The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (review)

On the fifth day of the third month of An'ei 1 (1772) Motoori Norinaga left his hometown, Matsusaka, in the company of his son and a few friends, on a short and uneventful, and all in all rather rainy journey. Its purpose was to view the cherry blossoms in Yoshino. On the fourteenth he was back in Matsusaka, and in the course of the next two months he composed a diary in which he described the journey. After the hat he had worn on the road he called it the "Sedge-hat Diary," or Sugagasa no nikki. It circulated as a manuscript for many years, until it was finally printed in 1795. The present volume by Michael Marra contains a full translation of this diary. In addition, it contains Marra's introduction, entitled "Motoori Norinaga's Poetics," the translation of twenty-six poems from Norinaga's poetry collection Suzunoya-shū that have in common that they all include the word aware, twenty-seven entries from Norinaga's zui-hitsu collection Tamakatsuma (begun in 1793, and continued until Norinaga's death in 1801), one essay from his poetical treatise Ashiwake obune (ca. 1759), and five essays from another poetical treatise, Isonokami no sasamegoto (1763). The additional translations are intended either to illustrate certain aspects of the travel diary, or to explicate Norinaga's views on Japanese poetry (p. x), so they can be regarded as appendices of the main text.

In view of the volume's title and the introduction, the reader is entitled to assume that it was Marra's intention to write about Norinaga's ideas on poetry. In that case, the obvious choice would have been to translate one or more of Norinaga's poetical treatises in toto. Sugagasa no nikki is, in itself, an interesting specimen of the genre of travel diaries and fully merits translation, but to try to sell it as a poetical treatise leads to an unnecessary loss of focus, however hermeneutically exhilarating the exercise may be. Norinaga did not write the diary to illustrate his ideas about the nature of poetry, but as a platform for projecting his personality and opinions. It was meant to show the man, "warts and all," as he struggles through the rain and the dirt, lets himself be carried in palanquins, tires and falls ill, discovers to his disappointment that the cherry blossoms in Yoshino are already past their peak when he arrives, meets a couple from Owari, of whom the man writes kanshi, but the wife, "past her prime but still quite comely," waka (Sugagasa no nikki, in vol. 18 of Motoori Norinaga zenshū, ed. Õkubo Tadashi, Chikuma Shobō, 1973, pp. 348-49; Marra, pp. 56-58). The diary further depicts Norinaga as he prays at the Mikumari jinja, where he is reminded of his father, who prayed to this deity for a son, and of the earlier visit he paid to this shrine himself, thirty years ago, because his mother insisted that he should fulfill the vow made by his, then already deceased, father. When he reaches the top of Mt. Kagu, he is reminded of Emperor Jomei's kunimi-uta (Man'yōshū 1:2), and when he visits the grave mounds around Mt. Unebi, he discourses on his own and others' attempts to identify the emperors who are buried in the mounds and quotes a villager in regard to the unforeseen consequences of the bakufu's attempts to preserve the tombs. To the extent the diary reflects a program, it is, I think, expressed in Norinaga's poem Inishie no / fukaki kokoro o / tazunezu wa / miru kai araji / ame no kaguyama ("Unless you search for the deep feelings of the past, there is no point in seeing it—Heavenly Mount Kagu"; Sugagasa no nikki, p. 367; Marra, pp. 79-80). In the context in which it is presented, this poem sums up a theme that grows in importance towards the end...