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Paper short abstract

The aim of my paper is to explore the commentary rediscovery of the Pillow Book in the early Edo period, particularly in the Vernal Spring commentary of Kitamura Kigin, which I argue evinces a telling concern for the layered textuality of Sei Shōnagon’s complicated work.

Paper long abstract

Though today Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is often partnered with the magnum opus of her contemporary Murasaki, the trajectories of the two works in historical reception could hardly be more disassociated. Compared to the Tale of Genji, with its endless library of exegetical tomes, works that might be called commentaries on the Pillow Book hardly even exist before the Edo period. How the Pillow Book was actually read over the centuries remains as such shrouded mostly in mystery. The decisive rediscovery came at last in the year Enpō 2 (1674), which saw the successive appearance of two pioneering commentaries: Katō Bansai’s The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon: A Commentary and Kitamura Kigin’s The Pillow Book: The Vernal Spring Commentary. Both works made available to the reading public, for the first time, not only the original work itself, but also an apparatus of explanatory annotations. Kigin’s Vernal Spring was particularly influential, its interpretation of the Pillow Book becoming indeed foundational for research well into the modern period.

A particularly notable feature of that interpretation is the Vernal Spring’s tendency to remark upon the quality of “ineffable excellence” (myō) to be found in the author’s “writing,” her “diction,” her “style.” Concern for writing phenomena is so strong, in fact, that there exist annotations flagging as “writing” even cases where the original text itself eschews the verb. I argue that this concern should be seen as a telling one. For it reveals, not only the annotating Kigin’s personal scholarly interests, but also an assumption of kindred interest among what we might call broader commentary circles, the especially literarily-inclined (portion of the) reading public that such annotations served. It highlights moreover the surprising fact that even from the work’s commentary debut, Edo literary scholarship was already discovering the Pillow Book’s layered textuality: its internal meta-discourse on the writing act, and its external appreciability as a written object. The aim of my paper is to explore this complicatedly new and yet seasoned reception of the Pillow Book, with due consideration also for the contemporary determining factors of scholarly environment and manuscript access.

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Paper short abstract

The Tale of Genji’s association with psychological depth was largely, I argue, the result of its encounters with print. Unlike in the more personalized medieval era, Edo commentaries like Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō, published for an unknown readership, needed to make character psychology explicit.

Paper long abstract

In present-day Japan, surely no capsule characterization of the Tale of Genji enjoys broader currency than its fame as a work particularly profound in the depiction of human emotions. Yet as any survey of the work’s reception will reveal, such an understanding has not been, historically, something seen as self-evident. Genji studies of the medieval period, for example, while certainly much concerned to deepen readers’ appreciation of psychology in the work, understood that purpose’s ultimate aim to be a thereby improved facility in the composition of waka and renga. This would change only in the early Edo period, and then in particular under the complicated influence of the newly prominent medium in which such changed discourse came to appear: the printed book.

The seventeenth-century printed editions Eiri Genji monogatari and Shusho Genji monogatari reproduced the Tale’s full original text with brief marginal or interlinear annotations. For the most part, these served to identify either passages of direct speech by the work’s characters, or passages narratively describing those characters’ inner feelings. Crucially, as a rule such annotations eschewed further description, stopping at identification alone. Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō, however, while fully these works’ contemporary peer, displays a far more ambitious approach. In particular, though often seen as mere compendium of earlier medieval commentaries, the Kogetsushō in fact offers many detailed psychological descriptions even on passages unremarked in prior Genji scholarship, at times notably on passages that its two printed predecessors had themselves also marked as depicting feelings.

Medieval scholarship, of course, had been inseparable from oral exposition: before an audience of courtiers and renga masters it addressed questions of psychology largely at listeners’ need. The Kogetsushō, by contrast, was a text published, in print, for an unknown readership, one whose anticipated needs it had to proactively pre-address. Spurred by circumstance, Kigin had pressing cause to make the logic and substance of character psychology, its inner reasoning as unfolded in the narrative, comprehensively explicit. That the Genji came to be so associated with psychological depth was thus appreciably, I argue, the result of just such encounters with the medium of print.

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Paper short abstract

The Moonlit Lake commentary sheds light on the impetus that led Kitamura Kigin to engage in scholarship on works of fiction long neglected by the tradition. Specifically, his treatment of commentary discourse on treatments of fiction in the Tale itself suggests how important the concept was to him.

Paper long abstract

Especially given the strong association of Kitamura Kigin with the Tale of Genji, the subject of his most famous and certainly most influential commentary, the Moonlit Lake (Kogetsushō), there has been surprisingly little attempt to connect his exegetical approach in that particular text with the character of his larger exegetical lifework. Yet if Kigin was the first early modern scholar to produce several commentaries both on old standards like the Genji as well as on long-neglected works like the Tales of Yamato, all of them evincing something like a roughly unified methodology, then the former group, of which the Moonlit Lake is the most extensive member, seems like a natural source to sift for embers of light on Kigin’s impetus. Assuming at the least that Kigin’s unprecedented expansion of scholarship on fiction reflects a change in his fiction-concept, after all, even specific scenes in the Genji, such as the famous discussion in the “Hotaru” chapter (but not only there), immediately suggest themselves as commentary sites to comb.

It is my argument that in Moonlit Lake we do indeed find a good deal of suggestive material precisely in this sense: though the commentary is largely (like most premodern commentaries) the remix of its medieval predecessors, the arrangement is utterly and tellingly individual. Indeed, with a printed text like the Moonlit Lake, to some extent the layout itself can be informative even prior to content. A glance for example at “Hotaru” is enough to reveal that the famous and much-imitated headnote/text template has here broken down: near half its fifty-one pages reveal some abandonment of the story-text in favor of securing space for quoted commentary, much of it precisely composed of discourse on fiction. Closer reading of the selected content itself in said chapter, moreover, makes even clearer how important to him the fiction-concept was.

Indeed, it is possible to see Kigin’s investment in the problem of fiction as the delayed realization of the Tale of Genji’s own promise. The fully-fledged “field of fiction studies” that never followed the Genji saw belatedly through its interpreter an emergence into historical fact.