Paper short abstract:

I examine fifteen poems by Sugawara no Michizane and their place within his literary collection to investigate their use as documentary evidence for his governorship. My case study helps us think about text versus context and the possibilities and pitfalls of selective and comprehensive reading.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine fifteen poems by the early Heian scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), with the twofold aim of questioning their value as evidence for his qualities as a provincial governor and interpreting these poems in light of the larger collection that preserves them, Michizane's own Kanke bunsō. These insights will serve as a point of departure to think about our practices of finding and selecting the texts we use to weave our narratives.

During the first two years of his stay in Sanuki, Michizane took up his brush to compose on the hardships faced by the poor and the elderly. Communis opinio holds that these poems betray a concern for a province and its people that is uncharacteristic for the governors of Michizane's day, and cites them as documentary evidence that he led an excellent administration based in Confucian principles of government. This narrative, however, fails to account for two crucial aspects of Michizane's poetry. On the one hand, other poems from the same period suggest concerns not easily reconciled with this more familiar narrative of Michizane as governor. On the other, the form in which we have these poems - both as individual pieces and as part of the collection as a whole - is of a much later date than Michizane's term as governor, for he compiled and presented his collection to Daigo tennō during his own most influential years at court. Nevertheless, few commentators (if any) question how Michizane's later personal political agenda may have influenced the contents of Kanke bunsō, if not within individual poems, then at least in the entire collection's presentation and arrangement, as well as possible omissions of poems now lost.

Such a contextually embedded reading of the poems reveals a much less straightforward persona of Michizane as governor. The clash between this persona and the familiar narrative shows how slower, contextualised close-reading remains a necessary safeguard to ground our practices of searching for evidence - a litmus test for the keywords we think with, digital and discursive.