Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Southern court general and poet Prince Muneyoshi (1311-?) worked to reconcile his political goals and poetic ambitions through his varied treatments of the trope of the capital (miyako) in his personal waka anthology, Rikashū (circa 1371?).

Paper long abstract

A son of Emperor Godaigo and Nijō Ishi of the famed poetic house, Prince Muneyoshi (also, Munenaga 1311-?) was a key military figure and poet of the Southern court whose poems offer unparalleled insight into the turmoil of the Nanbokuchō era. By all accounts, Muneyoshi had been composing poems in Kyoto from a young age, but the bulk of his poems are attributed to later periods when he was away on military campaigns in support of his father’s plan to stabilize outlying areas, strengthen central rule—and ultimately retake the capital. A close reading of his personal waka anthology Rikashū (circa 1371?) suggests that the capital was no mere memory or eventual political goal, for even as he was upholding his commitments to the Southern court in a dizzying array of locales, he was at the same seeking immediate and remote recognition from the waka mainstream in Northern court-controlled Kyoto. This presentation will explore how Muneyoshi worked to reconcile these two fundamentally disparate objectives through his varied treatments of the trope of the capital (miyako) in both the headnotes and the poems of Rikashū. Ranging from memory to gateway to destiny, Muneyoshi’s iterations of the capital, made possible by the fundamental ambiguity of that poetic term, facilitate a delicate balance between his unflagging commitments to his political aims and the Way of waka.