishers to offer their congratulations to Shōshi, but the specific plan to invite those of the highest rank to compose, and then to include their names as part of the ceremony, was a means for Michinaga to cement his daughter’s ties

20 Sanesuke is contrasting those of higher rank (third and above) to those of lower rank (fourth and below), but the terms he uses distinguish those who hold high office and those who do not. The term kandachime is equivalent to kugyō, senior nobles of third rank and above holding a post of consultant (sangi) or higher. It follows that hisangi are those who do not hold an office of consultant or higher and were generally fourth rank or below, though a senior noble of third rank or higher without a post would still be considered hisangi. 21 Shōyūki, Chōhō 1 (999).10.30. 22 Yū, “Shōshi judai byōbu uta eishin ni tsuite,” pp. 13–17. politics and precedence 219 to important political figures. In fact, Kanehira, whose name appears on only one of the lists of attendees, is the only participant mentioned who was not a senior noble. Michinaga’s invitation might be seen as a reward bequeathed to an exclusive set of like-minded political supporters, but it can also be seen as a test of fealty, one that even those of the highest rank found difficult to refuse, despite its unprecedented nature. In the politically tumultuous times following the death of the previous regent, the tacit approval of Shōshi’s introduction into Ichijō’s court, as expressed through the poetic offerings, was a sign of political alignment. In another poem from this event, Kazan refers implicitly to the turbulence that preceded Michinaga’s rise to power: Shokukokinshū 1865 Jōtōmon’in judai no onbyōbu ni. On the screens for the court entrance of Jōtōmon’in [Shōshi]. fuku kaze no / eda o narasanu / konogoro no / hana mo shizuka ni / niou narubeshi Now, after the branches have grown accustomed to the blowing wind, the flowers too must be at peace as they blossom forth. Kazan looks forward to Shōshi’s maturation under Ichijō, now that the winds of political unrest appear to have passed. Kazan’s poem also points to another important purpose Michinaga had in his planning of the event. The poetry from the event would be anthologized in later collections, becoming a permanent record of the support for Shōshi and, indirectly, for Michinaga as well. Kazan’s poem here, for example, was included in the large-scale personal collection Mandaishū (ca. 1249), as well as the eleventh imperial anthology, Shokukokinshū (completed 1265). Kazan’s other extant poem, as we have seen, was included in Kintō’s personal collection, as well as in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes. Kintō’s poem on the wisteria blossoms was included in both of these works and also in the third imperial anthology, Shūishū, as poem 1069 (Book 16: Miscellaneous Spring), as well as in Shinsen rōeishū (ca. 1107– 1123), an anthology of Chinese and Japanese poems collected by Fujiwara no Mototoshi. Tadanobu’s poem from The Kintō Collection is also anthologized as poem 960 (Book 16: Miscellaneous 1) in the seventh imperial compilation, Senzaishū. Other poems from the event also appear in multiple collections. In a sense, Michinaga and Sanesuke were in the same business 220 chapter four of endeavoring to become part of the written record. Having those of the highest rank participate in the event increased the likelihood that the court entrance ceremony would be noted in the official court diaries, personal accounts, and family histories of the day. Placed in various public and private collections, the poetry, too, would serve as a memorialization of the support shown for Shōshi. And while Sanesuke, in his own diary, complained about the transgressions of protocol in order to ensure that his opinion would be known to future generations, he also, in his own way, contributed to the record keeping for the event. The inscribed screens were later displayed in Shōshi’s apartments. Not only were they an intriguing work of art for Ichijō’s pleasure, but they also served as a kind of proof of Shōshi’s importance. Even if only a handful of poems were selected for inscription, the fact that the invitations went out to an extensive pool of potential contributors shows that Michinaga meant to obtain commendation and approval from important personages, regardless of what etiquette for such an occasion may have mandated. Ii Haruki suggests that Michinaga continued to press Sanesuke for poems, even after the final inscriptions had been determined, because he saw the poems as something outside the ceremony itself, to be collected and perhaps presented as a gift, another artifact, for the new consort.23 As such, it was in Michinaga’s best interest to gather as many of these auspicious and congratulatory verses from as many persons of consequence at court as he could persuade. Sanesuke was no mean poet—he was a regular participant at poetry contests and had eight poems included in imperial collections. To the end, however, he would not allow himself be counted as one of the persuaded. Whereas screen poetry was an important part of harvest celebrations and milestone birthday felicitations, screen poetry at court was generally reserved for imperial princesses and for those already designated as imperial consorts. It is ironic that Michinaga entered his daughter into court with a ceremony that encroached upon imperial prerogatives while he managed to have his nephew and rival Korechika banished for similarly infringing upon imperial authority by purportedly carrying out secret rites at Hōrinji.24 Michinaga clearly had a knack for expending resources in a way that called attention to himself and his causes, and, by assuming the

23 See Ii, “Shōshi judai ryō byōbu e to waka,” pp. 105–106. 24 See McCullough, Ōkagami, p. 352 and passim. politics and precedence 221 authority to put on a lavish display at court, he cemented his own position as well. The matter of timing, as well, should not be underestimated. Michinaga carefully staged the entrance ceremony to detract attention from the approaching birth of Ichijō’s second child by his main consort, Teishi. As we have seen, Michinaga rushed through the preparations to ensure that his daughter would enter Ichijō’s court before Teishi gave birth. In all probability, he used his informants to schedule the official designation of his daughter as junior consort for the exact day of Atsuyasu’s birth, all but assuring that Ichijō would be at her side and not Teishi’s that day. Teishi strikes a tragic figure: herself publicly embarrassed, her supporters’ reputations destroyed, and neither of her children’s births properly acknowledged—all the direct result of Michinaga’s shrewd planning. Michinaga staged a similar production when he introduced his second daughter, Kenshi (994–1027), into the court of Ichijō’s successor, Emperor Sanjō (976–1017, r. 1011–1016). By then he had a successful formula for such events.25 Up until Shōshi’s court entrance, as Sanesuke noted, screen poetry was generally composed by poetry specialists not of the highest rank and presented by senior nobility on the day of the ceremony. There was a significant decline in screen poetry after Michinaga’s time, due in part to the fact that his project was so successful that it was no longer clear who appropriate sponsors for such events should be. Even so, Shōshi’s entrance served as a model—ironically, a precedent—for later court entrance ceremonies, such as the one for Kujō Kanezane’s daughter Ninshi, discussed later. Thus, scholars such as Kudō Shigenori go so far as to say that the poems for Shōshi’s screens mark a turning point in the social meaning of waka production.26 The cooperation between poets and senior nobles was an acknowledgement of social and political hierarchies, but, with Michinaga, those hierarchies were swept aside in order to strengthen bonds among only the highest of the elite. Such was certainly the case in later court entrance ceremonies that were based on

25 Michinaga faced the same problem of a preexisting consort. He plotted the downfall of the rival consort, Seishi, by suggesting a date for her designation as empress (kōgō). While appearing to be gracious, he planned a grand procession for his own daughter, Ken- shi, from his Tsuchimikado Mansion to the imperial palace on the same day. This ensured Seishi’s public humiliation of having no one present at her designation. Her fortunes fell precipitously soon after. As with Shōshi’s court entrance, timing and resources were key to the success of Michinaga’s plan. See McCullough, Ōkagami, p. 354 and passim. 26 Kudō Shigenori, Heian chō ritsuryō shakai no bungaku (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1993), pp. 134–139. 222 chapter four the Michinaga model. In the end, his use of court ceremony to promote his daughter at the expense of the current empress, as well as to provide a more lasting artifact to attract imperial attention, must be considered a success. As one of his earliest winning stratagems, Michinaga’s placement of his daughter at court displays the kind of resourcefulness, cunning, and original thinking that would lead to his becoming one of the most powerful political figures in Japanese history. In the following year (1000), Shōshi was promoted to Teishi’s former rank of empress (chūgū), while Teishi was given an alternate title (kōgō). Teishi became pregnant with Ichijō’s third child and died in childbirth later that year. Not long after, Shōshi accepted a new lady-in-waiting into her entourage, Murasaki Shikibu (b. ca. 976), who would not only write The Tale of Genji in Shōshi’s service, but would also meticulously record in her diary, The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, the birth in 1008 of Shōshi’s first son by Ichijō, Prince Atsuhira (1008–1036). The birth of a son was a devas- tating blow to Michinaga’s few remaining enemies. The well-documented celebrations surrounding the birth of Atsuhira contrasted greatly with the relative obscurity of the birth of Ichijō’s first son, Atsuyasu, whose anonymity, as we have seen, Michinaga carefully engineered. Korechika, the last supporter of Teishi’s son, died in 1010. Atsuhira was designated crown prince in the following year, and he acceded as Emperor Go-Ichijō (1008–1036, r. 1016–1036) four years later. By then the redoubtable Minister of the Left had inserted other daughters into court to ensure control over the imperial line for the foreseeable future. He could not have asked for a better result.

Screen Poetry and Ninshi’s Court Entrance of 1190

Like Michinaga before him, Kujō Kanezane aspired to strengthen his political position through the placement of a daughter at court. In an instance of what appears to be nostalgic modeling, Kanezane envisioned for himself a revival of the golden age of Michinaga, invoking Shōshi’s unprecedented court entrance ceremony as a guide for the presentation of his own daughter, Ninshi, into the court of Gotoba. Kanezane’s ultimate disappointment contrasts greatly with Michinaga’s result, and one of the reasons for this difference was Kanezane’s unique set of circumstances at the outset, as described next. On the third day of the eleventh month of 1185, Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–1189), who was in Kyoto as a representative of his brother, the future politics and precedence 223 shogun Yoritomo (1147–1199), successfully obtained an imperial edict from the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192, r. 1155–1158) calling for the ‘chastisement’ of Yoritomo.27 Though many senior nobles supported the edict, the minister of the right at the time, Kujō Kanezane, was the only one who spoke out against the proposal, at least according to the account in The Future and the Past (Gukanshō; 1219). As an interpretive history by Kanezane’s brother, Jien (1155–1225), The Future and the Past has more than a little bias toward portraying the Kujō house in a positive light. Nonetheless, in the dispute between the Minamoto commanders, Kanezane appears to have sided with Yoritomo. Kanezane stated his position as follows: An edict of chastisement should be based on a crime committed. What crime has Yoritomo committed? Since we do not know that there has been a crime, it is difficult to say that such an edict should be issued.28 That very night there was an attempt on Yoshitsune’s life. Hanging the imperial edict around his neck, Yoshitsune fled to the west by horse and then by boat. Soon after, Yoritomo sent a mission from Kamakura to Kyoto to force from office the supporters of Yoshitsune, and he rewarded Kanezane by naming him regent in the third month of 1186. Kanezane was grateful for the promotion and went to the imperial palace to pay his respects to the six-year-old reigning emperor, Gotoba. Kanezane was likely involved with the selection of Gotoba, three years prior, as successor to the drowned Emperor Antoku (1178–1185, r. 1180–1183), a decision made in part because, among the sons of Emperor Takakura (1161–1181, r. 1168–1180), Gotoba was the one who had a Fujiwara rather than a Taira mother. Now backed by Yoritomo and newly promoted to regent, Kanezane appeared poised to dominate politics at court. Late in 1186, Kanezane held a grand celebration to honor his son and heir Yoshimichi (1168–1188), who was appointed minister of the center.

27 Historical background from Jeffrey P. Mass, The Development of Kamakura Rule, 1180– 1250: A History with Documents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 3–10, and Robert N. Huey, The Making of Shinkokinshū (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 23–49. 28 Okami Masao and Akamatsu Toshihide, eds., Gukanshō, NKBT 86 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967), p. 270. Trans. Delmer M. Brown and Ichirō Ishida, The Future and the Past: A Translation and Study of Gukanshō, An Interpretative History of Japan Written in 1219 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 147. 224 chapter four

However, just after returning from a New Year’s pilgrimage to the Fujiwara shrine at Kasuga in 1188, Yoshimichi suddenly passed away. This was a significant blow to Kanezane, whose position was already compro- mised by Goshirakawa’s reestablishment of the Retired Emperor’s Office (In no chō), which would later be headed by Kanezane’s major rival Minamoto no Michichika (1149–1202). Bereaved by the loss of his son, who by all accounts was a gifted and talented young man, Kanezane made preparations to take Buddhist vows after the forty-nine days of mourning had passed. He reported to Goshirakawa: There is nothing I can do about it. Because I have been born a man for whom matters cannot but be difficult, my sole desire now is to follow the way of the Buddha. Having achieved the highest office for which a member of my family is entitled, I now wish to enter the Buddhist priesthood.29 There was, however, a spark of hope left in the form of his daughter, Ninshi.30 Gotoba had not yet come of age, and Ninshi was already eighteen, but if Kanezane could place Ninshi in Gotoba’s court, and if she were to give birth to a future crown prince (a tried and true pattern for Fujiwara scions since the eighth century), then Kanezane’s position would be significantly improved. Encouraged by dreams both he and his wife had, Kanezane began in the summer of 1189 to prepare for the possibility of Ninshi’s presentation at court.31 A number of parallels can be drawn between the circumstances of Kujō Kanezane in 1189 and those of Fujiwara no Michinaga in 999, some two centuries earlier. Both men had beaten back potential rivals for political supremacy but had not yet cemented their positions of authority. Both had friends and relations in high places who were willing to help their

29 Okami and Akamatsu, Gukanshō, p. 274. Trans. Brown and Ishida, The Future and the Past, p. 152. 30 For important citations and background information on Ninshi’s court entrance, I have relied primarily on Kubota Jun, Shinkokin kajin no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyō daigaku shuppankai, 1973), pp. 608–615; Matsuno Yōichi, Fujiwara Shunzei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1973), pp. 257–263; and Tani Tomoko, “Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai byōbu to waka,” Tamamo 36 (2000): 131–146. 31 Sugawara Akihide, “Yume o shinjita sekai: Kujō Kanezane to sono shūi,” Nihongaku 5 (October 1984): 81–95, discusses the prevalence and meaning of the dreams Kanezane reports in his diary. Sugawara notes that the frequency of dreams coincides, not surprisingly, with times of anxiety, stress, or political unrest. He also points out how dreams were seen as a kind of portent or reponse from the gods because they often followed pilgrimages and prayers carried out with a specific purpose in mind. See also Haga Kōshirō, “Kujō Kanezane to yume,” Nihon rekishi (Yoshikawa kōbunkan Nihon rekishi gakkai) 260 (January 1970): 155–159. politics and precedence 225 cause. Both men had aspirations to marry a daughter off to the ruling emperor with the hopes that the daughter would produce an heir, the next crown prince. And, as we will see, both men skillfully brought painting, poetry, and politics together in the ceremonies that introduced their daughters into the imperial court. Still, in many ways the circumstances of the two men were quite different. Michinaga faced opposition organized by two of his nephews, but the major obstacle the redoubtable Minister of the Left had to deal with was the fact that the reigning emperor Ichijō already had a major consort: Teishi, the daughter of his late brother Michitaka. Kanezane’s situation was, if anything, even more complex. Competition came not only from within his own branch of the Fujiwara, but from influential members of other families, as well as from shifting alliances between supporters of the retired emperor Goshirakawa and the ascendant military leader Yoritomo. Neither Michinaga nor Kanezane had a daughter who was the ideal age to become consort to the reigning emperor. In Michinaga’s case, his eldest daughter was still very young when he began his plans for her court debut. He had Shōshi’s coming-of-age ceremony moved up and then immediately introduced her into Ichijo’s court. She was eleven and Ichijō was nineteen. In Kanezane’s case, Ninshi was already eighteen, and he inserted her into Gotoba’s court just days after the emperor’s own coming-of-age ceremony. Gotoba was eleven. In neither case was the age difference insurmountable. Once Kanezane could see himself as a latter-day Michinaga, one senses that his creative nostalgia kicked in as he planned for his daughter’s presentation at court. Here, Mikhail Bakhtin’s observations on the power of nostalgia help in our understanding of Kanezane’s motives in following Michinaga’s footsteps. Bakhtin notes that “in order to endow any ideal with authenticity, one need only conceive of its once having existed in its ‘natural state’ in some Golden Age.”32 Kanezane certainly thought of Michinaga’s term as minister of the left, and later regent, as such a ‘Golden Age.’ Passages quoted later from Kanezane’s own diary, Jade Leaves (Gyokuyō), and other contemporary sources confirm the intentional adherence to the Michinaga model. Kanezane’s entries in particular leave little doubt that his efforts were more than simply a search for precedent,

32 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holoquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 147–148. 226 chapter four but were instead a strategic and conscious process of authentication that found its source in the lasting age of Michinaga’s influence. Fujiwara no Shunzei, the most prominent poet at the time, lays bare the modeling: Formal screen poems have not been composed for some time now. For this event we must follow the precedent of Jotōmon’in when she entered court in the Chōho era (Byōbu uta hisashiku taetaru o, Jōtōmon’in onjudai Chōhō no rei nite, kono tabi okosaretaru narubeshi).33 In the revival of screen poetry as event at court, the ceremony for Kanezane’s daughter Ninshi was to follow the celebrated entrance of Michinaga’s daughter Shōshi (later known as Jōtōmon’in). The irony here is that the way Michinaga set about preparing the painted screens and the poems for his daughter was itself unprecedented. As we have seen, Fujiwara no Sanesuke, Michinaga’s contemporary and self-styled guardian of court protocol, complained on numerous occasions that requesting poems from the highest ranking of courtiers was “unheard of ” and the inscribing of their names onto the screens was “downright outrageous.” The fact that the invitation went out to many of the upper ranks that would not normally be asked to compose for such an occasion shows that Michinaga endeavored to obtain commendation and approval from as many people at court as possible, regardless of what the actual protocol for such an occasion might have been. By Kanezane’s time, deliberations over whom to request poems from had more to do with connections to certain poetic schools than with absolute rank, though both concerns do come into play. Eight poets participated in the event known as the 1190 Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court Entrance (Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai ryō byōbu waka), listed by abbreviated house affiliation in figures 7a and b. Represented are Kanezane’s own Kujō house, the two major poetic houses of the day, the Mikohidari and the Rokujō, and finally the Sanjō house. The two chief manuscript lineages of the collected poems have certain variations on the number of poems provided by each participant but agree that these eight poets composed for the occasion. First, there is Kanezane himself and his son

33 Cited in Matsuno Yōichi, Fujiwara no Shunzei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1973), p. 257. The passage is from Weeds Composed for Long Autumns (Chōshū eisō), the personal poetry collection of Shunzei, which he compiled in response to an 1178 request by Prince Shukaku (1150–1202). Its title refers to Shunzei’s position as the head of the empress’s offices, which were sometimes knows as the Palace of Long Autumns (Chōshūgū). politics and precedence 227

Kujô House (abbreviated)

Tadamichi (1097–1164) == Nakamitsu’s Daughter

① Kanezane (1149–1207) Jien (1155–1225)

Yoshimichi Ninshi ② Yoshitsune (1169-1206)

Mikohidari House (abbreviated)

Toshitada (1071-1123) == Atsuie’s Daughter

③ Shunzei (1114–1204) == Bifukumon’in Kaga Toshitada’s Daughter == Kin’yoshi (1115–1161)

④ Teika (1162–1241) ⑤ Takanobu (1142–1205) Father: Tametsune ⑥ Sanesada (1139–1191)

Figure 7a: Participants in the 1190 Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court Entrance.

Rokujô House (abbreviated, sons listed all have di�ferent mothers):

Akisuke (1090-1155)

Kiyosuke (1104–1177) Shigeie (11280–1180) Kenshô (ca. 1130–1210) ⑦ Suetsune (1131–1221) (adopted)

Sanjô House representative:

⑧ Sanefusa (1147–1225)

Figure 7b: Participants in the 1190 Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court Entrance. 228 chapter four

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune (1169–1206), a gifted poet who would later briefly occupy the office of regent. Representing the Mikohidari are the aforementioned poetic arbiter of the day Shunzei, his son Teika, Teika’s half- brother Takanobu (1142–1205), and Shunzei’s nephew, Minister of the Left Sanesada (1139–1191). Kanezane aligned himself, poetically at least, with the Mikohidari school, so it is not surprising that half the participants are from that house, while the illustrious Rokujō poetic house has Suetsune (1131–1221) as its lone representative. Finally, the influential Sanjō house is also represented by only one participant, Minister of the Right Sanefusa (1147–1225). The eight members of this group present a balance of poetically talented and politically important figures, all of whom had ties to Kanezane himself. Kanezane did not decide on the pool of invitees until very late. In Jade Leaves entries from as early as the ninth month of 1187, we find hints that he harbored hopes of presenting Ninshi at court. Preparations do not begin in earnest, however, until the fourth month of 1189 (see table 4). Several of the details, however, were not within Kanezane’s control. By this time, Goshirakawa’s influence in Kyoto was on the rise, and he appears to have assisted, or perhaps meddled with, the planning for the event. By the sixth month, the date for the ceremony had been set, presumably by Goshirakawa, for the eleventh day of the first month of the following year. The date and even the time of day were set to coincide with the court entrance some seven decades earlier of Taikenmon’in Shōshi (1101–1145), consort to Emperor Toba (1103–1156, r. 1107–1123) and mother of Emperors Sutoku (1119–1164, r. 1123–1241) and Goshirakawa. Incidentally, when Taira no Kiyomori’s (1118–1181) daughter Tokushi (later Kenreimon’in; 1155–1213) entered the court of Takakura, her ceremony also took place on the same date and at the same hour, following the precedent of Taikenmon’in.34 In neither of these cases were the presentation of painted screens and newly composed poetry part of the event. Kanezane’s ‘preparations’ between the eighth and tenth months of 1189 seem to consist mostly of visits to temples and shrines to pray that Ninshi’s entry would go smoothly. In his diary entry for the third day of

34 The fact that the court entrance of Kenreimon’in was modeled on that of Taikenmon’in is mentioned in Heihanki (or Hyōhanki), the diary of Taira no Nobunori (1112–1187), in the entries for the second and the fourteenth of the twelfth month of 1171 (Jōan 1). See Heihanki, in Zōho shiryō taisei, vol. 25. (Tokyo: Rinsen shoten, 1965). Cited in Tani, “Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai byōbu to waka,” p. 135. Ninshi’s following the outward model of Taikenmon’in thus had precedence in the Kenreimon’in’s court entrance just a generation before. politics and precedence 229

Table 4: Timeline for the court entrance of Ninshi (from Kanezane’s diary Jade Leaves for the years 1189–1190 [Bunji 5–6]). 4.3 Kanezane makes a pilgrimage to Tennōji, notes the possibility of his daughter Ninshi entering court. 6.16 Date for the entrance ceremony is set for the eleventh of the first month, same date and time as the entrance ceremony of the mother of Retired Emperor Goshirakawa, Taikenmon’in Shōshi. 8.2 Kanezane visits local temples with his wife, praying that their daughter’s court entrance will go smoothly. 9.18 Pilgrimage to the Fujiwara tutelary shrine at Kasuga for the same purpose. 10.14 Travels again to Kasuga to pray for Ninshi’s court entrance. 11.3 Makes various preparations for the ceremony. Mentions that topics are being considered for Chinese poems (shi) for painted screens that are to be presented at the ceremony. Precedents from the Eikyū era (Taikenmon’in’s entrance) are to be followed. 11.15 Notes the frantic schedule setting various details for the ceremony. Again offers prayers for his daughter’s court entrance. 11.26 Makes a pilgrimage to the three great shrines (Ise, Iwashimizu, Kasuga) for the same purpose. 11.28 Sends representatives to three Fujiwara ancestral graves: those of Kamatari, Fuhito, and Michinaga. 12.9 Pilgrimage to Sumiyoshi. Notes that Chinese poems are being composed for the ceremonial screens. 1.3 Gotoba, the reigning emperor, has his coming of age ceremony (he is eleven). 1.6 Kanezane’s first mention that Japanese poems (waka) were composed for the screens. Other sources suggest that these were requested in the middle of the eleventh month of the previous year. Final selection of both Japanese and Chinese poems for the screens. 1.11 Ninshi’s court entrance ceremony. Five-foot screens with Chinese poems and four-foot screens with Japanese poems are presented. the eleventh month, Kanezane records that topics for screen poems were being considered, but mentions only shi, or Chinese poems (these do not survive). Shunzei’s poetry collection Weeds Composed for Long Autumns notes that he and other poets received the request for waka poems in the eleventh month of 1189, but the topics had not yet been decided. Though not quite on the rushed schedule Michinaga supervised, the date for Ninshi’s entrance was fast approaching, and the poets would have to compose on rather short notice to make the deadline that was just weeks away. Each poet was to submit, by the end of the year, thirty-eight poems based on activities and images from the twelve months. 230 chapter four

Also in the eleventh month of 1189, Kanezane made pilgrimages in person to the three great shrines of Ise, Iwashimizu, and Kasuga, to pray for favorable circumstances for his daughter. Particularly revealing is the following entry in Jade Leaves, for the twenty-eighth day of the eleventh month, in which Kanezane states that he sent out envoys to offer prayers at the ancestral graves of three important Fujiwara scions. The first is Kamatari, founder of the family line. The second is Fuhito, second son of Kamatari and, more importantly, father of the consort to Emperor Shōmu. Fuhito represents the first fruition of the system of Fujiwara marriage politics that proved to be very successful for his descendants. And last, but certainly not least, is Michinaga, the more immediate archetype Kanezane hoped to follow. As Nishi’s entrance ceremony drew near, Kanezane pulled out all the stops in beseeching his ancestors for some kind of divine assis- tance. Kanezane longed in admiration for the golden age of his Fujiwara forebears, and his pilgrimages and prayers show how he aspired to the same goals through the same means. And as if he could not be any more transparent, later in the same entry, Kanezane acknowledged that “the main purpose of sending her to court is for her to give birth to imperial offspring.”35 Kanezane must have been heartened by Michinaga’s success and hoped that the union of his daughter and Gotoba would place him in a similar trajectory toward political triumph. Given his outward circumstances, such expectations were not unreasonable. On the third day of the first month of 1190, Gotoba, who had acceded seven years earlier at the age of three, had his coming-of-age ceremony. Three days later, Sanesada completed the selection of Chinese poems for one of the screens, and Kanezane himself finalized the Japanese poems for the other screen. Just five days after that, on the eleventh day of the first month, Ninshi entered court to become a consort to Gotoba. Jien narrates the event in The Future and the Past as follows: But while praying earnestly, he [Kanezane] received a miraculous revelation that his hopes for Ninshi would be realized. So he stopped thinking about becoming a priest. Devoting himself to good government (zensei) and reviv- ing court ceremonies, he solicited views from various nobles at the beginning of his term as Regent and gave special attention to the Records Office. Then, after Emperor Gotoba celebrated his coming-of-age on the third day of the First Month of Bunji 6 (1190), Kanezane realized—as he expected—

35 Gyokuyō, 1189.11.28, cited in Huey, The Making of Shinkokinshū, p. 25. This and subsequent translations from Jade Leaves are based on the Kokusho Kandkōkai edition of Gyokuyō (1907). politics and precedence 231

his desire to place his daughter Ninshi in the palace as Gotoba’s consort, in accordance with the precedent established by Empress Jotōmon’in, on the eleventh day of that same month.36 Kanezane himself writes, “On this day the daughter of the regent finally entered court. She is eighteen and I am fifty-two. Precedents from the Chōhō and Eikyū eras were followed, and presented were five-foot screens with Chinese poems and four-foot screens with Japanese poems.”37 Regrettably, the Chinese poems mentioned do not survive. The individual waka contributions of Shunzei, Teika, and Yoshitsune are preserved in each poet’s personal collection, and all 304 of the waka poems composed for the event are preserved in two major manuscript lineages. Each of the eight participating poets composed thirty-eight poems for the event. The topics for the poems were, scholars surmise, based on a twelve-panel tsukinami byōbu, a screen depicting the activities of the twelve months. Three topics were chosen for each month, plus two additional ones, for a total of thirty-eight topics. For thirty-six of these, we can discern which one of the eight contributions was selected for inscription.38 There are, unfortunately, no criticisms or records to indicate how the selections were made, but one can imagine that the criteria included fidelity to the topic at hand and conformity to the painted scene, as well as how well the poem expressed the felicity of the occasion. The final product comprised thirty-eight poems for inscription, and though the screens themselves do not survive, the total pool of 304 extant poems for the event supply a fertile ground for analysis. Tani Tomoko has pointed out the emphasis on court-ceremony (gyōji) topics, as opposed to standard seasonal images, in the poems for Ninshi’s screens.39 She argues convincingly that through such topics, Kanezane and his supporters wrote themselves into a framework of imperial authority. The very first topic, for instance, is “elite New Year’s greetings” (kochōhai), a relatively small service held in the eastern gardens of the Seiryōden at the beginning of the year. Nobles from the sixth rank and up would line

36 Okami and Akamatsu, Gukanshō, pp. 274–275; trans. Brown and Ishida, The Future and the Past, pp. 152–153 (emphasis added). 37 Gyokuyō 1190.1.11. The Chōhō era (999–1004) refers to the court entrance of Michi- naga’s daughter, while the Eikyū era (1113–1118) refers to the court entrance of the aforementioned Taikenmon’in Shōshi. 38 The number of poems selected for presentation, broken down by poet, is as follows: seven for Shunzei; six for Sanesada; five for Yoshitsune; four each for Kanezane, Sanefusa, and Suetsune; three each for Teika and Takanobu. 39 Tani, “Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai byōbu to waka,” pp. 131–146. 232 chapter four up to offer New Year’s salutations to the emperor. “New Year’s greetings” (chōga) was a more public version of this salutation, but the compositions for Ninshi’s screens on “elite New Year’s greetings” emphasize the fact that the screen poets for Ninshi, as well as those present for the ceremony itself, were all part of the more exclusive group. Teika’s submission on the topic occupies the prestigious inaugural position among the screen poems presented: Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 7 (First Month: Elite New Year’s Greetings) kasumi shiku / haru no hajime no / niwa no mo ni / mazu tachiwataru / kumo no uebito Through the gardens covered in mist at the start of spring, the first to cross are those from above the clouds.40 Shunzei’s poem on the topic similarly mentions the procession of high nobles in the palace gardens: Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 8 (First Month: Elite New Year’s Greetings) kokonoe ya / tamashiku niwa ni / murasaki no / sode o tsuranuru / chiyo no hatsu haru In the ninefold gardens strewn with jewels, a procession of purple sleeves— it is the first of a thousand springs. Descriptions from Teika’s collection Gleanings from Meager Grasses (Shūi gusō; 1216 with later additions), and The Akishino Clear Moon Collection (Akishino gesseishū; early thirteenth century) by Yoshitsune, make it clear that there is a line of nobles depicted in the pictures for this topic. The participants, who all regarded annual rites and ceremonies as an important part of their world, must have seen themselves portrayed in the painted scenes.

40 Text and numeration based on the edition in Shinpen kokka taikan henshū iinkai, ed., Shinpen kokka taikan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), 5:887–894. After the initial list of topics (divided by months) and register of the poets and their ranks, the 304 poems are listed in topical order, following the twelve months. Within each topic, the poems are listed according the rank of the composer—thus, Kanezane’s poem is first and Teika’s appears seventh within each group, regardless of which of the eight was chosen for inscription. Because Teika’s father Shunzei had taken Buddhist vows, he is without rank, and his poem appears last within each topic. politics and precedence 233

The prominence of court-ceremony topics directly relates to Kanezane’s efforts to revive such ceremonies, mentioned explicitly in the passage from The Future and the Past cited earlier. Kanezane was known for his expertise in court ceremony, and he used his knowledge in the selection of waka topics for the painted screens. These topics, in turn, helped connect his daughter and himself to the imperial institution, one of Kanezane’s stated goals. Such topics as the “Kasuga Festival” (kasuga sai) in the second month, the “changing of the wardrobe” (koromogae) in the fourth month, the “purification at end of summer” (minazuki barae) in the sixth month, the “bringing of tribute horses” (koma mukae) in the eighth month, the “entrance of the Gosechi maidens” (gosechi sannyū) in the eleventh month, and the “end of year salutations” (seibo) in the twelfth month, in addition to the “elite New Year’s greetings,” emphasize the participation and cooperation of the nobility and members of the imperial line in the affirmation of court ritual and, more broadly, calendrical and cosmological cycles. Many of the other topics are standard seasonal images (cherry blossoms in the third month, the moon in the eighth month, snow in the twelfth month) that, along with the court-ceremony topics, show the accord between ritual authority and cycles in nature, what Gustav Heldt has called a ‘pursuit of harmony.’41 A recurring question in the composition of screen poetry is whether the poets saw the screens before composing their poems. As we have seen, in the heyday of screen poetry in the early part of the tenth century, Ki no Tsurayuki and other poets who composed for such occasions tended to be of lower rank. They would have their compositions presented by the high-ranking nobles who attended the event. By Kanezane’s time, eminent poets, who were of increasingly higher rank, were often included at such events. There was also greater emphasis placed on the written record than on the recitation and inscription that occurred as part of the ceremony. In the case of Ninshi’s screens, the degree of uniform detail suggests that if the poets did not actually see the screens, they at least received lengthy descriptions and perhaps sketches of the scenes and not merely the waka topics. For instance, the third topic for the tenth month is ‘crane’ (tsuru). There are any number of ways to approach this dai while remaining true to both the conventions of the topic and the auspiciousness of the occasion. Teika’s personal poetry collection, Gleanings from

41 See Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan, Cornell East Asia Series 139 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2008), pp. 241–284. 234 chapter four

Meager Grasses, provides this detail: “By the side of a marsh near an inlet, there are cranes in a place thick with withered reeds (e no sawabe ni kanro shigereru tokoro tsuru ari).”42 Whether this is a description he made himself while looking at the screens or one he received with the request for poems is not clear. Perhaps, as I have argued was the case with the poems by Michitsuna’s Mother, these are his own words describing the sketched scenes he received. Kubota Jun has observed that for many of the topics, the eight poems read like variations of one another rather than individual poems on a set topic. He surmises that the poets were circumscribed by what was depicted in the painted scenes and were not simply responding to a verbal prompt.43 Examining the compositions on the topic ‘crane,’ for instance, five of the eight poems include the line “Naniwagata” (the name of an inlet now part of Osaka Bay), four include the line “tsuru no kekoromo” (the crane’s feather mantle), and all the poems include a reference to reeds growing by a marsh. In each case, the crane or cranes can be seen to symbolize Ninshi and her immediate family. Teika and Suetsune provide representative examples, the latter of which was chosen for inscription. Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 239 (Tenth Month: Cranes) yuku sue mo / iku yo no shimo ka / oki soen / ashima ni miyuru / tsuru no kekoromo Your destiny spans the many eras— how long will the frost gather? Between the reeds can be seen the crane’s feather mantle. Teika

Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 237 (Tenth Month: Cranes) fuyugomoru / ashima ni tateru / tomozuru wa / chitose no haru o / matsu ni ya aru ran Sheltering from winter, the many cranes stand among the reeds— How they must be waiting for the next one thousand springs! Suetsune

42 Shūi gusō, 1908. Numeration based on the edition in Shinpen kokka taikan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1986) 3: 787–831. 43 Kubota, Shinkokin kajin no kenkyū, pp. 608–615. politics and precedence 235

The consistency and overlap in the span of just eight poems shows that the margin for creativity was rather slim. Based on these details, and the fact that there is no mention in contemporary sources about the under- taking of a project to produce new screens for the event, Inoue Ken’ichirō believes that the screens were already extant (as was the case with the ceremony for Shōshi) and agrees with Kubota that the poets were probably allowed to see the screens to help them visually expand, in their imaginations, the topics provided by Kanezane.44 Though the eight submissions on each topic tend to be very similar, one discernible difference in compositional approach is that the upper nobility tended to compose more straightforward landscape poetry, while those of lower status tended to include more ostensible terms of felicitation. For a number of topics, there is a clear split between the higher ranking poets, namely, Regent Kanezane, Minister of the Left Sanesada, Minister of the Right Sanefusa, and Major Counselor Yoshitsune, and the lower ranking poets, namely, Shunzei, Teika, Takanobu, and Suetsune. Those not related by blood to Kanezane, for instance, interpret the house or shelter depicted in several of the painted scenes as a symbol of the Kujō house much more frequently than the other poets. Kanezane himself, in fact, does not once mention these buildings in any of his poems, though they figure prominently in the descriptions and in poems by others. The summer topic from the sixth month, “cooling off at a mountain spring” (yamanoi nōryō), presents a clear example of this trend. Teika, in his Gleanings from Meager Grasses, describes the picture as follows: “There are people cooling themselves off beside a mountain spring, and there is a person’s house (yamai atari ni hitobito nōryō shitaru tokoro, hito no ie ari).” For this scene, the Mikohidari poet Sanefusa composed the following: Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 122 (Sixth Month: Cooling off at a Mountain Spring) tama no i no / shimizu musubite / hi wa kurenu / tsuki to tomo ni ya / yado o karamashi Scooping up the clear waters from the jeweled springs, the day comes to a close— How I wish that, like the moon, this house will rise above.

44 Inoue Ken’ichirō, “Chūsei yamato-e kō: Waka shiryō ni yoru gadai no kentō,” Bijut- sushigaku 2 (March 1979): 1–138. 236 chapter four

Sanefusa expresses his hope that the Kujō house will enjoy prosperity and imperial favor, represented by the “jeweled springs.” Kanezane, in his poem on the topic, similarly makes skillful use of metaphorical meanings to wish his daughter well, but he does not refer to the dwelling that seems to have been a part of the picture. Poems for Ninshi’s Entrance 121 (Sixth Month: Cooling off at a Mountain Spring) iwai kumu / atari no osaza / tama koete / katsugatsu musubu / aki no yūtsuyu Droplets overflow on the leaves of small bamboo by the rocky spring— how quickly they form, adding to the autumn evening dew. While on the surface Kanezane’s composition is a poetic description that incorporates standard natural imagery, the circumstances of composition allow us to read more into the poem. The small bamboo is a felicitous symbol for Ninshi, who benefits from the spring or well of abundance, metaphorically representing Gotoba, by having the opportunity to bear the next emperor. The first line, “iwai kumu,” means both to “draw from a rocky well” and also to “draw forth blessings” for the event. The verb kumu also implies the formation of lasting bonds, as does the following verb musubu. These, combined with the suggestion of abundance in the third line, “tama koete” (droplets overflow), form a not-so-subtle expression of hope that Ninshi will succeed in producing a male heir for Gotoba, thereby securing Kanezane’s position at court. The poem is at once congratulatory and seasonal, and the underlying sentiment is an appropriate one for the ‘father of the bride.’45 Due in part to the cooperation that the composition of screen poetry represented, the entrance ceremony for Ninshi was ultimately a success. Kanezane’s plans to place himself in Michinaga’s trajectory, however, were not. Just six years later, Kanezane was forced from office by a coali- tion of rivals, and Ninshi was driven out of the palace. Whereas Michinaga was able to use Shōshi’s court entrance as a springboard toward political domination, Kanezane’s placement of Ninshi at court did not prevent the precipitous end of his political career. The most significant difference

45 Kanezane’s poem is anthologized as Shinkokinshū 280 (Book 3: Summer), one of the last poems in the “Summer” section, despite the word ‘autumn’ in the last line. politics and precedence 237 between the two was that Shōshi gave birth to a son, and Ninshi did not. Ninshi became pregnant in early 1195, and as Jien observed, “Probably more prayers had been made that an Empress give birth to an imperial son than had been made during any previous reign.”46 Despite Kanezane’s best efforts, the child born was a girl, later to be known as Shunkamon’in (1195–1211). Less than two months later, a court lady known as Zaishi (or Ariko, later Shōmeimon’in) gave birth to Gotoba’s first son. According to the historical narrative The Clear Mirror (Masukagami; ca. 1370), Kanezane’s rival Minamoto no Michichika adopted Zaishi only after the child was born, and he then advanced the son as a candidate for crown prince.47 Yoritomo, who had by this time taken the title of shogun and established a new military capital in Kamakura, apparently had designs for introducing his own daughter as a consort to Gotoba. Michichika moved quickly and had Gotoba abdicate with very little notice on the eleventh day of the first month of 1198. Gotoba was, according to The Future and the Past, keen on occupying the office of retired emperor that had been so successfully wielded by his grandfather, Goshirakawa.48 Zaishi’s son, and Michichika’s grandson, eventually acceded as Emperor Tsuchimikado (1195–1231, r. 1198–1210), with an elaborate enthronement ceremony held on the third day of the third month of 1198. Ultimately, in his resourcefulness, it is Michichika who more successfully modeled his actions on those of Michinaga. Had Ninshi given birth to a son, Kanezane’s career may have turned out otherwise, and certainly there were many things beyond his control. Kanezane’s nostalgic use of the Michinaga model was effective for the moment but in no way guaranteed his future success. To return to Bakhtin, Kanezane’s strategy can be aptly described through the concept of the ‘historical inversion,’ which Bakhtin explains as follows: The essence of this inversion is found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and society and the like in the past. . . . To put it in somewhat simplified terms, we might say that a thing that could,

46 Okami and Akamatsu, Gukanshō, p. 280; trans. Brown and Ishida, The Future and the Past, p. 158. 47 See George W. Perkins, trans., The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court during the Kamakura Period (1185–1333) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 34. 48 The events would eventually lead to Gotoba’s failed attempt at imperial restoration in the Jōkyū War of 1221. The complex relationship between the factions in Kyoto and Yoritomo’s fledgling government in Kamakura is narrated in Mass, The Development of Kamakura Rule, pp. 3–33. 238 chapter four

and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past. . . . The present and even more the past are enriched at the expense of the future.49 Nostalgia operates in such a way that the object of longing is often something that did not exist to begin with. The precedents Kanezane attempted to follow were real, as were the achievements of Michinaga before him. The formula, however, was a challenging one to follow. The screen poetry and the staging of Ninshi’s court entrance provided the opportunity for, but not the assurance of, success. Kanezane’s nostalgic use of the past bolstered his immediate circumstances while highlighting his lineage, but his case might be better described as a historical inversion. He was not so much longing for a past that never was, but for a future that would never be. Screen poetry helped Kanezane imagine himself in a position of political security by visually placing him and his daughter in a landscape of court ritual. Reference to the scenes within the paintings and the political ties outside of them formed the optical allusions that Kanezane hoped would be as effective for him as they were for Michinaga before him. The solidified position Kanezane imagined, however, proved to be only an illusion after all.

49 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 147. Conclusion

Poetic Conception, Poetic Vision

The development of Japanese aesthetics in the classical period owes much to thinking with pictures. As demonstrated in this book, poets of the period responded to visual stimuli with a range of techniques that imbued objects at hand and their simulacra with networks of associative meaning. In some cases, poets adopted the dramatic personas of figures within the picture as they interacted with the painted realm, and, in others, the poets themselves seem to have internalized the events and emotions depicted in the paintings. The practical impact of their engagement with their visual subject matter was such that the techniques they used were incorporated into the composition of court poetry even at venues where visual stimuli were not present. I put forward the notion of optical allusions as a descriptive tool in analyzing some of the complexities in the relationship of text and image in Japan, particularly in the screen poem format that flourished in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The pervasiveness of such allusions suggests that the various strategies Heian poets developed to connect the visual with other aspects of immediate experience and memories of the past, both individual and collective, affected not just the way they viewed poetry, but also the way they understood the world in which they lived. The following synthesis of these ideas highlights the synergies poets of the period cultivated between visual and verbal representations. Book 10 of Kokinshū, which is devoted to poems composed on “names of things” (mono no na), is a fitting place to begin. Each of the forty-six poems therein contains a place-name or the name of a seasonal plant or animal embedded in the words of the poem. Relying at various levels on optical allusions, these poems bring to the fore the role that the sense of sight played in the conception, appreciation, and transmission of waka poetry. In the Kokinshū anthology, poems based on an assigned topic will frequently be prefaced with a headnote that mentions a visual referent for the topic. Take, for example, the following poem by Fun’ya no Yasuhide (late ninth century). The headnote explains that he composed the poem upon seeing a display of artificial flowers made of finely carved wood. 240 conclusion

Kokinshū 445 (Book 10: Names of Things) Nijō no kisaki, tōgū no miyasundokoro to mōshikeru toki ni, medo ni kezur- ibana saserikeru o, yomasetamaikeru. When the Nijō Empress was still called the Mother of the Crown Prince, Yasuhide was ordered to compose upon a display of medo blossoms that included flowers carved from wood. hana no ki ni / arazaramedomo / sakinikeri / furinishi ko no mi / naru toki mogana Though it is not a tree that flowers, it blossoms even now— may a time come that the old tree bears fruit as well.1 The headnote’s straightforward reference to the display contrasts with the subtlety of the wordplay in the poem. The term medo is embedded in the second line of the poem. On the one hand, it refers to a kind of bush clover that was part of the display, and, on the other, it is part of the conces- sive phrase arazaramedomo, meaning “though they are not.” The primary audience would have appreciated the clever way the poem worked with the medo display. For later readers of the poem, the orthography of the poem, as well as the context provided by the headnote, made the embedded word easier to detect. Yasuhide also alludes to circumstances outside the medo display at hand: the final lines metaphorically refer to himself, expressing the sentiment, “I hope that my old self will someday find success as well.” Yasuhide’s poem points to the floral display that embodied the assigned topic. Similarly, Kokinshū 439 was likely presented along with a display of maidenflowers, the theme of the contest for which Tsurayuki composed his poem. As with the previous example, the headnote not only gives the context, but also offers directions for deciphering the wordplay in the poem. Kokinshū 439 (Book 10: Names of Things) Suzakuin no ominaeshi awase no toki ni, ominaeshi to iu itsumoji o, ku no kashira ni okite, yomeru.

1 Kojima Noriyuki and Arai Eizō, eds., Kokin wakashū, SNKT 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), p. 146. poetic conception, poetic vision 241

On the occasion of the maidenflower contest at Suzakuin Palace, composed by placing one of the five characters of ominaeshi at the head of each line. Ogura yama / MIne tachinarashi / NAku shika no / HEnikemu aki o / SHIru hito zo naki Wandering the peak of Mount Ogura a stag cries out— no one can truly know the long autumns he has passed here.2 The content of the poem has little to do with maidenflowers. In fact, the only immediately detectable connection is the season: maidenflowers typically bloom in autumn and are thus associated with that season, as is the stag. The primary audience probably had a visual cue that encouraged them to look for the maidenflowers hidden in the poem. For fear that the subtlety of the acrostic (oriku) construction of Tsurayuki’s poem would be lost on later readers who did not have this cue, the editors of Kokinshū pointed out that the first character in each line together form the Japanese word for maidenflower (ominaeshi). Poets relied on optical allusions in other ways. Some poets captured a moment in time through ekphrastic description—that is, by describing a visual scene rendered in a work of art, whether it was a screen painting, a seaside diorama, or a carefully sculpted garden. When composing poems to accompany painted screens, some poets took advantage of the visual input the paintings provided by expanding upon an assigned topic beyond mere ekphrasis. These poems exhibit a kind of division of labor between word and image: the poems could contribute voice, motion, sound, and other contexts, while the image could provide visual immediacy and scenic detail. Among the many examples in the preceding chapters of this phenomenon, the poem by Korenori discussed in chapter 2 provides a particularly good example. Kokinshū 932 (Book 18: Miscellaneous 2) Byōbu no e ni, yomiawasete, kakikeru. A poem composed to accompany the picture on a folding screen and then inscribed. karite hosu / yamada no ine no / kokitarete / naki koso watare / aki no ukereba

2 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 144. 242 conclusion

Rice plants from the mountain paddies are cut down to dry, fallen like the tears of the wild geese that cry while crossing through the sadness of autumn.3 In addition to the dynamic and emotive content that Korenori foregrounds, the rhetorical complexity of the poem relies on the evocation of a visual landscape. The primary audience would have had the painted screen to appreciate along with the poem, but, for later readers, the poem had to evoke the landscape through its diction. The poem then builds upon this visual foundation in much the same way that a poem exhibiting ‘allusive variation’ relies on a poetic foundation. Korenori bases his composition on a visual source that is understood by his audience, and then he adds context and detail that imparts a measure of originality that differentiates his expression from the source upon which it was based. The way in which a poem was eventually transcribed was also an important consideration. Written poems had a visual presence that was sometimes key to their full appreciation. Korenori’s poem presented earlier is a case in point. Apart from the expressive qualities of various calligraphic styles, the mere fact of a poem’s orthography facilitated its visualization, both in terms of what the poem expressed and of how the poem looked on the poem card, scroll, or screen. Certain phonetic characters in Korenori’s poem, for example, could be placed in such a way as to also represent objects (such as geese or rice plants) in the landscape that the poem describes. As mentioned in the introduction herein, products of this kind of graphic use of phonetic characters were later known as reed-script pictures. The earliest extant examples, however, date from the Kamakura period, and it is unclear when the practice began. In the end, there is insufficient evidence from the Kokinshū era to reconstruct what the transciption practices were for the many examples like Korenori’s. Embedded or secondary meanings that might remain hidden upon hearing a poem also become clear upon seeing it. This is especially true of the poems on “names of things” in Book 10 of Kokinshū. The following example by Lady Ise highlights visuality, orthography, and allusion. Kokinshū 459 (Book 10: Names of Things) nami no hana / oki kara sakite / chirikumeri / mizu no haru to wa / kaze ya naruran

3 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 280. poetic conception, poetic vision 243

The flowers of waves blooming in the distance seem to come scattering forth— is it but the wind that makes springtime on the waters?4 In equating the blossoms to white-capped waves, Ise employs a familiar poetic stance, or mitate, based on the sense of sight. The suffix -meri attached to the verb chiriku (scatter forth) indicates that the speaker is making an inference based on the sense of sight. The internal speaker of the poem draws a glib, but elegant, conclusion based on his (or her) visual experience. The external poet Ise relies on the sense of sight in another way. She has cleverly included the characters for the place-name ‘Karasaki,’ a site off the south shore of Lake Biwa, between two words of the second line, “oki KARA SAKIte,” roughly “blooming in the distance.” In many of the poems on “names of things,” the embedded word or ‘name’ is more immediately perceptible to the eye than to the ear, especially in acrostic poems like Tsurayuki’s Kokinshū 439. For one, the temporal limitations of listening to a poem preclude the kind of search for a hidden word that reading and rereading allows. Depending on line breaks and calligraphic style, transcription could contribute to the interpretation of a poem, as well as help reveal an embedded word or meaning. Thomas LaMarre has emphasized that in these cases, the pictorial operation of a poem should not be subordinate to its grammatical signification and linguistic message—that the visual and the verbal require a parallel deciphering process.5 In sum, the way the poem looked was often key to a full appreciation of what the poem meant. Ise’s poem also draws attention to how visuality played into the way allusion and precedent enriched the poetry of the period. The term ‘flower of waves’ (nami no hana) derives from a famous couplet by Bai Juyi, later included in the anthology Japanese and Chinese Poems for Singing (Wakan rōeishū; ca. 1012). Japanese and Chinese Poems for Singing 624 (Book 2: Gazing Afar) Winds ripple the white waves—flowers, a thousand petals; Geese dot the blue sky—graphs, one line.6

4 Kojima and Arai, Kokin wakashū, p. 149. 5 Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscrip- tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 50–76. 6 Sugano Hiroyuki, ed., Wakan rōeishū, SNKZ 19 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1999), p. 324. Also see Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford, CA: Stanford 244 conclusion

Modern editors of the anthology note that the couplet may be the origin of the widespread visual mitate of confusing blossoms and waves exhibited in Ise’s poem and others in Kokinshū. Even beyond the merging of waves and flowers, the grammatically parallel lines of Bai’s poem emphasize visual patterns. Just as the wind creates a design on the water, the geese adorn the sky the way calligraphy might adorn a painted screen. If the couplet was composed as the poet was looking out on an actual vista, as the descriptive title in the anthology implies, then the poet regarded the scene pictorially. Especially in the way he likens the geese to written characters (Ch. zi, J. ji), he seems to look upon the panorama as if it were a screen painting adorned with poetry. The inclination to view real landscapes in terms of pictorial compositions continued in China into the Song dynasty. The poem Su Shi composed as he saw incoming storm clouds from a lookout tower is an excellent example: On the twenty-seventh day of the sixth month of 1072, Su Shi was drunk at Lake Watch Tower in Hangchow, and looking out at an impending storm, composed: Black clouds—spilled ink half blotting out the hills; pale rain—bouncing beads that splatter in the boat. Land-rolling wind comes, blasts and scatters them: below Lake Watch Tower, water like sky.7 In the poem, nature has been replaced by a visual representation of nature, and the poet has come to perceive the landscape in front of him in terms of such representations. Su Shi’s training in both poetry and painting enabled him to abstract his direct experience and render it into suitable poetic material. The poets of Heian Japan also became predisposed toward seeing seasonal landscapes, and elements within them, in terms of pictorial representations. As the conventions of poetry and painting developed in mutually constituting ways, in part through the perceptual cycle described in chapter 3, these poets abstracted objects or scenes into images that then became the subject matter for poetic composition. Joshua Mostow has noted the use of the picture simile in Heian literature to “present and transform the real world” and how “pictorial perception” may have

University Press, 1991), p. 129, and Thomas J. Rimer and Jonathan Chaves, Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 187. 7 Trans. Burton Watson in Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chi- nese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 251. poetic conception, poetic vision 245 influenced the way narrative tales, such as The Tale of Genji, were written.8 In Ise’s poem, the speaker’s feigned confusion as she observes natural phenomena shows a similar process of ‘pictorial perception,’ one that would continue to develop through screen poetry composition. For screen poets, the fact that their perception and presentation of nature were informed by visual depictions is only part of the larger reflexive relationship between poetry and painting. The imagistic approach screen poets took toward their compositions stems in part from what Leo Stein has called ‘seeing pictorially.’ I put on the table a plate of the kind common in Italy, an earthenware plate with a simple pattern in color, and this I looked at every day for min- utes or for hours. I had in mind to see it as a picture, and waited for it to become one. In time it did. The change came suddenly when the plate as an inventorial object, one made up of parts that could be separately listed, a certain shape, certain colors applied to it, and so on, went over into a composition to which all these elements were merely contributory. The painted composition on the plate ceased to be on it but became part of a larger composition which was the plate as a whole. I had made a beginning to seeing pictorially.9 ‘Seeing pictorially’ is in essence a two-way process through which the viewer comes to recognize, perhaps subconsciously, how artistic conventions relate to reality, and how reality relates to artistic convention. In the Japanese tradition, both painting and poetry helped define and filter poetic topics (dai) and the associations that make up their poetic essence (hon’i). The fact that plovers are connected to the winter season, for instance, is due to the famous Tsurayuki screen poem discussed in chapter 3. Later poets would also build on the tone of desperate loneliness Tsurayuki ascribed to the plovers’ cries in that same poem. Regardless of their actual circumstances, these later poets learned to ‘see pictorially,’ sometimes specifically through Tsurayuki’s eyes. The limitations defined by the conventions of certain topics were counterbalanced by the benefits of the built-in associations that they implied. For example, a poet would never mention that he had come across chirping plovers on a warm spring day, even if he had, but on the contrary, the mention of plovers opened

8 Joshua Mostow, “‘Picturing’ in The Tale of Genji,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 33, no. 1 (1999): 1, 5. See also Mostow, “E no Gotoshi: The Picture Simile and the Feminine Re-Guard in Japanese Illustrated Romances,” Word & Image 11, no. 1 (1995): 37–54. 9 Leo Stein, “On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures,” in Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose (New York: Random House, 1947), pp. 75–76. Emphasis in the original. 246 conclusion up for him a vast ‘poetics of images,’ a complex network of poetic and visual allusions to literary examples drawn mainly from prior Chinese and Japanese poetry. A poet’s training thus entailed learning to see things with a heightened awareness in a manner that was elevated but also prescribed by poetic and pictorial tradition. This aesthetic was by no means limited to poetry. Authors of autobiographical accounts and narrative prose also wrote with this heightened sense of awareness of the poetic associations evoked by the mention of a single natural image. For example, in The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu frequently taps into a poetics of images to enrich her prose passages and the poems she has her characters recite. Genji in particular demonstrates time and again a finely tuned sensitivity toward letters, pictures, domestic objects, and elements within a landscape. In “Suma,” a chapter particularly ripe with allusions and images of parting, travel, and exile, Genji constructs a villa suitable to a man of taste. He selects a hillside area by the sea, near the site where the famous poet Ariwara no Yukihira was said to have lived in exile about a century earlier. In no time the work was handsomely finished. The streambed had been deepened, trees had been planted, and Genji felt to his surprise that he could actually live there.10 The way Murasaki portrays Genji’s experience in exile, and the way the readers of The Tale of Genji would have perceived it, are both intimately connected to a web of poetic and visual allusions to literary examples in Chinese and Japanese poetry.11 Both Genji and the readers of Murasaki’s story had experiences in the arts and in life that led them to see certain things within a landscape or a poetic description of one. Visual perception, mental processing, and poetic production were one fluid process. In creating an aesthetic garden complete with a stream within the ‘wilderness’ of Suma, and in composing poems invoking the banished literatus of the

10 Royall Tyler, trans., The Tale of Genji (New York: Viking Press, 2001), pp. 239–240. See also Helen Craig McCullough, trans., Genji and Heike: Selections from The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 173. McCullough’s translation gives Genji a more active role in the process. Japanese text in Abe Akio, Akiyama Ken, and Imai Gen’e, eds., Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan), pp. 179–180. 11 Within the span of a dozen lines, the Genji text contains references to the wanderings of the Chinese poets Qu Yuan (340 b.c.e.–278 b.c.e.) and Bai Juyi, to an episode of exile in The Tales of Ise, and to Ariwara no Yukihira, as well as to conventional descriptions of the Suma shoreline. poetic conception, poetic vision 247 past, Genji at once participates in and contributes to what is ironically a ‘communal’ sensibility of what constituted literary exile, a sensibility that Murasaki’s readers would have shared. Regardless of the fact that Suma was only a day’s journey from the city of Heian-kyō, the shoreline landscape itself was so imbued with conventions of privation and distance from the capital that there was no other way to comprehend Suma except through the lens of poetic exile. This vision of Suma inspires Genji to engage in a number of artistic pursuits. After recalling a poem by Yukihira about the sound of the waves upon the shore at Suma, Genji strums the kin, a seven-stringed zither, and sings, composing his own poem about the waves. Then, seeing the despondency of his companions, Genji changes his tack, hoping to cheer them up: The thought pained him, and once he had seen how dispiriting they must find his own gloom, he purposely diverted them with banter during the day and enlivened the hours by joining pieces of colored paper to write poems on, or immersed himself in painting on fine Chinese silk, which yielded very handsome panels for screens. He had once heard a description of this sea and these mountains and had imagined them from afar; and now that they were before him, he painted a set of incomparable views of an exceptionally lovely shore.12 The landscape inspires both visual and verbal composition. On occasion, the two must have worked together, with paintings giving rise to poetry or vice versa, perhaps even appearing together on the screens mentioned in the text. In “The Picture Contest” (“Eawase”) chapter, Murasaki describes Genji’s artistic endeavors at Suma as a poignant combination of painting and poetry: Genji’s paintings revealed with perfect immediacy, far more vividly than anything they had imagined during those years when they pitied and grieved for him, all that had passed through his mind, all that he had witnessed, and every detail of those shores that they themselves had never seen. He had added here and there lines of running script, Chinese or Japanese, and although these did not yet make it a true diary, there were such moving poems among them that one wanted very much to see more.13

12 Tyler, The Tale of Genji, p. 244; Abe, Akiyama, and Imai, Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13, pp. 184–185. 13 Tyler, trans., The Tale of Genji, pp. 328–329; Abe, Akiyama, and Imai, Genji monogatari, NKBZ 13, pp. 377–378. 248 conclusion

The efficacy of Genji’s compositions was such that those in attendance at the contest were able to see, through his eyes, what the experience at Suma was like. Recall how Wassily Kandinsky emphasized that a viewer will recover, in a successful work of art, the emotion that the artist put into it. Genji’s work appears to have succeeded in arousing in his audience the same kinds of feelings that originally inspired his visual and verbal compositions while in exile at Suma. Genji’s use of the visual as well as his use of the past mirror the way screen poetry contributed to larger stylistic developments in the compositional practices of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The rise of highly visual and determinedly allusive verse during this time, characteristics readily discernible in poems included in the eighth imperial anthology, Shinkokinshū, coincides with a revival in the production of folding screens and poetry composed for them (see chapter 2, figure 3). Several of the most important poets represented in Shinkokinshū, including the members of its editorial board, participated at events that called for new screen poetry. The court entrance of Ninshi in 1190 is but one example that demonstrates how influential poets of the day were asked to compose based on painted screens. Later, in 1207, some of the same poets, including Fujiwara no Teika, composed poems for the paintings on the sliding doors at Gotoba’s Saishōshitennōin monastery.14 As was the case with the court entrance ceremony for Gotoba’s consort Ninshi, this project also brought together paintings, poems, and allusive practices. Scholars have noted the strong visual component of many of the compositions that are considered the most representative of the poetry contained in Shinkokinshū. The following travel poem by Teika, one of the compilers, is a frequently cited example: Shinkokinshū 953 (Book 10: Travel) Tabi no uta tote yomeru. Composed as a travel poem. tabibito no / sode fukikaesu / akikaze ni / yūbe sabishiki / yama no kakehashi In the autumn wind that blows back the sleeves of the traveler,

14 See Edward Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 168–221, on “The Saishōshitennōin Poems and Paintings.” poetic conception, poetic vision 249

desolate is the approaching dusk on the bridge between the mountains.15 Teika begins his appeal to the senses with a close-up of the traveler’s fluttering sleeve. We find that the cause of the fluttering is a chill autumn wind that rises up as the sun is setting, heralding a night of cold. The poet then draws the view back from the lone traveler to a wider shot of the mountains and the bridge between them. The telescoping technique with which Teika directs the reader’s eye is indicative of skills he may have developed early in his career composing upon painted depictions. This particular poem, despite its strong visual components, comes from a seasonal sequence Teika composed in 1196 and has no known pictorial basis. Still, Teika’s experience with screen poetry no doubt contributed to his sensitivity to the limitations and possibilities posed by the interplay between the visual and the verbal. In this poem, for instance, Teika describes the blowing autumn wind and the fluttering of sleeves that could not readily be conveyed in the static medium of painting. These aspects could, however, be brought out in screen poetry, and often were. Many of the poems in the so-called Shinkokin style possess a striking visual aspect, undoubtedly due in part to the experience that poets of the age had with screen poetry. As with Teika’s composition, the reader of such poems is left with an evocative image that lingers in the mind’s eye. The use of allusive variation is an equally important characteristic of the poetry of this age and can also be likened to certain visual techniques used in screen poetry. Poems that exhibit allusive variation invoke a foundation poem and borrow a conception from it, an approach similar to the way screen poets dealt with the paintings that formed their subject matter. Just as a poet could incorporate a brief quotation of an older poem to call that poem to mind, a screen poet could incorporate an ekphrastic description to conjure an image in his readers’ minds. As topical conventions became more stringently defined, the borrowing of a persona, a narrative context, or a poetic conceit from an older poem helped open up the allusive possibilities of a set topic. For example, note how the following poem by Saigyō builds upon an earlier screen poem by Tsurayuki that was discussed in chapter 3.

15 Tanaka Yutaka and Akase Shingō, eds., Shinkokin wakashū, SNKT 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), pp. 286–287. The word kakehashi (bridge) may also refer to wood planks set into a mountainside to form a climbing path, also a striking visual image. 250 conclusion

Sankashū 1502 kawakaze ni / chidori nakiken / fuyu no yo wa / waga omoi nite / arikeru mono o In the river winds, the plovers cry out on this winter’s night— now I find that same sad longing is what I feel as well!16

The Tsurayuki Collection 338 Onaji rokunen no haru, Saemon no kami dono no byōbu no uta. In the spring of the sixth year of the same reign [Jōhei], a poem for the folding screen of the Captain of the Left Palace Guards. omoikane / imogari yukeba / fuyu no yo no / kawakaze samumi / chidori naku nari My longing unbearable, I go out to where she lives— In the cold river winds of the winter’s night, the plovers cry aloud.17 Here, Saigyō evokes Tsurayuki’s earlier poem by directly referring to it: the first three lines of his poem correspond very closely with the last three lines of Tsurayuki’s. The speaker of Saigyō’s poem appears to recall the circumstances in Tsurayuki’s poem—that of a man in desperate search of his wife—and declares that his own feelings are the same. The poem is at once an appreciation, an interpretation, and a response that can be understood as such only if the reader recognizes the allusion. It is not difficult to see how the technique of allusive variation employed by Saigyō and other poets of the age parallels the optical allusions that were part of screen poetry composition. Scholars have noted that the poems for Ninshi’s screen, for instance, read like allusive variations of each other, simulacra with no original.18 Part of the reason for the overlap in descriptive detail is that, beyond the conventions of the topics assigned for the event, the poets were responding to the painted scenes. In this case, a painting served as the ‘foundation poem’ that linked the submissions on

16 Gotō Shigeo, ed., Sankashū, SNKS 49 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982), p. 421. 17 Tanaka Kimiharu and Tanaka Kyōko, Tsurayuki shū zenshaku, Shikashū zenshaku sōsho 20 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1997), pp. 277–278. 18 Kubota Jun, Shinkokin kajin no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1973), pp. 608–615. poetic conception, poetic vision 251 each topic, creating a situation that brought allusive variation and screen composition together. The visual foundation served not only as a stimulus, but also as an interpretative ground that was at once expansive in the way that it tapped into a vast tradition but also limited by poetic and iconographic conventions. In conclusion, I offer two compositions by Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192– 1219), the third Kamakura shogun and another important Shinkokinshū-era poet, that epitomize aspects of the poem-painting relationship described in the preceding chapters. The first example, composed for a folding screen, shows how an engagement with the visual material makes sophisticated treatment of other sensory elements possible. Kinkaishū 56 Hana chireru tokoro ni kari no tobu o. Composed for a scene where the blossoms were falling and geese were flying overhead. karigane no / kaeru tsubasa ni / kaoru nari / hana o uramuru / haru no yamakaze The floral fragrance floats upon the wings of the geese that fly back home— the mountain winds of spring seem to lament the blossoms’ passing.19 As has been demonstrated in the preceding chapters, poets who composed for painted screens contended with two disparate, but not mutually exclusive, conditions. On the one hand, the poet was circumscribed by the visual image, having to take as the topic something specifically depicted in the painting. On the other hand, the poet could rely on the fact that the reader of his poem would be viewing the picture alongside the poem. This assumption provided some flexibility in the degree to which visual description needed to be incorporated. For Sanetomo’s poem, the painting has essentially put forward a compound topic (musubidai): geese and blossoms or, more specifically, flying geese and falling blossoms. Reading the poem, one can almost see Sanetomo’s ideas taking shape as he addresses the conventions of both parts of the compound topic in a single, cohesive

19 Higuchi Yoshimaro, ed., Kinkai wakashū, SNKS 44 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1981), p. 26. Kinakaishū numbering follows the Higuchi text. Higuchi notes an alternate manuscript that has the headnote “Byōbu no e ni hana chiru tokoro ni kari no tobu o” (Composed for the picture on a folding screen where through the falling blossoms geese were flying). 252 conclusion poem. The mention of returning geese and the fading blossoms furnishes a sense of motion that could only be implied in the painting. The appeal to the sense of smell further complements the scene, as does the per- sonification of the blowing wind, another aspect that the painter could not have depicted explicitly. The words draw the reader into a specific context for and relationship to the painted image, expanding his or her visual experience into an emotional one. As was the case with many of the poems analyzed in previous chapters, the poem, when considered as a verbal supplement, invites the viewer to look again at the image and more deeply reflect upon matters of time, space, and perspective. Furthermore, the emotive content and overall tone of the poem might also color one’s interpretation of the painting. The poem and the painted scene each fully stands on its own, but one can imagine that the combined effect of the two created an aesthetic whole much greater than the sum of its parts. The second example by Sanetomo demonstrates how a poet could take a visual scene in front of him and abstract it into a topic for a poem. Kinkaishū 27 Ame sobo fureru ashita, Shōchō Jun’in no mume, tokorodokoro sakitaru o mite, hana ni musubitsukeshi uta. On a morning of drizzling rain, when he saw the plums blossoming here and there at the Shōchō Jun’in temple, he composed this poem and affixed it to a branch of blossoms. furutera no / kuchiki no ume mo / harusame ni / sobochite hana zo / hokorobinikeru At the old temple gentle spring rains fall in a drizzle upon the plums of the decayed tree— and I see that those flowers too have fallen into ruin.20 Sanetomo composed the poem upon visiting a temple established by his father, the first shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–1199). The Shōchō Jun’in was newly constructed in 1185 to the memory of Yoritomo’s father, Yoshitomo (1123–1160). Despite this fact, Sanetomo refers to Shōchō Jun’in as an ‘old temple’ ( furutera), a term usually reserved for ancient temples with few visitors, usually abandoned and in disrepair. The disparity between poetic portrayal and objective reality is also present in Sanetomo’s description of the plum trees, which were probably planted or transplanted when the temple was built, as ‘decayed trees’ (kuchiki).

20 Higuchi, Kinkai wakashū, p. 18. poetic conception, poetic vision 253

The abstraction Sanetomo carries out is quite revealing. More than an exaggeration, this recasting of the landscape is a thinly veiled expression of discontent surrounding his family’s recent and sudden political decline. More pertinent to the text-image relationship is the fact that Sanetomo does not compose on the actual circumstances he experiences but looks upon the temple garden as if it were a painted scene, a process that facilitates his own production of conventionally acceptable poetic meanings. That is to say, if we are to believe that Sanetomo composed at the site, as the headnote maintains, his pictorial perception of the scene, as well as his own personal circumstances, filtered and modified what he saw from the outset. This filtering process enabled Sanetomo to revisualize the relatively new memorial as an ancient temple with decaying trees—a process analogous to Stein’s notion of ‘seeing pictorially.’ A picture can serve as a catalyst, providing the framework for a poet to progress from poetic conception to lyric expression. At other times, the practice of ‘seeing pictorially’ and abstracting direct experience into painted images and conventional poetic topics enabled a poet to produce an imaginative poem unbridled by his actual circumstances. The two Sanetomo poems show how the poem-painting dynamic can, in essence, help a poet realize a conception on the one hand, and conceptualize reality on the other. In a sense, the complex relationship between word and image, between representation and reality, has been turned on its head: poets who at first seemed to require a physical representation of the topics assigned to them eventually come to conceptualize their physical reality in terms of poetic topics. Whereas Minamoto no Tōru constructed his urban garden to look like the distant Shiogama shores, later poets would perceive actual landscapes in terms of the poetic representations they had seen. Murasaki describes Genji as one who took pleasure in the miniature landscapes maintained on aristocratic estates in the capital. Thus, when confronted with the reality of exile in Suma, Genji decides to build a garden to remind him of home, though ironically the very same kinds of gardens were usually built to remind their urban owners of rustic locations outside the capital. As Bruce Coates has observed, the refined hero “imposes order on the wilderness and creates an artificial realm reminiscent of the urban gardens he longs to see again.”21 In the capital, Genji might have created

21 Bruce A. Coates, “Buildings and Gardens in The Tale of Genji,” in Approaches to Teach- ing Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, ed. Edward Kamens (New York: Modern Lan- guage Association of America, 1993), p. 57. 254 conclusion a garden to replicate a measure of his experience out in the wilderness, but when he is in exile, the same kind of domesticated version of nature produces a comfortable reminder of home. Early poets appreciated artistic illusions of reality and drew upon physical objects and directly experienced scenery to produce their art. By contrast, for later poets, art often became the lens through which they experienced their reality. As with Su Shi’s rain clouds made of blotted ink, and Sanetomo’s revisioning of his father’s temple grounds, directly experienced scenery could be subsumed under poetic and pictorial representations. In these and other examples, the landscape itself has been transformed into an optical allusion. Appendix A

Screen Poems Predating Kokinshū (905)

The following timeline is based on Ienaga Saburo’s Jōdai yamato-e nenpyō (1966), Katano Tatsurō’s Nihon bungei to kaiga no sōkansei no kenkyū (1975), and Fujita Kazutaka’s “Heianchō byōbu uta no shiteki kōsatsu: Jusseiki ni okeru meisho e byōbu no tenkai” (1997). See bibliography full citation. Poems included in Kokinshū follow the Shinpen kokka taikan numeration. The remaining poems are from personal collections and follow the Shikashū taisei numeration.

I. emperor Montoku’s reign (850–858) Seiryōden daibandokoro no byōbu (1) KKS 930, by Sanjō no Machi II. Jōkan 11–18 (869–876) Nijō no Kisaki (Fujiwara no Takaiko) no byōbu (2) KKS 293 by Sosei (3) KKS 294 by Ariwara no Narihira III. emperor Uda’s reign (887–897) Kanpyō no ōontoki no onbyōbu (4) KKS 802 by Sosei (5) Tadamine shū I: 22 (Mibu no Tadamine) (6–9) Tadamine shū I: 26–29 (Mibu no Tadamine) IV. Kanpyō 3 (891) Sadayasu no miko no Kisai no Miya no isoji no ga tatematsurikeru on byōbu (10) KKS 351 by Fujiwara no Okikaze V. Kanpyō 8–9 (896–897) Tōgū no nyōgo (Fujiwara no Onshi) no onbyōbu (11–29) Ise shū I: 34–51 (Ise) VI. Kanpyō 9–Engi 5 (897–905) Teiji-in no onbyōbu (30) KKS 305 by Ōshikōchi no Mitsune VII. Before Engi 1 (901) Motoyasu no miko no nansoji no ga no ushiro no byōbu (31) KKS 352 by Ki no Tsurayuki (32–33) KKS 353–354 by Sosei 256 appendix a

VIII. engi 5 (tenth day of the second month of 905) Udaishō (Fujiwara no Sadakuni) no yosoji no ga no byōbu (34) KKS 357 by Sosei (35) KKS 358 by Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (36) KKS 359 by Ki no Tomonori (37) KKS 360 by Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (38) KKS 361 by Mibu no Tadamine (39) KKS 362 by Sakanoue no Korenori (40) KKS 363 by Ki no Tsurayuki (41) Sosei shū I: 35 (Sosei) (42–43) Mitsune shū II: 265, III: 145 (44–46) Tadamine shū I: 3, I: 30, II: 5 IX. two unspecified Engi 5 (905) or earlier events (47) KKS 931 by Ki no Tsurayuki (48) KKS 932 by Sakanoue no Korenori Appendix B

Translation from Tales of Times Now Past

Book 24, Story 31: The Story of How Lady Ise Composed a Poem for a Screen during the Engi Era [901–923].1

In a time now past, Emperor Daigo commissioned a screen to be used in the coming-of-age ceremony for one of his sons.2 In order to have poems for the poem-square on the screen, he told a group a poets, “Each one of you compose and submit poems for the screen.”3 The calligrapher Ono no Michikaze was commissioned to inscribe onto the screen the poems that everyone presented.4 It so happened that in the first panel depicting spring, there was a poem-square next to the scene where a woman in a carriage was going along a mountain path as the cherry blossoms were blooming.5 The emperor had overlooked the poem-square and did not request a poem for the scene from any of the poets. As Michikaze was inscribing the poems, he realized that the poem was missing. The emperor observed the problem and said, “What should be done about this? The day of the ceremony has already arrived—surely no one could compose on such short notice. But to have a poem missing for such a charming and interesting scene is very disappointing.” After pondering over the matter for some time, the emperor summoned the courtier Lesser Captain Fujiwara no Korehira.6 He arrived at once. The emperor ordered, “Go to Lady Ise right away, tell her what the situation is, and tell her to compose a poem for this scene,” and so saying the emperor sent him off. The

1 Translation based on NKBZ text: Mabuchi Kazuo et al., eds., Konjaku monogatari shū, NKBZ 23 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1974), 3:358–364. Much of the information in subsequent notes is indebted to the annotations in the NKBZ text. 2 Referred to here as the ‘Engi Emperor,’ Daigo (885–930, r. 897–930) is known to have commissioned several screens, as well the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, Kokinshū (905). It is not clear which of Daigo’s sons is referred to in this passage. 3 For poem-squares (shikishigata 色紙形), see chapter 1. 4 Ono no Michikaze came from a family of noted calligraphers and was called upon by Daigo frequently for commissions in a way similar to the event described here. 5 Presumably, the first of four or six panels of a screen depicting the four seasons. 6 Son of Fujiwara no Toshiyuki 藤原敏行, Korehira 伊衛 (875–938) was a minor courtier. 258 appendix b reason why Korehira was chosen as the messenger was because of his good nature and pleasant disposition. The emperor thought, “There is no one else whom Lady Ise will feel is so agreeable at first glance,” and so sent him off. Now Lady Ise, who was extremely skilled at many things, was the daughter of a certain governor of Yamato named Fujiwara no Tadafusa.7 She served the empress during the reign of the Teiji Emperor [Uda], and she gained his favor enough to become an imperial consort. Her looks and demeanor were exceedingly elegant, and she was always subtle yet charming. As far as waka composition was concerned, she was in no way inferior to her contemporaries Mitsune and Tsurayuki.8 As it was, when Uda became a monk, he cloistered himself deep in the mountains at a place called Ōuchiyama.9 Lady Ise, thinking the world had nothing left to offer her, also passed her days at home in idleness. She was recalling all the events at the palace, poignantly remembering her days there, when a voice called from the gate. A person in court dress entered through the gate, and, just as she was wondering who it could be, she saw that it was Lesser Captain Korehira who had arrived. “What could be the reason for this unexpected visit?” she thought, and sent someone out to see him. It was under imperial command that Korehira went to Lady Ise’s residence, which was near Gojō. In the garden, a thick grove of trees cast dark shadows, and interesting plants grew here and there. A bright green moss covered the garden and there were pebbles strewn everywhere. It happened to be the third month, and the cherry tree in the front was flourishing. On the south side of the mansion there were cloth curtains with hems that were torn here and there, lending an air of quiet antiquity to the place.10 Korehira stood at the walkway to the side of the inner gate and told his attendant, “Go in and announce that Korehira has come as a messenger from the emperor.” A young male servant came out and said, “Please enter this way.” They proceeded to the south side of the mansion

7 Fujiwara no Tadafusa 藤原忠房 (d. 929) was indeed a governor of Yamato Province and a noted poet, but he was not the father of Lady Ise. Lady Ise (d. ca. 939) was the daughter of Fujiwara Tsugukage 藤原継蔭 and the mother of the noted poet Nakatsukasa 中務. 8 Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (fl. early tenth century) and Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 872–ca. 945). For more on their careers as screen poets, see chapter 3. 9 Ōuchiyama, near Ninnaji in the northwest part of the capital, was one of Uda’s detached palaces. 10 Mokō no sudare 帽額の簾 refers to the hems of the hanging curtains. translation from tales of times now past 259 and then from within heard the elegant voice of a woman say, “Please come in.” Raising the outer blinds to enter, he found that the blinds in the main room were down. Three curtain stands, meticulously crafted of antique wood, were arranged between the pillars of the room. From west to east was a fairly old folding screen, four feet in height, spanning three of the bays.11 There were tatami mats with patterned Korean borders that matched the blinds of the room and on them were cushions of imported brocade.12 The floor of the sitting room was so polished that it shone like a mirror, and one could clearly see a person’s reflection in it. Everything in the room had an antiquated look. Korehira proceeded in, and when he sat beside a cushion, from behind the blinds a delightful and refreshing fragrance came subtly drifting in. The beautiful sleeves of a number of women could be seen through the blinds, and one could make out the fine hair of two or three of them. The blinds too had a grandeur about them and were quite elegant. Korehira hesitated for a moment and then approached the blinds. “I have a direct message from the emperor,” he said. “‘This evening is the coming-of-age ceremony for the young prince, and I have had a folding screen made for him as a congratulatory gift. I had various poets compose poems for the poem-squares, and just as the poems were being inscribed, I noticed that I had overlooked a certain scene and did not order a poem to be composed for it. Thus, there is no poem to write on the poem-square there. I summoned Mitsune and Tsurayuki to compose a poem, but both were away somewhere. Today is the day, and there is no one else I can ask, so won’t you please compose a poem for this scene immediately?’ Those were his words.” Lady Ise was caught quite off guard and said quietly, “I cannot believe such a request! How could this be?” One could faintly hear her say, “I’m sure it was commissioned far in advance. There is no way that I would be able to compose in the end something meant for Mitsune or Tsurayuki. Moreover, the suddenness of the request puts me at a loss. I can’t begin to even think of it.” Her response was dignified and quite charming. Hearing this, Korehira thought, “Ah, there are such remarkable people in this world.”

11 Four feet (shaku) was a standard height for a large folding screen. 12 ‘Korean borders’ translates kōrai beri 高麗端. The NKBZ editors note that kara nishiki 唐錦 does not necessarily mean the fabric or pattern was from China or Korea, but that it had an ‘imported’ quality. 260 appendix b

After a while, a pretty young girl in a light summer robe drifted out from behind the blinds holding a kettle of sake in one hand.13 Just as he was thinking how uncertain matters were, he saw from under the blinds that there were sake cups placed on a fan that had a most enchanting picture painted on it. Because the young girl was so charming, he followed her with his eyes from behind the blinds to where she came out on her knees and thus was late in noticing that the fan with the cups had been pushed out from under the blinds. Then another woman came in with the lid of a lacquered inkstone box that had a drawing within a circle frame.14 On the lid she spread out a paper with a subtly traced design and proceeded to lay out fruit. Sake was offered, and when he picked up his sake cup, the young girl picked up the sake flagon and poured. Even when he said, “That’s enough,” the woman ignored him and continued to pour. “Ah, they must know I like to drink,” he thought, and smiled. So then he drank, and when he went to put down his cup, they would not let him and forced more upon him. After four or five cups, he was finally able to put it down, but just as he replaced his cup, another came out from under the blinds. When he refused, she told him, “It’d be a pity to stop now.” He drank more and more and became very drunk. The ladies all looked at the lesser captain and saw his red cheeks—even his eyes glowed with the color of cherry blossoms—and it was a marvelous sight. After considerable time had passed, she wrote down a poem on paper with a delicate purple background motif, folded it up and wrapped it in paper with the same motif, and inserted it into the robes of one of her ladies, and sent the lady out from behind the blinds. She wore a red, layered, woven jacket that had a maroon outer layer and an indigo lining, as well as a woven skirt embroidered with gold and silver, and pants dyed a deep purple.15 The combination of colors was stunning. “This has been an unexpected pleasure,” he said, and he took the poem and got up to leave. The ladies all got up to see him off, singing his praises. He left through the gate, and the figure of him leaving in the distance was very elegant, and they watched until he could no longer be seen. It was quite sad as the

13 ‘Summer robe’ translates kazami 汗衫. A chōshi 銚子 was a large vessel, resembling a teapot, for serving sake. 14 “Ban’e ni makitaru suzuri no hako no futa” (盤絵／蛮絵ニ蒔キタル硯ノ筥ノ蓋). Ban’e usually refers to a picture of flora or fauna designed to fit in a circular frame. Here, the design is part of the lacquered surface of the inkstone box. 15 Akairo no kasane 赤色ノ重, which describes the jacket (karaginu 唐衣), refers to a pattern of layering where the outside is deep red and the inside is deep blue. Jiizuri 地摺, which describes the train (mo 裳), refers to a raised woven pattern of gold and silver. translation from tales of times now past 261 sound of his carriage and the voice of his driver urging the horses on faded into the distance. They could still discern his fragrance on the cushion where he had been sitting and to put it away filled them with sorrow. Meanwhile, at the palace, the emperor was asking, “Hasn’t he returned yet?” The emperor sent someone off to find out. At the front entrance came an announcement. Korehira came in and said, “I have returned,” whereupon the emperor said, “Quickly, quickly!” Okikaze had already been summoned, his brush prepared and dipped in ink. All the nobles and courtiers who were supposed to be there were already waiting. Korehira took out the wrapped letter and held it above his head. Then he approached the imperial dais, brought it down, and offered it to the emperor. The emperor opened the letter and read it, but the first thing he was struck by was how exquisite the writing was, not in the slightest way inferior to that of Okikaze. Lady Ise had written, chiri chirazu / kikamahoshiki o / furusato no / hana mite kaeru / hito mo awanamu How I wish to hear whether they have fallen or not— Would that I could meet someone returning from my hometown who had seen the cherry blossoms there.16 Reading the poem, the emperor was struck with admiration. Turning to all who were in attendance, he said, “Look at this.” Each recited the poem in a most splendid manner, and the poem sounded better with each reading, until it seemed that there could not be a more superb poem. After many recitations, Michikaze wrote it down. And thus it is a testament to the fact that Lady Ise was indeed a gifted poet that this story has been passed down.

16 Sekine Yoshiko and Yamashita Michiyo, Ise shū zenshaku, Shikashū zenshaku sōsho 16 (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1996), pp. 185–186. There is another translation in Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 202. The poem appears as SIS 49 (Book 1: Spring 1) with the following headnote: “Saiin byōbu ni, yama michi yuku hito aru tokoro” (On the screen of the Kamo Shrine Priestess, where there is a person traveling along a mountain path). Komachiya Teruhiko, Shūi wakashū, SNKT 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 16.

Bibliography

Abbreviations

GSRJ Shinkō gunsho ruijū. Tokyo: Meichō fukyūkai. NKBT Nihon koten bungaku taikei. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. NKBZ Nihon koten bungaku zenshū. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. SNKT Shin Nihon koten bungagku taikei. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. SNKZ Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. SNKS Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.

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Index

Abe no Hironiwa 安倍広庭 (659–732), Berger, John, 192, 194 155n Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (1598–1680), 105 Abbreviated History of Japan. See Fusō bōdai 傍題 (straying from topic), 150 ryakki booklets. See sasshi actual ekphrasis. See ekphrasis Book of Changes (Yi jing 易經; before 1000 acrostic (oriku 折句), 241 b.c.e.?), 5 Akishino Clear Moon Collection. Book of Songs (Shi jing 詩經; sixth century See Akishino gesseishū b.c.e.), 4–5 Akishino gesseishū 秋篠月清集 (Akishino Brooks, Cleanth, 14 clear moon collection, early thirteenth Brower, Robert, 187 century), 232 Bundy, Roselee, 189, 190 allusion, 4, 17–18, 239, 243, 248 Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai ryō byōbu waka. allusive variation (honkadori 本歌取り), See Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court 16, 18, 242, 249–250 Entrance Antoku, Emperor 安徳天皇 (1178–1185, Bunka shūrei shū 文華秀麗集 (Collection r. 1180–1183), 223 of masterpieces of literary flowers; annual rites and ceremonies (nenjū gyōji ca. 818), 56–57, 159 年中行事), 89, 205, 231. See also bush clover (hagi 萩), 95, 105, 110, 163. See ceremonies also topics, poetic apperception, 28 byōbu 屏風. See screens approximate physical reality, 26, 193, 199 byōbu e uta 屏風絵歌 (screen painting ariake no wakare 有明の別れ. See parting poems), 84 at dawn byōbu shi 屏風詩 (Chinese screen poems). Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), 14, 27 See screen poems Ariwara no Motokata 有原元方(888–953), byōbu uta 屏風歌 ([Japanese] screen 70–71, 104 poems). See screen poems Ariwara no Narihira 在原業平 (825–880), 71–73, 111–112, 135 calligraphy, 1, 23, 66–67, 81 83, 122, 143, Ariwara no Yukihira 在原行平 (818–893), 242 169, 247 Callistratus (fl. third to fourth centuries Arnheim, Rudolf, 195 c.e.), 6 ashide-e 葦手絵 (reed-script pictures), Cao Ba 曹霸 (fl. eighth century), 53–54 23, 242 caption (vs. illustration), 45–47 Atsuhira, Prince 敦成親王 (1008–1036), Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529), 15 222 ceremonies, 78–79, 84 Atsuyasu, Prince敦康親王 (999–1019), great thanksgiving services (daijōe 204, 221 大嘗会, or daijōsai 嘗会祭), 37, 43, autumn leaves (momijiba 紅葉), 38, 72, 65–66, 120–122 172–173. See also topics, poetic naming of the buddhas (butsumyôe 仏名会), 93 ba 場 (place, circumstances of coming-of-age (mogi 裳着), 1, 80, 102, composition), 93, 101 204, 225, 230 Bai Juyi 白居易 (J. Haku Kyoi or Haku court entrance ( judai 入内), 1, 204ff, Rakuten 白楽天; 772–846), 33–37, 222ff 48–51, 85, 130ff, 160, 243–244 Chen Jin 陳僅 (fl. ca. 1840), 53n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 225, 237 chidori 千鳥. See plovers Barthes, Roland, 28 Chinese screen poems (byōbu shi). Beauties under the Trees (Ki no shita bijin See screen poems zu 木下美人図; ca. 752), 32, 41, 61–65 Chisato. See Ōe no Chisato 282 index

Chōmei. See Kamo no Chōmei daijōe 大嘗会 (or daijōsai 嘗会祭, great Chōshū eisō 長秋詠藻 (Weeds Composed thanksgiving services). See ceremonies for Long Autumns; 1178), 226n, 229 Daini Takatō shū 大弐高遠集. See Takatō chrysanthemums (kiku 菊), 19–20, 105, 113, Collection 161, 164–165, 192. See also topics, poetic Dairi kiku awase 内裏菊合. See Palace Chronicles of Japan, The (Nihon shoki 日本 Chrysanthemum Contest 書紀; ca. 720), 31n deer (shika 鹿), 15, 39n, 95, 105, 156. chūgū 中宮 (empress), 222 See also topics, poetic Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), 6 Diary of Murasaki Shikibu (Murasaki Clear Mirror (Masukagami 増鏡; ca. 1370), Shikibu nikki 紫式部日記; 1008–1010), 237 42, 222 Coats, Bruce, 253 Dionysius of Helicarnassus (first century Collection for Governing the Country. b.c.e.), 6 See Keikokushū dioramas, seaside. See suhama Collection of Ancient and Modern Times. Discourses on Art. See Reynolds, Sir Joshua See Kokinshū doctor of letters (monjōshō 門上昇), 61n Collection of a Thousand Years. See Documented Offerings at Tōdai Temple. See Senzaishū Tōdaiji kenmotsu chō Collection of Gleanings. See Shūishū Du Fu 杜甫 (J. To Ho; 712–770), 51–55, 58 Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Flowers. See Bunka shūrei shū eibutsu 詠物. See yong wu Collection of Myriad Leaves. See Man’yōshū Eiga monogatari 栄華物語. See Tale of Collection Soaring above the Clouds. Flowering Fortunes See Ryōunshū E inga kyō 絵因果経 (or Kako genzai inga coming-of-age ceremony. See ceremonies kyō 過去現在因果経, Illustrated sutra concept. See yi 意 of cause and effect; eighth century), 46 Confucius 孔子 (551–479 b.c.e.), 5 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 195 contests eishi 詠史 (compositions on historical chrysanthemum (kiku awase 菊合), events), 151n 164–165, 169 ekphrasis, 2, 5–7, 10–12, 28, 93, 102, 105, garden (senzai awase 前栽合), 1, 163, 114, 171, 173, 176, 193, 241 168, 169 actual, 7 garden poetry (senzai uta awase 前栽 defined, 2 歌合), 168ff derivation, 6 iris (neawase 根合), 169 notional, 7 poetry (uta awase 歌合). See poetry emaki 絵巻 (picture scrolls), 142 contests and individual poetry emperors. See individual emperors by name contests by title Engi rokunen dairi tsukinami byōbu uta Continued Collection of Ancient and 延喜六年内裏月次屏風歌. See Poems Modern Times. See Shokukokinshū for the Palace Screen of Monthly Activities Continued Later Records of Japan. e-nikki 絵日記 (picture-diary), 176 See Shoku Nihon kōki enthronement hall. See Shishinden court entrance ( judai 入内). See ceremonies Evergreen Mountain (Tokiwayama 常盤 cranes (鶴 tsuru / tazu), 15, 212, 234. 山), 74 See also topics, poetic Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa 徒然草; cuckoo (hototogisu 杜鵑, 時鳥 and other ca. 1330), 44 variants), 153, 170, 191. See also topics, poetic Faulting the Goshūishū. See Nan Goshūi Five Men of the Pear Chamber dai 題. See topics, poetic, and individual (Nashitsubo no gonin 梨壺五人), 118n topics by name fu 賦. See rhapsody Daigo, Emperor 醍醐天皇 (885–930, Fuji (mountain) 富士山, 4 r. 897–930), 68n, 92, 109, 126, 162 Fujiwara no Fuhito 藤原不比等 daiga shi 題畫詩. See painting-poem (659–720), 230 index 283

Fujiwara no Kamatari 藤原鎌足 Fujiwara no Saneyori 藤原実頼 (614–669), 230 (900–970), 153, 187, 217 Fujiwara no Kaneie 藤原兼家 Fujiwara no Senshi 藤原詮子 (or Akiko, (929–990), 176, 202 later Higashi Sanjōin 東三条院; Fujiwara no Kanehira 藤原兼平 962–1002), 202 (953–1017), 211, 218–219 Fujiwara no Shōshi 藤原彰子 (or Akiko, Fujiwara no Kenshi 藤原妍子 (or Kiyoko; later Jōtōmon’in 上東門院; 1101–1145), 994–1027), 221 228 Fujiwara no Kintō 藤原公任 (966–1041), Fujiwara no Shōshi 藤原璋子 (or Tamako, 118, 158, 208, 211, 213ff later Taikenmon’in 待賢門院; Fujiwara no Kiyosuke 藤原清輔 1101–1145), 228 (1104–1177), 150 Fujiwara no Shunzei 藤原俊成 Fujiwara no Korechika 藤原伊周 (1114–1204), 153, 189–191, 226, 228ff, 232 (974–1010), 202, 220, 222 Fujiwara no Suetsune 藤原季経 Fujiwara no Korehira 藤原伊衛 (1131–1221), 228, 234–235 (875–938), 257 Fujiwara no Tadafusa 藤原忠房 Fujiwara no Koreyuki 藤原伊行 (d. 929), 258 (1123–1175), 66 Fujiwara no Tadamichi 藤原忠通 Fujiwara no Manshi 藤原満子 (1097–1164), 153 (or Mitsuko; n.d.), 68n Fujiwara no Tadanobu 藤原忠信 Fujiwara no Michikane 藤原道兼 (967–1035), 211–214 (961–995), 202 Fujiwara no Takaie 藤原隆家 Fujiwara no Michinaga 藤原道長 (979–1044), 202 (966–1027), 26–27, 42, 201ff, 211ff, 222, Fujiwara no Takaiko 藤原高子 230, 236 (d. 858), 71 Fujiwara no Michitaka 藤原道隆 Fujiwara no Takafuji 藤原高藤 (953–995), 202, 204 (838–900), 96, 117 Fujiwara no Michitsuna 藤原道綱 Fujiwara no Takanobu 藤原隆信 (955–1020), 211 (1142–1205), 228, 235 Fujiwara no Michitsuna no haha 藤原道 Fujiwara no Takatō 藤原高遠綱母 ca. 935–995), 176ff, 181–182, 234 (949–1013), 211, 213–214, 217–218 Fujiwara no Morosuke 藤原師輔 Fujiwara no Teika 藤原定家 (1162–1241), (908–960), 163–164 16–17, 228, 231–232, 234, 248–249 Fujiwara no Mototoshi 藤原基俊 Fujiwara no Teishi 藤原定子 (d. 1142), 153, 219 (or Sadako; 977–1001), 204, Fujiwara no Mototsune 藤原基経 207–208, 221–222, 225 (836–891), 62 Fujiwara no Tokihira 藤原時平 Fujiwara no Nagayoshi 藤原長能 (871–909), 90, 126, 163 (949–1009), 212n Fujiwara no Toshiyuki 藤原敏行 Fujiwara no Nakahira 藤原仲平 (d. 901?), 103 (875–945), 125–126 Fujiwara no Yasutada 藤原保忠 Fujiwara no Okikaze 藤原興風 (fl. early (890–936), 90 tenth century), 86–87 Fujiwara no Yoshitsune 藤原良経 Fujiwara no Onshi 藤原温子 (or Atsuko; (1169–1206), 228, 231, 235 872–907), 124 Fujiwara no Yukinari 藤原行成 Fujiwara no Sadakuni 藤原定国 (972–1027), 205, 207–208, 210–211 (867–906), 68n, 74, 91–92, 117, 119, 122, Fukiage 吹上, 165, 170 186 Fun’ya no Yasuhide 文屋康秀 (late ninth Fujiwara no Sanefusa 藤原実房 century), 239–240 (1147–1225), 228, 235–236 Fusō ryakki 扶桑略記 Abbreviated Fujiwara no Sanesada 藤原実貞 history of Japan; early twelfth century), (1139–1191), 235 157–158 Fujiwara no Sanesuke 藤原実資 fusuma 襖. See screens (957–1046), 37–38, 205–207, 217ff, 226 Future and the Past. See Gukanshō 284 index garden contests (senzai awase 前栽合). Heichū monogatari 平中物語. See Tales See contests of Heichū garden poetry contest (senzai uta awase Heldt, Gustav, 45, 66, 100, 120, 175, 233 前栽歌合). See contests Henjō 遍昭 (816–890), 161 gardens, 26, 41, 152, 161–163, 193, 241, Higashi Sanjōin. See Fujiwara no Senshi 246–247 Hirano Takakuni, 66 geese (kari 雁), 82, 151, 242. See also Hironiwa. See Abe no Hironiwa topics, poetic Hirotaka. See Kose no Hirotaka Genji monogatari 源氏物語. See Tale of hisangi 非参議, 26 Genji Hitomaro. See Kakinomoto no Hitomaro Gishūmon’in. See Kujō Ninshi Hōan ninen kugatsu jūninichi Kanpaku Gleanings from Meager Grasses. See Shūi Naidaijin Tadamichi uta awase 保安二 gusō 年九月十二日関白内大臣忠通歌合. Goichijō, Emperor 後一条天皇 See Regent Tadamichi Poetry Contest (1008–1036, r. 1016–1036), 222 Hokuzanshō 北山抄 (early eleventh Gombrich, E.H., 21, 193 century), 159 Gonki 権記 (Record of the Acting Grand Hollander, John, 7 Counselor, early eleventh century), 205 Homer (n.d.), 7 Goodman, Nelson, 29 hon’i 本意. See poetic essence Gossamer Journal (Kagerō nikki 蜻蛉日記; Hon’in Sadaijin Tokihira senzai awase. See late tenth century), 176ff, 181–182 Tokihira Garden Contest Gosenshū 後撰集 or Gosenwakashū 後撰 honkadori 本歌取り. See allusive 和歌集 (Later collection; ca. 951), 91, variation 118, 127, 169 Hōrinji 法輪寺, 220 Goshirakawa, Emperor 後白河天皇 hototogisu 杜鵑, 時鳥 and other variants. (1127–1192, r. 1155–1158), 223–225, 228, See cuckoo 237 How to Construct a Garden. See Sakuteiki Gotoba, Emperor 後鳥羽天皇 (1180–1230, Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), 20 r. 1183–1198), 201, 222–224, 230, Hyakunin isshu 百人一首 (One hundred 236–237, 248 poems by one hundred poets; early Great Mirror (Ōkagami 大鏡; ca. 1119), thirteenth century), 113 127 “Great Preface” (Daxu 大序), 4–5 Ichijō, Emperor 一条天皇 (980–1011, great thanksgiving services. r. 986–1011), 201, 202, 204, 209–210, 214, See ceremonies 221, 225 Gukanshō 愚管抄 (Future and the past; Ii Haruki, 176, 211 1219), 223, 230, 237 Ikuta River, Legend of (Ikutagawa densetsu Gyokuyō 玉葉 (Jade leaves; after 1200), 生田川伝説), 144ff 225, 228, 230ff Iliad (eighth century b.c.e.), 7 Illustrated Record of Imperial Objects at the hagi 萩. See bush clover Shōsōin. See Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku haiku 俳句, 2 Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. See E Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), 127n inga kyō haptics, 21n illustration (vs. caption), 45–47 Hakushi monjū (白氏文集; ca. 824), 48. image (xiang 象), 5 See also Bai Juyi imperial anthologies (chokusenshū Haraaka. See Kuwabara no Haraaka 勅撰集), 2, 80 See also individual Hatsuyuki monogatari 初雪物語. See Tale chokusenshū by title of the First Snow Inoue Ken’ichirō, 235 headnotes (kotobagaki 詞書), 22 inscription, 25, 47–48, 66, 79ff, 89, 122, 127, Heffernan, James, 7, 20 205, 220, 242 Heian period 平安時代 (794–1185), 1, 22, intent (zhi 志), 5 32, 36, 114, 127, 151, 239, 244 iris contests (neawase 根合). See contests index 285

Ise, Lady 伊勢 (d. ca. 939), 12, 25, 79, 123ff, Kanezane. See Kujō Kanezane 146, 242, 245 Kanke bunsō 菅家文草 (Sugawara poems by, 110, 125, 127, 128, 131ff, 146, collection; late ninth century), 44, 62 242–243 kanshi 漢詩. See poems, Chinese Ise Collection (Ise shū 伊勢集; tenth Karasaki 唐崎, 176, 243 century), 124ff, 134, 135ff, 141 kari 雁. See geese Ise monogatari 伊勢物語. See Tales of Ise Kasuga Shrine 春日神社, 224, 230 Ise shū 伊勢集. See Ise Collection Katagiri Yōichi, 70, 99 Ishiyama 石山, 9 Katō Kōichi, 99 Iwashimizu 岩清水, 230 Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 Izumi Noriko, 170 (1760–1849), 115 Izumi Shikibu Diary (Izumi Shikibu nikki Kawara (no) in 河原院, 161 和泉式部日記; early eleventh Kazan, Emperor 花山天皇 (968–1008, century), 139 r. 984–986), 118, 202, 208, 211, 215–216, 219 Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部 (b. 976?), 139 Keats, John (1795–1821), 10–12, 54, 60–61, 129 Jade Leaves. See Gyokuyō Keikokushū 経国集 (Collection for Japanese and Chinese Poems for Singing. governing the country; 827), 58–61 See Wakan rōeishū Kenkō. See Yoshida Kenkō Japanese Poems on Chinese Lines. Kenreimon’in. See Taira no Tokushi See Kudai waka Kenshi. See Fujiwara no Kenshi Jien 慈円 (1155–1225), 223, 237 Kenshō 顕昭 (ca. 1130–ca. 1210), 116, 173 Jingoji Mountains and Waters screen kichō 几帳 (curtain stand/curtain of 神護寺山水屏風 (thirteenth century state), 40, 42 copy of eleventh century original), 35, kiku 菊. See chrysanthemums 38–39, 41 Kikuchi Yasuhiko, 129 Jikkōshō 十口抄 (Ten oral commentaries; kin 琴 (seven-stringed zither), 247 ca. 1501), 172 Kinkaishū 金槐集 (Kamakura minister’s jokotoba 序詞 (literary preface), 83 collection; early thirteenth century), Jōtōmon’in. See Fujiwara no Shōshi 251–252 judai 入内 (court entrance). Ki no Tokifumi 紀時文 (or Tokibumi; See ceremonies 922?–996?), 88 Ki no Tomonori 紀友則 (ca. 845–907), 86 Kagerō nikki 蜻蛉日記. See Gossamer Ki no Tsurayuki 紀貫之 (ca. 872–945), Journal 2, 6, 12, 15, 25, 27–28, 68ff, 79, 87, 90ff, Kaifūsō 懐風藻 (Nostalgic recollections of 128, 140, 149–150, 182ff, 190, 197, 233, 245, poetry; 751), 154 250 kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot word), 20 and “Kana Preface,”, 2–5, 13, 17, 19, 21, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本人麻呂 27, 149–150, 192, 196 (ca. 662–710), 152 and Tosa Diary, 124 Kamakura period 鎌倉時代 (1185–1333), poems by, 68, 69, 81, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 36, 242 95, 97, 98, 101, 105–106, 111, 113, 141, 162, Kamijō Shōji, 189 190, 240–241, 250 Kamo no Chōmei 鴨長明 (1155?–1216), Ki no Yoshimochi 紀淑望 (d. 919), 3 90n Kintō. See Fujjiwara no Kintō kanajo仮名序. See “Kana Preface” Kintō Collection (Kintō shū公任集; “Kana Preface” (kanajo 仮名序), 2–5, 13, eleventh century), 212ff 17, 19, 21, 27, 149–150, 196 Kintō shū 公任集. See Kintō Collection kandachime (or kandachibe 上達部), 206 Kishi, Princess 規子内親王 (or Noriko; Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944), 196–197, 949–986), 168–169 248 Kishi Naishinnō senzai uta awase 規子内 Kaneie. See Fujiwara no Kaneie 親王前栽歌合 (Princess Kishi garden Kanehira. See Fujiwara no Kanehira poetry contest; 973), 169 286 index

Kiyomori. See Taira no Kiyomori Komachiya Teruhiko, 111 Kiyosuke. See Fujiwara no Kiyosuke koma mukae 駒迎. See tribute horses, Kiyotada. See Sugawara no Kiyotada bringing of Kiyowara no Motosuke 清原元輔 Konishi Jin’ichi, 152, 197 (908–990), 118n Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集. Kobayashi Taichirō, 39 See Tales of Times Now Past kōgō 皇后 (empress), 222 Korai fūtei shō 古来風躰抄 (Poetic styles Kojiki 古事記 Record of Ancient Matters; past and present; ca. 1200), 153 ca. 712), 125–126 Korechika. See Fujiwara no Korechika Kokinshū 古今集 or Kokinwakashū Korehira. See Fujiwara no Korehira 古今和歌集 (Collection of ancient and Koresada, Prince 是貞親王 (d. 903), 186 modern times; ca. 905), 2, 25, 70, 84, 86, Koreyuki. See Fujiwara no Koreyuki 92, 107–108, 118, 124, 139, 178, 239 Korenori. See Sakanoue Korenori KKS 41, 109 Kose no Hirotaka 巨勢弘高 (n.d.), KKS 89, 105–106 210–211 KKS 115, 190 Kose no Kanaoka 巨勢金岡 (d. ca. 895), KKS 103, 70 51 KKS 169, 103 kotakagari 小鷹狩. See topics, poetic KKS 195, 104 kotoba 詞 (words, form), 27, 197 KKS 273, 19, 165 kotobagaki 詞書. See headnotes KKS 277, 117 Kubota Jun, 150, 153, 234–235 KKS 293, 72, 175 kudai waka 句題和歌 (genre), 37, 160 KKS 294, 72, 112 Kudai waka 句題和歌 ( Japanese Poems KKS 304, 99n on Chinese Lines; 894), 160 KKS 305, 172 Kudō Shigenori, 221 KKS 336, 69 Kujō Kanezane 九条兼実 (1149–1207), KKS 351, 86 26–27, 201, 221, 222ff, 235ff, 236–238 KKS 352, 87, 119 Kujō Ninshi 九条任子 (later Gishūmon’in KKS 354, 119 宜秋門院 1173–1239), 26, 201, 221, 222ff, KKS 361, 186 236–238, 248, 250 KKS 362, 73 Kujō Yoshimichi 九条良通 (1168–1188), KKS 363, 68 223–224 KKS 404, 189 Kuranaka Shinobu, 57 KKS 439, 241–242 Kuwabara no Haraaka 桑原腹赤 KKS 445, 240 (789–825), 57–58, 73, 111, 172 KKS 780, 125 Kyōgoku Tamekane 京極為兼 KKS 852, 162 (1254–1332), 195 KKS 930, 8, 67 KKS 931, 81, 88 LaMarre, Thomas, 24, 106, 243 KKS 932, 82, 88, 241–242 Lee, Renssalear W., 13 KKS 982, 126 leiju 類聚 (J. ruijū, topical concordances), KKS 1093, 178n 155 Kokin waka rokujō 古今和歌六帖 Literary Arts Classified (Yiwen leiju 藝文 (Six volumes of old and new Japanese 類聚; seventh century), 155–156 poetry; late tenth century), 184 Li Bo 季白 (or Li BaiJ. Ri Haku; 701–762) Kokka chinhōchō 国家珍反宝帳 (Records Lo, Irving, 48 of rare treasures of the nation; eighth century), 57, 171 Magritte, René (1898–1967), 195 Kōkō, Emperor 光孝天皇 (830–887, maidenflowers (ominaeshi 女郎花), 4, 19, r. 884–887), 74 164, 241. See also topics, poetic Kokon chōmonjū 古今著聞集 (Notable makura kotoba 枕詞 (pillow word), 92, tales old and new; ca. 1254), 51 190 kokoro 心 (heart, feelings), 27, 197 manajo 真名序. See “Mana Preface” Komachi. See Ono no Komachi “Mana Preface.” (manajo 真名序), 3 index 287

Mandaishū 万代集 or Mandaiwakashū Minamoto no Yoshitomo 源義朝万代和歌集 (Collection of myriad eras; (1123–1160), 252 ca. 1249), 219 Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 mandala, 46 (1159–1189), 222 Manshi. See Fujiwara no Manshi Minamoto no Zaishi 源在子 (or Ariko, Man’yōshū 万葉集 (Collection of myriad later Shōmeimon’in 承明門院; leaves; ca. 759), 32, 155–156, 191 1171–1257), 237 MYS 265, 16 Miner, Earl, 187 MYS 1682, 64 mitate 見立, 65, 68–70, 78, 101, 113–114, MYS 1069–1086, 155 243–244 MYS 1874–1876, 156 Mitsune. See Ōshikōchi no Mitsune MYS 3872, 185 Mitsune Collection (Mitsune shū 躬恒集; MYS 4139–4140, 65 tenth century), 9, 112, 114ff, 117, 122, MYS 4477, 185 174–175 maps, 46 Mitsune shū 躬恒集. See Mitsune Collection Masuda Shigeo, 36 Miwa Mountain 三輪山, 125–126 Masukagami. See Clear Mirror Mochiki. See Sakanoue no Mochiki McCullough, Helen, 119, 122 Mochizuki 望月, 12, 98–99 meisho 名所 (famous place names), 157 mogi 裳着. See ceremonies, coming-of-age Mibu no Tadami 壬生忠見 (n.d.), 99 momijiba 紅葉. See autumn leaves Mibu no Tadamine 壬生忠岑 (fl. ca. Monmu, Emperor 文武天皇 (683–707, 890–920), 86, 186 r. 697–707), 154–155 Michichika. See Minamoto no Michichika monogatari 物語. See narratives, fictional Michikane. See Fujiwara no Michikane monogatari byōbu 物語屏風 (narrative Michikaze. See Ono no Michikaze screens), 129–130, 140, 143 Michinaga. See Fujiwara no Michinaga mono no na 物の名 (names of things), Michinoku 陸奥, 161 239–240, 242 Michitaka. See Fujiwara no Michitaka Montoku, Emperor 文徳天皇 (827–858, Michitsuna. See Fujiwara no Michitsuna r. 850–858), 8, 67, 71 Michitsuna’s Mother. See Fujiwara no Morosuke. See Fujiwara no Morosuke Michitsuna no haha Mostow, Joshua, 24, 124, 244 Michizane. See Sugawara no Michizane Motokata. See Ariwara no Motokata Midō kanpaku ki 御堂関白記. Record of Mototoshi. See Fujiwara no Mototoshi the Midō Regent; after 1021), 205, 211 Mototsune. See Fujiwara no Mototsune Miidera 三井寺, 188 Motosuke. See Kiyowara no Motosuke Minamoto no Michichika 源通親 Motoyasu, Prince 本康親王 (d. 902), 119 (1149–1202), 224, 237 mountains and waters. See senzui Minamoto no Sanetomo 源実朝 moya 母屋, 41–42 (1192–1219), 251–254 Mumyōzōshi 無名草子 (Nameless book, Minamoto no Shitagō 源順 (911–983), 169 ca. 1200), 123 Minamoto no Takaakira 源高明 Murakami, Emperor 村上天皇 (926–967, (914–983), 158 r. 946–967), 66, 120, 169 Minamoto no Tsunenobu 源経信 Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部 (b. ca. 976), 42, (1016–1097), 153 133, 143, 222, 246–248, 253 Minamoto no Tōru 源融 (822–895), 161–162, 253 Naga no Okimaro 長意貴麻呂 (late Minamoto no Toshikata 源俊賢 seventh century), 16 (959–1027), 206, 211, 217 Nagayoshi. See Fujiwara no Nagayoshi Minamoto no Toshiyori 源俊頼 nairan 内覧 (inspection), 202 (1055?–1129?), 150 Nakahira. See Fujiwara no Nakahira Minamoto no Yasumitsu 源泰光 Nameless Book. See Mumyōzōshi (924–995), 111 naming of the buddhas. See ceremonies Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝 Nan Goshūi 難後拾遺 (Faulting the (1147–1199), 223, 252 Goshūishū; ca. 1090), 153 288 index

Nara period 奈良時代 (710–784), 22–23 Ōsaka Barrier (Ōsaka no seki 逢坂関), Narihira. See Ariwara no Narihira 98, 138 narratives, fictional ([tsukuri] monoga- Ōshikōchi no Mitsune 凡河内躬恒 tari), 25, 98, 135, 147, 178 (fl. early tenth century), 8, 25, 79, 107ff, See also individual narratives by title 128, 173–175 Nashitsubo no gonin 梨壺五人. See Five poems by, 9, 108, 109, 112–113, 114, 116, Men of the Pear Chamber 117, 122, 172 New Collection of Ancient and Modern Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人 (665–731) Times. See Shinkokinshū Ōtomo no Yakamochi 大伴家持 New Selection of Poems to Sing. See Shinsen (717?–785), 64–65, 155 rōeishū Owen, Stephen, 156, 198 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 21 Ozawa Masao, 150 Nihon shoki 日本書紀. See Chronicles of Japan painting, 1, 48ff, 122, 130, 143, 239 Ninmyō, Emperor 仁明天皇 (810–850, appreciation of (Ch. hua zan 畫賛, r. 833–850), 66, 120 J. gasan 画賛), 53, 62, 144 Ninnaji 仁和寺, 51 painting-poems (Ch. tihua shi 題畫詩, Ninshi. See Kujō Ninshi J. daiga shi 題画詩), 24, 48, 58, nobleness of conception, 13, 14 61–62 Nobunori. See Taira no Nobunori characteristics of, 63 Nostalgic Recollections of Poetry. examples, 48–56 See Kaifūsō Palace Chrysanthemum Contest (Dairi kiku Notable Tales Old and New. See Kokon awase 内裏菊合 ca. 890), 170 chōmonjū Palace Poetry Contest of 960 (Tentoku notional ekphrasis. See ekphrasis yonen dairi uta awase 天徳四年内裏 nyōgo 女御 ( junior consort), 204 歌合; 960), 153 pampas grass (susuki 薄), 163. See also Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), 10–12, 54, topics, poetic 61, 129 parting at dawn (ariake no wakare 有明の Ōe no Chisato 大江千里 (fl. late ninth 別れ), 152–154. See also topics, poetic century), 160 patronage, 4, 80, 89, 138, 150, 158, 201ff Ōkagami 大鏡. See Great Mirror perceptual cycle, 20–21, 28, 193, 194, 198, Okikaze. See Fujiwara no Okikaze 244 Okimaro. See Naga no Okimaro personal collections (shikashū 私家集), 1 ominaeshi 女郎花. See maidenflowers perspective, 9–10, 25, 71, 76–77, 81ff, 94, One Hundred Poems by One Hundred 116, 252 Poets. See Hyakunin isshu Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973), 114–115 Ōnakatomi no Yorimoto 大中臣頼基 picturacy, 20 (b. ca. 886), 76–77 picture-diary. See e-nikki Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu 大中臣能宣 picture scroll. See emaki (921–991), 118n Pillow Book, The (Makura no sōshi 枕草子; onna e 女絵. See women’s pictures early eleventh century), 15 Ono no Komachi 小野小町 (ca. 825– pillow word. See makura kotoba ca. 900), 124 pivot word. See kakekotoba Ono no Michikaze小野道風 (893–966), Plato (427–347 b.c.e.), 14 128 Pliny the Elder (23–79), 51n Ononomiya nenjū gyōji (Ononomiya plovers (chidori 千鳥), 90, 153, 184ff, 191. annual rites and ceremonies, early See also topics, poetic eleventh century), 217 poems (see also screen poems) Onshi. See Fujiwara no Onshi Japanese (waka 和歌), 6, 8, 18, 37, 39, optical allusions, 10, 17–18, 78, 182, 201, 66, 160, 169, 217, 229 239, 250, 254 Chinese (kanshi 詩), 8, 37, 44, 56–62, oriku 折句. See acrostic 66, 154–155, 158, 160, 229 Orwell, George (1903–1950), 195 on things. See yong wu index 289

Poems for the Palace Screen of Monthly Regent Tadamichi Poetry Contest (Hōan Activities (Engi rokunen dairi tsukinami ninen kugatsu jūninichi Kanpaku Naidai- byōbu uta 延喜六年内裏月次屏風歌), jin Tadamichi uta awase 保安二年九月 183ff, 188 十二日関白内大臣忠通歌合), 153 poem-squares (shikishi 色紙/shikishigata Reizei-in 冷泉院, 57, 159, 163, 171 色紙形), 36, 38–39 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–1792), 13 poem-tale. See uta monogatari rhapsody ( fu 賦), 57n poetic essence (hon’i 本意), 2, 14–17, 20, Ri Haku. See Li Bo 22, 28, 149, 152–153, 182, 245 rokkasen 六歌仙 (Six poetic immortals), poetic illnesses (kabyō / uta no yamai 72n 歌病), 150 ryō 料 (base material), 93–94, 96, 110, 149 Poetic Styles Past and Present. See Korai Ryōunshū 凌雲集 (Collection soaring fūtei shō above the clouds; ca. 814), 158–159 poetic topics (dai 題). See topics, poetic, and individual topics by name Sadafun. See Taira no Sadafun poetry contests (uta awase 歌合), 17, 22, Sadakuni. See Fujiwara no Sadakuni 44, 70, 82, 124 Sadayasu, Prince 貞保親王 (870–924), Palace Poetry Contest of 960 (Tentoku 86 yonen dairi uta awase 天徳四年内裏 Saga, Emperor 嵯峨天皇 (786–842, 歌合), 153 r. 809–823), 8, 33, 58–60, 158–159, 171 Regent Tadamichi Poetry Contest (Hōan Saigyō 西行 (1118–1190), 249–250 ninen kugatsu jūninichi Kanpaku Saishōshitennōin 最勝四天王院, 248 Naidaijin Tadamichi uta awase 保安 Sakanoue no Korenori 坂上是則 (fl. early 二年九月十二日関白内大臣忠通 tenth century), 73–74, 81–84, 241–242 歌合), 153 Sakanoue no Mochiki 坂上望城 (n.d.), Teiji-in Poetry Contest (Teiji-in uta awase 74n, 118n 亭子院歌合; 913), 105–106, 171 Sakuteiki 作庭記 (How to construct a Yukihira Poetry Contest (Zai Minbukyō garden; mid-eleventh century), 161 ke uta awase 在民部卿家歌合; Sanefusa. See Fujiwara no Sanefusa 885), 169–170 Sanesada. See Fujiwara no Sanesada pregnant moment, 54–55, 95, 105–106 Sanesuke. See Fujiwara no Sanesuke Primer for Japanese Poetry. See Waka Sanetomo. See Minamoto no Sanetomo shogakushō Saneyori. See Fujiwara no Saneyori protention, 20 Sanjō, Emperor 三条天皇 (976–1017, proximate physical reality, 26, 193, 199 r. 1011–1016), 221 Sanjō no Machi 三条野町(ninth century) Quintilian (first century c.e.), 6 8, 67, 70–71 Qu Yuan 屈原 (340 b.c.e.–278 b.c.e.) Sankashū 山家集 (Collection of a Moun- tain Home; late twelfth century), 250 rakudai 落題 (missing topic), 150 Sano Crossing (Sano no watari 佐野の Record of Ancient Matters. See Kojiki 渡り), 16–17, 18 Record of Famous Painters from the Tang Sao 左保, 185–186 (Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫録; sasshi 冊子 (booklets), 210 ca. 840), 47 Screen Poems for Ninshi’s Court Entrance Record of the Acting Grand Counselor. (Bunji rokunen Ninshi judai ryō byōbu See Gonki waka 文治年任子入内料屏風和歌; Record of the Midō Regent. See Midō 1190), 226ff, 232ff, 250 kanpaku ki screens, 31, 241 Record of the Ononomiya Minister of the generic (shōji 障子), 40 Right. See Shōyūki curtain stands (kichō 几帳), 40, 42 Record of the Western Palace. See Seikyūki folding (byōbu 屏風), 1, 31, 33, 40, 42, Records of Rare Treasures of the Nation. 172, 173ff, 193, 205, 208, 226, 241 See Kokka chinhōchō sliding ( fusuma 襖), 40 reed-script pictures. See ashide-e standing (tsuitate 衝立), 40 290 index

types, 40 (Continued collection of ancient and uses of, 1, 40–45 modern times; 1265), 219 screen poems, Japanese (byōbu uta Shoku Nihon kōki (Continued later records 屏風歌), 1, 7, 11, 18–19, 23, 31, 84, 118, of Japan; ca. 869), 66 120, 202ff, 226ff shōji 障子. See screens screen poems, Chinese (byōbu shi Shōmeimon’in. See Minamoto no Zaishi 屏風詩), 23, 47–48 Shōmu, Emperor 聖武天皇 (701–756, sechien 節宴 (seasonal banquets), 158, r. 724–749), 32, 230 169 Shōshi. See Fujiwara no Shōshi Seikyūki 西宮記 (Record of the western Shōsōin 正倉院 (imperial repository), palace; before 969?), 158 32–33, 46, 57, 171 Seiryōden 清涼殿, 58, 62, 82, 162, 231 Shōsōin gyobutsu zuroku 正倉院図録 Sei Shōnagon (ca. 966–1017), 15 (Illustrated record of imperial objects at Sekine Yoshiko, 132, 135 the Shōsōin; eighth century), 33 Senshi. See Fujiwara no Senshi Shōyūki 小右記 (Record of the senzai awase 前栽合. See contests Ononomiya Minister of the Right; Senzaishū 千載集 Senzaiwakashū 千載和 978–1032), 37, 205–206, 211 歌集 1187), 213, 220 Shūi gusō 拾遺愚草 (Gleanings from SZS 960, 213 meager grasses; 1216 with later senzui 山水 (or sansui, mountains and additions), 232, 233–235 waters) Shūishō chū 拾遺抄注 ūishō; mid eleventh Jingoji screen, 38–39, 41, 47 century), 116 Tōji screen, 33–37, 41, 47 Shūishū 拾遺集 or Shūiwakashū 拾 Sesonji 世尊寺, 111 遺和歌集 (Collection of gleanings; setsuwa 説話 (short tales), 51n ca. 1007), 74, 90, 95, 96, 118, 184, 219 Shakyamuni, Prince (ca. fifth century SIS 16, 108 b.c.e.), 46 SIS 17, 111 Shen Deqian 沈德潛 (1673–1769), 53n SIS 170, 99n Shiga no yamagoe 滋賀山越 (Shiga SIS 180, 112 mountain pass), 188ff SIS 183, 110 shika 鹿. See deer SIS 129, 116 shikashū 私家集. See personal collections SIS 224, 187 shikishigata 色紙形. See poem-squares SIS 439, 95 Shimizu, Yoshiaki, 39, 121 SIS 492, 188 Shimizu, Yoshiko, 84, 175 SIS 1091, 74–75 shinden zukuri 寝殿造 (palace-style SIS 1247, 76 architecture), 38, 41–42, 140 Shukaku, Prince守覚法親王 (1150–1202) Shinkokinshū 新古今集 or 226n Shinkokinwakashū 新古今和歌集 (New Shun’e 俊恵 (b.113), 90n collection of ancient and modern times, Shunkamon’in 春華門院 (given name ca. 1205), 16, 248 Shōshi 昇子; 1195–1211), 237 SKKS 55, 160 Shunzei. See Fujiwara no Shunzei SKKS 671, 16 Silla (kingdom), 31–32 SKKS 953, 248 Six dynasties 六朝 (220–589), 54n, 107 Shinsen rōeishū 新選朗詠集 (New Six Volumes of Old and New Japanese selections of poems to sing; Poetry. See Kokin waka rokujō ca. 1107–1123), 219 Six poetic immortals. See rokkasen Shiogama 塩竈, 161, 163, 172, 253 Sōgi 宗祇 (1421–1502), 172n Shishiden 紫宸殿 (enthronement hall), Song dynasty 床朝 (960–1279), 47, 55, 59n 85 shitagaki 下書. See underdrawings Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chōgonka Shitagō. See Minamoto no Shitagō 長恨歌), 130ff, 134 Shokukokinshū 続古今集 or Sosei 素性 (d. ca. 910), 19, 70–73, 115, Shokukokinwakashū 続古今和歌集 119–120 index 291

Sosei Collection (Sosei shū 素性集; tenth taki滝. See waterfalls century), 19n, 71n Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monoga- Stein, Leo, 245 tari 栄華物語; ca. 1092), 165–168, 171, Sternberg, Meir, 10 208–211, 215–216, 219 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 114–115, 198 Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏 Suetsune. See Fujiwara no Suetsune 物語; ca. 1005), 133, 139, 143–144, 181, Sūfukuji 崇福寺, 188 222, 245–248, 253 Sugawara Collection. See Kanke bunsō Tale of the First Snow (Hatsuyuki monoga- Sugawara no Michizane 菅原道真 tari 初雪物語), 208 (845–903), 44–45, 62, 164–165 Tales of Heichū (Heichū monogatari 平中 Sugawara no Kiyotada 菅原清公物語; ca. 965), 135–137, 139 (770–842), 60–62 Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari 伊勢物語; late suhama 州浜 (seaside dioramas), 2, 164ff, ninth century), 135, 139, 141–143 170ff, 193, 241 Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku Suminoe 住江, 4, 19, 43, 122 monogatari shū 今昔物語集; ca. 1252), Sun Chuo 孫綽 (320–377), 57n 128 Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), 50n, 55, 244, 253 Tales of Yamato (Yamato monogatari 大和 susuki. See pampas grass 物語; ca. 951), 126–127, 142, 144ff Sutoku, Emperor 崇徳天皇 (1119–1164, Tamagami Takuya, 77, 84, 98, 129 r. 1123–1241), 228 Tamekane. See Kyōgoku Tamekane Suzaku, Emperor 朱雀天皇 (923–952, Tanabata 七夕, 74–75, 131 r. 930–946), 140 Tang dynasty 唐朝 (618–907), 1, 24, 32–33, 46, 48, 127, 151, 158 Tabito. See Ōtomo no Tabito Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫録. Tachibana no Narisue 橘成季 (n.d., See Record of Famous Painters from thirteenth century), 51n the Tang Tachibana no Toshitsuna 橘俊綱 Tani Tomoko, 231 (1028–1094), 161n Tatsuta River 竜田川, 71–73 Tadafusa. See Fujiwara no Tadafusa Teiji-in Poetry Contest (Teiji-in uta awase Tadamichi. See Fujiwara no Tadamichi 亭子院歌合; 913), 105–106 Tadamine. See Mibu no Tadamine Teika. See Fujiwara no Teika Tadanobu. See Fujiwara no Tadanobu Teishi. See Fujiwara no Teishi Taikenmon’in. See Fujiwara no Shōshi Tenmu, Emperor 天武天皇 (d. 686, Taira no Kiyomori 平清盛 (1118–1181), r. 673–686), 31 228 Ten Oral Commentaries. See Jikkōshō Taira no Nobunori 平信範 (1112–1187), Tentoku yonen dairi uta awase 天徳四年 228n 内裏歌合. See Palace Poetry Contest Taira no Sadafun 平貞文 (d. 923), 74–75 of 960 Taira no Tokushi 平徳子 (or Noriko textiles, 111–113 [Tokuko], later Kenreimon’in 建礼門 three perfections (Ch. sanjue, J. sansetsu, 院; 1155–1213), 228 三絶), 1 Takaakira. See Minamoto no Takaakira thought-images, 2 Takafuji. See Fujiwara no Takafuji Tōdaiji 東大寺, 46 Takaie. See Fujiwara no Takaie Tōdaiji kenmotsu chō 東大寺献物長 Takakura, Emperor 高倉天皇 (1161–1181, (Documented Offerings at Tōdai r. 1168–1180), 223, 228 Temple; eighth century), 33 Takano Haruyo, 70, 183 Toba, Emperor 鳥羽天皇 (1103–1156, Takanobu. See Fujiwara no Takanobu r. 1107–1123), 228 Takasago 高砂, 4 To Ho. See Du Fu Takatō. See Fujiwara no Takatō Tōji Mountains and Waters screen 東寺山 Takatō Collection (Daini Takatō shū 大弐水屏風 (eleventh century), 33, 34–35, 高遠集; early eleventh century), 36–39, 41 211–215, 217 TokifumiTokihira. See Fujiwara no Takedo Tsuneo, 37 Tokihira 292 index

Tokihira Garden Contest (Hon’in Sadaijin Tosa nikki 土佐日記. See Tosa Diary Tokihira senzai awase 本院左大臣時平 Toshikata. See Minamoto no Toshikata 前栽合; early tenth century), 163 Toshitsuna. See Tachibana no Toshitsuna Tokiwayama 常盤山. See Evergreen Toshiyori zuinō 俊頼随脳 Toshiyori’s Mountain poetic essentials; ca. 1115), 150 Tokuhara Shigemi, 162 Toshiyuki. See Fujiwara no Toshiyuki Tokushi. See Taira no Tokushi tribute horses, bringing of (koma mukae topics, poetic (dai 題), 2, 14, 17, 20, 25–28, 駒迎え), 12, 98, 233. See also topics, 39, 149ff, 174, 179, 182, 192ff, 197, 245, 253 poetic autumn leaves (momijiba 紅葉), 38, 72, Tsuchimikado, Emperor 土御門天皇 172–173 (1195–1231, r. 1198–1210), 237 bellflowers (rindō 竜胆), 163 Tsuchimikado Mansion 土御門殿, 42, bush clover (hagi 萩), 95, 105, 110,163 206–207, 211 changing of the wardrobe (koromogae tsukinami byōbu 月次屏風 (screens 衣替), 233 depicting monthly activities), 92, 112, chrysanthemums (kiku 菊), 19–20, 105, 231 113, 161, 164–165, 192 Tsukuba (mountain) 筑波山, 4, 19 compound (musubidai 結題), 251 tsuitate 衝立. See screens cooling off in mountain springs Tsunenobu. See Minamoto no Tsunenobu ( yamanoi nōryō 山井納涼), 235 Tsurayuki. See Ki no Tsurayuki cranes (tsuru/tazu 鶴), 15, 212, 233, 234 Tsurayuki Collection (Tsurayuki shū cuckoo (hototogisu 杜鵑, 時鳥 and 貫之集), 88–89, 90ff, 116, 140–141, 183, other variants), 153, 170, 191 187–188, 190, 250 deer (shika 鹿), 15, 39n, 95, 105, 156 Tsurayuki shū 貫之集. See Tsurayuki elite New Year’s greetings (kochōhai Collection 小朝拝), 233 Tsurezuregusa 徒然草. See Essays in end of year salutations (seibo 歳暮), Idleness 233 geese (kari 雁), 82, 151, 242, 251–252 Uda, Emperor (867–931, r. 887–897), 9, 79, Gosechi dancers’ entrance (gosechi 110, 124, 126ff, 157, 174 sannyū), 233 underdrawings (shitagaki 下書), 181 hunting (with small falcons, kotakagari Urashima 浦島, 162–163 小鷹狩), 38 utamakura 歌枕 (famous place names), Kasuga Festival (kasuga sai 春日際), 157 233 uta monogatari 歌物語 (poem-tale), 98, maidenflowers (ominaeshi 女郎花), 4, 135, 136, 139 19, 164, 241 ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is meanings, 151ff, 154 poetry”), 6 mist (kiri 霧), 171 moon (tsuki 月), 154ff Velázquez, Diego (1599–1660), 100n orange blossoms (tachibana 橘), 163 pampas grass (susuki 薄), 163 waka 和歌. See poems, Japanese parting at dawn (ariake no wakare 有明 Wakan rōeishū 和漢朗詠集 (Japanese の別れ), 152–154 and Chinese Poems for Singing; plovers (chidori 千鳥), 90, 153, 184ff, ca. 1012), 243–244 191 Waka shogakushō 和歌初学抄 (Primer purification at summer’s end (minazuki for Japanese poetry; 1169), 150 barae 水無月祓), 233 Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249), 5 tribute horses, bringing of (koma Wang Wei 王維 (701–761), 55–56 muakae 駒迎え), 12, 98, 233 waterfalls (taki滝), 8, 39n, 67 warbler (uguisu 鶯), 171 Weeds Composed for Long Autumns. wild pinks (nadeshiko 撫子), 163 See Chōshū eisō Tōru. See Minamoto no Tōru Wei Hong 衛宏 (first century c.e.), 4 Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki 土佐日記 ca. Wen xuan 文選 (Selections of Literature, 935), 124 J. Monzen; ca. 520), 57n index 293

Williams, Raymond, 14 Yorimoto. See Ōnakatomi no Yorimoto women’s pictures (onna e 女絵), 177–178 Yoritomo. See Minamoto no Yoritomo Yoshitomo. See Minamoto no Yoshimoto xiang 象. See image Yoshida Kenkō 吉田兼好 (ca. 1283–1352), Xiao Yue 蕭悅 (fl. early ninth century), 44 48–50 Yoshikawa Eiji, 81, 87 Xuanzong, Emperor 唐玄宗 (685–762), Yoshimichi. See Kujō Yoshimichi 130ff Yoshimochi. See Ki no Yoshimochi Yoshino 吉野, 68, 92, 114 Yacobi, Tamar, 10 Yoshinobu. See Ōnakatomi no Yoshinobu Yakaku teikin shō 夜鶴庭訓抄 (late Yoshitsune. See Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, twelfth century), 66 Minamoto no Yoshitsune Yakamochi. See Ōtomo no Yakamochi Yōzei, Emperor 陽成天皇 (868–949, Yamashita Michiyo, 132 r. 876–884), 62 yamato-e 大和絵 (Japanese pictures), 178 Yukihira. See Ariwara no Yukihira Yamato monogatari. See Tales of Yamato Yukihira Poetry Contest (Zai Minbukyō ke Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 (J. Yōkihi; 719–756), uta awase 在民部卿家歌合; 885), 130ff 169–170 Yasuhide. See Fun’ya no Yasuhide Yukinari. See Fujiwara no Yukinari Yasumitsu. See Minamoto no Yasumitsu Yū Kyonmi, 218 Yasutada. See Fujiwara no Yasutada yi 意 (concept), 5 Zai Minbukyō ke uta awase 在民部卿家 Yiwen leiju藝文類聚. See Literary Arts 歌合. See Yukihira Poetry Contest Classified Zaishi. See Minamoto no Zaishi yomeru 詠める (to compose), 81ff Zhang Zao 張藻 (fl. 766–778), 47 yong wu 詠物 (J. eibutsu; poems on zither. See kin things), 151, 154–155, 159ff, 164, 171