A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan (review)

A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan offers close, insightful readings of an overlooked issue in familiar Heian-period texts. Especially interesting are Paul Schalow's discussions of the ramifications of the friendships between Genji and Tō no Chūjō and between Kaoru and the Eighth Prince in The Tale of Genji.

Schalow hypothesizes that friendship for Heian noblemen represented the possibility of transcending life's disappointments and that it was understood as the feeling of being "known and appreciated by a kindred spirit" (p. 5). What he actually describes, however, is friendship as a source of consolation in times of distress. Transcendence seems a ponderous label for what might more simply be understood as appreciation of one kind of love or loyalty that persists through thick and thin. Schalow provides any number of examples of friendship providing solace in hard times and also finds considerable sexual rivalry between purported friends, but there are only a few examples of friendship being experienced as mutual knowledge and shared taste.

Schalow begins with an analysis of seven of the 803 poems in the Wakan rōei shū listed under the heading "Friends." His account of how one of Bo Juyi's poems was misunderstood due to the differences between Chinese and Japanese grammar is quite interesting, but, in general, these brief Chinese couplets and Japanese waka are rather straightforward and do not provide much with which to work. Schalow proposes that one indication that friendship is the theme of a poem is the use of "a two-pole rhetorical framework consisting of the pronouns 'you' (C: jun J: kimi) and 'I' (C: wo J: ware)" (p. 12) in a "highly specialized manner" (p. 14). Yet, this same "two-pole" use of pronouns is also found in heterosexual love poems (p. 24). Schalow is emphatic but vague when he suggests that the "deepest experience of friendship resides in the friend's absence, not in his presence" (p. 16). Surely the point he has in mind is what Yoshida Kenkō is famous for articulating in section 137 of Essays in Idleness, that the poignancy of longing for someone is more complex and interesting than the simple satisfaction of enjoying his or her presence.

In chapter 2 Schalow focuses especially on episodes 16, 38, 46, 82, 83, and 85 of the Tales of Ise, which illuminate the friendships between Ariwara no Narihira and his father-in-law, Ki no Aritsune, and between Narihira and Prince Koretaka. According to Schalow, the legacy of Ise was a model of masculinity in which men were expected to cultivate not just romantic love with women but also companionship with men. Episodes 16, 38, and 46 reveal intense feelings of empathy and affection between men who are social equals, while 82, 83, and 85 depict a friendship that has a hierarchical dimension, reflected in Narihira's devotion to Prince Koretaka, who is probably a cousin by marriage. To examine the dynamics of their relationship, Schalow, using concepts introduced by Konishi Jin'ichi, teases apart a set of binary qualities: joy/sorrow, movement/stillness, and masculinity/femininity.

Schalow then turns to The Tale of Heichū to show a model of male friendship that contrasts with that in Ise, since it shows a man who is befriended rather than the man who befriends. In discussing the friendship depicted in episode 5 of The Tale of Heichū, Schalow seems perplexed by one poem that strikes a note of discord because it accuses a friend of neglect. Such complaints are, in fact, quite common in romantic scenes. They seem to have been intended and sometimes accepted as avowals of love, insofar as the implied meaning of a cry of neglect is that one longs for attention. (There is an elaborate example of something similar in Schalow's translation of Great Mirror of Male Love; Stanford University Press, 1990: Mashida Jinnosuke writes out a long list of grievances against his lover Moriwaki...