Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History (review)

Across the years, visitors to Kyoto have glanced with curiosity at the Reizei family residence on the southwest corner of Imadegawa and Karasuma, on the same block as the modern structures of Dōshisha University. Once surrounded by the homes of many other members of the Kyoto nobility, the Reizei compound remains a visible sign of the family’s centuries-long dedication to the enterprise of waka. The Reizei family traces its ancestry back to the great court poets of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods—Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204) and his son Teika (1162–1241) and grandson Tameie (1198–1275)—the Reizei name having become attached to the descendants of Tameie’s son Tamesuke (1263–1328). Twenty-five generations later, the Reizei family still teaches and practices poetry. In addition, their family library has preserved and accumulated poetic texts, diaries, and paintings dating as far back as the late Heian period. Only in the spring of 1980 were select documents published or exhibited to the public at large. (The Reizei library has few works that were previously unknown. However, it contains manuscripts in the hand of such figures as Shunzei, Teika, and Tameie, as well as later Reizei masters.)

Steven D. Carter’s Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History traces the history of this poetic family from the time of Shunzei, disclosing how across the centuries, the Reizei family “parlay[ed] their social and cultural capital—their pedigree, their rank, their stores of knowledge, texts, and artifacts and the status those things conferred—into financial support to sustain it in the practice of the poetic Way” (p. 8). Carter’s is a history “of a house as a house—rather than just of the various individuals who bear its name—and the poetic enterprise to which that house was dedicated” (p. 8), and his attention to the larger and shifting contexts of waka practice—social, political, economic, interpersonal—vastly expands our understanding of this art form. Indeed, he challenges his readers to rethink their conception of the nature of artistic creativity itself. As Carter further writes,

Moderns may find [curious] this fixation on engagement with a long tradition—especially one that is embodied in a kind of conventionality rather than in a properly sanctified lineage of geniuses. . . . [T]o overlook conventionality, in the case of waka, at least, is to refuse to engage the record of the past as an ongoing project that cannot be reduced to the accomplishments of a few canonized “masterpieces” or sanctified “geniuses”—to allow the reputation of a few individuals and texts, in other words, to obscure the contours of a much larger discourse.

(p. 364)

The story of the Reizei family from the Kamakura period to the present day is fascinating in its details. Interweaving the activities of the Reizei house with major events in Japanese history during this long span of time, Carter’s narrative discloses the family’s remarkable resiliency and political astuteness in the service of preserving its status as purveyors of their centuries-old art form. Among the more familiar figures is Abutsu-ni (d. ca. 1283), the mother of Tameie’s two youngest sons, who traveled to Kamakura to champion the rights of inheritance of her elder son, Tamesuke, to income from estates and to his father’s manuscripts. The suit precipitated the split between the Nijō, the descendants of Tameie’s sons by an earlier wife, and the Reizei (and Kyōgoku) schools. A pattern of cultivating connections with the warrior class continued until the modern age, as the Reizei heirs sought both to adapt to the changing landscape of power and to maintain their at-times contentious association with the imperial court in Kyoto. By the Edo period, the Reizei also faced serious competition from not only new literary genres but commoner poets (jige), who were ready to challenge the authority of the established noble lineages. Yet the prestige of the waka tradition and of...