Optical Allusions: Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan by Joseph T. Sorensen (review)

The close relationship between the production of poetry and of screen paintings is well known to readers of Heian literature: examples of byōbu uta (screen poems) in various collections of waka may number in the hundreds. And yet, the study of screen paintings has been handicapped by several factors, chief among them the fact that despite the extensive textual record of these poems and the circumstances in which they functioned, “the extant screens from the five-hundred-year span [of the Nara and Heian periods] have no poems and the extant screen poems have no screens” (p. 23). The screens were fashioned of ephemeral materials, and only two “remain today that give us a concrete idea of what Heian-period screens were like” (p. 39); a third predates the Heian period. The two Heian pieces have spaces for which poems were probably intended, but no poems are inscribed: various poetry collections record waka meant for inscription on screens, at times with short headnotes describing the illustrations for which they were composed. It is primarily from these written records that scholars have attempted to reconstruct the illustrations. Joseph Sorensen’s Optical Allusions: Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800–1200) is a welcome and ambitious endeavor that not only illuminates the nature and development of screen paintings in Heian Japan, but also explores more fundamentally “the ways that literary language has often been dependent on visual representation, both in the context of Japanese screen poetry and in the Japanese poetic tradition as a whole” (p. 6).

Sorensen presents much information about the practical and aesthetic uses of byōbu (folding screens and similar portable room dividers) in the residences of Heian aristocracy. These objects, in addition to providing greater intimacy and privacy, captured the scenery of distant, outdoor places for indoor viewing. The author also touches upon considerations of appropriate subject matter for different locations in which a screen might be placed and for particular occasions that it might commemorate. Such details may be familiar to readers of Heian literature, but Sorensen’s overview is useful and engaging. Perhaps less known to most readers are the more symbolic functions of byōbu, and concerning these the author provides insightful analyses. Noting that “screens and their poems served as an affirmation of the participants’ social and political status” (p. 44), Sorensen relates the details that are known about the process of commissioning both paintings and poems, reminding us of the status differences among the commissioning nobles; the vocational poets (as Sorensen terms them), who were often of insufficient rank to gain entry into an imperial hall where a screen might be displayed and thus could not have seen the pictures for which they provided poems; and the pictorial artists, whose names, with a few exceptions, are not even recorded. Chapter 4 of Optical Allusions is Sorensen’s most extended treatment of the deployment of byōbu for political ends. The author introduces two sets of byōbu crafted at the time of the entry into court of two Fujiwara women, Shōshi, the daughter of Fujiwara no Michinaga, in 999, and Ninshi, the daughter of Fujiwara no Kanezane (founder of the Kujō house), in 1190. He details the recruitment of poets for these screens, the selection and inscription of their poems, and so on, deepening our understanding of the interconnections between cultural capital and political power in the Heian court.

Sorensen’s primary focus is the elucidation of the process he has termed “optical allusion”: how poets responded to pictorial representations, building upon “the reader’s knowledge of or assumptions about that image” (p. 18). First, he introduces the framing concept of ekphrasis (the literary description of a visual work of art), situating byōbu uta within a broader, global practice of composing verse that describes or responds to visual artifacts. He further uses this concept in introducing the argument that “literary language...