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In the anecdote 103 of The Tales of Ise, the narrator describes as “awful” a poem, known as one of the finest by Ariwara no Narihira. We chose to consider this criticism as an ironic remark contributing to the playful style of the narrative and inviting the reader to constantly renew his reading.

Paper long abstract

The Tales of Ise are one of the most widely read and studied works of classical Japanese literature, yet many gray areas remain. As Takahashi Tôru, a leading specialist in the literature of the Heian period, points out: « Every time I read The Tales of Ise, I am confused by their difficulty. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp the meaning because of difficult words or the brevity of the text. I can try to solve those problems in my own way with the help of various annotated editions. However, the moment I think I have understood it, I often feel overwhelmed by the feeling that it is all a misconception.” In addition to the ambiguous character of most tanka poems due to their brevity, The Tales of Ise include number of observations or judgements formulated by the narrator with regard to the actions and words of the characters. Far from facilitating understanding, those remarks seem on the contrary to open up the text to an infinite field of interpretation. The presentation will focus on the narrator's critical remarks regarding a poem composed by a character. In anecdote 103, the narrator appears to condemn a poem composed by the hero as “awful”. This poem which is also included in Kokinshû (905), is usually known as one of the finest poem of Ariwara Narihira’s and this narrator’s comment has traditionally been understood as a self-deprecatory expression of the hero-narrator. However, such an interpretation is hardly convincing in view of the fact that among the 35 poems of the Tales of Ise which tradition attributes to Ariwara Narihira, only this poem is subject to such a vehement criticism by the narrator. The presentation will propose an alternative interpretation by reflecting on the humorous aspect of the narrator’s comments in The Tales of Ise. It will try to show how the narrator’s humorous remarks extend the communicative space of the poem, opening up a new space - that of the monogatari - which involves the reader, and create a dynamic and engaging reading experience.

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Who is the “I” in poetry? What is its relation with its environment? Izumi Shikibu (c.970-?)’s complex poem sequences as well as many of her poems themselves show that non-Western pre-modern literature can provide valuable insights on questions concerning the lyric enunciation and the lyric subject.

Paper long abstract

Who is the speaker, the “I” in poetry? This question has been at the very heart of the long-running debate surrounding the nature and the definition of (mostly Western) lyric poetry.

Asking oneself what is the relation between the author and the speaker also implies reflecting upon the engagement of the poet with their environment. Is the outer world an extension, a projection of one’s inner world? On the contrary, is the heart of the poet moved by the objective outside world? From another perspective, if the speaker is akin to a character at the center of a narrative – be it one single poem or a sequence of poems – , is the environment a setting at the service of this very narrative?

Needless to say, I do not have the ambition nor the pretention to give an answer to these questions. That being said, it seems to me that some interesting insight could be gained through the study of Izumi Shikibu’s works (c.970-?). Indeed, her two poem collections Izumi Shikibu-shū and Izumi Shikibu-zokushū include various poem sequences, clearly conceived as structured thematic wholes more or less closely related to Izumi Shikibu’s personal experience. The complexity of these sequences raises the question of the speaker-author relation while also allowing us to reflect upon waka poetry’s representation of nature, which oscillates between literary poetic allusions and first-hand experience.

Furthermore, in numerous Izumi Shikibu’s poems, the “I” depiction is complex, ranging from self-objectivation (Kuboki Toshiko) to the projection of oneself in different times, spaces or even beings. Even when the “I” is one, it is frequent for the outer world to bleed into the inner world and vice-versa. These characteristics also emphasize the potential complexity of the relation between the poet, the lyric subject and their environment.

Through analyses of selected poem sequences and in-depth commentaries of single poems, this presentation aims to highlight the singularities of Izumi Shikibu’s many “I”s and provide a different perspective on questions concerning the lyric subject through the study of a non-Western example.

Keywords: Izumi Shikibu, Heian waka, lyric poetry, lyric subject, lyric enunciation

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Paper short abstract

The paper offers a reading of Kinto's Waka Kuhon (Nine Levels of Waka, ca. 1008) as a pivotal text between the anthropocentric view of nature of early poetic discourse and the characteristically "humanless" poetry of medieval times.

Paper long abstract

The famous opening statements of the Kokinshū kana preface offer an unabashedly anthropocentric definition of poetry: “The seeds of Japanese poetry lie in the human heart and grow into leaves of ten thousand words. Many things happen to the people of this world, and all they think and feel is given expression in description of things they see and hear” (Rodd & Henkenius, 1984: 35). So defined, nature (the things one sees and hears) is little more than a conduit for human sentiments, a means to an end. In the course of the Heian period, however, a very different approach to the natural world gradually gained strength, in which nature itself is the focus and the human is progressively decentered to the point of often disappearing altogether from the surface of the poem. The paper examines a representative text of this transition, Fujiwara no Kintō’s early eleventh century Waka kuhon (Nine Levels of Waka, ca. 1008). In presenting a reasoned ranking of different poetic styles, Kintō operates a dramatic inversion of the human-natural hierarchy that had hitherto dominated poetic discourse, placing poems that employ nature as metaphor low in his scale of poetic excellence and poems that center the natural at the top. I provide a reading of Kintō’s work and then discuss some of the cultural causes of this transition, such as the influence of Chinese landscape poetry, changes in aristocratic lifestyle (with the custom of owning villas in spots of scenic beauty becoming increasingly popular), and the growing popularity of place-based religious movements (e.g. mountain religion) that endowed the landscape in and around the capital with a new aura of sacredness.