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6 d Edward KamEns Terrains of Text in Mid-Heian Court Culture I n Murasaki Shikibu’s semiprivate living quarters (ca. 1008–1010), there were two cupboards. One was “crammed to bursting point” with “old poems and tales” (furu uta, monogatari); the other was full of miscellaneous Chinese books (fumi domo) left to her by her late husband. It was to the latter, she reports in her diary, that she was drawn in those times when idleness weighed upon her (tsurezure semete amarinuru toki): “Whenever my loneliness threatens to overwhelm me, I take out one or two of them to look at; but my women gather together behind by back. ‘It’s because you go on like this that you are so miserable. What kind of lady is it who reads Chinese books?’ (nadeu onna ka mannabumi wa yomu).”1 The lady in question had in fact, according to her own account, been reading Chinese texts since childhood, but, in anticipation of such censure, had long “avoided writing the simplest character.”2 And at yet other times when she sought distraction from her personal woes (mi no usa), she says, she had done so in the reading and rereading of monogatari—perhaps including her own, The Tale of Genji.3 From just such frequently cited passages as these, in a variety of literary texts of the Heian period, scholars have constructed an image of cultural practices configured by conspicuous borders that barred or at least strongly deterred women from encounters with “Chinese” texts, while men remained free to move at will across and among a variety of textual domains. Such passages, juxtaposed and contextualized in various ways, give support to the notion that Heian women were discouraged, and even discouraged one another, from reading Chinese texts. Other passages, almost always including the deliberately playful gender masquerade with which Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa nikki (ca. 930) begins, have provided the basis for the perception that Heian women were likewise barred from, or barred themselves from, the writing of Chinese texts as well. And yet there are many well-known exceptions that complicate this picture. One good example is the Great Kamo Priestess (Daisaiin) Senshi’s preface to her collection of Buddhist poems in Japanese, Hosshin wakashū (dated 1012), in which, writing in Chinese, she nevertheless cites her sense of alienation from “Chinese letters” (kanji)—as well as Sanskrit writing (bongo)—as the reason for her choice of “the thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem” (sanjūichiji no uta) to serve as her votive medium.4 To my knowledge, no one has ever seriously suggested that Senshi is not the author of this preface, or that its juxtaposition of languages is aberrant or accidental; rather, along with the many quotations from Buddhist scripture—in Chinese, of course—that stand beside her poems in the Hosshin wakashū text, 130 | Edward KamEns these multiple languages coexist in the space of this one work, performing their respective, complementary roles and interacting to form multiple tiers of signification .5 This juxtaposition may provide us with another telling model for the mid-Heian period’s textual terrain. Relatively recent historical conditions, some of which shall be discussed below and which are also discussed in the essay by Ivo Smits, have placed Japanese writings (wabun, kana bungaku), especially those by women, at the center of most conventional perceptions of Heian literary culture, with Chinese writings (kanbun) at the periphery—a construction that in many ways runs counter to historical reality, insofar as we are able to recover it through the reading of texts themselves. The purpose of this essay is to complicate this model further, to show its limitations, and to offer some alternative ways of perceiving how the literary terrain of mid-Heian Japan was encountered, accessed, and in some cases altered by at least some of the men and women who traversed it. The art historian Chino Kaori often spoke and wrote about what she called the “dual binary structure” of the culture of the Heian period. In her published work and many lectures in Japan and abroad, Chino developed this conception as a way of understanding how Chinese writing, Chinese painting, and other cultural forms of continental origin found their places within the complex amalgam that we encounter as Heian court culture. Chino’s dual binary structure was, for her, a way of analyzing some of the interactive relationships between kara-e and yamato-e (“Chinese” or “Japanese” pictorial images and styles), kanji and kana...

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