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- Convenor:
-
Or Porath
(Leiden University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Location:
- Auditorium 5 Jeanne Weimer
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night,” an illustrated narrative scroll from the medieval period housed in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The papers examine visual companions, narrative prefaces, literary motifs, as well as compare other recensions of the tale.
Long Abstract:
A Long Tale for an Autumn Night” (Aki no yo no naga monogatari) is an illustrated narrative scroll (emaki) dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. It is considered the earliest pictorial work belonging to the so-called genre of chigo monogatari (“acolyte tales”). This literature consists of stories revolving around the infatuation of an older monk with a young monastic acolyte (chigo). This scroll is also known for its iji dōzu (“synoptic narrative) technique, in that multiple parts of the narrative are illustrated within a single compositional frame. In this particular tale, the male-male love affair leads to intense military warfare between the Enryakuji and Miidera Tendai temples; the two lineages from which the lovers respectively hail. The plot climaxes with the suicide of the young boy Umewaka, and the realization that he is, in fact, a manifestation of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion associated with the Ishiyama-dera temple. The tragic but ambiguous ending elicits the monk’s renunciation of carnal desire, prompting him to become a Buddhist recluse.
This forum will bring together Japanese female scholars and Euro-American scholars to discuss the Met’s Aki no yo scroll, along with consideration of other extant textual and pictorial variants of the story. The first presentation explores the representation of mukaekō, a ritual enactment of the coming of Amida Buddha, a practice inaugurated at Ungoji temple by Sensai shōnin (?-1127). The Met’s scroll is the oldest visual testimony for this practice. The second presentation looks at an important aspect of emaki, “inserted illustrations” (sashi-e), visual companions that complement the narrative in pictorial form. The paper demonstrates how the producers as well as the spectators interpreted the story, with a focus on the context of its production and a theory of reception by its audience. The third paper investigates literary motifs of cherry blossoms and seasonal change as to highlight the dynamic relationship between narrative calligraphic prefaces (kotobagaki) and their corresponding images. The final paper will undertake a philological comparative study of the Met scroll and the famed warrior narrative, the Taiheiki.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
The cherry blossom is a recurrent motif in the first half of the Met's illustrated scroll, “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night.” This paper investigates floral and seasonal descriptions of cherry trees to highlight the discrepancy between narrative calligraphic prefaces and their corresponding images.
Paper long abstract:
The pictorial scroll of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled, “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night” (Aki no yo no naga monogatari), is an illustrated adaptation of a medieval iteration of a tale created during the Nanbokuchō Period (1336-1392). The text of the story is divided into scenes, and each of those are accompanied by matching images. The question that drives this paper is how the narrative prefaces (kotobagaki) relate to images in such work. In this paper, I examine the text-to-image issue by paying attention to the depiction of cherry blossoms in painted scrolls.
The scroll at the Met features cherry blossoms repeatedly in the work’s illustrations, mainly in the first half. The most common depiction involves Umewaka or the protagonist chigo (monastic acolyte) and the cherry tree. Moreover, it often features the monk Keikai gazing at Umewaka in a way that is suggestive of romantic longing and desire on the part of the monk. These visual patterns reflect the image and gender of chigo, who in medieval temple society were the priests’ object of sexual desire. The two motifs of flowers (symbolizing Umewaka) and the moon appear repeatedly in imagery. At the opening lines, the bodhisattva's ideals of benefiting oneself (jiri) and benefitting others (rita) are aligned respectively with the lines “the spring flower rising to the tip of the tree” and “the autumn moon descending to the bottom of the water.” Thus, the flowers and the moon are used to symbolize the beauty, sanctity, and tragic fate of Umewaka, who was the boyish manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon of the temple Ishiyama-dera.
However, there is a discrepancy between the expressions describing the flowers in the prefaces and the cherry blossoms depicted in the pictures, and there are some parts in which the images are not faithful pictorial representations of the text. In some of the illustrations there is no reference to flowers in the narrative prefaces that introduce subsequent pictorial scenes (kotobagaki), and at times, cherry blossoms appear arbitrarily regardless of the season indicated. This paper highlights the relationship between narrative prefaces and their corresponding images.
Paper short abstract:
The paper looks at "Inserted Illustrations" (sashi-e), visual companions that complement the narrative in pictorial form. This paper discusses the retelling and remaking of a story through such illustrations by comparing the Met's "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night" with other painted variants.
Paper long abstract:
The paper examines the function of illustrations in pictorial scrolls through a comparison between the manuscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Eisei Bunko manuscript, which are among the different variants of "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night" (Aki no yo no naga monogatari). Illustrated stories often display greater degrees of difference than textual materials. Questioning how a story is illustrated is important for revealing how people interpreted it.
With this in mind, the paper compares illustrations from the variant at the Met with those from the Eisei Bunko Museum in Tokyo. The former is almost certainly a product of temple culture. On the other hand, the Eisei edition reflects "the classical taste and aristocratic disposition of the upper class." These two scrolls demonstrate the reception of Aki no yo in two different cultural spheres, and aims to show that an analysis of the illustrations can reveal different modes of reception, and how each manuscript came to be illustrated in its own unique way.
This paper demonstrates how the Eisei Bunko manuscript was pictorially influenced by illustrations from the manuscript of the Met. The paper then explains how some of the illustrations in the Eisei edition were redrawn based on new interpretations of the text, and that the choice of scenes in the illustrations is different from the one at the Met. In this manner, I argue the possibility that the Eisei Bunko version intentionally reshaped and refigured the illustrations of the Met version in order to retell the story with its own original reading.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes the close relationship between “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night” and the military epic Taiheiki in terms of similarities in motifs, prose, and verse. It examines the original intention for making the painting, that is, to depict the armed conflict that ravaged the Tendai school.
Paper long abstract:
The oldest manuscript of “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night” (Aki no yo no naga monogatari) was written on the backside of a 1377 edition of the military epic Taiheiki ("Record of the Great Peace"). As this suggests, there is an intimate relationship between Aki no yo and Taiheiki, and previous studies by Gōtō Tanji, Kōjō Isao, and Hirasawa Gorō have pointed out such similarities in terms of literary motifs and poetic verse.
The paper explores in detail the common philological and visual ground, and points of similarity found in the verses and prose between Aki no yo and Taiheiki. The narrative preface of the variant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows similarities to the Eiwa 3 manuscript more than any other recension, and it is also the oldest text of the story. The variant at the Met includes many beautiful illustrations, especially the battle scenes, which are expansive and elaborate. The paper examines whether the original intention behind the painting was to depict the armed conflict between Miidera temple and Enryakuji temple over the construction of a Buddhist ordination platform, a battle that appears in the earlier work Sanmon mii kakushitsu ki and other texts.
Specifically, the scene where the monk Keikai peeps beyond the fence (kaimami) and gazes at the boy Umewaka, is similar to the scenes of Taiheiki in chapter 18, “On the Matter of Ichinomiya and Miyasudokoro,” and chapter 21, “Regarding the Slander and Death of Enya Hangan.” However, the similarities do not end here; there are commonalities in vocabulary as well. For example, the words used in the scene in which Umewaka commits suicide through drowning, conform to the terminology in the passages of chapter 34 “Regarding Cao’e and the jingwei bird” of the Taiheiki. Moreover, the description of Keikai in the battle between Mt. Hiei and Miidera temples closely resembles that of Wakiya Yoshisuke (1306-1342) in chapter 15 of Taiheiki, “Regarding the War with Miidera.” Therefore, a comparison of visuality and textuality will take the center stage in this paper.
Paper short abstract:
The paper reconstructs ritual action through examining the Met's "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night" by focusing on the mukaekō, a ritual enactment of the coming of Amida Buddha. This practice was inaugurated at Ungoji temple by Sensai shōnin, the main protagonist of the story, the adult monk Keikai.
Paper long abstract:
Among the many variants of Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), the recension at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of four confirmed extant works that were created as illustrated scrolls (emaki). In the entry in the diary of Prince Fushimi no Miya Sadafusa (1372-1456) or Kanmon nikki, dated to the eleventh month of Eikyō 10 (1438), this pictorial scroll is mentioned by name only. Therefore, it is certain that the illustrated scroll was made before 1438. It has been argued that the variant at the Met was produced during the Ōei era (1394-1427) because of the distinctive characteristics of its narrative text, but this remains uncertain. However, given the particular style of the painting and text, there is no doubt that it was created in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
Out of all of the Aki no yo scrolls, only the Met version has a depiction of a “Welcoming Ceremony” (mukaekō), a ritual enactment of the coming of Amida Buddha at the death of a worshipper, a practice inaugurated by Sensai shōnin (?-1127) at Ungoji Temple. The paper reconstructs ritual action through an examination of the Met scroll’s mukaekō scene, which may very well be the most distinctive feature of this work. This enable us to find out the context in which this picture scroll was created.
The mukaekō practice is believed to have been originated by the master Genshin (942-1017). Mukaekō is a thespian performance of raigō (“the coming of Amida and his retinue”), in which Amida Buddha, accompanied by various bodhisattvas including Kannon and Seishi, greets a Buddhist practitioner to accompany him to paradise at the end of their life. This mukaekō ceremony began in the late Heian period and is still practiced today at several temples, including the famous temple of Taimadera. Since Ungoji temple was destroyed in a fire during the Ōnin War (1467-1477), only few temple documents have survived, but the mukaekō described in the variant at the Met constitutes valuable material for understanding the concrete details of the ritual performance of mukaekō in Ungoji temple at the time.