Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the use of setsuwa (anecdotes) about famous poems and poets as educational tools in the poetic treatise Toshiyori zuinō (ca. 1115), a work composed as a poetic textbook for a future empress which offers invaluable insight into elite women’s education in the late Heian period.

Paper long abstract

The Toshiyori zuinō (Toshiyori’s Poetic Essentials, ca. 1115) is a poetic treatise (karonsho) by the innovative and influential poet Minamoto Toshiyori (ca. 1055–ca. 1129). What is notable about the Toshiyori zuinō is that we know not only its author, but also its very particular intended audience: the text was written as an introduction to and textbook on poetry for Fujiwara no Taishi (1095–1156), later a consort to Emperor Toba. Written at a time when Japanese court poetry (waka) was seeing the development of what would come to be regarded as characteristically medieval modes of thought and practice, the Toshiyori zuinō, as we might expect from a karonsho, sets out Toshiyori’s views on the history, nature, and ideal form of waka. However, the text is distinguished from most other poetic treatises by its inclusion of a large number of anecdotes (setsuwa) on famous poems and poets, including such well-known female poets as the eleventh-century Izumi Shikibu and Akazome Emon. These informal, anecdotal accounts were used for pedagogical purposes, being employed as key elements of the poetic education of the Toshiyori zuinō’s original reader (a use of setsuwa that accords perfectly with their fundamentally didactic nature). In this paper I will be examining Toshiyori’s use of the poets and poems of the past as educational tools, in the context of issues of female readership and education and the role of marginal, less prestigious texts such as setsuwa in the process of literary canon formation.