Paper short abstract:

A discussion of the use of waka poetry in entertaining medieval otogizôshi tales which simultaneously transmit and parody the culture of the aristocracy for an urban merchant readership, while satirizing the merchant's illusions of social mobility attained through cultural education.

Paper long abstract:

This paper centers on the place of classical poetry (waka 和歌) in tales known as otogizôshi 御伽草子 from the Muromachi (1333-1467) and Warring States (1467-1600) periods. These anonymous narratives were likely written by aristocrats for a non-elite audience of merchant townsfolk, who saw the study of waka as a gate into more general knowledge about the culture of the court. Some of these narratives extoll the powers of waka to facilitate social mobility. For example, the tale Saru Genji sôshi 猿源氏草子 (The Tale of Monkey Genji) narrates how a sardine peddler from the provinces successfully woos an aristocratic lady due to his poetic skill. This connects to a discourse on the practical, social, financial, and religious benefits of poetry that circulated for centuries. Yet in Saru Genji sôshi the poems are not orthodox waka but satiric or popular variants (kyôka 狂歌), humorously containing low vocabulary and commoner sentiment. I show that this tale is a parody of court culture, and that it simultaneously transmits basic knowledge about it; and that it is a satire of merchant culture as well, in particular of its dreams of social mobility through cultural education. A similar parodic interplay of courtly elegance (ga 雅) and new popular sensibilities (zoku 俗) fuels Menoto no sôshi 乳母の草紙 (The Nursemaid"s Booklet), a tale of two sisters with disparate governesses, which transmits and simultaneously subverts the courtly manners that had the composition of waka at their center. This paper argues that these texts reveal a new venue for the transmission of knowledge. Education about the court and its culture had been available from displaced aristocrats who served as cultural instructors since at least the late Heian period, in particular the twelfth century. The late medieval texts I discuss in this paper, by contrast, were meant to be read as stand-alone pedagogic artifacts, independently of an instructor-student arrangement. They combine entertainment and pedagogy to both parody and transmit the culture of the court, anticipating a fundamental intellectual and artistic trend of the Early Modern period (1600-1868).