Itineraries of Power: Texts and Traversals in Heian and Medieval Japan by Terry Kawashima (review)

Itineraries of Power: Texts and Traversals in Heian and Medieval Japan, by Terry Kawashima, is in many ways an outgrowth of the author’s first book, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). Whereas Writing Margins revealed the constructed nature of both centers and peripheries of power by focusing on “marginalizing acts,” Itineraries of Power seeks to show how authority is manufactured through tropes of movement, both literal (between geographic places) and figurative (between narrative modes or textual registers). Her broadly defined “nodes of motion,” which can range from poetic strategies to genre shifts to suggestions of ubiquity, signal key moments when power relationships are established and normalized (p. 7).

Though it deals with a much earlier time period, Itineraries of Power can be compared to another recent work that employs the trope of motion, Karen Thornber’s Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). As her title suggests, Thornber’s work aims at moving beyond an East/West dynamic in order to point out intra-East entanglements and engagements in the early twentieth century among Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese authors. Kawashima similarly moves beyond a center-periphery dynamic, which has seen some popularity, to point out strife among those perceived to be at the center of political and cultural authority as well as the multiplicity of perspectives and desires of those considered to be on the periphery.

In an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue, Kawashima takes us more or less chronologically through several figures and texts that utilize motion as a motif to call attention to instances when certain groups or individuals lay claim to authority in cultural and political spheres. Well researched and annotated within its intentionally limited scope, Itineraries of Power is an engaging study that combines close readings of texts with careful attention to the forces and circumstances involved in their production.

In chapter 1, Kawashima convincingly argues against generally held notions about waiting women and mobile men in Heian court culture. Focusing on the tenth-century collection of stories Tales of Yamato, the author provides several key examples of both the power embedded in female stasis and the undesirable instability that marks male movement. Fundamentally, some women are able to stay at court, even through political shifts, while in general male courtiers are forced to leave, usually to their detriment, when those same shifts occur. The opening story, for instance, features a woman attendant who “is shown to already possess one of the things the male Fujiwaras crave the most: the possibility of a multireign presence and influence at court” (p. 31). By contrast, the text portrays even such ninth-century poetic luminaries as Henjō and Ariwara no Narihira’s son Shigeharu on journeys of decline. Other stories show that the corollary is also true: “When men stay still, the outcome is negative, whereas when women engage themselves in movement, many good things can happen” (p. 51). These examples are not meant to deny uxorilocal practices, or the so-called “waiting woman motif,” but rather serve to equip readers with additional and alternative interpretative lenses.

Geographic movement to and between utamakura (place-names famous in poetry) forms the connection to chapter 2, in which Kawashima examines the poetry of and narratives surrounding the tenth-century courtier Fujiwara no Sanekata, whose posting in distant Mutsu Province was a virtual exile from court culture. By employing utamakura in his poetry to assert authority over contested territories, Sanekata appears to participate in the tradition from which he was excluded. The narratives of his exile and death in the provinces, however, reveal power struggles between competing military and aristocratic groups in the capital—not simply an attempt by the center to control a distant region. The chapter concludes with a chronicling of...