Send message to Author

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.