Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan rōeishū and Imagined Landscapes in Early Medieval Texts

Abstract

This essay explores how the poetry collection Wakan rōeishū becomes an important allusive referent for two medieval Japanese works, the travelogue Kaidōki and the no play Tsunemasa. In particular, it focuses on how Chinese poems from the collection become the means for describing Japanese spaces and their links to power, in the context of a changing political landscape.

THE VERY IDEA of "the medieval" (chūsei 中世) in Japan grew out of Japan's encounter with the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What constitutes Japan's medieval period, as well as its rough beginning and end dates, are still matters of debate, but scholars generally agree that the period from the late twelfth though late fifteenth centuries CE—an epoch marked by the presence of the Minamoto (1192–1333) and Ashikaga (1338–1573) shogunal houses—is "medieval."¹ In this essay, I discuss two works written at specific moments during this period, the travelogue Kaidōki (海道記"Travels on the [Eastern] Seaboard," author unknown, 1223) and the no play Tsunemasa (経正"Tsunemasa," playwright unknown, ca. early fifteenth century) to elucidate one way that the Japanese positioned their realm in a world context during a period when the polity was becoming decentered and its internal geography was being reshaped. My interest in these two works is their depiction of significant sites—first, the city of Kamakura, shogunal headquarters from 1192–1333; and second, Ninnaji 仁和寺, a Shingon Buddhist temple in the capital, founded in 888 by the retired emperor Uda (宇多天 皇, 867–931, r. 887–97) and closely allied with the imperial family. Both spaces are loci of authority and power, described in works created at moments when authority was in flux. Both Kaidōki and Tsunemasa rely heavily on the poetry anthology the Wakan rōeishū (和漢朗詠集 "Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing," compiled by Fujiwara no Kintō 藤原公任, [966–1041] ca. 1013) to delineate these extraordinary sites. Although the Wakan rōeishū influenced numerous genres during the medieval period, the use of allusions drawn from this anthology to frame landscapes associated with power raises a set of questions that help to elucidate Japan's relation to the medieval globe: how does this collection of poems written in two languages, and by poets from two cultures, create a way of reimagining "Japan"? And how might the shared ways in which the source is deployed in these two very different works tell us about what it means to be "medieval" in Japan?

The Medieval Era in Japan

Although some scholars locate the beginnings of Japan's medieval age during the Heian period (794–1185), most agree that the Genpei War (1180–85) marked an important turn toward "the medieval" in Japanese culture. The realm's first large-scale civil conflict, the Genpei War challenged Japan's traditional political structure and the centrality of its long-standing capital city, Heian-kyō 平安京(present-day Kyoto). The war was fought between scions of two military clans, the Taira (or Heike 平家, "Taira family"), which rose precipitously to the highest echelons of power during the 1160s and 70s, and the Minamoto (or Genji 源氏, "Minamoto clan"), which had suffered under the Taira ascendency. The war ended with a complete Minamoto victory.²

One result of the war was the establishment of a military headquarters, or bakufu 幕府, by the new shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝 (1147–99), in Kamakura 鎌倉, five hundred kilometers from the capital city. Although he never threatened to overturn the emperor or the central bureaucracy, Yoritomo asserted authority across the realm through appointees in provincial government offices and on estates. This attenuation of central authority was unprecedented and would remain part of the political landscape through the early modern period.³ The Minamoto domination of the position of shogun was short lived, however: following the death of the third and final Minamoto shogun in 1219, the office became the puppet of a regency controlled by the family of Yoritomo's wife, Hōjō Masako 北条政子 (1156–1225).

The years that followed were turbulent. In 1221, imperial partisans clashed with the shogun in an attempt to reassert imperial power, but were put down quickly by shogunal forces in what is known as the Jōkyū uprising. Kaidōki was written just two years after this event and makes reference to it. In 1274 and 1281, the shogun's army repelled two Mongol invasions, but at great cost. The Kamakura shogunate was then betrayed and overthrown in 1333 by former retainer Ashikaga Takauji 足利尊氏 (1305–58). After breaking with his benefactor, Emperor Go-Daigo 後 醍 醐 (1288–1339; r. 1318–39), the new shogun Takauji set up his headquarters in Heian-kyō and backed a rival monarch. For six decades, the imperial house was split, with the "northern court" in Heian-kyō supported by the shogun, and the "southern court" in possession of the imperial regalia in exile in the mountainous Yoshino region south of Heian-kyō. Only in 1392, under the stewardship of Takauji's grandson, Yoshimitsu 義満 (1358–1408), was the imperial line reunited and peace restored, if only for a short while. The nō theater emerged under Yoshimitsu's patronage, and it is likely that Tsunemasa, a play set during the Genpei War, was composed during Yoshimitsu's lifetime or shortly thereafter.

For Japanese in the thirteenth century and beyond, the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate following the Genpei War was seen as a turning point, because of both the bifurcation of power it represented and the symbolic losses that accompanied the end of the war. The child emperor, born to a Taira mother, had drowned in the final sea battle, taking with him one of the three imperial regalia: a sword. The conclusion of the war thus fundamentally altered the political, symbolic, and actual landscapes: never before had a marker of imperial authority been lost, and never before had an organ of the government with authority reaching across the realm been located anywhere other than the capital city. What would follow over the next several centuries only intensified the sense of distance from the classical past.

Because the establishment of the warrior bakufu opened up terrain physically and symbolically, attempts to describe and contain the realm's unfamiliar political and geographical contours were part and parcel to the arts flourishing during the medieval period. The two works considered here illustrate this process. The Kaidōki author is interested in capturing on paper the meaning and appearance of the just-founded military capital at Kamakura, whereas Tsunemasa describes a space associated with imperial and religious authority in the capital shortly after the northern and southern courts were finally reunited. Both works specifically address new or newly reconfigured political spaces in the shadow of political upheaval.

One long-standing recourse in Japan for describing anything unusual was allusion to a Chinese antecedent; examples can be found in early histories, poetry, collections of anecdotes (setsuwa 説話), and narrative works like The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏物語, authored by Murasaki Shikubu 紫式部, ca. 1008 CE). But allusion to Chinese originals takes on a different significance in works of the medieval period, when formerly unremarkable locales become the topic of narrative and drama. In this context, the Wakan rōeishū becomes a means to convey at once convergence and divergence from earlier norms. How is allusion to China through this text activated, and what can that process tell us about how medieval Japan saw itself on if not the globe, at least the world map?

Writing China in Japan: The Wakan rōeishū and Other Sources

From its earliest days, the Japanese polity looked to its established and powerful continental neighbor for inspiration. Japan's "permanent" capital cities (Nara and Kyoto) were laid out following the model of Chang'an, the Tang capital. China's bureaucratic system of governance, as well as its political, social, and religious thought systems, were imported and adapted as the Japanese polity developed in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. Most important for this study are Japan's formative bilingualism and its reliance on the Chinese writing system: Chinese was Japan's first written language, and the vernacular syllabic system derived from Chinese characters.⁴

Chinese remained the language of official documents and records in Japan well into the early modern period. Educated men were expected to be literate in it and also to be familiar with many of the best-known Chinese texts and authors, including historical records like the shiji史記 (Records of the Grand Historian) and Hou Han shu 後漢書 (Book of the Later Han); prominent poets (particularly the Tang-period masters Du Fu 杜甫, Li Bo 李白, and Wang Wei 王維, but also Bai Juyi 白居 易); the philosophical works of Confucius, Mencius, and others; and the religious texts of Buddhism.

The Chinese writing system could not be adopted easily to represent the vernacular, however, and over the course of the ninth century, Chinese characters were adapted to represent the phonetic units of the Japanese language, thus enabling people to express themselves in writing in both languages. From at least the early tenth century, these two modes were recognized as different: writing in the syllabic kana 仮名 was referred to as the "women's hand," while writing in Chinese or a slight modification of it was the "men's hand." Women were not expected to write Chinese, although female writers Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu of the Heian period intimate that they, and other women like them, were familiar with Chinese works as well.⁵ Both men and women were expected to be able to write, and particularly write waka poetry, in kana. The "women's hand" and "men's hand" were broad categories, and there were other ways of thinking about reading and writing as well; but throughout Japanese history, the juxtaposition between wa (和), referring to kana (and the vernacular), and kan (漢), referring to Chinese characters (and Chinese language; these are the "wakan" of the Wakan rōeishū) was widely accepted, and both languages and the various forms they encompassed were vitally important throughout the classical and medieval periods, as recent scholars have indicated.⁶

In the realm of poetry, the Chinese/Japanese pairing was manifest as waka 和 歌 (Japanese verse) and kanshi 漢詩 (Chinese poetry). Both forms enjoyed popularity among aristocrats (although kanshi were in principle limited to male writers through the medieval period, while both men and women wrote waka). Additionally, as in China, exemplary couplets (kaku 佳句) excerpted from longer works were revered, collected, and anthologized in early Japan, both as models for those learning Chinese and also as representatives of the Chinese tradition.⁷

The Wakan rōeishū, compiled between 1013 and 1020 by Fujiwara no Kintō, is an aesthetically playful engagement with the differences between the two languages.⁸ A collection of over eight hundred famous works, it consists of poetry and prose couplets in Chinese: kanshi (Chinese poems by Japanese poets) and waka (Japanese poems by Japanese poets). It was enormously influential and admired.⁹ The Wakan rōeishū comprises two scrolls (kan or maki 巻): it follows the seasonal arc from spring through winter in the first scroll; in the second, poems are organized thematically, under categories that seem at least in part derivative of earlier collections, starting with "wind" and moving through "monkeys and recluses to courtesans and the color white."¹⁰ Valued in aristocratic circles more for its Chinese couplets than its waka, the Wakan rōeishū was a well-known text in its time and became the object of significant commentary throughout the medieval and early modern period.¹¹

All Wakan rōeishū quotations in Kaidōki and Tsunemasa are indeed from these "Chinese" categories. Why are they quoted in these works, and how does the Wakan rōeishū as source text help shape the way we might interpret both the allusions and the works themselves?

Travels to the East Country: Kaidōki

Travel is a long-standing trope in Japanese literature: it is an established topic for poetry from the early Heian period, and works that range from Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa nikki 土佐日記 (ca. 935) and the Kagero nikki 蜻蛉日記 by the mother of Michitsuna (ca. 974) onward are framed as records of journeys. Exilic trips include those found in Kojiki 古事記 (ca. 812) and in Nihon shoki's 日本書紀 (ca. 820) accounts of Yamato takeru or the early lse monogatari 伊勢物語 (ca. early ninth century) are fundamental in the development of both narrative and poetic traditions. lse monogatari in particular stands as an important precursor for Kaidōki, as its "Azuma kudari" (descent to the east country) exilic sequence was the first influential poetic mapping of Azuma, the land east of the capital region, including some of the route followed by the Kaidōki narrator. At critical poetic locations (nadokoro 名所), Ise's poems are inevitable referents for the Kaidōki narrator and other travelers of later generations.

Written in 1223, Kaidōki is distinguished as being the earliest major medieval travelogue to address journeying from Heian-kyō to the new bakufu at Kamakura.¹² The "Kaidō" of the title is an abbreviation of Tōkaidō 東海道, the "Eastern Seaboard Route," a long-established road that mostly followed the coastline from Heian-kyō to the provinces of the eastern seaboard and was used for transporting people and tax goods between the capital city and the eastern provinces; it was also more or less the route east charted in Ise monogatari. When Yoritomo founded Kamakura as his headquarters, however, the Tōkaidō became even more meaningful because there was now an important terminus at the shogunal seat. Although the bakufu at Kamakura always recognized the sovereignty of the emperor, it also became an alternative locus for a certain set of bureaucratic affairs, including the adjudication of land disputes, any other contests involving members of the warrior class, and perceived threats against shogunal authority. In the early modern period when the Tokugawa shoguns established their headquarters at Edo (present-day Tokyo), the route would become celebrated in a wide range of literary, dramatic, and visual arts; but in the 1220s, its role as the route between Heian-kyo and Kamakura was still developing, and the idea that it had a noteworthy destination at its eastern terminus challenged the traditional geographies of power.¹³

Kaidōki thus at once embraces a tradition of travel narrative and brings new dimensions to it. The author is unknown, although the text has been attributed mistakenly both to Kamo no Chōmei 鴨長明(ca. 1153–1216) and to Minamoto no Mitsuyuk 光行I (1163–1244).¹⁴ Scholars generally divide Kaidōki into three sections: a prologue (jo 序), a dated travelogue (the longest section), and a conclusion. Throughout Kaidōki, the narrative style varies fairly dramatically. The prologue and conclusion, in particular, exhibit a version of wakan konkōbun (和漢混交文 mixed Japanese/Chinese style) with strong reliance on "Chinese" (kan) expressions and syntax; this is a style familiar in the works of Buddhist essayists and thinkers. The main travelogue, by contrast, contains more lyrical wabun passages embracing the narrative genre taking shape in the medieval period, which we refer to now as michiyuki-bun 道行文 (poetic travelogue).¹⁵ It is further marked by repetitions and abrupt changes both stylistically and in direction, which is one of the characteristics that makes this text so historically and narratively significant: on the one hand, it is more than a daily record of a journey; but on the other, it also is not the carefully crafted poetic travelogue we see in the more influential Tōkan kikō 東関紀行, written approximately twenty years later.

Kaidōki is putatively a first-person narrative of a pilgrimage-cum-sightseeing tour to Kamakura undertaken by an unnamed, middle-aged Buddhist novice, clearly a man of erudition and means, who wants to see the great temples of Kamakura. Composed two years after the ill-fated Jōkyū uprising (1221), it was written with that failed coup in mind. Intermingled with its descriptions of the scenery along the way to Kamakura, we find a haunting rumination on the sad fates of imperial partisans killed in the conflict, most prominently Fujiwara Naka-mikado Chūnagon Muneyuki 藤原中御門中納言宗行 (1174–1221), who was executed along the route as he was taken in captivity to Kamakura.¹⁶ Although the specter of Muneyuki's own tragic journey is not within the scope of this essay, its memory as evoked in this text is centrally important for any consideration of Kaidōki, because it mourns that hero's loss on a structural level, as the narrative starts and stops and repeats itself several times, never bringing that loss to closure. In other words, there is a counternarrative about the frightfulness of the warrior capital embedded in the description of its glories, and the reader is left with the impression of the narrator's ambivalence about the goal of his journey. Indeed, as though to mark this ambivalence, Kamakura is described twice in the text: first in the prologue, which contains an abbreviated description of the narrator's prospective journey; and once in the travelogue, after he has reached his destination.

My interest here is in the poet's consistent reliance on other sources, and particularly the Wakan rōeishū, to give shape to his own multi-layered understanding of what Kamakura means as a physical and textual space. The inscription of Chinese landscape on Kamakura occurs on a number of levels in Kaidōki. First, we find the explicit mapping of other sites onto it in the prologue (a pattern that will be repeated in Tsunemasa as well: see below). Second—and this occurs throughout the narrative—there is a syntactic and lexical mapping of the "foreign" onto the domestic in the travelogue's description of the warrior capital. Syntactically, this is manifest in the symmetrical sentence structure borrowed from Chinese (also used liberally in contemporary kanbun texts). Lexically, it occurs through allusions or other references that evoke a discursive sphere strongly coded as "Chinese."

The prologue of Kaidōki opens with the narrator outlining his personal circumstances. He is a Buddhist novice in his fifties, living in the Shirakawa district of the capital. Although predictably modest about his accomplishments, he demonstrates from the opening line that he is well versed in the Chinese classics, which has the effect of situating the narrative as a dialogue with a specific set of continental originals. He first compares himself to famous Chinese historical figures: he claims to be neither the wise Bo Yi (伯夷) nor the famed physician Hua Tuo (華佗).¹⁷ We should bear in mind that characterizing oneself as inferior to exemplary models is almost a cliché: what matters here is the fact that the referents are Chinese. The memorable past, in other words, is continental, and the well-educated man examines his life through that tradition as if in a mirror: here, he is the (pale) reflection of Chinese originals. In addition to delineating the identity of the narrator, the thematization of the Chinese past in Kaidōki creates a sense of continuity between the two realms. For our Japanese novice, the past of China is also the past of Japan. By demonstrating his knowledge of Chinese history, he thus creates a lineage for himself and his Japanese readers that includes China, but is simultaneously Japanese: like the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, the differentiation is based on a shared original source. Further, these references are textually mediated. China of old is China as described in revered works from that realm. By underlining the mediated nature of his relationship to China, the narrator draws attention to the significance to the imaginary nature of his descriptions as well as to his erudition.

The narrator then turns his thoughts to his destination, Kamakura:

The district of Kamakura in Sagami Province is the Sojuon on earth; it is the fortress at Yangzhou in our realm.¹⁸ Powerful warriors are a forest, the flower of their might opens luxuriantly; they flourish along the path of the warrior, they can hit a willow leaf from a hundred paces. Their bows resemble the crescent moon at dawn; pulled taut across the chest, they gleam. Their swords are like autumn frost; the long blades dangle at the waist, shining coldly. In the heat of battle, they use their claws as shields to subjugate their enemies. The generals join with their comrades as they embrace bravery. Their weapons inspire awe; birds of prey are afraid to fly above. Their punishments treat offenders harshly; those beasts are long kept at bay. Because of this, the spring buds of the realm receive blessings of the vernal winds from the east, and the sound of the tides of the Four Seas, warmed by the eastern sun, are quieted.¹⁹

The characteristic syntactic symmetry (taishō 対称) in this passage gestures to the Chinese couplet, while the hypotactic structure creates a textual landscape onto which individual images and phrases are placed. Immediately, the two non-Japanese spaces are mapped onto the new city: "Kamakura is the Sojuon of the earthly realm and the fortress of Yangzhou in this realm." The comparisons are strongly stated metaphors: Kamakura is each of them "on earth" and in "our realm." We are, in other words, invited to see both places when we imagine Kamakura. Both of the "foreign" sites evoked here, moreover, have strong military connotations: Sojuon is the mythical weapons storehouse of Śakra, the Deva King, who dwells at the top of Mount Sumeru, realm of the Devas. When the god needs to do battle to defend Buddhism, weapons magically appear at Sojuon. A reference to Sojuon in the widely read Ōjōyōshū (往生要集 "Essentials of Rebirth in the Pure Land" by Genshin 鑑真, 985) suggests that the topos was familiar to Japanese readers.²⁰ The Fortress at Yangzhou was known in Japan from a poem by Tang poet Bai Juyi, where it symbolizes unmovable defense able to withstand external threat.²¹ Kamakura in the narrator's imagination becomes these locales, in effect replicating not only foreign but also fabled sites on the Japanese landscape.

Other references to China as mediated by texts are embedded in this description as well. The line "they can hit a willow leaf from a hundred paces" comes from the story of Yang Yu, the archer of Chu found in the Chinese court history Shiji. But perhaps more interesting is the integration of lines from the Wakan rōeishū: "Their bows resemble the crescent moon at dawn; pulled taut across the chest, they gleam. Their swords are like autumn frost; the long blades dangle at their waists, shining coldly."

This passage draws from a pair of couplets from the "Generals" section of the Wakan rōeishū:

687. A three-foot flash of sword light:Ice is in his hand!A single arc of bow force:The moon is in his chest!

Lu Hui 陸翬²²

686. Male sword at his waistWhen he draws it: three feet of autumn frost'Female ochre' from his mouthwhen he chants, the sound of cold jade.

Minamoto Shitag ō 源順²³

The first couplet is by Chinese poet Lu Hui (Tang dynasty), the second by Japanese poet Minamoto Shitagō (911–83 CE). Both evoke continental scenes, just as their syntax suggests Chinese style. And, like the comparisons to Sojuon and Yangzhou, they label Kamakura as a military site. Note that in Kaidōki, the couplets are woven together on the page to create a prose image that at once echoes and alters the originals: the phrases are familiar, but they are inscribed in a unique way; they are at once Chinese and domestic.

As a text, the Wakan rōeishū embodies a similarly relational structure, where parts of Chinese and Japanese poems are brought into dialogue to evoke a rich and novel pattern of images about a specific topic. We should consider the possibility that this arrangement also serves as one important way of structuring narrative, a method with which the Kaidōki narrator experiments as he describes the landscape of the unknown Kamakura. In effect, the Kaidōki narrator follows Kintō, the compiler of the Wakan rōeishū, in taking fragments of longer works and arranging them to create original meanings. Here, the warriors of Kamakura are created from bits and pieces of couplets from the Chinese tradition. As we see in the second couplet, no attempt is made to maintain the wholeness of an individual poem. Rather, the narrator reworks parts of it in conversation with other pieces.²⁴ Thus, Kaidōki creates a pattern of modeling and layering that finds a syntactical analogue in the kanshi couplet and a textual one in the grouping of poems on similar topics written in both Chinese and Japanese. These levels of meaning are as important as the content of the quotations themselves: the organizational model provides guidance for reading the layering of other identities onto Kamakura. Rather than erasure, we might see instead a more experimental and inclusive mapping that allows the imagined Kamakura to embrace these other identities.²⁵

We can see this sort of juxtaposition and layering on another important level as well. There is a permeability between Kamakura and its residents, the warriors, who do not so much inhabit the land as embody it: they are "a forest"; their might is a flower that blossoms; their bows are the crescent moon; their swords the frost. Out of an awesome landscape the warriors emerge as more primal than human, using their nails or claws to defeat their enemies, like beasts and birds of prey. Furthermore, this scene is framed in terms of punishment. Although such imagery is not unusual in descriptions of warriors in battle, this is a description of a capital ostensibly at peace. The raging beasts arise out of a quiet, if strange, landscape and then are quickly submerged back into it, becoming the vernal breezes and the eastern sun, which bring tranquility to the spring forest that is the realm. Diachronically, there is narrative progression toward conclusion, but both syntax and structure here suggest the importance of a synchronic reading as well. This is a space that layers and brings into dialogue vicious punishment and tranquility, just as it does foreign and domestic phenomena. This is an ambivalent landscape imagined by an equally ambivalent narrator.

When Kamakura is depicted again, it is within the context of the travelogue. The narrator has described his journey there, and what will follow are several days of sight-seeing (and then a rather precipitous return to Heian-kyō, prompted by concern over the aging mother he left behind).²⁶ After recovering from the journey, he goes out and begins to take in his surroundings:

When I went out and looked around, the place wanted for nothing by way of scenery: there was the sea, there were the mountains; water and trees were abundant. It was not too open, nor was it too cramped, and the city streets branched out in all directions. There were gathering places and meeting places; in comparing this hamlet to the capital, the vistas were striking. Great men were gathered here, wise men were gathered, their gates aligned, the land prosperous. When I peeked in through a crack and with awe gazed upon the residence of the shogun, it spread out grandly, the color of the blue-green blinds seemed to embody the happiness there, the vermilion balustraudes were truly exquisite, the pavement below glistened as though strewn with pearls. The voice of the cuckoo greeting the spring joined the lively chatter of the esteemed guests in the hall; from early morning the fine steeds of the guests were arrayed before the gate.²⁷

Note that symmetrical syntax continues to shape the work. In contrast to the hyperbolic imagined Kamakura of the prologue, here we find here a more concrete landscape that serves as a backdrop for the human activity happening within it. This image is familiarizing: the description of the landscape follows the speaker's eye through viewed rather than imagined space, moving from the natural surroundings to the gatherings of people in the town's center, then narrowing further to peep through an opening in the fence at the dwelling of the shogun.

As in much of the travelogue—save, importantly, in the sections recalling the doomed warrior Muneyuki, which are more complex—the narrator marvels at the unexpectedness of the natural world in this eastern locale, but simultaneously anchors it within the quotidian. People bustle about as they do in the capital; the dwelling of the shogun is remarkable mainly for the (albeit opulent) conventionality of its fixtures. Yet even here, the narrator's vision is mediated by Wakan rōeishū couplets:

64. Whose house is it where emerald treesHave warblers singing though silken curtains still stand?And where the painted hallAwakened from dreams though pearl-sewn blinds have not yet been rolled up?

Attributed to Xie Guan 謝観 (Tang period)²⁸

558. Gazing South, there stretches the length of the road toward mountain passes: Travelers and journeying horses are seen flowing past from under blue-green blinds.Looking East, there too the marvel of tree-lined embankments:Purple ducks and white gulls frolicking before the vermilion balustrades.

Minamoto Shitagō ²⁹

Note that the clear Chinese references here are situated in the prosaic scene of the narrator peeping in on the shogunal residence. The mansion is presented in terms of a continental landscape, but, as earlier, the narrator here arranges pieces of that venerable landscape to delineate the visible features of the shogun's newly built structure. The image of Kamakura in this passage is accordingly less alien and alienating than that found in the prologue. Notably, the Wakan rōeishū poems cited here come from the sections on "The Warbler" and "Mountain Home," and it is certainly fitting to read this shift as a sort of domestication: the once-unknown Kamakura has become familiar now that it has been seen; there is a movement toward narrative closure or comfort suggested in this second set of poetic referents. Yet the experience is still mediated by the Wakan rōeishū: its poems are the building blocks with which Kamakura is constructed and the lens through which the narrator experiences the world.

What does this mean for Japan on the medieval globe? Here, as in earlier texts, China is a model, an older civilization, for which the Japanese felt an affinity and beside which they placed their culture as an offshoot: geographically and culturally, Japan was smaller and less ancient, peripheral to both China and India, the latter being the ultimate cultural referent where Buddhism was concerned. To an extent, the quotation of texts in Chinese to describe Kamakura nods to this relationship: Japan is made meaningful in the long shadow of its older and larger neighbor, and Kaidōki reaffirms the primacy of continental culture. But the reliance on the Wakan rōeishū is also connected to what is domestic, novel, and thus hard to describe: the bifurcated government, the suddenly meaningful space of Kamakura. While previous scholars have noted there this text valorizes Chinese over Japanese, I have argued that it is instead the juxtaposition of the two cultures—the way the text's form embraces plurality—that seems to motivate the borrowing.³⁰ These Chinese poems provide the reality that orders both the imagined and the experienced, implying an ongoing emphasis on both the mediated and multilayered nature of the Japanese narrator's perception. The Wakan rōeishū couplets are recontextualized on the local landscape, allowing the narrator to emphasize the value of maintaining multiplicity of vision and of voice, a voice predicated on an understanding that such mediated experience is the best and perhaps the only way to convey his meaning.

In Kaidōki, this seems to register a level of unease with the newness of Kamakura; the text embraces a complex desire on the one hand to create continuities and narrative closure (because Kamakura is like Yangzhou and Sojuon, it assures safety and a clear purpose), while on the other to maintain the possibility and insecurity suggested by the place (Kamakura is indescribable except through a multilingual vocabulary that expresses itself through multiplicity). The dialogue between domestic and foreign both authorizes the space as meaningful and allows its meaning to remain in question. We should bear in mind that the Other here is constructed completely within the Japanese imagination: the Wakan rōeishū is a quintessentially Japanese conceptualization of the world and waka's place in it. Mediated by the Wakan rōeishū, Kaidōki similarly creates Kamakura from an imaginary landscape. So in one important way, the world is not what is beyond political or cultural borders, but what can be imagined and recreated in the domestic mind and projected on the domestic landscape. At the same time, the text asserts that there is indeed an Other necessary to the description of the Japanese landscape, and that it is only through the heteroglossic description mediated by the Wakan rōeishū that the fullness of the domestic landscape can be captured.

The Nō Tsunemasa

The nō play Tsunemasa was created long after Kaidōki, but there are some striking similarities in the ways that it quotes the Wakan rōeishū to configure space; in fact, the temporal and generic distances between the two works demonstrate the vitality of the Wakan rōeishū as a cultural referent throughout Japan's medieval age and, I suggest, in response to ongoing political instability. Tsunemasa is classified as a shura nō: that is, a play in which the primary character, or shite, is the ghost of a warrior killed in battle. The earliest recorded performance of the play is from 1488, so we cannot tell whether it was among plays written or reworked in nō's formative years by nō's founding father Zeami 世阿弥 (ca. 1363-ca. 1443), who developed his art under the patronage of the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (although scholars generally believe that it was).³¹

In Tsunemasa, the space being configured is most fundamentally the nō stage, where Ninnaji, the most important Shingon Buddhist temple of the late Heian period, is recreated. The play evokes other spaces as well, however, through a narrative structure shared with a set of stories about Taira no Tsunemasa 平経政³² and his biwa (琵琶, a four-or five-stringed lute), tales derived from other narrative traditions. These scenes are evoked structurally through the play's staging of a religious ceremony at Ninnaji intended to commemorate Tsunemasa's battlefield death during the Genpei War. The secondary scenes are activated by quotations from the Wakan rōeishū. We find, in other words, the creation on the stage of a quintessentially Japanese space (the temple most closely affiliated with the imperial family) that is simultaneously imaged as the Chinese palace and a mythical island. How does this play position "Japan" in relation to its continental neighbor, and what can it suggest about the fantasies and anxieties about the Other for the medieval Japanese audience?

Tsunemasa is named for its eponymous shite. As with many important historical characters from the period, Tsunemasa is celebrated in the Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari 平家物語), Japan's best-known and probably most influential medieval war tale (fourteenth century), which describes the causes and effects of the war. A high-ranking member of the defeated Taira clan, Tsunemasa dies without fanfare in an early battle, and is better remembered in the tale for his skill at the biwa. The nō play about him derives from episodes found in one or more variants of the Heike describing Tsunemasa's life (and the history of his biwa), and the various strands come together in this play in ways reminiscent of Kaidōki's layering of landscapes. Among the approximately eighty variant textual lineages for the work, I primarily refer to the Kakuichi variant—a recitational text completed in 1371 and the basis for most translations into foreign languages—with occasional references to the Engyo-bon recension (1309), a non-recited variant. Recited variants were performed by blind men with religious or quasi-religious identities who accompanied themselves on the biwa. Known as biwa hōshi (琵琶法師 biwa priests), they were responsible for spreading the tale around the realm throughout the medieval period.³³ Non-recited varniants like the Engyō-bon were not part of this tradition.

Tsunemasa's cultural presence is most memorably established in two episodes of the Tales of the Heike. We first encounter him in the "Chikubushima mōde" (竹 生島詣で "The Pilgrimage to Chikubushima") episode. Sent north from the capital to attack the Minamoto leader Kiso Yoshinaka, Tsunemasa falls behind the main forces and pauses at Lake Biwa. Looking across the water, he sees the island of Chikubushima. Tsunemasa notes, "Surely though [ ... ] Penglai [ ... ] must look like this," evoking the fabled island of the immortals known from Chinese legend ³⁴ Crossing to the island with a small party, he spends the afternoon reciting sutras before the resident deity, Benzaiten 弁財天 (Sanskrit: Sarasvati, deity of eloquence and music), also referred to as Myōon 妙音 (deity of mysterious sound, also traced to Sarasvati). As night falls, the shrine's resident monks urge Tsunemasa to play one of the shrine's biwa. He performs two secret pieces,³⁵ and "the divinity, deeply moved, appeared on Tsunemasa's sleeve in the form of a white dragon" (one of her most well-known manifestations).³⁶ Notably, Tsunemasa's playing of secret pieces summons the god to appear at the shrine on Chikubushima, which Tsunemasa compares the island to Penglai, a topos from the Chinese cultural tradition popular in Japan as well. A few episodes later, we encounter Tsunemasa in the episode "Tsunemasa Departs the Capital," as he and his kinsman flee the oncoming forces led by Kiso no Yoshinaka. This is one of several scenes devoted to leave-takings by senior Taira nobles of those dear to them; in Tsunemasa's case, he pauses at the temple Ninnaji, where he had served as an acolyte during his youth and was beloved of the omuro 御室, or abbot, a prince of the blood. Tsunemasa entrusts his biwa, Seizan (青山 "Green mountain") to the temple, afraid it will be lost or destroyed should he take it with him. Next, we encounter the story "Concerning Seizan," an episode that, depending on the variant text, is included in "Tsunemasa Departs the Capital" or immediately follows it.

Tsunemasa's biwa has the following history.³⁷ Seizan was one of three biwa acquired by Fujiwara no Sadatoshi 藤原貞敏 (807–67), who, during Emperor Ninmyō's 仁明 reign (808–50, r. 833–50), had traveled to China to study with the lute master Lian Chengwu 廉妾夫.³⁸ Sadatoshi left China with Seizan, Kenjō 玄 象, and Shishimaru 獅子丸. Shishimaru was lost at sea—a sacrifice to the dragon spirit thought to control storms—on the return voyage, and Seizan and Kenjō were dedicated to the royal family. In the 960s, Emperor Murakami (926–67, r.946–67) was visited by a ghost as he strummed Seizan. The ghost revealed itself to be the spirit of Lian Chengwu, suffering in the afterlife for having withheld one of the secret pieces he was to teach Sadatoshi. The ghost then took up the biwa, taught the piece to Murakami, and disappeared; no one dared play Seizan thereafter. It was finally entrusted to the Ninnaji abbot, who then gave it to Tsunemasa in recognition of his great talent when Tsunemasa was sent to Usa shrine as a royal envoy.

Note here again the appearance of a figure from the beyond conjured in response to the playing of a storied lute. The location is the royal palace. In the Engyōbon, the story is repeated when Tsunemasa then plays at the Usa Hachiman shrine, far from the capital: his playing inspires the deity of Usa to manifest itself as a dragon above the main hall, and even the provincial monks of Usa "could not have mistaken the sound for that of a passing shower" (村雨とはまがわじものを murasame to ha magawaji mono wo).³⁹ This rendering is probably the basis for the description of the visit to Chikubushima in other texts, and all of these base stories inform the nō Tsunemasa. Finally, we should also note the nō play Genjō, concerning the other two lutes Sadatoshi received in China, Genjō (alt. Kenjō) and Shishimaru. In the play, Emperor Murakami's ghost is the shite who appears to prevent the famed lutenist Fujiwara no Moronaga (1138–92) from traveling to the continent to study the secret pieces. Instead, he has the dragon king 竜神 return the lost Shishimaru that had been held at the ryūgu 竜宮, the dragon palace beneath the sea. Moronaga also founds the Myo'on lineage of biwa playing, and was also known by the sobriquet Myo'on, a clear reference to the deity Benzaiten.⁴⁰

Tsunemasa is underlain by these stories. Like most nō, it relies heavily on the vocalized script, sparse musical accompaniment, stylized movements of the actors, and imagination of the audience to create its world on stage. But Tsunemasa is also a shura no, which usually have two acts: in the first, the shite appears in disguise; and in the second, he reveals himself as the spirit of a dead warrior and enacts his suffering in the asura (shura 修羅) hell, where he is forced to do battle eternally. By contrast, Tsunemasa has only one act, and the shite's posthumous sufferings are not the primary focus of his attachment to this world. Instead, the play describes the appearance of his ghost at the service where Seizan, his biwa, is being dedicated to the Buddha as an offering for his repose in the afterlife. Ever the musician, Tsunemasa's ghost takes up the biwa and a delightful evening of music ensues before he is called back to the shura realm and disappears.⁴¹

Another striking feature of Tsunemasa is that it recreates worlds of the past differently than most no. Like much of the repertoire, it quotes other texts to evoke conventional emotional responses and to recall famous earlier works and authors, a method of allusion referred to in Japanese as honka dori (本歌取り, generally translated as "allusive variation"). Thus, through an associative chain, the audience imagines a rich world of images, emotion, and history upon a relatively bare stage. Here, though, connections are activated not only through linear (historical) analogies but also through spatial juxtapositions that invite us to see them syn-chronously and in a different sort of relation to each other. This reading is encouraged by the play's strong reliance on the Wakan rōeishū.

The premise for Tsunemasa is that the abbot of Ninnaji has decided to dedicate Seizan as part of a musical memorial service (管弦講 kagen-kō) for Tsunemasa. The abbot is represented in the play by the waki, or secondary character, the priest Gyōkei. Gyōkei explains that Tsunemasa's death in battle has moved the abbot to offer Seizan as a prayer for Tsunemasa's realization of perfect enlightenment. Thus, as with many shura nō, there is a longstanding connection between the shite and the waki.⁴²

The shite now appears, beckoned by the goings-on. Like most shite, his entrance is accompanied by a quotation from the poetic past: "Wind blowing through autumn trees / brings rain down from a clear sky; / moonlight shining on broad sands / spreads the night with glittering frost" He continues: "the momentarily visible dew in the shadow of the grasses—lingering because of this longing; how shameful!"⁴³ The italicized quotation is a couplet by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), no. 150 in the Wakan rōeishū. Of all Tang-period poets, Bai Juyi's influence is particularly strong in classical and medieval Japanese works, both in quotation and in literary allusion; his collected works (Hakushi monjū 白氏文集) were in circulation in Japan by the Heian period. He is also the best-represented Chinese poet in the Wakan rōeishū, and this poem is from the "Summer Nights" section of that collection.

The couplet describes a confusion of sights and sounds: wind as rain; moonlight as frost. Mistaking one (elegant) thing for another is a common rhetorical device found in Japanese poetry, but here such confusion is then echoed in Tsunemasa's apparition. Gyōkei at first cannot be sure of his presence: 'In the deep reaches of the night, / with the lamp burning low, / there comes within the flame / a human form, glimmering between the seen and the unseen. / Who is now before me?'⁴⁴ Prefaced by the Bai Juyi couplet, his lack of substance is at once eerie and elegant, a sense amplified as the play continues (and these alternate between shite and waki):

Shite:

Was he real?

Waki:

Was nothing there?

Shite:

A mere shimmering

Chorus:

illusion, Tsunemasa's

transient form

illusion, Tsunemasa's

transient form

returns to this fleeting world⁴⁵

This, the second scene, introduces the ghost as a shimmering apparition fading in and out, stressing his movement between the seen and unseen worlds—in this respect he is less corporeal than most nō ghosts, who appear and disappear mysteriously but are not described as being so ephemeral while on stage.

In the fourth scene, we again encounter a quotation from the Wakan rōeishū. Gyōkei calls for the instrumentalists to begin to play to soothe Tsunemasa's spirit, and, as the others tune their instruments, Tsunemasa begins to tune Seizan:

Shite:

The spirit, still invisible, approaches the burning lamp

and tunes the biwa brought there for him.

Waki:

Resounds now, at this midnight hour,

midnight music to banish sleep.

Shite:

When—how strange!—the clear sky

clouds over, and all at once

the clamor of falling rain

Waki:

sweeps across grasses and trees,

threatening the tuning.

Shite:

But no, it is not rain, that sound!

Chorus:

See where yonder, from the clouds' edge.

Note here the echoes of the Usa performance, where the local monks were "in no danger of mistaking those brilliant notes for a passing shower."⁴⁶ The play continues:

But no, it is not rain, that sound!

See where yonder, from the cloud's edge,

Moonlight on Narabi-ga-oka

Illumines pine bought there, wind-tossed,

Sounding like a sudden shower.

An enchanting moment!

The greater strings clamor loudly

Like a rain shower beating down;

The finer murmur on and on,

Like lovers' whisperings.

Chorus (kuse):

The first and second strings gust and rage

Like wind blustering through autumn pines;

The third and fourth cry out mournfully,

Like a caged crane by night calling her child.

Be kind, O cocks who crow in the dawn,

let this night music never end!

Once again, the italicized segments are Chinese poems. The first is from Bai Juyi's Pipaxing 琵琶行 (Song of the Lute), the second, a Wakan roeishū couplet by the same poet. Both celebrate the playing of the strings, comparing their timbre to sounds in nature. Note the slippage from the actual natural images to the instruments' ability to recreate them. Confusing the sounds of a passing rain shower with the sound of the biwa nods to the Bai Juyi couplet in the first scene, drawing attention to a particular poet and to a particular meaning for music. Clearly, the kagen-kō is performing the extraordinary act of bringing the human, natural, and spiritual realms into harmony. Such is the power of music, particularly highly ritualized music per-formed as part of a Buddhist ceremony. And that power is expressed through references to Bai Juyi, the Chinese poet, again quoted from the Wakan rōeishū.

The segment concludes:

Shite:

When the music of the phoenix pipes⁴⁷

Chorus:

shakes autumn clouds above the peak of Qin,

Phoenixes, transported with delight,

fly down to bamboo, to parasol tree,

there to dance their pleasure, wing to wing.

Stirring strains in the modes, ritsu and ryo,⁴⁸

arouse deep feeling. As emotion mounts,

the dancers' waving sleeves recall

scenes from bygone days—silken sleeves

that bring to mind nearby Mt. Kinugasa.⁴⁹

How beautiful it is, the music of the night!⁵⁰

This passage begins with another quotation of a Wakan rōeishū poem, this time by Kong-sheng I 公乗憶 (no. 462). In the collection, it immediately precedes the Bai Juyi poem cited just above. Note the reference to harmonizing of the two major musical modes (ritsu and ryo), contextualized by the juxtaposition of Chinese (Qin Ridge) and Japanese (Narabigaoka, Mount Kinugasa) landscapes. The music seems to bring together the imagined Chinese landscape and the familiar one of Ninnaji, but of course on the bare nō stage, all effected through quotation of the bilingual Wakan rōeishū.

The intertextual relations with the various stories from the Heike are fairly clear. The "Tsunemasa Departs from the Capital" episode is the basis, and the depth of the emotional bond between the shite and the abbot (and/or Gyōkei) from that narrative motivates the kagen-kō at the center of the play. Besides this episode, however, all the rest of Tsunemasa's stories are vignettes of virtuoso, magical biwa performance. Each of these follows a similar pattern: a performer with uncanny skills plays the biwa, and a specter appears. The appearance is always felicitous. On the one hand, the tales are strung together through the transmission of special biwa or of secret knowledge: the instruments and the repertoire pass from Lian Chengwu to Sadatoshi to Murakami to Tsunemasa and Moronaga. The font is the continent, a concern emphasized through the quotation of famous Chinese poems about the nature of music that is, in turn, enacted on the stage. This is a typical variety of intertextuality in narrative traditions of the time, so it is not surprising to find it in a dramatic form with strong ties to existing narrative traditions.

But it is unusual to find the repetition of narrative structure, heightened by the structured spaces described in each antecedent tale and ultimately on the nō stage. All the scenes of virtuouso performance calling forth an apparition take place at demarcated sites: the palace, where Lian Chengwu visits Murakami; Chikubushima, the island shrine/temple complex that is home to Benzaiten; the Usa Hachiman Shrine. Chikubushima is further compared to Penglai, the fabled island of the immortals. Yet another landscape is suggested in Benzaiten's alter ego as the dragon princess from the Lotus Sutra, resident of the dragon palace at the bottom of the sea. All these spaces are special, and all are bounded socially, politically, and/or religiously. All have specifically marked entrances and clear borders, and all are delineated as different from the everyday spaces around them—in this respect, they also recall the descriptions of Kamakura in Kaidōki.

The space of the play, interestingly, is the one locale in Tsunemasa's story where a performance does not take place: Ninnaji. This raises the question: how might we interpret its representation in the nō? Historically, its associations with the imperial family mark it as a locus of imperial and religious authority. Established in 903 by the emperor Uda, it became his residence after his retirement, and princes of the blood served as abbots there from that time forward. Ninnaji represented the pinnacle of the Shingon establishment both during the Genpei War and throughout the time when the works considered here were written and first circulated. In Tsunemasa, then, the replication of narrative structure encourages us to see Ninnaji (imagined on the stage) as standing in for the other, bounded spaces of the narrative tradition (the palace, Chikubushima, etc.). The nō then actively conflates Ninnaji with other spaces once Tsunemasa's ghost takes up the biwa: the mountains surrounding Ninnaji blend with Qin Ridge as his music blends with the sounds of nature. And although Tsunemasa's ghost seems to trigger this blending, it is accomplished for the audience through asking them to see the stage through Wakan rōeishū couplets from Chinese poems by Chinese poets about Chinese landscapes.

In conclusion, I would like to return to the nature of the mediating role played by the Wakan rōeishū in both works. A wholly Japanese production, the Wakan rōeishū is a celebration of a broader tradition of poetry reaching out to the continent and to the continental forms used by Japanese poets. But it does not trace a chronological lineage from China to Japan: rather, it is arranged by topic, and poems in both languages and forms intermingle in ways intended to add depth and breadth to one another, similar to the format of other Japanese poetry anthologies. The layering of spaces in both Kaidōki and Tsunemasa are made richer when seen this very way: significant spaces take on fresh meanings as they become incarnations of other, imagined spaces. Indeed, the Wakan rōeishū was intended not only to be heard but also seen. It is represented in gorgeous manuscripts dating back to the eleventh century and excerpted on equally elegant screens that would be placed in prominent locations in aristocratic homes. The text is at once visual and aural, and in both aspects it is about juxtapositions of languages and forms that are embodied by discrete poems that interpenetrate and reinterpret each other. It creates a context where temporality is deemphasized, and spatial (and cultural) borders become sites for contact, overlap, augmentation, and consonance, a concern very clearly represented in Tsunemasa, a play equally marked by aural/visual contexts.

So, what is the significance of the Wakan rōeishū as an interpretive model for Kaidōki and Tsunemasa, and what can it tell us about medieval Japan on the medieval globe? In the case of Kaidōki, the narrative throughout suggests a level of discomfort with closure and a reluctance to describe Kamakura as a wholly domestic, prosaic site. Given that the narrator clearly had the Jōkyū uprising in mind when he wrote the text, the hyperbole and the borrowed images from Wakan rōeishū poems can be read as a means of creating distance, while the layering of imagined landscapes also emphasizes the threatening meaning of the bakufu, from which the narrator abruptly departs soon after his arrival. The Chinese/domestic pairing becomes a template for juxtaposing conflicting responses to a new, uncomfortable domestic space.

We cannot pin down such a particular historical referent to which Tsunemasa might be a response, but its reliance on the Wakan rōeishū works similarly to that of Kaidōki, suggesting interpretations for the play that can add depth to previous understandings of it. Specifically, Tsunemasa's engagement with the Wakan rōeishū undermines linear narrative and emphasizes spatial dimensions on a metatheatrical level, creating a polysemic mapping of a politically and culturally significant central locale. In contrast to Kamakura in 1223, Ninnaji in Yoshimitsu's time was a long-standing marker of imperial and Buddhist authority. It represented order, but in a capital city—and as representative of a monarchy—where that order had been profoundly questioned. In this context, what the space of Ninnaji represented—and whether, like Kamakura, its authority was real or, like the shite on the stage, apparitional—are matters that remain in question. In both texts, politically charged locations of variable meaning are thus articulated through a spatial idiom. The layering of foreign and domestic spaces is at once enabled by allusion to poems from the Wakan rōeishū and evocative of the structure of that text: spaces are brought into conversation with each other, the Chinese and the Japanese comprising a shared unit.

It is also important to emphasize the way that Ninnaji is demarcated as a space in Tsunemasa. Represented on the stage, Ninnaji is bordered by Narabigaoka and Mount Kinugasa and evokes other bounded spaces: the imperial palace, the Chinese imperial palace, Chikubushima, or Penglai. This is true of Kamakura as described in Kaidōki as well: Yangzhou and Sojoun are similarly places with clear peripheries, as is the shogunal residence within the capital. Yet in both works, these borders do not mark the boundary between contiguous spaces, and certainly not between domestic and foreign. Rather, "foreign" landscapes provide the language through which domestic ones can take form. This unique relationship between domestic spaces with ambiguous meaning and foreign spaces with very specific connotations suggest the Wakan rōeishū's allusive value for medieval works like Kaidōki and Tsunemasa. There is a clear sense of the Other to which domestic sites can be compared, but that Other is not a physical neighbor but rather a stable, if wholly imaginary, version of domestic spaces. The Other amplifies a domestic site's meaning, the poetic Chinese antecedent imbuing the physical domestic site with specific meanings that in turn make those spaces more "real." Wakan rōeishū, both in content and form, thus serves as a unique tool for "mapping" in these medieval Japanese works. The map it enables in Kaidōki and Tsunemasa emphasizes not lateral relations, but vertical ones: "Chinese" couplets and kanshi reinforce, or even create, wholeness for description of the"Japanese" domestic terrain they are used to describe.