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.