ABUTSU UTATANE IZAYOI NIKKI

Abutsu /Abutsu-ni /Ankamon'in no Shijo (1222-aft.1283)

"I HAD FORMED A CONNECTION WITH REMARKABLE MEN."
In her teens, Ankamon'in no Shijo served at the Japanese court as an attendant to Princess Ankamon'in (1209-83), hence her court name. By the time she went to court, her parents were dead and her step-father was governing a distant province. When she was about 18 years old, she apparently had an affair with an unknown man, but one so superior to her in rank that there was no chance of marriage to him. She left the court about that time, but we don't know if the affair was the reason.

Utatane (Fitful slumbers), her description of the unhappy affair and of her inability to accept the end of it, was apparently written shortly after the affair ended, but long enough so that she was able to look at it and herself with some objectivity. We know nothing of her life for the next 12 years except that she married and became the mother of two children.

In 1252 Shijo was employed by the family of Fujiwara no Tameie (1198-1275) to copy Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari. Tameie's branch of the Fujiwara had become the official custodians of many of the literary manuscripts belonging to the nation (much of what we have of early Japanese literature is extant because of the work of his family). A year later she married Tameie as a minor wife; in 1265, after the birth of three sons, she became his principal wife.
When Tameie died in 1275, Shijo became a Buddhist nun and took the name Abutsu-ni ("ni" means "nun"), but she did not retire from worldly activity. Soon there was conflict within the family as to whether the estate (and the guardianship of the precious manuscripts) would go to Tameie's eldest son by a previous marriage or to Abutsu's eldest son by Tameie. In 1279, she went to the eastern city of Kamakura, the seat of the military government, to plead her son's case. There she completed her report of her trip. Izayoi nikki (Sixteenth-night-moon diary).

After at least three years of trying to get a judgment from the authorities, Abutsu died, probably in Kamakura. In 1289, a decision in favor of her son was handed down; that decision was reversed in 1291, and finally re-reversed in the early 1300s. Her descendants continued to guard and copy much of the nation's literature.

Two volumes of Abutsu's poetry were published after her death, and forty-eight poems were included in imperial anthologies. She also wrote three prose works: a memorial for her husband; an essay of advice for one of her daughters, Menoto no fumi, (or Niwa no oshie, 1264); and Yoru no tsuru (The crane at night, c.1280), written for a high-ranking female patron, which discussed the writing of poetry and emphasized the value of accurate description of nature. The brief prose works have not yet been published in English translation; nor has a complete collection of her poetry.

Utatane

[John R. Wallace has translated Utatane in Monumenta Nipponica; the periodical is available at many university libraries; if you are not near one, you can get the article via interlibrary loan. (See the volume's table of contents online.):]

Fitful Slumbers: Nun Abutsu's Utatane. Trans. John R. Wallace. Monumenta Nipponica, 43: 4, 1988; pp. 391-416.
LC#: DS821.A1 M6;   ISSN: 0027-0741

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"I expected an unbroken string of nights dreaming with him."
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[The narrator thinks back over a youthful and hopeless love affair with a man of higher rank, and of her attempts to free herself of her obsession. At the start of the affair:]

After our first night together..., he often didn't even bother to wait for the night watchman to doze off. And so I expected an unbroken string of nights dreaming with him. It wasn't that I hadn't already learned that a man's inconstancy is like the easily fading dye made from the dayflower, but my heart had gone out to his, and his had dyed into mine. It was a time of careless and unfortunate confusion.       [p.399]

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"I felt a distaste for the person I had become."
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[But later:]

As I considered my present circumstances, I felt a distaste for the person I had become. What would be the future of someone so unreliable as myself?... The pain grew to the point that I no longer looked forward to passing the night with him....

Then... I heard a hushed knock like that of a small child, and my calmness deserted me at once. I went quietly out to the garden, chagrined at my lack of composure.       [p.402]

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"Believing it might soothe my mind... I secretly wrote...."
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[The narrator left home to go to a Buddhist convent but could not forget her lover. She tried to exorcise her feelings by writing them down:]

Although here is the moon of the Eagle-Peak where Buddha instructed, "Forsake this world," it seems my love for someone night after night finds no end.

....Believing it might soothe my mind, with a frail brush I secretly wrote about how I could not suppress the excessive bitterness and the grief I felt when I looked out as usual on the evening scene.        [pp.406-407]

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"...how fleeting, too, are my dreams in fitful slumbers."
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[She became ill, left the convent, and took lodgings in a nearby town; the poem she wrote there gives the tale its title:]

No friends were there to keep me company, so I lay down alone on the cheap bedding, uncomfortable and restless, unable to sleep soundly.

Though I bind my grass pillow
and lie down to rest,
how brief these nights are,
and how fleeting, too, are
my dreams in fitful slumbers.       [pp.408-409]

-----------------------------------------------
"I only wished that I had a friend...."
-----------------------------------------------

[Her step-father came to Kyoto and took her to the coastal province where he was governor. What she saw along the way interested her but couldn't free her of her loneliness:]

Many things caught my eye along the way, but there was no one close by whom I could ask where we were.       [p.411]

The tidelands of Narumi Bay were even more intriguing than I had heard. Flocks of plover flew by. The fishermen's salt kilns had aged into many curious shapes, and I found them novel and intriguing. I only wished that I had a friend from the capital with me....        [p.412]

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"But my heart does not always act according to reason."
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[She decided to return to her home in Kyoto, even though she realized she would not see her lover again; this passage ends the book:]

Perhaps I had learned something from my urge to drift off like the floating reeds.... I was determined to stop worrying over my troubles and destiny in this world.

But my heart does not always act according to reason, and I could not help wondering what would become of me.

Even though these tracings
may outlast me,
he who no longer thinks of me
will not look on them
with feeling.       [p.416]







Izayoi nikki

[In her anthology, Helen Craig McCullough has translated Izayoi nikki as "Journal of the Sixteenth-Night Moon"; she also gives the romanized Japanese of the nikki's poems. The book's general and individual introductions are helpful; there is a glossary and an valuable appendix on the poetry that is so integral a part even of Japanese works that are chiefly in prose. (See the book's table of contents online.):]

Classical Japanese prose: an anthology / compiled and edited by Helen Craig McCullough. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. (xii, 578 p.: ill., maps)
LC#: PL777.115 .C57 1990;   ISBN: 0804716285
Includes bibliographical references (p. [575]-578).

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"This art has helped to regulate society and to calm unrest."
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[At the start, Abutsu explains why securing a library of poetic manuscripts was worth going to the other end of the country. Her intended audience included those military judges in Kamakura who had never shown great interest in "the art of poetry":]

When I thought the matter over, it... seemed to me that there might be people who regarded the art of poetry as lacking in seriousness, as mere frivolous amusement. But our wise men have told us that this art has helped to regulate society and to calm unrest in the Land of the Rising Sun....       [p.340]

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"...the guardian of sons and of countless old bits of paper."
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I had formed a connection with remarkable men... and, by karmic chance, had become the guardian of... sons and of countless old bits of paper having to do with poetry....

It was easy to think of bidding farewell to my own life, because I held it in no special affection, but I could not bear the darkness of heart that arises from worry about a child, nor could I overcome my feelings of regret when I contemplated the present state of poetry.

Obsessed by the thought that the merits of our case must appear as cloudless reflections in the tortoise mirror of the east, I forgot every cause for hesitation, put aside every thought of self, and resolved to set off for Kamakura at once, following the beckoning of the sixteenth-night moon.      [pp.340-341]

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"It has awaited the second meeting."
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[For the first part of the trip, she went through much of the same territory she had traveled with her stepfather over 40 years earlier, territory she had described in Utatane:]

Around noon, we headed toward a hill splendid with colored leaves.... Evergreen trees also grew there; it was like looking at a brocade with a green ground. Upon making inquiries, I learned that the hill was called Miyajiyama.

How it has showered!
A thousand dippings in dye,
until at last
the old colors disappear
from the autumn-leaf brocade.

It seemed to me that I had seen the hill before---and even the season was the same.

Miyajiyama,
the mountain I crossed of yore!-
It has awaited
the second meeting that comes
as showers fall again.      [pp.351-52]

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"I can but question the waves for tidings of days gone by."
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[She passed homes of old friends, now dead:]

Hamamatsu (the name of the region thereabouts) had been the home of some people I had got to know fairly well. I saw in my mind's eye the faces of those who had dwelt there for years, and was deeply moved that I had lived to revisit the spot.

I hoped to find friends
unchanged as the shore-pine shade,
yet they are no more:
I can but question the waves
for tidings of days gone by.

I invited the children and grandchildren of those past friends to my lodgings.       [p.353]

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"Had my husband lived...."
------------------------------------

[The trip began to take a toll on the 60-year-old woman:]

We descended a mountain so steep that people could hardly keep from slipping.... After just managing the descent, we came to a river at the bottom called the Hayakawa [Swift River],  It was swift enough!        [p.359]

We groped our way across the Mariko River in the pitch dark and spent the night at Sakawa, planning to enter Kamakura on the following day.

Twenty-ninth Day. We left Sakawa and traveled a great distance along the beach.... A mist spread over the waves as they advanced and retreated on the shore.... It seemed a dream that I had journeyed so far from the capital.

Had my husband lived,
I would not have known this spray
nor experienced these trials
so far from the capital.       [pp.359-60]

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"...close to the sea at the foot of a hill, a dreadfully windy spot."
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[She arrived in Kamakura, then an isolated military-base city on the sea, far different from her urban and court-centered Kyoto:]

The place where I lived in the eastland was... close to the sea at the foot of a hill, a dreadfully windy spot. The Mountain Temple was nearby, so the environs were both peaceful and lonely.

The murmur of the waves and the soughing of the wind in the pines never stopped.       [p.360]

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"I stayed up all night writing letters for the capital."
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[She stayed in Kamakura at least three years, trying unsuccessfully to get the government to hear her suit; her only solace was in writing to her family:]

Having learned that someone who could carry messages was to leave before dawn, I stayed up all night writing letters for the capital. In the one to my older sister, with whom I was on close, loving terms, I spoke in detail of the little boys and then, with the winds and waves raging as usual, I added a description of my present circumstances:

Staying up alone
while the wind blows across the beach,
I try in vain all night long
to brush away the teardrops
and put my brush to paper.

Again, I wrapped together a few bits and pieces from the beach to accompany a letter to my younger sister, the nun, with whom I was equally intimate, and who would be longing for me in the old home:

Though I seek solace
in idly gathering seaweed
and kindling salt fires,
how I long to see the nun
in the old familiar home!       [p.363]

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"It seems as though they are playing favorites."
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[Her health began to fail, but she kept the ability to laugh at herself:]

On alternate days towards the end of the Third Month, I suffered two bouts of what seemed to be the kind of fever children have. It struck me as very odd.       [p.366]

...[T]he Fourth Month drew to a close and I abandoned hope of hearing even a faint echo of the cuckoo's song.... I suppose there have never been many cuckoos anywhere in the east as far as Michinoku. One could accept it if there were none at all, but it makes one fidgety and envious to learn that others hear them occasionally. It seems as though they are playing favorites.       [p.365-66]

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"The pleas she has presented---the leaves of her words---"
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[Izayoi nikki ends with a long poem, surely intended for someone in the Kamakura government who might be made to care about poetry and her son's claim. After a start in praise of poetry:]

....And thus, many times,
in faithful obedience
to august edicts
from successive sovereigns,
men have raked together
collections of salt seaweed
from Poetry Bay.

And among that company
there have been, in truth,
a father, son, and grandson
successively famed.
Now, there is actual proof
of a property
granted to that grandson's son
by special bequest.

....For love of that son,....
his mother, weeping aloud
like a crane in the night,
has embarked on a journey
from the capital,
but she is of small account,
and affairs of state
proliferate like grasses
at Kamakura.

The pleas she has presented---
the leaves of her words---
remain as buds on the branches,
and now the plum trees
have blossomed in the springtime
of a fourth year.

....If only the government
will reach a verdict
without delay---if only
it will emulate
the meadow spring whose waters,
though once they stagnate,
flow again as in the past....      [pp.372-76]


[In this anthology, Edwin O. Reischauer translates Izayoi nikki as "Diary of the Waning Moon." Reischauer's notes are helpful and he gives the poems in romanized Japanese; however, the book lacks the other supplementary material that is given by McCullough:]

Translations from early Japanese literature [by] Edwin O. Reischauer and Joseph K. Yamagiwa (Harvard-Yenching Institute studies, 29). 2d ed., abridged. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1972 [c1951] (vii, 358 p.)
LC#: PL782.E1 R43 1972;   ISBN: 067490422









13th century AD - Criticism, Spring, 1997 by James A. Wren

Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world, but on

it depends the fact that man has a world at all.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

As for my Epitaph when I am gone,

I'll trust no poet but will write my own.

Nelly Gwynn as Valeria in Dryden's Tyrannick Love

The Nun Abutsu was angry, and nearly eight hundred years before it became fashionable to do so, she determined that she would not take it any more. She had a story to tell, and she was going to tell it.(1)

Widely renowned for some forty-eight poems included in the imperial anthologies, and a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Kuniko, the young poet had met and fallen in love with the elderly Fujiwara Tameie. Theirs had been a passionate affair (as a series of poetic exchanges in the Gyokuyoshu and the Fugashu attest), and after some time she consented to become his wife. So strong were their physical desires that even the tonsure and his Buddhist vows could not keep them apart; she subsequently bore him two sons, Tamesuke (1263-1328) and Tamemori (1265-1328). And while not her equal as a poet, Tameie was nonetheless the titular head of the Mikohidari house, a long line of poets of court rank who had single-handedly shaped the world of Japanese poetry.(2) But together, their marital bliss would be relatively short-lived: he died on the first day of the fifth moon of 1275, at which time she shaved her head and came to be called Abutsu-ni, the Nun Abutsu.

Prior to his death, in the seventh moon of 1273, and again in the sixth moon of 1274, Tameie had issued legal documents that bequeathed the Hosokawa Estate, a property of little cosequence, to Tamesuke. The central incident and impetus of the Izayoi nikki, the travel diary of Abutsu-ni, is a journey to Kamakura occasioned precisely by a lawsuit over its ownership: she claimed the Hosokawa for her son Tamesuke against the opposition of Tameuji, one of Tameie's sons by a previous wife and some forty years Tamesuke's senior.(3) But at stake in her writings is a property far more valuable--and she knew this. What she wanted, indeed what she intended to secure for her son as his rightful inheritance, was his "birthright" as she saw it, as the authoritative and absolute arbiter of taste in court poetry. But just how would she get people to listen to her side of the story?

What is evident is that people did listen and continued to do so long after the lawsuit had been settled in Tamesuke's favor.(4) Down through the ages, the Izayoi nikki has enjoyed a wide readership, and Tamesuke's line as the Reizei branch of the family, a certain marked influence in the world of court poetry. Recently, however, the so-called teisetsu, or accepted interpretations, glibly pronounce that the diary, however insignificant as a work of art in its own right, remains somewhat important as an historical artifact for two reasons: as an educational guide, the purpose of which was to instruct Abutsu-ni's sons in the art of poetic composition, and as an exemplary tale of filial piety.(5) Ironically, these interpretations all but ignore the tone of overwhelming "paternal benevolence" in Tameie's poetic treatise, the Yakumo kuden ("Secret Teachings on the Art of the Eightfold Clouds"), expressly written in his final years as just such a poetic primer for Tamesuke.(6) Worse, the two lines of thinking can be traced directly back to (but no further than) the writings of a few prewar critics--Fujimura Saku and Kamazaki Keijiro, for example--who, without further examination, attached tremendous importance to the notion of filial piety alluded to in the opening line from the diary in support of their conclusion:(7)

Mukashi, kabe no naka yori, motomeide tari kemu fumi no mei wo ba,

ima no yo no hito no ko wa, yume bakari no, Karada no ue no koto to

shirazari ken na.

Children nowadays would not even dream that the name of the book

discovered long, long ago within a crack in a wall has anything to do

with them.

The concrete relationship of the allusion to the whole of the text, however, was summarily overlooked, primarily, I suspect, because the critics could not account for the vast temporal and cultural distances between the moment of enunciation of these lines and their own readings of them. They wholly ignored that the Meiji Restoration had resulted in the installation of an emperor whose prestige and power served to legitimate a national image configured in patriarchal terms which grew increasingly stronger toward the eve of Japan's military involvement on the Asian continent in 1931. Caught within the very weave of such a State-sanctioned ideology, they failed to recognize how their own readings complicitly rearticulated--in fact, played into the hand of--a larger, deceptively ahistorical discourse of Japan as a patriarchally-aligned family, so painstakingly erected by post-Restoration authorities. At the moment, however, their interpretations prevail. The Izayoi nikki is now rarely, if ever, read.

Scholars outside of Japan have tended to problematize the issue of genre, disingenuously noting as it were that the Izayoi nikki appears at the end of a long tradition of nikki bungaku, or diary literature, bound up in a gender-based cultural code concerning women who write. Mention is invariably made of the facts that prose and poetry haphazardly interdigitate (if only from a non-Japanese perspective), and that the diary as a genre in medieval Japan is unified less by certain explicable rhetorical strategies than by an overt presence of author. As a literary travel diary, then, this text is expected to bear some resemblance to prosaic truth, although discerning between fact and fiction is difficult if not impossible at times. Author and homodiegetic narrator are by convention one and the same, provided there is no compelling evidence to the contrary. As Earl Miner concisely and succinctly summarizes this position, "[u]ltimately fictionality is not an interpretive option." Maggie Childs' conclusion that this work "almost certainly . . . [contains] . . . a therapeutic element" assumes and builds upon just such a critical stance.(8)

However different these approaches may be, there are several fundamentally similar difficulties with their categorizations that limit--if not undermine--their value. Clearly, as a narrative about a writer, the Izayoi nikki invites interpretation as a text about writing and the nature of discourse. But none, for example, have paid attention to the cultural and social forces at work in shaping the text. Worse, critical interpretations have hindered us from appreciating the text as a field in which the past is reprocessed in a complex intertextual collision of words, voices, and conventions. We are prevented as it were from recognizing the poet's claims as well as the process by which her demands are advanced. More to the point, their interpretations dismiss, erase, or otherwise obliterate the role of language as it sets the exacting standard by which her claims were to be justified. Several lines later, for example, Abutsu-ni unambiguously links the abstract notion of filial piety with the concrete and active role of writing in general and later with yamato uta no michi ("the art of Japanese poetry") in particular. The groundwork properly laid, she vindicates her need to write:

. . . . . . azukari mo taru koto aredo, michi wo tasuke yo, ko wo

wagugume, ato no yo wo toe, tote, fakakichigiri wo musubi okareshi

Hosokawa no nagare mo, yue naku seki todo merareshi kaba, ato

too nori no tomoshi bi mo, michi wo mamori, ie wo tasukemu

oyako no inochi mo. . . . . .

. . . perhaps because of some Karma affinity, [I] have been entrusted

with . . . [two] . . . sons and hundreds and thousands of old sheets of

poems; but they have, without reason, damned even the flow of the

Hosokawa, which was left us with solemn pledges--"Support the art,

care for the children, and pray for my afterlife."(9)

Even a cursory reading of this introduction underscores that beyond her grievances and her apparent indignation is a lawsuit linked inextricably to three promises (i.e., art, children, afterlife). Put differently, the lawsuit is representative of the challenge to keep these "solemn pledges," but it is noteworthy that the sequence appears in inverse order from what we might expect of a dying man's wishes. More important even than karma and afterlife is Tameie's desire--twice mentioned, as miche wo tasuke yo and michi wo mamori--that the poetic lineage be preserved. For in medieval Japan, the world of the court mirrored--indeed, at times it seems to have been concerned with little else than--a complex but clearly recognizable politics mapping the separation of insider from outsider, the privileged from the less esteemed, the center from the marginalized and peripheral. Perhaps nowhere was this more in evidence than among the various political intrigues that contested, vied for their share in, the poetic inheritance.

My interest in the Izayoi nikki, however, lies not in its dramatization of a particular abstractable storyline but rather in exploring how, why, and to what extent rhetorical strategies are being used by its author to authorize as well as frame her argument. In a very real sense, the linkage of writing as act to larger questions of ownership is simultaneously a mark of the historical moment of enunciation inscribed within the text and an overt strategy of its figuration. Poetry and the creative process become in this sense tangible commodities, the ownership of which can legitimately be passed from one generation to the next. Furthermore, in opposing litigation and, when successful, transmitting the property comprising the poetic tradition, the poet commodifies the creative act, thereby justifying her belief less in rightful ownership than in her authority to ownership as the designated "keeper" of the tradition. As such, the Izayoi nikki presents us with an unusual figuration of the female as poet by building upon her unchallenged roles as wife and mother, positions widely respected as appropriate to women at court during the late Heian and emerging Kamakura periods, she constructs herself as poetic equal to Tameie and thereby proclaims herself the immediate overseer or protector of his poetic lineage. In doing so, she establishes for herself a position from which she may then pass the torch to her son. In this sense, the entire diary becomes both about how she does so and, as importantly, the very artifact by which she does so. If we accept John Frow's observation that the nature of textuality depends crucially not on the formal properties of the text in and of itself but even more so on the position that those properties establish within the matrices of the prevailing ideological field, a field of reading as it were, then we understand the process by which her particular strategies "worked their magic" and generated meaning from a myriad of possibilities.(10) What is obvious in the language of her travels, on the one hand, is a compliant deference to certain literary conventions; on the other, it is a defiant tempering of these very conventions to meet her own ends. She achieves the latter in at least three clearly discernible ways.

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

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

Second, behind the awesome power of silence lies ipso facto the voice of implication. Abutsu-ni's mention of certain male poets, all of whom are of marginal status (unless they belong to her family), strategically recovers the writings of their female counterparts. Without invoking their names directly, she restores to them the former power and position of their names, a practice the mirror image of which is the outcome she seeks in the lawsuit in the name of her son. Put differently, behind every named male poet there stands his equal or as likely his superior, a female poet whose accomplishments have held their own long after her name was forgotten (the only females directly named--though I must caution here that in medieval Japan names as such were far less frequently used than, say, in a modern Euro-American context--are an elder and younger sibling and the daughter of Tameuji's younger brother). When she alludes to the works of Funya no Yasuhide, she simultaneously acknowledges the power of his more famous relation, Ono no Komachi, the only female from among the "Six Poetic Geniuses." By alluding to the source of a poem on seaweed by her late husband, she insightfully reclaims the position of an all-but-neglecThe first set of seaweed poems tells of what occurs prior to Abutsu-ni's departure for Kamakura. Aware that her life has drastically changed with the death of her husband, she enters her chamber and is moved to write:

Todome oku furuki left behind

makura no chiri no on an old pillow

dani waga tachi a layer of dust

saraba taraka if I go,

harawan. (270) who will wipe it off?

She stills the pangs of loss with the thought that she has assembled an enormous volume of poetry left in her husband's possession--tangible evidence of the court tradition over a number of generations firmly held in her hands--with the expressed intent of sending them to Tamesuke. She appends her own words to the collection:

Wakanoura ni at Wakanoura

koki todometaru raked together

moshiogusa briny seaweed

kore wo makashi no from a time long past

katami tomo miyo (270-71) look upon it as a memento.

anaka shiko beware

yoko nami koku na do not tread the cross waves

hamachi dori plower of the strand

hitokata naranu your heritage, uncommon

ato wo omowaba (271) if you but remember.

tsui ni yomo in the end

ada ni wa naraji as heritage I shall keep it

moshiogusa briny seaweed

katami wo miyo no a memento of three generations if

ato ni nokoseba (271) but later recognized.

Whereas the first stanza very clearly links the memories of and duties to husband with the possiblity of journey (waga tachi may mean both "I stand in order to go," or if read wagatachi, "we"), the second focuses on the primary image of moshiogusa, briny seaweed burned for its salt. In this way Abutsu-ni shrewdly links poetry (wakanoura doubles as a specific location and as "waka no ura," Japanese poetry) to seaweed/writing (moshiogusa) and to the past (mukashi). In the choka, or long poem, appended to the end of the diary, she condenses and reiterates the essential focus of her argument as "wakanoura ji no moshiogusa" ("seaweed from along the Wakanoura" or "the writing behind Japanese poetry").

Later, on the twentieth of the month, her journey now well underway, Abutsu-ni's entourage approaches Nagoya. Despite the urgent need to press on, she decides on a detour to visit the Atsuta Jingu Shrine, highly revered as the repository for the Kusanagi-no-tsurugi (literally, the "grass-mowing sword"), one of the three imperial regalia symbolically recalling the Emperor's divine origins. While there, she writes:

   mitsu shio no          a full tide
   sashite zo kitsuru     rolls in
   narumi gata            Narumi beach
   kami ya aware to       will even the gods notice
   mirume tazunete (277)  my gathering seaweed?

Later, an exhausted Abutsu-ni turns to the Lotus Sutra for inspiration and solace.(20) Having recovered her composure, she begins to write to Tameko, the daughter of Tamenori (Tameuji's younger brother by the same mother):

itazura ni in vain

ama no shio yaku salt fires of the fishermanted female poet known only by the appellation Suke. Ironically, however ideologically impure this strategy may appear on the surface, it does render her writings capable of combining three seemingly disparate promises and the motivations that underlie them in a singular and concise action. Our reading of the Izayoi nikki, then, cannot help but have a dual focus. Certainly, it calls our attention to the importance of component texts, as earlier critics have documented in detail, by insisting that the autonomy of individual texts--or the sedimentation that we apprehend as abstracted story--is a misleading notion (as earlier critics have not seen) and that a work, therefore, has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet, insofar as such component texts focus our attention on intelligibility--on meaning, the configuration of meaning, and the power behind such complicit acts--our readings of necessity require us to consider them as contributors to a composite code that makes possible the various effects of signification.

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

The first set of seaweed poems tells of what occurs prior to Abutsu-ni's departure for Kamakura. Aware that her life has drastically changed with the death of her husband, she enters her chamber and is moved to write:

Todome oku furuki left behind

makura no chiri no on an old pillow

dani waga tachi a layer of dust

saraba taraka if I go,

harawan. (270) who will wipe it off?

She stills the pangs of loss with the thought that she has assembled an enormous volume of poetry left in her husband's possession--tangible evidence of the court tradition over a number of generations firmly held in her hands--with the expressed intent of sending them to Tamesuke. She appends her own words to the collection:

Wakanoura ni at Wakanoura

koki todometaru raked together

moshiogusa briny seaweed

kore wo makashi no from a time long past

katami tomo miyo (270-71) look upon it as a memento.

anaka shiko beware

yoko nami koku na do not tread the cross waves

hamachi dori plower of the strand

hitokata naranu your heritage, uncommon

ato wo omowaba (271) if you but remember.

tsui ni yomo in the end

ada ni wa naraji as heritage I shall keep it

moshiogusa briny seaweed

katami wo miyo no a memento of three generations if

ato ni nokoseba (271) but later recognized.

Whereas the first stanza very clearly links the memories of and duties to husband with the possiblity of journey (waga tachi may mean both "I stand in order to go," or if read wagatachi, "we"), the second focuses on the primary image of moshiogusa, briny seaweed burned for its salt. In this way Abutsu-ni shrewdly links poetry (wakanoura doubles as a specific location and as "waka no ura," Japanese poetry) to seaweed/writing (moshiogusa) and to the past (mukashi). In the choka, or long poem, appended to the end of the diary, she condenses and reiterates the essential focus of her argument as "wakanoura ji no moshiogusa" ("seaweed from along the Wakanoura" or "the writing behind Japanese poetry").

Later, on the twentieth of the month, her journey now well underway, Abutsu-ni's entourage approaches Nagoya. Despite the urgent need to press on, she decides on a detour to visit the Atsuta Jingu Shrine, highly revered as the repository for the Kusanagi-no-tsurugi (literally, the "grass-mowing sword"), one of the three imperial regalia symbolically recalling the Emperor's divine origins. While there, she writes:

   mitsu shio no          a full tide
   sashite zo kitsuru     rolls in
   narumi gata            Narumi beach
   kami ya aware to       will even the gods notice
   mirume tazunete (277)  my gathering seaweed?

Later, an exhausted Abutsu-ni turns to the Lotus Sutra for inspiration and solace.(20) Having recovered her composure, she begins to write to Tameko, the daughter of Tamenori (Tameuji's younger brother by the same mother):

itazura ni in vain

ama no shio yaku salt fires of the fisherman

keburi to mo smoke

tare ka wa mimashi who would notice

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

Tameko resonds with similar eloquence:

kie mo seji seaweed salt fires

Wakanoura ji ni along the Wakanoura

toshi wo hete the years erased

hikari wo souru brilliantly ablaze

ama no moshiobi (294) fires of the fisherman.

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

nagakare to through the ages

asa yu inoru morning and night pray

kimi ga yo wo for my Lord's reign

yamato kotoba ni Japanese poetry

kyo zo nobetsuru. (302) today spoken of.

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

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

It is, however, a grave mistake for contemporary readers to dismiss Abutsu-ni's pleas as marginal, inchoate, or a product from the fringe; for, undeniably, they have dearly exerted considerable influence both on her immediate successors and on those who were to follow some centuries later. But the strength of her influence betrays a bitter irony. In constructing for herself the role of protector, she simultaneously undermines the future role of women as writers.

How is this possible?

If we recognize that changes in cultural discourses both precede and shape their social counterparts, then we may see that the Izayoi nikki at its moment of enunciation participates in a broader societal transformation characteristic of the Kamakura period in general. Unlike Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon and other Heian-period predecessors, Abutsu-ni no longer represents an uncontested image of the female as poet.(23) On the contrary, the role as poet is one which she must strategically construct for herself. Simultaneously, her rhetoric, essential to the construction, nonetheless deconstructs it by suggesting that she speaks in the service of the politics and fortunes of men (and in particular her men). Her erudition certainly benefits her position, but only insofar as it pays homage to her late husband and serves to appropriate power for her male heirs. In this light, her text becomes an overwhelmingly necessary document germane to our understanding of the processes of transformation from the classical Heian period, through the Kamakura, to the Edo periods. The Izayoi nikki represents that last vestige of a particular medieval mindset while simultaneously bearing the sign of a radical shift in popular consciousness that became the core experience of women in general in the emerging Kamakura period. That it is her son who ultimately names the diary is telling both of her newfound position and of the power behind her writing. In recording the shift from an oral or oral-dependent tradition to a literate, writing culture, her text participates in the very shift of power determining how and by whom language can be and is used. It also marks, and is itself marked by, this shift at the very moment when the vernacular is wrenched from the brushes of women at court, commodified, and simultaneously appropriated as the possession solely of men, regardless of social level. The fact that Basho bothers to write a diary at all underscores, however ironically, that by the Edo period the diary tradition had ceased to be--to use a contemporaneous term that is wildly dismissive in its force--"woman's work" and had become an explicitly male genre, the power of which was appropriated by and then appropriate to men alone. It can, therefore, be no coincidence that Abutsu-ni is the last female writer celebrated widely in Japan until well into the late nineteenth century.

Notes

(1.) Indeed, I suspect that each of us has a similar "story" to relate. This essay began, for example, as a brief presentation I gave in Japan and in Japanese before a group of literary specialists. When I reached the podium, several members of the audience abruptly stood and left the auditorium; one elderly professor had the audacity--and in Japan, the authority--to complain loudly for all to hear that "foreigners" (he used the offensive term gaijin, but I interpreted him to mean "non-native scholars of Japanese") have nothing to contribute to the debate. Early into my reading, when it became obvious that my argument was in stark contrast to the accepted (read "acceptable") interpretation for the Izayoi nikki (as New Criticism never made the rounds in the Japanese Academy, none of its insights--including nearly seventy years of critical responses such as Feminism and Historicism--are to be found among the writings of the majority of university professors), almost half of the audience left the room. The difficulties that the Nun Abustu had in getting her "story" before a wider audience were in a short twenty-minutes rendered dear and unmistakable, concrete and seemingly unsurmountable.

(2.) There are a total of twenty-one chokusen wakashu, or imperial anthologies. The first, the Kokinwakashu, was compiled in 905 under the aegis of the Wakadokoro, the Imperial Office of Poetry, and includes some 1100 poems; the final anthology, the Shinzokukokinshu, was completed in 1439 and includes over 2100 poems. To be selected to compile such an anthology represented the pinnacle of one's career at court; prestige is the name of the game here. Tameie's grandfather Toshinari had been ordered to compile the seventh imperial anthology, the Senzaishu, while his father Sadaie was commissioned first in 1201 by retired emperor Go-Toba to compile the eighth imperial anthology, the Shinkokinshu, and again in 1232 to compile the ninth, the Shinchokusenshu. Continuing the hereditary lineage of the poetic tradition, Tameie had been ordered by the retired emperor Go-Saga to compile the tenth imperial anthology, the Shokugosenshu, in 1248, and the eleventh, the Shokukokinshu, in 1259.

(3.) For a detailed treatment in English of the historical records of the Mikohidari (and later the Reizei) line, see Robert H. Bower, "The Reizei Family Documents" Monumenta Nipponica 36 (1981) 4: 445-61.

(4.) As the widely accepted judicial authority of the day, the Kamakura shogunate played an active role in the resolution of such disputes. The wheels of justice, however, need not always turn quickly, as this case illustrates. Within a decade, a judgment was rendered against Tamesuke's line, although some five years later in 1291, a secondary ruling granted his family the legal rights as caretakers (in opposition to direct ownership) of the Hosokawa Estate. Ironically, this decision would provide the legal basis for the family to continue their claims of ownership. It would take almost a century and a half before the courts would finally render a judgment in favor of Tamesuke's progeny. Whether the extraordinary length of time required is itself suitable commentary on the importance placed on this particular issue or its relative lack thereof in the eyes of the Kamakura government is quite another matter.

(5.) For examples of the standard interpretation of the Izayoi nikki, see the following: Eguchi Masahiro, "Izayoi nikki no denhon to seiritsu ni "suite," Kokugo to Kokubungaku (1972); Nakamura Kikuichi and Iwakabe Seikichi, Hiso kara wakaru nihon bungakushi (Tokyo: Nichieisha, 1982), 45; Tamai Kosuke, Nihon bungaku no kenkyu (Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1965); and Taniyama Shigeru, "Izayoi nikki seir(7.) All further references will be to Abutsu-ni, Izayoi nikki, in Nihon koten bungaku zenshu: chusei nikki kikoshu, Vol. 48, ed. Nagasaki Ken, Tonomura Natsuko, Iwasa Miyoko, Inada Toshinori, and Ito Ken (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1994) and will be noted parenthetically by page number. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author and in the instance of the poetry are such as to underscore the linguistic nature of the originals. sometimes to the detriment of their readability.

(8.) See, for example, Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 112; and Maggie Childs, "Pre-modern Japanese Autobiography as Therapeutic Writing," in The Desire for Monogatari: Proceedings of the Second Midwest Research/Pedagogy Seminar on Japanese Literature, ed. Eiji Sekine (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1994), 45.

(9.) Izayoi nikki, 269. The English translation in this instance is from Edwin O. Reischauer, "The Izayoi Nikki," in Translations from Early Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Edwin O. Reischauer and Joseph K. Yamagiwa, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951), 53.

(10.) John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), 128ff.

(11.) See, for example, Sano Yasutaro, Izayoi nikki shinshaku (Tokyo, 1937); and Reischauer, "The Izayoi Nikki."

(12.) "Kanno Kakumyo, "Yokyoku ni okeru katoku no iso: Aridoshi no shudai wo megutte," Nihon bungaku 6 (1989): 1-11. Katoku setsu, or more precisely katoku setsuwa, a term comprised of four Sino-Japanese characters, is often used by Japanese scholars of Literature, but rarely if ever does it appear in a dictionary of literary terminology. It is virtually never defined. Therefore, to understand better its meaning, we need necessarily understand first the individual characters. Ka means poetry, though the term is almost exclusively reserved for waka (tanka, short poems using the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure). The meaning of toku is a bit more difficult to ascertain: originally written with a character meaning "regular" or "often repeated" (e.g., otokui, "a regular customer"), in the Edo Period, the character changed to a homophone meaning "virtue" or "gain" (in the ethical sense). The usual usage of setsu in Japanese bears out the meaning of "explanation" (e.g., settoku, "persuasion"; setsumei, "explanation"; or sekkyo, "sermon"). The original Chinese meaning "to speak" (in T'ang China, pronounced siuet, while today we will hear shuo), is preserved in Japanese in such words as kaisetsu ("commentary"), ronsetsu ("discourse"), or shasetsu ("editorial"). A ripe source of allusion (as in dento bungaku) and symbolic of the symbiotic relationship between literary writings and a still-pervasive oral tradition (collectively termed densho bungaku), the setsuwa represent in the main an enormous group of folktales and legends featuring an array of figures (historical and otherwise) who gained widespread popularity during the long medieval period (approximately 1185-1600) in Japan.itsu nendai kangae," Kokugo kokubun (1949).

(6.) See, for example, Fujimura Saku, Izayoi nikki, in Gendaigoyaku kokubungaku zenshu, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1937); and Kamazaki Keijiro, "Abutsu-ni no bungaku (toku ni `Izayoi nikki' ni oite)," Kokugo to kokubungaku 6 (1929) 10: 1917-40. Fukuda Hideichi has argued, however, that the Yakumo kuden, known among specialists as the Eiga no ittei ("The Foremost Style of Poetic Composition"), was written as an educational aid for his younger sons. See Fukuda Hideichi, Chusei wakashi no kenkyu [Tokyo: Kadogawa, 1972], 559-96. For an excellent English translation of the Eiga no ittei, see Robert H. Bower, "The Foremost Style of Poetic Composition: Fujiwara Tameie's Eiga no Ittei," Monumenta Nipponica 42 (1987) 4: 391-429.

(13.) Indeed, her usage is rather complex. Early into the text, Abutsu-ni writes: "Sara ni omoitsuzukereba, Yamato uta no michi wa, tada makoto sugu naku, ada narususami bakari to omou hito mo ya aramu Hi no moto no kuni ni, ama no iwato hirakeshi toki yori, yomo no kamitachi no kagura no kotoba wo hajimete, yo wo osame mono wo yawara gura nakatachi to nari ni keri to zo kono michi no ijiritachi hashiru shio kare tari keri (268). Or in the choka (a long poem of alternating 5-7 syllable pattern and ending in a 5-7-7 cadence) appended to the text, she recounts her argument in verse:

Shikishima ya

yamato no kuni wa

ametsuchi no

hirake hajimeshi

mukashi yori

iwato wo akete

omoshiroki

kagura no kotoba

utai teshi

sareba kashikoki

tameshi tote

hijiri no miya no

michi shiruku

hito no kokoro wo

tane to shite

yorozu no waza wo

koto no ha ni

origami made mo

aware tote

Yashima no hoka no

yotsu no umi

nami mo shizuka ni. (300)

The lexical affinities shared with the Japanese preface to the Kokinwakashu, composed by Ki no Tsurayuki, are immediately obvious:

Yamato uta wa, hito no kokoro wo tare to shite, yorozu no koto no ba to zo

narerikeri. Yo no naka ni iru hito, koto, waza, shigeki mono nareba, kokoro

ni omou koto wo, miru mono, kiku mo ni tsukete, ii idaseru nari. Hana ni

naku uguisu, mizu ni sumu kawazu no koe wo kikeba, ikitoshi ikerumo, izure

ga, uta wo yomazari keru. Chikara wo mo irezushite, ametsuchi wo ugokashi,

me ni nienu origami wo mo aware to omohaze, otoko onna no naka wo mo

yawarage, takeki mono no no kokoro wo mo nagusa muru wa, uta nari. (4-5)

For closer inspection, see Ki no Tsurayuki, Kokinwakashu6, in Shinnihon koten bungaku zenshu, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten), 1992.

(14.) Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 23ff. It is helpful to recall at this point that the poet Shunzei had characterized this aesthetic principle as "kotoba furaku, kokoro atarashi" ("old words, new concepts"). In fact, via a system of zukei ("traces") and hankyo ("echoes")--Ziva Ben-Porat uses the term "directional markers" in "The Poetics of Literary Allusion," PTL 1 (1976): 105-28--Abutsu-ni manages adroitly to invoke a number of prior texts, all of which certainly lend credence to her abilities and to her claims, and, just as important, aid in her attempt to deliver on her three promises to her late husband. To point to but a few examples as illustrative of this point: she alludes to the versions of the foundation myth found in the Nihongi (the trip round the pillar by Izanagi and Izanami) and the Kojiki, to the Ise monogatari, to the Shinkokinshu, to the Shinchokusenshu, and to the Lotus Sutra (in Japanese, known as the Hokekyo).

(15.) According to the Kojiki, the sun goddess Amaterasu, having concealed herself in the "rock cave of heaven" (ama no iwato), had plunged the world into utter darkness. She is lured from her stronghold out of curiosity over the attentions being given to Amenouzume, another goddess who is performing the sacred kagura as dance. Abutsu-ni's allusion concisely encompasses both usages, as poetry and as performance.

(16.) In the tradition of classical Chinese literature, in addition to the commonplace link in general, the image of drifting seaweed in particular implies a sense of loneliness or of isolation and despair resulting from love lost. These connotations carried over into and were preserved intact within the Japanese literary tradition as well, beginning with the earliest extant anthologies, the Man'yoshu (in the mention of a variety of kinds of seaweed, e.g., miru, moshiogusa, mochi) and the Kaifuso (where the final Chinese character in the title, the ideograph for a type of seaweed, is used specifically to mean writing). Or in the "Maboroshi" chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari, we can find: kakitsumete miru no kai nashi moshiogusa/onaji kumoi no keburi to wo nare (4: 534.) (I can no longer look upon these letters, like briny seaweed rising in the smoke to the heavens.). See Murasaki Shikibu, Genji monogatari, in Nihon koten bungaku zenshu, vol. 4.

(17.) Travel in Japan during the late Heian and Kamakura periods was treacherous, to say the least. If the natural elements failed to take their toll, the human ones (in the form of roadside robbers) would. The former were largely responsible for Abutsu-ni's demise after she reached Kamakura. It should also be pointed out that Tameuji, too, eventually traveled to Kamakura to respond to Abutsu-ni's testimony. He also died there.

(18.) See Sano, Izayoi nikki shinsaku, and Reischauer, "The Izayoi nikki," 79. Recall, however, that Basho later includes a very similar usage in his Oku no hosomichi (stanza 33):

michinoku no ezo the inhabitants of Michinoku

shiranu ishiusu know nothing of stone mortar

mononofu no an ancient hero

yoroi nomarune in full armor slept

makura kasu. his pillow borrowed.

See Matsuo Basho, Oku no hosomichi, in Shinnihon koten bungaku zenshu, vol. 70 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992). I know of no critics who dare to raise the issue of "illicit affairs" with regard to Basho's usage--for to do so would be tantamount to intellectual suicide among Japanese scholars, native and non-native alike. Why, then, I wonder has this not been the case for similarly heinous readings of Abutsu-ni?

(19.) Reischauer, "The Izayoi Nikki," 95.

(20.) Abutsu-ni was not one to overlook details. In this instance, her reading from the Lotus Sutra clearly addresses any concerns with the spiritual inferiority of women in a world where it was commonly held that women required at least one further rebirth as a man before they might achieve enlightenment. The Lotus Sutra alone, however, suggests that women and men alike are capable of achieving enlightenment.

(21.) Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics. Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981).

(22.) It is interesting to compare the perceptions found in Reischauer, "The Izayoi Nikki," 20, with Julia Kristeva's, in Langue discours, societe (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

(23.) As a number of critics have demonstrated time and again, women at the Heian court enjoyed, as well as exercised, an unprecedented degree of power and influence. See, for example, the following: W. H. McCullough, "Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 27 (1967): 103-67; P. Nickerson, "The Meaning of Matrilocality: Kinship, Property, and Politics in Mid-Heian," Monumenta Nipponica 48 (1993) 4: 429-67; Norma Field, The Splendor of Longing in The Tale of Genji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Poetry, Narrating, and the Politics of Fiction in "The Tale of Genji" and Other Mid-Heian Texts (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 1991).
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James A. Wren "13th century AD". Criticism. FindArticles.com. 25 Oct, 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n2_v39/ai_20017498/
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