Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet by Paul S. Atkins (review)

As the notion of individual genius has fallen far out of favor, few American scholars since Robert Brower have been inclined to tackle Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) comprehensively and as an isolated subject. Roselee Bundy has focused on aspects of Teika, particularly on specific sets of his poetry, and has revealed much about Teika the poet. I treated him as one of a complex cast of characters surrounding Retired Emperor Gotoba in my book about Shinkokinshū. And his shadow is cast across the medieval poetry world as described by Steven Carter and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen.¹ No one, however, seems to have been willing to take on the complex topic of Teika writ large. With Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet, Paul Atkins has taken a stab at it. The result, while admirable, still shows how complicated the task is.

A question Atkins asks near the end of his conclusion reveals a great deal about his stance toward the problem: “Even though we know more about Teika than perhaps any of his contemporaries, what do we really know relative to the fullest, most accurate understanding possible?” (p. 213). This kind of positivist search for definitive “knowledge” is what has driven Japanese kokubun scholars for a long time. Other scholars have abandoned the search as impossible and have chosen instead to focus on historicizing poets and works, or to step back and examine the shifting character of knowledge. Atkins’s study provides a good accounting of what is “known”—enough to satisfy most positivists—and leaves a lot left over for other scholars with different approaches.

What Atkins has produced is to some extent a recitation of a standard kokubun vision of Teika and his reception. It is good to have this in one place, and he has done a lot of work putting the pieces together. I would like to see this as a jumping-off point. There are several loose threads hanging off his tapestry, and I propose to suggest some directions that future scholars, including Atkins, might take to weave those threads into a more intricate picture.

Chapter 1 is a biography of Teika. Atkins titles the chapter “A Documentary Biography,” by which he means to convey that the information is derived from documents like Teika’s diary, Meigetsuki; other contemporary diaries; and some of the poem prefaces in Teika’s poetry collection Shūi gusō. Although Atkins acknowledges that secondary sources (e.g., works by Murayama Shūichi and Kubota Jun) have provided the outlines, he seems to have verified matters for himself, too.

For the interpretation of this “data,” he falls back, problematically, on the kokubun tradition and uncritically accepts many received “truths” like the Rokujō/Mikohidari binary (i.e., the view, which I have also espoused in the past, that there was a clear-cut rivalry between these two poetic houses) and the notion (derived, it seems, from Brower and Miner’s cyclical vision of waka history) that the Mikohidari school represented innovation and therefore deserved to take over the waka scene. The trouble with this view is that it needs to ignore facts in order to be tenable. For example, Atkins clearly privileges the Roppyakuban utaawase, as do most kokubun scholars, because it allegedly marks the emergence of the Mikohidari school and Teika (pp. 19, 65). But he is less enthusiastic about the Sengohyakuban utaawase, suggesting that anything that large is bound to have a lot of dross. (Later on, he says of the contest with multiple judges that “the elite judges seemed to take their job lightly” [p. 112].) Contemporaries saw it differently: while the compilers of Shinkokinshū picked 34 poems from the 1,200 in the Roppyakuban utaawase, they picked 90 from the 3,000 in the Sengohyakuban utaawase—a slightly higher rate. In other words, the Mikohidari “takeover” was by no means complete in the early 1200s, as indeed...