Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan: Poetics and Practice by Brian Steininger (review)

I suspect many readers of this journal, like me, first encountered Chinese-language poetry by Japanese authors when they read the late Burton Watson’s translations in Donald Keene’s Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, published in 1955 and still in print. Reading them as an undergraduate, I found them perhaps even more interesting than much of the vernacular poetry, the brevity of which made it seem rather unsubstantial (the long poems from Man’yōshū being an appealing exception). Nonetheless, Japan’s literature in Chinese had a bad reputation and was little studied. In my graduate student days, when a senior scholar learned I was working my way through Sugawara no Michizane’s writings in Chinese, he questioned why I was bothering, since, as everyone knew, it was all derivative.

That was quite a number of years ago, when even in Japan only a few scholars were studying Japan’s Chinese-language literary heritage. Things have changed since then. Although the familiar vernacular classics remain the core of Japanese literary studies, ever more research—most published in Japanese, but some in Western languages too—is now investigating this literature. Instead of naming the various scholars who are contributing to this modest boom, I would like to encourage anyone interested to look at the bibliography in the back of Brian Steininger’s impressive new book: included are the key publications in English and Japanese and some in French, German, and Chinese, plus recent unpublished dissertations that suggest we can look forward to more on the subject. Of course, the bibliography is the least of Steininger’s contributions to our understanding of Japan’s literature in Chinese. All specialists interested in Heian court culture, especially literary scholars and historians, are sure to learn much from his book. My reading of it is that of a historian with only an amateur knowledge of literature, but I trust that a literary scholar’s view, while different, would be equally positive.

In keeping with the current trend among literary scholars to disparage “influence studies,” Steininger eschews the question of whether or not Japan’s literature in Chinese is merely derivative. Instead, he focuses on how writing in Chinese, or at least writing that looks like Chinese, was used in the Heian court, particularly in its middle years. After an introduction reviewing scholarship on Japan’s literature in Chinese (or “literary Sinitic,” as Steininger would have it), the first chapter looks at the status of the court scholars who were its usual authors. Steininger’s conclusion that, for them, personal relationships came to replace bureaucratic status is additional evidence in support of the conventional view that over the course of the Heian period the public institutions of the ritsuryō state were slowly replaced by more private arrangements. If this observation fits a familiar pattern, Steininger’s approach is novel: he uses the little-studied Utsuho monogatari (Tale of a Tree Hollow) as a guide to understanding the workings of a court society in which the status of literary men was precarious and increasingly dependent on patronage from those of higher rank but lesser erudition. For example, the tale illustrates how a ritual privately sponsored by a powerful courtier might provide an opportunity for an impecunious scholar to show his talent and be rewarded. The importance of such ritual displays is a recurring theme in Steininger’s study.

Steininger does not, however, always merely reinforce an established interpretation. Whereas canonical literary works of the period are apt to portray zuryō (“custodial governors,” in Steininger’s translation) as greedy parvenus, he notes that such status was typically the goal for officials of low rank, including literati such as Minamoto no Shitagō (911–983), a key figure in his study. The prestige attached may have been minimal, but the income was much needed.

The next chapter continues this thread while moving from a literary model...