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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the Kaifūsō collection (Verses Recollecting Old Customs, 751) as a negotiation between the historical reality of the practice of Sinitic poetry before and during the early Nara period (710-784) and its ideal representation as a prestigious and continued form of cultural capital.

Paper long abstract:

As the oldest extant collection of Sinitic poetry in Japan, the Kaifūsō (Verses Recollecting Old Customs, 751) constitutes a precious window into the literary culture of the Nara period (710-784), and as such it has attracted a fair degree of scholarly attention. On the one hand, the collection can be read as a narrative about the evolution of Sinitic poetry from the idealized reign of Emperor Tenji (r. 668-672) to its gradual decentralization from the imperial court in the early Nara period, a representation that is seemingly supported by the scarcity of documentation about court poetic practice during that time. This paper, however, seeks to move away from an understanding of the Kaifūsō as a repository of historical poetic practice to instead rethink it as a strategically imagined literary environment. Specifically, I aim to present the Kaifūsō as a site of negotiation between the historical reality of Sinitic poetry before and during the Nara period and the ideal role that the anonymous compiler envisioned for it as an uninterrupted court practice as well as a form of cultural capital that could support and legitimize an individual’s socio-political status. By reading the structure of the Kaifūsō as a strategy to complement and expand the poetic culture of the court, I thus argue that the collection was conceived of not so much as a representation of what poetic practice was, but instead of how it was imagined it should be. In this way, I suggest, the Kaifūsō imagination anticipates the gradual rise of Sinitic poetry from the end of the eighth century and can be thought of as an early precursor of the discourse surrounding poetic literacy and practice that fully bloomed at the beginning of the Heian period.