Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the poetic exchanges between Japanese literati and the envoys from the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926) in order to demonstrate the latter’s role as the driving force behind the reception of the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi in Heian Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have long been puzzled as to why the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi (772-846) achieved great popularity among the aristocratic elites of Heian Japan (794-1185), while the literary collections of other continental literati that are known to have reached Japan were largely disregarded. In this paper, I trace the origin of the Heian appreciation of Bai Juyi by placing his poetry in the context of the “Yuan-Bai style” that was disseminated across East Asia through the corpus of the poetic exchanges between Bai Juyi and his friend Yuan Zhen (779-831). In particular, I associate the popularity of this corpus among early Heian poets in ninth-century Japan with their poetic exchanges involving the envoys who were regularly dispatched by the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926). I argue, first, that this connection helps to reconstruct one aspect of the Sinitic literacy of the educated elites of Balhae, about which very little textual evidence has survived. Second, and more importantly, I make the case that these elites were the driving force behind the reception of specific continental texts, such as Bai’s collected works, in Heian Japan.