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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I consider the significance of the interpretive complexity we find in some works of Muromachi exegesis like renga poet Shōhaku's Genji commentary Rōkashō. I argue that it accurately reflects dynamic shifts in how what we call "commentary" functioned in the study of classical texts.

Paper long abstract:

The Rōkashō (Trifling with Blossoms, 1504), a commentary on the Tale of Genji, is a text of considerable interest. In origin it was simply the collected "Genji Notes" (Genji kikigaki) of the renga poet Shōhaku. This was a private text, his personal edition of lectures given by his teacher, the commoner renga master (rengashi) Sōgi, whose own teachings harkened back to those of the high-ranking court literatus Ichijō Kaneyoshi. It assumed its final shape as the Rōkashō only after a younger poetic aristocrat, Sanjōnishi Sanetaka, prepared an official version for public circulation. In this way Kaneyoshi's commentary, having once been taken over into the lecture sessions of the rengashi, made its way eventually back to noblemen like Sanetaka. The example represents a pattern of flow within Genji commentary, one which the Rōkashō is an optimal text to observe.

One might ask why renga masters would make such use of Kaneyoshi's Genji commentary. But it might be better, I argue, to consider what exactly in Kaneyoshi's commentary was in fact being used. In his "Ise monogatari" Gukenshō (One Fool's Views on the Tales of Ise), after all, he almost completely rejects Ise commentaries that take a more fiction-centric approach. To what extent, if any, do we ever observe such an interpretive attitude, so characteristically severe of Kaneyoshi, being faithfully adopted in exegesis by rengashi? In this paper I use the Rōkashō to trace these dynamic shifts that took place within commentary from Kaneyoshi to Sōgi, to Shōhaku, and to Sanetaka. Reexamining our ideas about the motivating concerns of commentary activity, I seek to delineate how, in Muromachi commentaries on classics like the Ise or the Genji, what we call "commentary" actually functioned.