Objects of Discourse: Memoirs by Women of Heian Japan (review)

When applied to certain vernacular literary works of the Heian period, "genre" can be a vexed subject, and a vexing one. Long monogatari such as Genji largely escape this debate, since they can safely be called "narrative fiction" (with a dutiful nod toward the large proportion of poetry in their texts). But works such as Ise monogatari, which tell the story of a historical figure in brief prose-and-poetry episodes, do not fit comfortably into any Western generic category. For this reason, when the corpus of Japanese literary classics was systematized in the Meiji period to give it at least a superficial resemblance to its Euro-American counterpart, the terms utamonogatari and joryū nikki bungaku were coined to denote, respectively, the "poem-tales" of which Ise is representative and the "diaries" epitomized by Murasaki Shikibu nikki and Sarashina nikki. The scholars who devised these categories no doubt believed they were simplifying matters for future generations. In fact, by placing each work in a single, exclusive group with a recognizable Western generic name, they made things more complicated, especially for those of us whose earliest encounters with literature were of the Euro-American variety.

Objects of Discourse: Memoirs by Women of Heian Japan, John R. Wallace's reading of four members of the joryū nikki group—Kagerō nikki, Izumi Shikibu nikki, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, and Sarashina nikki—begins with the admirable intention not to "define a genre for the Heian memoir" (p. 3), since the modern "appellation nikki bungaku—even the concept of genre itself—does not suit well these writing practices" (p. 10). Wallace thus joins those who have long maintained that searching for Euro-American generic equivalents is an exercise in futility. Having observed that a given work of classical Japanese prose tends to contain multiple Western genre characteristics, Helen McCullough concludes (with a nearly audible sigh of exasperation), "Purely as a matter of convenience, we shall here consider all classical belletristic prose as falling into two overlapping general categories: Tales and Memoirs."¹ Edith Sarra further underlines the narrative and structural variety among nikki which argues against classification in a Western genre and even suggests that we should not be too quick to appropriate all kana nikki as literature.²

Yet when we come right down to it, we are still left with the need to explain what is meant by "nikki," especially as the term was used in the Heian and Kamakura periods. The subject has been regularly tackled by scholars around the world.³ Writing about nikki in a language other than Japanese, moreover, requires that the troublesome term must either be translated into a Western generic equivalent—diary, memoir, journal, etc.—or left as its italicized self. Over the past 15 years, "diary," once the standard English equivalent for "nikki," has lost much ground to the now preferable "memoirs." Sarra speaks for many in finding that "memoir" "better conveys an idea of the versatility of form and impulse typical of Heian women's nikki."⁴ But none is a perfect fit, and all carry implicit meaning for native readers of European languages. We may be agreed on marginalizing genre when analyzing nikki; nevertheless, we cannot embark on an intelligent discussion of the form without first addressing the question of how preconceptions embedded in the chosen Western generic equivalent, be it "diary," "journal," or "memoir," affect our reading of the remote nikki. Analyzing a given nikki—and each surviving example is different from the others—requires a clear view of both the work itself and our inevitable tendencies to normalize it.

Wallace also chooses "memoir" as his principal "nikki" equivalent, followed closely by "autobiography" and several other terms: "Nikki, which means a daily record, does not describe accurately the narrative structure of any of this volume's texts. Better English terms are journal, memoir, record of poems, or fictional narrative; some passages are best...