Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales of Ise by Jamie L. Newhard (review)

The ambiguities of Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise) have made it a well-studied text and thus a good focal point for exploring the nature of literary scholarship in Japan over the course of almost a thousand years. While Ise monogatari is a unique text (more than an anthology of poems, less than a coherent narrative), Jamie Newhard’s extremely well-documented, detailed, and thorough examination of commentaries on it explains a great deal about the nature and vicissitudes of literary scholarship in general in premodern Japan.

Chapter 1 is a sophisticated but accessible consideration of the theoretical issues of the power dynamics of who produced and consumed “literary knowledge” and why, the functions of secret knowledge, the expectations created by canonization, and the role of genre in conditioning interpretation.

In chapter 2, Newhard reviews the earliest attitudes toward Ise monogatari found in Genji monogatari, Mumyōzōshi, twelfth-century poetic treatises, and Old Commentaries written from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Discussions in these texts tended to begin with efforts to settle questions of authorship but the central assumption then was that Ise monogatari was basically factual and scholars’ primary concern was identifying the people and events mentioned indeterminately there. Newman only briefly touches on the far-fetched and arbitrary allegorical interpretations that were common during this time since Susan Klein has already written extensively about them in Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2002).

Chapter 3 explores the Transitional Commentaries produced between 1460 and the early seventeenth century, which differed from previous commentaries most essentially in viewing Ise monogatari as partially fictitious. Newhard shows how these writers were inclined to treat immoral behavior as fictional to make it less morally objectionable. The commentaries of this period were written by courtiers and by renga (linked verse) masters for the elite warriors and wealthy townsmen who were their students. Many originated as lecture notes that were later certified by the lecturer. Newhard discusses several in great detail, such as Ichijō Kaneyoshi’s Ise monogatari gukenshō, Shōhaku’s Ise monogatari shōmonshō, and Hosokawa Yūsai’s Ise monogatari ketsugishō. Some interesting points she makes include the importance of Kaneyoshi’s commentary as the first to criticize the Old Commentaries and for its pedagogical orientation in focusing on explaining obscure passages to enhance students’ understanding of the text. She also notes Sōgi’s comments about poetic techniques and emotional effects and Yūsai’s efforts to minimize improprieties committed by characters in Ise by manipulating the identifications of those characters. Another important aspect of these commentaries is that they contain contradictory interpretations, apparently because they offered different information for different audiences. Some information was made widely available; secret information was reserved for insiders.

In chapter 4, Newhard discusses the publication of Ise monogatari in movable type and woodblock-printed editions for wide audiences for profit during the early modern period. Previously commentaries presumed familiarity with the base text and overwhelmed it on the page. Now page layout came to prioritize readability of the base text and commentary was subordinated to it. In many editions, illustrations added to the appeal of woodblock-printed texts and summaries preceded each section. There was little change in the content of the commentary but the amount of it was reduced. There was also a new tendency to market Ise monogatari to women readers. In addition to painstakingly describing several specific examples of early modern editions, Newhard provides an overview of developments in charts detailing her examination of 178 texts. Her quantitative data show decade by decade the trends in the publication of traditional commentaries versus popular books and in the inclusion of illustrations, front matter, annotations, etc.

Chapter 5 examines the diverse work of five kokugaku (nativist) scholars, who took novel positions on the enduring issues of the factuality of the text and...