Blueprints for Making Room: Considering Closure and Hospitality in Anglophone Heian Literary Studies

How might the field of Heian literary studies become more open and more energizing to inhabit? I was invited to review two new books on Heian literature and soon felt drawn to consider a broader range of monographs and issues, including what it means to inhabit this subfield presently and how we might improve our interpretive and pedagogical work. In a fit of genuine optimism, I initially wrote: "Edith Sarra's and Takeshi Watanabe's new books help me hold out hope for anglophone Heian literary studies. Despite being focused squarely on single texts, both studies add much to our understanding of Heian literature, mining metaphors of exorcism and architecture to expand our sense of how literary texts, historical narratives, and the structures scaffolding them are fabricated." Serving as both departure point and allegorical touchstones for my essay, Watanabe's Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan and Sarra's Unreal Houses: Character, Gender, and Genealogy in "The Tale of Genji" highlight literal and symbolic structures such as tamaya 霊屋 (spirit huts) and Genji's 源氏 vaunted Rokujōin 六条院 mansion (which Sarra deems "The House of Wishful Thinking"). Consequently, notions of mourning and wishing meshed as I pondered which types of thinking, writing, and teaching deserved to fade, and which ones should be amplified. If, like the houses Sarra theorizes, the configuration called "Heian literary studies" also supplies "blueprints of the possible" (p. 262), how might we revise those layouts to excavate and accommodate untapped possibilities? This brief reflection fails to account fully for the capacious landscape of Heian literature or the ensuing sample of scholarly monographs. Still, I wonder how our engagements might reflect more of the breadth embodied by our textual objects themselves. How could we expand our own sense—and students' sense—of how to navigate this terrain in more generative, less grief-ridden, ways?

In 2020, a vicious pandemic year in which poor and BIPOC folks' disproportionate exposure to premature death occurred alongside protests for racial justice, on the one hand, and an intensification of racist anti-Black and anti-Asian violence, on the other, a weary hope—for wellness, for justice, for peace—pervaded these endless past months. Amidst this mappō 末法 parade of horrors sure to make Kamo no Chōmei 鴨長明 swoon, Watanabe's emphasis on "a collective, healing history" (p. 155) and contention that Eiga monogatari's 栄花物語 author "could be said to have effectively purged those negative, corrosive energies that not only spawned mono no ke 物の怪 [evil spirits], but also fueled the less overt antagonisms that gradually tore societies apart" (p. 197) resonated for being hopeful and timely. However, what made the year all the more surreal was the jarring gap between daily news coverage of corrosive energies and the discussions of weights and measures, Mongols, birthdays, and "Ox or buffalo?" that occupied the Premodern Japanese Studies LISTSERV.¹ Following a pertinent consideration of epidemics in premodern Japan as COVID-19 took hold, as the year wore on, the realm of professional communal exchange stayed eerily remote from the real world. The asymmetry in urgency made me wonder if this strain of disregard was not in fact endemic to what we do: baked into our tiny idyll like a snow globe on some mantle, unfazed as the world around it burns. To what extent does attention to politics in Heian Japan preclude a reckoning with conflicts animating our own era?

Adding to the uncanniness was the resemblance this scenario bore to an earlier period. As Michael Bourdaghs explains,

Early Western studies of Japanese culture tended to stress the aesthetic beauty of Japanese art and literature, to the neglect of its intellectual and political content. Politics and abstract theory were supposed to be the domains of Western modernity; Japan was assigned the task of...