Paper short abstract:

Saigyō , the medieval waka poet, is known as a cultural border-crosser. Then how is the "border-crossing" achieved in Saigyō's poetry? I will explore some rhetorical devices as they relate to the multidimensional "border-crossings" that are characteristic of Saigyō's poetry.

Paper long abstract:

The 12th-century poet Saigyō (1118-1190), who has had not only a huge impact on Japanese literature, is readily able to cross various boundaries through his poetry: between this-world and the other world, between the living and the dead, dream and reality, the courtly and the lowly, the sacred and the profane, gods and buddhas, past and future. How is this "border-crossing" achieved in Saigyō's poetry? I will argue that there are two important rhetorical devices: apostrophic expressions and what we might call analogical expressions. In the Sankashū, Saigyō's personal poetry collection, there are two poems composed upon looking at the pine tree standing in front of his hut during his ascetic seclusion in Sanuki. In the first poem: "O pine tree, may you endure for a long time to come and mourn for my afterlife, for there is no one who would remember my footprints and miss me" (1358), Saigyō appeals to the pine tree as if with a human, asking it to mourn for him during his afterlife. In the second poem: "If it became too hard for me to live in this hut and I ended up drifting away from here, would this pine tree be left all on its own?" (1359), Saigyō wonders what would happen to the pine tree, viewing the world from the position of the pine.

These apostrophic and analogical tropes centered on nature are a common feature in waka. For example, the speaker entreats the wind to stop blowing while the blossoms are at their peak, or wonders why the flowers are in such a hurry to fall. However, in Saigyō's case, he brings his emotions as close as possible to nature, viewing nature as his "friend" (such as with the pine tree), thereby crossing the boundary between the world of humans and that of nature. In the similar ways, Saigyō traverses the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. This presentation will explore these techniques as they relate to the multidimensional "border-crossings" that are characteristic of Saigyō's poetry.