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

Brian Steininger's Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan presents a broad overview of the nature and status of writing in literary Sinitic in the mid-Heian period, or from the beginning of the tenth century to the end of the eleventh century. The choice of the term "literary Sinitic" in place of "literary Chinese" or "classical Chinese" is a conscious one, following Victor Mair, and reflects a desire to emphasize the transregional nature of a system of inscription that extended across East Asia and existed apart from the Chinese vernacular. Steininger's exploration of this transregional system in its mid-Heian articulations is guided by a set of interrelated questions. What was the social context for the composition of poetry and parallel prose in literary Sinitic? What were the institutional structures and pedagogical techniques for the acquisition of literacy? How was literary Sinitic experienced aurally? How did writers differentiate "literary" composition from other forms of writing and scribal practice?

The first chapter sets the stage for answering these questions by establishing key features of the social world of Heian nobles and officials. Much of the analysis revolves around a reading of the anonymously circulated kana tale Utsuho monogatari (Tale of a Tree Hollow, late tenth century). Of the tale's two main narrative threads, one concerns the efforts of the powerful noble Minamoto no Masayori to maintain status for his lineage through the marriage of his daughter Atemiya, while the other tells the story of Kiyohara no Toshikage, an envoy to the Tang whose literary abilities secure status for his descendants. Steininger reads the first narrative as a caricature of Heian social practice, the second as a fantastic reimagining thereof. While the story of Atemiya satirizes the fraught nature of Heian marriage politics and the pursuit of status through gift exchange, that of Toshikage offers a complementary vision, conjuring an alternate reality where those of lower status are able to succeed on their own merits without the need for elite patronage. Chapter 2 builds on this understanding of the mid-Heian social context to shed light on the largest body of writings left behind by officials: parallel-prose documents in literary Sinitic composed for ritual use, particularly those preserved in the collection Honcho monzui (Literary Essence of This Court, mid-eleventh century). Many of these texts were prepared by talented low-ranking scholars working essentially on commission on behalf of high-status nobles, a situation that allows Steininger to advance a view of literary production as parallel to, or even a form of, reciprocal gift-giving.

Shifting the focus from the social context of literary production to the texts themselves, chapter 3 delineates the formal features of bunsho ("patterned writing"), or stylized composition in literary Sinitic, and the discourses that surrounded and shaped it. Two works with long afterlives receive the bulk of attention: the composition manual Sakumon daitai (Essentials of Composition, mid-Heian period)—selections of which are presented as the first of the monograph's two appendices—and the poetic anthology Wakan roeishu (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Verses for Chanting, c. 1012), especially as read through later commentaries. Specific formal techniques are seen to have particular rhetorical appeal and staying power. Steininger's analysis also highlights the ways that Sakumon daitai and Wakan roeishu commentaries divorce compositions from the context of their production, allowing poems to be repurposed, for example, as calligraphic specimens, rhetorical inspiration, or thematic guides. Untethered from the social moorings illuminated in the opening chapters, language floats free, ready for re-appropriation. In the end, literary meaning and aesthetics are seen not as things that exist a priori—nor is poetry seen as a trace of specific occasions or the individual poet—but as things that are instead always brought into existence anew through social practice.

The final two chapters take up the relationship between what Steininger terms "the...